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.

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.

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.

...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.

Nature draws no line between living and nonliving.

Any powerful technology can be abused.

Never misconceive that which is real

I don't want anything I don't deserve, but if they offer me more money, I'm not stupid.

Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin' day.

You can actively flee, then, and you can actively stay put.

Years ago the public used to hound me but now I can go shopping in peace

We don't need secrecy.

No other road, no other way, No day but today!

When I was a dancer, I felt this great sense of knowing my body and being in my body, and I think it's really easy as women to lose that and not really be one and loving it.

If there is something that opens horizons, it is precisely ignorance.