What we need is a plan B ... independent of the Internet. [It] doesn't necessarily have to have the performance of the Internet, but the police department has to be able to call up the fire department.

[Language is] really a pretty amazing invention if you think about it. Here I have a very complicated, messy, confused idea in my head. I'm sitting here making grunting sounds and hopefully constructing a similar messy, confused idea in your head that bears some analogy to it.

The computers are in control. We just live in their world.

Global consciousness is that thing responsible for deciding that pots containing decaffeinated coffee should be orange.

People are mostly focused on defending the computers on the Internet, and there's been surprisingly little attention to defending the Internet itself as a communications medium. And I think we probably do need to pay some more attention to that, because it's actually kind of fragile.

I am convinced that we humans are just at the beginning of our journey, on our way to becoming something more wonderful than we can imagine.

If you hear an expert talking about the Internet and saying it [does] this, or it will do that, you should treat it with the same skepticism that you might treat the comments of an economist about the economy or a weatherman about the weather.