We can influence the future but not see it.

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.

Sky, wait.” The way his voice wraps around my name makes me wish the only word in his entire vocabulary way Sky.

Do good and be a good person because that’s just what the Lord expects. There just ain’t nothing special about being and doing good. It’s what the Lord expects…

And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. (“How to Write with Style”. Essay, 1985)

In moments of crisis, the initiative passes to those who are best prepared.

Some say his droppings have been found as far north as York, and that he has a full size tattoo of his face, on his face. All we know is he’s called the Stig.

Knowledge forbidden? Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord Envy them that? Can it be a sin to know? Can it be death?

Can't India dream of exporting teachers of high calibre? Can't we instil the desire in children to become great teachers?

Life is the beginning of death. Life is for the sake of death. Death is at once the end and the beginning—at once separation and closer union of the self. Through death the reduction is complete.

The sign on the bar said: 'girls- topless, bottomless', I went inside and there was nobody there!