Kevin Kelly Quotes

For every good thing you love ask yourself what your proper dose is.

Habit is far more dependable than inspiration. Make progress by making habits. Don’t focus on getting into shape. Focus on becoming the kind of person who never misses a workout.

We need a bit of top-down as well. Every predominantly bottom-up organization that lasts for more than a few years does so because it becomes a hybrid of bottom up plus some top down. I came to that conclusion through personal experience. I was a co–founding editor of Wired magazine. Editors perform a top-down function — we select, prune, solicit, shape, and guide the results of writers.

Embrace pronoia
which is the opposite of paranoia. Choose to believe that
the entire universe is conspiring
behind your back
to make you a success.

When robots and automation do our most basic work, making it relatively easy for us to be fed, clothed, and sheltered, then we are free to ask, “What are humans for?” Industrialization did more than just extend the average human lifespan. It led a greater percentage of the population to decide that humans were meant to be ballerinas, full-time musicians, mathematicians, athletes, fashion designers, yoga masters, fan-fiction authors, and folks with one-of-a-kind titles on their business cards. With the help of our machines, we could take up these roles — but, of course, over time the machines will do these as well. We’ll then be empowered to dream up yet more answers to the question “What should we do?” It will be many generations before a robot can answer that.

You don’t need more time because you already have all the time that you will ever get; you need more focus.

In the universal library, no book will be an island. It’s all connected.

Question makers will be seen, properly, as the engines that generate the new fields, new industries, new brands, new possibilities, new continents that our restless species can explore. Questioning is simply more powerful than answering.

Banning the inevitable usually backfires. Prohibition is at best temporary, and in the long run counterproductive.

What we want instead of conscious intelligence is artificial smartness.

processes — the engines of flux — are now more important than products. Our greatest invention in the past 200 years was not a particular gadget or tool but the invention of the scientific process itself.

We’ll use technology to produce commodities, and we’ll make

We are different from our animal ancestors in that we are not content to merely survive, but have been incredibly busy making up new itches that we have to scratch, creating new desires we’ve never had before. This discontent is the trigger for our ingenuity and growth.

Nature is thus more than a diverse gene bank harboring undiscovered herbal cures for future diseases — although

The perfect kind of art
to display in your home
are odd pieces
that a child is unlikely to forget.