Selected quotations for our times
In finding the quote from Marshall McLuhan on professionals and amateurs I used in my last post, I dug up a file I created a dozen years go with some quotes I was collecting. Here are just a few that are still worth bearing in mind today:
“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind”
– Winston Churchill
“It is hardly possible to overrate the value… of placing human beings in contact dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar… Such communication has always been, and is peculiar in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.”
– John Stuart Mills in 1848
“Computer games don’t affect kids; I mean, if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music”.
– Kristian Wilson of Nintendo Inc in 1989
“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.”
– Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
“We have for the first time an economy based on a key resource [information] that is not only renewable, but self-generating. Running out of it is not a problem, but drowning in it is.”
– John Naisbitt
“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
– TS Elliot
“The illiterate of the future are not those who can’t read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”
– Alvin Toffler
“If two of you agree, then one of you is redundant”
– Samuel Goldwyn (attributed)
“The way to live an interesting life is to live on the steep part of the learning curve”
– Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari
