Quotes about humor

Nothing beats a long wait at a bus stop as a reality check.

“Are you smarter than me?”

“I’ll answer that when you give me a working definition of intelligence.”

“An AGI?” I asked, because at the Serious Cybernetics Corporation it was important to make a distinction between Artificial General Intelligence and ordinary AI. AGI being the sort that was self-aware enough to pass the Turing test and ask difficult philosophical questions before going “Daisy-Daisy” and trying to wipe out humanity, while ordinary AI mainly tried to sell you books on Amazon.

“He was a Parisian,” he said. “You can never be sure what Parisians believe in—beyond Paris of course.”

The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back. —Anonymous

I wondered, not for the first time, whether all farmers become obsessed or if only obsessive people become farmers.

The first rule of Big Brother is that Big Brother is never watching when you want him to.

The perennial problem for retailers the world over are the customers. Not only do they clutter up the shop, but they also demand to be reminded of the title of a book they read a review about in the Telegraph, given directions to The Lion King, helped to find a book their mum will like and, occasionally, purchase some actual merchandise. All of this customer-facing activity gets in the way of the shelving, merchandising, sticking, destickering, table pyramiding and stock returning that is necessary for the smooth operation of a modern bookshop.

It’s a police rule of thumb that anything involving members of the public takes twice as long as you think it will.

Inside he had the soul of an accountant, but alas none of the facility with numbers.

“Anything else to report?” he asked.

“A creeping sense of existential dread,” I said. “Apart from that I’m good.”

“A romantic,” said Nightingale. “The most dangerous people on earth.”