”There are local and temporary islands of decreasing entropy in a world in which the entropy as a whole tends to increase, and the existence of these islands enables some of us to assert the existence of progress.”

• Norbert Wiener

“The forest was shrinking, but the trees kept voting for the axe, who had convinced them that, because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them”

• Turkish proverb

”The real important split in the US is between people who believe in the Constitution and those who don’t.”

• Dave Winer

”A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into coffee into theorems.”

• Alfred Rényi

“A word is a frozen thought that thinking must unfreeze.”

• Hannah Arendt

“Doubt is an art which has to be acquired with difficulty.”

• Charles Sanders Peirce

“The answer to any question starting, ‘Why don’t they—…?’ is almost always, ‘Money.’”

• Robert Heinlein

“When people have money, they convert it into emissions. That’s what wealth is.”

• Simon Kuper, writing in today’s Financial Times

“Talent is a flame. Genius is a fire.”

Bernard Williams