An intelligent person feels guilty for downloading music without paying the musician, but they use this free-open-culture ideology to cover it.

Every time we give a musician the advice to give away the music and sell the T-shirt, we're saying, "Don't make your living in this more elevated way. Instead, reverse this social progress, and choose a more physical way to make a living." We're sending them to peasanthood, very much like the Maoists have.

Chemotherapy is a good thing even though it kills healthy cells. But we still hope for something better. We'd like to prevent cancer in the first place.

The network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.

Once you can understand something in a way that you can shove it into a computer, you have cracked its code, transcended any particularity it might have at a given time. It was as if we had become the gods of vision and had effectively created all possible images, for they would merely be reshufflings of the bits in the computers we had before us, completely under our command.

In history, in most cultures, and at most points in time, if you want to find the most advanced technologies, you can look principally in two places. One is weapons and the other is musical instruments. My hypothesis is that instruments are usually ahead of weapons. In fact, I think you can find many examples of instruments being predecessors of weapons and very few in the reverse.

We should talk about the ultimate cause of war. It's a question we should never stop asking, because if we do, there's a chance, however remote, that we might miss an opportunity to reduce the occurrence of war.