...Local prohibitions cannot block advances in military and commercial technology... Democratic movements for local restraint can only restrain the world's democracies, not the world as a whole.

In thinking about nanotechnology today, what's most important is understanding where it leads, what nanotechnology will look like after we reach the assembler breakthrough.

Likewise nanotechnology will, once it gets under way, depend on the tools we have then and our ability to use them, and not on the steps that got us there.

My work at MIT had focused on what we could build in space once we had inexpensive space transportation and industrial facilities in orbit. And this led to various sorts of work in space development.

The basic parts, the start-up molecules, can be supplied in abundance and don't have to be made by some elaborate process. That immediately makes things simpler.

I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.

On the molecular scale, you find it's reasonable to have a machine that does a million steps per second, a mechanical system that works at computer speeds.

In a sense, artificial intelligence will be the ultimate tool because it will help us build all possible tools.

Scientists study physical things, then describe them; engineers describe physical things, then build them.

Nature draws no line between living and nonliving.

Any powerful technology can be abused.

The proud person always wants to do the right thing, the great thing. But because he wants to do it in his own strength, he is fighting not with man, but with God.

When in doubt, favor compassionover certainty or tradition.

There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.

The fog comes on little cat feet.

Disney is our contemporary landscape. The best art will reflect that and challenge you. Disney comforts you, whereas the best art shakes up your comfort level and perception.

One of the real problems of society is that its far too atomized, what sociologists call secondary associations.

The most insidious of sophisms are usually repeated to justify immodesty and seem to be the same everywhere.

Words are a distraction to enlightenment. Getting rid of conceptual thinking means enlightenment.

Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar.

You should do something that will make your heart dance once a day. If you can't do that because you're too depressed, then do something that will make somebody else's heart dance.