Aphorisms of 96, 97, 98

Week 53, 1998

If the gateways of perception are cleared,
everything will appear to man as it is: infinite.

William Blake

Week 52, 1998

The main obstacle of education is our school system.

Timo

Week 51, 1998

The nodes of the net have to become schools.

Vilém Flusser

Week 50, 1998

Without friendship there is no life.

Cicero

Week 49, 1998

God is dead but grammar lives.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Week 48, 1998

Evolution for a long time was taught in a bad way.

Gregory Bateson

Week 46, 1998

The alphabet is a linear code,
which programs man for
a particular kind of consciousness,
namely the so called "historical consciousness".

Vilém Flusser

Week 45, 1998

It is a medievalism of man
that he is able to do grammar.

Aristotle

Week 44, 1998

Arts in fact is the description of a paintbrush
on a higher level.

Rolf Geissler, artist

Week 43, 1998

Not the alphabetism has come to an end,
but we will come to an end,
if we carry on with alphabetism.

Rudolf Kaehr

Week 42, 1998

There is nothing more difficult to carry out,
nor more doubtful of success,
nor more dangerous to handle,
than to initiate a new order of things.
For the reformer has enemies in all
who profit by the old order.

Machiavelli in "The Prince" 1513

Week 41, 1998

The most efficient weapon against a myth
is possibly to mythologize it itself,
by means creating an artificial myth.

Roland Barthes

Week 40, 1998

We know, what consciousness is
(so long we're not asking what it is).

Martin Kurthen

Week 39, 1998

Human communication is an artificial process.

Vilém Flusser

Week 38, 1998

There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.

Thurber

Week 36, 1998

All that we've got here is American made,
it's a little bit cheesy but it's nicely displayed.

Frank Zappa, taken from song "Flakes, Flakes"

Week 35, 1998

If you treat humans according to how they should be,
you help them to become what they are able to.

Johann W. von Goethe

Week 34, 1998

Laws are like sausages,
it's better not to watch them being made.

Otto von Bismarck

Week 33, 1998

If you want to become a real scientist,
half an hour a day think the opposite of what your colleagues think.

Albert Einstein

Week 32, 1998

Scientists are human beings with less prejudices than others, but much more stubborn.

Rousseau

Week 31, 1998

Truth is the invention of a liar.

Heinz von Foerster

Week 26, 1998

Naturally I don't know if it would become better,
when it is different, but it has to become different,
when it should become good.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Week 17, 1998

The hand mill stands for a society of feudal lords, the steam mill for a society of industrial capitalists.

Karl Marx

But for what stands the computer?

Arno Bammé

Week 15, 1998

It needs more creativity and leadership quality
to define the right tasks
as to find the solutions for the tasks.

Hansjürgen Linde, Bernd Hill

Week 11, 1998

And if, for medical reasons, the human being will be genetically modified, to me there's no problem with it.

Stephen Jay Gould

Week 10, 1998

There is no better idea of rationality than that
of a readiness to accept criticism.

Karl Popper

Week 7, 1998

The sentence
" The wiser gives in"
gives the power to the foolish.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Week 6, 1998

Church meddling into governmental tasks
could also be answered by outsourcing of governmental financial services.

Vincent F. Zaphod

Week 5, 1998

Those who stick too much to small things normally become incapable of great things.

La Rochefoucault

Week 4, 1998

Esoteric is, when cellulitis
moves from the ass to the brain.

unknown

Week 3, 1998

Cybernetics is the science of effective organisations.

Stafford Beer

Week 2, 1998

Basically we' re all Africans.

Vincent F. Zaphod, Word Artist

Week 1, 1998

If a lion could speak,
we would'nt be able to unterstand him.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Week 48, 1997

Sorry but Goethe's aphorism on the german aphorism's page is surely untranslateable.

Editor's Note

Week 43, 1997

The more mechanistic we design
our produced environment,
the more biological it has to be,
if it at all should function.

Kevin Kelly, Wired Magazine

Week 42, 1997

It is the aim of science to produce thoughts
which with a high probability are new and challenging.

Mitchell Feigenbaum

Week 41, 1997

Man possesses a perspective,
if he deserves to possess one.

Gregory Chaitin

Week 40, 1997

To measure intelligence has its analog in the trial
to express the computing power
of a computer in kilograms.

unknown

Week 39, 1997

The laws of nature are written by man.
The laws of biology have to write themselves.

Heinz von Foerster, Theoreme No. 3

Week 37, 1997

Often the big enemy of truth is not the lie,
- constructed, invented and dishonest -,
but the myth, - perpetual, convincing and unrealistic.

John F. Kennedy

Week 36, 1997

If the human brain would be so simple,
that we are able to understand it,
we would be so simple,
that we are unable to understand.

Emerson Pugh

Week 26, 1997

On one hand technology is simulation par excellence.
On the other there might be an utopian hope, that technology will create objects which exist independently from subject.

Jean Baudrillard

Week 24, 1997

Traveller, paths are made by walking.

Antonio Machado

Week 23, 1997

To my opinion arts do not have to stay
below the knowledge level of its era.

Gerhard Merz, Artist

Week 22, 1997

I do not want to take some feeling for the measure of all things,
that's boring.

Rolf Geissler, Artist

Week 21, 1997

The most serious activity of man is to play.

George Santayana

Week 20, 1997

Even a stopped clock two times a day shows the right time. So during the years it is able to refer to a never-ending story of successes.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Week 19, 1997

I didn't understand your question, but I will answer it.

Eva Meyer

Week 18, 1997

The net is not the territory.

Luther Blissett

Week 17, 1997

Cybernetics is the science of reasonable metaphors.

Gordon Pask

Week 16, 1997

...the "sentence of sufficient reason" or the separation of
"res extensa" and "res cogitans" are considered as the Fall:
Flying is getting cheaper.

Freely after R. Kaehr and the German magazine Wirtschaftswoche 14, 1997

Week 15, 1997

A German 'Evolution':

Germany, the land of poets and thinkers,
Germany, the land of judges and hangmen,
Germany, the land of officials and bankers.

unknown

unfortunately the second line has no rhyme, click on the flag and see German version!

Week 14, 1997

Organization is frozen information.

Anatol Rapoport

Week 13, 1997

I like to keep things as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Albert Einstein

Week 12, 1997

Thou should not use other software than mine.

Motto of a world-famous software dealer

Week 11, 1997

For a hammer the whole world looks like a nail.

unknown

Week 10, 1997

In Germany the basic outlines of the rights for officials
can only be dismissed by a bloody revolution.

Jürgen Rüttgers, Research Minister, FRG

Week 9, 1997

Is coincidence male or female ?
If it is, what's it's hobby?

Gisela Behrendt, EIGENBLUT Prod.

Week 8, 1997

Where the observer's necessary conditions are given,
observing happens.

Humberto Maturana

Week 7, 1997

The increasing multimedia domain probably will develop to one of those disciplines, which - like architecture - are able to bridge the gap between engineering and humanities, between sciences and arts, between left and right cortex.

Nicholas Negroponte

Week 6, 1997

Skalat maðr rùnar rísta,
nema ráda vel kunni.

None should write runes,
who can't read what he carves.

The Motto of NORDUNET, the Scandinavian part of the internet, taken from an Icelandic saga by Egill Skalla-Grimsson

Week 5, 1997

Nothing happens without personal transformation.

W. Edwards Deming

Week 4, 1997

A thought which is not dangerous
is not worth to be called a thought.

Oscar Wilde

Week 3, 1997

Without adventure, civilization is in full decay.

Alfred North Whitehead

Week 2, 1997

When the sun of culture shines low,
even dwarves cast long shadows.

Friedrich Nowottny, previous intendant of WDR (a German broadcasting network)

Week 1, 1997

We imagine enterprises as machines,
but in reality they are similar to theatre groups.

Noel M. Tichy

Week 52, 1996

Scientists pay homage to a 'concretism' of a kind of rationality,
which is interested in the wheels of a clock
and not in the time it measures.

Max Horkheimer

Week 51, 1996

The theory decides what is measurable.

Albert Einstein

Week 50, 1996

The idiot does not break the Decalogue,
he only turns the tables around and shows,
that on the backside the opposite is written.

Hermann Hesse, in: "Thoughts about Dostojewski's 'The Idiot' "

Week 49, 1996

Only those questions that are in principle undecidable,
we can decide.

Heinz von Foerster

Week 48, 1996

Science does not prove anything;
science only explores, it proves nothing.

Gregory Bateson

Week 47, 1996

By education most have been misled;
So they believe, because they so were bred.
The priest continues what the nurse began,
And thus the child imposes on the man.

John Dryden, The Hind and the Panther

Week 46, 1996

There are two kinds of people, one kind opens the window in the morning and asks while looking at the world: "Why?" The others also look out of the window at the world and ask: "Why not?" I would like to increase the amount of those a little bit who ask: "Why not?"

Daniel Goeudevert, 7.11.96, on the presentation of his book (Like a Bird in an Aquarium) in Dortmund, Germany

Week 45, 1996

Act in a way, so that the amount of choices increase.

Heinz von Foerster, the ethic imperative

Week 44, 1996

The evolution of the PC proceeded similar to the development of the printed book, but it took only fourty years instead of sixhundred.

Alan Kay, 1977

Week 43, 1996

The collision of alphabetic and electronic culture borders
typical for the 20th century
grants the printed word a decisive role
for the inhibition of our return
to the Africa within ourselves.

Marshall McLuhan, 1962

Week 42, 1996

Pulling on computer clothing will be as much important
for the history of mankind as the pulling on
of the first clothing in the stone age.

Timothy Leary

Week 41, 1996

Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny.

Frank Zappa

Week 40, 1996

He who thinks of costs too late ruins his enterprise.
He who thinks of costs to early kills creativity.

Philip Rosenthal, entrepreneur

Week 39, 1996

Man is not the creature of circumstances.
Circumstances are the creatures of men.

Benjamin Disraeli, Vivian Grey

Week 38, 1996

The separation of poetry and music
found its first expression in a printed page.

Marshall McLuhan

Week 37, 1996

One has to put in order what is not yet in confusion.

Laotse

Week 36, 1996

He who refuses to do arithmetics
is doomed to talk nonsense.

John McCarthy, Professor for Artificial Intelligence,
Stanford Univ.