The future masters of technology will have to be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb.

- Marshall McLuhan, 1969.

The case for digitally-driven stupidity assumes we’ll fail to integrate digital freedoms into society as well as we integrated literacy. This assumption in turn rests on three beliefs: that the recent past was a glorious and irreplaceable high-water mark of intellectual attainment; that the present is only characterized by the silly stuff and not by the noble experiments; and that this generation of young people will fail to invent cultural norms that do for the Internet’s abundance what the intellectuals of the 17th century did for print culture.

- "Does the Internet Make You Smarter?" by Clay Shirky, June 4, 2010.

If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Austrian philosopher

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence-whether much that is glorious-whether all that is profound-does not spring from disease of thought-from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.

- "Eleanora" by Edgar Allan Poe, 1841.