Quotes from Ramez Naam

His body had thrown a bewildering array of kicks and strikes at the punching bag, most of which he was sure had hurt him more than they would have damaged any real-world assailant.

After the debacle of the party, debugging the code running in his own brain was bliss. His body lay safely in his bed. His mind exulted inside the Nexus development environment, tracing the events that had led to the fault. Here he was in his element.

to have the right future, we need to lay down the right past, for that future to build on.

The Chandler Act (aka the Emerging Technological Threats Act of 2032) is the opening salvo in a new War on Science. To understand the future course of this war, one need only look at the history of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. Like those two manufactured "wars", this one will be never-ending, freedom-destroying, counterproductive, and ultimately understood to have caused far more damage than the supposed threat it was aimed at ever could have.

The evolution of language marked a great leap forward for our species. It boosted our cognitive abilities by webbing us together into larger, more powerful group minds. I believe that another quantum step in human cognition awaits us on the other side of direct linkage of our brains and minds to one another." - Somdet Phra Ananda

You're just a small piece. Death doesn't matter. The whole lives on.

The way to find the cause of an event is to understand who had the most to gain from it.

In a secret barracks on the outskirts of Shanghai, three dozen identically faced men moaned uneasily in their sleep, tossed and turned from side to side. They dreamt of violence. They dreamt of fire. They dreamt of death. They woke in a ripple of consciousness. Their mother had died. Their mother was in danger. They rose as one, checked their weapons, checked their bodies. Somewhat calmed by this, they returned to their bunks and eventually to sleep. Their mother might need them soon.

Everything important in our world requires the efforts of large numbers of individuals. Indeed, to overcome our planet's most pressing problems, we are required to think not as individuals, not even as nations, but as a single humanity.

I'm saying that Nexus may defy human understanding because it is not the product of normal human thought,"Holtzman said. "It is the product of posthuman thought.

Rangan came to the surface in the mid-afternoon of Inauguration Day, in the trunk of a car driven by a terrified aide of Senator Barbara Engels, Chairwoman of the Senate Select Oversight Committee on Homeland Security.

Will was very British and on his way to very drunk.

All that matters is what we do with the instant we are given.

Well, that was a huge step. We had an instruction set. We could move data around. We could do conditionals. We could do most of the things a simple chip can do. We had the visual cortex for our display. The auditory cortex for our speakers. The motor cortex for our input. On top of that, we could write any damn software we wanted.

That would've been way too hard. We wanted to do neuroscience, not operating system development. So

Only a fool is always certain,

Never trust a soldier who's eager to go to war.

The right to determine your individual destiny belongs in your hands, and no one else's.

Fortune Town IT Mall and buy software and electronics of all sorts very, very, very cheap,

it can be tempting to hoard knowledge, to use it as a way to gain advantage over others. But if we seek to serve our fellow man, we must spread the things we learn as far and wide as possible. To empower the downtrodden, we must put knowledge in their hands.

When the CIA is the place you turn to for moral clarity, Nakamura thought, you might have a problem.

Broad dissemination and individual choice turn most technologies into a plus. If only the elites have access, it's a dystopia.

When the chips are down, when you have to weigh what you believe in against your own safety – that's when you find out what you're made of.

She let her practice speak through her body. She was a stalk of bamboo. She was a summer storm. She was a whirlwind. She was made for this.