"Copernicus published his manuscript in 1543 just in time for the council of Trent. So you're a church father and what this new system of Copernicus is saying is this: The Earth moves, although the Bible says it doesn't. It's no longer at the center of God's universe, although the Bible says it is. It's a planet, so heaven and Earth are no longer separate. And Aristotle was wrong, although church authority depends on him being right. You're a church father and you pick up this subversive, heretical, revolutionary piece of lunacy and you start foaming at the mouth, right? Wrong. When the council finally got around to reading Copernicus they were delighted. His new system had made calendar reform more precise. And the business of it turning every basic belief about the universe on its head? A mere fairytale since from the church's viewpoint he was talking nonsense. Astronomy drew lines and circles in the sky but they weren't really there, they're a mathematical convenience for measuring or teaching astronomy. While the Copernicus system might well have been brilliant mathematics, no one thought for a minute that he was actually suggesting the earth was whizzing around the sun. That kind of talk would blow holes in everything."

“Edison invented inventing.”

“You can only know where you're going if you know where you've been.”

“The name of the game here, and in all the institutions that run your life, is keeping order, because if the institutions didn't do that, it would be the end of civilization as we know it, wouldn't it? So, the institutions are usually old-fashioned; don't like change.”

“James Burke: The Knowledge Web; Voices From The Smithsonian Associates - 1 hour audio lecture”

“Today, the nuclear bomb is like a Sword of Damocles hanging over us. Will it fall again?”

“Karnak was the first great statement of what technology could do with unlimited manpower and the approval of the gods. Ironically, the modern equivalent lies, again, in the desert. This time, the nomads also settled by a river... a river of oil. But what had took the pharaohs 4,000 years to build took the Kuwaitis 4,000 days. What's happened in Kuwait, the change from a nomadic existence to being able to buy and use everything modern technology has to offer has come in much less than one generation. Kuwait represents the immense power of technology used in a way most of us have never experienced, because we've lived with the kind of change it can bring for more than a hundred years. Here it's been focused. Change has been instant and total. Kuwait has suddenly become like New York, or any other of the great urban islands on technology, totally dependent on that technology. Like them, without it, Kuwait would return to the desert.”