Michael > Michael's Quotes

“Owning something is becoming less important than the right to access it.”
― Matt Mason, The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism

“First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.”
― Nicholas Klein

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
― Benjamin Franklin, Memoirs of the life & writings of Benjamin Franklin

“We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“For a bunch of hairless apes, we've actually managed to invent some pretty incredible things.”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

“It doesn’t matter how big your neocortex is or how abstractly you can reason: unless you can trust others, your species will forever remain stuck in the Stone Age.”
― Bruce Schneier, Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive

“Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.”
― Cory Doctorow, Little Brother

“When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.”
― Cory Doctorow

“In the inevitable showdown between speed and quality, quality must prevail.”
― Eric Schmidt

“It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have a huge variety of needs and dangers.”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

“I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide.”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

“Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“Anything sufficiently weird must be fishy.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is.”
― Liu Cixin, Death's End

“Life with a cheat code isn't life. Our existence isn't something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That's what it is to be human - the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“As a computer scientist, I make a living helping to advance the cutting edge of the digital world. Like many in my field, I'm enthralled by the possibilities of our techno-future. But I'm also convinced that we cannot unlock this potential until we put in the effort required to take control of our own digital lives — to confidently decide for ourselves what tools we want to use, for what reason, and under what conditions.”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

“Wir wollen Computer und Menschen in eine Übereinstimmung bringen - eine wirklich schwere Aufgabe, das Hirn ist fürchterlich komplex. Aber es gibt eine zweite Möglichkeit: Nicht den Computer menschförmig machen, sondern die Gesellschaft computerförmig.”
― Raphaela Edelbauer, DAVE