A mere index hunter, who held the eel of science by the tail.

A mere index hunter, who held the eel of science by the tail.

The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody
appreciates how difficult it was.

The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody
appreciates how difficult it was.

The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

Encryption...is a powerful defensive weapon for free people. It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless of who is running read more

Encryption...is a powerful defensive weapon for free people. It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless of who is running the government... It's hard to think of a more powerful, less dangerous tool for liberty.

Since the invention of the microprocessor, the cost of moving a byte of information around has fallen on the order read more

Since the invention of the microprocessor, the cost of moving a byte of information around has fallen on the order of 10-million-fold. Never before in the human history has any product or service gotten 10 million times cheaper-much less in the course of a couple decades. That's as if a 747 plane, once at $150 million a piece, could now be bought for about the price of a large pizza.

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something read more

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.

To the natural philosopher, to whom the whole extent of nature
belongs, all the individual branches of science constitute read more

To the natural philosopher, to whom the whole extent of nature
belongs, all the individual branches of science constitute the
links of an endless chain, from which not one can be detached
without destroying the harmony of the whole.

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate read more

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas... that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.

The consequences of things are not always proportionate to the apparent magnitude of those events that have produced them. Thus read more

The consequences of things are not always proportionate to the apparent magnitude of those events that have produced them. Thus the American Revolution, from which little was expected, produced much; but the French Revolution, from which much was expected, produced little.