Marvin Minsky Quotes

Because you aren't who you think you are. You aren't what everyone else believes. You might have delivered countless deaths but you love more fiercely than anyone I've ever known.

People feel removed from sexism. 'I'm not a sexist, but I'm not a feminist.' They think there's this fuzzy middle ground. There's no fuzzy middle ground. You either believe that women are people or you don't. It's that simple.

Focus on something that has high value to someone else, be really rigorous in making that assessment, because natural human tendency is wishful thinking, so the challenge to entrepreneurs is telling what's the difference between really believing in your ideals and sticking to them as opposed to pursuing some unrealistic dream that doesn't actually have merit, be very rigorous in your self analysis, certainly being extremely tenacious, and just work like hell. Put in 80-100 hours every week. All these things improves the odds of success

[On the Gaussian curve, remarked to Poincaré:] Experimentalists think that it is a mathematical theorem while the mathematicians believe it to be an experimental fact.

It is difficult to discuss... history.. it is more difficult to talk about today.. simple things…

Do not be alarmed by simplification, complexity is often a device for claiming sophistication, or for evading simple truths.

Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.

How wonderful it is that we believe in modern revelation. I cannot get over the feeling that if revelation were needed anciently, when life was simple, that revelation is also needed today, when life is complex. There never was a time in the history of the earth when men needed revelation more than they need it now.

Sometimes I think nothing is simple but the feeling of pain.

It’s as simple as that. Simple and complicated, as most true things are.

And simple truth miscalled simplicity

One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.

[Screenwriting] is no more complicated than old French torture chambers, I think. It's about as simple as that.

The investment business has taught me – increasingly as the years have passed – that people, especially investors (and, I believe, Americans), prefer good news and wishful thinking to bad news; and that there are always vested interests to offer facile, optimistic alternatives to the bad news.

Life's complicated and people do things for a lot of reasons. I think if you live in a black-and-white world, you're gonna suffer a lot. I used to be like that. But I don't believe that anymore.

To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.

there are two kinds of people in this world : those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.

I don't think God is an explanation at all. It's simply redescribing the problem. We are trying to understand how we have got a complicated world, and we have an explanation in terms of a slightly simpler world, and we explain that in terms of a slightly simpler world and it all hangs together down to an ultimately simple world. Now, God is not an explanation of that kind. God himself cannot be simple if he has power to do all the things he is supposed to do.

That the fundamental aspects of heredity should have turned out to be so extraordinarily simple supports us in the hope that nature may, after all, be entirely approachable. Her much-advertised inscrutability has once more been found to be an illusion due to our ignorance. This is encouraging, for, if the world in which we live were as complicated as some of our friends would have us believe we might well despair that biology could ever become an exact science.

That's what History teaches us, I think, that life goes on, even though individuals die and whole civilizations crumble away: The simple things last; they are repeated over and over by each generation.

The sun is simple. A sword is simple. A storm is simple. Behind everything simple is a huge tail of complicated.

You can't believe how hard it is for people to be simple, how much they fear being simple. They worry that if they're simple, people will think they're simpleminded. In reality, of course, it's just the reverse. Clear, tough-minded people are the most simple.

We find ourselves in that situation where we want to believe, we want to think we're the exception, we want to think we can change someone or tame a lion or make a bad guy good or something like that but 9 times out of 10 we end up looking back going, "Oh, shame on me, should've seen that one coming!"

If I'm not like my characters, I think just it's like a musician liking to play certain pieces of music rather than others. I just have more satisfaction when playing complicated things rather than some of your more straightforward, simple moments. . . . I like to be challenged.

If history teaches us anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly.