A world without glass would strike at the foundation of modern progress: the extended lifespans that come from understanding the cell, the virus, and the bacterium; the genetic knowledge of what makes us human; the astronomer's knowledge of our place in the universe. No material on Earth mattered more to those conceptual breakthroughs than glass.

— Steven Johnson

Babbage had most of this system sketched out by 1837, but the first true computer to use this programmable architecture didn’t appear for more than a hundred years.

— Steven Johnson

Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.

— Steven Johnson

Berners-Lee was supremely lucky in the work environment he had settled into, the Swiss particle physics lab CERN. It took him ten years to nurture his slow hunch about a hypertext information platform.

— Steven Johnson

Bill Gates (and his successor at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie) are famous for taking annual reading vacations. During the year they deliberately cultivate a stack of reading material—much of it unrelated to their day-to-day focus at Microsoft—and then they take off for a week or two and do a deep dive into the words they’ve stockpiled. By compressing their intake into a matter of days, they give new ideas additional opportunities to network among themselves, for the simple reason that it’s easier to remember something that you read yesterday than it is to remember something you read six months ago.

— Steven Johnson

Build a tangled bank.

— Steven Johnson

Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio - all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another.

— Steven Johnson

Chance favors the connected mind.

— Steven Johnson

Every genuinely new technology has a genuinely new way of breaking – and sometimes, those malfunctions open a new door to the adjacent possible. Sometimes the way a new technology breaks is almost as interesting as the way it works.

— Steven Johnson

Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete

— Steven Johnson