“True personalization is now upon us. It's not just a matter of selecting relish over mustard once. The post-information age is about acquaintance over time: machines' understanding individuals with the same degree of subtlety (or more than) we can expect from other human beings, including idiosyncrasies (like always wearing a blue-striped shirt) and totally random events, good and bad, in the unfolding narrative of our lives.”

— Nicholas Negroponte, book Being Digital

Being Digital (1995)

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Nicholas Negroponte16

American computer scientist 1943

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“We believe that we live in the 'age of information,' that there has been an information 'explosion,' an information 'revolution.' While in a certain narrow sense that is the case, in many more important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An unenlightenment. An age of missing information.”

Bill McKibben (1960) American environmentalist and writer

Source: The Age of Missing Information (1992), p. 9

“Certain truths about human beings have never changed. We are tribal creatures in our very DNA; we have an instinctive preference for our own over others, for “in-groups” over “out-groups”; for hunter-gatherers, recognizing strangers as threats was a matter of life and death. We also invent myths and stories to give meaning to our common lives. Among those myths is the nation — stretching from the past into the future, providing meaning to our common lives in a way nothing else can. Strip those narratives away, or transform them too quickly, and humans will become disoriented. Most of us respond to radical changes in our lives, especially changes we haven’t chosen, with more fear than hope. We can numb the pain with legal cannabis or opioids, but it is pain nonetheless.
If we ignore these deeper facts about ourselves, we run the risk of fatal errors. It’s vital to remember that multicultural, multiracial, post-national societies are extremely new for the human species, and keeping them viable and stable is a massive challenge.”

Andrew Sullivan (1963) Journalist, writer, blogger

The Reactionary Temptation (2017)

“Because our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorization, and make it tangible. Thanks to our detections of false patterns, along with real ones, what is random will appear less random and more certain—our overactive brains are more likely to impose the wrong, simplistic, narrative than no narrative at all.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 105

“Being in humaneness is good. If we select other goodness and thus are far apart from humaneness, how can we be the wise?”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

The opening phrase of this chapter after which the chapter is named in Chinese.
Source: The Analects, Chapter IV

“For myself, I am totally convinced that these are the true happenings of our time; that, even as I write, these events are unfolding. As they further unfold, I believe they will prove to your fullest satisfaction that this is the true condition of our present time in history.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

The Great Approach (2001) p. 1

“Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used to anything. Over time, even the unthinkable gradually wears a little niche for itself in your mind and becomes just something that happened.”

Tana French In the Woods

Source: In the Woods

“Democracy will win -- because a government’s legitimacy can only come from citizens; because in this age of information and empowerment, people want more control over their lives, not less; and because, more than any other form of government ever devised, only democracy, rooted in the sanctity of the individual, can deliver real progress.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2014, Remarks to the People of Estonia (September 2014)

“I am saying to modern scientists and theologians: don't imagine that our latest ideas about the Big Bang or the human genome have solved the mysteries of the universe or the mysteries of life. Here are Bacon's words again: "The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding".”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

Progress In Religion (2000)
Context: I am saying to modern scientists and theologians: don't imagine that our latest ideas about the Big Bang or the human genome have solved the mysteries of the universe or the mysteries of life. Here are Bacon's words again: "The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding". In the last four hundred years, science has fulfilled many of Bacon's dreams, but it still does not come close to capturing the full subtlety of nature.

“True there has been more talk of peace since 1945 than, I should think, at any other time in history. At least we hear more and read more about it because man's words, for good or ill, can now so easily reach the millions.
Very often the words are good and even inspiring, the embodiment of our hopes and our prayers for peace. But while we all pray for peace, we do not always, as free citizens, support the policies that make for peace or reject those which do not. We want our own kind of peace, brought about in our own way.
The choice, however, is as clear now for nations as it was once for the individual: peace or extinction. The life of states cannot, any more than the life of individuals, be conditioned by the force and the will of a unit, however powerful, but by the consensus of a group, which must one day include all states. Today the predatory state, or the predatory group of states, with power of total destruction, is no more to be tolerated than the predatory individual.”

Lester B. Pearson (1897–1972) 14th Prime Minister of Canada

The Four Faces of Peace (1957)

“We must understand that what Pascal said is true of every human being in the whole of space-time, ourselves included—“The last act is tragic, however pleasant all the comedy of the other acts. A little earth on our heads, and all is done with forever.”—understand it in our bones, so that we can live with it calmly if not serenely.”

Poul Anderson (1926–2001) American science fiction and fantasy writer

The Sorrow of Odin the Goth (p. 343)
Time Patrol

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