“I don’t understand why when we destroy something created by man we call it vandalism, but when we destroy something by nature we call it progress.”

“When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a vandal, when he wantonly destroys one of the works of god we call him a sportsman.”

“When we make something hard to use, people get upset. They become so angry that they want to destroy it. We don’t want to create things that people will want to destroy”

“To understand the nature of the Revolution we must call it "progress"; and we may define progress by the word "tomorrow".”

“We don’t even survive in the memories of the living. Science has destroyed that myth. Whenever we remember something, what we’re doing is remembering the last time we remembered it; our memory doesn’t go back to the original notch, the first one was cut, but to the last one. Human memory is virtual, like that of a computer. When we open a file we’re not opening it as it was when we first created it, but as it was the last time we used it. It is called hypercathexis and is our brain’s most sophisticated recourse when it comes to confronting pain.”

“Calling something exotic emphasizes its distance from the reader. We don’t refer to things as exotic if we think of them as ordinary. We call something exotic if it’s so different that we see no way to emulate it or understand how it came to be. We call someone exotic if we aren’t especially interested in viewing them as people — just as objects representing their culture.”