How long will it be before … the man sitting in London will see all things passing in Asia, or whenever it pleases him or an agent to turn a mirror on a view? It will be. Or how long before the discovery of cheap and perfect aerial navigation will change society and annihilate national distinctions? That, too, will be. These and a thousand stranger discoveries will during the ensuing century burst upon the world, changing it utterly. -Charles Godfrey Leland, Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling (1891)-

One measure of friendship consists not in the number of things friends can discuss, but in the number of things they need no longer mention. -Clifton Fadiman-

I have traveled the length and breadth of this country, and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year. -The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957-

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man. -Elbert Hubbard-

You can have the other words — chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I’ll take grace. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I’ll take it. -Mary Oliver-

I think 74 degrees Fahrenheit is the ideal overnight temperature in February. -Cutlass 43k-

I have never understood the female capacity to avoid the answer to a direct question. -Spock, “Star Trek”-

So I will go as far as I can into rock and roll carrying my Christian banner. -Cliff Richard-

The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular? -David Sarnoff’s associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s-

The trouble with political correctness is not that it leads to totalitarian forms of thought control, as its critics on the right maintain. The trouble with political correctness is that it is too easily learned; it can create a veneer of civility and make us think that things are getting better when, in fact, they are getting worse. -Alan Rutkowski, Toronto “Globe and Mail” 8 February 1995-