"Our mission as humans is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, and to find full contentment, but to expand the possibilities for others. Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others: our children, and all children to come."
"The world of our own making has become so complicated that we must turn to the world of the born to understand how to manage it."
"The central act of the coming era is to connect everything to everything."
"Complexity must be grown from simple systems that already work."
"There is nothing to be found in a beehive that is not submerged in a bee. And yet you can search a bee forever with cyclotron and fluoroscope, and you will never find a hive."
"To err is human; to manage error is system."
"A network nurtures small failures in order that large failures don't happen as often."
"The only organization capable of unprejudiced growth, or unguided learning, is a network."
"A system is anything that talks to itself."
"We can only get smart things from stupid things."
"The "I" of a vivisystem is a ghost. Like the transient form of a whirlpool held upright by a million spinning atoms of water, it can be scattered with a fingertip."
"A mind cannot possibly consider anything beyond what it can measure or calculate; without a body it can only consider itself. Without the interruptions of hellos from the eye, ear, tongue, nose, and finger, the evolving mind huddles in the corner picking its navel."
"The future of machines is biology."
"An event is not triggered by a chain of being, but by a field of causes spreading horizontally, like creeping tide."
"Life never falls, but never gets out of falling. It is poised in a persistent state of almost-fell."
"We don't have a word for learning and teaching at the same time, but our schooling would improve if we did."
"Artificial complex systems will be deliberately infused with organic principles simply to keep them going."
"Biology always wins in any blending of organic and machine."
"One can imagine the future shape of companies by stretching them until they are pure network. It will be hard at times to tell who is working for whom."
"A company cannot be a learning company without also being a teaching company."
""It works, why worry?" is life's deepest philosophy."
"In network economics, more brings more."
"Anything that can hold an electronic charge can hold a fiscal charge."
"There's nothing more addictive than being a god."
"The great irony of god games is that letting go is the only way to win."