The urgent finds you; you have to find the important. Importance is not fast. It is slow. It is not superficial. It is deep. And as a result, it's extremely powerful. When important matters go wrong, they undermine everything. When they go right, they sustain everything.

How can I throw my life away in the least unhappy way?

Programming (or making music) at night is dreamtime, a period exclusively mental, utterly absorbed, sustained and timeless, placeless, disembodied.

There should always be in sight the draw — a kind of a beacon that draws you on through the labyrinth.

Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbaninzation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.

Historians will consider this a dark age. Science historians can read Galileos technical correspondence from the 1590s but not Marvin Minskys from the 1960s.

Carbon tax has the advantage of basically being able to subsidize one set of activities that you want with another set of activities that you don't want. It's like a cigarette tax.