“Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose. That language was Joss, which predated Basic and was beautiful. But Basic happened to be on a GE timesharing system that was done by Dartmouth, and when GE decided to franchise that, it started spreading Basic around just because it was there, not because it had any intrinsic merits whatsoever.”

Source: Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (1980), Chapter 1, Computers and Computer Cultures

Source: Every Day

Isha Insights Magazine, Spring Edition 2009
Sourced from newspapers and magazines
Context: The basic purpose of life and the basic purpose of education is to enhance one’s boundaries of perception. I don’t want the children to just survive after ten years of schooling here. They must blossom and flower wherever they go. -Sadhguru (on Isha Vidhya rural education project)

Karel Appel defines his painting', interview 1968

Public Talks, The State of the Onion 11

Source: The Real Frank Zappa Book (1989), p. 239; this may be derived from a similar observation by Harlan Ellison which is sometimes misattributed to Zappa: "The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity."

Context: I just undertook over the last nine months a project with the International Monetary Fund to look at the capacity of the poorest countries to keep their children in school, make sure there are vaccines, make sure that there is basic healthcare and so forth. And the result... that a poor country cannot do that on their own resources, but what it would take from the rich countries is tiny as a fraction of our resources... If we do not help... Probably more than five million kids will die [this year] because they don’t have access to basic healthcare that could be handled by... $40 per person in the rich world, for example. Even a few billionaires could take it on their own philanthropy, basically, and do this, but we’re not doing it...

The Humanist interview (2012)
Context: This war against women started a long time ago with old Democrats who took over the Republican Party, which was, before that, the very first to support the Equal Rights Amendment. Even when the National Women’s Political Caucus started, there was a whole Republican feminist entity. But beginning with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, right-wing Democrats like Jesse Helms began to leave the Democratic Party and gradually take over the GOP.
So I always feel I have to apologize to my friends who are Republicans because they’ve basically lost their party. Ronald Reagan couldn’t get nominated today because he was supportive of immigrant rights. Barry Goldwater was pro-choice. George H. W. Bush supported Planned Parenthood. No previous Republicans except for George W. Bush would be acceptable to the people who now run the GOP. They are not Republicans. They are the American version of the Taliban. … They’ve taken over one of our two great parties. This causes people to wrongly think that the country is equally divided but if we look at the public opinion polls, it isn’t. So, I can’t think of anything more crucial than real Republicans taking back the GOP.

Charles West Churchman, Russell Lincoln Ackoff (1950) Methods of inquiry: an introduction to philosophy and scientific method. p. 185; Partly cited in: Britton, G. A., & McCallion, H. (1994). An overview of the Singer/Churchman/Ackoff school of thought. Systems Practice, Vol 7 (5), 487-521.
1950s
Context: … All other languages can be translated into the thing-language, but the thing-language cannot be translated into any other language. Its terms can only be reduced to what are called "ostensive" definitions. These consist merely of pointing or otherwise evoking a direct experience. Hence, the thing-language is absolutely basic. Out of this basic language, we build up the other languages of the sciences, beginning with the language of physics, and proceeding to biology, psychology, and the social sciences.