On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
With each new book, the march of our national history takes a step forward. When one is present at a book launch, one is bearing witness to the birth of a new body of ideas, to the coming into being of another testimony of history.
But obviously, we're looking for all good ideas to help deal with our long-term debt problem. This is something that is going to affect our economy. It affects our kids. And we need to deal with it.
I have heard Science Fiction and Fantasy referred to as the fiction of ideas, and I like that definition, but it's the mainstream public that chooses my books for the most part.
Fear of error which everything recalls to me at every moment of the flight of my ideas, this mania for control, makes men prefer reason's imagination to the imagination of the senses. And yet it is always the imagination alone which is at work.
