"Half genius and half buffoon," Freeman Dyson ... wrote. ... [Richard] Feynman struck him as uproariously American-unbuttoned and burning with physical energy. It took him a while to realize how obsessively his new friend was tunneling into the very bedrock of modern science.

It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover.

Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy's souls reside there, too.

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

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

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

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?