A Quote by Marvin Minsky

Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas - of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances and checks.

Marvin Minsky

Quote Topics

Balances Checks Common Common Sense Earned Exceptions Hard Ideas Immense Instead Learned Life Multitudes Practical Rules Sense Simple Society Tendencies Thing

Quote Author

Marvin Minsky
American - Scientist
August 9, 1927 - January 24, 2016

Ours is a government of checks and balances. The Mafia and crooked businessmen make out checks, and the politicians and other compromised officials improve their bank balances.

Steve Allen

Ideas first and last: yet it is not till these are formulated and utilized that the devotees of the common sense discern their value and advantages. The idealist is the capitalist on whose resources multitudes are maintained life long. Ideas in the head set hands about their several tasks, thus carrying forward all human endeavors to their issues.

Amos Bronson Alcott

We're somewhat lucky here in the United States, where we hope that the checks and balances hold out for many years to come and decades to come. But in a lot of countries, you don't have these checks and balances.

Jan Koum

This used to be a government of checks and balances. Now it's all checks and no balances.

Gracie Allen

I'm a practical person. Most fashion people live in the clouds, and they're full of it. I live like a human being - or, I try to - and I have to be intelligent; I have to be practical. I'm a great believer in common sense, and the older I get, I see that common sense is not that common.

Iris Apfel

The Adlerians, in the name of "individual psychology," take the side of society against the individual. ... Adler's later thought succumbs to the worst of his earlier banalization. It is conventional, practical, and moralistic. "Our science ... is based on common sense." Common sense, the half-truths of a deceitful society, is honored as the honest truths of a frank world.

Alfred Adler

When certain concepts of TeX are introduced informally, general rules will be stated; afterwards you will find that the rules aren't strictly true. In general, the later chapters contain more reliable information than the earlier ones do. The author feels that this technique of deliberate lying will actually make it easier for you to learn the ideas. Once you understand a simple but false rule, it will not be hard to supplement that rule with its exceptions.

Donald Knuth

Lord Darlington (LD): I think life too complex a thing to be settled by these hard and fast rules. Lady Windemere (LW): If we had 'hard-and-fast rules' we would find life much simpler. LD: You allow of no exceptions? LW: None! LD: Ah, what a fascinating Puritan you are, LW. LW: The adjective was unnecessary, LD.

Oscar Wilde

We are on the precipice of a crisis, a Constitutional crisis. The checks and balances, which have been at the core of this Republic, are about to be evaporated by the nuclear option. The checks and balances that say if you get 51% of the vote, you don't get your way 100% of the time. It is amazing, it's almost a temper tantrum.

Chuck Schumer

The most practical thing in the world is common sense and common humanity.

Nancy Astor

It is hard for us to admit we have a sin nature because we live in this system of checks and balances. If we get caught, we will be punished. But that doesn't make us good people; it only makes us subdued. Just think about the Congress and Senate and even the president. The genius of the American system is not freedom; the genius of the American system is checks and balances. Nobody gets all the power. Everybody is watching everybody else. It is as if the founding fathers knew, intrinsically, that the soul of man, unwatched, is perverse.

Donald Miller

In a tripartite government with its checks and balances, we have lost the balances.

John Fleming

Common sense is, of all kinds, the most uncommon. It implies good judgment, sound discretion, and true and practical wisdom applied to common life.

Tryon Edwards

Society has to be structured such that there are checks and balances, so that it can't be manipulated, for instance, for the profit of just some multinational company who's going to get rich on trying to legislate the environment.

Greg Graffin

Whenever you go on TV, there are so many checks and balances; it's a big business with a lot of rules. Stand-up is intimate and the freest, most lawless place I've ever been able to go.

Tom Green

You need basically some accountability rules, which means democratic checks and balances at the euro zone level, and definitely, you have to increase convergence in terms of taxes, in terms of social affairs and so on.

Emmanuel Macron

A Quote by Marvin Minsky

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors