"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"For my generation, formed equally by the liberating exuberance of rock and roll and the imperial brutality of Vietnam, the question of where we stood on America was inescapable. Was this nation (it!) the enemy, tyrannical abroad, hopelessly racist at home, and in the process of choking to death on a glut of consumer goods? Or were we (we!), however corrupted by various forms of power, still the source of a vital democratic impulse that fed cultural dissidence and subverted authoritarian values all over the world? I took the latter position, and through the '6os and '7os, exploring its paradoxes was a central concern of my writing."

"Fearless, sweet reason, exacting style, and an unbounded sensuous spirit make Ellen Willis's radical essays among the finest that America has ever produced."

"Ellen Willis was one of the few great critics of her generation. She was theoretically sophisticated, historically informed, and courageous in her commitment to freedom. Her prose was lyrical and melodic, and she was always unsettling!"

"Like other eminent polemical writers, Willis has always had the knack of turning radical ideas into common sense."

"Through brilliant, often polemical, writings, the feminist and educator Ellen Willis, who has died of lung cancer aged 64, was central to the cultural debates and political controversies of the United States over nearly four decades...Willis brought lucidity and style to the most controversial and baffling cultural issues—her thought was a beacon of clarity. For those of us fortunate enough to have been her comrades, anticipating her insights was part of what kept us returning to meetings month after month, year after year."

"Ellen Willis has always been one of the sharpest political writers on the left...one of the most profound as well."

"Ellen Willis, who died in November at the age of 64, was such a unique and wonderful set of contradictions—or seeming contradictions. She was a staunchly radical feminist who believed in pleasure, happiness, and freedom. She was a fierce polemicist on the page who, in person, was often painfully shy. She loved long nineteenth-century novels, but was an ardent reader of the tabloids. She was one of the most instinctively ethical people I have ever known, and yet she hated any hint of sanctimony or self-righteousness. She was a dyed-in-the-wool bohemian who was obsessed with real estate—which is to say, she was a true New Yorker. And for me, part of the fun, and the adventure, of being Ellen’s friend and colleague was discovering that these disparate characteristics weren’t really contradictions at all: that somehow, in her inimitable way, she had put all the pieces together…Much has been written about the merging of high and low culture, but Ellen really lived that mix. She approached just about everything—George Eliot and The Sopranos, Herbert Marcuse and Lou Reed—with equal thoughtfulness, seriousness, dignity, and care. Ellen lacked both pretense and condescension. Her writings on pop culture weren’t a form of slumming; she genuinely—though not naively—believed in the emancipatory possibilities of the demotic, because she had experienced them herself. And though Ellen, like so many of us, was increasingly alienated from the culture in which she lived, she never became a mandarin. (In a 2005 piece, she chided Susan Sontag as a “curmudgeon” with a “free-floating animus” toward pop.) Up until almost the moment of Ellen’s death, the world, and its possibilities, held her interest…"