"We cannot import evolution and learning without exporting control."

Kevin Kelly (editor)Business See all quotes by Kevin Kelly (editor) →

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“The surest way to smartness is through massive dumbness.”

“The net shifts from mass media to mess media.”

“There is nothing to be found in a beehive that is not submerged in a bee. And yet you can search a bee forever with cyclotron and fluoroscope, and you will never find a hive.”

“In a poetic sense the prime goal of the new economy is to undo – company by company, industry by industry – the industrial economy.”

“The great secret which life has kept from us is that once born, life is immortal. Once launched, it cannot be eradicated.”

“It is the great irony of life that a mindless act repeated in sequence can only lead to greater depths of absurdity, while a mindless act performed in parallel by a swarm of individuals can, under the proper conditions, lead to all that we find interesting.”

Resonant Thoughts

"I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of…"

— James Baldwin

Social Activism1924–1987

#knowledge

"In Jeet Kune Do, it’s not how much you have learned, but how much you have absorbed from what you have learned. It is not how much fixed knowledge you can accumulate, but what you can apply livingly t…"

— Bruce Lee

Entertainment1940–1973

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"When I got my first paycheck, $5'000 or something. I bought a Leger and I bought a Frida Kahlo self-portrait, but I don't know which came first. But I remember buying it and I had just gotten married …"

— Madonna (entertainer)

Music1958

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"If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that h…"

— G. K. Chesterton

Literature1874–1936

#knowledge