And that because the moving parts are a million times smaller than the ones we’re familiar with, they move a million times faster, just as a smaller tuning fork produces a higher pitch than a...

It’s very much like filmmaking always is-you’re always asked to do something that you’re not sure you know how to do. So you make an educated guess as to what you think will work and...

Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.

The game isn’t over till the clock says zero.

My instincts are always against people who want to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things.

Nevertheless, during the sixty years of the twentieth century many problems have come increasingly into the realm of acceptable public discussion.

In the space of three weeks, I met a fair bunch of the guys who were just starting those little programmers’ co-ops, and everybody was talking about starting businesses.

It was a glimpse into some kind of wonderful world where electricity and mathematics and engineering and nice diagrams all came together.

This could be done in part, because the equipment was very inexpensive. Not much money was involved in tooling so that basic changes of that type could be accomplished.

One could not pluck a flower without troubling a star.

The pains of childbirth were altogether different from the enveloping effects of other kinds of pain. These were pains one could follow with one’s mind.

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.

All living things are gnarly, in that they inevitably do things that are much more complex than one might have expected.

These rovers are living on borrowed time. We’re so past warranty on them. You try to push them hard every day because we’re living day to day.

I don’t feel that an atmosphere of debate and total disagreement and argument is such a bad thing. It makes for a vital and alive field.

A total nuclear freeze is counterproductive – especially now, when technology is rapidly changing and the Soviets have some important strategic advantages.

It may not always be profitable at first for businesses to be online, but it is certainly going to be unprofitable not to be online.

I was invited to join the newly established Central Chemical Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1954 and was able to establish a small research group in organic chemistry, housed in temporary...

Five years ago, people were crying and feeling the Japanese were about to take over the Earth. I don’t hear that kind of talk anymore.

An investigator starts research in a new field with faith, a foggy idea, and a few wild experiments. Eventually the interplay of negative and positive results guides the work. By the time the research is...

Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.

Each generation of scientists stands upon the shoulders of those who have gone before.

As with sound, images are subjective. You and I may not see the same color red as red, but we will probably agree that the image on the screen is a digital image or film...

If we suppose that many natural phenomena are in effect computations, the study of computer science can tell us about the kinds of natural phenomena that can occur.

The future of the world, dependent as it is upon atomic energy, requires more understanding and knowledge about the atom.

I was trained in the ’50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley’s soul and such things.

Human and moral factors must always be considered. They must never be missing from policies and from public discussion.

Having seen a non-market economy, I suddenly understood much better what I liked about a market economy.

Modern democracy was no doubt the most wholesome and needed reaction against the abuses of absolutism and of a selfish, often corrupt, bureaucracy.

It’s true that the original idea was mine, but what you see today is the work of probably tens of thousands of the world’s best engineers, all concentrating on improving the product, reducing the cost,...

In many places where you have these kinds of people – very strong, very confident people – the atmosphere is frenetic and tense and unpleasant.

As long as any adult thinks that he, like the parents and teachers of old, can become introspective, invoking his own youth to understand the youth before him, he is lost.

Any powerful technology can be abused.

Once the image was in the digital environment, one of the problems was, we had no means to reproduce the color spectrum, grey scale, and contrast that film produces, without converting the digital file to...

Selling a book or story has never become absolutely automatic for me.

I probably visualize myself, the shots I’m going to get in the game, how I’m going to play defense, what we have to do to stop the other team’s best player, what it’s going to...

People keep asking how anthropology is different from sociology, and everybody gets nervous.

New developments in weapon systems during the 1950s and early 1960s created a situation that was most dangerous, and even conducive to accidental war.

Since I became chairman, I’ve tried to turn EFF into civil liberties and responsibilities.

The Nobel Prize, so long regarded in our science as the highest reward a man’s work can earn, must bring to its recipient a most solemn sense of his debt to his fellow scientists and...

Today, people tend to credit me with having the original idea and made the first circuits.

Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long...

Sooner or later I’m going to die, but I’m not going to retire.

Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines – of molecular machines that are part of replicators – and so it comes from an area that already raises some of the issues that nanotechnology will...

At present, however, I don’t think the Net is a very good medium for books, books should really be inexpensive lightweight paperbacks you can bang around.

When we opened our eyes, we saw bedrock exposed in the walls of the crater.

I don’t have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style.

Anything that reduces war-related destruction should not be considered altogether immoral.

But there is a corollary to freedom and that’s personal responsibility, and the real challenge is how you generate that personal responsibility without imposing it.

In the summer of 1965 I was invited to join Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio and returned to academic life as professor with the added responsibility of becoming also Department Chairman.