Brian Eno via Cory Doctorow via Tim Harford:

Be the first to not do what nobody has ever thought of not doing before.

Dhirubhai Ambani:

If you don't build your dream, someone else will hire you to help them build theirs.

Linda Stone:

We have narrowed ourselves in service to the gods of productivity, a type of productivity that is about output and not about results.

Stijn Debrouwere:

We don't care that our dashboards don't actually help us. There's nothing like a dashboard full of data and graphs and trend lines to make us feel like grown ups. Like people who know what they're doing. So even though we're not getting any real use out of it, it's addictive and we can't stop doing it.

Schumpeter at The Economist:

What is clear is that office workers are on a treadmill of pointless activity. An entire management industry exists to spin the treadmill ever faster.

Leon Wieseltier:

The machines to which we have become enslaved, all of them quite astonishing, represent the greatest assault on human attention ever devised: they are engines of mental and spiritual dispersal, which make us wider only by making us less deep.

The devices that we carry like addicts in our hands are disfiguring our mental lives ... They generate a hitherto unimaginable number of numbers, numbers about everything under the sun, and so they are transforming us into a culture of data, into a cult of data, in which no human activity and no human expression is immune to quantification, in which happiness is a fit subject for economists, in which the ordeals of the human heart are inappropriately translated into mathematical expressions, leaving us with new illusions of clarity and new illusions of control.

Simon Critchley on the work of John Gray:

When the earth is done with humans, it will recover and the blip of human civilization will be forgotten forever. Global warming is simply one of the periodic fevers that the earth has suffered during its long, nonhuman history. It will recover and carry on. But we cannot and will not.

Carl Sagan:

Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

Franz Kafka:

It's entirely conceivable that life's splendor surrounds us all, and always in it's complete fullness, accessible but veiled, beneath the surface, invisible, far away. But there it lies - not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If we call it by the right word, by the right name, then it comes. This is the essence of magic, which doesn't create but calls.