Quotable

In the history of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet. – Werner Heisenberg

History shall be kind to me for I intend to write it. – Winston Churchill

History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. – Mark Twain

Prediction is difficult, especially about the future. – Niels Bohr

The future ain’t what it used to be. – Yogi Berra

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. – Alan Kaye

The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed. – William Gibson

The future can’t be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. – Donella Meadows, “Dancing with Systems”

History is not the past. It is the present. You carry our history with us. We are our history. – James Baldwin, “Black English: A Dishonest Argument”

Throughout history, the present has demonstrated a remarkable inability to recognize what its most important contributions to the future will be. – ES

After the singularity, robots will replace humans and humans will replace pets. – ES

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. That’s why it’s important to eat at least two of them. – ES

Getting through the techne to let the sophrosyne sing… – ES

The pursuit of money is for those who can’t figure out anything better to do with their lives. – ES

Neither is form a receptacle for content, nor content an armature for form. The processes by which technological media develop are inseparable from the content they embody, just as the developing content of technological media is inseparable from the formal structures that embody it. – ES

A picture paints a thousand lies. – ES

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
Theodor Adorno in Minima Moralia (1951), E. Jephcott trans (1974), p. 222.

We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origins. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own.
– Sir Arthur Eddington, Space, Time, and Gravitation, 1920

“…nature as described by our scientists is indeed an artifact built in collaboration with a Being sufficiently complex to mock and, perhaps, punish materialists by responding to them in a crudely materialistic way…” – Paul Feyerabend, “Nature as a Work of Art,” 1992.

“Every totalitarian society, no matter how strict, has had its underground. In fact, two undergrounds. There’s the underground involved in political resistance and the underground involved in preserving beauty and fun – which is to say, preserving the human spirit.” Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker.

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