Neil deGrasse Tyson:

In the 20th century, Americans led the world in major inventions. But the ambitions of the nation have flatlined. You go through the school system and come out on the other side, and there's no grand vision to walk into. To get everyone thinking about the future again may require another big project where we dream the impossible dream and achieve the impossible goal.

Kathryn Schulz:

If you choose to be invisible, it's a superpower; if it's forced upon you, it's a plight. The same goes for being visible.

Zeynep Tufekci:

Technology in the workplace is as much about power and control as it is about productivity and efficiency.

David Brooks:

People on the road to character understand that no person can achieve self-mastery on his or her own. In the realm of action, a person of character is committed to tasks that can't be completed in a single lifetime.

Max Eulenstein and Lauren Scissors:

People are worried about missing important updates from the friends they care about.

Tom Standage:

We sell the antidote to information overload -- we sell a finite, finishable, very tightly curated bundle of content.

Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen:

As Hayek emphasized, the market does not require perfect knowledge to function, rather it is the means by which imperfect knowledge is made to function in the social interest.

Jess Bidgood:

Law enforcement officials around the country have taken to monitoring social media for signs of potentially dangerous parties.

Stewart Brand:

In some cultures you're supposed to be responsible out to the seventh generation -- that's about 200 years. But it goes right against self-interest.

Zeynep Tufekci:

This problem is not us versus the machines, but between us, as humans, and how we value one another.

Freeman Dyson:

At Trinity College, Cambridge, they planted an avenue of trees in the early 18th century, leading up from the river to the college. This avenue of trees grew very big and majestic in the course of 200 years. When I was a student there 50 years ago, the trees were growing a little dilapidated, though still very beautiful. The college decided that for the sake of the future, they would chop them down and plant new ones. Now, 50 years later, the new trees are half grown and already looking almost as beautiful as the old ones. That's the kind of thinking that comes naturally in such a place, where 100 years is nothing.

Douglas Adams:

There's nothing easier than getting a human mind to ignore something it doesn't want to see.

Mr. Murry:

Security is a most seductive thing. I've come to the conclusion that it's the greatest evil there is.

Amar Toor:

Under the law, internet service providers would have to install monitoring mechanisms ... recordings could be stored for up to one month, and metadata for up to five years.

Heather Havrilesky:

You have the illusion of accomplishment, but really? You aren't doing shit. You're pretending that you're accomplishing something, that's all.

Alex Stamos:

Security companies need to recognize that most of their addressable market cannot properly consume their products ...

Mike Masnick:

We need to bring society back to a place where people accept that there's some risk involved in everything. That's the nature of being alive.

Kimmy Schmidt:

Titus, age doesn't matter. You can die at any time.

Yuval Noah Harari:

We are the only ones who can defeat ourselves ...

Matt Kennard and Claire Provost:

Along the side of the road, signs remind drivers to stay alert and abide by speed limits: "Life is a Journey. Complete it," urges one.

Titus Andromedon and Kimmy Schmidt:

Titus: How old do you think I am?

Kimmy: Titus, age doesn't matter. You can die at any time.

David Brooks:

Every college student should know: career success doesn't make you happy.

Don Hertzfeldt:

People who are weirdly happy all the time, like a little dog -- don't trust them.

Hayao Miyazaki:

I don't ever feel happy in my daily life.

How could that be our ultimate goal?

Ben McLannahan:

Just one-fifth of survey participants said they were content with their job, their firm, their pay and their prospects. Half of the 100 people interviewed -- in a range of mostly senior positions at banks, brokers and asset managers -- said they were unhappy on all four fronts.

Jeannette Neumann:

"I'm going to frame my bank statement, which shows that Bankinter is paying me interest on my mortgage," said a customer who lives in Madrid. "That's financial history."

Liz Ryan:

Know what you want so the universe can bring it to you.

Bruce Schneier:

I'd upgrade to something newer and better [than Eudora], but there isn't anything newer and better. Sooner or later a new Microsoft OS will break it, and I will be very sad.

Oliver Burkeman, on David Brooks:

Recently, one student told him that, since taking the course, he was much sadder than he used to be. "That's a high compliment!" says Brooks. "He was a phenomenally bright and successful student. But, you know -- you should be a little sadder, sometimes."

Dan McWhorter, VP of threat intelligence at FireEye:

Advanced threat groups like APT 30 illustrate that state-sponsored cyber espionage affects a variety of governments and corporations across the world.

James Lewis:

You can say these guys see spies everywhere, but the problem with that is spies are everywhere.

Paul Krugman:

The [FitBit] spies on me all the time ...

Prime Minister Manuel Valls:

There will be no mass surveillance ... this is not a French Patriot Act.

Rene Magritte:

Ceci n'est pas une pipe.

Hillary Clinton:

Everyday Americans need a champion. And I want to be that champion.

Lauren French:

Hillary Clinton wiped "clean" the private server housing emails from her tenure as secretary of state, the chairman of the House committee investigating the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi said Friday.

Nate Freier, research professor at the U.S. Army War College:

It really is every man for himself.

Chris Riley and Jochai Ben-Avie:

Once we accept the principle that the government has a right to force records to be held onto so they can effectively go into the past, where does that stop? What's the limit? Or are we paving the way to a world where nothing can be deleted just in case the government might want to look at it?

David Lynch:

So many things these days are made to look at later. Why not just have the experience and remember it?

Anna Slomovic, lead research scientist at the Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute at George Washington University and a former chief privacy officer at Equifax and Revolution Health:

All of a sudden, everything you do and everything you eat, depending on which bits of the information they collect, is sitting in someone's database.

A Very Convincing Sales Man:

Noooooo problem ... don't worry about privacy ... privacy is dead ... there's no privacy ... just more databases ... that's what you want ... that's what you NEED ...

WCSH-TV, via Portland Press Herald:

Police departments in midcoast and northern Maine said they have paid ransom to hackers to keep their computer files from being destroyed.

David Brooks:

It seems probable that cops would be less likely to abuse their authority if they were being tracked. But I've been surprised by how many people don't see the downside to this policy. Most people don't even seem to recognize the damage these cameras will do both to police-civilian relations and to privacy.

David Cole:

The fact that parts of our government wanted to kill, without a trial, a citizen who, even if convicted, will face a maximum of fifteen years in prison, illustrates the dramatic divide between the military and law enforcement models for addressing terrorism. Remote-control killing without trial away from battlefields should be disturbing regardless of the passport the victim holds.

David Graeber:

The most powerful way to represent power has always been to refuse to represent it. The way to show that something is truly powerful is to hide it, to render it invisible, ineffable, unknowable, utterly featureless and abstract.

Space Caviar:

Does your home have an airplane mode?

Trevor Timm:

Facebook is extremely meticulous about what content the public should see. Close watchers of the social media site know that most of the time you only see around 6 percent of what your friends post. For organizations who want their followers to see their posts, it's even less. But most users don't know this is happening. As Alexis Madrigal explained, more than 60 percent of users in one study "had no idea that there even was a filtering algorithm, let alone one that looks at more than a thousand data signals to determine what to show a user."

Leo Mirani:

11% of Indonesians who said they used Facebook also said they did not use the internet.

An exchange:

David Sanger: There's a lot we miss every day. I go to work every day convinced that I've got a handle on fully 3% of what's going on, okay?
Stewart Baker: [laughing] The key is [that] you can persuade us it's the most important 3%.
David Sanger: [laughing] That's right. [laughing] That's right.

Nick Halstead:

For the first time, aggregate analysis is enabled across the entirety of Facebook users -- not just the public profiles. Access to topic data opens up an entire world of previously unavailable data that includes Non-Public Posts such as status updates, Page Posts, plus Comments, Likes and Shares on posts with demographics.

Ravi Somaiya:

If Facebook pushes beyond the experimental stage and makes content hosted on the site commonplace, those who do not participate in the program could lose substantial traffic -- a factor that has played into the thinking of some publishers. Their articles might load more slowly than their competitors', and over time readers might avoid those sites.

Trevor Timm:

Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million dollars two years ago, breathing new life into a paper that was struggling financially for years. Facebook, which bought WhatsApp for $19 billion soon after, could buy 76 Washington Posts for that amount.

Steven Johnson:

The truth is California doesn't have a water problem. We all do.

The Economist:

The UN's latest World Population Prospects expects the world to grow from 7.2 billion people today to 9.6 billion in 2050. India will swell to 1.6 billion people; it is on track to overtake China in 2028.

Bob Work:

I tell you now, our technological superiority is slipping. We see it every day.

The Economist:

America's preeminence is over.

Steven Pinker:

We see the fossils of dead superlatives that our ancestors overused ...

William Ellsworth, a research geologist at the United States Geological Survey:

We can say with virtual certainty that the increased seismicity in Oklahoma has to do with recent changes in the way that oil and gas are being produced.

Wes Felter:

We're getting into interest-only adjustable-rate subprime technical debt.

Alissa Walker:

It is actually cheaper to ship alfalfa to Beijing than it is to truck it from one side of [California] to the other.

Vince Beiser:

Desert sand generally doesn't work for construction; shaped by wind rather than water, desert grains are too round to bind together well. Exporters in Australia are literally selling sand to Arabs.

NPD:

According to the NPD Connected Intelligence Consumers and Wearables Report, 36 percent of fitness tracker owners in the US are 35-54 years old, 41 percent had an average income of more than $100,000, and 54 percent were women. One-in-ten U.S. adults now own a fitness tracker.

Paul Krugman:

The [FitBit] spies on me all the time, and therefore doesn't let me lie to myself about my efforts.

Joan Didion:

Self-deception remains the most difficult deception.

Paul Krugman:

The truth is that nobody cares.

Liz Ryan:

Resist the urge to say more about yourself. No one cares.

Paul Krugman:

The rich already live in a kind of privatized surveillance state; now the opportunity to live in a gilded fishbowl is being (somewhat) democratized.

Danielle Kurtzleben:

Only 1 percent of Americans consider themselves upper-class.

David Graeber:

Today, in many municipalities, as much as 40% of the money governments depend on comes from the kinds of predatory policing that has become a fact of life for the citizens of Ferguson. Increasingly, cities find themselves in the business of arresting citizens in order to pay creditors.

The wealthiest Americans gain their wealth, increasingly, not from making or selling anything, but from coming up with ever-more creative ways to make us feel like criminals.

John Oliver:

No one cares. [Americans] don't give a shit.

I think they will say, "I definitely do not care."

George Lucas:

Look around you. Ideas are everywhere.

Akim Reinhardt:

We build ideas like large, intricate Rube Goldberg contraptions. We're desperate to know that we caught the mouse because we built a proper trap. We're distraught by the prospect that we are the mice and the mice are us and every living thing dies, whether in a trap or in an open field or in the talons of bird or in the wreckage of a car or in a hospital. Nothing matters.

Olivia Laing:

Faced with the knowledge that nothing we say, no matter how trivial or silly, will ever be completely erased, we find it hard to take the risks that togetherness entails.

Everyone is promoting, no one is listening.

Geoff Manaugh:

Los Angeles is where you confront the objective fact that you mean nothing; the desert, the ocean, the tectonic plates, the clear skies, the sun itself, the Hollywood Walk of Fame -- even the parking lots: everything there somehow precedes you, even new construction sites, and it's bigger than you and more abstract than you and indifferent to you. You don't matter. You're free.

SLOMO:

I said, "How does a strapping young man like me get to be an old codger like you?" And he looked at me and said, "Do what you want to!" And at first I was thinking, this old man just made more sense to me than anything I'd ever heard in my life. It's just, do what you want to.

Steve Jobs:

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.

John Givings:

Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

Melinda Gates:

Let your heart break. It will change what you do with your optimism.

Hillary Clinton:

Everyday Americans need a champion. And I want to be that champion.

Michiru Hoshino:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!