"We should not be surprised that life, having subjugated the bulk of inert matter on Earth, would go on to subjugate technology, and bring it also under its reign of constant evolution."

"No one has been more wrong about computerization than George Orwell in 1984. So far, nearly everything about the actual possibility-space which computers have created indicates they are the end of authority and not its beginning."

"The hardest lesson for humans to learn: that organic complexity will entail organic time."

"When everything happens at once, wide and fast moving problems simply route around any central authority. Therefore overall governance must arise from the most humble interdependent acts done locally in parallel, and not from a central command."

"We are all steering."

"We cannot import evolution and learning without exporting control."

"Telling the future is what organisms are for."

"As life evolves it unbinds from the inorganic and interacts more with the organic."

"Inconsistency is an inevitable trait of any self-sustaining system built up out of consistent parts."

"The quickest route to describing a seed's output is to sprout it."

"Evolution is a technological, mathematical, informational, and biological process rolled into one. It could almost be said to be a law of physics, a principle that reigns over all created multitudes, whether they have genes or not."

"The genes harbor their own wisdom and their own inertia."

"Hereditary information does not exist independently of its embodiment."

"If machines knew as much about each other as we know about each other (even in our privacy), the ecology of machines would be indomitable."

"The work of managing a natural environment is inescapably a work of local knowledge."

"Urbanization is the advent of edge species."

"Life is in the business of making its environment agreeable for life."

"In turbulence is the preservation of the world."

"What little time left is in this century is rehearsal time for the chief psychological chore of the 21st century: letting go, with dignity."

"Life is a verb not a noun."

"The story of automation is the story of a one-way shift from human control to automatic control."

"Organisms are self-causing agencies. Every self is a tautology: self-evident, self-referential, self-centered, and self-created."

"Life is the strange loop of a snake releasing itself from its own grip, unmouthing an ever fattening tail tapering up to an ever increasingly large mouth, birthing an ever larger tail, filling the universe with this strangeness."

"Dying creatively is the hallmark of vivisystems."

"The great secret which life has kept from us is that once born, life is immortal. Once launched, it cannot be eradicated."

"Life is a transforming flood that fills up empty containers and then spills out of them on its way to fill up more. The shape and number of vessels submerged by the flood doesn't make a bit of difference."

"An ecosystem is more like a conference than a community -- indefinite, pluralistic, tolerant, and in constant flux."

"Memory is a reenactment of perception, indistinguishable from the original act of knowing."

"The capacity to evolve must be evolved itself. Evolution has been, and will keep on, exploring the space of possible evolutions. Organisms, memes, the whole ball of wax are only evolution's way to keep evolving."

"Life-as-it-could-be is a territory we can only study by first creating it."

"We want a machine that is constantly remaking itself."

"The nature of life is to delight in all possible loopholes. Every creature is in some way hacking a living by reinterpreting the rules."

"Animals are robots that work. Toons are simply robots without hard bodies."

""Correct" is a property of small systems."

"It is the great irony of life that a mindless act repeated in sequence can only lead to greater depths of absurdity, while a mindless act performed in parallel by a swarm of individuals can, under the proper conditions, lead to all that we find interesting."

"What humans can't engineer, evolution can."

"Any highly evolved form is beautiful."

"The great irony of god games is that letting go is the only way to win."

"There's nothing more addictive than being a god."

"Anything that can hold an electronic charge can hold a fiscal charge."

"In network economics, more brings more."

""It works, why worry?" is life's deepest philosophy."

"A company cannot be a learning company without also being a teaching company."

"One can imagine the future shape of companies by stretching them until they are pure network. It will be hard at times to tell who is working for whom."

"Biology always wins in any blending of organic and machine."

"Artificial complex systems will be deliberately infused with organic principles simply to keep them going."

"We don't have a word for learning and teaching at the same time, but our schooling would improve if we did."

"Life never falls, but never gets out of falling. It is poised in a persistent state of almost-fell."