"For a smart material to be able to send out a more complex signal it needs to be nonlinear. If you hit a tuning fork twice as hard it will ring twice as loud but still at the same frequency. That's a linear response.

"It's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information."

"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts..."

"The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it."

"Congress will pass a law restricting public comment on the Internet to individuals who have spent a minimum of one hour actually accomplishing a specific task while on line."

"I find sitting at a specially equipped desk in front of some pretty ugly plastics and staring at a little window is a very unnatural event."

"What the country needs are a few labor-making inventions."

"Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully."

"Just as we could have rode into the sunset, along came the Internet, and it tripled the significance of the PC."

"Leaders have to act more quickly today. The pressure comes much faster."