There's something uniquely revealing about the process of sorting through what gets left behind by a culture or civilization.Steven Johnson
No single innovation has more powerfully shaped the human landscape than the city.Steven Johnson
Most great stories of triumph over adversity follow the same narrative pattern: the characters start out leading ordinary lives until a crisis abruptly intervenes, forcing them to summon hidden reserves of courage and endurance.Steven Johnson
The more extensively the patterns of connection are mapped, the less space there is for the superstitions and prejudices that thrive on ignorance and isolation.Steven Johnson
Heroism is a kind of tunnel vision: You simplify the complexity of the world into a single, salient strand.Steven Johnson
Seeing the city as a doctor had implications larger than medicine alone, because the city posed a broad set of challenges that all required some form of mapping before they could be solved.Steven Johnson
There's no natural distance from which to see a city; the scale at which you look will inevitably determine what you see.Steven Johnson
Sometimes what is important is not so much the choice you make between competing theories, but rather the fact that you are now beginning to think in the presence of alternatives.Steven Johnson
When you're confronted with a crisis, it's often a good idea to look to the margins, to the activities of people who were outliers relative to the mainstream population.Steven Johnson
The outliers, in the end, are our greatest source of hope; they are the ones that history tells us are capable of cutting through the noise and pointing the way toward a world not ruled by either dumb nature or predatory big men.Steven Johnson