Decius:

Our authorization is obviously not required.

Dan Geer:

Things that need no appropriations are outside the system of checks and balances.

Decius:

The police and the military are increasingly tribes of their own, separate from the rest of us ...

Rustin Cohle:

Of course I'm dangerous. I'm police. I can do terrible things to people with impunity.

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

When the police brutalize people, we are forgiving because ultimately we are really just forgiving ourselves. Power, decoupled from responsibility, is what we seek. The citizen who needs to look away generally finds a reason.

Rustin Cohle:

People incapable of guilt usually do have a good time.

David Cole:

These programs are best understood not as unique to Obama or Bush, or even the United States, but as reflections of how the world is changing in ways that threaten not only fundamental human rights to life and privacy, but the essence of democracy itself. As such, they raise questions that will not go away under this president or the next, but that will with increasing urgency confront nations around the world.

James Comey and Robert Hannigan have ... called for public debate on terrorism and technology. It is disappointing, if not surprising, that they see a need for public debate only when new technologies may impair their ability to monitor us, and not when such technologies enhance their monitoring.

James Fallows:

As a country, America has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not. What happens to all institutions that escape serious external scrutiny and engagement has happened to our military. For democracies, messy debates are less damaging in the long run than letting important functions run on autopilot, as our military essentially does now.

Rory Stewart:

Nothing is ultimately more damaging to the military than absence of criticism.

Charles J. Dunlap Jr., a retired Air Force major general who now teaches at Duke law school:

It's becoming increasingly tribal, in the sense that more and more people in the military are coming from smaller and smaller groups. It's become a family tradition, in a way that's at odds with how we want to think a democracy spreads the burden.

The Economist:

Wealth is so unevenly distributed that you need just $3,650 (less debts) to count yourself among the richest half of the world. A mere $77,000 puts you among the wealthiest 10%. And $798,000 places you in the wealthiest 1%.

David Leonhardt:

The typical American family makes less than the typical family did 15 years ago, a statement that hadn't previously been true since the Great Depression.

Christopher Matthews:

44% of Americans are living with less than $5,887 in savings for a family of four.

Thomas Piketty:

The richest 1 percent appropriated 60 percent of the increase in US national income between 1977 and 2007.

Lizzie Widdecombe:

Apple makes more than two million dollars in revenue per employee each year.

Evgeny Morozov:

As citizens in an era of Datafeed, we still haven't figured out how to manage our way to happiness. But there's a lot of money to be made in selling us the dials.

Robert Pogue Harrison:

With a few exceptions, our new tech armies rarely take the time to think through what they are doing. Or if they do, they tend to think in ways that only add to the turmoil and agitation.

Elizabeth Buchanan:

But just because we can do this with the data, should we?

Noam Scheiber:

Every successful startup is in some sense a confidence game.

Michael Lewis:

Much of what Wall Street sells is less like engineering than like a forecasting service for a coin-flipping contest -- except that no one mistakes a coin-flipping contest for a game of skill.

Matt Levine:

Banks are magic, and if you look too hard at how the magic happens, you might stop believing in it.

Jerry Seinfeld:

I love advertising, because I love lying. In advertising, everything is the way you wish it was. I don't care that it won't be like that when I actually get the product being advertised, because, in between seeing the commercial and owning the thing, I'm happy, and that's all I want.

Taylor Swift:

People are still buying albums, but now they're ... buying only the ones that hit them like an arrow through the heart or have made them feel strong or allowed them to feel like they really aren't alone in feeling so alone.

Ursula K. LeGuin:

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable -- but then, so did the divine right of kings.

Winston Churchill:

The essential aspects of democracy are the freedom of the individual, within the framework of laws passed by Parliament, to order his life as he pleases, and the uniform enforcement of tribunals independent of the executive. As long as these rights are defended, the foundations of freedom are secure. I see no reason why democracies should not be able to defend themselves without sacrificing these fundamental values.

David Remnick:

Kleptocracies rarely value theoretical tracts. They value numbered accounts. They value the stability of their own arrangements.

David Brooks:

Data-driven politics assumes that demography is destiny, that the electorate is not best seen as a group of free-thinking citizens but as a collection of demographic slices. This method assumes that mobilization is more important than persuasion; that it is more important to target your likely supporters than to try to reframe debates or persuade the whole country.

John Fraser:

A sense of entitlement sits more naturally beside a sense of grievance than most people realize.

Robert Kaplan:

Unless Americans can be led back to an understanding of their enlightened self-interest, to see again how their fate is entangled with that of the world, then the prospects for a peaceful twenty-first century in which Americans and American principles can thrive will be bleak.

David Runciman:

People who think they can pick up politics when they need it often find that when they really need it they don't know where to find it. The professionals run rings round them. The only way to learn how to do politics is to keep on doing it, in good times as well as bad. We need more politics and we need more politicians.

David Cole:

Today, fully half of all members of Congress become lobbyists upon leaving office. Members of Congress spend 30–70 percent of their time raising money for their next campaign.

Matt McKenna:

We live in a country in which Congress has an approval rating of barely 15% and yet 95% of incumbents are reelected.

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Michael Lewis:

When you start your career you might think you are setting out to change the world, but the world is far more likely to change you. So watch yourself, because no one else will.

Mike Tyson:

I've learned that when people congratulate me, that's when I focus on my flaws. That way I don't allow my narcissism to fly sky-high and allow me to think that I can act out without any consequences.

David Brooks:

The tragedy of middle-aged fame is that the fullest glare of attention comes just when a person is most acutely aware of his own mediocrity.

Simon Critchley:

We always have to acknowledge that we might be mistaken. When we forget that, then we forget ourselves and the worst can happen.

Maciej Ceglowski:

'Big data' has this intoxicating effect. We start collecting it out of fear, but then it seduces us into thinking that it will give us power. In the end, it's just a mirror, reflecting whatever assumptions we approach it with.

Tim Cook:

I think that anyone that thinks they have it all down is not looking hard enough, not looking deep enough, or not raising the bar. From our point of view, we don't want to find zero issues. If we're finding zero issues, our bar is in the wrong place.

Andrew Solomon:

Most people imagine that resolving particular problems will make them happy. If only one had more money, or love, or success, then life would feel manageable. It can be devastating to realize the falseness of such tempered optimism. A great hope gets crushed every time someone reminds us that happiness can be neither assumed nor earned; that we are all prisoners of our own flawed brains; that the ultimate aloneness in each of us is, finally, inviolable.

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

That the enemy is us, is never easy to take.

Joan Didion:

Self-deception remains the most difficult deception.

Carl Sagan:

If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed.

Peter Beinart:

The wisest thinkers have reconciled the national desire to feel special with the knowledge that Americans are just as fallen as everyone else.

Joan Didion:

People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.

Julie Snyder and Sarah Larson:

What is the whole truth? And how do you know when you've found it? Can it even be found?

Marcelo Gleiser:

As the Island of Knowledge grows, so do the shores of our ignorance.

Ken Caldeira:

The class of things that we think we know but don't is bigger than we think.

Ed Caesar:

What we know is always dwarfed by what we can never know.

Charlie Huenemann:

Technology is great, but the more advanced it gets, the more likely it is that its fundamental principles will become obscure to us.

Taylor Swift:

I have to stop myself from thinking about how many aspects of technology I don't understand.

Freeman Dyson:

Science is not concerned only with things that we understand. The most exciting and creative parts of science are concerned with things that we are still struggling to understand. Wrong theories are not an impediment to the progress of science. They are a central part of the struggle.

Philip Hoare:

Some 40 per cent of the earth's ice-free land mass is now intensively farmed to produce food. Only 12 per cent of its rivers run freely to the seas. Nearly one billion people go hungry every day; 1.5 billion are overweight or obese. Each year, more than 300,000 sea birds die on fishing lines and 100 million sharks are killed. Every square kilometre of sea contains 18,500 pieces of floating plastic.

B. Lynn Ingram:

California is on track for having the worst drought in 500 years.

Ankit Agrawal:

China has completed, on average, at least one large dam per day since 1949.

Molly Crabapple:

Winning does not scale. Don't pretend that everyone can win.

Joseph Stiglitz:

Just because somebody is winning and somebody else is losing doesn't mean that society as a whole is benefiting in any way.

Peter Thiel:

Google makes so much money that it is now worth three times more than every U.S. airline combined.

Federal Reserve:

Inflation-adjusted earnings of the bottom 90 percent of Americans fell between 2010 and 2013, with those near the bottom dropping the most. Meanwhile, incomes in the top decile rose.

William Deresiewicz:

Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they're doing but with no idea why they're doing it.

Ian Bogost:

The hope and promise of new computer technology has given way to the malaise of living with it.

David Ulin:

How do we connect, or reconnect, to those around us but also to the very essence of ourselves? Where, in the flatness of contemporary society ... do we find some point of intersection, some lasting depth?

Emma Healey:

Our greatest contemporary inventions are all just new and more complicated ways to be lonely for and about each other, at speeds that once seemed unimaginable.

James Comey:

It is time to have open and honest debates about liberty and security.

My goal is to urge our fellow citizens to participate in a conversation as a country about where we are, and where we want to be, with respect to the authority of law enforcement.

Barack Obama:

There is an inevitable bias not only within the intelligence community, but among all of us who are responsible for national security, to collect more information about the world, not less.

James Comey:

I believe people should be skeptical of government power. I am.

Devlin Barrett:

"What is done on U.S. soil is completely legal," said one person familiar with the program. "Whether it should be done is a separate question."

James Risen:

It is difficult to recognize the limits a society places on accepted thought at the time it is doing it. When everyone accepts basic assumptions, there don't seem to be constraints on ideas. That truth often only reveals itself in hindsight.

Michael Hayden and Michael Mukasey:

The sponsors of the USA Freedom Act prefer the counsel of hypothetical fears to the logic of concrete realities.

Jose A. Rodriguez Jr.:

We did what we were asked to do, we did what we were assured was legal, and we know our actions were effective.

Dick Cheney:

I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective ...

Eric Fair:

Most Americans haven't read the report. Most never will.

Shikha Dalmia:

Regimes change course only when the cost of maintaining the status quo exceeds the cost of enacting change.