Marcelo Gleiser:

As the Island of Knowledge grows, so do the shores of our ignorance.

Tasneem Zehra Husain:

Personally, I've begun to think of knowledge as a fractal. Rich and intricate worlds lie between points that appear adjacent. The circumscribed area may well be finite, but the boundary is infinitely long.

David Wolman:

What happened in L'Aquila is a window onto how we think about, communicate, and live with risk, and about impediments to clear thinking that afflict us all.

Dan Geer:

The late Peter Bernstein, perhaps the world's foremost thinker on the topic, defined "risk" as "more things can happen than will." With technologic advance accelerating, "more things can happen than will" takes on a particularly ominous quality if your job is to ensure your citizens' survival in an anarchy where, daily, ever more things can happen than will. Realpolitik would say that under such circumstances, defense becomes irrelevant. What is relevant is either (1) offense or (2) getting out of the line of fire altogether.

Adam Gopnik:

The best argument for reading history is not that it will show us the right thing to do in one case or the other, but rather that it will show us why even doing the right thing rarely works out. The advantage of having a historical sense is not that it will lead you to some quarry of instructions, the way that Superman can regularly return to the Fortress of Solitude to get instructions from his dad, but that it will teach you that no such crystal cave exists. What history generally "teaches" is how hard it is for anyone to control it, including the people who think they're making it.