Michael

“Fiction is empathy technology.”
― Steven Pinker

“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“What you should do," she told Fat during one of his darker hours, "is get into studying the characteristics of the T-34." Fat asked what that was. It turned out that Sherri had read a book on Russion armor during World War Two. The T-34 tank had been the Soviet Union's salvation and thereby the salvation of all the Allied Powers- and, by extension, Horselover Fat's, since without the T-34 he would be speaking - not english or Latin or the koine - but German.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“Currently spirituality is at an ebb in the more advanced technological societies. This in part because memes that validate spiritual order tend to lose their credibility with time, and need to be recast in new forms again and again. At present we are living in an era when many of the basic tenets of Christianity, which has supported Western spiritual values for almost two thousand years, have come into conflict with the conclusions of science and philosophy. While religions have lost much of their power, science and technology have not been able to generate convincing value systems to replace them.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi