“You know what's truly weird about any financial crisis? We made it up. Currency, money, finance, they're all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning it's shining on the same physica...”

“In a world so redolent with wonder, how can we allow ourselves to conduct our daily lives with so little insight, such absence of dignity?”

“The future is unwritten. there are best case scenarios. There are worst-case scenarios. both of them are great fun to write about if you' re a science fiction novelist, but neither of them ever hap...”

“I meant, tell me all about this steampunk thing! Gavin broke in. How does that concept work out for you people, here in Brazil?You dont know about steampunk? shouted Xavier, dubiously.Well, I dont ...”

“Eliza opened her furry black satchel. She pulled out a portable CD player. Gav, look here. Once, I loved this machine. Because it plays all my CDs. But nobody buys music in the stores any more! Eve...”

“She had Google, and she had Wikipedia. She could look up anything obscure, any words or phrases that she didnt understand. A romance novel was just a book, while the Internet was the Internet. The ...”

“People don't always need a name.”

“I stole the very shiniest words and hoarded them all up until they made something worth having.”

“Sometimes a name seems our most arbitrary possession,and sometimes it seems like the grain in a rocklike a sculptor's hunk of Italian marble: Whack itand you might get either your first glimpse of ...”

“Now I existed solely thanks to the quantum paradox, my brain a collection of qubits in quantum superposition, encoding truths and memories, imagination and irrationality in opposing, contradictory ...”

“Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal. For example, most people consider that the greatest evidence of an event on...”

“Things get done only if the data we gather can inform and inspire those in a position to make difference.”

“I'd like to put in a vote for the intrinsic fascination of science.”

“When a species wants to tap the collective intelligence of a population, they don't take a poll; they don't take a vote. They form a real-time system.”

“For what were all these country patriots born? To hunt, and vote, and raise the price of corn?”