Wilfred M. McClay:

Our dignity derives not only from our relentless drive for mastery but also from our graceful acceptance of limits -- from how we come to terms with our defeats, failures, decay, and yielded territory. The conquest of the world will not change that, except to make it harder to understand, and harder to achieve.

Gary Taubes:

One lesson of science is that if the best you can do isn't good enough to establish reliable knowledge, first acknowledge it -- relentless honesty about what can and cannot be extrapolated from data is another core principle of science -- and then do more, or do something else.

Frank Chimero:

I think we often mischaracterize design as a practice of problem-solving, as if the problems go away. But closure, at least in my experience, is so rare in design. The loops stay open, because most problems are chronic and shift forms. They can be diminished, but they hardly ever entirely go away.

Protagonist of A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick:

I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better. Because, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.

Maya Angelou:

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Taylor Swift:

I'd like to point out that people are still buying albums, but now they're buying just a few of them. They are 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.

Alain de Botton:

There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. This is a truth chiselled indelibly into the script of life. Choosing who to marry or commit ourselves to is therefore merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for, rather than an occasion miraculously to escape from grief.

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.

The only thing in this world more difficult than caring about other people is finding other people who genuinely care about you. It's hard enough to find a job that pays your rent and doesn't grind your soul down into a tiny sliver, never mind finding one where your experience and skills are valued, given weight or room to grow. It's hard enough to find peers who can stand to be around you, let alone friends who think the things you care about are important and worthy of attention.

David Foster Wallace:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

Alain de Botton:

A flourishing life requires a capacity to recognize ... that we have our own priorities to honour in the brief time still allotted to us.

Elissa Bassist:

If someone died each time I checked my inbox, there would be no one left. How do you cancel the noise of social networking and get back down on the ground to produce?

Ian Bogost:

The shame of expecting an immediate reply to a text or a Gchat message after just having failed to provide one. The narcissism of urgency.

Jonathan Safran Foer:

Technology celebrates connectedness, but encourages retreat. ... The flow of water carves rock, a little bit at a time. And our personhood is carved, too, by the flow of our habits.

Each step "forward" has made it easier, just a little, to avoid the emotional work of being present, to convey information rather than humanity.

Tasneem Raja:

As programmers will tell you, the building part is often not the hardest part: It's figuring out what to build.

Sister Corita Kent:

Be self-disciplined: this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.

It's the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.

Melinda Gates:

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

Maya Angelou:

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Apple:

This is it. This is what matters.

The experience of a product. How it will make someone feel.

...

You may rarely look at it, but you'll always feel it.

This is our signature, and it means everything.

Miranda Lambert:

It's amazing, the amount of rejection
That I see in my reflection
And I can't get out of the way

Steve Fishman, on Steve Cohen's dedication to trading:

When a friend asked, "Why do you keep doing it?," he responded, "What else is there to do?"

Chris Hayes:

36 percent of the 2010 Princeton class who had full-time jobs at graduation went into finance.

Thomas Piketty:

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

Michael Osinski:

When you're close to the money, you get the first cut. Oyster farmers eat lots of oysters, don't they?

Zafar, via Zia Haider Rahman, via James Wood:

If metaphors increase our understanding, they do so only because they take us back to a familiar vantage, which is to say that a metaphor cannot bring anything nearer. Everything new is on the rim of our view, in the darkness, below the horizon, so that nothing new is visible but in the light of what we know.

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.

Matthew Power, on Brandon Bryant:

He tried to remind himself that the world was just as real when seen in a grainy image as with the naked eye, that despite being filtered through distance and technology, cause and effect still applied. This is the uncanny valley over which our drones circle. We look through them at the world, and ultimately stare back at ourselves.

Sanford Schwartz:

If Julian Schnabel is a surfer in the sense of knowing how to skim existence for its wonders, he is also a surfer in the more challenging sense of wanting to see where something bigger than himself, or the unknown, will take him, even with the knowledge that he might not come back from the trip.

Lawrence Ulrich:

I suspect that the 4 Series, buoyed by BMW's shrewdly cultivated customer base, will soon reflect satisfied faces wherever creative, fashionable folks meet for potent cocktails and subtle one-upmanship.

Rebecca Solnit:

The world seems to be made more and more of stuff we're not supposed to look at, a banal infrastructure that supports the illusion of automotive independence, the largely unseen places from which our materials come -- strip mines, industrial agriculture, automated assembly lines, abattoirs -- and where they end up: the dumps. Los Angeles consists mostly of these drably utilitarian spaces, in part because cars demand them, and it is a city built to accommodate cars. These spaces tend to be grey, the grey of unpainted cement, asphalt, steel and accumulated grime; and they tend to be either abandoned or frequented by people who are also discards, a kind of subterranean realm hauled to the surface. Or not.

John Pearley Huffman:

Low expectations don't guarantee happiness, but at least there isn't much disappointment. The reborn Mitsubishi Mirage lowers expectations, strangles them and buries their remains in a deep unmarked grave. If this car wasn't disappointing, it wouldn't be anything at all.

Justin Fox:

That's all a way of ignoring the systems that make the world possible. One example from the '60s that I think is pretty telling is all the road trips. The road trips are always about the heroic actions of people like Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady and their amazing automobiles, right? Never, never did it get told that those road trips were only made possible by Eisenhower's completion of the highway system. The highway system is never in the story. It's boring. What's in the story is the heroic actions of bootstrapped individuals pursuing conscious change. What we see out here now is, again, those heroic stories. And there are real heroes. But the real heroes are operating with automobiles and roads and whole systems of support without which they couldn't be heroic.

David Runciman:

Technology moves faster than politics. When technology escapes from political control, politicians face a choice: do they adapt to the change, or do they insist that it adapts to them?

Tom Mitchell, FT:

That's China for you. One day, it's your favorite neighborhood canteen. The next, it's a pile of rubble.

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.

Mike Tidwell:

What, basically, do we say to our kids in the face of astonishing loss in the natural world? How much of that loss do we even want them to know about, to discover and love, as it changes and exits? What do we owe our kids? What do we owe these places? How do we even talk about all this?

Matthew Power:

Bryant closed his laptop and went out into the yard, tossing a tennis ball to his enormous bounding Japanese mastiff. Fingers of snow extended down through the dark forests of the Bitterroot, and high white contrails in the big sky caught the late-afternoon sunlight. The landscape of western Montana, Bryant observed, bears a striking resemblance to the Hindu Kush of eastern Afghanistan -- a place he's seen only pixelated on a monitor. It was a cognitive dissonance he had often felt flying missions, as he tried to remind himself that the world was just as real when seen in a grainy image as with the naked eye, that despite being filtered through distance and technology, cause and effect still applied. This is the uncanny valley over which our drones circle. We look through them at the world, and ultimately stare back at ourselves.

The Royal Tart Toter, via Maria Bustillos:

This cosmic dance of bursting decadence and withheld permissions twists all our arms collectively. But, if sweetness can win -- and it can -- then I'll still be here tomorrow, to high five you, yesterday, my friend. Peace.

Ben Thompson:

I sometimes fear that the tech industry as a whole learned the wrong lesson from the SOPA debate a few years ago. In that case much of the tech world came together at the last minute to defeat a terrible piece of legislation. It was certainly a great outcome, but I very much wonder how often the last-minute protest card can be played. Wouldn't it be better if we never got to the moment of crisis at all?

David Runciman:

Anyone who thinks that technological innovation driven by market forces alone will solve a problem on the scale of climate change is deluding themselves. Market players aren't willing to take big enough risks to effect the genuinely transformative changes. As yet, climate change hasn't got politically scary enough: there needs to be a greater threat of violence. That's the truly scary thought.

In a world of myriad possibilities, especially for those who have the technical abilities that bring lavish rewards in the private sector, politics looks like a real grind. True, successful politicians get to exercise real power now and then, which must be a thrill. But most politicians are not successful: they labour away, scrabbling for votes, striving for influence, only to find that someone has beaten them to it.

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.

Decius:

There are two reasons that people act: Carrots and Sticks. Lowering the barrier to entry might be a carrot, but the sticks are much more effective and come when the political situation makes it impossible for people to go about their lives without acting.

I'm confident that technology has improved the resources available to people if/when they choose to act. So far they don't need to, largely. Don't wish for times when they do.

Lawrence Lessig:

We still have the power to fix our democracy.

We will, if you help.

Decius:

We're in a bad part of the cycle of human society. You and I are young enough that we'll see the other side of it, but we'll be old men when we do.

John Givings:

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

Maciej Ceglowski:

I've come to believe that a lot of what's wrong with the Internet has to do with memory.

In our elementary schools in America, if we did something particularly heinous, they had a special way of threatening you. They would say: "This is going on your permanent record".

It was pretty scary ... How wonderful it felt when I first realized the permanent record didn't exist. They were bluffing! Nothing I did was going to matter! We were free!

And then when I grew up, I helped build it for real.

Stewart Butterfield:

Look at it hard, and find the things that do not work. Be harsh, in the interest of being excellent.

Hanna Rosin:

Andrew and Jenny, a brother and sister who are 6 and 4, respectively, explore a patch of woods to find the best ferns to make a bed with. Jenny walks around in her knee-high white socks, her braids swinging, looking for the biggest fronds. Her big brother tries to arrange them just so. The sun is shining through the dense trees and the camera stays on the children for a long time. When they are satisfied with their bed, they lie down next to each other. "Don't take any of my ferns," Jenny scolds, and Andrew sticks his tongue out. At this point, I could hear in my head the parent intervening: "Come on, kids, share. There's plenty to go around." But no parents are there; the kids have been out of their sight for several hours now. I teared up while watching the film, and it was only a few days later that I understood why. In all my years as a parent, I have never come upon children who are so inwardly focused, so in tune with each other, so utterly absorbed by the world they've created, and I think that's because in all my years as a parent, I've mostly met children who take it for granted that they are always being watched.