The basic parts, the start-up molecules, can be supplied in abundance and don't have to be made by some elaborate process. That immediately makes things simpler.

And that because the moving parts are a million times smaller than the ones we're familiar with, they move a million times faster, just as a smaller tuning fork produces a higher pitch than a large one.

In thinking about nanotechnology today, what's most important is understanding where it leads, what nanotechnology will look like after we reach the assembler breakthrough.

...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.

If you take all the factories in the world today, they could make all the parts necessary to build more factories like themselves. So, in a sense, we have a self-replicating industrial system today, but it would take a tremendous effort to copy what we already have.

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.

Likewise nanotechnology will, once it gets under way, depend on the tools we have then and our ability to use them, and not on the steps that got us there.