"We are running the risk nowadays of a great World State where deliberate and conscious primitive injustice may be the only possible condition for the statistical happiness of the masses: a world worse than hell for every clear mind. Perhaps it would not be a bad idea for the teams at present creating cybernetics to add to their cadre of technicians, who have come from all horizons of science, some serious anthropologists and perhaps a philosopher who has some curiosity as to world matters."

"Let us remember that the automatic machine, whatever we may think of any feelings it may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor that competes with slave labor, must accept the economic conditions of slave labor. It is perfectly clear that this will produce an unemployment situation, in comparison with which the present recession and even the depression of the thirties will seem a pleasent joke. This depression will ruin many industries - possibly even the industries that have taken advantage of the new potentialities. However, there is nothing in the industrial tradition which forbids an industrialist to make a sure and quick profit, and to get out before the crash touches him personally."

"We are in the position of a man who has only two ambitions in life. One is to invent the universal solvent which will disolve any solid substance, and the second is to invent the universal container which will hold any liquid. Whatever this inventor does, he will be frustrated."

"The bag's not for what I take, Colson - it's for what I find along the way."

"Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident."

"The cotton of India is conveyed by British ships round half our planet, to be woven by British skill in the factories of Lancashire : it is again set in motion by British capital; and, transported to the very plains whereon it grew, is repurchased by the lords of the soil which gave it birth, at a cheaper price than'that at which their coarser machinery enables them to manufacture it themselves."

"The paradoxical truth I’m driving at is that today’s technologies of individualization are technologies of mass individualization. Customization can be surprisingly homogenizing. Everyone, or nearly everyone, is on Facebook: It is the most convenient way to keep track of your friends and family, who in theory should represent what is unique about you and your life. Yet Facebook seems to make us all the same. Its format and conventions strip us of all but the most superficial expressions of individuality, such as which particular photo of a beach or mountain range we select as our background image."

"There is, for instance, a widespread belief that the machine relieves man of work, that thereby he gains leisure and time for free activity. This belief in many cases is unshakable and unexamined. Where one comes across it, one senses that it is one of the props which uphold technical progress, justify it, and secure an optimistic view of the future. Obviously, a machine which does not profit man appeals to no one – optimism is needed in this connection also. But we are here dealing with an assertion, the validity of which has not been established, and constant repetition gives it no greater conviction.

Leisure and free activity are not accessible to everybody, and they are conditions in no way connected with the machine. A man who is relieved of work is not thereby capable of leisure; a man who gains time does not thereby gain the capacity to spend this time in free activity, for leisure is not a mere doing-nothing, a state that can be defined negatively. Leisure, to be fruitful, presupposes a spiritual and mental life from which it draws its meaning and its worth. An otium sine dignitate (”leisure without dignity”) is hollow, empty loafing. Nor is leisure, as many seem to think, a mere intermission in work for a limited time – no, by definition it is unlimited and indivisible, and from it originates all meaningful work. Leisure is the prerequisite of every free thought, every free activity. And this is why only the few are capable of it, since the many, when they have gained time, only kill it."

"The efficiency provided by the copy operations allow the entire song to fit in only 603 bytes."

"Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power."

"I thought about the relationship between infromation and knowledge. You have to have information before you can have knowledge. And knowledge is kind of the "how" connections - "how does this connect to that?", "how does this work?" between information.

Wisdom is the "why" connections between the knowledge. You have modules of knowledge and now you want to make ethical and aesthetic choices about different futures - that's really a "why" question. So I thought that if you could at least facilitate this - the connection between the different bodies of knowledge talking to each other then there's kind of a trickle up effect that might develop some wisdom on the planet."

"What Bumble and Hinge did to the dating market, contemporary human-resources practices have done to the job market. People are swiping like crazy and getting nothing back."

"Among all the things of this world, information is the hardest to guard, since it can be stolen without removing it."

"There is no virtue without effort."

"Firmitas, utilitas, venustas."

"One of the great things about standards is that there are so many different ones to choose from!"

"In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face."

"America would be better off if its elites could act responsibly without being terrified. If CEOs remembered that citizens are a kind of shareholder, too. If economists tried to model the future before it arrives in their rearview mirror. If politicians chose their constituents’ jobs over their own. None of this requires revolution. It requires everyone to do the jobs they already have, just better."

"If only we could learn the right lessons from the successes of the past, we would not need to learn from our failures."

"One of the differences between digital preservation and preserving traditional formats of records is that digital records don't just survive by accident. We need to make a conscious decision that they're worth keeping. We have to think about that when we create them in the first place in terms of the standards that we use. We have to make a commitment to keeping them alive in a way we haven't had to in the past."

"Fortuna est quae fit cum praeparatio in occasionem incidit."

"There is an ancient Indian saying that something lives only as long as the last person who remembers it.

My people have come to trust memory over history. Memory, like fire, is radiant and immutable while history serves only those who seek to control it, those who douse the flame of memory in order to put out the dangerous fire of truth.

Beware these men for they are dangerous themselves and unwise. Their false history is written in the blood of those who might remember and of those who seek the truth."

"Wherever you walk, you walk like you belong! That is my challenge to you. Walk like you belong! Because you do."

"I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective – the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income."

"The fact is, we're moving in uncharted waters. We're dealing with one of the fundamental assets of society - that is - recorded information. There's a real risk in taking something that works and transforming it in a way that's more responsive to fads and to technological wizardry without thinking through the fundamental implications that those changes will make on the system that is at the heart of civilization."