“Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.”

“I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence.”

“But every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence.”

“Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.”

“When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.”

“The essence of real creativity is a certain playfulness, a flitting from idea to idea without getting bogged down by fixated demands. Of course, you don’t always get what you thought you were asking for.”

“As Irving Good realised in 1965, machines with superhuman intelligence could repeatedly improve their design even further, triggering what Vernor Vinge called a 'singularity.'”

“It is an edged cliché that the world is most pleasant in the years of a Waning Sun. It is true that the weather is not so driven, that everywhere there is a sense of slowing down, and most places experience a few years where the summers do not burn and the winters are not yet overly fierce. It is the classic time of romance. It's a time that seductively beckons higher creatures to relax, postpone. It's the last chance to prepare for the end of the world.”

“Politics is good; when it works properly, disagreements get solved without people beating each other up. But when a regime knows its days are numbered, there's always the chance it may use its position to change the rules and make the debate it is losing irrelevant.”

“Tycoon had a peddler's talent for using words to redefine reality.”

“Sometimes, sitting here in the dark, slowly slowly creating strategy, she wondered if she was only fooling herself to think her plans were clever.”