Nicholas Kristof:

The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976.

Eric Schmidt:

You get a billion people doing something, there's lots of ways to make money. Absolutely, trust me. We'll get lots of money for it.

Ali Dhux:

A man tries hard to help you find your lost camels.
He works more tirelessly than even you,
But in truth he does not want you to find them, ever.

Mark Fletcher:

I fear I spend too much time on the Internet as a crutch to avoid thinking about the crushing sameness of each and every day as well as the black hollowness of my soul.

Andre Agassi:

Even if it's not your ideal life, you can always choose it. No matter what your life is, choosing it changes everything.

David Gelernter:

If this is the information age, what are we so well-informed about?

Hal Varian:

Data are widely available; what is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them.

Jeffrey Rosen:

We are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent -- and public -- digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts.

Graeme Wood:

There are times when I would love to cease existing as a person in the eyes of others, and to swim through crowds unnoticed, the way women do in their steel-blue burqas in Herat. Far from being an experience that no one should have, it seems one that everyone should have the choice to have.

Mark Twain:

In my early manhood and in middle-life, I used to vex myself with reforms, every now and then. And I never had occasion to regret these divergencies, for whether the resulting deprivations were long or short, the rewarding pleasures which I got out of the vice when I returned to it, always paid me for all that it cost.

William Deresiewicz:

Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things -- the leaders -- are the mediocrities? Because excellence isn't usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering.

Rivka Galchen:

The main way you move forward in science is by finding out you were wrong about what you thought you already knew.

Lawrence Lessig:

Under our current system of campaign finance, there is no overlap between the interests of voters and of contributors. There is instead a fundamental gap. The sort of thing you need to do to make contributors happy is not the sort of thing you need to do to make voters happy.

Tony Judt:

What we need is a return to a belief not in liberty, because that is easily converted into something else, as we saw, but in equality. Equality, which is not the same as sameness. Equality of access to information, equality of access to knowledge, equality of access to education, equality of access to power and to politics. We should be more concerned than we are about inequalities of opportunity, whether between young and old or between those with different skills or from different regions of a country. It is another way of talking about injustice. We need to rediscover a language of dissent.