Hofstade Quotes & Sayings

I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. — Eric Hoffer

If we're stuck on one world, we're limited to a single case; we don't know what else is possible. Then - like an art fancier familiar only with Fayoum tomb paintings, a dentist who knows only molars, a philosopher trained merely in NeoPlatonism, a linguist who has studied only Chinese, or a physicist whose knowledge of gravity is restricted to falling bodies on Earth - our perspective is foreshortened, our insights narrow, our predictive abilities circumscribed. By contrast, when we explore other worlds, what once seemed the only way a planet could be turns out to be somewhere in the middle range of a vast spectrum of possibilities. When we look at those other worlds, we begin to understand what happens when we have too much of one thing or too little of another. We learn how a planet can go wrong. — Carl Sagan

People are fascinated by space flight. It makes them interested in science, gets them asking questions and motivates them. — Helen Sharman

When we PEEL off LAYERS of SOCIAL CONDITIONING and the need to live upto that EXPECTATION..
The most beautiful 'creation' surfaces ...The REAL YOU !!!
To be real, it needs courage..Our biggest aim should be to build that COURAGE..
Being 'that' REAL is our biggest POSSIBILITY...also the biggest RESPONSIBILITY! — Abha Maryada Banerjee

If one feels the need of something grand, something infinite, something that makes one feel aware of God, one need not go far to find it. I think that I see something deeper, more infinite, more eternal than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of a little baby when it wakes in the morning and coos or laughs because it sees the sun shining on its cradle. — Vincent Van Gogh

The theories of the social sciences do not consist of "laws" in the sense of empirical rules about the behavior of objects definable in physical terms. All that the theory of the social sciences attempts is to provide a technique of reasoning which assists us in connecting individual facts, but which, like logic or mathematics, is not about the facts. It can, therefore, and this is the second point, never be verified or falsified by reference to facts. — Friedrich Hayek

Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts. — Charles Stross