Mark Twain:

When an entirely new and untried political project is sprung upon the people, they are startled, anxious, timid, and for a time they are mute, reserved, noncommittal. The great majority of them are not studying the new doctrine and making up their minds about it, they are waiting to see which is going to be the popular side.

Michael Lewis:

Perhaps now more than ever, clever people are habituated to being paid to ignore the spirit of any rule ... Upon seeing a new rule they do not think, "What social purpose does this serve, and how can I help it to do the job?" They think, "How can I game it?"

Mark Bittman:

Everything affects everything. It's all tied together, and the starting place hardly matters: A just and righteous system will have a positive impact on everything we care about, just as an unjust, exploitative system makes everything worse.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Gregory Treverton:

On its face, centralization seems to make governments more stable. But that stability is an illusion.

Anna Madeleine:

The cusp, or threshold, between light and darkness, and between what we believe and what we perceive -- that moment when we realise something isn't flat when we thought it was, or that it is static when we thought it was moving -- are the moments James Turrell manages to suspend us in, sometimes for surreally extended periods of time.

Richard Holbrooke:

Only with hindsight can one look back and see that the smartest course may not have been the right one.

Bruce Schneier:

Even if it was done right it would be the wrong thing to do.

Adam Gopnik:

Even doing the right thing rarely works out.

Ashby Jones:

Happiness exists just around the corner, it's just a matter of figuring out how to get there.