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

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

You can't waste time and you can't save time; you can only choose what you do at any given moment.

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

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

The basic idea of Western science is that you don't have to take into account the falling of a leaf on some planet in another galaxy when you're trying to account for the motion of a billiard ball on a pool table on earth. Very small influences can be neglected. There's a convergence in the way things work, and arbitrarily small influences don't blow up to have arbitrarily large effects.

When the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver's watch, that "wonderful kind of engine...a globe, half silver and half of some transparent metal," they identified it immediately as the god he worshiped. After all, "he seldom did anything without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action in his life." To Jonathan Swift in 1726 that was worth a bit of satire. Modernity was under way. We're all Gullivers now. Or are we Yahoos?