The Coming Technological Singularity (1993)
“I don't care what denomination you belong to, as long as you're embarrassed by it.”
As quoted by Baruch Sienna in a 2006 review http://www.kolel.org/pages/blogger/2009/01/nothing-sacred-douglas-rushkoff-crown.html of Nothing Sacred : The Truth about Judaism (2003) by Douglas Rushkoff, and in "Across The Great Divide" by Jonathan Mark in The Jewish Week (3 September 2008) http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c36_a13303/News/New_York.html.
“Happy is what you realize you are a fraction of a second before it's too late.”
“Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?”
Like a Great Family.
Other
Adams quotes — and takes the title of this chapter — from Karl Pearson's classic work The Grammar of Science: "In the chaos behind sensations, in the 'beyond' of sense-impressions, we cannot infer necessity, order or routine, for these are concepts formed by the mind of man on this side of sense-impressions." "Briefly chaos is all that science can logically assert of the supersensuous."
The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
“People are the common denominator of progress.”
Economic Development (1964), ch. 2
Context: People are the common denominator of progress. So, paucis verbis, no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated. It would be wrong to dismiss the importance of roads, railroads, power plants, mills, and the other familiar furniture of economic development. At some stages of development — the stage that India and Pakistan have reached, for example — they are central to the strategy of development. But we are coming to realize, I think, that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first.
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 565.
