The microwave oven is one of the modern objects that convey the most elemental feeling of power over the passing seconds ... If you suffer from hurry sickness in its most advanced stages, you may find yourself punching 88 seconds instead of 90 because it is faster to tap the same digit twice.

The quotation-business is booming. No subdivision of the culture seems too narrow to have a quotation book of its own.... It would be an understatement to say that these books lean on one another. To compare them is to stroll through a glorious jungle of incestuous mutual plagiarism.

He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know, but as the essence of knowing.

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

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

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

As soon as the printing press started flooding Europe with books, people were complaining that there were too many books and that it was going to change philosophy and the course of human thought in ways that wouldnt necessarily be good.