“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

“The universe is a machine for making gods.”
— Henri Bergson, 1932

“Too many words dilute and blur ideas.”
— Eric Hoffer, 1977

“The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee, 1964

“The blindness of those who think it absurd to suppose that complex organic forms may have arisen by successive modifications out of simple ones becomes astonishing when we remember that complex organic forms are daily being thus produced. A tree differs from a seed immeasurably in every respect... Yet is the one changed in the course of a few years into the other: changed so gradually, that at no moment can it be said — Now the seed ceases to be, and the tree exists.”
— Herbert Spencer, 1852

“I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. [...] Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.”
— C. S. Lewis, 1943

“Theory is taught so as to make the student believe that he or she can become a Marxist, a feminist, an Afrocentrist, or a deconstructionist with about the same effort and commitment required in choosing items from a menu.”
— Edward Said, 1993

“It is sometimes possible to change the attitudes of millions but impossible to change the attitude of one man.”
— Edward Bernays

“There are two kinds of programmers -- those who have written compilers and those who haven't.”
— Terry A. Davis

“The spoken language is a symbolization of something that happened, could have happened, or is in the process of happening, while the written language is a symbolization of the spoken language.”
― Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture (1976)

“The greatest talents have been frequently misapplied and have produced evil proportionate to the extent of their powers.”
― Thomas Robert Malthus, 1798

“As a confirmed melancholic, I can testify that the best and maybe only antidote for melancholia is action. However, like most melancholics, I suffer also from sloth.”
― Edward Abbey, 1990

“The ultimate resource is people—especially skilled, spirited, and hopeful young people endowed with liberty—who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit and inevitably benefit the rest of us as well.”
― Julian Simon

“Culture can be loosely defined as the body of non-genetic information which people pass from generation to generation.”
― Paul R. Ehrlich

“Dictators must have enemies. They must have internal enemies to justify their secret police and external enemies to justify their military forces.”
― Richard Perle, 2005

“It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects.”
― Alfred Kinsey, 1948

“The long sleep of death closes our scars, and the short sleep of life our wounds.”
― Jean Paul, 1795

“Only to the extent that a man has emancipated himself [...] from all that is generic, does he count as a free spirit within a human community. No man is all genus, none is all individuality.”
― Rudolf Steiner, 1894

“Thought was still wholly intangible and ineffable until modern formal logic interpreted it as the manipulation of formal tokens. And it seemed still to inhabit mainly the heaven of Platonic ideals, or the equally obscure spaces of the human mind, until computers taught us how symbols could be processed by machines.”
― Allen Newell, 1975