The next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together. I'm talking about an organic computer - about biological substances that can function like a semiconductor.

You've got to think about big things while you're doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.

Man has a limited biological capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the capacity is in future shock.

Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.

The Law of Raspberry Jam: the wider any culture is spread, the thinner it gets.

The next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together. I'm talking about an organic computer - about biological substances that can function like a semiconductor.

One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition.

Profits, like sausages... are esteemed most by those who know least about what goes into them.

Anyone nit-picking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor doubtless deserves the error that provoked it.

Our technological powers increase, but the side effects and potential hazards also escalate.

The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.

It is better to err on the side of daring than the side of caution.

To think that the new economy is over is like somebody in London in 1830 saying the entire industrial revolution is over because some textile manufacturers in Manchester went broke.

Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.

The great growling engine of change - technology.

You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment.

Future shock is the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.

Most managers were trained to be the thing they most despise - bureaucrats.

Change is not merely necessary to life - it is life.

Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur.

I work virtually every waking hour.

My wife and I, unlike many intellectuals, spent five years working on assembly lines. We came to fully understand the criticisms of the industrial age, in which you are an appendage of a machine that sets the pace.

No serious futurist deals in prediction. These are left for television oracles and newspaper astrologers.

Nobody knows the future with certainty. We can, however, identify ongoing patterns of change.

People of the future may suffer not from an absence of choice but from a paralysing surfeit of it. They may turn out to be victims of that peculiarly super-industrial dilemma: overchoice.

The biggest tragedy I had was the loss of my daughter from neuromuscular disease in 2000, at age 46.

We must search out totally new ways to anchor ourselves, for all the old roots religion, nation, community, family, or profession are now shaking under the hurricane impact of the accelerative thrust.

Change is not merely necessary to life – it is life.

Idea-assassins rush forward to kill any new suggestion on the grounds of its impracticality, while defending whatever now exists as practical, no matter how absurd.

By instructing students how to learn unlearn and relearn a powerful new dimension can be added to education.

One of the more fantastic possibilities is that man will be able to make biological carbon copies of himself.

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn unlearn and relearn.

The recognition that no knowledge can be complete no metaphor entire is itself humanizing. It counteracts fanaticism. It grants even to adversaries the possibility of partial truth and to oneself the possibility of error.

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

Change is not merely necessary to life, it is life.

Over and over again, financial experts and wonkish talking heads endeavor to explain these mysterious, 'toxic' financial instruments to us lay folk. Over and over, they ignobly fail, because we all know that no one understands credit default obligations and derivatives, except perhaps Mr. Buffett and the computers who created them.

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

There's my education in computers, right there; this is the whole thing, everything I took out of a book.

And my real enemy is not to hold the specimen sterile, but it's the lighting. The light is our real enemy. So we have to work with very very poor lighting. But we can increase the light with computers.

Nanotechnology will let us build computers that are incredibly powerful. We'll have more power in the volume of a sugar cube than exists in the entire world today.

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

The big question society will have to answer is whether it wants computers thinking like humans.

Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.

I do two things. I design mobile computers and I study brains.

Well, we didn't have our original drummer on our last record. And most of that album was not played as a band in the studio. It was mostly the world of computers and overdubs. There was very few things played live or worked out as a band.

After a semester or so, my infatuation with computers burnt out as quickly as it had begun.

Learning can take place in the backyard if there is a human being there who cares about the child. Before learning computers, children should learn to read first. They should sit around the dinner table and hear what their parents have to say and think.

Computers rather frighten me, because I never did learn to type, so the whole thing seems extraordinarily complicated to me.

They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.