Invented Quotes

Shakespeare and his few peers invented all of us. ~ Harold Bloom

Donald Saari uses a combination of stories and questions to challenge students to think critically about calculus. "When I finish this process," he explained, "I want the students to feel like they have invented calculus and that only some accident of birth kept them from beating Newton to the punch." In essence, he provokes them into inventing ways to find the area under the curve, breaking the process into the smallest concepts (not steps) and raising the questions that will Socratically pull them through the most difficult moments. Unlike so many in his discipline, he does not simply perform calculus in front of the students; rather, he raises the questions that will help them reason through the process, to see the nature of the questions and to think about how to answer them. "I want my students to construct their own understanding," he explains, "so they can tell a story about how to solve the problem. ~ Ken Bain

For many parts of Nature can neither be invented with sufficient subtlety, nor demonstrated with sufficient perspicuity, nor accommodated unto use with sufficient dexterity, without the aid and intervening of the mathematics, of which sort are perspective, music, astronomy, cosmography, architecture, engineery, and divers others. ~ Francis Bacon

I was convinced in middle school that I invented tight-rolling your pants, because I would get hand-me-downs from my brothers, and of course they were bell-bottoms from the '70s. So I would fold and fold over the bells. I like to think I started the trend. But I didn't. ~ Patrick Wilson

God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. ~ C.S. Lewis

When it first emerged, Twitter was widely derided as a frivolous distraction that was mostly good for telling your friends what you had for breakfast. Now it is being used to organize and share news about the Iranian political protests, to provide customer support for large corporations, to share interesting news items, and a thousand other applications that did not occur to the founders when they dreamed up the service in 2006. This is not just a case of cultural exaptation: people finding a new use for a tool designed to do something else. In Twitter's case, the users have been redesigning the tool itself. The convention of replying to another user with the @ symbol was spontaneously invented by the Twitter user base. Early Twitter users ported over a convention from the IRC messaging platform and began grouping a topic or event by the "hash-tag" as in "#30Rock" or "inauguration." The ability to search a live stream of tweets - which is likely to prove crucial to Twitter's ultimate business model, thanks to its advertising potential - was developed by another start-up altogether. Thanks to these innovations, following a live feed of tweets about an event - political debates or Lost episodes - has become a central part of the Twitter experience. But for the first year of Twitter's existence, that mode of interaction would have been technically impossible using Twitter. It's like inventing a toaster oven and then looking around a year later and discovering that all your custo ~ Steven Johnson

It could be that the methods needed to take the next step may simply be beyond present day mathematics. Perhaps the methods I needed to complete the proof would not be invented for a hundred years. ~ Andrew Wiles

No, the idea of a benevolent god was very much an exception in the enormous pantheon of gods that people had invented over the course of human history. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

Women's studies needed a syllabus and so invented a canon overnight. It puffed up clunky, mundane contemporary women authors into Oz-like, skywriting dirigibles. Our best women students are being force-fed an appalling diet of cant, drivel and malarkey. ~ Camille Paglia

We must not forget that the wheel is reinvented so often because it is a very good idea; I've learned to worry more about the soundness of ideas that were invented only once. ~ David Parnas

Whoever invented English
should have learned
to spell. ~ Thanhha Lai

BASIC is a language invented in 1964 to provide computer access to non-science students. ~ Anonymous

And if, for some awful reason, you forget that money is a game, a make-believe concept that some people invented, you could be led back into the complex layered world of Should. And here, the loss isn't a financial one. You are the cost. Is it worth it? ~ Elle Luna

Really, this horrid House of Commons quite ruins our husbands for us. I think the Lower House by far the greatest blow to a happy married life that there has been since that terrible thing called the Higher Education of Women was invented. ~ Oscar Wilde

I invented an invisible machine to help you get to sleep. It only works after your eyes stay shut for a length of time. It's also so quiet that you won't hear it. ~ Jarod Kintz

Not much was really invented during the Renaissance, if you don't count modern civilization. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

[Skinner] does not invoke other events, processes, or mechanisms which are hypothesized or invented for the purpose of mediating between behavior and its empirical determinants. This omission is sometimes misconstrued as a denial that mediating mechanisms exist; they obviously do, they are obviously neurological and they are also obviously themselves lawful. ...The argument [against employing them as part of scientific practice] is simplicity itself... [Skinner] considers such theoretical terms unnecessary; they may generate research whose only usefulness is to disconfirm the mediating entity or redefine it without increasing our knowledge of behavior's controlling variables; they can become the absorbing focus of an inquiry and so deflect attention from behavior itself; they can become a "refuge from the data". ~ Kenneth MacCorquodale

The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel. ~ Douglas Adams

People tend to view history as if it were another planet and think the modern world was invented in 1963. I don't agree. ~ Julian Fellowes

While artists fervently believe that the art marketplace was invented by the devil and remains in his henchman's hands, they have no choice but to carry long spoons and sup there. ~ Eric Maisel

Human beings had invented war, invented and manufactured the weapons, even invented the players, the fighters, the actors of the war. But they themselves could not venture forth, could not wage it themselves. ~ Philip K. Dick

Because," she said, "that is what men would call it. They invented Satan, didn't they? Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which men want to live. ~ Anne Rice

40 THINGS THAT PROVE GOD CARES ABOUT GIRLS, including He made babies so cute! and He invented Australian accents! and There are no diets in heaven! ~ Kathleen Hale

I judge myself by the shiny, pretty people I see at parent-teacher meetings, or on Facebook, or Pinterest, who seem to totally have their shit together and never have unwashed hair. They never wait until Thursday night to help their kid with the entire week's homework. They don't have piles of dusty boxes in corners waiting to be opened from the move before last. They have pretty, pastel lives, and they are happy, and they own picnic baskets and napkins and know how to recycle, and they never run out of toilet paper or get their electricity turned off. And it's not even that I want to be one of those people. I fucking hate picnics. If God wanted us to eat on the ground He wouldn't have invented couches. I just don't want to feel like a failure because my biggest accomplishment of the day was going to the bank. ~ Jenny Lawson

The precedents for feminine self-expression run back through all the ages since the art of writing was invented ... The era may witness the first female engineer, motor truck chauffeur, radio broadcaster, head of an aviation school, or federal prohibition officer, but it has not produced the first thinking, creative, and writing woman by any means. ~ Mary Ritter Beard

In short, Arab leaders committed to the destruction of Israel invented the concept "Palestinian people" in order to justify their interminable war against Israel. ~ Meir Levi, David

What the hell is this stuff?" he muttered, frowning at the oily spot on the linen cloth. "Pearlman slathered it on me this morning."
"It's macassar oil. Gentlemen use it to keep their hair neat. Nicholas used it," she added pointedly.
"Well, tomorrow he's giving it up. I smell like a rotten apple."
"You do not. And I think it looks rather nice."
He sent her an incredulous look. "I look like an otter. And everything I put my head against gets greasy."
"That's why someone invented the antimacassar," she told him, almost smiling.
"The-aha!" He laughed as he made the connection. "Of course. First they invent something stupid, then something ugly to make up for it. We live in a wondrous age, Annie. ~ Patricia Gaffney

When I started out as a music journalist, at the end of the 1980s, it was generally assumed that we were living through the lamest music era the world would ever see. But those were also the years when hip-hop exploded, beatbox disco soared, indie rock took off, and new wave invented a language of teen angst. ~ Rob Sheffield

The Devil invented gambling. ~ Saint Augustine

Still, it's cool," said Ron, a little defensively. "And from what they said, Dumbledore invented it himself!"
"I know, but surely he wouldn't have singled you out in his will just to help us turn out the lights! ~ J.K. Rowling

The factory system is one of the worst and cruelest things ever invented to pamper the rich at the expense of the poor. It fattens them, and melts the flesh off our bones: it clothes them in grand raiment, and bids us shiver in rags: it brings all indulgences within their reach, and kills the industrious creatures whose toil provides them. ~ Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna

To the best of our scientific understanding, determinism and randomness have divided the entire cake between them, leaving not even a crumb for 'freedom'. The sacred word 'freedom' turns out to be, just like 'soul', an empty term that carries no discernible meaning. Free will exists only in the imaginary stories we humans have invented. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

I'd like to meet the person who invented sex and see what they're working on now. ~ Groucho Marx

It seems to me there's this grand mathematical world out there, and I am wandering through it and discovering fascinating phenomena that often totally suprise me. I do not think of mathemaatics as invented but rather discovered. ~ George Andrews

What a lucky thing the wheel was invented before the automobile; otherwise can you imagine the awful screeching? ~ Samuel Hoffenstein

To admit we do not understand a phenomenon is not to admit the presence of the miraculous but merely, reasonably, to accept the limitations of human knowledge. God was invented to explain what our ancestors couldn't comprehend: the radiant mystery of being. The existence of the incomprehensible, however, is not a proof of god. ~ Salman Rushdie

The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn't want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down. ~ Margaret Atwood

With none of Vader's backstory available at the time, and having just invented the Noghri species for this story, I came up with the idea that Vader might have designed his mask to look like a stylized version of a Noghri face, the better to facilitate his command of the death commando squads. ~ Timothy Zahn

Alarm clocks were invented by fork-tongued devils disguised as gremlins wearing snake masks. ~ Amy Kathleen Ryan

Mankind has invented the mirror in vain, for there's nobody in this world who looks into the mirror and sees himself as he truly is; each person has his own mirror hidden in his own mind and he can't see more than what that mirror in his mind reflects! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

O matter how much research you do, or invention you do, whether it's a character from a novel, a completely invented character or someone who actually existed, it's a work of faction. By the very fact you only have an hour and a half or two hours to tell a story, you're telescoping events and it is, in the end, a work of imagination. ~ Cate Blanchett

But you cant be alive forever, and you always wear out life long before you have exhausted the possibilities of living. And all that must be somewhere; all that could not have been invented and created just to be thrown away. And the earth is shallow; there is not a great deal of it before you come to the rock. And the earth dont want to just keep things, hoard them; it wants to use them again. ~ William Faulkner

On the question of whether mathematics was discovered or invented, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans had no doubt-mathematics was real, immutable, omnipresent, and more sublime than anything that could conceivably emerge from the feeble human mind. The Pythagoreans literally embedded the universe into mathematics. In fact, to the Pythagoreans, God was not a mathematician-mathematics was God!

The importance of the Pythagorean philosophy lies not only in its actual, intrinsic value. By setting the stage, and to some extent the agenda, for the next generation of philosophers-Plato in particular-the Pythagoreans established a commanding position in Western thought. ~ Mario Livio

Let's be grateful to all those who came in before us. Grateful to all those men and women, young and old alike, who paved the path forward for us, brick by brick. To those men and women who marched across the bridge in Selma on that great day, those men and women who rallied behind the Gandhis and the Mandelas every single time they were needed, to those men and women who stood up for voting rights and civil rights and gay rights and equality and justice and a free world, those men and women who invented the future by inventing things that fundamentally changed the world from the electricity to vaccinations, from airplanes to birth control pills, from the printing press to the internet. ~ Sharad Vivek Sagar

I will love you and protect you until the end of time. You're my girl, my obsession, my princess. I love you in a way they haven't invented yet. ~ Alexa Riley

Can it be, that the Greek grammarians invented their dual number for the particular benefit of twins? ~ Herman Melville

We are meaning-seeking creatures. Dogs, as far as we know, do not agonise about the canine condition, worry about the plight of dogs in other parts of the world, or try to see their lives from a different perspective. But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value ~ Karen Armstrong

Somewhere I'd heard, or invented perhaps, that the only pleasures found during a waning moon are misfortunes in disguise. Superstition aside, I avoid pleasure during the waning or absent moon out of respect for the bounty this world offers me. I profit from great harvests in life and believe in the importance of seasons. ~ Roman Payne

The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment's reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

If we didn't already have libraries, they would now have to be invented. They are the keys to American success in fully exploiting the information superhighways of the future. ~ James H. Billington

How to have a successful relationship Factoid: "Successful relationships" were invented in the 20th century along with washing powder and consumerism. Like washing powder, the concept has evolved so you no longer need to separate the whites. ~ Adam Douglas

People have always said since TV was invented what a cultural wasteland it is but I think it is the worst and the best. It is the golden age of television. ~ Joel McHale

In the contemporary world there are two classes of bad plans-the plans invented and put into practice by men who do not accept our ideal postulates, and the plans invented and put into practice by the men who accept them, but imagine that the ends proposed by the prophets can be achieved by wicked or unsuitable means. Hell is paved with good intentions, and it is probable that plans made by well-meaning people of the second class may have results no less disastrous than plans made by evil-intentioned people of the first class. Which only shows, yet once more, how right the Buddha was in classing unawareness and stupidity among the deadly sins. Let us consider a few examples of bad plans belonging to these two classes. In the first class we must place all Fascist and all specifically militaristic plans. Fascism, in the words of Mussolini, believes that "war alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it." Again, "a doctrine which is founded upon the harmful postulate of peace is hostile to Fascism." The Fascist, then, is one who believes that the bombardment of open towns with fire, poison and explosives (in other words, modern war) is intrinsically good. He is one who rejects the teaching of the prophets and believes that the best society is a national society living in a state of chronic hostility towards other national societies and preoccupied with ideas of rapine and slaughter. He is ~ Aldous Huxley

They sit and stare and stare and sit
Until they're hypnoti[z]ed by it,
Until they're absolutely drunk
With all that shocking ghastly junk.
Oh yes, we know it keep them still,
They don't climb out the window sill,
They never fight or kick or punch,
They leave you free to cook the lunch
And wash the dishes in the sink-
But did you ever stop to think,
To wonder just exactly what
This does to your beloved tot?
It rots the senses in the head!
It kills imagination dead!
It clogs and clutters up the mind!
It makes a child so dull and blind
He can no longer understand
A fantasy, a fairyland!
His brain becomes as soft as cheese!
His powers of thinking rust and freeze!
He cannot think-he only sees!
'All right' you'll cry. 'All right' you'll say,
'But if we take the set away,
What shall we do to entertain
Our darling children? Please explain!'
We'll answer this by asking you,
'How used they keep themselves contented
Before this monster was invented?'
Have you forgotten? Don't you know?
We'll say it very loud and slow:
They... used ... to... read! They'd read and read,
And read and read, and then proceed
To read some more, Great Scott! Gadzooks!
One half their lives was reading books!...
Oh books, what books they used to know,
Those children living long ago!
So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,
Go throw ~ Roald Dahl

Whoever had said in the guidebooks that the bum bag was a sensible device against theft had lied; no single item of dressware ever invented cried out "mug me" more than a pouch of zip-up plastic suspended by your groin. ~ Kate Griffin

The tank was originally invented to clear a way for the infantry in the teeth of machine-gun fire. Now it is the infantry who will have to clear a way for the tanks. ~ Winston Churchill

I always admired Ray Kroc, the man who invented McDonald's. Ray had a vision of the most commonplace thing - a hamburger and fries to go - but to him it was just the greatest thing ever, and he was going to make it the greatest thing ever for everybody else, and he did. ~ David Lee Roth

In time she said, "I love you, Oddie."
My voice was thick when I replied. "I love you more than life."
"We'll be okay," she said.
"We are okay."
"We're weird and screwed-up, but we're okay," she agreed.
"If someone invented a thermometer that measured weirdness, it would melt under my tongue. But you-you're cool. ~ Dean Koontz

You want to see how devoted we are to comfort? Walk into the average American home and hide the remote control, and watch what happens. Life without the remote control is an unbearable burden for the average American family. Then someone invented a TV with a beeper so that when you clap your hands, the remote control will beep until you find it. ~ John Ortberg Jr.

Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain. ~ Lily Tomlin

The only ghosts, I believe, who creep into this world, are dead
young mothers, returned to see how their children fare. There is
no other inducement great enough to bring the departed back.
They glide into the acquainted room when day and night, their
jailers, are in the grip, and whisper, "How is it with you, my
child?" but always, lest a strange face should frighten him, they
whisper it so low that he may not hear. They bend over him to
see that he sleeps peacefully, and replace his sweet arm beneath
the coverlet, and they open the drawers to count how many little
vests he has. They love to do these things.

What is saddest about ghosts is that they may not know their
child. They expect him to be just as he was when they left him,
and they are easily bewildered, and search for him from room to
room, and hate the unknown boy he has become. Poor, passionate
souls, they may even do him an injury. These are the ghosts that
go wailing about old houses, and foolish wild stories are
invented to explain what is all so pathetic and simple. I know
of a man who, after wandering far, returned to his early home to
pass the evening of his days in it, and sometimes from his chair
by the fire he saw the door open softly and a woman's face
appear. She always looked at him very vindictively, and then
vanished. Strange things happened in this house. Windows were < ~ J.M. Barrie

Please don't feel hurt, Satan, but my parents raised me to believe you didn't exist. My mom and dad said you and God were invented in the superstitious, backward pea brains of hillbilly preachers and Republican hypocrites. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

We have, all of us, invented things that others have beat us to: walking upright, a certain sort of sandwich involving avocado and an onion roll, a minty sweet cocktail, ourselves, romantic love, human life. ~ Elizabeth McCracken

Filmmakers began to experiment with special effects almost as soon as motion pictures were invented. The history of special effects is the history of motion pictures. ~ Ben Burtt

They remain shadows. Two sepia shadows on an old snapshot, two barely moving shadows in my head, shadows whose few
remaining words and acts I have invented. Perhaps I only want their forgiveness for having forgotten them. I remember their deaths, but not their lives. Yet they're inside me, flowing unknown in my blood and moving unrecognized in my skull. ~ Margaret Laurence

And I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it. ~ Barack Obama

Of course, the speed at which any society embraces these strategies will always be a product of the interplay between politics, culture, and leadership. Culture shapes a society's political responses, and its leadership and politics, in turn, shape culture. What exactly is culture? I like this concise definition offered by BusinessDictionary.com: culture is the "pattern of responses discovered, developed, or invented during the group's history of handling problems which arise from interactions among its members, and between them and their environment. These responses are considered the correct way to perceive, feel, think, and act, and are passed on to the new members through immersion and teaching. Culture determines what is acceptable or unacceptable, important or unimportant, right or wrong, workable or unworkable." One ~ Thomas L. Friedman

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell. ~ Antonin Artaud

(As a side note: I thought money was a bad idea way back when it was first invented. I remember the moment very clearly. This guy owed me a sheep, but instead of giving me an actual sheep he gave me five coins he said were worth the same as a sheep. "But I can't eat round pieces of metal, asshole," were my exact words.) ~ Gene Doucette

Unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh new school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek. The harmony of soul and body - how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void. Harry! If only you knew what Dorian Gray is to me! ~ Oscar Wilde

I obviously invented Solipsism ~ Dean Cavanagh

The earth's round, like an orange, but this map is like its skin, cut off in ovals, north to south, laid flat and stretched a bit at the top and bottom. A Dutchman called Mercator invented the way to do this accurately twenty years ago. It's the first accurate world map. ~ James Clavell

We've invented a thousand shades of gray, devising a comfortable Christian existence we can all live with - super awesome, except the Bible doesn't support it. According to Scripture, no real disciple serves God while addicted to the dollar. There ~ Jen Hatmaker

Atoms are round balls of wood invented by Dr. Dalton.
(Answer given by a pupil to a question on atomic theory, as reported by Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe.) ~ Henry Enfield Roscoe

The prototypic Don Juan, invented early in the XVI century by a Spanish monk, was ~ George Bernard Shaw

The sovereign God of the universe said, "This one is Mine." Over and against all the prerequisites I had invented for placing my faith in God, the Father had placed His Spirit in me. ~ Matt Chandler

All the rules had to be invented from the beginning. No one knew what the rules were, but gradually figured them out. The basics were: We've got to take a line. We've got to stay up off the floor. We have to have enough light to see. And we have to save enough air to get out. ~ Robert F. Burgess

The English invented cricket to make other human endeavors look interesting. ~ Bill Bryson

My favorite thing about Milan is that you see these guys, and it's as if a spaceship came out of the most attractive planet invented and just dropped them off all across the city. ~ Brad Goreski

I used to pray you know, pray to God that He would somehow stop it. All the nights of listening to my mother scream and things breaking. Of holding my brother and sister and listening to them cry and begging me to stop it.'
My voice is slow and steady like a freight train at night.
'I was too young, and we were always told that they'd put us in foster homes where people would rape us if we ever said anything. So we explained away the bruises and my mom wore big sunglasses whenever she left the house. And we invented car accidents if the bruising was too bad to cover with make-up. ~ Emily Andrews

The Chinese had gunpowder, but it didn't occur to them to put it in a gun. They possessed the compass but didn't go anywhere. They invented paper, printing, and a written form of their language, but hardly anyone in China was taught to read. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Hillary Clinton essentially offers a third Obama term. And the role is perfect for her. She championed 'Obamacare' because years earlier she had all but invented it. ~ Mike Pence

The young Steve Jobs had a hard time articulating something that didn't exist. He could see it, taste it, knew what it felt like, but he didn't have all the language because it hadn't been invented yet. People didn't fathom the personal computer on a mass produced level. ~ Joshua Michael Stern

It is the popular misconception of marriage as a mere social convention or quaint tradition invented by the brain of man which has led to the denigrating of this holy relation, the multiplication of unspeakable immorality, the common unrest between husbands and wives, and the gradual disintegration of society and civilization. For if marriage exists merely by human authority then men and women may do with it or conduct themselves in it as they please. They may redefine it, or they may abandon it altogether. But if marriage is a divine institution, then it is governed by a higher authority. It becomes, then, a matter of obedience, and the conduct of husbands and wives within marriage is a conduct for which they must give their account to God. The original institution of marriage is therefore basic to our understanding of marriage, our estimation of marriage, and our right behavior in marriage. ~ Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

Gringos invented two terms that are untranslatable into most languages: "snack" and "quickie," to refer to eating standing up and loving on the run . . . that, too, sometimes standing up. ~ Isabel Allende

Wow. I'm twenty years old. Rene Descartes invented analytic geometry in his early twenties. Talk about pressure. ~ Anna Kay Akana

I was merely making more perceptible that binary rhythm which love adopts in all those who have too little confidence in themselves to believe that a woman can ever fall in love with them, and also that they themselves can genuinely fall in love with her. They know themselves well enough to have observed that in the presence of the most divergent types of woman they felt the same hopes, the same agonies, invented the same romances, uttered the same words, and to have realised therefore that their feelings, their actions, bear no close and necessary relation to the woman they love, but pass to one side of her, splash her, encircle her, like the incoming tide breaking against the rocks, and their sense of their own instability increases still further their misgivings that this woman, by whom they so long to be loved, does not love them. ~ Marcel Proust

I invented the colors of the vowels!
A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green
I made rules for the form and movement of each consonant, and, and with instinctive rhythms, I flattered myself that I had created a poetic language accessible, some day, to all the senses. ~ Arthur Rimbaud

People were capable of living their lives in a state of permanent disappointment, there were plenty of people who did not marry the person they hoped to marry, much less live the life they hoped to live, other people invented new dreams to replace the old ones, finding fresh reasons for discontent. ~ Katie Kitamura

At the time of the Cognitive Revolution, the planet was home to about 200 genera of large terrestrial mammals weighing over 100 pounds. At the time of the Agricultural Revolution, only about a hundred remained. Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet's big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing, or iron tools. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

The past cannot be lost in the present. Not even memories were lost, because memories are not fixed but ever-changing, because memories do not record the past but are only constructions invented in the present. They are a feat of the imagination. They are made now and last only seconds--flashes, images, evanescent, impermanent, gone. Forever. They are not even words on a page. ~ Gregory Martin

The problem came down to this: Americans, who had invented the modern assembly line, the skyscraper, the airplane, and the integrated circuit, no longer believed in the future. ~ George Packer

We sometimes meet an original gentleman, who, if manners had not existed, would have invented them. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The alphabet was invented in Iraq, so it's a cool place. ~ Baron Vaughn

The true success is the person who invented himself. ~ Al Goldstein

They're so boring. They're so pathetic, all those journalists. Most of them are. Most of those kind that write gossip stuff, and most of it's gossip. Things are just invented about your personal life and you just have to take that. It's bullshit. People believe it, though. They just believe everything they read. ~ Mick Jagger

There are almost 200 currencies of the world, but there's only one international currency. There are almost 200 currencies controlled by central banks and governments, but there is only one mathematical currency today, and that is bitcoin. We are going to build more of them. Cryptographic currencies are going to be a mainstay of our financial future. They are going to be a part of the future of this planet because they have been invented. It's as simple as that. You cannot un-invent this technology. You cannot turn this omelette back into eggs. ~ Andreas M. Antonopoulos

More than anything, more than anything she had with him, she missed the language they had invented, the likes of which she had never had nor would again. The thoughts and ideas he had birthed in her, his golden touch, and the words that erupted from her and became sparks of light to him. ~ David Grossman

The Church was resolved to have a New Testament, and as, after the lapse of more than three hundred years, no handwriting could be proved or disproved, the Church, which like former impostors had then gotten possession of the State, had everything its own way. It invented creeds, such as that called the Apostle's Creed, the Nicean Creed, the Athanasian Creed, and out of the loads of rubbish that were presented it voted four to be Gospels, and others to be Epistles, as we now find them arranged. ~ Thomas Paine

The distinction between mathematics and science is pretty well settled. It remains mysterious to us why mathematics that is invented for reasons having nothing to do with nature often turns out to be useful in physical theories. In a famous article,8 the physicist Eugene Wigner has written of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. ~ Steven Weinberg