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

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

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

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.

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.

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

The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.