“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

“[T]he kind of linguistic recoding that people do seems to me to be the very lifeblood of the thought processes.”
― George Armitage Miller, 1956

“A political society does not live to conduct foreign policy; it would be more correct to say that it conducts foreign policy in order to live.”
― George F. Kennan, 1954

“[T]here is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”
― H. L. Mencken, 1917

“Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behaviour of the whole.”
― Murray Gell-Mann, 1997

“In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.”
― Michael Crichton

“Vision is a process that produces from images of the external world a description that is useful to the viewer and not cluttered with irrelevant information.”
― David Marr, 1978

“Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our common sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience.”
― Paul Churchland