Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.
The appropriate length of a name is inversely proportional to the size of its scope.
I know exactly what I would do with immortality: I would read every book in the library.
American Stance: Everything not forbidden is permitted. Prussian Stance: Everything not permitted is forbidden.
In another thirty years people will laugh at anyone who tries to invent a language without closures, just as they'll laugh now at anyone who tries to invent a language without recursion.
Of course, this is a heuristic, which is a fancy way of saying that it doesn't work.
A few months ago I was visiting my mother, and she said that as a child I had always wanted to learn everything, and that it took me a long time to realize that you couldn't learn everything. I got really angry, and I shouted "I'm not done yet!"
How strange when an illusion dies. It's as though you've lost a child.
Obsession with a consumerist lifestyle, above all when few people are capable of maintaining it, can only lead to violence and mutual destruction.
As I kid, I was always jealous of the music that my favorite bands had written - but not really of how they played. So I'd daydream about having written songs, and this way above being able to perform them.
Throughout the 20th century, the Republican Party benefited from a non-interventionist foreign policy. Think of how Eisenhower came in to stop the Korean War. Think of how Nixon was elected to stop the mess in Vietnam.