"It's a "hits" economy where resources flow to those that show some life. If a new novel, new product, or new service begins to succeed it is fed more; if it falters its left to wither."

"In the network economy, success is self-reinforcing; it obeys the law of increasing returns. The great innovation of Silicon Valley is not the wowie-zowie hardware and software it has invented. Silicon Valley's greatest "product" is the social organisation of its companies, and most important, the tangled web of former jobs, intimate colleagues, information leakage from one firm to the next, rapid company life cycles, and agile e mail culture. This social web, suffused into the warm hardware of jelly bean chips and copper neurons, creates a network economy."

"In the industrial economy success was self-limiting; it obeyed the law of decreasing returns."

"The value of a network explodes as its membership increases, and then the value explosion sucks in yet more members, compounding the result."

"Mathematics says the sum value of a network increases as the square of the number of members. In other words, as the number of nodes in a network increases arithmetically, the value of the network increases exponentially. Adding a few more members can dramatically increase the value of the network."

"The great benefits reaped by the new economy in the coming decades will be due in large part to exploring and exploiting the power of decentralised and autonomous networks."

"At present there is far more to be gained by pushing the boundaries of what can be done by the bottom than by focusing on what can be done at the top."

"Without some element of governance from the top, bottom-up control will freeze when options are many. Without some element of leadership, the many at the bottom will be paralysed with choices."

"Complete surrender to the bottom is not what embracing swarm power is about."

"The aim of swarm power is superior performance in a turbulent environment."

"The surest way to smartness is through massive dumbness."

"Dumb parts, properly constituted into a swarm, yield smart results."

"When we permit any object to transmit a small amount of data and to receive input from its neighborhood, we change an inert object into an animated node."

"We are connecting everything to everything."

"The dynamic of our society, and particularly our new economy, will increasingly obey the logic of networks. Understanding how networks work will be the key to understanding how the economy works."

"As the world of chips and glass fibers and wireless waves goes, so goes the rest of the world."

"As tremendous as the influence of financial inventions have been, in the influence of network inventions will be as great, or greater."

"Communication – which in the end is what the digital technology and media are all about – is not just a sector of the economy. Communication IS the economy."

"The tricks of the intangible trade will become the tricks of your trade."

"The apparent veil between the organic and the manufactured has crumpled to reveal that the two really are, and have always been, of one being."

"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."

"I loathe the misogynist assumption that a woman’s faults must be the direct result of a man’s actions, but I find myself incapable of separating Walker’s fraught marriage from her hatred of Judaism. She doesn’t separate the two either. In her 2014 book, The Cushion in the Road, Walker writes about meeting an elderly Palestinian woman in the Occupied Territories. The woman accepted a gift from Walker, and then bestowed a blessing upon her, “May God protect you from the Jews,” to which Walker responded, “It’s too late, I already married one”...I wonder how Walker could put the burden of her trauma onto us — black Jewish women. What is her responsibility to her daughter, and what is my responsibility to Alice Walker? Many of my black and Jewish friends refuse to even judge her. Perhaps it is I who know nothing, nothing at all. I know that I will not cancel Alice Walker. I can’t erase the incredible work she created. I will continue to read The Color Purple and her other works. But I will never be able to rid myself of the ghost of this poem. It would be irresponsible and self-hating of me to do so. I will read and teach Walker’s work with love, but this poem will always be there, fluttering in the wind like a torn-out page of the Talmud."

"This ninny [referring to one particularly hostile black author] implied that The Color Purple would absolutely destroy black Americans. But it's interesting that we've survived rapes, slavery, ridicule, abuse, discrimination and you tell us we are so weak that a book is going to destroy us. Please!"

"There are some young Black women, however, that I particularly want to talk about, younger than I in any case, young Black women who are writing, who are inspirational to me...I'm impressed certainly with Alice Walker."

"Today, great writers from minority groups in the U.S. are finding their voice in the wonderful, rich imagery of magic realism. Writers such as Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Amy Tan all have a unique, rich way of writing that can be described as magic realism. These women are among those who have broken away from the style of writing that defines most of the fiction coming from industrialized countries: that pragmatic, minimalist style and way of facing reality in which the only things one dares talk about are those things one can control. What cannot be controlled is denied."

"But please remember, especially in these times of group-think and the right-on chorus, that no person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow and be perceived as fully blossomed as you were intended."

"I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering bout the big things and asting bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, he say, the more I love."

"I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it."

"I think Africans are very much like white people back home, in that they think they are the center of the universe and that everything that is done is done for them."

"The world is changing, I said. It is no longer a world just for boys and men."

"We know a roofleaf is not Jesus Christ, but in its own humble way, is it not God?"