Quotes by American Authors - Page 19

The problem with people who say monsters don't really exist is that they're almost never saying it to the monsters." —Alice Healy
Seanan McGuire
Oh," the girl said, shaking her head. "Don't be so simple. People adore monsters. They fill their songs and stories with them. They define themselves in relation to them. You know what a monster is, young shade? Power. Power and choice. Monsters make choices. Monsters shape the world. Monsters force us to become stronger, smarter, better. They sift the weak from the strong and provide a forge for the steeling of souls. Even as we curse monsters, we admire them. Seek to become them, in some ways." Her eyes became distant. "There are far, far worse things to be than a monster.
Jim Butcher
Like any normal fifth grader, I preferred my villains to be evil and stay that way, to act like Dracula rather than Frankenstein's monster, who ruined everything by handing that peasant girl a flower. He sort of made up for it by drowning her a few minutes later, but, still, you couldn't look at him the same way again.
David Sedaris
Even from the beginning, that was the problem. People liked pretty things. People even liked pretty things that wanted to kill and eat them.
Holly Black
Because all the monsters have been let out of their cages tonight, no matter what court they belong to. So I may roam wherever I wish until the dawn.
Sarah J Maas
But perhaps the monsters needed to look out for each other every now and then.
Sarah J Maas
Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.
Stephen King
If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible.
Chuck Palahniuk
Will looked horrified. "What kind of monster could possibly hate chocolate?
Cassandra Clare
We know that we are continually subjected to a huge range of sensory inputs and internal experiences of sensations and thoughts. In fact, almost anything existing in our universe, that can come into human and other animals' purview, can be experienced as information - a bird call, our friend's 'hello,' the rock we trip over, the intuition we have about the honesty of someone we are talking to, a book we read.
Marcia J. Bates
While information is the oxygen of the modern age, disinformation is the carbon monoxide that can poison generations.
Newton Lee
I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it.
David Brooks
Information can be such a double-edged sword.
Jessiqua Wittman
Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.
James Gleick
I will say that again in a different way: the persistent unethical and ignorant emphasis on secrecy and on making decisions for partisan advantage or to pay off campaign contributors and select insiders is not sustainable. We the People have an opportunity to embrace this manifesto of Open-Source Everything and bury 'rule of secrecy.' This is why I am optimistic about the future.
Robert David Steele
Liberation technology creates wealth, and open-source technology creates wealth. In both instances the 'center of gravity' for dramatic change toward resilience and sustainability is the human brain mass of five billion poor--the one billion rich have failed to 'scale.' The human brain is the one unlimited resource we have on Earth.
Robert David Steele
I realized in 1988 that my life as a spy specializing in secrets was not only unproductive, it was in sharp opposition to what we actually need: full access to true information, and consequently, the ability to create Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT).
Robert David Steele
I am not alone in the conviction that real, lasting national security can best be obtained through complete transparency of government, business, and other facets of society, and this includes open access to all of the many available types of information.
Robert David Steele
Most commanders wanted as many good sources of information as possible. MacArthur was focused on limiting and controlling his sources of intelligence.
David Halberstam
Explain to me again why we’re at a whorehouse?”Gwenvael sighed around his ale. “Because, my thick-headedbrother, if you want information about human men then you go to theone place all human men come to eventually.
G.A. Aiken
Here's the bottom line: The secret world of intelligence--at least in the United States of America--represents everything wrong with the government, the industrial era, our financial-economic system, and our ethics.
Robert David Steele
It was called the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages. If not for the monks, everything the world had ever learned would have been lost. Well, we live in a similar time, when we're losing the vast majority of what we do and see and learn. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Dave Eggers
We just start putting our ideas out there, yet how do we actually attack contemporary problems? We do what some of the most successful American businesses do. We outsource and collaborate
Baratunde R. Thurston
It is more informative how we treat things with no defined legal rights, than how we treat things with legal rights.
Bryant McGill
They tell me we're living in an information age, but none of it seems to be the information I need or brings me closer to what I want to know. In fact (I'm becoming more and more convinced) all this electronic wizardry only adds to our confusion, delivering inside scoops and verdicts about events that have hardly begun: a torrent of chatter moving at the speed of light, making it nearly impossible for any of the important things to be heard
Matthew Flaming
Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.
Ray Bradbury
The really strange thing about this is that it was one of the Fog Facts.That is, it was not a secret. It was known. But it was not known. That is, if you asked a knowledgeable journalist, or political analyst, or a historian, they knew about it. If you yourself went and checked the record, you could find it out. But if you asked the man in the street if President Scott, who loved to have his picture taken among the troops and driving armored vehicles and aboard naval vessels, if you asked if Scott had found a way to evade service in Vietnam, they wouldn't have a clue, and, unless they were anti-Scott already, they wouldn't believe it.In the information age there is so much information that sorting and focus and giving the appropriate weight to anything have become incredibly difficult. Then some fact, or event, or factoid mysteriously captures the world's attention and there's a media frenzy. Like Clinton and Lewinsky. Like O. J. Simpson. And everybody in the world knows everything about it. On the flip side are the Fog Facts, important things that nobody seems able to focus on any more than the can focus on a single droplet in the mist. They are known, but not known.
Larry Beinhart
The next question is how? How does news find us? What you need is a certain critical literacy about the fact that you are almost always subject to an algorithm. The most powerful thing in your world now is an algorithm about which you know nothing about.
Kelly McBride
...we are overwhelmed with information and dying for wisdom.
Mark Batterson
Everything that informs us of something useful that we didn't already know is a potential signal. If it matters and deserves a response, its potential is actualized.
Stephen Few
Signals always point to something. In this sense, a signal is not a thing but a relationship. Data becomes useful knowledge of something that matters when it builds a bridge between a question and an answer. This connection is the signal.
Stephen Few
You may not want to hear that or think of it as writing, but I’m telling you that the moving of information is a literary act in and of itself. Even when people aren’t reading it.
Kenneth Goldsmith
The most common definition [of the word information] is: "the action of informing; formation or molding of the mind or character, training, instruction, teaching; communication of instructive knowledge.This definition remained fairly constant until the years immediately following World War II, when it came in vogue to use 'information' as a technological term to define anything that was sent over an electric or mechanical channel. 'Information' became part of the vocabulary of the science of messages. And, suddenly, the appellation could be applied to something that didn't necessarily have to inform. This definition was extrapolated to general usage as something told or communicated, whether or not it made sense to the receiver. Now, the freedom engendered by such an amorphous definition has, as you might expect, encouraged its liberal deployment. It has become the single most important word of our decade, the suspense of our lives and our work.
Richard Saul Wurman
The most common definition of [the word information] is: "the action of informing; formation or molding of the mind or character, training, instruction, teaching; communication of instructive knowledge.This definition remained fairly constant until the years immediately following World War II, when it came in vogue to use 'information' as a technological term to define anything that was sent over an electric or mechanical channel. 'Information' became part of the vocabulary of the science of messages. And, suddenly, the appellation could be applied to something that didn't necessarily have to inform. This definition was extrapolated to general usage as something told or communicated, whether or not it made sense to the receiver. Now, the freedom engendered by such an amorphous definition has, as you might expect, encouraged its liberal deployment. It has become the single most important word of our decade, the suspense of our lives and our work.
Richard Saul Wurman
The hardest bit of information to extract is the first piece.
Robert Ferrigno
Information is the coin of war.
Terry Goodkind
Information is information, not matter or energy.
Norbert Wiener
Like physical events with their causal and teleological interpretations, every linguistic event had two possible interpretations: as a transmission of information and as the realization of a plan.
Ted Chiang
The bit is a fundamental particle of a different sort: not just tiny but abstract—a binary digit, a flip-flop, a yes-or-no. It is insubstantial, yet as scientists have finally come to understand information, they wonder whether it may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself. They suggest that the bit is the irreducible kernel and that information forms the very core of existence.
James Gleick
Remember this: of all the commodities men trade in, information is the most valuable by far.
Raymond E. Feist
Trade isn't about goods. Trade is about information. Goods sit in the warehouse until information moves them.
C.J. Cherryh
We either need an overwhelming force advantage, or we need more information.""Reinforcements cut into our bounty, remember?""It's unanimous. We need more information.
Howard Tayler
Keep in mind that when we limit our exposure to information, or when information itself is scarce, our picture of reality suffers. We become oblivious to both opportunities and hazards. Trends become invisible. History disappears. It's really just two sides of the same coin: the first commitment is as much a commitment to gathering information, from as many sources and in as much volume as can constructively be used, as it is a commitment to facing the facts.
John Salka
Religious ceremonies are of paramount importance in Bali ( an island, don't forget, with seven unpredictable volcanoes on it-you would pray, too).
Elizabeth Gilbert
[W]hen a message is squeezed through a twenty-second news spot, so much can be lost that what is left will fail to move anyone enough to make them turn off the set and actually do something. Meanwhile, the viewers will believe that they have learned everything they need to know on that subject and will be bored the next time they hear it.
Jerry Mander
We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation.
James Gleick
Information, defined intuitively and informally, might be something like 'uncertainty's antidote.' This turns out also to be the formal definition- the amount of information comes from the amount by which something reduces uncertainty...The higher the [information] entropy, the more information there is. It turns out to be a value capable of measuring a startling array of things- from the flip of a coin to a telephone call, to a Joyce novel, to a first date, to last words, to a Turing test...Entropy suggests that we gain the most insight on a question when we take it to the friend, colleague, or mentor of whose reaction and response we're least certain. And it suggests, perhaps, reversing the equation, that if we want to gain the most insight into a person, we should ask the question of qhose answer we're least certain... Pleasantries are low entropy, biased so far that they stop being an earnest inquiry and become ritual. Ritual has its virtues, of course, and I don't quibble with them in the slightest. But if we really want to start fathoming someone, we need to get them speaking in sentences we can't finish.
Brian Christian
We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as “superintelligent,” but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe.
James Gleick
Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
Guy Billout
There’s no going back, and there’s no hiding the information. So let everyone have it.
Andrew Kantor
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story.
Gertrude Stein
To bankrupt a fool, give him information.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause than the cure.
Daniel C. Dennett
What we find changes who we become.
Peter Morville
Even though I may feel unsafe and unacceptable, I am accepted in Christ.
Emily P. Freeman
My company has had a safety program for 150 years. The program was instituted as a result of a French law requiring an explosives manufacturer to live on the premises with his family.
Crawford Greenwalt
Love is the perfect safety, or the perfect weapon.
Bryant McGill
For someone who needs refuge, a key is provided.
Anna Keesey
Peri went to the window, gesturing out at the dragons, perched and flying, everywhere. "Safe, true, but how boring! How confining! How sad! How could that compare with this? And what is safe? You were not safe on your little farm. War came to you and took all your safety away! If I am to be in this world, I want more than to be a hound upon the game board, tucked away in a corner until the jackals come and sweep all away!
Mercedes Lackey
Safety comes in our nearness to God, not in our distance from our enemies.
Dillon Burroughs