Robin Ouzman Hislop

“wanted to hear the legendary songs, but he didn’t want to kill himself and his crew. So he hatched a plan. He knew that when he heard the music, he would be unable to resist steering toward the island’s rocks. The problem wasn’t the present rational Ulysses, but instead the future, illogical Ulysses – the person he’d become when the Sirens came within earshot. So Ulysses ordered his men to lash him securely to the mast of the ship. They filled their ears with beeswax so as not to hear the Sirens, and they rowed under strict orders to ignore any of his pleas and cries and writhing. Ulysses knew that his future self would be in no position to make good decisions. So”
― David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You

“But we should recognize that, if we redesign nature to fit human wishes, we risk making it a mirror of our own pathologies. A world that has been rebuilt into a factory producing the things humans need or want will be a world without wilderness and from which many of the species with which we share the planet will disappear.”
― John N. Gray, Heresies: Against Progress And Other Illusions

“There is no power in the world that can ensure that technology is used only for benign purposes. Partly this is because we cannot agree on what such purposes are. Partly it is because even when enough people are agreed there is no power that can enforce the consensus. The institution on which we would have to rely for such enforcement – the modern state – is not up to the job.”
― John N. Gray, Heresies: Against Progress And Other Illusions

“parts of the world, governments are no longer in charge. Once a new technology is out in the world anyone can use it. At that point it becomes a weapon in human conflicts and an embodiment of human dreams. We are not masters of the tools we have invented. They affect our lives in ways we cannot control – and often cannot understand. The world today is a vast, unsupervised laboratory, in which a multitude of experiments are simultaneously under way.”
― John N. Gray, Heresies: Against Progress And Other Illusions