“Every morning, I have woken up knowing that I will never run out of books
to read. That has been my life.”

—Kenzaburo Oe

“Cities are no more artificial than Bee-hives. The internet is as natural as a spider’s web. We ourselves are technological devices, invented by ancient bacterial communities as means of genetic survival — we are part of an intricate network that comes from the original takeover of the Earth. Our power and intelligence do not belong specifically to us, but to all life.”

— John Gray, Straw Dogs

“Like the artist, the networked self is an aggregator of information flows, a collection of links to others, a switching machine.”

— Gregory Bateson

“In network theory, a node’s relationship to other networks is more important than its own uniqueness. Similarly, today we situate ourselves less as individuals and more as the product of multiple networks composed of both humans and things.”

— Kazys Varnelis

"When people think the same idea and move in the same direction, that's a cult. When people think many different ideas and move in one direction, that's a movement."

"The collective thought is more powerful than the individual thought. In fact, the individual thought is mostly the result of collective thought and of interaction with other people. The language is entirely collective, and most of the thoughts in it are. Everybody does his own thing to those thoughts - he makes a contribution. But very few change them very much."