Ian Morris:

Humans may all be much the same, wherever we find them, but the places we find them in are not. Geography is unfair and can make all the difference in the world.

Michael Greenberg:

Tom's apartment building had been completed just before the global bust but still seemed unfinished, with thick cables dangling from the hallway ceilings. At the building's entrance was a minuscule glass room, like a military checkpoint, every inch of which was taken up by a bare mattress and a TV. A man lay on the mattress, apparently drunk. "Security," explained Tom.

As we drove to the airport, I thought of Italo Calvino's line about how a traveler arriving in a new city finds a part of himself that he did not know he had. "The foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places."

Julian Assange:

When it comes to the point where you occasionally look forward to being in prison on the basis that you might be able to spend a day reading a book, the realization dawns that perhaps the situation has become a little more stressful than you would like.

Trevor Butterworth:

The statement that "a good watch is a watch that tells the time well" only has meaning in a society where timing is everything, where we have ritualized and sanctified time keeping.

George Russell:

We have made our tools, and in turn our tools have made us. The world seems ready made for us as we move from one size box to another, and graduate from gadget to gadget. The great majority of us are no longer thinkers, but choosers. Novelty scarcely seems to stand a chance. Yet once and a while, we get a hint that the world is out there, waiting for us.

When no artificial light is present humans experience what is called "divided sleep", which is a period of intense sleep followed by a period of wakefulness in the middle of the night during which you would be awake and active. This is then followed by a "second sleep" which is a lighter, dream filled state which lasts until morning. People on long hiking trips can begin to experience this after a week of being in the wilderness. Artificial light has changed the most basic way that we live.

Stephen Budiansky:

The real energy hog, it turns out, is not industrial agriculture at all, but you and me.

Marc Gunther:

We need food and oxygen. We don't need The Food Network and Oxygen.

Leeane Jensen, fitness manager at Bakar Fitness, on patrons' reaction to a cable TV outage:

It was an uproar. People said: 'That's what we're paying for.'