Help us [think] they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence

 --- Norbert Wiener, "God and Golem, Inc.," 1964, quoted by Etymonline

The future offers very little hope for those who expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking. Help us they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence.

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it

 --- Robert Frost, quoted by Anneliese Burgess in Skuld, skaamte en die krag van 'n geheime innerlike lewe, March 2026

No war is over until the enemy says it’s over

 --- Jim Mattis, quoted by Ned Temko in What constitutes victory in an ‘asymmetric’ war with Iran?, CS Monitor, March 2026

In context

Mr. Trump reminded his social media followers this week that he was “President of the United States of America, by far the Most Powerful Country Anywhere in the World” – hardly the words of a leader reluctant to “finish the job.”

But unless he can virtually eliminate Iran’s missile and drone capacity, he’ll have to reckon with another reality of war – summed up by Jim Mattis, Mr. Trump’s defense secretary during his first term in office.

“No war is over,” he said, “until the enemy says it’s over.”

“We may think it over, we may declare it over, but in fact, the enemy gets a vote.”

quantum mechanics [is] a theory that predicts very well and explains very badly

 --- Nick Ormrod, quoted in A new understanding of causality could fix quantum theory’s fatal flaw by  Ciarán Gilligan-Lee in New Scientist, November 2025

In context

The upshot is that the observer who performs the measurement is all-important. The gnawing problem is that it isn’t at all clear what qualifies as an observer. With no precise definition, quantum theory offers no answer to the key question of how and why the world we see – where particles have definite properties – emerges from the quantum fog.

That’s why many physicists view quantum theory as it is typically understood to be deeply unsatisfying. “The current situation with quantum mechanics is that it’s a theory that predicts very well and explains very badly,” says Nick Ormrod at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. We can’t just fall back on the phrase “because we measure it”, he says, particularly as many suspect that the vagueness of quantum theory is a big part of why physicists struggle to apply it in contexts where no observers are present, such as the very early universe or the fabric of space-time.