Laszlo Barabasi Quotes

Keep in mind that imagination is at the heart of all innovation. Crush or constrain it and the fun will vanish. ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

The real legacy of the Internet is not the birth of thousands of new online companies but the transformation of existing businesses. We can see its signature on everything from mom-and-pop stores to large multinational agglomerates. ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

If we were to construct a similar map for society, it would have to include each person's professional and personal interests and chart everyone she or he knew. It would make Milgram's experiment seem clumsy and obsolete by allowing us to find, in seconds, the shortest path to any person in the world. It would be a must-use tool for everyone from politicians to salespeople and epidemiologists. Of course, such a social search engine is impossible to build, since it would take at least a lifetime to interrogate all 6 billion people on the earth to learn about their friends and acquaintances. ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

The diversity of networks in business and the economy is mindboggling. There are policy networks, ownership networks, collaboration networks, organizational networks, network marketing-you name it. It would be impossible to integrate these diverse interactions into a single all-encompassing web. Yet no matter what organizational level we look at, the same robust and universal laws that govern nature's webs seem to greet us. The challenge is for economic and network research alike to put these laws into practice. ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

Today we know more about Jupiter than the guy who lives next door to us. We can predict where an election will go, we can turn a gene on or off, and we can even send a robot to Mars, but we are lost if asked to explain or predict the phenomena we might expect to know the most about, the actions of our fellow humans. ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

The Second Law: Performance is bounded,
but success is unbounded. ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

There is an old debate," Erdos liked to say, "about whether you create mathematics or just discover it. In other words, are the truths already there, even if we don't yet know them?" Erdos had a clear answer to this question: Mathematical truths are there among the list of absolute truths, and we just rediscover them. Random graph theory, so elegant and simple, seemed to him to belong to the eternal truths. Yet today we know that random networks played little role in assembling our universe. Instead, nature resorted to a few fundamental laws, which will be revealed in the coming chapters. Erdos himself created mathematical truths and an alternative view of our world by developing random graph theory. Not privy to nature's laws in creating the brain and society, Erdos hazarded his best guess in assuming that God enjoys playing dice. His friend Albert Einstein, at Princeton, was convinced of the opposite: "God does not play dice with the universe. ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

Before we move on, let me clarify that there is a fundamental difference between what we do and how predictable we are. When it comes to things we do-like the distances we travel, the number of e-mails we send, or the number of calls we make-we encounter power laws, which means that some individuals are significantly more active than others. They send more messages; they travel farther. This also means that out-liers are normal-we expect to have a few individuals, like Hasan, who cover hundreds or even thousands of miles on a regular basis.

But when it comes to the predictability of our actions, to our surprise power laws are replaced by Gaussians. This means that whether you limit your life to a two-mile neighborhood or drive dozens of miles each day, take a fast train to work or even commute via airplane, you are just as predictable as everyone else. And once Gaussians dominate the problem, outliers are forbidden, just as bursts are never found in Poisson's dice-driven universe. Or two-mile-tall folks ambling down the street are unheard of. Despite the many differences between us, when it came to our whereabouts we are all equally predictable, and the unforgiving law of statistics forbids the existence of individuals who somehow buck this trend. ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

A string of recent breath-taking discoveries has forces us to acknowledge that amazingly simple and far-reaching natural laws govern the structure and evolution of all the complex networks that surround us. ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

We owe the low price of electricity today to the power grid, the network that emerged
through these pairwise connections, linking all producers and consumers
into a single network. It allows cheaply produced power to be instantly
transported anywhere. Electricity hence offers a wonderful example of the
huge positive impact networks have on our life ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

Nature normally hates power laws. In ordinary systems all quantities follow bell curves, and correlations decay rapidly, obeying exponential laws. But all that changes if the system is forced to undergo a phase transition. Then power laws emerge-nature's unmistakable sign that chaos is departing in favor of order. The theory of phase transitions told us loud and clear that the road from disorder to order is maintained by the powerful forces of self-organization and is paved by power laws. It told us that power laws are not just another way of characterizing a system's behavior. They are the patent signatures of self-organization in complex systems. ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

Open the "book of life" and you will see a "text" of about 3 billion letters, filling about 10,000 copies of the new York Times Sunday edition. Each line looks something like this:
TCTAGAAACA ATTGCCATTG TTTCTTCTCA TTTTCTTTTC ACGGGCAGCC
These letters, abbreviations of the molecules making up the DNA, could easily mean that the anonymous donor whose genome has been sequenced will be bald by the age of fifty. Or they could reveal that he will develop Alzheimer's disease by seventy. We are repeatedly told that everything from our personality to future medical history is encoded in this book. Can you read it? I doubt it. Let me share a secret with you: Neither can biologists or doctors. ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

Euler's proof that in Konigsberg there is no path crossing all seven bridges only once was based on a simple observation. Nodes with an odd number of links must be either the starting or the end point of the journey. A continuous path that goes through all the bridges can have only one starting and one end point. Thus, such a path cannot exist on a graph that has more than two nodes with an odd number of links. As the Konigsberg graph had four such nodes, one could not find the desired path. ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

Forget dice rolling or boxes of chocolates as metaphors for life. Think of yourself as a dreaming robot on autopilot, and you'll be much closer to the truth. ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

80 percent of profits are produced by only 20 percent of the employees, 80 percent of customer service problems are created by only 20 percent of consumers, 80 percent of decisions are made during 20 percent of meeting time, and so on. It ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

Time is our most valuable nonrenewable resource, and if we want to treat it with respect, we need to set priorities. ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

The difference between human dynamics and data mining boils down to this: Data mining predicts our behaviors based on records of our patterns of activity; we don't even have to understand the origins of the patterns exploited by the algorithm. Students of human dynamics, on the other hand, seek to develop models and theories to explain why, when, and where we do the things we do with some regularity. ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

The First Law: Performance drives success,
but when performance can't be measured,
networks drive success. ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

The Third Law: Previous success x fitness = future success. ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

Although cascading failures may appear random and unpredictable,
they follow reproducible laws that can be quantified and even predicted using the tools of network science.
First, to avoid damaging cascades, we must understand the structure of the network on which the cascade propagates. Second, we must be able
to model the dynamical processes taking place on these networks, like the flow of electricity. Finally, we need to uncover how the interplay between
the network structure and dynamics affects the robustness of the whole system. ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

Mark Twain once said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

A subtle urge to synchronize is pervasive in nature. Indeed, it drives the firing of thousands of pacemaker cells in the heart and brings into synchrony the menstrual cycles of women who live together for long periods of time. ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

The Fifth Law: With persistence success can come at any time. ~ Albert Laszlo Barabasi

Once I read a story about a butterfly in the subway, and today, I saw one. It got on at 42nd, and off at 59th, where, I assume it was going to Bloomingdales to buy a hat that will turn out to be a mistake - as almost all hats are. ~ Miklos Laszlo

Air France's in-flight magazine. ~ Ervin Laszlo

By now the window of the bar is visible, glowing ahead of them, but there is no sound, not a single word to be heard, as if the place were deserted, not a soul … but now, someone is playing the harmonica … Irimias scrapes the mud off his lead-heavy shoes, clears his throat, cautiously opens the door, and the rain begins again, while to the east, swift as memory, the sky brightens, scarlet and pale blue and leans against the undulating horizon, to be followed by the sun, like a beggar daily panting up to this spot on the temple steps, full of heartbreak and misery, ready to establish the world of shadows, to separate the trees from one another, to raise, out of the freezing, confusing homogeneity of night in which they seem to have been trapped like flies in a web, a clearly defined earth and sky with distinct animals and men, the darkness still in flight at the edge of things, somewhere on the far side on the western horizon, where its countless terrors vanish one by one like a desperate, confused, defeated army. ~ Laszlo Krasznahorkai

As long as ratings are directly linked to pay and career opportunities, every employee has this incentive to exploit the system. ~ Laszlo Bock

The noise of the rain seemed to have grown a little fainter but then it pelted down again. ~ Laszlo Krasznahorkai

Europeans believe that culture is something they can grasp and touch because, for them, culture is comprised of objects, or remnants of objects, and this object, this remnant, conceals within it the essence of the original. For the Chinese, the matter is completely different---for them, the essence of culture can only be preserved in spiritual form. ~ Laszlo Krasznahorkai

What we care about is, when faced with a problem and you're a member of a team, do you, at the appropriate time, step in and lead. And just as critically, do you step back and stop leading, do you let someone else? ~ Laszlo Bock

To be more accurate, Eszter continued, it was only a shadow in the mirror, a mirror where the image and the mirror wholly coincided though the shadow nevertheless tried to separate them, to separate two things that had from eternity been the same and could not be separated or cut into two, thereby losing the weightless delight of being swept along with it, substituting, he thought as he stepped away from the drawing-room window, a solid eternity purchased with knowledge for the sweet song of participating in eternity, a song so airy it was lighter than a feather. ~ Laszlo Krasznahorkai

However apparently insignificant the event, whether it be the ring of tobacco ash surrounding the table, the direction from which the wild geese first appeared, or a series of seemingly meaningless human movements, he couldn't afford to take his eyes off it and must note it all down, since only by doing so could he hope not to vanish one day and fall a silent captive to the infernal arrangement whereby the world decomposes but is at the same time constantly in the process of self-construction. ~ Laszlo Krasznahorkai

I believe in the directorial point of view and directorial choices. ~ Laszlo Nemes

The illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as the pen. ~ Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

Back in the past metaphysical realisation needed only the will of realisation. Later realisation also needed initiation. Even later initiation already presupposed preparation. Today even preparation has to be prepared, but first of all a self-correction should take place. ~ Andras Laszlo

We have progressed in a technological sense, but I'm not so sure whether we have progressed in a civilizational matter - the quality of the civilization has not improved. It's a civilization that's in love with technology but forgetting about the human side of it and the destructive tendency in human civilization has not been faced. ~ Laszlo Nemes

[Confiscating a book and punishing its author] is a sign that one does not have a good case, or at least doesn't trust it enough to defend it with reasons and refute the objections. Some people even go so far as to consider prohibited or confiscated books to be the best ones of all, for the prohibition indicates that their authors wrote what they really thought rather than what they were supposed to think ... ~ Laszlo Radvanyi

...and it really was extremely sudden, the way it struck him that, good heavens, he understood nothing, nothing at all about anything, for Christ's sake, nothing at all about the world, which was a most terrifying realization, he said, especially the way it came to him in all its banality, vulgarity, at a sickeningly ridiculous level, but this was the point, he said, the way that he, at age 44, had become aware of how utterly stupid he seemed to himself, how empty, how utterly blockheaded he had been in his understanding of the world these last 44 years, for, as he realized by the river, he had not only misunderstood it, but had not understood anything about anything, the worst part being that for 44 years he thought he had understood it, while in reality he had failed to do so; and this in fact was the worst thing of all that night of his birthday when he sat alone by the river, the worst because the fact that he now realized that he had not understood it did not mean that he did understand it now, because being aware of his lack of knowledge was not in itself some new form of knowledge for which an older one could be traded in, but one that presented itself as a terrifying puzzle the moment he thought about the world, as he most furiously did that evening, all but torturing himself in an effort to understand it and failing, because the puzzle seemed ever more complex and he had begun to feel that this world-puzzle that he was so desperate to understand, that he was torturin ~ Laszlo Krasznahorkai

I decided Conrad was right after all. Ilsa was meant to be with Laszlo. That was the way it was always supposed to end. Rick was nothing but a tiny piece of her past, a piece that she would always treasure, but that was all, because history is just that. History. ~ Jenny Han

I no longer care if I die, said Korin, then, after a long silence, pointed to the nearby flooded quarry: Are those swans? ~ Laszlo Krasznahorkai

Every period has its own optical focus. ~ Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

When I began research, I read the writings of the Sonderkommandos. They are not well known, but these prisoners wrote from the middle of hell from Auschwitz, to let the world know what happened. The texts were buried beneath the ground and found after the liberation of the concentration camps. ~ Laszlo Nemes

The invention of photography destroyed the canons of representational, imitative art. ~ Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

In May 2010, a Florida programmer by the name of Laszlo Hanyecz wanted to test the technology. He offered to buy a pizza for 10,000 coins. The pizza arrived. For several days after that, Hanyecz bought 10,000-bitcoin pizzas. I bet he regrets it now. Ten thousand bitcoins would at one stage be worth over 12 million dollars. Twelve million bucks for a pizza! ~ Dominic Frisby

It was a long struggle against invisible foes, or to put it more accurately, against invisible foes that might not have been there at all, but it was a victorious struggle, in the course of which they understood that the victory would only be unconditional if they annihilated or, if he might put it in such old fashioned terms, said Korin, exiled, exiled anything that might have stood against them, or rather, fully absorbed it into the repulsive vulgarity of the world they now ruled, ruled if not exactly commanded, and thereby besmirched whatever was good and transcendent, not by saying a haughty 'no' to good and transcendent things, no, for they understood that the important thing was to say 'yes' from the meanest of motives, to give them their outright support, to display them, to nurture them; it was this that dawned on them and showed them what to do, that their best option was not to crush their enemies, to mock them or wipe them off the face of the earth, but, on the contrary, to embrace them, to take responsibility for them and so to empty them of their content, and in this way to establish a world in which it was precisely these things that would be the most liable to spread the infection so that the only power that had any chance of resisting them, by whose radiant light it might still have been possible to see the degree to which they had taken over people's lives... how could he make himself clearer at this point, Korin hesitated... ~ Laszlo Krasznahorkai

Faith, thought Eszter . . . is not a matter of believing something, but believing that somehow things could be different; in the same way, music was not the articulation of some better part of ourselves, or a reference to some notion of a better world, but a disguising of the fact of our irredeemable selves and the sorry state of the world, but no, not merely a disguising but a complete, twisted denial of such facts: it was a cure that did not work, a barbiturate that functioned as an opiate. ~ Laszlo Krasznahorkai

The photographer is a manipulator of light; photography is a manipulation of light. ~ Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

I don't want to hurt anyone" Laszlo fiddled with a button on his tux jacket. "Can't we convince the CIA that some of us are peaceful?"
"we'll have to try" Angus folded his arms across his broad chest. "And if they doona believe we're peaceful, then we'll have to kill the bastards."
Roman frowned, somehow their Highlander logic escaped him. ~ Kerrelyn Sparks

Design ... is the integration of technological, social, and economical requirements, biological necessities, and the psychological effects of materials, shape, color, volume and space. ~ Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

He gained height, grew thin, the hair on his temples had begun to grey, but, now as then, he had none of that useful sense of proportion, nor could he ever develop anything of the sort, which might have helped him distinguish between the continuous flux of the universe of which he constituted a part (though a necessarily fleeting part) and the passage of time, the perception of which might have led to an intuitive and wise acceptance of fate. Despite vain efforts to understand and experience what precisely his 'dear friends' wanted from each other, he confronted the slow tide of human affairs with a sad incomprehension, dispassionately and without any sense of personal involvement, for the greater part of his consciousness, the part entirely given over to wonder, had left no room for more mundane matters, and (to his mother's inordinate shame and the extreme amusement of the locals) had ever since then trapped him in a bubble of time, in one eternal, impenetrable and transparent moment. He walked, he trudged, he flitted - as his great friend once said, not entirely without point - 'blindly and tirelessly... with the incurable beauty of his personal cosmos' in his soul [...] ~ Laszlo Krasznahorkai

I'm not interested to believe in something, but to understand the people who believe. ~ Laszlo Krasznahorkai

Death, he felt, was only a kind of warning rather than a desperate and permanent end. ~ Laszlo Krasznahorkai

...the task was not to choose but to accept, there being no obligation to choose between what was appropriate and what was inappropriate, only to accept that we are not obliged to do anything except to comprehend that the appropriateness of the one great universal process of thinking is not predicated on it being correct, for there was nothing to compare it with, nothing but its own beauty, and it was its beauty that gave us confidence in its truth - and this, said Korin, was what struck him as he walked those hundred furiously-thinking paces on the evening of his birthday: that is to say he understood the infinite significance of faith and was given a new insight into what the ancients had long known, that it was faith in its existence that had both created and maintained the world; the corollary of which was that it was the loss of his own faith that was now erasing it, the result of which realization being, he said, that he experienced a sudden, utterly numbing, quite awful feeling of abundance... ~ Laszlo Krasznahorkai

We've found that trusting people to do the right thing generally results in them doing the right thing. Allowing people to reward one another facilitates a culture of recognition and service, and is a way to show employees that they should be thinking like owners rather than serfs. ~ Laszlo Bock

There's just one other twist. Googlers working in engineering or product management can nominate themselves for promotion. ~ Laszlo Bock

We have - through a hundred years of photography and two decades of film - been enormously enriched ... We may say we see the world with entirely different eyes. ~ Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

We're losing film, especially in projection, we're losing a great achievement of civilization. A still image and darkness make up 50% of the experience. The still images become movement in your head. That's the magic of cinema. ~ Laszlo Nemes

I love the Dutch impressionists - Vermeer, Rembrandt. What they were able to do with light was astonishing. As for photographers, I think mostly of the Hungarians: Robert Capa, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Jozsef Pesci. In fact, I have one of his photographs hanging in my house. ~ Vilmos Zsigmond

There are genocidal tendencies that are at the heart of the human potential, and I think if we don't talk about it, we're not preparing ourselves for a better future. ~ Laszlo Nemes

What one ought to capture in beauty is that which is treacherous and irresistible ... ~ Laszlo Krasznahorkai

Design is the organization of materials and processes in the most productive way, in a harmonious balance of all elements necessary for a certain function. ~ Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

We are forced to choose, for the processes we have initiated in our lifetime cannot continue in the lifetime of our children. Whatever we do either creates the framework for continuing the supreme adventure of life and consciousness on this planet or sets the stage for its termination. The choice before us is urgent and important: it can neither be postponed nor ignored. ~ Ervin Laszlo

We have seen and do see the type of evil that is within human civilization, and the Holocaust took place in European history during an advanced state of technology and form of civilization, only to become an event in that history that questioned what civilization actually means. ~ Laszlo Nemes

We want to understand what works here rather than what worked at any other organization. ~ Laszlo Bock