Also, it's good to have more than one profession, in case your own profession goes out of style. A Wall Street trader who's also a belly dancer will do a lot better than a trader who winds up driving a taxi.

By setting oneself totally free of constraints, free of thoughts, free of this debilitating activity called work, free of efforts, elements hidden in the texture of reality start staring at you; then mysteries that you never thought existed emerge in front of your eyes.

Deficits are like putting dynamite in the hands of children. They can get out of control very quickly.

The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally.

Information is bad for knowledge.

An elephant is vastly more efficient, metabolically, than a mouse. It's the same for a megacity as opposed to a village. But an elephant can break a leg very easily, whereas you can toss a mouse out of a window and it'll be fine. Size makes you fragile.

The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.