Piero Olmeda Quotes

“To count the stones losing countis the sense of our life: the algebraof our displacements.To follow paths losing sense is the circumvolution, the evolution: the logicof our moments. But. No.There is no symmetry in our acts.Never the chance of steps that surprise usto salt.Our time machine. Forward.Never backward the meat machine.No turning back. No turning back.There is no remedy: deathis an incurable asymmetry.Huge is the ticking of the Clock butbut our time has the clutch, the vortexthe saltwater of a wave that covers us.It reshapes and hollows out the face, like sandrobs us of our flesh.”

“I painlessly came to realize that the reverence I felt for the holiness of life is not ever likely to be entirely at home in organized religion. It was later, when I was able to travel farther , that the presence of holiness and mystery seemed, as far as my vision was able to see, to descend into the windows of Chartres, the stone peasant figures of Autun, the tall sheets of gold on the walls of Torcello that reflected the light of the sea; in the frescoes of Piero, of Giotto; in the shell of a church wall in Ireland still standing on a floor of sheep-cropped grass with no ceiling other than he changing sky.”

“Most frequently asked question at my AI talks: Will robots be conscious? We slaughter 60 billion animals/year, but are concerned for robots?”

“The paradox of innovation is that it is accepted as an innovation when it has become imitation.”

“The world is divided into the ordinary and the extraordinary. The problem is deciding which is which.”

“If you know one thing very well and the rest only superficially, that one thing will always appear to be more 'unique.”

“Evolution did not design us to believe only true facts, nor to buy only useful products, nor to say only meaningful sentences”

“Why are...poor people more ready to share their goods than rich people? The answer is easy: The poor have little to lose; the rich have more to lose and they are more attached to their possessions. Poverty provides a deeper motivation for understanding your neighbors, welcoming others and attending to those who are suffering. I would go so far as to say that poverty helps you understand what happiness is, what serenity is in life.”

“Scientists and inventors of the USA (especially in the so-called "blue state" that voted overwhelmingly against Trump) have to think long and hard whether they want to continue research that will help their government remain the world's superpower. All the scientists who worked in and for Germany in the 1930s lived to regret that they directly helped a sociopath like Hitler harm millions of people. Let us not repeat the same mistakes over and over again.”

“The cure to eliminate fake news is that people stop reading 140-character tweets and start reading 600-page books.”