Replicating Quotes & Sayings

It doesn't cost anything to replicate code. So the companies that make code, that's why they've done so well. We take it for granted now, but why is it that code is free? It's because somebody built this self-replicating process. — George Dyson

At the inauguration of each sentence, the writer commences with an optimistic sense of curiosity. Similar to an inquisitive explorer, a writer begins each thoughtful decree with an appreciative sense of the unknown and ends with a reverent regard for the unanswerable. Repeating this instigating act of discovery by placing a combination of sentences down on paper creates a unique verdict. The writer's compilation of pronouncements expresses their interpretation of life. Replicating this creative endeavor in the futile effort to say it all imitates the revolving mystery of life where physical reality and mysterious forces of nature operate upon humankind. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate. — Neal Stephenson

In the Game of Life, as in our world, self-reproducing patterns are complex objects. One estimate, based on the earlier work of mathematician John von Neumann, places the minimum size of a self-replicating pattern in the Game of Life at ten trillion squares - roughly the number of molecules in a single human cell. — Stephen Hawking

We ignore the blackness of outer space and pay attention to the stars, especially if they seem to order themselves into constellations. "Common as the air" meant something worthless, but Hackworth knew that every breath of air that Fiona drew, lying in her little bed at night, just a silver flow in the moonlight, was used by her body to make skin and hair and bones. The air became Fiona, and deserving - no, demanding - of love. Ordering matter was the sole endeavor of Life, whether it was a jumble of self-replicating molecules in the primordial ocean, or a steam-powered English mill turning weeds into clothing, or Fiona lying in her bed turning air into Fiona. — Neal Stephenson

In a sense, the earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of concrete all over the planet, the cancerous rot-outs in Europe, Japan, and the United States, thick with replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and spreading and threatening to shock the biosphere with mass extinctions. — Richard Preston

Within the chemically rich liquid oceans, by a mechanism yet to be discovered, organic molecules transitioned to self-replicating life. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

I think we all realized that we had really been replicating things that had already been happening. I don't know if we were smart enough to realize that we were in a cul-de-sac, but we were curious. — David Baker

I'm not into replicating old movies. But one should never say never. Tomorrow I may feel like making a part 2 of some of my movies. — Madhur Bhandarkar

The elder Navarro had believed, as did the ancient philosophers of the Far East, that the cosmos ultimately revealed itself as a repeating pattern, an infinitely replicating superstructure contained and embodied in a galaxy, down to a drop of blood. — Laird Barron

What I hate about kitchen-sink dramas is [this idea] that the set is real, therefore you're going to be seeing truth. You have to earn truth. Truth can't be a part of the fact that people appear to talk that way and live in that room. You're looking for the poetry in something, and I don't mean poetry in the fancy sense. Naturalism believes by just replicating a thing you give the truth, rather than earning the truth. — John Guare

My notion of a failed writing workshop is when everybody comes out replicating the teacher and imitating as closely as possible the great original at the head of the table. I think that's a mistake, in obvious opposition to the ideal of teaching which permits a student to be someone other than the teacher ... The successful teacher has to make each of the students a different product rather than the same. — Nicholas Delbanco

Cancer, perhaps, is an ultimate perversion of genetics - a genome that becomes pathologically obsessed with replicating itself. The — Siddhartha Mukherjee

It is always amazing to see how wide a spectrum of results can be obtained from replicating an identical negotiation with different principal actors; it makes no difference whether there subjects are inexperienced or whether they are senior executives and young presidents of business firms. That is an important lesson to be learned here. — Howard Raiffa

Challenging and highlighting abusive power dynamics in our culture is my goal; replicating them is not. — Kara Walker

Evolution across the universe was nothing but the endless proliferation of automatic, organized complexity, a vast arid Turing machine full of self-replicating machinery forever unaware of its own existence. And we - we were the flukes and the fossils. We — Peter Watts

Can something be created in language independently of the people who use the language? Can language become a self-replicating system or ... ' I'm drunk, I suddenly realise, so I shut up. But — Scarlett Thomas

The more cases of Ebola infection we have, the more chances there are for the virus to mutate in a particular way that adapts it well to living in humans, replicating in humans, and perhaps transmitting from human to human. — David Quammen

And within the computer's innards, a spreading cancer. A self-replicating corruption. A B-pop mutiny of bass and drum and oscillating frequency. Inane quasi poetry glorifying a pointless act of intimacy. — Jay Kristoff

Americans worry that Afghanistan has become a petri dish in which the germs of Islamic fanaticism are replicating - soon Afghans will be hijacking American planes and bombing embassies everywhere. And their fears are not necessarily unfounded. The Taliban are unemployed war veterans, ready and even eager to return to the battlefield. — William T. Vollmann

The new living flesh was replicating the old in a game, we were a chain of shadows who had always been on the stage with the same burden of love, hatred, desire, and violence. — Elena Ferrante

Gerald Schroeder points out that the existence of conditions favorable to life still does not explain how life itself originated. Life was able to survive only because of favorable conditions on our planet. But there is no law of nature that instructs matter to produce end-directed, self-replicating entities. — Antony Flew

Beauty didn't seem to be a priority for people anymore. If you had to judge by I-95, America had become a cancerous clusters of cheap houses, replicating out of control ... People just needed places to collect their stuff. — Wendy Wunder

RNA viruses are limited to small genomes because their mutation rates are so high, and their mutation rates are so high because they're limited to small genomes. In fact, there's a fancy name for that bind: Eigen's paradox. Manfred Eigen is a German chemist, a Nobel winner, who has studied the chemical reactions that yield self-organization of longer molecules, a process that might lead to life. His paradox describes a size limit for such self-replicating molecules, beyond which their mutation rate gives them too many errors and they cease to replicate. They die out. RNA — David Quammen

What is unusual about Earth is that language, literally, has become alive. It has infested matter. It is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us. — Terence McKenna

Yet, every day, I miss the feeling of flying. I will never experience it again. Sometimes, if I run far enough, past my limits, I can beat my legs into numbness, almost replicating the feeling of being a young gymnast on a good day. I can make myself feel numb but heavy. Never light. And I always feel the pain later. I pay the price with sore shins, aching ankles, and "hip pointers" jabbing into my pelvis.

Still, I have a love affair with gymnastics, with that period in my life. Often, I dream dreams of weightlessness. When I feel most disheartened, heavy with the burdens of everyday life, I imagine myself buoyant, floatable. I waft, on my own accord, propelled by my own volition, in effortless control. Completely powerful, resilient, substantial, agile.

I miss it every day. — Jennifer Sey

What people have to make sure of is that they're not replicating something that already exists. You really have to ask yourself: "Is there a point in me doing this? Has this already been said before? Is this moving things along or is this just adding to the giant pile of junk that's already there?" — Jarvis Cocker

My dad's a scratch golfer and I've got the knack of seeing something and then replicating it. I saw my dad swing a club and I worked out how to do the same thing. My backswing and follow-through have been basically the same since I was two. — Rory McIlroy

Once Europe's colonial empires were sent into deep decline, thanks to World War II, America became globalization's primary replicating force, integrating Asia into its low-end production networks across the second half of the twentieth century - just like Europe had integrated the U.S. before. — Thomas P.M. Barnett

Cancer is nothing more than a healthy cell that starts replicating out of control. — Dan Brown

Around me the beautiful windows, connecting me to other lives and other times, to things done and also deliberately left undone, stood dark. Rose, I was sure, had acted out of love, yet for Iris her mother's absence had remained an unresolved sadness at the center of her life. I thought of what Rose had written about anger, about its power to corrupt, to make a space for evil. Maybe she was right. Maybe evil, that old-fashioned word, could be called other things, disharmony or dysfunction. Maybe Rose was right and evil wasn't attached top an individual as much as if was a force in the world, a seeing force, one that worked like a self-replicating virus, seeking to entangle, to ensnare, to undo beauty. [p.353] — Kim Edwards

Service members will only stay on active duty if they can provide for their families - and DOD schools provide a world-class education that has proven time and again to be an incentive for sailors, soldiers, airmen and marines to reenlist. Military dependents that attend DoDDS schools are highly regarded by prestigious universities the world over for a number of reasons, but there's one that you'd have a hard time replicating in a stateside school system: they've lived overseas, traveled the world, seen and experienced other cultures, learned foreign languages through immersion, and they've gained an understanding of the world that you can't get in a traditional classroom. Add a rigorous curriculum and a long track record of high test scores throughout DoDDS, and it's pretty easy to see why military kids are in such high demand. — Tucker Elliot

[W]e may now be on the threshold of a new kind of genetic takeover. DNA replicators built 'survival machines' for themselves - the bodies of living organisms including ourselves. As part of their equipment, bodies evolved onboard computers - brains. Brains evolved the capacity to communicate with other brains by means of language and cultural traditions. But the new milieu of cultural tradition opens up new possibilities for self-replicating entities. The new replicators are not DNA and they are not clay crystals. They are patterns of information that can thrive only in brains or the artificially manufactured products of brains - books, computers, and so on. But, given that brains, books and computers exist, these new replicators, which I called memes to distinguish them from genes, can propagate themselves from brain to brain, from brain to book, from book to brain, from brain to computer, from computer to computer. — Richard Dawkins

People of a "scientific" bent have been known to ridicule those, like Harry, who believe unlikely notions such as the idea that the Universe was created in six days and that the first human being was formed by God breathing into a lump of clay. It should be noted that the latest scientific theories entail that (1) all of the matter in the Universe was once compressed into an area smaller than the point of a pin; and (2) life came about when a chance collision of molecules accidentally lined up three million nucleic acids in exactly the right order to form a self-replicating protein. — Robert Kroese

Actually, the entire ascent of life can be presented as an adaptive radiation in the time dimension. From the beginning of replicating molecules to the formation of membrane-bounded cells, the formation of chromosomes, the origin of nucleated eukaryotes, the formation of multicellular organisms, the rise of endothermy, and the evolution of a large and highly complex central nervous system, each of these steps permitted the utilization of a different set of environmental resources, that is, the occupation of a different adaptive zone. — Ernst W. Mayr

Art is a self-replicating force. — Jerry Saltz

Reluctant though you may be, Noah, you are the embodiment of the Hero. You don't have to learn to become good at anything. You simply are the best at everything. Your telomeres don't stop replicating. If you aren't killed, you might actually live forever. You have every gift, Noah.
I D O N ' T W A N T T H E M. — Michelle Hodkin

The supreme artist lives as closely as possible to replicating the perfect dream, with life unfolding in a manner that a person could never conceive or direct. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Chances are, the aliens will not want to land on our backyard, or even the White House lawn, with their flying saucers. They may have tiny, robotic self-replicating probes which can reach near light speed and can proliferate around the galaxy. So instead of the Enterprise and huge star ships, the aliens might actually send tiny probes to explore the universe. One might land on our lawn and we won't even know. — Michio Kaku

[T]he ideals and desires of the majority define the structure of society as it is; a would-be mass movement that pursues a different path will reliably find itself failing to attract members, while a mass movement that reshapes its message to attract a large audience will inevitably turn into a mechanism for replicating the existing order of things. — John Michael Greer

War is, in some not yet entirely defined sense, a self-replicating pattern of behavior, possessed of a dynamism not unlike that of living things. — Barbara Ehrenreich

I think comics can be the basis for great films, but I think the focus of such a project should be on making the film as good as possible, not on painstakingly replicating the comic. — Adrian Tomine

What if we individually and collectively committed ourselves to the one thing that is needful - to replicating the loving sacrifice of Calvary to all people, at all times, in all places, regardless of their circumstances or merit? What if we just did the kingdom? — Gregory A. Boyd

We cannot rely on trial-and-error approaches to deal with existential risks ... We need to vastly increase our investment in developing specific defensive technologies ... We are at the critical stage today for biotechnology, and we will reach the stage where we need to directly implement defensive technologies for nanotechnology during the late teen years of this century ... A self-replicating pathogen, whether biological or nanotechnology based, could destroy our civilization in a matter of days or weeks. — Ray Kurzweil

Both the American and the European approaches to foreign policy were the products of their own unique circumstances. Americans inhabited a nearly empty continent shielded from predatory powers by two vast oceans and with weak countries as neighbors. Since America confronted no power in need of being balanced, it could hardly have occupied itself with the challenges of equilibrium even if its leaders had been seized by the bizarre notion of replicating European conditions amidst a people who had turned their backs on Europe. — Henry Kissinger

With a chip on his shoulder larger than his margin of victory, Barack Obama is approaching his second term by replicating the mistake of his first. Then his overreaching involved health care - expanding the entitlement state at the expense of economic growth. Now he seeks another surge of statism, enlarging the portion of gross domestic product grasped by government and dispensed by politics. The occasion is the misnamed 'fiscal cliff,' the proper name for which is: the Democratic Party's agenda. — George Will

One of the concepts essential to molecular manufacturing is that of a self-replicating manufacturing system. That concept has lagged behind in its acceptance. — Ralph Merkle

If you take all the factories in the world today, they could make all the parts necessary to build more factories like themselves. So, in a sense, we have a self-replicating industrial system today, but it would take a tremendous effort to copy what we already have. — K. Eric Drexler

Above all, I would not expect a wise race, at great expense, to set loose an army of self-replicating robots. — Barney Oliver

Short-term performance envy causes many of the shortcomings that lock most investors into a perpetual cycle of underachievement. Watch your competitors not out of jealousy but out of respect and focus your efforts not on replicating others' portfolios but on looking for opportunities where they are not. The only way for investors to significantly outperform is to periodically stand far apart from the crowd, something few are willing, or able, to do. — Seth Klarman

The Strandbeest is a self-replicating meme, a brain virus. It infects the student's brain. In fact, the Strandbeest abuse students for their reproduction. For two years, this reproduction fell into a flow acceleration. Now, 3D printers produce walking mini Strandbeests. — Theo Jansen

I am in touch with a company that hopes to replicate my voice. However, they are not replicating my original voice - if they did that, I would sound like a man in his 20s, which would be very strange! They are actually trying to replicate the synthesizer that sits on my wheelchair. — Stephen Hawking

That whole thing of replicating what others do is a siren call. The sirens lure you to the rocks of unoriginality. — Stewart Copeland

Here's the thing - in this damned century, you'll meet a lot of people who do a lot of things. What's funny is the fact that the most desirable attributes of these people are nothing but developed and cultured thoughts. And these things come naturally to people who shine bright. The other guys just try to ape these thoughts, in an embarrassing attempt to recreate some of that magic. Sadly,- what looks beautiful as a natural quotient can be extremely funny and disgusting when replicated manually. Stop replicating feelings; else you'll turn into one of those duplicate personalities. They're wannabes. You don't have to become one! — Shomprakash Sinha Roy

Parasites are not only incredibly diverse; they are also incredibly successful. There are parasitic stretches of DNA in your own genes, some of which are called retrotransposons. Many of the parasitic stretches were originally viruses that entered our DNA. Most of them don't do us any harm. They just copy and insert themselves in other parts of our DNA, basically replicating themselves. Sometimes they hop into other species and replicate themselves in a new host. According to one estimate, roughly one-third to one-half of all human DNA is basically parasitic. — Carl Zimmer

Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo
which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead. — Neal Stephenson

He was like an infection that spread through my body, replicating in my mind and heart. Every — S.D. Hendrickson

Natural selection based on the differential multiplication of variant types cannot exist before there is material capable of replicating itself and its own variations, that is, before the origination of specifically genetic material or gene-material. — Hermann Joseph Muller

Live Below the Line raises real money to help the world's poorest people, but it is also a symbolic demonstration aimed at highlighting - not replicating - the plight of the world's poor. — Hugh Evans

We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information. — Neal Stephenson

When you click on a link, you are replicating the string of code that it links to. Replication of code sequences isn't life, any more than replication of nucleotide sequences is, but we know that it sometimes leads to life. — George Dyson

The choice in this life is not between easy and hard, but between kinds of hardship, between a hardship that gives birth to wisdom, compassion and mercy, and the hardship that keeps on replicating itself to no end. — Noam Shpancer

time-lapse of a replicating virus, — Blake Crouch

The whole nuclear-arms-control and non-proliferation policy of the nuclear powers is a fraud: The Americans could not prevent the Soviets from replicating their weaponry, and then could not object when the British did the same. — Conrad Black

All of the elements of the comic way tend to spread to others, insinuating joy where it was previously absent. Conversation has a way of leaping among persons, as it does at parties and celebratory gatherings. Storytelling always begets storytelling. It is difficult to watch others at play without wanting to join them. This is not only a human phenomenon, for researchers have consistently noted that animals at play are often imitated by other animals. So wherever it is possible to initiate a playful activity, it will have a good chance of replicating itself through other parts of the system. — Joseph Rusling Meeker

My laboratory is interested in the related challenges of understanding the origin of life on the early earth, and constructing synthetic cellular life in the laboratory. Focusing on artificial life frees us to explore novel chemical systems, but what we learn from these systems helps us to understand possible pathways leading to the origin of life. Our basic design for a synthetic cell involves the encapsulation of a spontaneously replicating nucleic acid, which acts as the genetic material, within a spontaneously replicating membrane vesicle, which provides spatial localization. We are using chemical synthesis to make nucleic acids with modified nucleobases and sugar-phosphate backbones. — Jack W. Szostak

By the nature of cinema and how it literalizes what we envision, movies can have difficulty replicating that connection we make with a classic book. — Steve Erickson

All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities — Richard Dawkins

Fewer and fewer of our progenitors were replicating themselves via the weird, squishy process to which they devoted their organs of entertainment. — Charles Stross

This should not be just another art form for historians to see and appreciate, but an embodiment of powerful, evergreen human philosophy mingled with mythology and science, replicating divine and spiritual precipitation, which must compel human beings through generations to get mesmerised and assimilate it into their lives. — Bibhu Datta Rout

I don't think you make fans happy by just replicating frames. What they want to see is that you stayed true to the story, true to the characters and true to the design. — Sylvain White

If you're not observing the world around you, in some sense you're not really an artist because then that means you're just replicating other people's stuff, or, I don't even know what you're doing. — Neill Blomkamp

It uses the greatest random-access indexing system ever invented - one that computer scientists haven't come even close to replicating. Whereas an index in the back of a book provides a single address - a page number - for each important subject, each subject in the brain has hundreds if not thousands of addresses. Our internal memories are associational, nonlinear. You don't need to know where a particular memory is stored in order to find it. It simply turns up - or doesn't - when you need it. Because of the dense network that interconnects our memories, we can skip around from memory to memory and idea to idea very rapidly. — Joshua Foer

We will get growth and affordability in health care not by replicating the expertise of today's physicians in the form of new physicians. We will get it by embodying their expertise in devices and equipment, so expertise becomes widely available, more affordable, and much easier to obtain. This — Clayton M Christensen

For all that we have done, as a civilization, as individuals, the universe is not stable, and nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating and decaying and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy. — Richard K. Morgan

As he was wont to remark, Nature has had her day; she has finally exhausted through the nauseating uniformity of her landscapes and her skies, the sedulous patience of men of refined taste. Essentially, what triteness Nature displays, like a specialist who confines himself to his own single sphere; what small-mindedness, like a shopkeeper who stocks only this one article to the exclusion of any other; what monotony she exhibits with her arrangements of mountains and seas! Page 20.
There is no doubt whatever that this eternally self-replicating old fool has now exhausted the good-natured admiration of all true artists, and the moment has come to replace her, as far as that can be achieved, with artifice. — Joris-Karl Huysmans