The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy, but the ones that contain the deepest explanations.

Every problem that is interesting is also soluble.

The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests.

Is the human race a universal constructor?

Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make more sense than common sense.

Time travel may be achieved one day, or it may not. But if it is, it should not require any fundamental change in world-view, at least for those who broadly share the world view I am presenting in this book.

Quantum computation is... a distinctively new way of harnessing nature... It will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes.

The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy, but the ones that contain the deepest explanations.

It is possible to build a virtual-reality generator whose repertoire includes every possible environment.

I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn't forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics we usually eventually find a technological way of doing it.

Humans may or may not have cosmic significance, and if they do, it will be by hitching a ride on the objective centrality of knowledge in the cosmic scheme of things.

I don't think it would be a good idea for scientists to have more political power. Scientists as a group are more inclined to try to derive an ought from an is, than the population at large.

Science is objective. And in my view we cannot take any experimental results seriously except in the light of good explanations of them.

The brain is the only kind of object capable of understanding that the cosmos is even there, or why there are infinitely many prime numbers, or that apples fall because of the curvature of space-time, or that obeying its own inborn instincts can be morally wrong, or that it itself exists.

The most important application of quantum computing in the future is likely to be a computer simulation of quantum systems, because that's an application where we know for sure that quantum systems in general cannot be efficiently simulated on a classical computer.

To me quantum computation is a new and deeper and better way to understand the laws of physics, and hence understanding physical reality as a whole.

Where we have good, testable explanations, they then have to be tested, and we drop the ones that fail the tests.

Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow.

Base metals can be transmuted into gold by stars, and by intelligent beings who understand the processes that power stars, but by nothing else in the universe.

The orthogonal features, when combined, can explode into complexity.

The Tax Code today is more complicated than ever, and the very people on the Republican side who denounce the Tax Code's complexity are the ones that put together what they now call a convoluted monstrosity. They put it into effect.

Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves.

Armageddon is not around the corner. This is only what the people of violence want us to believe. The complexity and diversity of the world is the hope for the future.

The complexity of the emotional life of the play is what you live to work on.

We need to shift the paradigm from reactive technologies to more integrative solutions that deal with the variety and complexity of the threats that are out there today.

What we call 'evil' doesn't necessarily deserve any kind of respect or understanding, by any means; it just deserves an acknowledgement of its complexity so we can better understand it - so we can help prevent it.

The intellectual evolution of the race consists in an increase in the number, delicacy, complexity, permanence and speed of formation of such associations.

A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

This growth in the number, speed of formation, permanence, delicacy and complexity of associations possible for an animal reaches its acme in the case of man.

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.

Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

Complexity is one of the great problems in environmental design.

From time immemorial, man has desired to comprehend the complexity of nature in terms of as few elementary concepts as possible.

We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.

We're all complex human beings, and if some of that complexity shows through, I think it's advantageous for the movie.

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.

I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.

I don't really have preferred roles except those with some complexity.

I have been interested in phenomena involving complexity, diversity and evolution since I was a young boy.

In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity.

My father taught me Basic and rudimentary C, I learned everything else on my own, including studying computational complexity on my own. That's more a function of my age than anything else though - back when I was in school there were hardly any programming classes.

We have a picture for how complexity arises, because if the universe is computationally capable, maybe we shouldn't be so surprised that things are so entirely out of control.

Magneto has a whole lot of complexity to him. Emotionally, he's coming from a very damaged place. I like the ambivalence of it. I want the audience leaving the theater wondering, asking the questions themselves rather than being spoon-fed like a lot of these super-villain characters.

The father's greatest folly is that he believes he can be a much more simple person than he is; he is not really able to deal with his own complexity as a human being.

Expansion means complexity and complexity decay.

I love to work. I love to have complexity.

Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.

Afghan society is very complex, and Afghanistan has a very complex culture. Part of the reason it has remained unknown is because of this complexity.

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.