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.

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

[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.

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.

We're at a point in time which is analogous to when single-celled organisms were turning into multi-celled organisms. So we're the amoebas.

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

Your genome knows much more about your medical history than you do.