Whit Diffie and Susan Landau:

We are moving from a world with a billion people connected to the Internet to one in which 10 or 100 times that many devices will be connected as well. Particularly in aggregation, the information reported by these devices will blanket the world with a network whose gaze is difficult to evade.

Vannevar Bush, 1945:

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems.

Benjamin Franklin:

It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.

Bruce Schneier:

Will not wearing a life recorder be used as evidence that someone is up to no good?

Gary Wolf:

If you want to replace the vagaries of intuition with something more reliable, you first need to gather data. Once you know the facts, you can live by them.

Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira:

Follow the data.

David Lynch:

So many things these days are made to look at later. Why not just have the experience and remember it?

David Clark:

Don't forget about forgetting.

Gary Wolf:

When we quantify ourselves, there isn't the imperative to see through our daily existence into a truth buried at a deeper level. Instead, the self of our most trivial thoughts and actions, the self that, without technical help, we might barely notice or recall, is understood as the self we ought to get to know. Behind the allure of the quantified self is a guess that many of our problems come from simply lacking the instruments to understand who we are. Our memories are poor; we are subject to a range of biases; we can focus our attention on only one or two things at a time. We don't have a pedometer in our feet, or a breathalyzer in our lungs, or a glucose monitor installed into our veins. We lack both the physical and the mental apparatus to take stock of ourselves. We need help from machines.

Drew Endy:

My guess is that our ultimate solution to the crisis of health-care costs will be to redesign ourselves so that we don't have so many problems to deal with.