The tree of nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster.

It's not that any sufficiently advanced technology is magic, it's that any technology taking place beyond the threshold of our senses is.

The problem isn't who is in charge. It's what is in charge. The problem is that people are encouraged to function as machines. Or, actually, as mechanisms. Human emotion and sympathy are unprofessional. They are inappropriate to the exercise of reason. Everything which makes people good - makes them human - is ruled out. The system doesn't care about people, but we treat it as if it were one of us, as if it were the sum of our goods and not the product of our least admirable compromises.

If we one day cease to exist, what will be remarkable is that we were ever here at all.

People don't want children to know what they need to know. They want their kids to know what they ought to need to know. If you're a teacher you're in a constant battle with mildly deluded adults who think the world will get better if you imagine it is better. You want to teach about sex? Fine, but only when they're old enough to do it. You want to talk politics? Sure, but nothing modern. Religion? So long as you don't actually think about it. Otherwise some furious mob will come to your house and burn you for a witch.

Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.

Children, bored and opinionated, are scholars of the most dogmatic stripe.