“One scientist is all it takes to change everything.”
— Károly Zsolnai-Fehér, 🔗

“[M]an's words, for good or ill, can now so easily reach the millions.”
— Lester B. Pearson, 1957

“The future does not belong to men.”
— Charles de Gaulle, 1967

“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

“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

“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

“Home is where I work and I work everywhere.”
— Alfred Nobel

“[H]ow could it be possible to bolt every door, to seal every crevice through which truth aspires to enter?”
— 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

“[N]o endeavor that is worthwhile is simple in prospect; if it is right, it will be simple in retrospect.”
— Edward Teller

“Printers have persecuted me without a cause.”
— 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

“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

“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

“Nobody ever made a grammatical error in a non-literate society.”
— Marshall McLuhan

“[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

It takes might to centralize;
it takes magic to decentralize.

“You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. [...] No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.”
— Ken Thompson, Reflections on Trusting Trust (1983)

“A cherished characteristic of computers is their deterministic behaviour: software gives the same result for the same input. This makes it possible, in theory, to build binary packages from source packages that are bit for bit identical to the published binary packages. In practice however, building a binary package results in a different file each time. This is mostly due to timestamps stored in the builds. [...] Compiling software is resource intensive and it is valuable to have someone compile software for you. Unless it is possible to verify that compiled software corresponds to the source code it claims to correspond to, one has to trust the service that compiles the software.”
— Jos van den Oever, Is that really the source code for this software? (2013)

“The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.”
— Michel Foucault

“The art isn't the art, the art is never the art. The art is the thing that happens inside you when you make it, and the feeling in the heart of the beholder.”
— No Boilerplate, The Cult Of Done