Sunday, January 25, 2026

Collection of quotes from quotes by person posts: 2021-2024

This post is a collection of quotes from quotes by person posts from 2021 to 2024. There are 125 quotes listed below alphabetically by last name.

Neem Karoli Baba:
"It's better to see God in everything than to try to figure it out." (AZQuotes.com)

Walter Bagehot:
"No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation." (AZQuotes.com)

Jean Baudrillard:
"The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is already reproduced, the hyper-real." (Simulations, 1983)

Ludwig van Beethoven:
"In the world of art, as in the whole of creation, freedom and progress are the main objectives." (AZQutoes.com)

Tim Berners-Lee:
"We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities. The aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards." (Information Management: A Proposal, 1989)

Tim Berners-Lee:
"Interestingly, there was no strict rule at CERN, no hierarchical management which said everyone had to use the same sort of computer. So each team used whatever hardware and software systems they thought were best for them to use to build their part of this huge big puzzle." (The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: The World Wide Web - A Mid-Course Correction, BBC One, 2019)

Madame Blavatsky:
"There is the karma of merit and the karma of demerit. Karma neither punishes or rewards, it is simply the one universal law which guides unerringly, and so to say, blindly all other laws productive of certain effects along the grooves of their respective causations." (The Theosophical Glossary, 1892)

Allan Bloom:
"Only the search back to the origins of one's ideas in order to see the real arguments for them, before people became so certain of them that they ceased thinking about them all, can liberate us." (Giants and Dwarfs, 1990)

David Bohnett:
"I was a passionate advocate of the validity of user-generated content, that the internet was all about giving people the opportunity to contribute and participate and feel like they are apart of the medium, that it was not a top-down programmed model..." (Interview with Internet History Podcast, 2015)

Daniel Boorstein:
"While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous." (Gresham's Law: Knowledge or Information? 1979)

danah boyd:
"And that's where we have this challenge, which is that our actual social graph of the country is so fragmented that we also label things as misinformation whenever it comes from people... who are not part of our immediate 2 degree out network. And that's where there's another question to the fix: Can we reknit that graph of this country?" (Disinfo Discussions: The Fundamentals with danah boyd, Aspen Institute, 2021)

Ray Bradbury:
"Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible." (The Paris Review Interview, 2010)

Dmitri Breteton:
"When Google rose and all the web directories fell, we lost the metaphor of the library. We lost the ability to explore blogs on various subjects with no real goal." (To Organize The World's Information, 2021)

Georges Braque:
"It is the limitation of means that determine style, gives rise to new forms and makes creativity possible." (Les Problème de la Peinture, interview with Gaston Diehl, 1945)

Percy Williams Bridgman:
"...the scientist would maintain that knowledge of itself is wholly good, and that there should be and are methods of dealing with misuses of knowledge by the ruffian or the bully other than by suppressing the knowledge." (AZQuotes.com)

Martin Buber:
"The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda." (Quoted in Encounter with Martin Buber, 1972)

Vannevar Bush:
"There is a new profession of trail blazers, who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected." (As We May Think, 1945)

Robert Cailliau:
"There was a a time when the community that was on the Net was homogenous and civilized. Now it's not. We're in the middle of chaos. It may calm down. But the alternative is that there's a total meltdown of the system and that it becomes unusable. That would be a catastrophe." (AZQuotes.com)

Joseph Campbell:
"Thinking in mythological terms helps to put you in accord with the inevitables of this vale of tears. You learn to recognize the positive values in what appear to be the negative moments and aspects of your life." (The Power of Myth, 1988)

Steve Case:
"When I first got started in the late 70's, early 80's, and first was thinking about the interactive world, I believed so fervently that it was the next big thing, I thought it would happen quickly." (AZQuotes.com)

Arthur C. Clarke:
 "If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run - and often in the short one - the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative." (The Exploration of Space, 1951)

Alan Cooper:
"No matter how beautiful, no matter how cool your interface, it would be better if there were less of it." (AZQuotes.com)

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:
"Flow is being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz." (AZQuotes.com)

Aleister Crowley:
"Adaptation to one's environment makes for a sort of survival; but after all, the supreme victory is only won by those who prove themselves of so much hardier stuff than the rest that no power on earth is able to destroy them. The people who have really made history are martyrs." (The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, 1929)

Ward Cunningham:
"A wiki is always in the process of being organized. But for every hour spent organizing, two more hours are spent adding new material. So the status quo for a wiki is always partially organized." (A Conversation with Ward Cunningham, JAOO Conference 2003)

John Dalberg-Acton:
"The true democratic principle, that none shall have power over the people is taken to mean that none shall be able to restrain or to elude its power." (Review of Democracy in Europe, 1878)

Ram Dass:
"Early in the journey you wonder how long the journey will take and whether you will make it in this lifetime. Later you will see that where you are going is here and you will arrive now... so stop asking." (Be Here Now, 1971)

Matt DeCarlo:
"One of the ideas that I really latch onto a lot is the idea of a non-disposable assignment or renewable assignment... Where I see scholarship going is a more collaborative approach where students are building durable, public artifacts of their learning." (Interview with RU Tartan, 2019)

Denis Diderot:
"Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory." (Quoted in Dictionary of Thoughts by Tyron Edwards)

Stephen Downes:
"We have to look at learning as something that is not done for us but is something that we do... We have to look at education as a reclamation project of owning our own learning again." (Lecture with Chang School, 2015)

Umberto Eco:
"After all, the cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopaedia." (Language and Lunacy, 1998)

Albert Einstein:
"...by using an incomplete description, (in the main) only statistical statements can be obtained out of such description. If it should be possible to move forward to a complete description, it is likely that the laws would represent relations among all the conceptual elements of this description which, per se, have nothing to do with statistics." (Einstein's Reply to Criticisms, 1949)

Ralph Waldo Emerson:
"Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it." (Quotation and Originality, 1859)

Paul Erdős:
"Why are numbers beautiful? It's like asking why Beethoven's Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don't see why, someone can't tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is." (AZQuotes.com)

Jonathan Flatley:
"...I think there's a case to be made that Warhol tried to have a collector's relationship to nearly every object of perception that he came into contact with as a way to orient himself on a daily basis toward similarity." (Warhol: Virtual Lecture with Jonathan Flatley, Memorial Art Gallery, 2022)

Buckminster Fuller:
"Out of my general world-pattern-trend studies, there now comes strong evidence that nothing is going to be quite so surprising and abrupt in the future history of man as the forward evolution in the educational process." (AZQuotes.com)

David Fuller:
"I think we have to find a new way of sensemaking in this, particularly in this liminal space. What we need is some kind of rules of engagement, or some kind of, I don't know, decentralized method of, like a code of conduct or like a set of principles or something that more people can sign up to." (Conspiracy, Sensemaking & Truth. An Inquiry, Rebel Wisdom, 2020)

Sue Gardner:
"What would it look like if we could engage more? If... citizens could talk more directly to each other so much more easily. We don't think about those things anymore... We can't get there until we stop the sewage, but it would be lovely, imagine if we could realize some of that original promise. It would be great." (Interview with Max Bell School of Public Policy, 2021)

Rebecca Giblin:
"I would love to see new alliances. I would like to see creative workers really see themselves more as workers and unite with other workers in the shared struggle that we have against concentrated corporate power." (Rebecca Giblin - Reversion Rights, Out-Of-Print Books and How to Fix Copyright, Walled Culture, 2022)

Gregg Gillis:
"I know I'm sampling. I'm blatant. I'm as obvious as I can be. But at the same time you can really make new music out of samples..." (Interview with Moe Trains Eats)

Kurt Gödel:
"The development of mathematics toward greater precision has led, as is well known, to the formalization of large tracts of it, so that one can prove any theorem using nothing but a few mechanical rules... One might therefore conjecture that theses axioms and rules of inference are sufficient to decide any mathematical question that can at all be formally expressed in these systems. It will be shown below that this is not the case, that on the contrary there are in the two systems mentioned relatively simple problems in the theory of integers that cannot be decided on the basis of the axioms." (AZquotes.com)

Vincent van Gogh:
"Love always brings difficulties, that is true, but the good side of it is that it gives energy." (Letter to Theo van Gogh, Mar. 1884)

Walter Gropius:
Our guiding principle was that design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life, necessary for everyone in a civilized society." (AZQuotes.com)

Alexander Grothendieck:
"Discovery is the privilege of the child: the child who has no fear of being once again wrong, of looking like an idiot, of not being serious, of not doing things like everyone else." (AZQuotes.com)

George Gurdjieff:
"The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness." (Quoted in In Search of the Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky)

J. B. S. Haldane:
"Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose... I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy." (Possible Worlds, 1927)

Manly P. Hall:
"There are many levels of life which we cannot see and know, yet which certainly exist. There is a larger world, vast enough to include immortality... Our spiritual natures belong to this larger world." (AZQuotes.com)

Tristian Harris:
"What would the Twitter look like that's making humanity a multi-planetary species? ...And you just think to yourself, gosh, how did they get to the 23rd century? ...What developmental trajectory? What inventions? What ways did they have to organize themselves socially? What social technologies?" (The Bigger Picture on Elon Musk and Twitter, Your Undivided Attention, Center for Human Technology, 2022)

Václav Havel:
"We introduced a new model of behavior: don't get involved in diffuse general ideological polemics with the center, to whom numerous concrete causes are always being sacrificed... In other words, don't get mixed up in backroom wheeling and dealing, but play an open game." (Disturbing the Peace, 1986)

Franziska Heine:
"I think that in this positive outlook and vision, I believe we actually, our movement, can in a way become an example for how to tackle challenging problems collectively... I believe we can be successful with that and we will create a world in which creating and sharing knowledge is something that really everyone can do and that serves in turn, everyone." (WIKIMOVE #12 - Wikimedia Deutschland for the Movement, 2023)

Abbie Hoffman:
"The key to organizing an alternative society is to organize people around what they can do and more importantly, what they want to do." (Revolution for the Hell of It (1968)

Christiaan Huygens:
"I believe that we do not know anything for certain, but everything probably. " (Letter to Pierre Perrault, 1673)

Ivan Illich:
"The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing and caring." (Deschooling Society, 1971)

Jony Ive:
"So much of what we try to do is get to a point where the solution seems inevitable: you know, you think, 'Of course its that way, why would it be any other way?' It looks so obvious, but that sense of inevitability in the solution is really hard to achieve." (Interview with Icon Magazine, 2003)

Henry Jenkins:
"It actually goes back to the 1920's, this idea that a fan community can be a visible participant in what the story's about..." (Lecture with India Culture Lab, 2015)

Samuel Johnson:
"Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language." (A dictionary of the English Language, 1755)

Jamie Joyce:
"What The Society Library's goals are is to figure out, okay, if we're all coming from different backgrounds, we've interacted with different ideas, we have different values and assumptions, and we have different sets of knowledge that we're operating on, how do we create media artifacts and knowledge artifacts and societal institutions to enable the possibility to see from different points of view?" (Making Great Choices Based of the Most Information, Intelligent Conversations, 2022)

Brewster Kahle:
"We're doing, I think, a pretty good job of collecting but how about reusing? And how do we catalog these things? Make these more available to our students? How do we do data mining more effectively? I don't think we really know how to do that yet." (Interview with Canadian Association of Research Libraries, 2022)

Nikos Kazantzakis:
"Our profound human duty is not to interpret or to cast light on the rhythm of God's arch, but to adjust, as much as we can, the rhythm of our small and fleeting life to his." (The Saviors of God, 1923)

Helen Keller:
"To know the history of philosophy is to know that the highest thinkers of the ages, the seers of the tribes and the nations, have been optimists." (Optimism, 1903)

Kevin Kelly:
"As more of the economy migrates to intangibles, more of the economy will require standards." (New Rules for the New Economy, 1999)

Martin Luther King Jr.:
"The strong man holds in a living blend strongly marked opposites... The philosopher Hegel said that truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in the emergent synthesis which reconciles the two." (Strength to Love, 1963)

Stephen Koch:
"I think his greatest gift was immediacy: making you see in an unmediated way, just right there in front of you with a kind of absolute frontal clarity. I think that he had that. He had feeling for it and a grasp of it that was unique." (Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film, PBS American Masters)

Barbara Kruger:
"Direct address has been a consistent tactic in my work, regardless of the medium that I'm working in." (AZQuotes.com)

Annie Leibovitz:
"You don't have to sort of enhance reality. There is nothing stranger than truth." (AZQuotes.com)

Lawrence Lessig:
"If the internet teaches us anything, it is that great value comes from leaving core resources in a commons, where they're free for people to build upon as they see fit." (May the Source Be With You, 2001)

El Lissitzky:
"At present we are living through an unusual period in time a new cosmic creation has become reality in the world, a creativity within ourselves which pervades our consciousness... in this way the artist became the foundation on which progress in the reconstruction of life..." ('Suprematism' in World Reconstruction, 1920)

Wayne Mackintosh:
"OER (Open Educational Resources) are defined by UNESCO as learning, teaching, and research materials in any format and medium that: reside in the public domain or released under an open license, that permits no-cost access, plus permission for others to re-use, repurpose, adapt, and redistribute." (Interview with Flexible Learning NZ, 2021)

Anthony Magnabosco:
"We want to get to the person's 'epistemology', or how we're using the word: how the person concluded that their reasons are good enough for thinking something is true." (What is (And Why Do) Street Epistemology, Dutch Skeptic Society, 2021)

Katherine Maher:
"My vision of what Wikipedia can and should be is... the epistemological backbone of the internet. There are no other sources of high quality information that so many people rely on in so many languages as sort of an omnibus place to find out context about the world, history about the world." (Interview with Atlantic Council, 2021)

Thomas Mann:
"Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of the subject - the actual enemy is the unknown." (The Magic Mountain, 1924)

Ernst Mayr:
"Most scientific problems are far better understood by studying their history than their logic." (The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution and Inheritance, 1982)

Robert McChesney:
"Now, the one thing that's clear is that we need non-profit, noncommercial media - more than ever in the United States. We don't need a purely nonprofit, non-commercial system, but we need a significant non-profit, non-commercial system. Advertising-run media, profit-driven media, simply is not acceptable as the entirety of our media system." (The Problem of the Media, Interview with Anthony Ha, Mother Jones, 2004)

Terence McKenna:
"Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness and this plot prosecutes its goals through a limiting of language. Language is the battleground over which the fight will take place because what we cannot say, we cannot communicate." (Opening the Doors of Creativity, 1990)

Terence McKenna:
"...we must receive, transmit and conquertize the word in order to create a forward escape out of the contradictions in the world that are the legacy of bad language that's brought us this far. Its a healing of language" (Language Can Do Anything, We Plants Are Happy Plants)

Terence McKenna:
"You should do your version. Everybody should understand, you have this little place where you can build and display your dreams... There is this place now which is a window into your soul that you can put online. And my website will become more and more me until to will be more me than I am." (Timewave, бor)

Terence McKenna:
"The only way you can transcend the ambiguity of language is if you turn it into something beheld." (Magic, бor)

Marshall McLuhan:
"Artists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium or to release the power of another." (Understanding Media, 1964)

Marshall McLuhan:
"All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered." (The Medium is the Massage, 1967)

John Stuart Mill:
"The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error." (On Liberty, 1859)

Jacques Monod:
"In science, self-satisfaction is death. Personal self-satisfaction is the death of the scientist. Collective self-satisfaction is the death of the research. It is restlessness, anxiety, dissatisfaction, agony of mind that nourish science." (AZQuotes.com)

Maria Montessori:
"It is easy to substitute our will for that of the child by means of suggestion or coercion; but when we have done this we have robbed him of his greatest right, the right to construct his own personality." (AZQuotes.com)

Elisabeth Morel:
"...throughout this presentation we'll be talking about 'accessibility', which we're thinking refers to making content accessible to individuals with disabilities. We know that about 20% of our population has some type of disability but we know that OER [open educational resources] impacts far more than just those with disabilities and so its about providing better access for all of our students..." (OER: What's next? Accessibility, ACRL CJCLS OER Committee, 2021)

Ted Nelson:
"So that notion of hypertext seemed to me immediately obvious because footnotes were already the ideas wriggling, struggling to get free, like a cat trying to get out of your arms." (AZquotes.com)

Friedrich Nietzsche:
"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." (Twilight of the Idols, 1888)

Martha Nussbaum:
"Knowledge is no guarantee of good behavior, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behavior. (Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, 2012)

George Orwell:
"The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea of discipline versus individualism. The issue of truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background." (The Prevention of Literature, 1946)

Octavio Paz:
"The relations between rhetoric and ethics are disturbing: the ease with which language can be twisted is worrisome, and the fact that our minds accept these perverse games so docilely is no less cause for concern. We ought to subject language to a diet of bread and water if we wish to keep it from being corrupted and corrupting us... Unweave the verbal fabric: reality will appear." (The Monkey Grammarian, 1974)

Petrarch:
"This age of ours consequently has let fall, bit by bit, some of the richest and sweetest fruits that the tree of knowledge has yielded; has thrown away the results of the vigils and labors of the most illustrious men of genius, things of more value, I am almost tempted to say, than anything else in the whole world." (On the Scarcity of Copyists)

Rufus Pollock:
"To me, mapping I think is crucial to social conscious emergence of this group and its greatly more coherent, more connected, more visible to itself... " (Interview with The New School at Commonweal, 2022)

Neil Postman:
"Beginning in the mid 19th century, we began what you call the 'communications revolution' and going on into our own century, we now have flooded our culture with media of communication technologies that are devoted to filling up our lives with information. And so for the first time, too much information becomes now a problem to be solved." (Interview with The Open Mind, WNET Group, 1990)

Lane Rasberry:
"So supposing you're with an organization. Supposing that you have knowledge that you would like to share, I would like to invite anyone in such a position to edit in Wikipedia. Share your know knowledge and publications in Wikipedia." (WikiProject Medicine, MisinfoCon, 2020)

Jef Raskin:
"An interface is humane if it is responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties." (The Human Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems, 2000)

Eric S. Raymond:
"Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)." (The Cathedral and the Bazaar, 1997)

Wilhelm Reich:
"Rooting in work is crucial to any accomplishment. Rooting in mere enthusiasm will in the long run force illusory measures to keep the fires of empty enthusiasm going. And this makes politics and politicians." (Writings, 1951)

Thomas Reid:
"Every man feels that perception gives him an invincible belief of the existence of that which he perceives; and that this belief is not the effect of reasoning but the immediate consequence of perception." (AZQuotes.com)

Larry Sanger:
"We need to do for encyclopedias what blogging standards did for blogs: there needs to be an 'Encyclosphere'. We should build a totally decentralized network, like the Blogosphere - or like email, IRC, blockchains, and the World Wide Web itself." (Introducing the Encyclosphere, Larry Sanger Blog, 2019)

Friedrich Schlegel:
"Aphorisms are the true form of the universal philosophy." (Athenaeum Fragments, 1798)

Daniel Schmachtenberger:
"Can we make the types of transparency and the types of incentive alignment, the types of capacity for deterrence that would exist at a small tribal type scale possible at much much larger scales, where the increase in effective coordination starts to be more effective, right, you start to reduce a huge amount of waste and duplication and, you know, failures of those kinds?" (In Search of the Third Attractor - Part 1, Rebel Wisdom, 2022)

Daniel Schmachtenberger:
"When we talk about what the catastrophic risk landscape is, that's the landscape. The metacrisis is how do we solve all of that and recognizing that our problem solving mechanisms haven't even been able to solve the problems we've had for the last many years let alone prevent these things. And so the central orienting question, its like the U.N. has 17 sustainable development goals, there's really one that must supersede them all which is develop the capacity for global coordination that can solve global problems. If you get that one, you get all of the other ones. If you don't get that one, you don't get any of the other ones." (A Problem Well-Stated is Half-Solved with Daniel Schmachtenberger, Your Undivided Attention, Center for Humane Technology, 2024)

Martin Seligman:
"The good life consists in deriving happiness by using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of living. The meaningful life adds one more component: using these same strengths to forward knowledge, power or goodness." (AZQuotes.com)

George Bernard Shaw:
"This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one..." (Man and Superman, 1903)

Herbert A. Simon:
"Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent." (The Sciences of the Artificial, 1969)

Solon:
"In the ideal state, laws are few and simple because they have been derived from certainties. In the corrupt state, laws are many and confused because they have been derived from uncertainties." (AZQuotes.com)

Richard Stallman:
"To be able to choose between proprietary software packages is to be able to choose your master. Freedom means not having a master." (The Free Software Movement and the Future of Freedom, 2006)

Gertrude Stein:
"The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic." (Composition as Explanation, 1926)

Rudolf Steiner:
"When the human being hears music, he has a sense of wellbeing, because these tones harmonize with what he has experienced in the world of his spiritual home." (AZQuotes.com)

Catherine Stihler:
"Our values drive that openness and that sharing because we see that value in why we want the world to have an improved commons of knowledge, culture, creativity because that then builds on other things and that creates and improves and keeps that cycle of creativity, of thinking, of thoughtfulness, of energy, of renewal, of new ideas and maybe the word innovation." (Catherine Stihler: Creative Commons, the EU Copyright Directive, and Civil Society's Role, Walled Culture, 2022)

Aaron Swartz:
"The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it." (Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, 2008)

Leo Szilard:
"The most important step in getting a job done is the recognition of the problem. Once I recognize a problem I can think of someone who can work it out better than I could." (Quoted in Close-up: I'm Looking for a Market for Wisdom, LIFE Magazine, 1961)

Matthew Taylor:
"In mediation processes, one of the methods that's used often, and this is in conflict situations, armed conflict situations sometimes, is a process of getting people to agree what they disagree about. And that's really important. And the reason that's important is because the way most political debates are structured is not over trying to understand what we disagree about; it's about trying to caricature each other. And being caricatured is painful and it makes us angry and it makes us want to lash out." (Polarisation vs Democracy, Matthew Taylor, Rebel Wisdom, 2021)

Peter Thiel:
"Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page won't make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them." (Zero to One, 2014)

Linus Torvalds:
"The big thing about distributed source control is that it makes one of the main issues with SCM's go away - the politics around, 'who can make changes'." (Linux.com)

Lila Tretikov:
"It could be visual, it could be auditorial, it could at some point maybe tactile. Right? Who knows what we're going to do in the future. And of course there's words, and text, and symbols, and numbers and all of those things that enable us to learn much better, enable us to really build on top of that new discoveries, and learn more, and truly explore and go as far as we want." (Interview with The Open Mind, WNET Group, 2016)

Jan Tschichold:
"Readers want what is important to be clearly laid out; they will not read what is too troublesome." (AZQuotes.com)

John Vervaeke:
"How do you really properly re-cognize, recognize these other perspectives and be able to indwell them and internalize them to a degree without doing some imposition of assimilation or just seeking agreement?" (A Dialogos with John Vervaeke concerning governance... Jordan Hall, 2022)

Lev Vygotsky:
"In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than himself. As in the focus of a magnifying glass, play contains all developmental tendencies in a condensed form and is itself a major source of development." (Mind in Society, 1978 posthumous)

Jimmy Wales:
"I don't pretend I've got the solutions for all this, but where I find it interesting to explore is around devolving power into the community, whatever that might mean in a give context... For me that's the real answer." (Interview with Interintellect, 2021)

H. G. Wells:
"An immense and ever-increasing wealth of knowledge is scattered about the world today; knowledge that would probably suffice to solve all the mighty difficulties of our age, but it is dispersed and unorganized. We need a sort of mental clearing house for the mind: a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared." (AZQuotes.com)

Ken Wilber:
"I have one major rule: Everybody is right. More specifically, everybody - including me - has some important pieces of truth, and all of those pieces need to be honored, cherished and included in a more gracious, spacious and compassionate embrace." (Introduction to Collected Works of Ken Wilber, 2000)

Andrew Wiles:
"Perhaps I could best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of entering a dark mansion. You go into the first room and it's dark, completely dark. You stumble around, bumping into the furniture. Gradually you learn where each piece of furniture is. And finally after six months or so, you find the light switch and turn it on. Suddenly, it's all illuminated and you can see exactly where you were." (AZQuotes.com)

Colin Wilson:
"Boredom is basically a feeling of narrowness, and surely a narrow vision is bound to be less true than a broad one?" (The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders, 1988)

Steve Wozniak:
"I don't believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee... I'm going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone... Not on a committee. Not on a team." (AZQuotes.com)

Paramanhansa Yogananda:
"When you learn to get along with yourself, you will know how to get along with everybody." (AZQuotes.com)

Ethan Zuckerman:
"The more participatory an institution is, the higher a chance it has at being trusted. The more an institution opens itself up to you being a functioning member, and particularly a governing member, the better a chance it has of being trusted." (Disinfo Discussions: Decline in Trust with Ethan Zuckerman, Aspen Institute, 2021)

List of philosophy quote collection posts (non-person, non-wiki)

This post is a list of philosophy quote collection posts (non-person, non-wiki). The amount of quotes for each post is also provided (466 total*). This post was last updated January 2026. There are 21 posted listed below chronologically.
* total doesn't include Philosophy quotes organized

Saturday, January 24, 2026

List of quotes by person posts: 2018

This post is a list of quotes by person posts in 2018. The amount of quotes for each post is also provided (865 total). There are 132 posts listed below chronologically.
  1. Ludwig Wittgenstein - 9
  2. Carl Jung - 7
  3. Charles Sanders Peirce - 11
  4. William James - 8
  5. Bertrand Russell - 6
  6. Alfred North Whitehead - 8
  7. Tony Lawson - 16
  8. James Clerk Maxwell - 5
  9. Niels Bohr - 7
  10. Erwin Schrodinger - 8
  11. Ernest Rutherford - 5
  12. Max Planck - 5
  13. Nicolaus Copernicus - 3
  14. Paul Dirac - 7
  15. David Bohm - 8
  16. Michael Faraday - 4
  17. Freeman Dyson - 8
  18. Werner Heisenberg - 4
  19. Richard Feynman - 9
  20. Galileo Galilei - 6
  21. Sigmund Freud - 8
  22. Johannes Kepler - 7
  23. Charles Darwin - 7
  24. Benoit Mandelbrot - 7
  25. Max Born - 5
  26. Hermann Weyl - 2
  27. Gaston Bachelard - 3
  28. Northrop Frye - 7
  29. Otto Neurath - 4
  30. Ludwig Feuerbach - 6
  31. Henri Poincaré - 6
  32. L. K. Samuels - 3
  33. Thucydides - 3
  34. Ian Hacking - 6
  35. Dmitri Mendeleev - 9
  36. Michael C. Jackson - 5
  37. Eric Temple Bell - 5
  38. George Sarton - 4
  39. William Whewell - 9
  40. John Polkinghorne - 5
  41. Roger Penrose - 5
  42. George Henry Lewes - 9
  43. Karl Mannheim - 3
  44. Augustus De Morgan - 9
  45. Socrates - 8
  46. Plato - 7
  47. Richard von Mises - 5
  48. Oskar Morgenstern - 4
  49. Frank Ramsey - 4
  50. Ernst Mach - 7
  51. David Hilbert - 7
  52. Giuseppe Peano - 3
  53. John Sowa - 3
  54. George Boole - 4
  55. G. H. Hardy - 5
  56. Edward Witten - 8
  57. Benjamin Peirce - 6
  58. Georg Cantor - 7
  59. Bernhard Riemann - 7
  60. Carl Friedrich Gauss - 8
  61. Adolphe Quetelet - 8
  62. Edmund Husserl - 5
  63. Martin Heidegger - 11
  64. Giles Deleuze - 11
  65. Willard van Orman Quine - 12
  66. Gilbert Ryle - 2
  67. Gottlob Frege - 8
  68. Saul Kripke - 4
  69. Rudolf Carnap - 8
  70. P. F. Strawson - 4
  71. A. J. Ayer - 8
  72. J. L. Austin - 6
  73. Arthur Schopenhauer - 12
  74. G. E. Moore - 7
  75. George Berkeley - 7
  76. James Heckman - 6
  77. Baruch Spinoza - 9
  78. Thomas Aquinas - 7
  79. Hannah Arendt - 7
  80. Simone de Beauvoir - 5
  81. Thomas Hobbes - 6
  82. Jean-Jacques Rousseau - 14
  83. Carl Sagan - 6
  84. Stephen Hawking - 4
  85. Jacques Derrida - 10
  86. Michel Foucault - 8
  87. Thomas Kuhn -2
  88. Henry David Thoreau - 11
  89. Paul Feyerabend - 6
  90. Niccolo Machiavelli - 7
  91. Henri Bergson - 8
  92. Avicenna - 3
  93. Averroes - 5
  94. Anselm - 4
  95. William of Ockham - 7
  96. Parmenides - 6
  97. John Stuart Mill - 10
  98. Louis de Broglie - 5
  99. Voltaire - 14
  100. Michel de Montaigne - 11
  101. Francois de La Rochefoucauld - 9
  102. Friedrich Schelling - 6
  103. Ibn Khaldun - 7
  104. Alexander Fleming - 5
  105. E. O. Wilson - 6
  106. Carl Linnaeus - 4
  107. Alfred Russel Wallace - 8
  108. John Dalton - 6
  109. Antoine Lavoisier - 5
  110. Robert Boyle - 4
  111. Linus Pauling - 7
  112. William Thomson - 9
  113. Euclid - 6
  114. Pythagoras - 10
  115. Archimedes - 7
  116. Alan Turing - 7
  117. Pierre de Fermat - 4
  118. Joseph-Louis Lagrange - 6
  119. James Watt - 6
  120. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek - 6
  121. Alexander Graham Bell - 6
  122. William Harvey - 7
  123. Gregor Mendel - 5
  124. Joseph Lister - 4
  125. Edward Jenner - 4
  126. Wilhelm Rontgen - 4
  127. Johann Sebastian Bach - 5
  128. Enrico Fermi - 5
  129. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - 12
  130. Jacques Lacan - 8
  131. John Rawls - 5
  132. Jean-Francois Lyotard - 4

List of quotes by person posts: 2017

This post is a list of quotes by person posts in 2017. The amount of quotes for each post is also provided (486 total). There are 64 posts listed below chronologically.
  1. Tony Lawson - 27
  2. Paul Samuelson - 11
  3. Joe Earle - 2
  4. Noah Smith - 21
  5. Alfred Marshall - 7
  6. John Maynard Keynes - 5
  7. David Ricardo - 6
  8. John Kenneth Galbraith - 9
  9. William Stanley Jevons - 9
  10. Paul Krugman - 10
  11. Thomas Robert Malthus - 12
  12. Milton Friedman - 20
  13. Ragnar Frisch - 9
  14. Jan Tinbergen - 5
  15. Adam Smith - 40
  16. Aristotle - 12
  17. David Hume - 6
  18. Immanuel Kant - 6
  19. Francis Bacon - 5
  20. Rene Descartes - 7
  21. Friedrich Nietzsche - 4
  22. Karl Popper - 6
  23. Roger Bacon - 4
  24. Claude Bernard - 5
  25. Ronald Fisher - 6
  26. Kenneth Arrow - 5
  27. Emile Durkheim - 7
  28. Søren Kierkegaard - 10
  29. Georg W. F. Hegel - 5
  30. Max Weber - 3
  31. Albert Einstein - 5
  32. Isaac Newton - 2
  33. Thorstein Veblen - 6
  34. Friedrich Hayek - 7
  35. Albert Camus - 4
  36. Henry George - 8
  37. Simone Weil - 7
  38. John Locke - 8
  39. Ludwig von Mises - 3
  40. Joseph Stiglitz - 4
  41. Jean-Paul Sartre - 5
  42. Robert Owen - 5
  43. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - 9
  44. Alan Watts - 3
  45. Jeremy Bentham - 3
  46. Joseph Schumpeter - 5
  47. Karl Marx - 10
  48. Francois Quesnay - 3
  49. Auguste Comte - 4
  50. Leonardo da Vinci - 4
  51. Jean-Baptiste Say - 6
  52. Franz Kafka - 5
  53. Blaise Pascal - 5
  54. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - 6
  55. Thomas More - 5
  56. Leonhard Euler - 6
  57. Thomas Edison - 5
  58. Jimmy Wales - 5
  59. Isaac Asimov - 8
  60. John von Neumann - 8
  61. Marie Curie - 4
  62. Pierre-Simon Laplace - 4
  63. Tjalling Koopmans - 2
  64. Dani Rodrik - 28

List of quotes by person posts: 2020

This post is a list of quotes by person posts in 2020. The amount of quotes for each post is also provided (300 total). There are 52 posts listed below chronologically.
  1. Gregory Bateson - 5
  2. Niels Henrik Abel - 4
  3. Louis Pasteur - 9
  4. Rachel Carson - 10
  5. James Chadwick - 7
  6. Ludwig Boltzmann - 6
  7. Jean-Michel Basquiat - 6
  8. Andy Warhol - 6
  9. Willem de Kooning - 7
  10. Wassily Kandinsky - 12
  11. Piet Mondrian - 8
  12. Henri Matisse - 7
  13. Raphael - 2
  14. Michelangelo - 9
  15. Pablo Picasso - 8
  16. Vincent van Gogh - 2
  17. Roy Lichtenstein - 10
  18. Claude Monet - 9
  19. Paul Klee - 6
  20. Édouard Manet - 5
  21. Pierre-Auguste Renoir - 4
  22. Camille Pissarro - 6
  23. Paul Cézanne - 4
  24. Jackson Pollock - 5
  25. Mark Rothko - 7
  26. Salvador Dalí - 5
  27. Edgar Degas - 5
  28. Kazimir Malevich - 4
  29. Ferdinand de Saussure - 6
  30. Claude Lévi-Strauss - 4
  31. Cy Twombly - 4
  32. Nikola Tesla - 8
  33. Julian Schnabel - 3
  34. Rembrandt - 4
  35. Jasper Johns - 4
  36. Gerhard Richter - 9
  37. David Hockney - 5
  38. Robert Rauschenberg - 4
  39. Judy Chicago - 3
  40. Fernand Léger - 7
  41. Joan Miró - 5
  42. Damien Hirst - 11
  43. Jeff Koons - 6
  44. Marcel Duchamp - 7
  45. Paul Gauguin - 8
  46. Edward Hopper - 5
  47. Marc Chagall - 4
  48. Alexander Calder - 3
  49. René Magritte - 3
  50. Francis Bacon - 3
  51. Georgia O'Keeffe - 3
  52. Diego Rivera - 3

List of quotes by person posts: 2021

This post is a list of quotes by person posts in 2021. The amount of quotes for each post is also provided (224 total). There are 36 posts listed below chronologically.

List of quotes by person posts: 2024

This post is a list of quotes by person posts in 2024. The amount of quotes for each post is also provided (76 total). There are 20 posts listed below chronologically.

List of quotes by person posts: 2023

This post is a list of quotes by person posts in 2023. The amount of quotes for each post is also provided (75 total). There are 19 posts listed below chronologically.

List of quotes by person posts: 2022 (minimal version)

This post is a list of quotes by person posts in 2022. The amount of quotes for each post is also provided (183 total). There are 50 posts listed below chronologically.
  1. Neil Postman - 8
  2. Martin Luther King Jr. - 3
  3. Tim Berners-Lee - 4
  4. Tim Berners-Lee - 2
  5. David Bohnett - 4
  6. Sue Gardner - 8
  7. Jimmy Wales - 3
  8. Katherine Maher - 3
  9. Brewster Kahle - 3
  10. Ward Cunningham - 4
  11. Lawrence Lessig - 6
  12. Ken Wilber - 5
  13. J. B. S. Haldane - 3
  14. Aaron Swartz - 4
  15. H. G. Wells - 4
  16. Tristian Harris - 4
  17. Rufus Pollock - 8
  18. Terence McKenna - 3
  19. Terence McKenna - 4
  20. Colin Wilson - 3
  21. Matt DeCarlo - 2
  22. Wayne Mackintosh - 3
  23. Lila Tretikov - 2
  24. Gregg Gillis - 3
  25. Henry Jenkins - 4
  26. Stephen Downes - 8
  27. Terence McKenna - 3
  28. John Vervaeke - 2
  29. Elisabeth Morel - 2
  30. Ethan Zuckerman - 2
  31. danah boyd - 3
  32. Catherine Stihler - 3
  33. Rebecca Giblin - 3
  34. Albert Einstein - 4
  35. Anthony Magnabosco - 8
  36. Jamie Joyce - 10
  37. Lane Rasberry - 2
  38. Stephen Koch - 2
  39. Daniel Schmachtenberger - 2
  40. Matthew Taylor - 2
  41. David Fuller - 2
  42. Dmitri Breteton - 4
  43. Walter Gropius - 3
  44. Vannevar Bush - 2
  45. Jean Baudrillard - 3
  46. Robert Cailliau - 3
  47. Jan Tschichold - 3
  48. Alan Cooper - 3
  49. Jef Raskin - 2
  50. Herbert A. Simon - 2

(original version from May 2022)

Tuesday, January 20, 2026

Tony Lawson: The Nature and State of Modern Economics (minimal version)

Tony Lawson is a British economist. This post is 4 quotes from his book, Essays on: The Nature and State of Modern Economics (2015).

1. "Economics too has its more basic concerns. There include such matters such as social relations, collective practices, social positions, community, capitalism, money, corporations, technology, gender, rights obligations, human nature, care trust, crises, economy and so forth." (page 6)

2. "Firms, money, markets, institutions, social relations, even individual identities, cannot be experimentally isolated for each other." (page 16)

3. "Social reality is of a nature that is significantly at variance with the closed systems of isolated atoms that would guarantee the conditions of mathematical deductivist modelling." (page 112)

4. "Even if the ontology I defend is roughly right, there may yet be pockets of social reality that provide the appropriate conditions for successes when utilizing methods of formalistic modeling, as I regularly acknowledge." (page 210)

(original version from April 2018)

Dani Rodrik and pluralism (minimal version)

Dani Rodrik is a Turkish economist best known for his contributions to economic development. This post is 4 quotes from his book, Economics Rules (2015).

1. "Rather than a single, specific model, economics encompasses a collection of models. The discipline advances by expanding its library of models and by improving the mapping between these models and the real world. The diversity of models in economics is the necessary counterpart to the flexibility of the social world." (page 5)

2. "What are economic models? The easiest way to understand them is as simplifications designed to show how specific mechanisms work by isolating them from other, confounding effects." (page 12)

3. "Efforts to construct large-scale economic models have been singularly unproductive to date. To put it even more strongly, I cannot think of an important economic insight that has come out of such models." (page 39)

4. "Eventually, we developed a decision tree that helped us navigate across potential models... We would start at the top of the tree by asking whether the constraints on investment were mainly on the supply side or on the demand side... At each node of the decision tree, we tried to develop informal empirical tests to help us select among models that would send us down different paths." (page 89)

(original version from July 2017)

Monday, January 19, 2026

Adam Smith's system of economics (minimal version)

Adam Smith (1723-1790) is a British economist best known from his book, The Wealth of Nations (1776). There are 3 quotes listed below.

1. "By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention." (The Wealth of Nations, 1776)

2. "Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society, which he has in his view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society." (The Wealth of Nations, 1776)

3. "The value of any commodity, therefore, to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command. Labour, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities." (The Wealth of Nations, 1776)

(original version from April 2017)

Ragnar Frisch's critique of macro econometrics (minimal version)

Ragnar Frisch (1895-1973) was a Norwegian economist best known for his contributions to econometrics. There are 2 quotes listed below.

1. "I believe that economic theory has arrived at a point in its development where the appeal to quantitative empirical data has become more necessary than ever. At the same time its analyses have reached a degree of complexity that require the application of a more refined scientific method than that employed by the classical economists." (Quoted in Ragnar Frisch 1895-1995 by O. Bjerkholt)

2. "In this feverish world of ours, where one wants the economic analyses to produce easily understandable results quickly and at the least possible cost, some of us have fallen into the habit of assuming for simplicity that the hundreds sometimes thousands of variables that enter into the analyses are linked together by very simple relationships." (Theory of Production, 1964)

(original version from April 2017)

Milton Friedman and free markets (minimal version)

Milton Friedman (1912-2006) was an American economist. There are 2 quotes listed below.

1. "I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible... because I believe the big problem is not taxes, the big problem is spending. I believe our government is too large and intrusive, that we do not get our money's worth..." (Quoted in Conservatives Betrayed, 2006)

2. "If I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government." (Interview on Fox News, 2004)

(original version from April 2017)

Thomas Robert Malthus and the population problem (minimal version)

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) was a British economist best known for his book, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). There are 3 quotes listed below.

1. "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio, Subsistence, increases only in an arithmetical ratio." (An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798)

2. "The perpetual tendency of the race of man to increase beyond the means of subsistence is one of the general laws of animated nature, which we can have no reason to expect to change." (An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798)

3. "The employment of the poor in roads and public works, and a tendency among landlords and persons of property to build, to improve and beautify their grounds, and to employ workmen and menial servants, are the means most within our power and most directly calculated to remedy the evils arising from that disturbance in the balance of produce and consumption." (An Essay on the Principle of Population 2nd Edition, 1836)

(original version from April 2017)

David Ricardo and mathematical economics (minimal version)

David Ricardo (1772-1823) is a British economist best known for his book, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817). There are 2 quotes listed below.

1. "Possessing utility, commodities derive their exchangeable value from two sources: from their scarcity, and from the quantity of labour required to obtain them." (Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 1817)

2. "Labour, like all other things which are purchased and sold, and which may be increased or diminished in quantity, has its natural and its market price. The natural price of labour is that price which is necessary to enable the labourers, on with another, to subsist and to perpetuate their race, without either increase or diminution." (Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 1817)

(original version from April 2017)