“The Analytical Engine does not occupy common ground with mere 'calculating machines.' It holds a position wholly its own, and the considerations it suggests are more interesting in their nature.”

“Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently. It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science.”

“The science of operations, as derived from mathematics more especially, is a science of itself, and has its own abstract truth and value.”

“Mathematical science shows what is. It is the language of unseen relations between things. But to use and apply that language, we must be able fully to appreciate, to feel, to seize the unseen, the...”

“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform... But it is likely to exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on s...”

“Those who incline to very strictly utilitarian views may perhaps feel that the peculiar powers of the Analytical Engine bear upon questions of abstract and speculative science rather than upon thos...”

“It was the truth, and like any truth, it was powerful.”

“Their Silver war is being paid for in Red blood.”

“We've already been killed, all of us. It happened so long ago, we've forgotten it.”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”

“At the end of the day the only thing that stays are your words. They linger while you disappear. Hanging in the air like they're on a clothesline, oh how I wish I could let them go.”

“Only wise men look for new wisdom.”

“This person has just arrived on this planet, knows nothing about it, has no standards by which to judge it. This person does not care what it becomes. It is eager to become absolutely anything it i...”