Unfortunately, public debates do not have much room for subtlety. The audience wants a quick thrust at your opponent, not a slow and convoluted series of moves.
ALAN LIGHTMANWe’re plugged in 24 hours a day now. We’re all part of one big machine, whether we are conscious of that or not.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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I’m still happy with the way Einstein’s Dreams came out. That book came out of a single inspiration. I really felt like I was not creating the words, that I was hearing the words.
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In a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared.
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Some say it is best not to go near the center of time.
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Whenever Obama uses subtleties in discussing a complex issue, he gets creamed.
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I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics.
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It’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.
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We don’t have the time, literally, to think during the day. To listen to ourselves think. To think about where we are going, who we are, what’s important.
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That’s an exciting thing. In a class of fifteen there are usually two very good writers, equal to good student writers anywhere in the country. Those two make the class wonderful.
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In this acausal world, scientists are helpless.
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I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie.
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Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.
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“The Diagnosis” had ten drafts of very significant changing, where I went through the whole book, wholesale and changed everything. Then the last year or so it was making small changes.
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It’s not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don’t count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.
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The relationship between science and the humanities is two-way. Science changes our view of the world and our place in it. In the other direction, the humanities provide the store of ideas and images and language available to us in understanding the world.
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So many little lives, amounting to nothing. I ask you: What is infinity multiplied by zero? It is hardly worth our discussion.
ALAN LIGHTMAN