Entropy Quotes - Page 3

• Once I got home, I sulked for a while. All my brilliant plans foiled by thermodynamics. Damn you, Entropy!

  Andy Weir

  Home, Damn You, Brilliant

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• Millions for nonsense, but not one cent for entropy.

  Alfred Bester

  Nonsense, Cents, Millions

  Alfred Bester (1974). “Tiger! Tiger!”

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• Professor Eddington has recently remarked that 'The law that entropy always increases - the second law of thermodynamics - holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of nature'. It is not a little instructive that so similar a law [the fundamental theorem of natural selection] should hold the supreme position among the biological sciences.

  Ronald Fisher

  Thinking, Law, Fundamentals

  "The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection". Book by Ronald Fisher, 1930.

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• Aging is a staircase - the upward ascension of the human spirit, bringing us into wisdom, wholeness and authenticity. As you may know, the entire world operates on a universal law: entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy means that everything in the world, everything, is in a state of decline and decay, the arch. There's only one exception to this universal law, and that is the human spirit, which can continue to evolve upwards.

  Jane Fonda

  Mean, Law, Decay

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• Evolution in the biosphere is therefore a necessarily irreversible process defining a direction in time; a direction which is the same as that enjoined by the law of increasing entropy, that is to say, the second law of thermodynamics. This is far more than a mere comparison: the second law is founded upon considerations identical to those which establish the irreversibility of evolution. Indeed, it is legitimate to view the irreversibility of evolution as an expression of the second law in the biosphere.

  Jacques Monod

  Science, Views, Expression

  Jacques Monod (1971). “Chance and necessity: an essay on the natural philosophy of modern biology”

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• Of course, uh, the universe is gradually slowing down and, uh, will eventually collapse inwardly on itself, according to the laws of entropy when all it's thermal and mechanical functions fail, thus rendering all human endeavors ultimately pointless. Just to put the gig in some sort of context.

  Bill Bailey

  Funny, Humor, Law

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• Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.

  Norbert Wiener

  Future, Math, Progress

  Norbert Wiener (1988). “The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society”, p.46, Da Capo Press

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• Pain shared is pain lessened; joy shared is joy increased. Thus do we refute entropy.

  Spider Robinson

  Pain, Empathy, Joy

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• I don't know where the characters are going to go or what's going to happen. I know that something inevitable will happen. I know that they want certain things and they're in a certain room and they smell like this and they look like that. More often than not, an entropy creeps in that strangles me, and then the inevitable happens. I don't know if I have the ability to write an ending like My Fair Lady's, when everyone gets what they want after a few minor conflicts. If I tried to write that it would just be false. Or I'd have someone enter with a machine gun.

  Adam Rapp

  Character, Writing, Gun

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• In the face of entropy and nothingness, you kind of have to pretend it's not
  there if you want to keep writing good code.

  Karl Lehenbauer

  Writing, Want, Faces

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• [My] pictures are about memory and forgetfulness. The evidence is dissolving. Bones crumble; human ash returns to soil; teeth, sandals, hair, bullets, axes disperse into atoms and molecules. Footprints in the snow will be erased by the next storm. The evidence of evil, like the evidence of good, obeys the universal laws of entropy. Heat cools, matter disintegrates, memories fade. If we let them.

  Simon Norfolk

  Memories, Axes, Law

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• The total energy of the universe is constant; the total entropy is continually increasing.

  Rudolf Clausius

  Energy, Constant, Universe

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• One of the main purpose of art has ever been that of making its indispensable contribution to the growth of entropy of the universal stupidity.

  William C. Brown

  Art, Stupidity, Growth

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• Only lifeless mechanisms move along faultlessly straight lines and compass circles. In art the surest way to destroy is to canonize one given form and one philosophy: that which is canonized quickly dies of obesity, of entropy.

  Yevgeny Zamyatin

  Inspirational, Art, Philosophy

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• Stars looking at our planet, watching entropy and pain and maybe startin' to wonder how the chaos in our lives could pass as sane. I've been thinkin' 'bout the meaning of resistance of a world beyond our own and suddenly the infinite and penitent began to look like home.

  Jon Foreman

  Stars, Pain, Home

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• Entropy is the price of structure.

  Ilya Prigogine

  Structure

  "Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature". Book by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers (pp. 283-284), 1984.

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• Whether you have a leadership title or not, you have the potential to either lead your organization beyond all expectations or inhibit its growth through entropy.

  Simon T. Bailey

  Organization, Expectations, Growth

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• Life, this anti-entropy, ceaselessly reloaded with energy, is a climbing force, toward order amidst chaos, toward light, among the darkness of the indefinite, toward the mystic dream of Love, between the fire which devours itself and the silence of the Cold.

  Albert Claude

  Life, Dream, Science

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• The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.

  James Gleick

  Negative, History Of Life, Life Is

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• All things tend toward entropy. The whole universe is moving outward, the stars pulling away from one another, God knows what falling through the cracks between them.

  Cassandra Clare

  Stars, Moving, Fall

  Cassandra Clare (2012). “Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments Series (5 books): City of Bones; City of Ashes; City of Glass; City of Fallen Angels, City of Lost Souls”, p.1992, Simon and Schuster

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• Jacob's room is the place entropy goes to die.

  Jodi Picoult

  Rooms, Jacob, Dies

  Jodi Picoult (2010). “House Rules: A Novel”, p.93, Simon and Schuster

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• Under the current high energy / high entropy regime, sustainable development is a joke.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Energy, Development, Regimes

  Source: www.raisethehammer.org

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• The aggressive incoherence of our common surroundings can be described as entropy made visible. The way we have disposed things on the landscape leads us in the direction of disorder and death. They are categorically evil. These dispositions are destroying our only home-planet and other organisms that share it. They defeat our need to care about where we are and the things in place there. They prompt us to feel that civilization is not worth carrying on. They rob us of our identity and our will to live. These things are not about personal taste or style.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Home, Civilization, Evil

  Interview With Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org.

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• No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.

  Philip K. Dick

  Fate, Chaos, Structure

  Philip K. Dick (2013). “Galactic Pot-Healer”, p.103, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The general struggle for existence of animate beings is not a struggle for raw materials, these for organisms are air water & soil, all abundantly available, nor for energy which exists in plenty in the sun and any hot body in the form of heat, but rather a struggle for entropy, which becomes available through the transition of energy from the hot sun to the cold earth.

  Ludwig Boltzmann

  Struggle, Air, Water

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