I care about strangers when they're abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when they're literally in front of me.

I am interested in the possibility that we are going to be wrong in the same way that history has indicated that mankind always is. It seems as though the history of ideas is the history of being wrong. And to me, that is a kind of continuum. It's a continual path that shows we don't always know something, but we're always shifting to a path that makes us feel more comfortable in the moment, even if that shift is wrong, and a new shift is destined to happen again.

It is very easy for me to imagine in 200 years, people looking back at chemotherapy as proof that people of the 20th century were insane and just morons.

I think one possibility [in the future] might be chemotherapy. And I'm always hesitant to say that because it makes it sound like I'm against chemotherapy. Right now, chemotherapy is the best cancer treatment therapy we have. But let's say we find some way where we can almost genetically engineer the DNA of our being and fight cancer that way. Then, the idea that we used to pump poison into people to fight off cancer will almost seem like the use of leeches or something.

I hate motorcycles. Because if I hit one, even if it's not my fault, if I've done nothing wrong, I'm not charged with manslaughter, he's gonna die, because he's on a motorcycle. So I have to live my life knowing that I killed this guy.

Who Am I? Or (Perhaps More Accurately) Who Else Could Be Me?

Nine Inch Nails were the best and most popular industrial band of all time; as a consequence, industrial purists usually assert that Nine Inch Nails aren't an industrial band at all (this is a counterintuitive phenomenon that tends to occur with purists from all subcultures, musical or otherwise).