Robert Darnton:

Thomas Jefferson formulated it succinctly: "Knowledge is the common property of mankind."

We have the technical means to make Jefferson's dream come true, but do we have the will?

Martin Wolf:

Of the need there can be no doubt. Of the will, the doubts are many.

Christopher Calabrese:

If you can identify any individual at a distance and without their knowledge, you literally allow the physical tracking of a person anywhere there's a camera and access to the Internet.

Anil Dash:

We're all celebrities now, in a sense. Everything that we say or do is on the record.

Drake Bennett:

When asked what they most regret in their recent past, subjects tend to describe actions, but over the long run, people regret the things they didn't do, whether it's not going to night school or never learning to play the piano.

Susan Orlean:

For some reason, even people who did fairly well in high school biology ask me whether you need a rooster to have eggs, which is like asking whether a woman needs a boyfriend in order to ovulate.

Joel Stein:

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.

Joe Klein:

There is something profoundly diseased about a society that idolizes its ignoramuses and disdains its experts. It is a society that no longer takes itself seriously.

Lawrence Lessig:

Somehow, as a culture, we, or maybe just we who are old, have forgotten how to deal with stuff we can't believe.

Drake Bennett:

America is disappointed. But it turns out that human beings are easy to disappoint. Research suggests that even when people know that someone has nothing but bad options to choose from, they still blame the decider for a bad outcome.

Johann Hari:

The Cranfield School of Management studied 170 companies who had used management consultants, and it discovered just 36 per cent of them were happy with the outcome -- while two thirds judged them to be useless or harmful.

Marlo Stanfield:

You want it to be one way. But it's the other way.

Jay Rosen:

Ninety percent of everything is crap, but that's nothing novel. There's just more everything now.

Bruce Feiler:

Go. You'd be surprised at what you get just by showing up.