"The group of artists and scientists that had so far done least was the one that had attracted the greatest interest - and the greatest alarm. This was the team working on ‘total identification’. The history of the cinema gave the clue to their actions. First, sound, then colour, then stereoscopy, then Cinerama, had made the old ‘moving pictures’ more and more like reality itself. Where was the end of the story? Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience, and became part of the action. To achieve this would involve stimulation of all the senses, and perhaps hypnosis as well, but many believed it to be practical. When the goal was attained, there would be an enormous enrichment of human experience. A man could become - for a while, at least - any other person, and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or imaginary. He could even be plant or animal, if it proved possible to capture and record the sense impressions of other living creatures. And when the ‘programme’ was over, he would have acquired a memory as vivid as any experience in his actual life indeed, indistinguishable from reality itself.

The prospect was dazzling. Many also found it terrifying and hoped that the enterprise would fail. But they knew in their hearts that once science had declared a thing possible, there was no escape from its eventual realization..."

Arthur C. Clarke in Childhood's End, published in 1952.

"So it goes." ~ Kurt Vonnegut

"We no longer have roots, we have aerials." ~ McKenzie Wark

"The map is not the territory" ~ Alfred Korzybski

"The description is not the described; I can describe the mountain, but the description is not the mountain, and if you are caught up in the description, as most people are, then you will never see the mountain." ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

"Nothing is more noble, nothing more venerable than fidelity. Faithfulness and truth are the most sacred excellences and endowments of the human mind." ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

"We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. We are monkeys with money and guns." ~ Tom Waits

"The beauty of flowers is sad because they are fragile and destined for death, like anything on Earth of course, but flowers are particularly fragile, and like animals their corpse is only a grotesque parody of their vital being, and their corpse, like that of an animal, stinks." ~ Michel Houellebecq, "The Map and the Territory"

"Woke up this morning feeling like the hapless victim of an elaborate self-defeating plot that I have unwittingly perpetrated against myself." ~ John Tottenham

"The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed." ~ Ernest Hemingway

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." ~ Edmund Burke

"I didn't call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone - he stretched out his arms towards the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward - and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness." ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

"All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up." ~ Pablo Picasso

"A genius is the one most like himself." ~ Thelonious Sphere Monk