A coldly rationalist individualist can deny that he has any obligation to make sacrifices for the future.

The three filters [against folly] operate through these particular questions: Literacy: What are the words? Numeracy: What are the numbers? Ecolacy: And then what?

The only thing we can really count on in this uncertain world is human unreliability itself.

Of course, a positive growth rate might be taken as evidence that a population is below its optimum.

People are the quintessential element in all technology... Once we recognize the inescapable human nexus of all technology our attitude toward the reliability problem is fundamentally changed.

Economists (and others) who are satisfied with nature-free equations develop a dangerous hubris about the potency of our species

The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion, of some sort.