Rob Horning:

Pinterest users can simply add desired goods to a board and instantaneously indulge the fantasy that some part of the site's user base will see it and draw the appropriate conclusions. The gesture immediately circulates. This fantasy need not climax with a purchase or seek appropriate occasions to display it. And it need not be terminated by the disillusionment that comes with actual ownership, when an affectively inert thing takes its place amid the mounting slag pile of one's emotionally spent objects -- objects that no longer say anything about you and have become merely useful at best, objects that sit there taunting you with your discarded ideas of who you were trying to be, and for whom, and when.

On Pinterest, there are apparently no ... physical stakes, no contexts that are fixed at a point of purchase and then outgrown; one can keep on pinning and never know the disillusionment of possession.

Evgeny Morozov:

Gone are the burdens of ownership!

Ed Cumming:

Distraction is a kind of obesity of the mind ...

Sara Germano:

In retail there are signs that the fashion of fitness may be driving sales more than actual fitness.

David Brooks:

Data-driven politics is built on a philosophy you might call Impersonalism. This is the belief that what matters in politics is the reaction of populations and not the idiosyncratic judgment, moral character or creativity of individuals.

Sterling Hayden:

Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?

David Brooks:

If you live for external achievement, years pass and the deepest parts of you go unexplored and unstructured. You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity. You grade yourself on a forgiving curve. You figure as long as you are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like you, you must be O.K. But you live with an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys. Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self, between you and those incandescent souls you sometimes meet.

Scott Berkun:

The polite lie is what most people want, and that's fine, but when you say enough polite lies you soon lie to yourself too.

Joan Didion:

Self-deception remains the most difficult deception.