John Wood:

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.

Curtis White:

Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs. We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called "the visible God": money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.

Ashby Jones:

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

Sarah Silverman:

You're very free if you don't love money.

David Foster Wallace:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

Peter Maass:

Smaller cars, less driving, more carpools, public transportation, better home insulation, smaller homes, less meat, more renewable energy -- these are the sorts of useful things we can do. It little matters whether we fill our tanks at BP or Exxon stations. What matters is that we visit gas stations less often.

Decius:

Our job is to apply our well-earned cynicism and fail to follow the baby boomers off a cliff in their pursuit of some idealistic agenda.

Mark Foulon:

We have tried incremental steps and they have proven insufficient.

Tom Friedman:

We're entering an era where being in politics is going to be more than anything else about taking things away from people. It's going to be very, very interesting.

Wallace:

There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

Angus McCullough:

The only way to end your game is to lose.

The Second Best Time Is Now