“The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.”

"Printing and Paper Making" in The Common School Journal Vol. V, No. 3 (1 February 1843)
Context: Every school boy and school girl who has arrived at the age of reflection ought to know something about the history of the art of printing, papermaking, and so forth. … All children will work better if pleased with their tools; and there are no tools more ingeniously wrought, or more potent than those which belong to the art of the printer. Dynasties and governments used to be attacked and defended by arms; now the attack and the defence are mainly carried on by types. To sustain any scheme of state policy, to uphold one administration or to demolish another, types, not soldiers, are brought into line. Hostile parties, and sometimes hostile nations, instead of fitting out martial or naval expeditions, establish printing presses, and discharge pamphlets or octavoes at each other, instead of cannon balls. The poniard and the stiletto were once the resource of a murderous spirit; now the vengeance, which formerly would assassinate in the dark, libels character, in the light of day, through the medium of the press.
But through this instrumentality good can be wrought as well as evil. Knowledge can be acquired, diffused, perpetuated. An invisible, inaudible, intangible thought in the silent chambers of the mind, breaks away from its confinement, becomes imbodied in a sign, is multiplied by myriads, traverses the earth, and goes resounding down to the latest posterity.

Hugo Chávez at a press conference in New Delhi, after signing a cooperative agreement with India's hydrocarbon sector, March 2005.
2005

Source: Thought Without a Body? (1994), p. 291

Daily Telegram #1611, Mr. Rogers Thinks Its Time That A Smart Man Came Along (21 September 1931)
Daily telegrams

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), The Simplest Thing that Could Possibly Work
Context: The complexity that we despise is the complexity that leads to difficulty. It isn't the complexity that raises problems. There is a lot of complexity in the world. The world is complex. That complexity is beautiful. I love trying to understand how things work. But that's because there's something to be learned from mastering that complexity.

Source: The Critic as Artist

Conversation: Elon Musk on Wired Science (2007)

The Age of Uncertainty (1977), BBC Television series (also published in book form, non verbatim version)

Introduction to the 2002 Edition, p. xi.
The Design of Everyday Things (1988, 2002)