destruction is easy for humans but creation is too difficult.

There's something beautifully soothing about a fact — even (or perhaps especially) if we're not sure what it means.

Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities.

The computer can help us find what we know is there. But the book remains our symbol and our resource for the unimagined question and the unwelcome answer.

Throught human history, illusions of knowledge, not ignorance, have proven to be the principal obstacles to discovery

The hero was a big man; the celebrity is a big name.

It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world. Expecting more novelty than there is, more greatness than there is, and more strangeness than there is, we imagine ourselves masters of a plastic universe. But a world we can shape to our will is a shapeless world.