“The trouble with being inspired to perform the impossible was that the inspiration gave you no clues to the practical means.”
“Blenkinsop sighed. "As usual, those of you who can think of better ways to win the war are invited to write directly to Mr. Winston Churchill, number 10 Downing Street, London South-West-One. Now, are there any questions, as opposed to stupid criticisms?”
“Our whole strategy must be to prevent the Allies from securing a beachhead, because once they achieve that, the battle is lost…perhaps even the war.”
“War was grueling and oppressive and frustrating and uncomfortable, but one had friends. If peace brought back loneliness, Godliman thought he would not be able to live with it.”
“Villages in the English countryside were cut off by the snow,”
“Around most of its coast the cliffs rise out of the cold sea without the courtesy of a beach. Angered by this rudeness the waves pound on the rock in impotent rage: a ten-thousand-year fit of bad temper that the island ignores with impunity.”
“I haven’t had the opportunity to discover the merits of monogamy.”
“It just means that if someone hates you, they still have feelings for you. If they really didn't care about you, they'd just forget about you. They wouldn't even waste the time hating you.”
“The Russians would lose 305,000 troops in the last 42 miles approaching Berlin---about the number of American army soldiers who died in all of World War II. Of the 125,000 of Berlin's civilians who died in the Russian attack, 6,400 were suicides;”
“It from bit.” It’s an unorthodox theory, which starts with the assumption that information
is at the root of all existence. When we look at the moon, a galaxy, or an atom, their essence, he claims, is in the information stored within them. But this information sprang into existence when the universe observed itself. He draws a circular diagram, representing the history of the universe. At the beginning of the universe, it sprang into being because it was observed. This means that “it” (matter in the universe) sprang into existence when information (“bit”) of the universe was observed. He calls this the “participatory
universe”—the idea that the universe adapts to us in the same way that we adapt to the universe, that our very presence makes the universe possible.”
“Cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones,” wrote the poet Richard Wilbur, and even in the atomic era it was hard to see how the physicist’s swarming clouds of particles could give rise to the hard-edged world of everyday sight and touch.”
“That’s what I love about people. They have dreams and grand ambitions, and they start building towards them, even though they know they won’t live to see them finished. That’s how the pyramids were built.”
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