“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”
— Martin Buber

“The natural flow of technology tends to move in the direction of making surveillance easier.”
— Zimmermann's Law, 2013

“Without writing, you are reduced to a finite automaton.
With writing you have the extraordinary power of a Turing machine.”
— Manuel Blum

“Once you entomb mathematics in an artificial language à la Hilbert, once you set up a completely formal axiomatic system, then you can forget that it has any meaning and just look at it as a game that you play with marks on paper that enable you to deduce theorems from axioms. You can forget about the meaning of the game, the game of mathematical reasoning, it's just combinatorial play with symbols! There are certain rules, and you can study these rules and forget that they have any meaning!”
— Gregory Chaitin

“The role of outstanding scientists in influencing younger associates is repeatedly emphasized in the interviews with laureates. Almost invariably they lay great emphasis on the importance of problem-finding, not only problem-solving.”
— Robert K. Merton, 1968

“[A coherent] worldview gives us a framework to interact with the world and connect ideas to each other. When this is functional, the parts reinforce and support each other, allowing us to navigate the chaotic and weird universe we exist within.”
— Alan Smith, Is Tor an NSA honeypot?

“Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming. [...] In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation.”
— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968)

“[AI] is not just another invention; AI is itself an infinite inventor.”
— Mustafa Suleyman, What Is an AI Anyway?

“Ubuntu, a widely used and influential GNU/Linux distribution, has installed surveillance code. When the user searches her own local files for a string using the Ubuntu desktop, Ubuntu sends that string to one of Canonical's servers. (Canonical is the company that develops Ubuntu.) [...] Ubuntu surveillance is not anonymous.”
— Richard Stallman, Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do? (2012)

“The documents left no doubt that the NSA was equally involved in economic espionage, diplomatic spying, and suspicionless surveillance aimed at entire populations. Taken in its entirety, the Snowden archive led to an ultimately simple conclusion: the US government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide. Far from hyperbole, that is the literal, explicitly stated aim of the surveillance state: to collect, store, monitor, and analyze all electronic communication by all people around the globe.”
— Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide (2014)

“The sole purpose of man on earth is to manifest his Creator. He has no other purpose.”
— Walter Russell, A New Concept of the Universe (1953)

“Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species.”
— Alfred Russel Wallace, 1855

“We have two great stories about the simulation and artificial general intelligence. In one story, man fears that some program we've given birth to will become self-aware, smarter than us, and take over. In another story, there are genius simulators and we live in their simulation; and we haven't realized that those two stories are the same story. In one case, we are the simulator, and in another case, we are the simulated. And if you buy those and put them together, we are the AGI, and whether or not we have simulators, we may be trying to wake up by learning our own source code.”
— Eric Weinstein, Geometric Unity and the Call for New Ideas & Institutions, @1:07:47, 2020

“[Y]ou can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.”
— G. K. Chesterton, 1905

“Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine. And next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. [...] Today's "best practices" lead to dead ends; the best paths are new and untried.”
— Peter Thiel

“When you're really thinking hard about mathematics, you're in your own world.”
— Jim Simons

“If any human being is, in this precise moment, suffering, or ill, or hungry, that is something that should concern all of us.”
— Gino Strada

“One does not have freedom if anyone else (especially a large organization) has power over one, no matter how benevolently, tolerantly and permissively that power may be exercised. It is important not to confuse freedom with mere permissiveness.”
— Ted Kaczynski

“Culture itself is some kind of neotenizing force, because what culture provides is a bunch of rules, so you don't have to think, and a bunch of myths, so you don't have to think again; culture has all the answers. [...] But now technology throws a curve, and the curve is that we live so long that we figure out what a scam this is. We figure out that what you're supposed to work for isn't worth having, we figure out that our politicians are buffoons, we figure out that professional scientists are reputation-building grab-tailing weasels, we discover that all organizations are corrupted by ambition, you know, you get the picture: we figure it out.”
— Terence McKenna, Dreaming Awake at the End of Time, @33:21, 1998

“Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.”
— Aldous Huxley, 1929

“It's very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature. […] In the big cities, there are people who have never seen living nature, all things are products of humans […] The bigger the town, the less they see and understand nature.”
— Albert Hofmann