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 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.

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.

I was the wings that kept her aloft, while the churning sea of reality nipped at her feet. I kept her from drowning, but I still felt bad, that her toes had to experience such dreadful cold.

What should a good children’s book be like? If you ask me, I can tell you after thinking long and hard: It must be good.

There is something about the fifteen-year-old mind -- a kind of skin or veil or walling off from feelings not your own.

I give myself sometimes admirable advice but I am incapable of taking it.

If I'm ever stuck on a respirator or a life support system, I definitely want to be unplugged -- but not until I'm down to a size eight.

Man is a disgusting thing. If you beat him he starts to scream, but if it is the other one who is beaten, then he constructs a theory.

I do small things. I try to do good things every day.

You might be a redneck if your mother has been involved in a fist fight at a high school sports event.

Every time we read to a child, we're sending a 'pleasure' message to the child's brain. You could even call it a commercial, conditioning the child to associate books and print with pleasure.

I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news. Alaska isn't a foreign country.