Academics From The United States

"What has occurred over the course of the last few centuries is a growing (but by no means universal or certain) recognition that science gets the job done, while religion makes excuses. Sometimes they are very pretty excuses that capture the imagination of the public, but ultimately, when you want to win a war or heal a dying child or get rich from a discovery or explore Antarctica, you turn to science and reason, or you fail."

"If a scientist saw a cataclysm coming, say a meteor on collision course for earth in 2050, we wouldn’t be saying, “Hallelujah, physics is true, bring it on! Our faith in mathematics is strengthened!” We’d be trying to stop it. Which makes the Christian reaction puzzling. If I actually believed Jesus was coming to end the world, I’d be preparing by stocking up on timber and nails. They were pretty effective last time."

"Religion is a barbarous obsidian knife poised over our chests — put it in a cabinet and admire it as a work of art, but don't ever wield the damned thing ever again."

"...what I want to happen to religion in the future is this: I want it to be like bowling. It's a hobby, something some people will enjoy, that has some virtues to it, that will have its own institutions and its traditions and its own television programming, and that families will enjoy together. It's not something I want to ban or that should affect hiring and firing decisions, or that interferes with public policy. It will be perfectly harmless as long as we don't elect our politicians on the basis of their bowling score, or go to war with people who play nine-pin instead of ten-pin, or use folklore about backspin to make decrees about how biology works."

"When President Bush goes on television and says certain cultures hate us for our democracy and freedom, he's just wrong. Everywhere I went in the Middle East, everyone told me how much they loved America and Americans; the hatred is directed at American policy."

"When I was a young man working 14 hour days, I traded using outrageous and terrifying leverage. I was either very lucky, very smart or very dumb. That’s what terrifies people about commodities. Commodities themselves are no riskier than stocks. A stock on margin has more risk than a commodity fully paid for. It’s all about the degree of leverage."

"I did very little marketing. The key is to make your clients money. If you have a good track record, people will find you and knock on your door. Just make your clients money."

"I started out with $600, a second hand Volkswagen, and a wife. One was an asset and one was a liability. I will let you figure out which was which. I liquidated both, and still had the $600. I worked long hours, and spent weekends reading about markets. I simply love it. You have to love what you do, whether it be gardening, hairdressing, etc. When you love it, then the money follows. Even if it doesn’t, you will still be happy. Being happy and poor is better than being unhappy and poor."

"The bottom line is this is not a war we want to get into. We can win the battle of Iraq, but that is not the war. It's not a war that can be won in the traditional sense. If we succeed in ousting Saddam Hussein, what then? Who is going to run Iraq afterwards? We cannot do it. The country is a mish mash of factions who hate each other."

"I'm tired of trying to do something worthwhile for the human race, they simply don't want to change!"

"Attacking Iraq would be madness."

"Unfortunately politicians are not very sound people or they wouldn't be politicians."

"I am dying to find a way to invest in both North Korea and Myanmar. The major changes in these two countries are among the most exciting things I see right now, looking to the future."

"Sometimes I think our central bank will keep printing money till we run out of trees."

"Teach your children or your grandchildren Chinese. It is going to be the most important language of their lifetimes."

"If you bail out every investment bank that gets in trouble, that’s not capitalism, that’s socialism for the rich."

"Software without bias is like water without wet."

"If Nietzsche’s image reached its nadir during the Second World War, when Hitler presented Mussolini with a bound edition of his works and the historian Crane Brinton wrote a book asserting he would have been “a good Nazi,” a resurrection was soon to come. The German émigré and Princeton professor Walter Kaufmann almost single-handedly revived his standing with his many translations and forceful reminder that Nietzsche hated anti-Semites and German nationalists as well as woolly-headed romantics. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche was a late flower of the Enlightenment, a tough-minded rationalist with the courage to face the Darwinian revelation that there is no purpose to nature or to our existence. The true task of the overman was to overcome himself, not others, and to do so by sculpturing his impulses and thoughts and inheritances into a willed unity that could be called “style.”"

"Kaufmann’s Nietzsche is important for other reasons as well. It is a book that everyone seems to be familiar with but few have actually read, as if, having succeeded in upending the traditional picture of Nietzsche, it can now be safely ignored. But reading it (or rereading it) repays the effort. Kaufmann’s own views are considerably more nuanced than I have been able to suggest, and his accounts of Nietzsche’s dependence of Goethe, of his naturalism—the view that human beings are continuous with the rest of the animal world, in the spirit of Darwin—the mechanisms of sublimation, and his affinities with American pragmatism are genuine and lasting contributions to our understanding of this still seductive and enigmatic philosopher who is now, thanks to this book, part and parcel of our intellectual heritage. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche is still very much alive, and for that reason his Nietzsche deserves to come alive once again."

"What makes The Present Age and The Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle important is not so much that the former essay anticipates Heidegger and the latter, Barth: it would be more accurate to say that Heidegger’s originality is widely overestimated, and that many things he says at great length in his highly obscure German were said earlier by various writers who had made the same points much more elegantly, and that some of these writers, including Kierkegaard, were known to Heidegger. Why should Kierkegaard’s significance depend on someone else’s, quite especially when many points that others copied from him may be wrong?"

"The great artist liberates the emotions and recreates the sheer wonder of childhood without surrendering the development of the intellect."

"I agree with Paul that love is more important than faith and hope; but so are honesty, integrity, and moral courage. The world needs less faith and more love and nobility."

"The most obvious failure of organized religions is surely that almost all of them have made a mockery of what their founders taught."

"If it does not upset, it is not philosophy."

"Heresy is a set of opinions "at variance with established or generally received principles." In this sense, heresy is the price of all originality and innovation."

"Of faith and morals, one cannot speak honestly for long without hurting feelings. Therefore, most people speak dishonestly of the most important subjects. Many recent philosophers prefer not to speak of them at all. But in some situations honesty is incompatible with silence."

"There is thus a certain plausibility to Nietzsche's doctrine, though it is dynamite. He maintains in effect that the gulf separating Plato from the average man is greater than the cleft between the average man and a chimpanzee."

"Of course, not everything old is beautiful, any more than everything black, or everything white, or everything young. But the notion that old means ugly is every bit as harmful as the prejudice that black is ugly. In one way it is even more pernicious. The notion that only what is new and young is beautiful poisons our relationship to the past and to our own future. It keeps us from understanding our roots and the greatest works of our culture and other cultures. It also makes us dread what lies ahead of us and leads many to shirk reality."

"I categorically reject Marks’ whole philosophy and I’d probably call him delusional."

"Bob Marks is an unbelievably prolific public intellectual."

"Robert Marks... deals in high-level mathematics -the kind of stuff only a handful of people around the planet even understand." "[His math] basically lead[s] you to the conclusion that there is design in the universe." Mark Mathis, Executive Producer of "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed."

"Bob’s research will vindicate itself. He finds himself at the center of a firestorm that is really not of his own making, and one day — yes, this day is coming, eventually — after the controversy wanes, Bob’s work will still be standing, simply because it is powerful and true."

"Individual self-sovereignty is a load-bearing pillar on which liberty rests."

"The best immortality prospect for the materialist looks to be either deep freezing dead bodies until a cure is found, or computer replication of brains in silicon. One won’t work and the other can’t survive a power outage."

"Those who worship at the feet of materialism often don’t admit to the limitations imposed by their narrow core belief."

"[S]ome modern [Christian] praise music sung in churches during Sunday worship service is referred to as 7-11 music: seven words repeated eleven times."

"Any claim that “all religions are true” is like claiming any liquid from a cow, when chilled, goes well with a chocolate chip cookie."

"Emotions that make us human will never be duplicated by a machine. These include compassion, love, empathy, elation, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, pleasure, pride, excitement, embarrassment, regret, jealousy, grief, hope, and faith. Properly defined, creativity, sentience, and understanding are also on the list. These and other non-algorithmic traits are evidence of non-computable you."

"Computers can only analyze inside the box. Remarkable humans have the meta-ability to go outside ourselves, look back inside, and explore our abilities. We can understand understanding, think about thinking, and … know about the unknowable"

"Given enough time, any algorithm performed on a modern-day computer can be done by the programmer with pencil and paper."

"Those who believe in the coming of Strong AI argue that non-algorithmic consciousness will be an emergent property as AI complexity ever increases. In other words, consciousness will just happen, as a sort of natural outgrowth of the code’s increasing complexity. Such unfounded optimism is akin to that of a naive young boy standing in front of a large pile of horse manure. He becomes excited and begins digging into the pile, flinging handfuls of manure over his shoulders. “With all this horse poop,” he says, “there must be a pony in here somewhere!” Strong AI proponents similarly claim, in essence, “With all this computational complexity, there must be some consciousness here somewhere!”"

"The ultimate success of AI is not due to journal papers, blogs, press releases, forecasts, corporate acquisitions, speculation, or promises. Success is measured by reduction to practice."

"[N]on-algorithmic computing in digital silicon is an oxymoron."

"[Ray] Kurzweil says that “consciousness is a biological process like digestion, lactation, photosynthesis, or mitosis.” Or, to revise Descartes, “I lactate. Therefore, I think.”"

"Actual AI is written with computer code such as Python or C++. “Super-intelligent AI” is written using PowerPoint slides."

"The better we understand creation and the possibilities of logic and algorithms, the more we see the glory of God."

"Robots deserve no more human rights than a 3D printer or toaster."

"[The robot] Sophia has been granted citizenship in Saudi Arabia. And Homer Simpson has been given citizenship in Winnipeg, Ontario. Both decisions are silly. The difference is that the city of Winnipeg acknowledged that their action was a joke."

"If we remove people's non-algorithmic characteristics, we will get a very boring person."

"Turning a soul into an algorithm is pure nonsense."