Quasioptimal

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

— Bertrand Russell

We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.

— Father John Culkin, glossing McLuhan

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is.

— G. K. Chesterton

Above all, there is no strict distinction between means and ends.

— James C. Scott

Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting man's wishes and desires, namely in providing him with wealth.

— Marshall McLuhan

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left.

— Marshall McLuhan

In citing [etymological] evidence, we must avoid uninhibited word-mysticism. Nevertheless, the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep the common understanding from levelling them off to that unintelligibility which functions in turn as a source of pseudo-problems.

— Martin Heidegger

Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.

— Max Frisch