Climate change. Urbanization. Biotechnology. Those three narratives, still taking shape, are developing a long arc likely to dominate this century.

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.

It's good to let God pick a man for you. We don't do so well when we pick them ourselves. They end up lipsticks in a drawer, all those wrong colors you thought looked so good in the package.

We fear what we most desire.

Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart don’t know how to laugh either.

More and more, he heard his spine playing stick games through his skin, singing old dusty words, the words of all his years.

You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lines. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I'll rise.

Stop competing on price; compete on value. Deliver total consumer solutions, rather than just your piece of the solution.

Right from the very beginning, I knew I wanted to write palpably Scottish fiction.

He who pays no attention to what his neighbor does, says or thinks, preferring to concentrate on making his own actions appropriate and justifiable, better uses his time.

If a consensus of the majority is all it takes to determine what is right, then having and controlling information becomes extraordinarily important.

A public man must never forget that he loses his usefulness when he as an individual, rather than his policy, becomes the issue.