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

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

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 history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.

I can't remember the last book that taught me so much, and so well, about what it means to be human.

It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.

For [Richard] Feynman, the essence of the scientific imagination was a powerful and almost painful rule. What scientists create must match reality. It must match what is already known. Scientific creativity is imagination in a straitjacket.