Alan Key

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." - Alan Kay

Victor Hugo

"I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses." - Victor Hugo (1802-1885)

John le Carre

"Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen." - John le Carre, "The Chancellor Who Agreed To Play Spy", The New York Times, May 8, 1974

Ernest Hemingway

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut." - Ernest Hemingway (American Writer)

Bill Hicks

"It's just a ride and we can change it any time we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money, a choice, right now, between fear and love." - Bill Hicks, Revelations (1993)

Expanded and in video form, after the Jump.

Horace Walpole

"Life is a comedy for those who think... and a tragedy for those who feel." - Horace Walpole

Albert Einstein

"The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life." - Albert Einstein

TS Eliot, poetry & theatre

Excerpt of TS Eliot's poem "Choruses" from The Rock, a pageant play:

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

- TS Eliot (American Poet), "Choruses"

Complete poem, after the Jump:

Max Beerbohm

"You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men." - Max Beerbohm

Norman Mailer

"There is no greater importance in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you." - Norman Mailer

Albert Einstein

"The physicists say that I am a mathematician, and the mathematicians say that I am a physicist. I am a completely isolated man and though everybody knows me, there are very few people who really know me." - Albert Einstein

Giacomo Cassanova

"By recollecting the pleasures formerly, I renew them, I enjoy them a second time, while I laugh at the remembrance of troubles now past, and which I no longer feel." - Giacomo Cassanova (Venetian Writer)

Alfred Korzybski

"There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking." - Alfred Korzybski

Edward Abbey

"No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets." - Edward Abbey

Blaise Cendrars

"Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everyting, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes." - Blaise Cendrars (Swiss/French)

Hồ Xuân Hương, poem

Excerpt of a poem:

In the dead of night, nightwatcher's drums resound
I awake and find myself lonely in the vast world
After many an inebriating farewell cup, I come to my senses
The slanting moon on the wax is shaped like a crescent

- Hồ Xuân Hương (Vietnamese Poet), untitled

Complete poem, after the Jump

Network (1976), film

"…At the bottom of all our terrified souls we know that democracy is a dying giant; a sick, sick, dying, decaying political concept riding in it's final pain. I don't mean that the United States is finished as a world power… What is finished, is the idea that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourish of every individual in it; it's the individual that's finished. It's the single, solitary human being that's finished; it's every single one of you out there that's finished. Because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals, it's a nation of two-hundred some-odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-that-white steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings, and as replaceable as piston rods." - Howard Beale, Sidney Lumet's Network (1976)

Complete quote as well as video, after the Jump.

Janet Long

"Part of being sane, is being a little bit crazy." - Janet Long

Hmmm, so conversely does that mean part of being crazy, is being a little bit sane?

Harlan Ellison

"The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity." - Harlan Ellison

Doug Larson

"If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur." - Doug Larson

Sir Richard Steele

"Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body." - Sir Richard Steele

Network (1976), film

"So, you listen to me. Listen to me: Television is not the truth!...Go to God! Go to your gurus! Go to yourselves! Because that's the only place you're ever going to find any real truth. But, man, you're never going to get any truth from us [Television Networks]…We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true!...You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing! WE are the illusion!" - Howard Beale, Sidney Lumet's Network (1976)

Complete quote as well as video, after the Jump.

Alan Dean Foster

"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." - Alan Dean Foster

Spike Milligan

"Money can't buy friends, but it can get you a better class of enemy." - Spike Milligan

Arnold Toynbee

"America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair." - Arnold Toynbee