"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."

"An event is not triggered by a chain of being, but by a field of causes spreading horizontally, like creeping tide."

"The future of machines is biology."

"A mind cannot possibly consider anything beyond what it can measure or calculate; without a body it can only consider itself. Without the interruptions of hellos from the eye, ear, tongue, nose, and finger, the evolving mind huddles in the corner picking its navel."

"The "I" of a vivisystem is a ghost. Like the transient form of a whirlpool held upright by a million spinning atoms of water, it can be scattered with a fingertip."

"We can only get smart things from stupid things."

"A system is anything that talks to itself."

"The only organization capable of unprejudiced growth, or unguided learning, is a network."

"A network nurtures small failures in order that large failures don't happen as often."

"To err is human; to manage error is system."

"There is nothing to be found in a beehive that is not submerged in a bee. And yet you can search a bee forever with cyclotron and fluoroscope, and you will never find a hive."

"Complexity must be grown from simple systems that already work."

"The central act of the coming era is to connect everything to everything."

"The world of our own making has become so complicated that we must turn to the world of the born to understand how to manage it."

"If I have seen further than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarfs."

"You don't need something more to get something more. That's what emergence means. Life can emerge from physics and chemistry plus a lot of accidents. The human mind can arise from neurobiology and a lot of accidents, the way the chemical bond arises from physics and certain accidents. Doesn't diminish the importance of these subjects to know they follow from more fundamental things plus accidents."

"Three principles — the conformability of nature to herself, the applicability of the criterion of simplicity, and the "unreasonable effectiveness" of certain parts of mathematics in describing physical reality — are thus consequences of the underlying law of the elementary particles and their interactions. Those three principles need not be assumed as separate metaphysical postulates. Instead, they are emergent properties of the fundamental laws of physics."

"Just because things get a little dingy at the subatomic level doesn't mean all bets are off."

"I thought of killing myself but soon decided that I could always try MIT and then kill myself later if it was that bad but that I couldn't commit suicide and then try MIT afterwards. The two operations, suicide and going to MIT, don't commute..."

"Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behaviour of the whole."

"Possibly we will find an elegant model, in agreement with observation, that yields the pattern of lepton masses as well as the pattern of quark bare masses and even relates hadrons and leptons. This is our dream; touch us!"

"That which is not forbidden is mandatory."

"The Feynman [Problem-Solving] Algorithm: (1) Write down the problem. (2) Think real hard. (3) Write down the solution."

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."

"One of the things that makes Gell-Mann so insufferable is that he is almost always right."

"I had barely sat down when he began to tell me... that science writers were "ignoramuses" and a "terrible breed" who invariably got things wrong: only scientists were really qualified to present their work to the masses. As time went on, I felt less offended, since it became clear that Gell-Mann held most of his scientific colleagues in contempt as well."

"The false report that measuring one of the photons immediately affects the other leads to all sorts of unfortunate conclusions. ...the alleged effect ...would violate the requirement of relativity theory that no signal... can travel faster than the speed of light. If it were to do so, it would appear to observers in some states of motion that the signal were traveling backward in time."

"The principal distortion disseminated ... is the implication, or even the explicit claim, that measuring the polarization, circular or plane, of one of the EPRB] photons somehow affects the other photon. In fact, the measurement does not cause any physical effect to propagate from one photon to the other. ...If on one branch of history, the plane polarization of one photon is measured and thereby specified with certainty, then on the same branch of history the circular polarization of the other photon is also specified with certainty. On a different branch of history the circular polarization of one of the photons may be measured, in which case the circular polarization of both photons is specified with certainty. On each branch, the situation is like that of Bertlmann's socks, described by John Bell... Bertlmann... always wears one pink and one green sock. If you see just one... you know immediately the other... Yet no signal is propogated... Likewise no signal passes from one photon to the other in the experiment that confirms quantum mechanics. No action at a distance takes place."

"While many questions about quantum mechanics are still not fully resolved, there is no point in introducing needless mystification where in fact no problem exists. Yet a great deal of recent writing about quantum mechanics has done just that."

"Niels Bohr brain-washed a whole generation of physicists into believing that the problem had been solved fifty years ago [Gell-Mann's comment on the Copenhagen interpretation]"

"His words touched their hearts."

"What a man! His sense of values takes one away from Paris and this greedy turmoil."