[W]e didn't do much to alter the course of human history, did we?' said Philip. 'As one old spy to another, I reckon I'd have been more use running a boys' club. Don't know what you feel.'

John le Carré, Silverview

If a machine can think, it might think more intelligently than we do, and then where should we be? Even if we could keep the machines in a subservient position, for instance by turning off the power at strategic moments, we should, as a species, feel greatly humbled. … This new danger … if it comes at all … is remote but not astronomically remote, and is certainly something which can give us anxiety. It is customary, in a talk or article on this subject, to offer a grain of comfort, in the form of a statement that some particularly human characteristic could never be imitated by a machine. It might for instance be said that no machine could write good English, or that it could not be influenced by sex-appeal or smoke a pipe. I cannot offer any such comfort, for I believe that no such bounds can be set.

Alan Turing, quoted by Sebastian Sunday Grève in AI’s first philosopher:  https://aeon.co/essays/why-we-should-remember-alan-turing-as-a-philosopher

Someone else’s fool is a joke, your own fool a calamity.

A folk proverb quoted by Solzhenitsyn.

Time does not precede . . . the world. . . . Time is something that accompanies motion and bodies.”

 

The necessary connection of movement and time is real and time is something the soul (dhihn) constructs in movement.

 

Ibn Rushd (Averroes)

[I]n a large house, formerly a house of state ... in those shrunken fragments of its greatness, lawyers lie like maggots in nuts. 

Charles Dickens, Bleak House

We must not expect to find reason anywhere in Nature, but only the evidence of will!

Pliny the Elder, Natural History 

From a wonderful and beautiful book

Life is hard. Everyone believes the world is ending all the time. But so far, all of them have been wrong.... The truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.

Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land