“Art does not imitate, but interpret. It searches out the idea lying dormant in the symbol, in order to present the symbol to men in such form as to enable them to penetrate through it to the idea.”
— Giuseppe Mazzini
— Giuseppe Mazzini
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“The world neither ever saw, nor ever will see, a perfectly fair lottery.”
— Adam Smith
— Adam Smith
“[M]an's words, for good or ill, can now so easily reach the millions.”
— Lester B. Pearson, 1957
— Lester B. Pearson, 1957
“I am conscious of my inability to grasp, in all its details and positive developments, any very large portion of human knowledge. The greatest intelligence would not be equal to a comprehension of the whole.”
— Mikhail Bakunin, 1871
— Mikhail Bakunin, 1871
“The great difference between magic and the scientific imitation of life is that where the former is content to copy external appearance, the latter is concerned more with performance and behavior.”
— William Grey Walter
— William Grey Walter
“Today war..., [is] not a war of human beings but a technical struggle of machines one against another and all against the non–combatant population.”
— Karl Jaspers, 1933
— Karl Jaspers, 1933
“[H]ow could it be possible to bolt every door, to seal every crevice through which truth aspires to enter?”
— Condorcet, 1794
— Condorcet, 1794
“[W]hat reason is there for us to believe that man is the end of the evolution of life upon the earth? Why suppose that his birth has exhausted the creative forces of nature, and that the universal mother of the flora and fauna should, after having shaped him, become for ever barren. [...] Long before him, all over the globe, animated forces were multiplying in the depths of the sea, in the mud of the strand, in the forests, lakes, prairies, and tree-topped mountains. After him, new forms will go on taking shape. A future race, born perhaps of our own, but having perchance no bond of origin with us, will succeed us in the empire of the planet. These new spirits of the earth will ignore or despise us. The monuments of our arts, should they discover vestiges of them, will have no meaning for them.”
— Anatole France, 1905
— Anatole France, 1905
“[N]o endeavor that is worthwhile is simple in prospect; if it is right, it will be simple in retrospect.”
— Edward Teller
— Edward Teller
“Printers have persecuted me without a cause.”
— A misprinted Bible from 1612
— A misprinted Bible from 1612
“The National Security Agency, whose Cold War research into code breaking and electronic eavesdropping spurred the American computer revolution, has become a victim of the high-tech world it helped to create. [...] The N.S.A.'s failures don't make the headlines.”
— Seymour Hersh, 1999
— Seymour Hersh, 1999
“While erroneous customs prevail in any country, it would evince an ignorance of human nature in any individual to offend against them, until he has convinced the community of their error.”
— Robert Owen
— Robert Owen
“If I could offer one piece of advice to young people thinking about their future, it would be this: Don't preconceive. Find out what the opportunities are.”
— Thomas Sowell
— Thomas Sowell
“Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society.”
— Marshall McLuhan
— Marshall McLuhan
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“[A]n important difference between the way in which we use the brain and the machine is that the machine is intended for many successive runs, either with no reference to each other, or with a minimal, limited reference, and that it can be cleared between such runs; while the brain, in the course of nature, never even approximately clears out its past records. Thus the brain, under normal circumstances, is not the complete analogue of the computing machine but rather the analogue of a single run on such a machine.”
— Norbert Wiener, 1948
— Norbert Wiener, 1948