“If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, it would have been permitted.”

“The Tower of Babel fell apart not because of technology but because of languages.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

“Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

“The Holocaust would have been unimaginable without the Nazi Party; the Nazi Party would have been unimaginable without Hitler; and Hitler’s rise to power would have been unimaginable without the unique circumstances that brought the Weimar Republic to ruin. To hear Goldhagen tell it, mass murder was all set to go: a century-long build-up of eliminationist anti-Semitism simply had to express itself. But the moment when a historian says that something had to happen is the moment when he stops writing history and starts predicting the past.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

“What I accomplished definitely wasn't achieved by myself. Without others, none of this would have been possible.”

Emmitt Smith (1969) American football player and sports broadcaster

“Neither Stalinism nor Fascist totalitarianism would have been possible without the transmogrified Marxism, that infilled both.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

“Had the modern professors of eugenics had power in France in 1694, they probably would not have permitted such a child to have been born. Their scientific knowledge would have shown conclusively that no person of value could have come from the union of his father and mother. In those days, nature had not been instructed by the professors of eugenics and so Voltaire was born.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

“The basic totalitarian claim: What I know is everything that needs to be known, and if only it were only manifest in the world, the world would become a utopia. I also think that that's the core idea behind the Tower of Babel. It's the idea that we can build a structure that makes the transcendent unnecessary.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

“One of the influences in his design for the tower was the Tower of Babel the sense of building the impossible” that “has something mythic about it. The spaces inside the structure, in between the twisting steel, are “cathedral like”, according to Balmond, while according to Kapoor, the intention is that visitors will engage with the piece as they wind “up and up and in on oneself” on the spiral walkway.”

Anish Kapoor (1954) British contemporary artist of Indian birth

“Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that.”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood