Kevin Kelly Quotes

If you are not falling down occasionally, you are just coasting.

Weird but true: If you continually give, you will continually have.

Don’t reserve you kindest praise
for a person until their eulogy. Tell them while they are alive
when it makes a difference to them
Write it in a letter they can keep.

Every time a closed system opens, it begins to interact more directly with other existing systems, and therefore acquires all the value of those systems.

Eventually technical standards will become as important as laws.

The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation. You no longer expend energy deciding whether to do it. You just do it. Good habits can range from telling the truth to flossing.

"There is no "I" for a person, for a beehive, for a corporation, for an animal, for a nation, for any living thing. The "I" of a vivisystem is a ghost, an ephemeral shroud."

Paradoxically, the worst evils in the world are committed by those who truly believe they are combating evil. Be extremely vigilant with yourself when facing evil.

Nicholas Negroponte, head of MIT’s Media Lab, once quipped in the 1990s that the urinal in the men’s restroom was smarter than his computer because it knew he was there and would flush when he left, while his computer had no idea he was sitting in front of it all day.

Pablo Picasso brilliantly anticipated this inversion in 1964 when he told the writer William Fifield, “Computers are useless. They only give you answers.” So

the laws of nature are rigged in favor of life.” In this view, “life emerges from a soup in the same dependable way that a crystal emerges from a saturated solution,

What we want instead of conscious intelligence is artificial smartness.

What humans can't engineer, evolution can.

You’ll learn a lot more if you ask people “how are you sleeping?” instead of “how are you doing?”

The visitor waiting for the demo stands in the center of an actual real nondescript waiting room. A pair of large dark goggles rest on a stool. The visitor dons the goggles and is immediately immersed into a virtual version of the same room she was standing in, with the same nondescript paneling and chairs. Not much is changed from her point of view. She can look around. The scene looks a little coarser through the goggles. But slowly the floor of the room begins to drop away, leaving the visitor standing on a plank that now floats over the receding floor 30 meters below. She is asked to walk out farther on the plank suspended high over a most realistic pit. The realism of the scene has been improved over the years so that by now the response of the visitor is very predictable. Either she cannot move her feet or she trembles as she inches forward, palms sweating.