Barry Schwartz:

Are people actually liberated by all this freedom? Living a decent life just isn't good enough anymore. Why would you settle for decent when anything is possible?

Lawrence Lessig:

Whether or not you believe in capitalism, nobody believes in crony capitalism, and crony capitalism is what we've got.

Clay Shirky:

Bad discourse isn't a behavior problem, it's a design problem.

David Frum:

Few of us have the self-knowledge and emotional discipline to say one thing while meaning another. If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don't usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves.

Harold Bloom:

Obsessed by a freedom we identify with money, we tolerate plutocracy as if it could someday be our own ecstatic solitude. I wonder though which is more dangerous, a knowledge-hungry religious zealotry or a proudly stupid one? Either way we are condemned to remain a plutocracy and oligarchy.

Clarence W. Dupnik, the Pima County sheriff:

Pretty soon we're not going to be able to find reasonable, decent people willing to subject themselves to serve in public office.

Tony Judt:

We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it.

Douglas Rushkoff:

The debt-based economy was invented so that people with money could get richer by having money, that's what it's for.

Joe Brown:

In this economy, $2.1 million is probably enough to make you a one-man special-interest group with some serious Washington clout.

But don't. Buy a Grand Sport.

Tyler Cowen:

The pro-wealth cultural vision may be overly optimistic about human willingness to embrace the idea of responsibility.

Paul Krugman:

By all means, let's listen to each other more carefully; but what we'll discover, I fear, is how far apart we are.