“One shouldn't worry about taking pictures or making tape recordings. Those are superfluities of sedate lives. One should worry about the spirit, which is always receding.”

Source: Blood Promise

[The Guardian, 2008-09-04, A fetishistic approach to security is a perverse way to keep us safe, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/04/terrorism.terrorismandtravel, Schneier, Bruce, 2012-08-01]
Human perception of reality, risk and terrorism

As quoted in Stevie Wonder (1978) by Constanze Elsner, and Jet Vol. 53, No. 22 (16 February 1978), p. 60
1970s
Context: Sometimes I think I would love to see … just to see the beauty of flowers and trees and birds and the earth and grass. … Being as I've never seen, I don't know what it's like to see. So in a sense I'm complete. Maybe I'd be incomplete if I did see. Maybe I'd see some things that I didn't want to see... the beauty of the earth compared to the destruction of man. You see, it's one thing when you are blind from birth, and you don't know what it's like to see, anyway, so it is just like seeing. The sensation of seeing is not one that I have and not one that I worry about.

Source: Ghost Town

Three Uses of the Knife (1996)

John Perry Barlow 2.0 (2004)
Context: It’s a perfect set of circumstances to give us the time Yeats foretold, with the best having lost all conviction and the worst full of passionate intensity. I’m an optimist. In order to be libertarian, you have to be an optimist. You have to have a benign view of human nature, to believe that human beings left to their own devices are basically good. But I’m not so sure about human institutions, and I think the real point of argument here is whether or not large corporations are human institutions or some other entity we need to be thinking about curtailing. Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government.

Source: Have a Little Faith: a True Story