George Dyson:

Approaching Beverly Hills along Sunset Boulevard from Santa Monica, the first indications that you are nearing the destination are people encamped at the side of the road announcing "Star Maps" for sale. Beverly Hills is a surprisingly diverse community of interwoven lives, families, and livelihoods, and a Star Map offers only a rough approximation of where a few select people have their homes.

Synthetic Genomics is still at the Star Map stage. But it is becoming Google Earth much faster than most people think.

Raymond Chandler, in 1949:

Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but good-hearted and peaceful. It had the climate they yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America.

Freeman Dyson:

Now, after some three billion years, the Darwinian era is over.

From the archive:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

From The World in 2009:

Someone once accused Craig Venter of playing God.

His reply was, "We're not playing."

Martin Schwartz:

Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it.