- Self - Host: One picture worth a thousand words? Well, the new illustrations did get rid of a lot of verbal diarrhea. Style in general became less purple, more down to earth, exact, informative. That's why poetry became poetic, and prose took over the facts because you didn't need rhyme to remember anymore. You didn't need to remember. If you read the latest, most definitive book on something, well you were up to speed with the best in the field.
- Self - Host: And with a computer, I can tap the databases of the world for my facts. And because of the computer-generated rate of change with which we live, those facts are obsolete almost in the instant I access them. In here, cross-indexing at the speed of light. So, thanks to printing, we have a world fact doesn't mean the same thing as it did before. Not definitive, checkable through your own experience, but fluid, one stage removed, transient. And if that is true of facts, what happens to standards, values, ethics, when the facts they're based on, aren't? What can you trust in a world where nothing in the old sense is real? Nothing.
- Self - Host: [showing cross-indexing] The way going through that exercise shows you how things and ideas might interrelate, is at the root of the process of change itself. Because when you put together two ideas that you never thought fitted together before, you get a third idea. Thanks to cross-indexing, one and one make three. That's what our kind of change is all about in the modern world.
- Self - Host: [Exiting a helicopter] You know, you can say 'If God had intended man to fly he would've given him wings' about almost anything these days. Thanks to science and technology, we can talk instantly across oceans, televise the surface of the moon, live underwater, have a new heart, and a million other things. And we do it all for the same reason I went up in that thing: because we trust the science that says it'll do what it's supposed to. And there's no way you could check personally yourself anyway. The fact is that a helicopter flies, and that's that. And everything in life is like that: other people's facts. You don't have to DO anything. Other people do. With their expertise, they make things you use. And somewhere, somebody knows all there is to know about whatever it is. You don't have to. When was the last time you actually made something yourself completely from scratch? And the tools of course, too?