“The question was what's happening to the individual in America? Is the individual going the way of the environment, being destroyed? In other words, were we becoming the creatures of the machine?
That was the way people thought in the '60s. Now maybe that's passé today but that's the kind of thing people thought about. Are we turning into machines? They wanted to rebel against that.
Their rebellion cannot be called a success by any means, far from it. Those of us who tried are very grateful that we tried to the degree we did. Anybody who achieved any success against the machine feels good about it.”

The Greening of America turns 40 (2010)

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Charles A. Reich55

American lawyer 1928–2019

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“The way we work, the way we talk, the way we watch television or walk down the street, even the way we fuck, or maybe that especially—each of those is part of the problem of identity. We can’t do any of those things authentically until we find out who we really are and be that person, inside and out, instead of the person other people want us to be. Usually those other people, if they want us to be something we aren’t, are using us as a laboratory for working out their own identity problems.”

Thomas M. Disch (1940–2008) Novelist, short story writer, poet

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Julian Barnes book The Sense of an Ending

Source: The Sense of an Ending

“The word ‘Liberal’ has now become so variously interpreted that few people know what it means. Those who use it most precisely today are the Fascists and the Communists. They know what Liberalism is, and they are against it. For these people are collectivists.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

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Source: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
p. 58

“During the last few years it has become apparent that the concept of "machine" must be very greatly extended if it is to include the most modern developments. Especially is this true if we are studying the brain and attempting to identify the type of mechanism that is responsible for the brain’s outstanding powers of thought and action. It has become apparent that when we used to doubt whether the brain could be a machine, our doubts were due chieﬂy to the fact that by ‘‘machine’’ we understood some mechanism of very simple type. Familiar with the bicycle and the typewriter, we were in great danger of taking them as the type of all machines. The last decade, however, has corrected this error. It has taught us how restricted our outlook used to be; for it developed mechanisms that far transcended the utmost that had been thought possible, and taught us that ‘‘mechanism’’ was still far from exhausted in its possibilities. Today we know only that the possibilities extend beyond our farthest vision.”

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W. Ross Ashby (1951), "Statistical Machinery". In: Thales Vol 7. p.1 as cited in: Peter M. Asaro (2008) " From Mechanisms of Adaptation to Intelligence Ampliﬁers: The Philosophy of W. Ross Ashby http://cybersophe.org/writing/Asaro%20Ashby.pdf"

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Orrin Hatch (1934) United States Senator from Utah

Destroy 'pirate' PCs, says politician, BBC News, 2003-06-18, 2006-08-22 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/2999780.stm,

“Now what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.”

Constantine P. Cavafy Waiting for the Barbarians

Source: Waiting for the Barbarians (1904), l. 26
Context: Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
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And some of our men who have just returned from the border say
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Those people were a kind of solution.

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David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

Closing lines
Life in Cold Blood (2008)

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Charles A. Reich55

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