Quotes

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn my inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind.

Short cuts make long delays. (Chapter 4: A Short Cut to Mushrooms)

Too many secrets. (clip)

Money’s most powerful ability is to allow bad people to continue doing bad things at the expense of those who don’t have it. (clip)

Mr. Abbott… are you interested in Setec Astronomy?

I’m interested in all kinds of astronomy. (clip)

The world isn’t run by weapons anymore, or energy or money. It’s run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data. It’s all just electrons. […] There’s a war out there, old friend, a world war. And it’s not about who’s got the most bullets. It’s about who controls the information: …what we see and hear, how we work, what we think. It’s all about the information. (clip)

There are no secrets in a computer.

Hackers do their homework!

You make the habit, and the habit makes you.

Do the hard work early.

Between the states of confusion and frustration is learning.

In the country of the blind, the one-eyed people run things and the two-eyed people are in for a rough time. We owe much of civilization to the insights and suffering of the tiny number of two-eyed people. (clip)

It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that. I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over. (clip)

Instead of using the machine to emancipate us from the organizational structures of the office, we just implemented those structures into the machine. Instead of using the screen to liberate us from the four sides of a flat sheet of paper, we just made an electronic version of paper. (clip)

Hierarchy is the official metaphysic of the computer world. Today’s hierarchical computer tools impose hierarchy where it may not exist; they can model the hierarchical aspects of the world but not the vital remainder. They teach beginners that it’s the necessary structure of computers and the universe. (clip)

The desktop was meant to ease white-collar workers into a new and unfamiliar technology, it wasn’t meant to be the pinnacle of user interaction for all time. We can do better, it just doesn’t occur to enough of us to demand better—to ask visionaries to imagine something new. (clip)