The process of debugging, going an correcting the program and then looking at the behavior, and then correcting it again, and finally iteratively getting it to a working program, is in fact, very close to learning about learning.

Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism.

What's the difference between obsolete and cutting edge? Obsolete works.

Nations have the wrong granularity. They’re too small to be global and too big to be local, and all they can think about is competing.

Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.

There is a belief that children drop out of school because they're needed by their families to work, or the little girls are needed to take care of younger siblings. It turns out that's not really true.

MIT is governed by a second, even higher rule: the inalienable right of academic freedom.