Michael Nielsen:

When something doesn't quite match your expectations of how you think the world actually is, people will often build on that, and they will realize that what seems like a minor discrepancy can actually turn into a really, really big thing.

Roger Kimball:

It is worth pausing to consider how much of our cultural life -- even in its most august precincts -- is caught up in the voracious logic of celebrity. It is a logic that builds obsolescence into the banner of achievement and requires that seriousness abdicate before the palace of notoriety and its sound-bite culture.

Simon Kuper:

Anyone who still believes that politics will uplift humanity is considered a crank. Yet the idea of progress hasn't vanished. It has simply been privatised. They don't think the next human generation will be better off, but they are making darned sure their own children will be.

William Saletan:

Romney will always be what he needs to be. Count on it.

Paul Krugman:

Won't Mr. Romney pay a price for running a campaign based entirely on falsehoods? He obviously thinks not, and I'm afraid he may be right.

Joe Nocera:

They just want theirs. That is the culture they have created.

George Packer:

It's easy for most Americans to go days without giving the war a thought.

The military, on its end, seems to want things this way.

What I expect in the next few years is the willful amnesia that always comes with the end of unsuccessful wars.

Charles Simic:

The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit.

An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country. Most of our politicians and their political advisers and lobbyists would find themselves unemployed, and so would the gasbags who pass themselves off as our opinion makers. Luckily for them, nothing so catastrophic, even though perfectly well-deserved and widely-welcome, has a remote chance of occurring any time soon. For starters, there's more money to be made from the ignorant than the enlightened, and deceiving Americans is one of the few growing home industries we still have in this country. A truly educated populace would be bad, both for politicians and for business.