Science is not gadgetry. The desirable adjuncts of modern living, although in many instances made possible by science, certainly d...o not constitute science. Basic scientific knowledge often (but not always) is a prerequisite to such developments, but technology primarily deserves the credit for having the financial courage, the ingenuity, and the driving energy to see to it that so-called "pure knowledge" is in fact brought to the practical service of man. And it should also be recognized that those who have the urge to apply knowledge usefully have themselves often made significant contribution to pure knowledge and have even more often served as a stimulation to the activities of a pure researcher.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What, then, is the basic difference between today's computer and an intelligent being? It is that the computer can be made to see ...but not to perceive. What matters here is not that the computer is without consciousness but that thus far it is incapable of the spontaneous grasp of pattern--a capacity essential to perception and intelligence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Next, 'real' is what we may call a trouser-word. It is usually thought, and I dare say usually rightly thought, that what one migh...t call the affirmative use of a term is basic--that, to understand 'x,' we need to know what it is to be x, or to be an x, and that knowing this apprises us of what it is not to be x, not to be an x. But with 'real' (as we briefly noted earlier) it is the negative use that wears the trousers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man has lost the basic skill of the ape, the ability to scratch its back. Which gave it extraordinary independence, and the libert...y to associate for reasons other than the need for mutual back-scratching.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A part, a large part, of travelling is an engagement of the ego v. the world.... The world is hydra headed, as old as the rocks an...d as changing as the sea, enmeshed inextricably in its ways. The ego wants to arrive at places safely and on time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The differences between the President and the Prime Minister were at least in one respect something more than the obvious differen...ces of national character, education, and even temperament. For all his sense of history, his large, untroubled, easy-going style of life, his unshakable feeling of personal security, his natural assumption of being at home in the great world far beyond the confines of his own country, Roosevelt was a typical child of the twentieth century and of the New World; while Churchill for all his love of the present hour, his unquenchable appetite for new knowledge, his sense of the technological possibilities of our time, and the restless roaming of his fancy in considering how they might be most imaginatively applied, despite his enthusiasm for Basic English, or the siren suit which so upset his hosts in Moscow--despite all this, Churchill remains a European of the nineteenth century.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
With all of its bad influences, T.V. is not to be feared.... It can be a fairly safe laboratory for confronting, seeing through, a...nd thus being immunized against unhealthy values so as to be "in the world but not of it."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In my early life, and probably even today, it is not sufficiently understood that a child's education should include at least a ru...dimentary grasp of religion, sex, and money. Without a basic knowledge of these three primary facts in a normal human being's life--subjects which stir the emotions, create events and opportunities, and if they do not wholly decide must greatly influence an individual's personality--no human being's education can have a safe foundation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »