"I like middles," said John Updike. "It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules."

The middleman acts in the middleman's interest. Google is a middleman made of software.

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Many people like to think that any child, with the proper nurturance, can blossom into some kind of academic oak tree, tall and proud. It's just not so.

Most people will do almost anything to be liked.

Giving up being liked is the ultimate public sacrifice.

No place in the United States is likely to escape a long and deep recession.

When you have a large society that consumes lots of resources, that society is likely to collapse once it hits its peak.

Richard Holbrooke must know that there will be no American victory in this war; he can only try to forestall potential disaster. But if he considers success unlikely, or even questions the premise of the war, he has kept it to himself.

If we all started thinking a bit more like friends, and a bit less like attention whores, the privacy problem would be solved at a stroke.

If anyone ever asks you to be a buffer state, just walk away. It does not look like fun.

I like the feeling of knowing that nobody is trying to reach me.

I don't mean this in a negative way, but Y Combinator is more like a cult than a venture capital fund. And Paul is the cult leader.

There is so much you can't know about your spouse when you get married, like that one day she will want to eat her placenta.

It is unlikely that we will be able to defeat the Taliban.

There is no conceivable force the United States can deploy to pacify Afghanistan.