You never actually know how you're going to handle a problem until you actually have it.

But why? Why do you need prophets to tell you how you ought to live? Why do you need anyone to tell you how you ought to live

[Y]our agricultural revolution is not an event like the Trojan War, isolated in the distant past and without relevance to your lives today. The work begun by those neolithic farmers in the Near East has been carried forward from one generation to the next without a single break, right into the present moment. It's the foundation of your vast civilization today in exactly the same way that it was the foundation of the very first farming village.

If the world is saved, it will not be by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all. Why not new minds with new programs? Because where you find people working on programs, you don't find new minds, you find old ones. Programs and old minds go together like buggy whips and buggies.

If the world is saved, it will not be saved by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all.

....he began to speak to me, not in the jocular way of visitors to the menagerie but rather as one speaks to the wind or to the waves crashing on a beach, uttering that which must be said but which must not be heard by anyone.

Many of the biggest and most far-reaching investments we make in our lives are investments that have little or nothing to do with money.