Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.

Writing comes into being to retain information across time and across space. Before writing, communication is evanescent and local; sounds carry a few yards and fade to oblivion. The evanescence of the spoken word went without saying. So fleeting was speech that the rare phenomenon of the echo, a sound heard once and then again, seemed a sort of magic.

The Internet is like a town that leaves its streets unmarked on the principle that people who don't already know don't belong

At its most fundamental, information is a binary choice. In other words, a single bit of information is one yes-or-no choice.

Tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output.... In weather, for example, this translates into what is only half-jokingly known as the Butter- fly Effect—the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.

I have seen the future, and it is still in the future.

The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.