Deutsch Quotes

The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche. ~ David Deutsch

All observations point to the fact that the intellectual woman is masculinized; in her, warm, intuitive knowledge has yielded to cold unproductive thinking. ~ Helene Deutsch

It is a mistake to conceive of choice and decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula. That omits the most important element of decision-making, namely the creation of new options. Good ~ David Deutsch

From the least parochial perspectives available to us, people are the most significant entities in the cosmic scheme of things. They are not 'supported' by their environments, but support themselves by creating knowledge. Once they have suitable knowledge (essentially, the knowledge of the Enlightenment), they are capable of sparking unlimited further progress. ~ David Deutsch

They say she was once a grand lady and lived on the hill. But she took to reading books and went from bad to worse. Stuffed her head full of ideas, and now she's a bit addled. ~ Helen Deutsch

If we can't program it, we can't understand it. ~ David Deutsch

If you reject the infinite, you are stuck with the finite, and the finite is parochial ... the best explanation of anything eventually involves universality, and therefore infinity. The reach of explanations cannot be limited by fiat. ~ David Deutsch

Only a thin partition separates the psychically normal from the diseased. ~ Helene Deutsch

If it turns out that all this time we have merely been studying the programming of a cosmic planetarium, then that would merely mean that we have been studying a smaller portion of reality than we thought. So what? Such things have happened many times in the history of science, as our horizons have expanded beyond the Earth to include the solar system, our Galaxy, other galaxies, clusters of galaxies and so on, and, of course, parallel universes. ~ David Deutsch

Copenhagen interpretation Niels Bohr's combination of instrumentalism, anthropocentrism and studied ambiguity, used to avoid understanding quantum theory as being about reality. ~ David Deutsch

History
Coming too close
Is monstrous, like a doll
That is alive and bigger than the child
Who tries to hold it. ~ Babette Deutsch

And to this world, to this scene of tormented and agonised beings, who only continue to exist by devouring each other, in which, therefore, every ravenous beast is the living grave of thousands of others, and its self-maintenance is a chain of painful deaths; and in which the capacity for feeling pain increases with knowledge, and therefore reaches its highest degree in man, a degree which is the higher the more intelligent the man is; to this world it has been sought to apply the system of optimism, and demonstrate to us that it is the best of all possible worlds. The absurdity is glaring. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

A good ad is one simple idea, with humanity in it, that connects with consumers, that represents the value system of a company and then can connect it with the consumer. We always say a brand is set of shared values. So if you can simply demonstrate your value system as a brand, so that a consumer could say, "Ah, our values line up. I vote for you, brand!" that's a good ad. ~ Donny Deutsch

For many people traveling can have deep psychological meaning. ~ Helene Deutsch

You can be hard on people as long as you're just as hard on yourself. ~ Donny Deutsch

Poetry is the fiery index to the genius of the age. ~ Babette Deutsch

No precautions, and no precautionary principle, can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee. We need a stance of problem-fixing, not just problem-avoidance. ~ David Deutsch

The poet, like the lover, is a person unable to reconcile what he knows with what he feels. His peculiarity is that he is under a certain compulsion to do so. ~ Babette Deutsch

That person is lonely who has no one for whom he or she is Number One. ~ Helene Deutsch

The theory that the biosphere was created without evolution, a few thousand years ago, is ruled out by overwhelming scientific evidence. To claim that there are 'alternative (always better) Biblical explanations of the same data', which make creationism a reasonable alternative to our best theories of biology and physics, is appalling intellectual dishonesty. ~ David Deutsch

I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn't forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics we usually eventually find a technological way of doing it. ~ David Deutsch

Base metals can be transmuted into gold by stars, and by intelligent beings who understand the processes that power stars, but by nothing else in the universe. ~ David Deutsch

Adolescence is the period of the decisive last battle fought before maturity. The ego must achieve independence, the old emotional ties must be cast off, the new ones created. ~ Helene Deutsch

I would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective. ~ Mark Twain

Every problem that is interesting is also soluble. ~ David Deutsch

[a] heavy sense of guilt [is] the most potent factor in the whole psychologic picture of motherliness. ~ Helene Deutsch

The passion, the competitiveness, the swinging for the fences, it adds up. ~ Donny Deutsch

Bad philosophy before the Enlightenment was typically of the because-I-say-so variety. When the Enlightenment liberated philosophy and science, they both began to make progress, and increasingly there was good philosophy. But, paradoxically, bad philosophy became worse. ~ David Deutsch

Another danger is that - as is already happening to some extent - authors and editors run scared and go to absurd lengths to avoid giving offence. (An American editor rejected Polar, a picture book about a toy polar bear which is published in England by Andre Deutsch, on the ground that the text, written by Elaine Moss, states explicitly that the bear is white). A demand to avoid stereotypes can easily become in effect a demand for a different stereotype: for instance that girls should always be shown as strong, brave and resourceful, and that mothers should always have jobs and never, never wear an apron. And books written to an approved formula, or with deliberate didactic aim, do not often have the breath of life. Some members of women's groups in North America have published their own anti-sexist books, featuring such characters as fire-fighting girls or boys who learn to crochet. Good luck to them; but those I have seen are far below professional standard.

("Are Children's Books Racist and Sexist?" from Only Connect, 2nd ed., 1980) ~ John Rowe Townsend

The brain is the only kind of object capable of understanding that the cosmos is even there, or why there are infinitely many prime numbers, or that apples fall because of the curvature of space-time, or that obeying its own inborn instincts can be morally wrong, or that it itself exists. ~ David Deutsch

I've always managed by walking around. Any CEO or leader who spends the majority of his time in his office is not doing his job. ~ Donny Deutsch

mechanical reinterpretations of human affairs not only lack explanatory power, they are morally wrong as well, for in effect they deny the humanity of the participants, casting them and their ideas merely as side effects of the landscape. Diamond ~ David Deutsch

Trying to rely on the sheer good luck of avoiding bad outcomes indefinitely would simply guarantee that we would eventually fail without the means of recovering. ~ David Deutsch

The main fighter for the DSP [Deutsch-Sozialistische Partei or German Socialist Party], as I have said, was Julius Streicher, then a teacher in Nuremberg. At first he, too, had a holy conviction of the mission and the future of his movement. ~ Adolf Hitler

The Enlightenment (The beginning of) a way of pursuing knowledge with a tradition of criticism and seeking good explanations instead of reliance on authority. ~ David Deutsch

The most important application of quantum computing in the future is likely to be a computer simulation of quantum systems, because that's an application where we know for sure that quantum systems in general cannot be efficiently simulated on a classical computer. ~ David Deutsch

The only thing I hated about the agency business was a lot of business travel. It was the only part of my job that I did not like. I found it very tedious and wearing. ~ Donny Deutsch

The embattled gates to equal rights indeed opened up for modern women, but I sometimes think to myself; that is not what I meant by freedom, it is only social progress. ~ Helene Deutsch

Deutsch and her colleagues, in their 2006 paper, suggested that their work not only has "implications for the issues of modularity in the processing of speech and music ... [but] of the evolutionary origin" of both. In particular, they see absolute pitch, whatever its subsequent vicissitudes, as having been crucial to the origins of both speech and music. In his book The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, Steven Mithen takes this idea further, suggesting that music and language have a common origin, and that a sort of combined protomusic-cum-protolanguage was characteristic of the Neanderthal mind. ~ Oliver Sacks

That outgrowth of arrogance comes at a price: some people don't like is. I take responsibility for that. ~ Donny Deutsch

And here's what management is: motivating people and putting them in places where they can succeed. ~ Donny Deutsch

One teeny tiny minute is very powerful if you do each and every day ~ Leicht Deutsch Lerne

The hardest part of writing is the same as doing your homework...it's staying seated in your chair. ~ Stacia Deutsch

The most important of all limitations on knowledge – creation is that we cannot prophecy: we cannot predict the content of ideas yet to be created, or their effects. This limitation is not only consistent with the unlimited growth of knowledge, it is entailed by it. ~ David Deutsch

If you can't embrace failure, or the possibility of failure, or the tremendous fear of failure, you can't be wildly successful. ~ Donny Deutsch

I appear wild on the outside, but I'm a conservative businessman. ~ Donny Deutsch

Who, except the poets, reads poetry? ~ Babette Deutsch

The failure-dichotomy principle: failure is good. Failure is not an option. Balance those in your brain. ~ Donny Deutsch

I chop and change between what is called 'work' and what is called 'recreation.' There are no discontinuities in my day. I only play tennis with people I find interesting. ~ David Deutsch

I don't have a favorite medium; I was brought up on TV. so I am clearly of the TV generation, but it depends on what you are trying to sell; sometimes a fully integrated solution, sometimes a pure Internet solution, sometimes a pure billboard solution. ~ Donny Deutsch

The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests. ~ David Deutsch

The key to success is not purely who's the smartest, who's the best, but also who can say with conviction, "I deserve it." The entire concept is wrapped up in one phrase: "Why not me? ~ Donny Deutsch

To me quantum computation is a new and deeper and better way to understand the laws of physics, and hence understanding physical reality as a whole. ~ David Deutsch

Perhaps a more practical way of stressing the same truth would be to frame the growth of knowledge (all knowledge, not only scientific) as a continual transition from problems to better problems, rather than from problems to solutions or from theories to better theories. This ~ David Deutsch

When I looked into the mechanics of being a businessman, I found it wasn't rocket science. ~ Donny Deutsch

Failure is not an option on this one. ~ Donny Deutsch

I've built my success on the idea that a win for me involves a win for everyone around me. ~ Donny Deutsch

Because we are universal explainers, we are not simply obeying our genes. For ~ David Deutsch

The most general way of stating the central assertion of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution is that a population of replicators subject to variation (for instance by imperfect copying) will be taken over by those variants that are better than their rivals at causing themselves to be replicated. This ~ David Deutsch

Where we have good, testable explanations, they then have to be tested, and we drop the ones that fail the tests. ~ David Deutsch

After all, the ultimate goal of all research is not objectivity, but truth. ~ Helene Deutsch

Quantum computation is ... a distinctively new way of harnessing nature ... It will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes. ~ David Deutsch

Is the human race a universal constructor? ~ David Deutsch

The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy, but the ones that contain the deepest explanations. ~ David Deutsch

There are moments in business and in life when you have to say, "Failure is not an option." ~ Donny Deutsch

To iterate is human, to recurse divine. ~ L Peter Deutsch

The difference between Pound and Whitman is not between the democrat who in deep distress could look hopefully toward the future and the fascist madly in love with the past. It is that between the woodsman and the woodcarver. It is that between the mystic harking back to his vision and the artist whose first allegiance is to his craft, and so to the reality it presents. ~ Babette Deutsch

It's a very simple thing on the make-or-break decision, it's the guy, and that's what separates the great leaders and great successes, and if you don't listen to it, you don't have it, you're never gonna get it, 'cause it's never gonna come from someplace else. ~ Donny Deutsch

How to sustain the miracle
Of being, that like a muted bell,
Or like some ocean-breathing shell,
Quivers, intense and still? ~ Babette Deutsch

It was no mystery why Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold had singled me out as a prime prospect for their heinous crime. My grandfather, Julius Rosenwald, was the chairman of the board of Sears, Roebuck and Co. His prominence made me an ideal choice. ~ Armand Deutsch

Poetry is important. No less than science, it seeks a hold upon reality, and the closeness of its approach is the test of its success. ~ Babette Deutsch

To me, it's always what's next and I think that's what drives most very successful people. It's never about the money. I mean that's a way of keeping score. It's about achievement and it's about winning a game and it's about upping the ante. ~ Donny Deutsch

It is interesting to note that in every phase of life feminine masochism finds some form of expression. ~ Helene Deutsch

International Relations are too important to be left to the specialists. ~ Karl Wolfgang Deutsch

Any serious analysis of Marxism must begin with the controversy over whether he is a humanist champion of free will or a determinist. Because Marxian writings on the subject often are so contradictory, it is impossible to know for sure. ~ Kenneth Deutsch

The best bosses understand the people working for them. That's the first component: what makes my people tick? What are they in it for? ~ Donny Deutsch

The scientific revolution was part of a wider intellectual revolution, the Enlightenment, which also brought progress in other fields, especially moral and political philosophy, and in the institutions of society. Unfortunately, the term 'the Enlightenment' is used by historians and philosophers to denote a variety of different trends, some of them violently opposed to each other. What I mean by it will emerge here as we go along. It is one of several aspects of 'the beginning of infinity', and is a theme of this book. But one thing that all conceptions of the Enlightenment agree on is that it was a rebellion, and specifically a rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge. ~ David Deutsch

Every business is about understanding people. Which people you have to get through. Which people you have to embrace. Which people you have to jump over. Which people you have to push out of the way. That's the game. ~ Donny Deutsch

Sparta has no philosophers. That's because the job of a philosopher is to understand things better, which is a form of change, so they don't want it. Another difference: they don't honour living poets, only dead ones. Why? Because dead poets don't write anything new, but live ones do. A third difference: their education system is insanely harsh; ours is famously lax. Why? Because they don't want their kids to dare to question anything, so that they won't ever think of changing anything. How ~ David Deutsch

Humans may or may not have cosmic significance, and if they do, it will be by hitching a ride on the objective centrality of knowledge in the cosmic scheme of things. ~ David Deutsch

I am convinced that the reason so many fans leave Dodger Stadium after the seventh inning is that they become bored. ~ Armand Deutsch

It is possible to build a virtual-reality generator whose repertoire includes every possible environment. ~ David Deutsch

Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilisation or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal. ~ David Deutsch