Don DeLillo Quotes

I think a few hundred years from now we'll start having the 'posthuman' era of different species.

With the opening of the second decade of the twentieth century it seemed that the stage was set for the last act in an unquestioned evolutionary drama.

The next evolutionary step is into the screen.

If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won't even be recognizable.

With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries.

Removing the faults in a stage-coach may produce a perfect stage-coach, but it is unlikely to produce the first motor car.

You can graph human evolution, which is mostly a straight line, but we do get better and change over time, and you can graph technological evolution, which is a line that's going straight up. They are going to intersect each other at some point, and that's happening now.

Once you have speech, you don't have to wait for natural selection! If you want more strength, you build a stealth bomber; if you don't like bacteria, you invent penicillin; if you want to communicate faster, you invent the Internet. Once speech evolved, all of human life changed.

The swine flu is evolution, isn't it? In a way, it's an evolution of flu.

'Avatar' is staggering. It's seismic. Evolutionarily speaking, it is cladogenesis in a thunderclap.

Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.

Men are so delving into the mysteries of things that today a boy of twenty knows more than twenty doctors formerly knew.

We are terribly imaginative, as far as technique in science is concerned. As far as changes in social arrangements are concerned, we lack utterly in imagination.

If the West can claim superiority in anything, it is . . . in science and scientific technique.

I'm going to create a - the kind of a country that we were from the standpoint of industry. We used to be there. We've given it up. We've become very, very sloppy.

...the emergent capabilities bursting forth from the revolutionary advances in the life sciences are about to make us the principal agent of evolution.

Look at the history of the printing press, when this was invented what sort of consequences this had. Or industrialization, what sort of consequences that had. Very often, it led to enormous transformational processes within individual societies. And it took awhile until societies learned how to find the right kind of policies to contain this and manage and steer this.

We are the first species to have taken our evolution into our own hands.

There will always be people who are ahead of the curve, and people who are behind the curve. But knowledge moves the curve.

In fact, technology in, and of, itself does not cause particular kinds of change. It is, essentially, an enabling or facilitating agent. It makes possible new structures, new organizational and geographical arrangements of economic activities, new products and new processes, while not making particular, outcomes inevitable.

The techniques have galloped ahead of the concepts. We have moved away from studying the complexity of the organism; from processes and organisation to composition.

When biological technology becomes further advanced, human beings as we know them, will become a modified species. If we as human beings fail to include the possibility of this development in our overall, social evolution we will witness the decline of our species

If humans fight the last war, nature fights the next one.

Because I'm 44, I feel kind of lucky that I lived through this period where I started my career where there was no Internet at all, and now when I finish it, there will be nothing but the Internet.

I kind of like it when a lot of people die, and on the other hand I always wonder how many unused frequent-flier miles they had.