“In the area of politics our major policy obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.” Ed Murrow (1908-1965).
Category Archives: Quotes
Brain Eno giving good quote
Sorry. It’s starting to become quote central. But I like this. A lot. Get over it. This man has a brain the size of a planet.
This is from SciFoo via Guy Weber via Roberto Trotta at Imperial.
I may actually blog something from my own small brain shortly….
Quote of the week (for Sherborne school)
One day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other, “My little computer said such a funny thing this morning”.
Alan Turing (1949?)
Quote(s) of the Week
Quote of the week
Edinburgh International Book Festival
I’m off to Edinburgh on Friday to speak at the Edinburgh festival (12.30 Saturday, Garden Theatre). I’m inclined to somehow weave in the following quote.
“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end,… We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
Henry David Thoreau
Interesting thoughts relating to this here.
Quote of the week (about digital culture)
After yesterday’s essay something short.
“The complicated, ambiguous milieu of human contact is being replaced with simple, scalable equations. We maintain thousands more friends than any human being in history, but at the cost of complexity and depth.”
Daniel. H. Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising.
Quote of the Week
Apologies, holidays and a book launch, not to mention brainmail issue number 99 to be dealing with. Here’s a little gem I found in the newspapers last weekend.
“Sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, dancing; all the things we like doing are about surrender. Religion is the formalised social version of that.” Brian Eno.
Man Vs. Machine: Gandhi
Don’t know how I managed to miss the thoughts of Gandhi on man versus machine, but I did…
“The supreme consideration is man. The machine should not tend to make atrophied the limbs of man.”
“What I object to is the craze for machinery, not machinery as such. The craze is for what they call labour-saving money. Men go on ‘saving labour’ till thousands are without work and thrown on the open streets to die of starvation. I want to save time and labour, not for a fraction of mankind, but for all.”
“I can have no consideration for machinery which is meant either to enrich the few at the expense of the many, of without cause to displace the useful labour of many.”
“My opposition to machinery is much misunderstood. I am not opposed to machinery as such. I am opposed to machinery which displaces labour and leaves it idle.”
“I want the concentration of wealth, not in the hands of a few, but in the hands of all. Today machinery merely helps a few to ride on the backs of millions. The impetus behind it all is not the philanthropy to save labour, but greed. It is against this constitution of things that I am fighting with all my might….”
“Ours has been described as the machine age because the machine dominates our economy. ‘Now, what is machine?’ one may ask. In a sense, man is the most wonderful machine in creation. It can neither be duplicated nor copied. I have, however, used the word not in its wider sense, but in the sense of an appliance that tends to displace human or animal labour instead of supplementing it or merely increasing its efficiency. This is the first differential characteristic of the machine. The second characteristic is that there is no limit to its growth or evolution. This cannot be said of human labour. There is a limit beyond which its capacity or mechanical efficiency cannot go. Out of this circumstance arises the characteristic of the machine.”
Are libraries kennels for underdogs?
I just has a flash of inspiration. Maybe. I’m supposed to be thinking about bookshops, but I keep getting drawn back to public libraries and a line has jumped into my head.
“Libraries are kennels for underdogs.”
BTW, book light above from here.