It is time we steered by the stars, not by the lights of each passing ship.
- General Omar Bradley

The Model of Hierarchical Complexity presents a framework for scoring reasoning stages in any domain as well as in any cross cultural setting. The scoring is based not upon the content or the subject material, but instead on the mathematical complexity of hierarchical organization of information. The subject’s performance on a task of a given complexity represents the stage of developmental complexity.

The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
- Albert Einstein

Psuedo-random number generators provide a useful and well-defined example of the importance of context. We can make a PRNG that is completely indistinguishable in its output from a "true" RNG.

This is analogous to the "free will" vs determinism problem.

As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin.
- Alan Watts

You didn't come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.
- Alan Watts

Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged - people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.
- Ted Nelson

Do not all charms fly
At the touch of cold philosophy?
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine–
Unweave a rainbow...
- John Keats

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
– Alfred North Whitehead

The systems approach begins when first you view the world through the eyes of another.
- C. West Churchman

If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord on the strength of a resolution taken once and for all. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.
- Albert Einstein

Man's destiny is to know, if only because societies with knowledge culturally dominate societies that lack it. Luddites and anti-intellectuals do not master the differential equations of thermodynamics or the biochemical cures of illness. They stay in thatched huts and die young.
-- Edward O. Wilson

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald