The young remember most deeply.... When we are old and failing, it is the memories of childhood which can be summoned most clearly.

Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.

Once evolution gets a good basic design, it tends to throw away the variants and concentrate on the near-infinite diversity within that design.

The future is like smoke from a burning forest, waiting for the wind of specific events and personal courage to blow the sparks and embers of reality this way or that.

The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and remembered.

Once upon a time ... the only autonomous intelligences we humans knew of were us humans. We thought then that if humankind ever devised another intelligence that it would be the result of a huge project ... a great mass of silicon and ancient transistors and chips and circuit boards ... a machine with lots of networking circuits, in other words, aping-if you will pardon the expression-the human brain in form and function. Of course, AIs did not evolve that way. They sort of slipped into existence when we humans were looking the other way.

If our god's work is to be done in our time, we must do it ourselves.