Jim Holt Quotes

#1. I find it hard to swallow the notion that the world is improved by extra suffering. And that goes for a lot of Christian doctrine. Jones commits a crime, so you expiate the evil by nailing Smith to a cross and it's all better. - John Leslie

Jim Holt

#2. Excessive administration secrecy ... feeds conspiracy theories and reduces the public's confidence in government.

John McCain

#3. Messages from the unseen that the great Alan Turing left behind at his death: Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.

Jim Holt

#4. (It is interesting that the words "cosmos" and "cosmetic" have the same root, the Greek word for "adornment" or "arrangement.")

Jim Holt

#5. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing.

John Cage

#6. I really don't like to formulate what I believe because, like a quantum phenomenon, it varies from day to day, and anyway there's a sort of bad luck attached to expressing yourself too clearly.

Jim Holt

#7. Is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside.

Jim Holt

#8. Suppose you turn your attention inward in search of this 'I'. You may encounter nothing more than an ever changing stream of consciousness, a flow of thoughts and feelings in which there is no real self to be discovered.

Jim Holt

#9. To begin with, if existence arose out of a need for goodness, then it must be essentially mental. In other words, existence must ultimately consist of mind, of consciousness.

Jim Holt

#10. To abandon the principle of simplicity would be to abandon all reasoning about the external world

Jim Holt

#11. When you are trying to understand the world, it is unwise to assume that you occupy a privileged position in it.

Jim Holt

#12. In 1921, a New York rabbi asked Einstein if he believed in God. "I believe in Spinoza's God," he answered, "who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.

Jim Holt

#13. Having just enough life to enjoy being dead.

Jim Holt

#14. Those qualities of bodies that cannot be intended and remitted [i.e., qualities that cannot be increased and diminished] and that belong to all bodies on which experiments can be made should be taken as qualities of all bodies universally.

Isaac Newton

#15. So this is how you swim inward. So this is how you flow outwards. So this is how you pray.

Mary Oliver

#16. Consistency is the virtue of small minds, and Spinoza had a great mind - he was inconsistent all over the place.

Jim Holt

#17. You have to have a temperamental attraction to dangerous ideas ...

Jim Holt

#18. It has been said that the question, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' is so profound that it would occur only to a metaphysician, yet so simple that it would occur only to a child.

Jim Holt

#19. Instead of being an inert object, nothingness would appear to be a dynamic thing, a sort of annihilating force.

Jim Holt

#20. The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

Jim Holt

#21. Morse code didn't leave a paper trail, or an email thread on the screen of your tablet. She would never be able to scroll back and reread the exchange she'd just had with Rufus.

Neal Stephenson

#22. This is the real task before us: to reassert our commitment as a nation to a law higher than our own, to renew our spiritual strength. Only by building a wall of such spiritual resolve can we, as a free people, hope to protect our own heritage and make it someday the birthright of all men.

Ronald Reagan

#23. Does mathematics carry its own ontological clout?

Jim Holt