Ben Bernanke:

Don't be afraid to let the drama play out.

If your uniform isn't dirty, you haven't been in the game.

Mary Meeker, Scott Devitt, and Liang Wu:

Do humans want everything to be like a game?

On Finite and Infinite Games:

There are at least two kinds of games: finite and infinite.

A finite game is a game that has fixed rules and boundaries, that is played for the purpose of winning and thereby ending the game.

An infinite game has no fixed rules or boundaries. In an infinite game you play with the boundaries and the purpose is to continue the game.

Finite players are serious; infinite games are playful.

Finite players try to control the game, predict everything that will happen, and set the outcome in advance. They are serious and determined about getting that outcome. They try to fix the future based on the past.

Infinite players enjoy being surprised. Continuously running into something one didn't know will ensure that the game will go on. The meaning of the past changes depending on what happens in the future.

Fourteen-year-old Casey Schwartz:

Facebook takes up my whole life.

If I'm not watching TV, I'm on my phone. If I'm not on my phone, I'm on my computer. If I'm not doing any of those things, what am I supposed to do?

Samantha Power, US ambassador to the United Nations:

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

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. I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further it gets from our hearts.

Tim Maly:

"We apologize for any offence our algorithms may have caused" is right up there with "the motive of the algorithm is still unclear" as strange markers of a strange time.

Noam Cohen's friend:

Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.

David Simon:

We asked for this.

Gail Collins:

Do you remember how enthusiastic people were about having a president who once taught constitutional law?

The Economist on Obama, in November 2008:

He has to start deciding whom to disappoint.

Rory Stewart:

Americans are particularly unwilling to believe that problems are insoluble.

Roberto G. Quercia:

The problem with this conversation is that it's like discussing the future of shipbuilding from the deck of the Titanic.

Bruce Schneier, from 2009:

Just as we look back at the beginning of the previous century and shake our heads at how people could ignore the pollution they caused, future generations will look back at us - living in the early decades of the information age - and judge our solutions to the proliferation of data.

We must, all of us together, start discussing this major societal change and what it means. And we must work out a way to create a future that our grandchildren will be proud of.

Filip Drapal, spokesman for Prague transport company Ropid, on possible "singles only" train carriages:

We want to emphasize that public transport is not only a means of travel but that you can do things there that you cannot do in your car.

Rolf Potts:

Travel anywhere is often a matter of exploring half-understood desires. Sometimes, those desires lead you in new and wonderful directions; other times, you wind up trying to understand just what it was you desired in the first place. And, as often as not, you find yourself playing the role of charlatan as you explore the hazy frontier between where you are, who you are, and who it is you might want to be.

Penelope Trunk:

If you can see where you'll be, you're already there. If you know for sure where you are going then you are actually living someone else's version of a path.

Are you scared? Are you a person who makes emotional space in your life to be routinely surprised?

Megan Garber:

Space is becoming ordinary. And that means it's about to get really interesting.

Geoff Manaugh:

It all comes down to ground conditions -- to the interruption, even the complete disappearance, of the ground plane, of firm terrestrial reference, of terra firma, of the Earth, of the very planet we think we stand on. Whether presented under the guise of the earthquake or of warfare or even of General Relativity, Lebbeus's work was constantly erasing the very surfaces we stood on -- or, perhaps more accurately, he was always revealing that those dependable footholds we thought we had were never there to begin with. That we inhabit mobile terrain, a universe free of fixed points, devoid of gravity or centrality or even the ability to be trusted.

Architecture is more than buildings. It is a spacesuit.

Architecture is about the lack of stability and how to address it. Architecture is about the void and how to cross it. Architecture is about inhospitability and how to live within it.

Alexander Hammid:

The Private Life of a Cat

Simone Weil:

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Henry Mahncke:

Some things you can do with your brain are highly productive and others are not.

Tom Chiarella:

Listen. Be attentive to what people say. Respond, without interruption. You always have time. You own the time in which you live. You grant it to others without obligation. That is the gift of being gracious. The return — the payback, if you will — is the reputation you will quickly earn, the curiosity of others, the sense that people want to be in the room with you. The gracious man does not dwell on himself, but you can be confident that your reputation precedes you in everything you do and lingers long after you are finished. People will mark you for it. You will see it in their eyes. People trust the gracious man to care. The return comes in kind.

Michael Chabon:

Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted -- not taught -- to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?

Gilbert White:

The grace of wildness changes somehow when it becomes familiar.

When I say the grace of wildness, what I mean is its autonomy, its self-possession, the fact that it has nothing to do with us. The grace is in the separation, the distance, the sense of a self-sustaining way of life. That vixen may rely on us for a duck or a chicken now and then, and to keep the woodland from closing in. How she chose to den so close to us is beyond me. The answer is probably as simple as an available hole. But our only choice is to leave her alone, to give her enough room to raise the next generation.

Neil Postman:

George Bernard Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. I would go further: in Technopoly, all experts are invested with the charisma of priestliness. Some of our priest-experts are called psychiatrists, some psychologists, some sociologists, some statisticians. The god they serve does not speak of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity. And that is why such concepts as sin and evil disappear in Technopoly. They come from a moral universe that is irrelevant to the theology of expertise. And so the priests of Technopoly call sin "social deviance," which is a statistical concept, and they call evil "psychopathology," which is a medical concept. Sin and evil disappear because they cannot be measured and objectified, and therefore cannot be dealt with by experts.

Kevin Ashton:

The common thread that links creators is how they spend their time. No matter what you read, no matter what they claim, nearly all creators spend nearly all their time on the work of creation. There are few overnight successes and many up-all-night successes.

Oliver Jeffers:

Be disciplined. Work hard. Be prepared to hear "no" a lot and don't care. My dad taught me an important lesson, which is to look at why someone does something rather than what they actually do. A lot of artists are making art because they they want to be cool and they want people to like them. That's the wrong reason to be making art. Starting out, you will encounter a lot of people who don't really care what you do, but that shouldn't be the motivation ... Be prepared to have a lot of people not enjoy your work and have it not bother you; you should do it because you want to do it.

Yue Wang:

Allicia Mogavero, of southern Rhode Island, makes breast-milk jewelry that she sells at the online store Mommy Milk Creations, on the craft site Etsy.com. For $64 to $125, she'll plasticize a sample of your breast milk and mold it into miniature shapes -- hearts, moons, flowers or tiny hands. The milk beads are then set into a pendant of your choice. The final product is a keepsake of your body's liquid gold that you can wear "as a badge of honor" or perhaps give to your children when they are old enough to not be totally skeeved out by it.

David Byrne:

Complete creative freedom is as much a curse as a boon.

Walter Kirn:

Percentile is destiny in America.

No one had ever told me what the point was, except to keep on accumulating points, and this struck me as sufficient. What else was there?

Richard Conniff:

We tend to think that we are exclusively a product of our own cells, upwards of ten trillion of them. But the microbes we harbor add another 100 trillion cells into the mix. The creature we admire in the mirror every morning is thus about 10 percent human by cell count.

Ross Pomeroy:

By seeking straightforward explanations at every turn, we preserve the notion that we can always affect our condition in some meaningful way. Unfortunately, that idea is a facade.

Catherine Rampell:

Highly paid, college-educated people are increasingly clustering in the college-graduate-dense, high-amenity cities where they get good deals on the stuff they like, while low-skilled people are increasingly flowing out to cheaper places with a worse quality of life. The end result is that measures of the growing income gap between the high-skilled and the low-skilled, which already look pretty shocking, seriously understate the inequality between these two classes.

Evgeny Morozov:

Just as Amazon's algorithms make it possible to predict what books you are likely to buy next, similar algorithms might tell the police how often -- and where -- certain crimes might happen again. Ever stolen a bicycle? Then you might also be interested in robbing a grocery store.

Facebook is at the cutting edge of algorithmic surveillance here.

Bruce Schneier:

Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we're being tracked all the time.

Your Local High Speed Internet & Cable Provider:

We believe in money. Pools of money.

Mark Andreesen:

A lot of people looked at Facebook and saw a Web site. None of the people close to Mark [Zuckerberg] and the company thought of Facebook as a Web site. They think of it as a data set, a feedback loop.

Dexter Filkins:

In recent years, eighty-four per cent of the Army's majors have been promoted to lieutenant colonel -- hardly a fine filter. Becoming a general was like gaining admission to an all-men's golf club, where back-slapping conformity is prized above all else.

Quentin Hardy:

In January this year, Florida's Juvenile Justice Department reported that 114,538 youth and employee records had disappeared when a mobile storage device with no password was stolen. The state will pay for a year of credit monitoring for everyone whose data was lost.

Department of Urology, University of California, San Francisco:

Between 2002 and 2010, an estimated 17616 patients presented to US EDs with trouser zip injuries to the genitals. The penis was almost always the only genital organ involved. Zip injuries represented nearly one-fifth of all penile injuries. Amongst adults, zips were the most frequent cause of penile injuries. Annual zip-related genital injury incidence remained stable over the study period.

Graham Hill:

The average size of a new American home in 1950 was 983 square feet; by 2011, the average new home was 2,480 square feet. In 1950, an average of 3.37 people lived in each American home; in 2011, that number had shrunk to 2.6 people.

Christoph Niemann:

Simplicity is not about making something without ornament, but rather about making something very complex, then slicing elements away, until you reveal the very essence.

James Lewis:

You've got to keep grinding.

Calvin Trillin:

Writing the story at seventy lines didn't mean the compressing was over. At the end of the week (or "at week's end," as we would have put it, in order to save three words), the makeup people would invariably inform us that the story had to be shortened to fit into the section. Since words or passages cut for space were marked with a green pencil -- changes that had to be made because of something like factual error were in red -- the process was called greening. The instructions were expressed as how many lines had to be greened -- "Green seven" or "Green twelve." I loved greening. I don't have any interest in word games -- I don't think I've ever done a crossword or played Scrabble -- but I found greening a thoroughly enjoyable puzzle. I was surprised that what I had thought of as a tightly constructed seventy-line story -- a story so tightly constructed that it had resisted the inclusion of that maddening leftover fact--was unharmed, or even improved, by greening ten per cent of it. The greening I did in Time Edit convinced me that just about any piece I write could be improved if, when it was supposedly ready to hand in, I looked in the mirror and said sternly to myself "Green fourteen" or "Green eight." And one of these days I'm going to begin doing that.

Jhumpa Lahiri:

The best sentences orient us, like stars in the sky, like landmarks on a trail.

I hear sentences as I'm staring out the window, or chopping vegetables, or waiting on a subway platform alone. They are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, handed to me in no particular order, with no discernible logic. I only sense that they are part of the thing.

Geoffrey O'Brien:

Quotes are the actual fabric with which the mind weaves: internalizing them, but also turning them inside out, quarreling with them, adding to them, wandering through their architecture as if a single sentence were an expansible labyrinthine space.

At a certain point, in a necessary act of appropriation, you make it part of who you are, whether or not you ever quote it to anyone but yourself. Culture then is not a wall "over there" but the very tiles out of which your own thoughts are constructed.

Michiru Hoshino:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Henry David Thoreau:

It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?

Teddy Wayne:

"We need to hire a 22-22-22," one new-media manager was overheard saying recently, meaning a 22-year-old willing to work 22-hour days for $22,000 a year.

Perhaps the middle figure is an exaggeration, but its bookends certainly aren't.

Kilian Jornet Burgada asks himself:

How much is it worth sacrificing to do what you love?

Cal Newport:

Do less. But do what you do with complete and hard focus. Then when you're done be done, and go enjoy the rest of the day.

David Ferguson:

My advice? Just find the thing you enjoy doing more than anything else, your one true passion, and do it for the rest of your life on nights and weekends when you're exhausted and cranky and just want to go to bed.

It could be anything -- music, writing, drawing, acting, teaching -- it really doesn't matter. All that matters is that once you know what you want to do, you dive in a full 10 percent and spend the other 90 torturing yourself because you know damn well that it's far too late to make a drastic career change, and that you're stuck on this mind-numbing path for the rest of your life.

Is there any other way to live?

Nathaniel Rich:

The deeper you dive, the more you get paid.

Cormac McCarthy:

Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

James Lewis:

You've got to keep grinding.

Peter Thiel:

Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead.