top of page
.png){kind=small}
"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."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Effort quotes
"Effort will always triumph over unapplied potential."
"The merit of all things lies in their difficulty."
"Everything is hard before it is easy."
"It's not going to be easy, but it's kind of like ripping off a band-aid. Painful for a minute, but it has to be done."
"If someone tells you that you can achieve your dreams with little to no work, they are lying to you."
"Plans are easy to make, dreams are easy to dream. But putting your back into it? A little bit of hard graft and discipline? That is just too scary and far too much effort for the masses."
"Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them."
Explore more quotes by K. Eric Drexler
"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."
"I've encountered a lot of people who sound like critics but very few who have substantive criticisms. There is a lot of skepticism, but it seems to be more a matter of inertia than it is of people having some real reason for thinking something else."
"You can find academic and industrial groups doing some relevant work, but there isn't a focus on building complex molecular systems. In that respect, Japan is first, Europe is second, and we're third."
"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."
"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."
"Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines - of molecular machines that are part of replicators - and so it comes from an area that already raises some of the issues that nanotechnology will raise."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"But while doing that I'd been following a variety of fields in science and technology, including the work in molecular biology, genetic engineering, and so forth."
bottom of page