It is very desirable to have a word to express the Availability for work of the heat in a given magazine; a term for that possession, the waste of which is called Dissipation. Unfortunately the excellent word Entropy, which Clausius has introduced in...
Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outc...
We may seem the weakest and most insignificant of all the Realms, but our strength comes in other ways. We have what no other race has: imagination. Any one of us, even the lowliest, can create worlds within ourselves; we can people them with the mos...
Before we invented civilization our ancestors lived mainly in the open out under the sky. Before we devised artificial lights and atmospheric pollution and modern forms of nocturnal entertainment we watched the stars. There were practical calendar re...
It is a curious thought that the earliest description of the steam-engine in antiquity describes its use for the magic opening of the temple doors, when the priests lit the fires on the altars, to deceive the populace into ascribing to a deity what w...
If you're a boy, any display of sensitivity is gay. Compassion is gay. Crying is supergay. Reading is usually gay. Certain songs and types of music are gay. 'Enola Gay' would certainly be thought gay. Love songs are gay. Love itself is incredibly gay...
Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"-...
It’s always the end of the world,” said Russell Grandinetti, one of Amazon’s top executives. “You could set your watch on it arriving.” He pointed out, though, that the landscape was in some ways changing for the first time since Gutenberg ...
But if it so happens ... a work ... under pain of otherwise becoming shameful or false, requires fantasy ... [and that] certain limbs or elements of a figure are altered by borrowing from other species, for example transforming into a dolphin the hin...
Often I would hear other people ask, “When will I be normal again?” What you don’t often hear is a blunt truth: things will never be normal again. Not the “old" normal at least. You have to invent the new normal. I knew that I needed to take ...
We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencie...
Ah, well! then the young woman was only in advance of the age," said Miss Archer; "and what with that and the telephone, and that dreadful phonograph that bottles up all one says and disgorges at inconvenient times, we will soon be able to do everyth...
Our lives drifts along with normal things happening. Some ups, some downs, but nothing to go down in history about. Nothing so fantastic or terrible that it'll be told for a thousand years. “But because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story a...
You know, sometimes I don't understand what's wrong with us. This is just about the most creative and imaginative country on earth—and yet sometimes we just don't seem to have the gumption to exploit our intellectual property. We split the atom, an...
Life is an endless attempt to word the unwordable, to make what cannot be touched walk on the ground, to embody what can never be fit inside a single lifetime. We see reflections of ourselves in sunrises, hear our perfection in thunderstorms and babi...
You cannot reconcile creativeness with technical achievement. You may be perfect in playing the piano, and not be creative. You may be able to handle color, to put paint on canvas most cleverly, and not be a creative painter...having lost the song, w...
Wallace: I'm sorry, Gromit. I know you're doing this for my own good, but the fact is I'm just crackers about cheese. Look, if I must change me ways, at least let me do it my way, with technology. [Lowers the Mind Manipulation-omatic onto his head] W...
Alex: [voice over] This is my miniature brother, Igor. I am tutoring him to be a man of this world. For an example, I exhibited him a smutty magazine three days yore. Igor: [in Russian] Why is it dubbed sixty-nine? Alex: [voice over] I explain it to ...
Mr. Incredible: You mean you killed off real heroes so that you could *pretend* to be one? Syndrome: Oh, I'm real. Real enough to defeat you! And I did it without your precious gifts, your oh-so-special powers. I'll give them heroics. I'll give them ...
Director: Cut dammit! Cut! Mr Bakshi. Hrundi V. Bakshi: Yes, Sir? Director: Has it occurred to you that the period of our picture is 1878? Hrundi V. Bakshi: Oh, yes indeed sir. I am well aware that that is the period of the film. 1878. Director: Mr. ...
Dr. Emmett Brown: [Doc Brown is trying to read Marty's mind with a geodesic helmet and a suction cup] Erm, you want me to make a donation to the Coastguard Youth Auxilliary? Marty McFly: Doc, [pulls off suction cup] Marty McFly: I'm from the future. ...
