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It is this institutional group-think that now finds itself threatened by new technologies that do not lend themselves to centralized controls. The Internet and other unstructured tools will continue to destabilize the herds that the institutional order has worked so feverishly to keep confined to their assigned pastures.

— Butler D. Shaffer Wizards of Ozymandias: Reflections on the Decline and Fall (2012)

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More quotes by Butler D. Shaffer

It has persuaded us that others are the cause of our failures, and that others should be responsible for our happiness and well-being.

Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival (1985)

The efforts of one organism to live at the expense of another is, when confined to members of the same species, a form of cannibalism.

Boundaries of Order: Private Property of a Social System (2009)

The hubris that attends all political programs of central planning is fueled by an ignorance of the forces of chaos.

Wizards of Ozymandias: Reflections on the Decline and Fall (2012)

One cannot be devoutly religious, or patriotic, or moral, without differentiating oneself from the ungodly, the disloyal, or the immoral. To be for one’s own group, or nation, or race requires that one be against strangers.

Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival (1985)

For our world to be predictable and controllable, it must be mechanistic and linear in nature. But, the illusions of the behaviorists to the contrary notwithstanding, there is nothing less mechanistic and linear in nature than the human mind, whose intricacies and capacities have yet to be matched by even the most sophisticated computers.

Boundaries of Order: Private Property of a Social System (2009)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Butler D. Shaffer (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.