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

Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.

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.

When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.

Cyberspace, especially, draws us into the instant.

Geniuses of certain kinds - mathematicians, chess players, computer programmers - seem, if not mad, at least lacking in the social skills most easily identified with sanity.