Daniel Gilbert:

At every age we think we're having the last laugh, and at every age we're wrong.

Vladimir Putin:

It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.

Jonathan Franzen:

You could argue that America in 2013 is ... another weakened empire telling itself stories of its exceptionalism while it drifts towards apocalypse of some sort, fiscal or epidemiological, climatic-environmental or thermonuclear. Our far left may hate religion and think we coddle Israel, our far right may hate illegal immigrants and think we coddle black people, and nobody may know how the economy is supposed to work now that markets have gone global, but the actual substance of our daily lives is total distraction. We can't face the real problems; we spent a trillion dollars not really solving a problem in Iraq that wasn't really a problem; we can't even agree on how to keep healthcare costs from devouring the GNP. What we can all agree to do instead is to deliver ourselves to the cool new media and technologies, to Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, and to let them profit at our expense.

Kwame Anthony Appiah:

Clearly many people across the spectrum think that [Obama] hasn't done enough coddling.

Evgeny Morozov:

As smart technologies become more intrusive, they risk undermining our autonomy by suppressing behaviors that someone somewhere has deemed undesirable. These devices can give us useful feedback, but they can also share everything they know about our habits with institutions whose interests are not identical with our own.

Straw Man:

Money for me, databases for you.