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"anyone who thinks clearly, and has a genuine mastery of his subject matter, also expresses himself clearly and understandably. Someone who expresses himself in obscure and high-flown terms, if he is not a pure philosophical idea-constructor or a fantasist of religious mysticism, only shows that he is himself unclear about the matter, or has reason to avoid clarity"

Faraday, in a letter to Maxwell: "I have always found that you could convey to me a perfectly clear idea of your conclusions, which, though they may give me no full understanding of the steps of your process, give me the results neither above nor below the truth.. would it not be a good thing if mathematicians.. were to give us the results in this popular, useful, working state, as well as in that which is their own"

"I soon learned to scent out that which was able to lead to fundamentals and to turn aside from everything else, from the multitude of things which clutter up the mind and divert it from the essential"

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind"

"Perhaps, someday, solitude will come to be properly recognised and appreciated as the teacher of personality... The individual who has experienced solitude will not easily become a victim of mass suggestion", Einstein, in a letter to Queen Elizabeth of Belgium, 1939

Einstein, writing for a peace meeting held in 1938: "The triumph of barbarism and inhumanity can only lead to a situation... in which America herself will be forced to fight, and this under circumstances vastly more unfavourable than most people can possibly anticipate today"

"people, when they’re writing, forget for the most part to go deeper inside themselves and experience the full import and truth of what they’re writing... people need to live in the subject matter fully and really experience it every time, every day, with every article they write, and then words will be found that are fresh, that come from the heart and go to the heart"

'I want to affect people like a clap of thunder, to inflame their minds with the breadth of my vision, the strength of my conviction and the power of my expression'

'I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of... and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?'

'How does one hate a country, or love one?... I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks... but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?'

'There are more servants, more services in Orgoreyn than in Karhide. This is because all Orgota are employees of the state; the state must find employment for all citizens, and does so. This, at least, is the accepted explanation, though like most economic explanations it seems, under certain lights, to omit the main point.'

'So they have gone very slowly. At any one point in their history a hasty observer would say that all technological progress and diffusion had ceased. Yet it never has. Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.'

'There is no division of humanity into strong and weak halves, protective/protected, dominant/submissive, owner/chattel, active/passive. In fact the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter.'

'The only things that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next'

'if it were proven that there is no God, there would be no religion... But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion'

‘No, I don’ t mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political, not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression. It grows in us, that fear. It grows in us year by year.'

'The physical union of human and machine, long dreaded and long anticipated, has been an accomplished fact for decades, though we tend not to see it. We tend not to see it because we are it, and because we still employ Newtonian paradigms that tell us that “physical” has only to do with what we can see, or touch.'

'history...is a species of speculative fiction itself, prone to changing interpretation and further discoveries'

'If you wish to know an era, study its most lucid nightmares. In the mirrors of our darkest fears, much will be revealed. But don’t mistake those mirrors for road maps to the future, or even to the present.'

'A fashionably dressed man in Floral Street, outside Paul Smith, was the first headset-equipped cellphone user I ever mistook for a talkative madman'

Gibson fails to predict the great firewall: 'Are the faceless functionaries who keep Shonen Knife and Cosmo out of straying local hands going to allow access to the geography-smashing highways and byways of whatever the Internet is becoming? More important, will denial of such access, in the coming century, be considered even a remotely viable possibility by even the dumbest of policemen?'

'Singapore is curiously, indeed gratifyingly devoid of certain aspects of creativity. I say gratifyingly because I soon found myself taking a rather desperate satisfaction in any evidence that such a very tightly run ship would lack innovative élan', Wired, 1993

On collective media, 'the unthinking construction of a species-wide, time-defying, effectively immortal prosthetic memory. Extensions of the human brain and nervous system capable of surviving the death of the individual - perhaps even of surviving the death of the species. The start of building what would become civilization, cities, cinema.'

'This perpetual toggling between nothing being new, under the sun, and everything having recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my work' Dead man sings, Forbes, 1998

'all of us, to some extent, wish to be in heavy rotation'

'When we turn on the radio in a New York hotel room and hear Elvis singing "Heartbreak Hotel," we are seldom struck by the peculiarity of our situation: that a dead man sings'

'The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!'

“I thought as much, sir, when you mentioned rabbits. The thing about rabbits, sir, is that everybody has one. I’d like to see you step up to the goat-class where I feel you belong. Frankly you look more like a goat man to me.”

“What are the advantages to goats? ”

The animal salesman said, “The distinct advantage of a goat is that it can be taught to butt anyone who tries to steal it.”

"Nothing depressed him more than the moments in which he contrasted his current mental powers with what he had formerly possessed. Every day he declined in sagacity and vigor. He and the thousands of other specials throughout Terra, all of them moving toward the ash heap. Turning into living kipple."

"Like the androids, it had no ability to appreciate the existence of another. He had never thought of this before, the similarity between an electric animal and an andy. The electric animal, he pondered, could be considered a subform of the other, a kind of vastly inferior robot. Or, conversely, the android could be regarded as a highly developed, evolved version of the ersatz animal. Both viewpoints repelled him."