Here are a list of quotes that have changed my life and good knowledge to share to know earlier in life as knowing sooner is better than later.
My personal quote is "People always love the easy way out, but not the hard truths."
It is difficult to keep the descriptions updated and this page is a heavy Work In Progress, so the organization is rough.
Please check out my Storygraph Profile for a list of books I have read.
Last updated December 12th 2025
This quotes have changed the way I have seen life and my life crossroads or have confirmed a guess I have since I was young all along in that what people always told me was wrong. These quotes represent my viewpoints on the world and my insights through my life experiences. My meaning behind my personal quote is stated multiple times in 1984, with same point but different wording.
The descriptions for the quotes explain the reasoning why I pursuit my research fields of explainable artificial intelligence towards autonomous driving, precision agriculture, precision medicine, predictive maintenance, alongside breaking into other fields using my computer science expertise.
The full two paragraphs unchanged from the book:
"The Allen Institute for AI surveyed more than 1,500 Americans to measure their understanding of current AI capabilities. Participants were asked to answer true or false statements like "Siri uses AI." The results paint a dire picture: more than 84 percent of Americans are "AI illiterate," the researchers concluded. Most Americans incorrectly believed that "AI can understand cause and effect (for example, if I heat water on the stove, then it will boil) at the level of an adult human." Even educated engineers are sometimes led astray. A former software engineer from Google with a graduate degree in computer science incorrectly believed that Google's advanced chatbot "is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us."
We sometimes ascribe powerful AI tools with intelligence, but in reality, they are artificial! But to endow AI with even the most basic reasoning capabilities would require a radical restructuring of AI technology, Turning Award winner Judea Pearl argues in The Book of Why. Most AI researchers agree that while we are making research strides in this area, we are nowhere close to instilling your car with intuition. "It's so striking that as much as AI technologies have advanced, we still don't have AI systems with anything like human common sense," MIT Professor Joshua Tenenbaum told Scientific American." (Kuman and Anderson 9)
"Garbage in, garbage out"
Meaning: "AI is only as good as the person who deploys it." (From ABC Radio Nation Future Tense The Truth about AI - garbage in, garbage out (unchanged))
People ask me all the time, about the replacement of humans by AI, my short reply is always that only humans that are over reliant on AI for doing everyday tasks will be replaced by AI, as anyone can use AI themselves instead of hiring these humans that rely on AI to do everything for them, so they are replaceable by AI as they are replacing their own human work with AI generated work themselves.
These two paragraphs has spurred me to pursue education of artificial intelligence for the general public with the incoming plans of usage of artificial intelligence in K12 to higher education and the AI revolution happening currently with the people in my life asking constantly on whether AI will replace humans and other questions that indicate their lack of knowledge how artificial intelligence works (I prefer the term computer vision for my work in the field of computer vision within artificial intelligence as the term artificial intelligence has misleading connotations as the current state of artificial intelligence is more artificial than intelligent).
The main guidance I have been given by the section editor of Artificial Intelligence section of a prestigious research journal and multiple AI researchers on artificial intelligence in the Mechanical Engineering Department of UC Merced since my time working in MESA Lab as a student research assistant has been:
If humans do not understand the problem and solve it themselves, how could artificial intelligence learn to solve these problems if humans do not even know themselves?
For instance, autonomous driving with cars such as Waymo offering driver-less cars driven using computer vision and robotics techniques.
However on ethnics and human safety, this is where the issues come into play, as for an unavoidable accident between two humans the artificial intelligence needs to make the decision using information gathered through the computer networks and embedded systems:
Which human's life is worth saving over another?
When the AgreCom CEO Stuart Hawling came into my capstone lecture class CSE120 Software Engineering for the Innovate to Grow Program to do a talk, he discussed on Bluetooth Sensors (Computer Networks and Internet of Things) in traffic intersections with traffic lights collecting data and the geographic information through GPS on the car (November 10th 2025). A method proposed by Agrecom CEO Stuart Hawling who came into my capstone class's lecture to do an Explainable Artificial Intelligence alongside Ethnics in Artificial Intelligence talk who using social credit score determined by the Big Data received through Internet of Things (IoT) smart vehicles and smart traffic management.
UC Merced's Mechanical Engineering Department Professor Ricardo de Castro (who was my Circuit Theory professor my third year Fall semester) conducts research on autonomous driving vehicles through Cooperative Driving, Learning-based Motion Control, Diagnosis and Fault-Tolerance Control, and Cloud Aided Vehicle Control and Sensing.
In addition, UC Merced's Computer Science & Engineering Department Professor Ross Greer (who was my Introduction to Computer Vision professor my third year Spring semester) conducts research in computer vision for autonomous driving on Safe Autonomous Driving & Intelligent Transportation Systems, Robotic Perception and Planning, and Human-Machine Communication, Interaction, and Co-Creativity.
Quotes I have seen in MESA Lab Research Seminars and MESA Lab quotes. Professor Yangquan Chen is my former PI so I like watching his videos in my free time.
"We make real systems that work and others want them."
"You're not going to lose your job due to AI, you're going to lose your job to somebody who uses AI"
"Come up with good questions to ask ChatGPT. Okay. Good question will lead to good research."
“Now self-delusion in humans is very, very common. There are enumerable ways of you changing a thing and kidding yourself and making it look some other way. When you ask, ``Why didn't you do such and such,'' the person has a thousand alibis. If you look at the history of science, usually these days there are 10 people right there ready, and we pay off for the person who is there first. The other nine fellows say, ``Well, I had the idea but I didn't do it and so on and so on.'' There are so many alibis. Why weren't you first? Why didn't you do it right? Don't try an alibi. Don't try and kid yourself. You can tell other people all the alibis you want. I don't mind. But to yourself try to be honest.”
“In summary, I claim that some of the reasons why so many people who have greatness within their grasp don't succeed are: they don't work on important problems, they don't become emotionally involved, they don't try and change what is difficult to some other situation which is easily done but is still important, and they keep giving themselves alibis why they don't. They keep saying that it is a matter of luck. I've told you how easy it is; furthermore I've told you how to reform. Therefore, go forth and become great scientists!"
A powerful book that's always been relevant. The quote of "if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad" has supported my persistence and determination in identifying propaganda and working on building a better future.
“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”
"Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”
"It was curious how that predestined horror moved in and out of one’s
consciousness. There it lay, fixed in future times, preceding death as surely as
99 precedes 100. One could not avoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it:
and yet instead, every now and again, by a conscious, wilful act, one chose to
shorten the interval before it happened."
“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
“In the face of pain there are no heroes.”
“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
“We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
"The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same"
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”
“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”
I saw this news article posted on Instagram and it instantly confirmed my hunch of why the so called adults deemed as 21 and afterwards act the same high school and middle school drama in work spaces. The proof of what people have always said that "You're an adult now (18 years old and older), you should be more mature" proven wrong.
This is a pivotal study especially with the plans to implement artificial intelligence in education from K12 to higher education with the lost of fifty years worth of education for literacy and math skills for the United States due to using America's own adolescences as guinea pigs in a "sweeping, if not exactly though-out educational experiment" ("A Recipe for Idiocracy" by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic Nov. 19th 2025).
Due to the No Child Left Behind Act enacted in 2002 by President George W. Bush and the lowering of standards and removal of penalty for failure as a result of the act that became widespread during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and continuing, the results of these laws and policies have come into focus especially in this day and age of Smartphones, Social Media, and the Artificial Intelligence Revolutions since 2002.
Unchanged from the news article by Rose Horowitch except for bolding for key points:
"The human brain goes through five distinct stages of development during the average human lifetime, with measurable key turning points as we grow, mature, age and decline, new research suggests.
Neuroscientists at the University of Cambridge scanned the brains of almost 4,000 people aged 0 and 90 years old to identify the four milestones which mark fundamental changes in the neural connections which make our brains work.
One of the most surprising findings is that the period the scientists refer to as “adolescence” starts around the age of nine years old, but far from ending when you reach your twenties, carries on for over another decade until you are in your early 30s.
The researchm (sic) published in the journal Nature Communicationsm (sic), found that our brains are constantly learning and adapting as we absorb new information. However, it is not a smooth journey of growth and consolidation, but one marked by flurries of activity – particular in the first half of life.
The five “major epochs” the team identified are:
Childhood – from birth to age nine
Adolescence – from nine to 32
Adulthood – from 32 to 66
Early ageing – from 66 to 83
Late ageing – from 83 onwards
These distinct eras were detected using datasets taken from MRI diffusion scans, which map neural connections in the brain by tracking how water molecules move through brain tissue.
“We know the brain’s wiring is crucial to our development, but we lack a big picture of how it changes across our lives and why,” said Dr Alexa Mousley, a Gates Cambridge scholar who led the research.
“These eras provide important context for what our brains might be best at, or more vulnerable to, at different stages of our lives. It could help us understand why some brains develop differently at key points in life, whether it be learning difficulties in childhood, or dementia in our later years.”
"The medical profession's answer has been to go from specialization to superspecialization."
"Expertise is the mantra of modern medicine."
"We live in the era of the superspecialist - of clinicians who have taken the time to practice, practice, practice at one narrow thing until they can do it better than anyone else. They have two advantages over ordinary specialists: greater knowledge of the details taht matter and a learned ability to handle the complexities of the particular job. There are degrees of complexity, beyond the usual kind that avoiding daily mistakes is proving impossible even for our most superspecialized."
"The researchers learned that about half the time the staff did not know one another's names. When they did however, the communications ratings jumped significantly. The investigators at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere had also observed that when nurses were given a chance to say their names and mention concerns at the beginning of a case, they were more likely to note problems and offer solutions. The researchers called it an "activation phenomenon." Giving people a chance to say something at the start seemed to activate their sense of participation and responsibility and their willingness to speak up."
" "That's not my problem" is possibly the worst thing people can think, whether they are starting an operation, taxiing an airplane full of passengers down a runway, or building a thousand-foot-tall skyscraper. But in medicine, we it all the time. I've seen it in my own operation room."
"We continue to have upwards of 150,000 deaths following surgery every year -- more than three times the number of road traffic fatalities. Moreover, research has consistently showed that at least half our deaths and major complications are avoidable. The knowledge exists. But however superemely specialzied and trained we may have become, steps are still missed. Mistakes are still made."
Problem
"Medicine, with its dazzling successes but also frequent failures, therefore poses a significant challenge: What do you do when expertise is not enough? What do you do when even the superspecialists fail?"
“These works are handed down from teacher to pupil, from parent to child, almost without question, like DNA. They are memorized, recited, discussed in book reports, included in university entrance exams, and once the student is grown up, they become a source for quotation. They are made into movies again and again, they are parodied, and inevitably they become the object of ambitious young writers’ revolt and contempt.”
“This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”
“One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious.”
Chapter 27
"To this day, I struggle to understand humans and their selfharm tendencies. But on another note, there's something about them that I find beautiful."., Daybit Sem Void
Description a WIP as I have not read the books and stories associated with the quotes.
"“Anyway, you can be sure of one thing, a man's got to fake just to stay alive.”, Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun
"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.", Mark Twain
Syllogistic Paradox as Ultimate aka Discrete Math
"Have you considered whether the answer to your question will be of any relevance to our current predicament? If a question is of no help, then don't ask it. Time is clearly precious to the both of us."
"My goals are roughly aligned with yours. Since you're here, I won't intercede... but should you fail, I will be forced to prevent some avoidable misfortunes."
"That's all you need to know. Just two paragraphs. Very effective communication. I can't stand discourtesy - even when it comes from myself."
"He's only just woken up - dazed. He may need... a few pointers."
"We're running out of time, let's retrace our steps and evaluate the situation. From the data we've collected, there are three avenues we can explore..."
"I am only laying out my questions. As for the answers... They'll find them themselves."
"Pursuit tinged with negativity is still pursuit, and it is capable of leading us to the right conclusion. For the masses of the mediocre to reach a level of awareness - this is a necessary rite of passage."
"Ah, we cross paths again. Do you remember me? Of course, why would you? Memory is such a fickle thing, after all."
"Don't play the fool. Think."
"Ignorance is a malady that must be cured."
"To stand aside and observe is the best treatment one can give. There is a disease called "foolishness" that is harder to cure than any ailment."
"Should your mind exhibit symptoms of dullness, feel free to give the doctor a call."
"I have a fastidious nature - I cannot stand fools, idiots, or imbeciles. Seeing them fills me with dread. Regrettably, this space station is just like the Intelligentsia Guild - devoid of geniuses and filled with mediocrity."
"You learn to know yourself before your enemy, but it can still require encouragement."
"The average person is easily swayed by their environment, after all."
"Copying others rarely leads to improved results."
"No need to rush. Patience breeds success."
"Just as my calculations predicted."
"An interesting test of intellect."
"Apologies, it's an unfortunate habit of mine. When one is immersed in academic research, skepticism comes far more naturally than belief."
"While geniuses wander among the stars, the ordinary can't even trace their footsteps. These less gifted have no choice but to walk alone, enduring a lifetime of tumbles and triumphs...but even a life marked by failure is a life worth living - it is only in moments of solitude and despair, when help is absent, that fools grasp how to pick themselves up."
"Ah, the Technology Department. Charming little place isn't it? Madam Yabuli does possess some semblance of competence, but her subordinates? Oh, they're a riot - brimming with enthusiasm yet utterly devoid of intellect. It's as if evolution halted prematurely for them."
"They want to start some collaborations with Herta and have graciously extended an invitation for me to play the role of science consultant. It's delightfully amusing. I can't wait to witness firsthand how these geniuses from the so-called "Super Smart Club" squander the IPC's vast resources."
Amy's research activities are dedicated in memory of her multiple decreased family members who mostly passed away due to cancer. Ordered by most recent:
decreased aunt Lolita (Yuet Wah) Ng who worked at Hong Kong Police Force as an Assistant Force Welfare Officer at the Kowloon Welfare Office who passed away in March 2024 during her second year in college from lung cancer
decreased grandmother Chun Ping Chan who passed away in 2022 during her high school senior year who had a superbug on top of various medical difficulties
decreased uncle Pui Sang Wong who passed away from nasal cancer in 2021
deceased grandfather Ping Chiu Chan who passed away in either 2011-2012 (in her third grade or fourth grade)
decreased aunt Stella Ng who passed away in 1997 from breast cancer