Josiah

“As for Rockefeller and Standard Oil, they had made a terrible investment. Not that it mattered, but it’s not clear whether the company even got its money back. Attorney General Philander Cox, who had heard Roosevelt dictate the letter to Cortelyou, told him, “Why, Mr. President, the money has been spent. They cannot pay it back—they haven’t got it.” Roosevelt, who did not care if the truth got in the way of his PR efforts, responded, “Well, the letter will look well on the record, anyhow.”
― Tevi Troy, The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry

“If our brains—if we, that is, for our brains are the permanent essence of us—no longer have need of knowledge, and if we have no need because the computers do it all for us, then what is human intelligence good for? An existential intellectual crisis looms: If machines will acquire all our knowledge for us and do our thinking for us, then what, pray, is the need for us to be?”
― Simon Winchester, Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic

“So often, vast circumstances confine us, like a life sentence in prison or tending to people who are dying, or racist immigration law, or combat, circumstances that seem to “always win.” But in recognizing the vastness of such fates, that we are “a tiny speck” in a “huge place,” we can find a “freeing feeling” and even an urge to build “real joy for all people.” We so often experience transformative awe in the hardest of circumstances.”
― Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

“And if a featherlike touch on the glass surface of a tiny handheld instrument that is today still called a telephone even though it is everything but, and if that touch can command the billions of transistors within the device to connect to equipment unseen that is buried in vaults unknown and from there instantly summon up all that is known and has ever been known about any topic imaginable—what implications does such a development have for humankind?”
― Simon Winchester, Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic