A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.
All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.
Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works.
As you gain elevation (on the mountain) your IQ goes down- but your emotional affect goes up, which is great for having a mythic experience, whether you want to or not.
Certain knowledge of what to fight for, and what to fight against, gives meaning to life and provides its own version of discipline: never give up. That kind of meaning is illusory, I now believe, and blinkered. Fealty to a mystical absolute is a formula for disaster, especially in transformative times.
Civilization's shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems.
Do what's good for humans, modeled on how humans already do things; ignore what's convenient for computers.
Every interview with a public figure should include the question 'What have you been wrong about, and how did that change your views?' The answer will tell us if the person is intellectually honest or a tale spinner with delusions of infallibility.
For artists diving into a new technology, it is a triple short-cut to mastery: you get a free ride on the novelty of the medium; there are no previous masters to surpass; and after a few weeks, you are the master. Try that with the violin.
Historians will consider this a dark age. Science historians can read Galileos technical correspondence from the 1590s but not Marvin Minskys from the 1960s.
How can I throw my life away in the least unhappy way?
If all of your electricity in your lifetime came from nuclear (energy), the waste from that lifetime of electricity would go in a Coke can.
If you don't like bacteria, you're on the wrong planet.
In our researches on the likely economic apocalypse it's become clear what is the prime survival tool for hard times: friends. Good friends. Lots of them.
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.
Redefine the possible.
Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn't change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.
Style is time's fool. Form is time's student
The amusements of broadcast consist mainly of songs, stories, and games, just as in tribal life. The songs and stories are mostly about courtship, the games mostly played by men, just as in tribal life.
The great problem with the future is that we die there. This is why it is so hard to take the future personally, especially the longer future, because that world is suffused with our absence.
The point is to explore whatever may be helpful for thinking, understanding, and acting responsibly over long periods of time.
The urgent finds you; you have to find the important. Importance is not fast. It is slow. It is not superficial. It is deep. And as a result, it's extremely powerful. When important matters go wrong, they undermine everything. When they go right, they sustain everything.
There's no unemployment in squatter cities. Everyone works. One-sixth of humanity is there. It's soon going to be more than that.
Tool- something with a use on one end and a grasp on the other end.
Want to know where the action in a culture is? Watch where new language is turning up and where the lawyers collect, usually in that sequence.
We are as gods and might as well get good at it.
We can influence the future but not see it.
When a fantasy turns you on, you're obligated to God and nature to start doing it right away.
When a generation talks just to itself, it becomes more filled with folly than it might have otherwise.
Whenever I hear the word 'share' I would reach for a gun if I had one. 'Share' is frequently followed by the word 'feelings,' and I have enough of my own thank you; please do us both a favor and repress yours.
You own your own words, unless they contain information. In which case they belong to no one.
Found 32 occurence(s) in 52,450 quotation(s).
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