When we feel ourselves to be the sole heirs of the universe, when "the sea flows in our veins...and the stars are our jewels," when all things are perceived as infinite and holy, what motive can we have for covetousness or self-assertion, for the pursuit of power or the drearier forms of pleasure?

- Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 1954

A line dividing human and machine intelligence must be drawn. If there is no such line, then advocates of computerized psychotherapy may be merely the heralds of an age in which man has finally been recognized as nothing but clockwork...The very asking of the question, "What does a judge (or psychiatrist) know that we cannot tell a computer?" is a monstrous obscenity.

- Joseph Wiezenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (1976)

'The possibilities that lie in the future are infinite. When I say 'It is our duty to remain optimists', this includes not only the openness of the future but also that which all of us contribute to it by everything we do: we are all responsible for what the future holds in store. Thus it is our duty, not to prophesy evil but, rather, to fight for a better world.'

- Karl Popper, The Myth of the Framework, (1994)

Write it on your heart
that every day is the best day in the year.
He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day
who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.

Finish each day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities
no doubt have crept in;
forget them as soon as you can.

Tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely
and with too high a spirit
to be encumbered with
your old nonsense.

This day is all that is
good and fair.
It is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on yesterdays.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

'Empiricism is inadequate because scientific theories explain the seen in terms of the unseen and the unseen, you have to admit, doesn’t come to us through the senses.'

- David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity, 2011