The technology of synthetic biology is currently accelerating at four times the rate of Moore's Law. It's been doing that since 2005, and it's likely to continue.

A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.

Humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years. [With de-extinction,] we have the ability now, and maybe the moral obligation, to repair some of the damage.

If you don't like bacteria, you're on the wrong planet.

Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.

A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.

The great problem with the future is that we die there. This is why it is so hard to take the future personally, especially the longer future, because that world is suffused with our absence.

All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.

If all of your electricity in your lifetime came from nuclear [energy], the waste from that lifetime of electricity would go in a Coke can.

One advantage of a solar collector in space: It would be some kind of origami thing that would unfold and be relatively light because it doesn't have gravity to deal with.

Do what's good for humans, modeled on how humans already do things; ignore what's convenient for computers.

Anyone in any walk of life who is content with mediocrity is untrue to himself and to American tradition.

He used both hands when he made the bear. Imagine a bear proceeding from the hands of God.

For the minority, what else is democracy than dictatorship?

A happy life consists in tranquility of mind.

Growing up in New England, being schooled and classically trained, it needed to shake, it needed to evolve.

For all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world.

Book marketing should be a planned process, an art if you will.

Everybody's a complex person. Everybody. Everybody's nuanced.

What else are our lives but a story we tell ourselves to find some sense in the pain ofliving?