"Likewise nanotechnology will, once it gets under way, depend on the tools we have then and our ability to use them, and not on the steps that got us there."

Ability, Tools, Will

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"Likewise nanotechnology will, once it gets under way, depend on the tools we have then and our ability to use them, and not on the steps that got us there."

Exlpore more Ability quotes

"Ability without honor is useless."

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman Statesman

Ability, Honor

"The will is commendable though the ability may be wanting."

Ovid, Roman Poet

Ability, May, Will

"The abilities of man must fall short on one side or the other, like too scanty a blanket when you are abed. If you pull it upon your shoulders, your feet are left bare; if you thrust it down to your feet, your shoulders are uncovered."

Thomas Paine, English Writer

Ability, Feet, Man

"I like to think of sales as the ability to gracefully persuade, not manipulate, a person or persons into a win-win situation."

Bo Bennett, American Businessman

Ability, Sales

"Those who can't, try: those who can, don't have to."

Idries Shah, Indian Author

Ability, Action, Effort, Success

"Martyrdom: The only way a man can become famous without ability."

George Bernard Shaw, Irish Dramatist

Ability, Famous, Man

"We are all capable of being great dreamers."

Lailah Gifty Akita, Ghanaian Author

Ability, Potential, Self, Ambition

"If I drive myself to the brink of my ability, then I don't get stale or bored."

Dean Koontz, American Author

Ability,

"What I do I do very well and what I don't do well I don't do at all."

Anonymous, Unknown Unknown

Ability, Effort, Limit, Performance

"The size of a fish does not determine its speed."

Matshona Dhliwayo, Zimbabwean Philosopher

Ability, Size, Speed, Performance

Explore more quotes by K. Eric Drexler

"On the molecular scale, you find it's reasonable to have a machine that does a million steps per second, a mechanical system that works at computer speeds."

Computer

"My greatest concern is that the emergence of this technology without the appropriate public attention and international controls could lead to an unstable arms race."

Technology

"In thinking about nanotechnology today, what's most important is understanding where it leads, what nanotechnology will look like after we reach the assembler breakthrough."

Thinking

"An international race in the relevant technologies is getting under way at this point, not necessarily with an understanding of where that race leads in the long run, but strongly motivated by the short-term payoffs."

Race

"If you take all the factories in the world today, they could make all the parts necessary to build more factories like themselves. So, in a sense, we have a self-replicating industrial system today, but it would take a tremendous effort to copy what we already have."

Effort

"My work at MIT had focused on what we could build in space once we had inexpensive space transportation and industrial facilities in orbit. And this led to various sorts of work in space development."

Work

"After realizing that we would eventually be able to build molecular machines that could arrange atoms to form virtually any pattern that we wanted, I saw that an awful lot of consequences followed from that."

Atoms

"It's a lot easier to see, at least in some cases, what the long-term limits of the possible will be, because they depend on natural law. But it's much harder to see just what path we will follow in heading toward those limits."

Law

"The basic parts, the start-up molecules, can be supplied in abundance and don't have to be made by some elaborate process. That immediately makes things simpler."

Abundance

"The really big difference is that what you make with a molecular machine can be completely precise, down to the tiniest degree of detail that can exist in the world."

Detail