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I Quotes

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All I Quotes

“If you could extend the elective franchise to all persons of color who can read the Constitution of the United States in English and write their names and to all persons of color who own real estate valued at not less than two hundred and fifty dollars and pay taxes thereon, and would completely disarm the adversary. This you can do with perfect safety. And as a consequence, the radicals, who are wild upon negro franchise, will be completely foiled in their attempts to keep the Southern States from renewing their relations to the Union.”

“If you could go anywhere, where would you want to go?” “Could we find a map of someplace perfect?” “Like paradise?” I asked, teasing. “Here? No.” He stared upward, the first stars shining in his eyes. “A better place. Someplace where nothing goes wrong. There must be a myth like that somewhere.” I bit my lip; my shoulders fell. “Navigation involves the beliefs of the Navigator and the mapmaker. And I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who truly believes in a world without suffering.”

“If you could have sufficient insight into all the inner and outer parts of your mental life, along with remembrance and intelligence enough to consider all the circumstances and take them into account, you would be a true prophet and visualize the future in the present as in a mirror.”

“If you could have the arms of Hercules, legs as swift as the wind. If you could leap shoulder high above the rim, have the kick of a dolphin, the reflexes of a cat. If you could have all these, you would have the body, you would have the tools. But you would not have greatness until you understand that the strongest muscle is the heart. To me, that's the soul of the Olympic Games.”

“If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month.”

“If you could learn entire languages in a week, draw perfect pictures without thinking about it, and make complex calculations in your head in seconds, would you be willing to trade that for the ability to comfortably walk into a coffee shop and shake a stranger’s hand? My thoughts went racing to modern comic mythology such as X-Men: The Last Stand, in which mutants are presented with a drug that could make them normal by robbing them of their powers. Would purine treatment in autistic savants be the same sort of thing? I had to know, so I asked Dr. Naviaux, “Will savants lose their mutant powers if we cure them? “Treating an autistic savant with a purine inhibitor should not change his or her extraordinary abilities at all,” he said. The hyperconnected islands of neurons that were formed when an autism patient was young would still be there. The powers that the islands grant would still be available, but they would no longer be the only neural connections available. “In younger patients in particular, new connections, longer ones, stand a good chance of forming once the danger response is shut down by a purine blocker,” says Dr. Naviaux. The result? A superhuman mind without the burden of autism. Wow.”

“If you could map out a human brain, an open question is, if you simulated it, would it be you? Now, as we discussed earlier, we don't have a great definition or even a good technological handle to know whether something is conscious or not just by looking at it, so there's that aspect that we're not ready to answer, I would argue. But it raises very interesting questions about the nature of identity.”

“If you could meet any character from literature, who would it be? I would not want characters to come to my world. They’d lose their special qualities, the perfect amount of what I should know about them. On the other hand, I could go to theirs because they would not have any preconceptions of who I was. I’d like to hang out with the Cheshire cat, learn how to disappear, and speak in smart illogic. He would look exactly like his pen-and-ink illustration by Tenniel. I’d be rendered in pen and ink, too. That would be required for entering a pen-and-ink world with its particular dimensional strangeness.”