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“Computers make children advance faster, but they also make them think like computers.”
Describing the effect of computer games; Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto (New York: Scribner, 2004), 17.
“Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.”
Walter Gropius, from the Bauhaus Manifesto, cited in William Edgar, “No News Is Good News: Modernity, The Postmodern, and Apologetics,” Westminster Theological Journal 57 (Fall 1995).
“Gonna change my way of thinking
Make myself a different set of rules
Gonna change my way of thinking
Make myself a different set of rules
Gonna put my good foot forward
And stop being influenced by fools.”
Bob Dylan, “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking”
“There is indeed much about this property to whet his appetite if only the price suites him: easy access to Rome, good communications, a modest house, and sufficient land for him to enjoy without taking up too much of his time. Scholars who take to the country, like himself, need no more land than will suffice to clear their heads and refresh their eyes, as they stroll around their grounds and tread their single path, getting to know each of their precious vines and counting every fruit tree.”
Pliny the Younger writes to his friend, Baebius Hispanus, who is selling a piece of property in Italy. Pliny would like to recommend to him the historian, Seuetonius Tranquillus, as a potential buyer; Pliny the younger, Letters, 24, 1-4 (trans. B. Radice).
Reflecting upon how an emotional robot might express love, Hans Moravec, a AI specialist at Carnegie-Mellon University, asserts that,“When you bring one into your house, it will understand that you’re the person it’s there for, and that it had better keep you happy …”
The fact that ‘love’ equals ‘my own happiness as I define it’ is insipid hubris; Michio Kaku, Visions (New York: Anchor, 1997), 91.
“There is nothing more absurd … than the millions who wish to live in luxury and idleness and yet be slender and good-looking.”
Wendell Berry, “The Unsettling of America,” in The Art of the Commonplace, edited by Norman Wirzba (Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2002), 43.
“… we have made golden calves of ourselves – become a nation of terrified, self-obsessed idols.
”Bill McKibben, “The Christian Paradox: How a Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong,” 31-37, Harper’s Magazine (August, 2005), 37.
“The music we listen to is so … true. It kind of reflects the way we are. It symbolizes us. We’re true people. You’re true to your feelings and true to your friends. You try.
”Fan Justin, commenting on his favorite band, Dashboard Confessional, which is led by the religious hero, Chris Carrabba; Andy Greenwald, Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003), 181.
“I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery. Who is the conjuror, and what can be the point of such deception? The conjuror is the human mind itself, evolved by natural selection, and the point has been to bolster human self-confidence and self-importance – so as to increase the value we each place on our own and others’ lives.
”Theoretical psychologist, London School of Economics, Nicholas Humphrey; John Brockman, ed., What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today’s leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty. (New York: Harper, 2006), 111.
