I think our grandparents were Victor Frankenstein. I basically am the kind of deeply unnatural creature that Mrs Shelley instinctively dreaded. I not only eat her sacred cows but I eat them with ketchup. While I take her point, I think that transgressive monstrosity and tampering with the life force are both a lot more fun than she suspected.

One of the points about distractions is that everything that they do is destabilizing.

Worrying about a large institution, especially when it has computers, is like worrying about a large gorilla, especially when it's on fire.

Political people don't solve stuff - not really. Political people are like guys in pop music.

We may yet work up to some serious shooting war, or maybe some acts of urban genocide committed with rogue nuclear weapons. But if that were the case, why would we call that "9/11"? If Washington disappeared in a mushroom cloud, we'd give that huge event a different name.

The level of ignorance is declining, and the ability to accumulate data and manipulate it for various ends is increasing.

When you can’t imagine how things are going to change, that doesn’t mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.