Predictions Schoolchildren Learn in Bootling (TM) Land

Marshall McLuhan (1964):

Persons grouped around a fire or candle for warmth or light are less able to pursue independent thoughts or even tasks than people supplied with electric light. In the same way, the social and educational patterns latent in automation are those of self-employment and artistic autonomy.

Eihei Dogen (1200-1253):

Acting on and witnessing myriad things with the burden of oneself is delusion. Acting on and witnessing oneself in the advent of myriad things is enlightenment.

Ernst Mach (1838-1916):

The goal which it (physical science) has set itself is the simplest and most economical abstract expression of facts.

Norbert Weiner (1950):

Let us remember that the automatic machine . . . is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor that competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor.

Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), as cited by Friedrich Nietzsche:

Beati in regno coelesti videbunt poenas damnatorum ut beatitudo illis magis complaceat.

Primo Levi (1982):

If I'm not for myself, who will be for me?

If not this way, how? And if not now, when?

Robert Frost (1915):

Home is the place where, when you have to go there,

They have to take you in.

Charles Darwin (On the Origin of the Species):

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

Titus Flavius Vespasianus (Roman Emperor 69-79):

Pecunia non olet.

La Veuve Cliquot (circa 1860):

The world is in perpetual motion, and we must invent the things of tomorrow. One must go before others, be determined and exacting, and let your intelligence direct your life. Act with audacity.

Anonymous:

The early bird gets the worm. The second mouse gets the cheese.

Paul Gauguin writing to Vincent van Gogh (July 1888):

My dear Vincent ... I entirely agree with you on the slight importance that accuracy contributes to art. Art is an abstraction.