A User's Guide to History

Programhistory

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"It's not defeat my friend..." he said as he turned to me, "only a setback"

"With every apparent defeat we become stronger and wiser, with every victory we gain confidence and pride"

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"We sleep soundly in our beds, because rough men stand ready in the night to do violence on those who would harm us."

-George Orwell

Paraphrase of a sentiment in his 1945 essay Notes on Nationalism

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"There's nothing worse than a late blooming philosopher"

Tyrion Lanister to Circe

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"Your focus determines your reality"

Qui Gonn Jinn

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

1999

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"Daemons... they don't stop working. They're always active. They seduce. They manipulate. They own us. And even though you're with me even though I created you, it makes no difference. We all must deal with them alone. The best we can hope for... the only silver lining in all of this... is that when we break through, we find a few familiar faces waiting on the other side."

Quote from Eliot from Mr Robot Season 1 Episode 4: "eps1.3_da3mons.mp4"

Written by Sam Esmail

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"On the day I can no longer read you or figure you out, but you can easily understand me, that's when you'll finally have grown up" - Zhang Beihai's father

The Dark Forest

Cixin Liu

2008

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"Just do the best within your responsibility. Let's go drinking and then go back to sleep like good bugs."

Ding Yi from the Three Body Problem

Cixin Liu

2006

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"The one-armed woman said, 'There was a movie called Maple recently. At the end, an adult and the child stand in front of the grave of a red guard who had died during the faction civil wars. The child asks the adult' Are they heroes?' The adult says no. The child asks' Are they enemies?' The adult again says no. The child asks 'Then who are they?' The adults says, 'History.' "

"The Three-Body Problem"

Cixin Liu

2006

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"Live not in fear, for in fear we do not explore the world that we have at our fingertips."

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"Buddha, please help my Lord break away from the sea of misery."

The Three Body Problem

Cixin Liu

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Fecemi la divina potestate

"I was made by divine power"

Phrase written above the entrance of the Tower

The Boy and the Heron (2023)

Hayao Miyazaki

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The ocean lies before me

An expanse of blue and dark blue

Within it life teams

But a calm dominates the horizon

Through the clouds above

The bright sun shines forth

Its beams piercing the gloom and illuminating the land

For all can see that the sun is there, only at times hidden by grey and sorrow

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Beneath the tomb lies,

A darkness that envelopes

The very air within

Is plagued by silence

An opaque mirk,

Houses the secrets within

To life, to death

And the space in between

Three stones lie adjacent,

A darkness swells beneath

My father is there

And awaits my company

- inspired by "The Boy and the Heron"

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"When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement become headlong - faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until its too late."

Jessica's Bene Gesserit proverb

DUNE (1965)

Frank Hebert

[hexeosis]

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Into Infinite

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It's my 10 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

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Science versus charlatanry

To the editor of the Evening News:

"It is an unfortunate fact that every man who seeks to disseminate knowledge must contend not only against ignorance itself, but against false instruction as well. No sooner do we deem ourselves free from a particularly gross superstition, than we are confronted by some enemy to learning who would set aside all the intellectual progress of years, and plunge us back into the darkness of mediaeval disbelief.

While I entertain no doubt as to the sincerity of the author… [it is impossible] for me to comprehend how any person of judgment and education can now give credence to the doctrines of a false and ridiculous system completely exploded over 200 years ago. In this age of enlightenment it out not be necessary to shew the utter absurdity of the idea that our daily affairs can be governed by the mere apparent motions of infinitely distant bodies whose seeming arrangements and configurations, on which the calculations of judicial astrology are based, arise only from perspective as seen from our particular place in the universe. It seems very provoking that astronomers and other men of sense should be obliged to waste their time and energy in proving Astrology to be false, when there exists not the slightest reason to believe any part of it true…The fallacies of Astrology are like the many heads of the Lernean Hydra; chop off one, and two grow in its place.

I should not take up your time… if I did not consider Astrology a dangerous as well as a silly subject. In the minds of the masses it tends to become confused with Astronomy, and thereby to injure the reputation of that science."

H. P. Lovecraft