Jason

“You cannot change the world with ideas. People with few ideas are less likely to make mistakes; they follow what everyone else does and are no trouble to anyone; they're successful, make money, find good jobs, enter politics, receive honours; they become famous writers, academics, journalists. Can anyone who is so good at looking after their own interests really be stupid? I'm the stupid one, the one who wanted to go tilting at windmills.”
― Umberto Eco , The Prague Cemetery

“The tragedy of man is that he has developed an intelligence eager to uncover mysteries, but not strong enough to penetrate them.”
― Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History: A Chronicle of Pestilence and Plagues

“Racism may indeed carry out the doom of the Western world and, for that matter, of the whole of human civilization. When Russians have become Slavs, when Frenchmen have assumed the role of commanders of a force noire, when Englishmen have turned into “white men,” as already for a disastrous spell all Germans became Aryans, then this change will itself signify the end of Western man. For no matter what learned scientists may say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“My father says everything's going to be machines when we grow up. He says the only jobs open will be in junkyards for busted machines. The only thing a machine can't do is play jokes. That's all they'll use people for, is jokes.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner