Nicholas Carr:

You don't just flip a switch to make a technology invisible.

It disappears only after a slow process of cultural and personal acclimation.

John Gray, on the work of Yuval Noah Harari:

For most human beings, the shift to farming was not a choice but a trap. While hunter-gathering was no lost Eden, peasant life, with less leisure and a greater risk of starvation and disease, was worse. So why did the societies which embraced farming expand and drive hunter-gatherers to the margins of the world? Because farming provided more food per unit of territory, and thereby gave such societies a numerical advantage. "This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions."

Philip Hoare:

Some 40 per cent of the earth's ice-free land mass is now intensively farmed to produce food. Only 12 per cent of its rivers run freely to the seas. Nearly one billion people go hungry every day; 1.5 billion are overweight or obese. Each year, more than 300,000 sea birds die on fishing lines and 100 million sharks are killed. Every square kilometre of sea contains 18,500 pieces of floating plastic.

Oliver Morton:

Today's culture encourages an affection for variation and a disdain for conformity. When we look at a meadow of hundreds of types of sedge and grass and flower, we feel a greater sense of nature's abundance than a wheat field provokes, even if the wheat feeds more people. The altar at which nature is worshipped is that of biodiversity, not gross primary productivity.

Tasneem Zehra Husain:

Chances are, if you know about the principle of least action, you know enough science to realize that electrons and photons and rubber balls are not active decision makers, but that doesn't keep you from envying their ability to always follow the optimal route from one point to another. In fact, it almost makes the whole thing worse.

Kinetic energy is puzzling enough, but the invisible potentials in which we find ourselves are often completely unknown, so we don't have an expression for the action. We don't know what it is we need to minimize.

Bill Gross:

There are things a model can't accommodate.

James Kwak:

Sometimes something takes over your life, and you feel trapped inside it.

Sometimes the only thing to do is walk away.

Alan Kay:

We can't learn to see until we realize we are blind.