There is so much blandness and grayness out there, people want to be able to say "it's mine." They want to customize their cars like they customize a jeans jacket.

Give ordinary people the right tools, and they will design and build the most extraordinary things.

Uncertainty is intrinsic to the process of finding out what you don't know, not a weakness to avoid.

The real opportunity is to harness the inventive power of the world to locally design and produce solutions to local problems.

Computer science is one of the worst things that ever happened to either computers or to science.

Chaos has come to be associated with the study of anything complex, but, in fact, the mathematical techniques are directly applicable only to simple systems that appear to be complex.

Of old sat Freedom on the heights The thunders breaking at her feet: Above her shook the starry lights; She heard the torrents meet.

Chess is the gymnasium of the mind.

God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.

In a long race, if I'm worried about fatigue, my concentration is the first thing to go.

Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed.

The only person you resent is yourself.

Friendship is not diminished by distance or time, by imprisonment or war, by suffering or silence. It is in these things that it roots most deeply.

Not since Lord of the Flies has a novelist written with such perceptiveness about the potential for harm that lurks within the innocence of childhood.

Every book takes you to the terror, that terrible place of possible failure.

People like myself say, 'Fix the problem. Put him in the general [prison] population. The moral prisoners will deal with him in a way we don't have the nerve to do.'