“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

“Striking a balance in favor of individual rights has always been the right decision for us and that it remains so even when technology gives us new ways to exercise those rights. Individual liberty has never weakened us; freedom of speech, enhanced by the Net, will only make us stronger.”
― Mike Godwin

“The idea that all our pursuits can be distilled into neatly-defined objectives and then almost mechanically pursued offers a kind of comfort against the harsh unpredictability of life. There’s something reassuring about the clockwork dependability of a world driven by tidy milestones laid out reliably from the starting line. [...] Objectives might sometimes provide meaning or direction, but they also limit our freedom and become straitjackets around our desire to explore. After all, when everything we do is measured against its contribution to achieving one objective or another, it robs us of the chance for playful discovery. So objectives do come with a cost.”
― Kenneth Stanley, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned

-: "No brain?"
-: "Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat!"
-: "So... what does the thinking?"
-: "You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."
-: "Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
-: "Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?"

— Terry Bisson, They're Made Out of Meat (1991)