Douglas Hofstadter Quotes
Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truths, but as we shall soon see, a formal system, no matter how powerful—cannot lead to all truths.
Quotes to Explore
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Religious ideas about good and evil tend to focus on how to achieve well-being in the next life, and this makes them terrible guides to securing it in this one. Of course, there are a few gems to be found in every religious tradition, but insofar as these precepts are wise and useful they are not, in principle, religious.
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It's always an honor to represent your country.
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We need to protect the privacy rights of all Americans, and that means stopping the federal government from spying on the cellphones and emails of law-abiding citizens.
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The actress they'd hired had refused to appear naked in front of the camera. I didn't like to appear naked either, but the first thing I did was take off my clothes and jump into the pool completely naked.
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Real Madrid is the most important thing that happened to me, both as a footballer and as a person.
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Lets be clear, Dolly Parton is a rapper. Somewhere before all the country, I don't know what happens up there in the mountains when you're growing up, but she has been spitting rhymes for a very long time - 50 years I'd say.
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It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
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I like what it is to sing, or to be with the others singing, to make music, but the fuss and all the things that are the exterior part of a career, has never interested me.
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I don't have any particular goals in making a recording. In a way the recording is itself the goal. The music comes into my mind, and from there the main job is to give form to it.
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The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.
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This world is too hard for me to leave my kids, without me supervising and being there for them.
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The film business creates a large amount of waste, and I'm not immune to waste in the business.
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Architecture will always express the technical and social progress of the country in which it is carried out. If we wish to give it the human content that it lacks, we must participate in the political struggle.
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But if I played well and prepared myself properly, then all I had to do was control myself and put myself in a position to win.
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You can't propel a nation to move forward if all you are doing is taking something from them.
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All you needed back then was a blow dryer and a dream.
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My school in St. Louis is great. They basically created a program where I can do online classes and independent studies when I'm traveling. But then I still get to go home and take classes in a normal school environment.
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All we had aboard the ship that morning was one Annapolis graduate and three reserves.
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If what I read doesn't reflect my life - whether I'm gay or Latino or on welfare - doesn't that really mean that my life is not valuable?
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I do think corporations should pay their tax.
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Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.
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I went to Africa without the perspective of a balance between teaching people the truth, which has been my calling, and helping people who have physical problems, like AIDS and orphans and hunger.
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In some ways, I think it's the closest that we come to the truth — is in the form of fiction.
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Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truths, but as we shall soon see, a formal system, no matter how powerful—cannot lead to all truths.
