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.

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.

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.

Because you’ve survived, there is a next strategy.

This should have been a red flag, I realize in retrospect. Working really hard on anything is, by definition, not cool.

God's mill grinds slow but sure.

That queen of secrecy, the violet.

As a child, I remember being in the pool at this pool party and having to get out of the pool to watch Nixon resign. My first idea of a president was of a guy who was a crook.

If we wish to wash our hands of the Jews blasphemy and not share in their guilt, we have to part company with them. They must be driven from our country.

Love never goes away; it just changes form.

The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction.

I hate having to wait. I've got the thing done. I just want to see what happens.

I have a large number of enthusiastic admirers of my art. And they all sing a hymn in praise from the bottom of their hearts for my art.