60 Quotes by Douglas Hofstadter

I don't feel I have the right to snuff the lives of chicken and fish.

There has to be a common sense cutoff for craziness, and when that threshold is exceeded, then the criteria for publication should get far, far more stringent.

Many people believe that our lives end not when we die but when the very last person who knew us dies. Memory is part of it, yes, but I think it's much more than memory.

You can imagine a soul as being a detailed, elaborate pattern that exists very clearly in one brain. When a person dies, the original is no longer around. But there are other versions of it in other people's brains. It's a less detailed copy, it's coarse-grained.

This sentence contradicts itself - no actually it doesn't.

It always takes longer than you expect, even if you take Hofstadter's Law into account.

Since most women are kind of different from the top-model image, there is a constant losing battle of self-image, ... It's damaging when every woman that's portrayed in the media or who are on the covers of magazines are part of a stereotypical form of beauty, whereas the average woman is not.

I would like to understand things better, but I don’t want to understand them perfectly.

I would proclaim that the vast majority of what [say, Scientific American] is true-yet my ability to defend such a claim is weaker than I would like. And most likely the readers, authors, and editors of that magazine would be equally hard pressed to come up with cogent, non-technical arguments convincing a skeptic of this point, especially if pitted against a clever lawyer arguing the contrary. How come Truth is such a slippery beast?