Top 120 Ted Chiang Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Of course beauty has been used as a tool of oppression, but eliminating beauty is not the answer; you can’t liberate people by narrowing the scope of their experiences. That’s positively Orwellian. What’s needed is a woman-centered concept of beauty, one that lets all women feel good about themselves instead of making most of them feel bad.”

— Ted Chiang

52. “Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.”

— Ted Chiang

53. “When we speak, we use the breath in our lungs to give our thoughts a physical form. The sounds we make are simultaneously our intentions and our life force.”

— Ted Chiang

54. “We human beings may not be the answer to the question why, but I will keep looking for the answer to how. This search is my purpose; not because you chose it for me, Lord, but because I chose it for myself. Amen.”

— Ted Chiang

55. “I can’t believe that you, a grown woman taller than me and beautiful enough to make my heart ache, will be the same girl I used to lift off the ground so you could reach the drinking fountain, the same girl who used to trundle out of my bedroom draped in a dress and hat and four scarves from my closet.”

— Ted Chiang

56. “Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same.”

— Ted Chiang

57. “I think there are events of another category that are likewise not fixed in a causal chain: acts of volition. Free will is a kind of miracle; when we make a genuine choice, we bring about a result that cannot be reduced to the workings of physical law. Every act of volition is, like the creation of the universe, a first cause.”

— Ted Chiang

58. “Living with you will be like aiming for a moving target; you’ll always be further along that I expect.”

— Ted Chiang

59. “It is not that the turret clocks are running faster. What is happening is that our brains are running slower.”

— Ted Chiang

60. “Physics admits of a lovely unification, not just at the level of fundamental forces, but when considering its extent and implications. Classifications like “optics” or “thermodynamics” are just straitjackets, preventing physicists from seeing countless intersections.”

— Ted Chiang

61. “Some lovers break up with each other the first time they have a big argument; some parents do as little for their children as they can get away with; some pet owners ignore their pets whenever they become inconvenient. In all of those cases, the people are unwilling to make an effort. Having a real relationship, whether with a lover or a child or a pet, requires that you be willing to balance the other party’s wants and needs with your own.”

— Ted Chiang

62. “In 1936, Gerhard Gentzen provided a proof of the consistency of arithmetic, but to do it he needed to use a controversial technique known as transfinite induction. This technique is not among the usual methods of proof, and it hardly seemed appropriate for guaranteeing the consistency of arithmetic. What Gentzen had done was prove the obvious by assuming the doubtful.”

— Ted Chiang

63. “It was something I thought of when I was talking with my sister,” he says. Derek’s sister teaches children born with Down syndrome. “She mentioned that some parents don’t want to push their kids too much, because they’re afraid of exposing them to the possibility of failure. The parents mean well, but they’re keeping their kids from reaching their full potential when they coddle them.”

— Ted Chiang

64. “You’ll do what makes you happy, and that’ll be all I ask for.”

— Ted Chiang

65. “It’s no coincidence that “aspiration” means both hope and the act of breathing. When we speak, we use the breath in our lungs to give our thoughts a physical form. The sounds we make are simultaneously our intentions and our life force. I speak, therefore I am.”

— Ted Chiang

66. “Like physical events with their causal and teleological interpretations, every linguistic event had two possible interpretations: as a transmission of information and as the realization of a plan.”

— Ted Chiang

67. “If you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can’t assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible.”

— Ted Chiang

68. “There have always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion, some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic. Most people agree these arguments are irrefutable, but no one ever really accepts the conclusion. The experience of having free will is too powerful for an argument to overrule.”

— Ted Chiang

69. “Lord, I place myself in your presence, and ask you to shine your light into my heart as I look back upon this day, so that I may see more clearly your grace in everything that has happened.”

— Ted Chiang

70. “The difference is that the heat energy we radiate is a high-entropy form of energy, meaning it’s disordered. The chemical energy we absorb is a low-entropy form of energy, meaning it’s ordered. In effect, we are consuming order and generating disorder; we live by increasing the disorder of the universe. It’s only because the universe started in a highly ordered state that we are able to exist at all.”

— Ted Chiang

71. “Science is not just the search for the truth,” he said. “It’s the search for purpose.”

— Ted Chiang

72. “If mathematical thinking is defective, where are we to find truth and certitude?”

— Ted Chiang

73. “Loving someone means making sacrifices for them.”

— Ted Chiang

74. “For a mind to even approach its full potential, it needs cultivation by other minds.”

— Ted Chiang

75. “Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don’t need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community’s understanding of itself. So it wouldn’t be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.”

— Ted Chiang

76. “We experienced events in an order, and perceived their relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all. A minimizing, maximizing purpose.”

— Ted Chiang

77. “The universe began as an enormous breath being held.”

— Ted Chiang

78. “The answer was simple. It was the difference between sympathy and empathy. Carl.”

— Ted Chiang

79. “Of course, everyone knew that Heaven was incomparably superior, but to Neil it had always seemed too remote to consider, like wealth or fame or glamour. For people like him, Hell was where you went when you died, and he saw no point in restructuring his life in hopes of avoiding that.”

— Ted Chiang

80. “Our language has two words for what in your language is called ‘true.’ There is what’s right, mimi, and what’s precise, vough. In a dispute the principals say what they consider right; they speak mimi. The witnesses, however, are sworn to say precisely what happened; they speak vough. When Sabe has heard what happened he can decide what action is mimi for everyone. But it’s not lying if the principals don’t speak vough, as long as they speak mimi.”

— Ted Chiang

81. “You see, the foundations of our culture were laid in classical Greece, where physical beauty and the body were celebrated. But our culture is also thoroughly permeated by the monotheistic tradition, which devalues the body in favor of the soul. These old conflicting impulses are rearing their heads again, this time in the calliagnosia debate.”

— Ted Chiang

82. “We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated.”

— Ted Chiang

83. “Their righteousness could not save them from the consequences of their deeds.”

— Ted Chiang

84. “Her concentration was gone, and last night she had had a nightmare about discovering a formalism that let her translate arbitrary concepts into mathematical expressions: then she had proven that life and death were equivalent.”

— Ted Chiang

85. “The prospect of living without interference, living in a world where windfalls and misfortunes were never by design, held no terror for him.”

— Ted Chiang

86. “When you watch Olympic athletes in competition, does your self-esteem plummet? Of course not. On the contrary, you feel wonder and admiration; you’re inspired that such exceptional individuals exist. So why can’t we feels the same way about beauty?”

— Ted Chiang

87. “Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.”

— Ted Chiang

88. “And then, our universe will be in a state of absolute equilibrium. All life and thought will cease and, with them, time itself.”

— Ted Chiang

89. “Forgive me, Lord, for being sharp to a man who sought only to assist me. I ask for your help in being patient with those who believe women helpless.”

— Ted Chiang

90. “I would be honored to relate everything I know of the future, if Your Majesty sees fit to ask, but for myself, the most precious knowledge I possess is this: Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.”

— Ted Chiang

91. “It’ll be when you first learn to walk that I get daily demonstrations of the asymmetry in our relationship. You’ll be incessantly running off somewhere, and each time you walk into a door frame or scrape your knee, the pain feels like it’s my own. It’ll be like growing an errant limb, an extension of myself whose sensory nerves report pain just fine, but whose motor nerves don’t convey my commands at all. It’s so unfair: I’m going to give birth to an animated voodoo doll of myself.”

— Ted Chiang

92. “And yet I know that, because free will is an illusion, it’s all predetermined who will descend into akinetic mutism and who won’t. There’s nothing anyone can do about it; you can’t choose the effect the Predictor has on you. Some of you will succumb and some of you won’t, and my sending this warning won’t alter those proportions. So why did I do it? Because I had no choice.”

— Ted Chiang

93. “Hillalum said nothing. For the first time, he knew night for what it was: the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky.”

— Ted Chiang

94. “I am a lover of beauty, he of humanity.”

— Ted Chiang

95. “He considers intelligence to be a means, while I view it as an end in itself.”

— Ted Chiang

96. “I view the world as incidental to my aims, while he cannot allow someone with enhanced intelligence to work purely in self-interest.”

— Ted Chiang

97. “And I think I’ve found the real benefit of digital memory. The point is not to prove you were right; the point is to admit you were wrong.”

— Ted Chiang

98. “This is classic PR: hide behind a nice-sounding name, and create the impression of a third party looking out for the consumer’s interests.”

— Ted Chiang

99. “Their devotion had never been put to any serious test, and might not have withstood one; their love for God was based in their satisfaction with the status quo.”

— Ted Chiang

100. “The pleasure you give is returned in the pleasure you receive.”

— Ted Chiang