“The material particle or the conscious mind—has been discovered not to be sufficiently unchanging to be treated as a thing in isolation... but more often to be the opposite: a changing system in a changing environment.”

Von Bertalanffy (1950) &quot; The Theory of Open Systems in Physics and Biology http://vhpark.hyperbody.nl/images/a/aa/Bertalanffy-The_Theory_of_Open_Systems_in_Physics_and_Biology.pdf&quot; In: Science, January 13, 1950, Vol. 111. p. 23 <br class="br">1950s

Videodrome commentary track
Context: Technology isn’t really effective, it doesn’t really expose its true meaning, I feel, until it has been incorporated into the human body. And most of it does, in some way or another. Electronics. People wear glasses. They wear hearing aids that are really little computers. They wear pacemakers. They have their intestines modified. It’s really quite incredible what we’ve been able to do to the human body and really take it some place that evolution on its own could not take it. Technology has really taken over evolution. We’ve seized control of evolution ourselves without really quite being conscious of it. It’s no longer the environment that affects change in the human body, it’s our minds, it’s our concepts, our technology that are doing that.

Source: QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985), p. 15

"Siroes", Act I, scene viii
Translations, Dramas and Other Poems of Metastasio (1800)

Michael Franti Interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s75CPceiCw&amp;feature=related

Nicomachus of Gerasa: Introduction to Arithmetic (1926)
Context: Bodily, material things are... continuously involved in continuous flow and change—in imitation of the nature and peculiar quality of that eternal matter and substance which has been from the beginning... The bodiless things, however, of which we conceive in connection with or together with matter, such as qualities, quantities, configurations, largeness, smallness, equality, relations, actualities, dispositions, places, times, all those things... whereby the qualities in each body are comprehended—all these are of themselves immovable and unchangeable, but accidentally they share in and partake of the affections of the body to which they belong. Now it is with such things that 'wisdom' is particularly concerned, but accidentally also with... bodies.<!--p.181

A rant about stupidity... and the coming civil war... (2009)
Context: I've long felt that the best minds of the right had useful things to contribute to a national conversation — even if their overall habit of resistance to change proved wrongheaded, more often than right. At least, some of them had the beneficial knack of targeting and criticizing the worst liberal mistakes, and often forcing needful re-drafting.
That is, some did, way back in when decent republicans and democrats shared one aim — to negotiate better solutions for the republic.
Alas, today's Republican Establishment seems not only incapable but uninterested in negotiation or deliberation. It isn't just the dogmatism, or lockstep partisanship, or Koolaid fantasies spun-up by the Murdoch-Limbaugh hate machine. Heck, even though "culture war" is verifiably the worst direct treason against the United States of America since Fort Sumter, that isn't what boggles most.
It's the stupidity. The vast and nearly uniform dumbitudinousness of ignoring what has happened to conservatism, a transformation of nearly all of the salient traits of Barry Goldwater from:

Saturday Review of Literature, Volume 26 (1943), p. 4.
Attributed

Chè nel mondo mutabile e leggiero,
Costanza è spesso il variar pensiero.
Canto V, stanza 3 (tr. Wickert)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)