Doug Engelbart -- in some interview (sorry, I lost the source)

I got this wild dream in my head about what would help mankind the most, to go off and do something dramatic, and I just happened to get a picture of how, if people started to learn to interact with computers, in collective ways of collaborating together, and this was way back in the early 50s, so it was a little bit premature. So anyways, I had some GI bill money left still so I could just go after that, and up and down quite a bit through the years, and I finally sort of gave up.

Loren Eiseley -- The Man Who Saw Through Time (1973 biography of Francis Bacon)

We of today have difficulty in realizing that the world of Bacon and Shakespeare was only semiliterate, steeped in religious contention, with its gaze turned backward in wonder upon the Greco-Roman past. Oswald Spengler justly remarks that human choice is only possible within the limitations and idea-forms of a given age. More than three hundred years ago, Francis Bacon would have understood him. Bacon's world horribly constricted his ability to exert his will upon it. At the same time he would have had a slight reservation. "Send out your little book upon the waters," he would have countered, "and hope. Your will may be worked beyond you in another and more favorable age."