Leo Rosten Quotes

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, whereas consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love, and anger. Throughout history, intelligence always went hand in hand with consciousness.

People are powerfully moved by imagination, belief, and knowledge. They can consider the past and future. They can make changes in their behavior out of reason in a way that animals can't do.

The thing that we possess, that machines don't, is the ability to exhibit wisdom.

I think technology really increased human ability. But technology cannot produce compassion.

I believe there is something going on in a conscious being, which includes many animals, as well as ourselves, that is not a computational activity. And to be conscious at all is not a quality that a computer as such will ever possess - no matter how complicated, no matter how well it plays chess or any of these things.

Equipment has heart, human heart, inside it.

You won't remember what it was like when your technology didn't recognize when you are sad or angry.

I spent many, many hours with my computer, and it really bugged me that it was very oblivious to my emotional state. And that kind of inspired and motivated me to build an emotionally intelligent computer.

Maybe the only significant difference between a really smart simulation and a human being was the noise they made when you punched them.

You insist that there is something a machine cannot do. If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do, then I can always make a machine which will do just that.

If you were to insist I was a robot, you might not consider me capable of love in some mystic human sense, but you would not be able to distinguish my reactions from that which you would call love so what difference would it make?

The arithmetical machine produces effects that approach nearer to thought than all the actions of animals. But it does nothing that would enable us to attribute will to it, as to the animals.

I am not some kind of computer. Only machines have glib answers for everything.

So through identification you have pleasure and pain.

Pain narrows consciousness; pleasure blurs it.

Self-awareness is probably overrated. A complex, self-regulating system doesn't need it in order to be successful, or even smart.

The future is about emotion: reactions to events are usually far more important than the events themselves.

You look like a human being, but you don't have a mind of your own.

Feelings are never stupid, they just make us feel stupid sometimes.

Joy, happiness ... we do not question. They are beyond question, maybe. A matter of being. But pain forces us to think, and to make connections ... to discover what has been happening to cause it. And, curiously enough, pain draws us to other human beings in a significant way, whereas joy or happiness to some extent, isolates.

I have the benefit of experience which tells me that sulking solves nothing

If you don't have anything useful to say then you attack people. If you feel that your house of cards has been discovered and is starting to come unraveled, you become very desperate. Intelligent people tend to talk about the facts. They don't sit around and call each other names. That's what you can find on a third grade playground.

Schadenfreude is so nutritious.

As the growing emphasis on feelings crowds out reason, facts will play a smaller role in public discourse.

It is feeling that sets a man thinking, and not thought that sets him feeling.