One passionate person is worth a thousand people who are just plodding along ...

Damn I need funding for this ...

Now I have a reputation. I can be selective about what I go do.

He did what an increasing number of senior managers uncertain of their job prospects are doing: He set himself up at his own company.

There are 260 million people in America, and you are one of them.

No matter who you are, you have the potential to be so very much less.

Tomorrow is closer than you think.

"If you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it and don't think anything of personalities, or emotional conflicts, or of money, or of family distractions; if you just think of, detail by detail, what you have to do next, it is a wonderful dream even though the end is a long way off, for there are about five thousand steps to be taken before we realize it; and start taking the first ten, and stay making twenty after, it is amazing how quickly you get through those five thousand steps. Rather, I should say, through the four thousand nine hundred and ninety. The last ten steps you never seem to work out. But you keep on coming nearer to giving the world something well worth having."

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.

WashPost editor: "It's a useful service, but it's not going to drive me to the unemployment office tomorrow."

This region has grown accustomed to high-technology highs and lows over four decades, but the current dot-com collapse has lasted longer and cut deeper. And the recently affluent technology workers who had come to believe in the "long boom," the idea that prosperity would be permanent, are quietly giving up their flashy signs of success to make ends meet.

Architectures and institutions are often shaped to fit one another, but they are still different sorts of things.

"You could buy your own used DNA synthesizer and make whatever you want in the comfort and privacy of your own garage."

I can't help thinking the reputation system is less about creating communities of friends than it is about building cults of personality around popular, "reputable" individuals.

They were there looking for people who had the talent to think outside the box. It never occurred to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing.

The cultural landscape that emerges will be a plural space of creation in which it may even become pointless to designate who created exactly what, since everyone will be stealing from and remixing everyone else.

If you want to be in the right place at the right time you need to figure out where things are going.

Eric Schmidt: "I think you need to win, but you are better off winning softly."

From the start our great leaders have tried to steer us away from the pitfalls of great wealth. Almost all of our great thinkers and writers have joined the cause. Great wealth leads to decadence and complacency, and hence to corruption and decay. And yet when it comes to leading the simple life, we are utter failures.

Wait a few years and perhaps the Lotto will be restored to its former glory. In the meantime, ferociously ambitious young people will become what ferociously ambitious young people have not been in a long time: dull.