". . . if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedelus, or the tripods of Haephestus, which the poet says 'of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods', if in like manner the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves." Aristotle, Politics

"Printing, gunpowder and the magnet . . . these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world." --Francis Bacon, Novum Organum.

"He who first shortened the labor of Copyists by device of Movable Types was disbanding hired Armies, and cashiering most Kings and Senates, and creating a whole new Democratic world: he had invented the Art of Printing. The first ground handful of Nitre, Sulphur and Charcoal drove Monk Schwartz's pestle though the ceiling; what will the last do? Achieve the final undisputed prostration of Force under thought, of Animal courge under Spiritual." Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus.

"The light which has been shed on mankind by the art of printing has eminently changed the condition of the world. . . . A first attempt to recover the right of self government may fail, so may a 2d, a 3d., etc., but as a younger and more instructed race comes on, the sentiment becomes more and more intuitive . . . " Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, Sept. 4, 1823

"Voltaire and Dr Franklin, when they experiment with physics, could not know . . . a liberated middle class would take advantage of the discoveries of science, not for the advancement of humanity, but for their own enrichment and power. . . . [T]he people, instead of becoming politically educated and more and more keen for the privileges of a free society, as soon as the novelty of voting and being represented had worn off, relapsed into the profoundest apathy about the administration of their affairs and allowed themselves to be cheated and enslaved with very little resistance." Edmund Wilson

"Science is at hand to spread a more bountiful table than ever has been spread been offered to the millions and the tens of millions. Shorter hours of labor, greater assurances against individual misfortune; a wider if simpler culture; a more consciously realized sense of social justice; an easier and more equal society-- these are the treasures which, after all these generations, and centuries of impotence and confusion, are now within the reach of mankind. . . . But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science." --Winston S. Churchill, Blood Sweat and Tears.

[Wilbur Wright said:] "I can conceive that aeroplanes might possibly be of some use in war, but never for any commercial purpose, or as a regular means of communication." --quoted by Edith Wharton, Looking Backward

"So far as we know, everybody in the world who has tried to make a nuclear explosion since 1945 has succeeded on the first try." John McPhee, The Curve of Binding Energy

"The only reaction that I remember . . . was a very considerable elation and excitement, and there were parties and people got drunk and it would make a very interesting contrast--what was going on in Los Alamos at the same time as what was going on in Hiroshima. [Later] I would see people building a bridge and I would say 'they really don't understand.' I really believed it was senseless to make anything because it would all be destroyed very soon anyway, but they didn't understand that . . . so I was really in a kind of depressive condition. . . . But fortunately, its been useless for about thirty years now, isn't it, almost, maybe we'll make thirty years?" Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

"Who in the modern age still has dreams that extend beyond our grandchildren? . . . This book is supposed to be about technology, not social justice, but you cannot tell which technology is good and which is bad without paying some attention to social justice." Freeman Dyson, Imagined Worlds

 "The Matthew Arnold ideal of infusing the scientific world with sweetness and light, of keeping machinery from becoming Frankenstein by tempering its driver with Hellenism, does not prevail, but it persists." --J. Frank Dobie, A Texan in England.

"One thing is gone, to return no more forever--the romance of the sea. Soft sentimentality about the sea has retired from the activities of this life, and is but a memory of the past, already remote and much faded. . . . The iron-clad, with her unsentimental aspect and frigid attention to business, banished romance from the war-marine, and the unsentimental dreamer has banished it from the commercial marine. The dangers and uncertainties which made sea life romantic have disappeared and carried the poetic element along with them." Mark Twain, About All Kinds of Ships," in Peter Neill,. ed. American Sea Writing.

" . . . he hated everything brewed in the vats of modernity. He hated music without melody, paintings without pictures, and novels without plots. In other words, a rich, well-rounded life." --Peter Devries, Comfort Me With Apples.

[Tom Wolfe's] fear of telephones is pathological . . . He would like to rent a room with a telephone out in New Jersey, give out the number as his, and then sit back in New York and think of it ringing and ringing and ringing." --Elaine Dundee, Tom Wolfe . . . But Exactly, Yes!

"Experiments by the physicist Charles and by Wedgwood and Davy in England in the late eighteenth century, and the invention of lithography in the early nineteenth century, were all directed towards the discovery of a means to reproduce paintings . . . Photography has become increasingly important, and its role is greater with every passing day. Originally devised to reproduce lines, it soon tackled the problem of values and colors; it then passed beyond overt appearances and began to produce images of the invisible. It is not the least of contemporary photography's miracles that it enables us to see things that were once invisible and this enlarges the scope of our perceptions." Madeline Hours, Conservation and Scientific Analysis of Painting

"At first, it was men of science who took up the new invention as a hobby. But daguerrotypy soon proved to be a democratic art that could be practiced by anyone with a little patience and wherewithal . . . . Nothing illustrated photography's status as a democratic art so well as the extraordinary range of nineteenth-century American portraits. The photo-album, crammed with prints of family members and celebrities, was a ubiquitous feature of the nineteenth-century American home. 'The results of this art are not confined to wealth for encouragement and success,' [wrote photographer H.J. Rogers in 1872] 'But in consideration of its superior fidelity to nature, cheapness and rapidity of production, it now justly receives the support of the masses, of the people.'" ­ Martha A. Sandweiss, Masterworks of American Photography.

"Between his professional flowering in the 1880s and his death in 1907, Saint-Gaudens was seen as proof that America could produce art . . . He gave the crude, grabbing republic its lessons in symbolic deportment and visual elocution, and won its unstinting gratitude. . .Today portrait sculpture is dead, and the photo-opportunity reigns. But Saint-Gaudens lived in an age when sculpture was thought the supreme mode of official commemoration, and the types he created are still very much with us." --Robert Hughes, in Nothing if Not Critical

"But talking of television, do you see any future for it? We have a set and I enjoy the fights, but everything else on is too awful for words. . . . Its odd about T.V. One starts, like you, by loathing and despising it , and it gradually becomes tolerable . . . . The main thing that strikes me is the 1930 movies were a damned sight better than those of today." P.G. Wodehouse letter to Denis Mackail, May 6 1952.

[I]n the televison age, you cannot win unless you portray a media-friendly image . . . . DeGaulle considered the telephone an intolerable nuisance of the modern world and not even his closest advisors dared call him directly." --Richard Nixon, Leaders.

"VISUALS. I am sure the purists, who want their news unfiltered and their heroes unrehearsed, gag on the word visuals. But in the Television Age, it hasn't happened, or at least it hasn't really registered, if people can't see what you see." --Michael K. Deaver [aide to Ronald Reagan]

[Every White House office has a TV set]: "It isn't enough that they're experiencing it; it isn't real unless its ratified, and television is the ratifier. [So now ] [w]e all watch the same TV shows, receive and repeat the same cultural references, hear the same jokes, read from the same syndicates, see the same commercials, and we're starting to talk alike, with air-conditioned voices, like people from nowhere, like the anchor on TV. . . . When I was in the White House, TV was no longer the prime means of receiving the presidency, TV in a way was the presidency."--Peggy Noonan [speechwriter to Ronald Reagan]

"Another reason why Congress is in such disarray today is its media soapbox, particularly television news. Many Congressmen view each TV appearance as free fund-raising or commercial time." --Senator Barry Goldwater.

"It certainly seems like the criminals are the first to see the potential of a new technology," said attorney Jenifer Grasnick [who has defended cyber-criminals] "There was a time when only call girls had answering machines and drug dealers had pagers."

"Show me where a man gits his corn-pone, I'll show you where he gits his opinions." [attributed to] Mark Twain.

"In the general course of human nature, a power over a man 's subsistence amounts to a power over his will." Hamilton, Federalist 79.

"The critic who deals is a common spectacle, and not a noble one; the only way to keep your nose clean in the art world is not to deal or collect at all, and very few writers are prepared to do that. In Berenson's time it was simply assumed that art critics and art historians were up for sale and on the take, unless they were so rich as not to need the money." --Robert Hughes, Nothing If Not Critical.

"This continent is a country of planters, farmers, and fishermen; not of manufactures. The difficulty of establishing particular manufactures in such a country, is almost [insuperable.] For one manufacture is connected with others in such manner, that it may be said to be impossible to establish one or two without establishing several others. . . . [As to rights in general] and particularly that great one, the foundation of all the rest--that their property, acquired with so much pain and hazard, should be disposed of by none but themselves--or to use the beautiful and emphatic language of the sacred scriptures, 'that they should sit very man under his vine, and under his fig-tree, and none should make them afraid.'"- John Dickinson [opposing rash action against Britain which could forfeit the law's protection of property] Letters from a Farmer.

". . . when Europeans first reached the highlands of eastern New Guinea, in the 1930's they discovered dozens of previously uncontacted Stone Age tribes, of which the Chimu tribe proved especially aggressive in adopting Western technology. When Chimbus saw white settlers planing coffee, they began growing coffee themselves as a cash crop. In 1964 I met a 50-year-old Chimbu man, unable to read, wearing a traditional grass skirt, and born into a society still using stone tools, who had become rich by growing coffee, using his profits to buy a sawmill for $100,000 cash, and bought a flee of trucks to transport his coffee and timber to market. [The neighboring Daribi were uninterested even in helicopters,] As a result, Chimbus are moving into Daribi area, taking it over for plantations, and reducing the Daribi to working for them." Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel

"Hand tools, the lack of chemical fertilizers, the lack of good seed, indiscriminate stock breeding these and other factors limited the productivity of medieval agriculture. Everyone in the Middle Ages, whatever his rank in society, lived close to the edge of famine, because poor roads prevented the quick movement of grain into regions where crops had failed. Moreover, few areas supplied surplus grain. Peasant diet was simple, scant and very low in meat." Arthur R. Hogue, Origins of the Common Law

"In the majority of cases the white man's idea of the wrongness of slavery, lies in the bad treatment of the slaves. . . [I]f he could be convinced that the slaves were well fed, clothed, and housed, he would forget that man has an unalienable right to liberty and believe slavery to be a sublime and beneficent institution because its victims could revel in hog and hominy. . . [The troops of the all-black 54th regiment] unpaid for 18 months, heard a Colonel harangue them for 'squabbling about money' when they should be grateful for cookstoves and new Springfield rifles. 'You are a race of slaves. A few years ago your fathers worshipped snakes and crocodiles in Africa.' . . . One year in the service of the United States has purged me of the major part of my patriotism." George E. Stevens [African American civil war soldier].

"Uneducated, barely able to read (if a letter was longer than a paragraph or two, he would throw it down in disgust and have his clerk read it to him) superstitious, the Commodore [Vanderbilt] believed in mysticism and the occult and, much to Dr. Linsley's dismay, was willing to try anything suggested by anyone promising a cure. . . . No, it was not what he could do with his money that interested the Commodore. It was the money itself. The money. It was money madness, greed. The money was the basis of his self-esteem, it was the tally of his wins, of his success, of his self-worth, and there would never be enough to satisfy him." Arthur T. Vanderbilt II, Fortune's Children

[The Commodore's son] Willie Vanderbilt talked with reporters on his way home from his French stable: "My life was never destined to be quite happy," he told them. "It was laid out along lines which I could not forsee, almost from earliest childhood. It has left me with nothing to hope for, with nothing definite to seek or strive for. Inherited wealth is a real handicap to happiness. It is as certain death to ambition as cocaine is to morality." Arthur T. Vanderbilt II, Fortune's Children

"The readers (and I should doubtless have been among them) who twenty years ago would have smiled at the idea that time could transform a group of bourgeois colonials and their republican descendants into a sort of social aristocracy, are now better able to measure the formative value of nearly three hundred years of social observance: the concerted living up to long established standards of honor and conduct, of education and manners . . . When I was young it used to seem to me that the group in which I grew up was like an empty vessel into which no new wine could ever be poured. Now I see that one of its uses lay in preserving a few drops of an old vintage too rare to be savoured by the youthful palate; and I should like to atone for my unappreciativeness by trying to revive that faint fragrance." --Edith Wharton, Looking Backward.

"The man who 'kept a shop' was more rigorously shut out of polite society in the original Thirteen States than in post-revolutionary France--witness the surprise (and amusement) of the Paris solicitor, Moreau de St Méry, who, fleeing from the Terror, earned his living by keeping a bookshop in Philadelphia, and for this reason, though his shop was the meeting-place of the most blue-blooded of his fellow émigrés, and Tallyrand and Marquis de la tour de Pin were among his intimates, yet could not be invited to the ball given for Washington's inauguration." --Edith Wharton, Looking Backward. [nb. although--Benj. Franklin the printer? Perhaps the exception proving her rule.]

"Long before this reduction in income, it had been said of Harry Carpenter that, if he was dropped from a height of 5500 feet without a parachute, he would land safely with his knees under some rich man's table . . . . If he had not been felt to be cracked up, with that instinct for feeling something wrong with a member of the pack and healthy desire to turn him out, if it is impossible to destroy him, which characterizes the rich, he would not have been reduced to accepting the hospitality of Wallace Johnson . . . with his rather special pleasures. Thus Harry Carpenter postponed his inevitable suicide by a matter of weeks if not months. . . . The money on which it as not worthwhile for him to live was one hundred and seventy dollars more than the fisherman Albert Tracy had been supporting his family on . . . ." Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not

"I been rich and I been poor. And honey, rich is better." --attributed to Mae West.

[Charles Lamb's advice to a young friend who considered leaving his bank clerkship for free-lance writing:] "Throw yourself on the world without any rational plan of support, beyond what the chance employ of booksellers would afford you!!! Throw yourself rather, my dear sir, from the steep Tarpeian rock slap-dash headlong upon iron spikes. If you had but five consolatory minutes between the desk and the bed, make much of them, and live a century in them, rather than turn slave to the booksellers. They are Turks and Tartars, when they have poor authors at their beck. Hitherto you have been at arm's length from them. Come not within their grasp. I have known many authors . . . some starved, some go mad, one dear friend literally dying in a workhouse. You know what a rapacious, dishonest set these booksellers are . . . . O you know not, may you never know the miseries of subsisting by authorship. 'Tis a pretty appendage to a situation like yours or mine, but a slavery worse than all slavery to be a bookseller's dependent, to drudge your brains for pots of ale and breasts of mutton, to change your free thoughts and voluntary numbers for ungracious task-work." --The Letters of Charles Lamb

"The rich die differently from the poor, the ignorant from the educated. Suicide is favored by the upper classes, who turn aggression inward, against themselves; homicide is more prevalent among the lower classes, who turn it outward, against others--which is one reason we are so fascinated when a Jean Harris kills. It is out of character, privilege degrading itself. . . . The autopsy is the final proof that we are not all born equal. [For instance] some people are born with wide coronary arteries. Where arteries are concerned, the bigger and wider they are, the longer the life." --Micheal M. Daden, M.D., Unnatural Death: Confessions of a Medical Examiner

"The period we now know as the Renaissance was first called a rinascita (rebirth) by Vasari in 1550. People living at that time were certainly aware something new was happening, but the word had no wide currency until used by Swiss historian Jacob Burchardt in his classic the Civilization of the Rennaisance in Italy (1860) . . . The real cause of the Rennaissance was not the fall of Consantinople, the invention of printing, or the discovery of America, though these were phases in the process; it was, quite simply, money." Richard Saul Wurman, Access Guide, Florence Venice & Milan

"There is a sense in which higher education in the United States would profit by having temporarily, at least, less money rather than more: the reduction of expenditures might force the colleges and universities to rationalize their operations and determine, in the light of some intelligible criteria, what they should and should not do." Robert Maynard Hutchins, Some Observations on American Education

"Jesus never instituted a charity ball where, amid the voluptuous swell of the dance, the rustle of silks, the sparkle of diamonds, and the stimulus of wine and women dressed decolleté, he could dissipate his love for the lowly." --anonymous 19th Century cleric

"Your possessions own you." --Mahatma Ghandi

[When asked what is the right time for lunch] "Diogenes said: 'If a rich man, when you want, if a poor man, when you can.' Diogenes, Diogenes Laertius

"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for for it, immediately or in the long run." --Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

"Most people live haphazard lives subject to the varying winds of fortune. Many are forced by the situation in which they were born and the necessity of earning a living to keep to a straight and narrow road in which there is no possibility of turning to the right or to the left . . . . But the artist is in a privileged position [and] can within certain limits make what he wishes of his life." W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up

 "So I wish for you I have no more time, so I have just one wish for you the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom." Richard P. Feynman, Commencement Address."

"Try to imagine working for the pure love of simply making something beautiful--something that maybe can't be sold or used to help sell anything else, but that is simply a communication between man and man, a bond of understanding and human enlightenment--which is what a real work of art is. If you do that, then maybe you will see why I am not so foolish after all to have followed what seems sometimes only a faint star . . . .I only ask to leave behind me something that the future may find valuable, and it takes a bit of sacrifice sometimes in order to give the thing that you know is in yourself and worth giving. I shall make every sacrifice toward that end" Hart Crane letter to his father (January 12, 1924).

For what an injustice it is, when we allow each way of life its own recreation that none should be permitted to studies! Especially when literary trifles may lead to serious matter, and fooleries may be so handled that a reader who is not altogether a fathead may garner more from them than from the bristling and pompous arguments of some whom we know." -Erasmus, prefatory letter to Sir Thomas More introducing In Praise of Folly

Whoever is not in possession of leisure can hardly be said to possess independence. They talk of the dignity of work. Bosh. True Work is the neccessity of poor humanity's earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure." Herman Melville letter to Catherine Gansevoort Lansing, 5 September 1877.

"But Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by the Truth--and go to the soup societies. Heaven! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister. It can hardly be doubted that all Reformers are bottomed on the truth, more or less; and to the world at large are not reformers almost universally laughing-stocks? . . . . What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,--it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot." Herman Melville letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1 June 1851

"I please myself, [Emerson] reassured his conscience in one of his journal entries, with the thought that my accidental freedom by means of a permanent income is no wise essential to my habits." David E. Shi, The Simple Life

"I have always been fond of anthologizing. I think it a dainty occupation for a person of leisure and literary tastes." Logan Pearsall Smith, Unforgotten Year

--Ogden Nash

"Successful technologies often began as hobbies." Freeman Dyson, Imagined Worlds

"The time it takes to make a [connection] in the brain is very much longer than it is in our computers today, never mind the fancy business of some future atomic computer, but the brain's interconnection system is much more elaborate. Each nerve is connected to thousands of other nerves, whereas we only connect transistors to two or three others." Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

"I had spent thousands of dollars in on-line and telephone charges, and thousands more on a desktop machine and color monitor, and had devoted many hours to trying to improve my bandwith and to downloading and configuring new and improved software--all the while thinking that these forms of material progress were going to enrich my life in some immaterial way. And where had it all brought me? To my room, sweating, junk piled around me, dim light, wires everywhere, eyes burning, neck aching, alone." John Seabrook, Deeper--My Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace