We choose mania over boredom every time.

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

Google is where we go for answers. People used to go elsewhere or, more likely, stagger along not knowing.

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.

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.

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

The alternative to doubt is authority, against which science had fought for centuries.