After realizing that we would eventually be able to build molecular machines that could arrange atoms to form virtually any pattern that we wanted, I saw that an awful lot of consequences followed from that.

I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.

...Local prohibitions cannot block advances in military and commercial technology... Democratic movements for local restraint can only restrain the world's democracies, not the world as a whole.

Scientists study physical things, then describe them; engineers describe physical things, then build them.

Nature draws no line between living and nonliving.

Any powerful technology can be abused.

Today we have big, crude instruments guided by intelligent surgeons, and we have little, stupid molecules of drugs that get dumped into the body, diffuse around and interfere with things as best they can. At present, medicine is unable to heal anything.