They just want theirs. That is the culture they have created.

We know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers.

There is often a mismatch between what we see when we look at our children, and what is really there.

We need to return to the culture of thrift that my mother and her generation learned the hard way through years of hardship and deprivation.

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

Much of the land will be given back to nature. People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow.

Your colleague's husband's sister can make you fat, even if you don't know her.

It's not as if being married means you're any less alone.

I find other people's errors very reassuring. It makes me feel better about my own deficiencies.

Paul Graham asks what living in your city tells you. Living in the north Perimeter area for 6 odd years now has told me that everybody makes way, way more money than I do. It's not inspiring so much as it makes you sympathize with class warfare.

"I like middles," said John Updike. "It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules."

The middleman acts in the middleman's interest. Google is a middleman made of software.

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Many people like to think that any child, with the proper nurturance, can blossom into some kind of academic oak tree, tall and proud. It's just not so.

Most people will do almost anything to be liked.

Giving up being liked is the ultimate public sacrifice.

No place in the United States is likely to escape a long and deep recession.

When you have a large society that consumes lots of resources, that society is likely to collapse once it hits its peak.

Richard Holbrooke must know that there will be no American victory in this war; he can only try to forestall potential disaster. But if he considers success unlikely, or even questions the premise of the war, he has kept it to himself.

If we all started thinking a bit more like friends, and a bit less like attention whores, the privacy problem would be solved at a stroke.

If anyone ever asks you to be a buffer state, just walk away. It does not look like fun.

I like the feeling of knowing that nobody is trying to reach me.

I don't mean this in a negative way, but Y Combinator is more like a cult than a venture capital fund. And Paul is the cult leader.

There is so much you can't know about your spouse when you get married, like that one day she will want to eat her placenta.

It is unlikely that we will be able to defeat the Taliban.

There is no conceivable force the United States can deploy to pacify Afghanistan.

There's no point in trying to hack apart the connections between the inside and the outside of the mind.
Instead we ought to focus on managing and improving those connections.

Schools ought to teach the high art of how to be discriminating.

If I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable.

Don't make fun of grad students! They just made a terrible life choice.

So worrisome has the situation become that students at prestigious universities are even talking about becoming butchers.

Do not destroy what you cannot create.

Don't let your design make promises you can't keep.

Before you reconfigure, mount a scratch monkey.

Your code should not look hopelessly unmaintainable, just be that way.
Otherwise it stands the risk of being rewritten or refactored.

Don't forget about forgetting.

Oughts and Noughts | A Noteworthy Year

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

One must assume that all garbage is monitored by the state. Anything less would be a pre-9/11 mentality.

Revolutionize your heart out. We'll still have this country by the balls.

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

If you've never wept and want to, have a child.

The truth is we're lousy at recognizing when our normal coping mechanisms aren't working. Our response is usually to do it five times more, instead of thinking, maybe it's time to try something new.

So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard. Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be.

The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us. It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

Clate Mask:

In a startup, passionate employees almost always outperform experienced corporate types who command big bucks.

Johan de Kleer:

One passionate person is worth a thousand people who are just plodding along ...

Bill Gurley:

Customers seem to really like free as a price point. I suspect they will love "less than free."

Paul Carr:

If we all started thinking a bit more like friends, and a bit less like attention whores, the privacy problem would be solved at a stroke.

Maggie Jackson:

Despite our wondrous technologies and scientific advances, we are nurturing a culture of diffusion, fragmentation, and detachment. In this new world, something crucial is missing -- attention.

Sanjay Jha:

If I didn't have smartphones in the market for Christmas of '09, this business wouldn't have a runway.

Saul Hansell:

Mr. Jha does not have Motorola flying again, but he at least has it poised for a takeoff.

Paul Vigna:

There's a line from an early Bruce Springsteen song that's been ringing in my head this morning. "Well the runway lies ahead like a great false dawn."

Who can say the worst has passed?

Anthony Shadid:

"Bodies were hurled into the air," said Mohammed Fadhil, a 19-year-old bystander. "I saw women and children cut in half."

George Soros:

The short-term needs are the opposite of what is needed in the long term.

Interior Minister Roberto Maroni:

We are closing the net on the super-fugitives.

Have you seen Gomorrah?

Gomorrah has been hailed as a classic mafia movie, which lays bare the savagery of the Neapolitan Camorra and how it develop... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

Remember kids! In order to maintain an untenable position, you have to be actively ignorant.

People who learn slang secondhand will tend to use it incorrectly.

Mr. Hanson has no truck with those who do not mow their lawn, keep their music down or clean their cars regularly.

Mr. Hanson does not cotton to getting too involved in his neighbors' lives.

There is no front line anymore.

There is no right hand, left hand anymore.

There is no right hand any more.

There is no magic anymore.

There is no privacy anymore.

There is no reason to go above Fifth to socialize anymore.

There is no pleasure in the chase anymore.

If you are a sufferer of Hyperhidrosis, then there is no reason for you to worry and feel embarrassed any more.

There is no such thing as having a life outside work anymore.

There is no margin anymore.

There is no album any more.

There is no such thing as punk anymore.

There is no localization of music anymore.

There is no accountability any more.

There is no kingdom anymore.

Machismo has always had street parking, except there is no street anymore because of the pending light rail.

There is no euphoria anymore that used to colour every special event vibrating with patriotism at the dawn of Independence.

There is no such thing anymore as the "City of Nashville."

I cringe and keep searching, but there is ... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ]

I think that was when I fell in love with yardwork.

Metaphorically speaking, of course.

That and having a dad who would not let me mow the lawn until I turned 21. OK. That is an exaggeration. It was 19.

It looks like Governor Mark Sanford is up for sale. Well, maybe not literally, but someone did post a Craigslist ad, saying he is.

She was like, 'This boy literally taught himself how to ride through all the books that he read.'

Metaphorically, if not literally, Kaufman says, "Cary has to ride the train for every movie."

Literally she turns her skirts upside down.

Metaphorically speaking, that describes the brain of an adolescent.

Alarming Trend: Kids Literally Smoking Candy.

Honestly? It's like literally I felt like I was in this alternate universe. You're so almost out of whack with reality.

Do the kids actually inhale the candy? Do they simply take it into their mouths and blow a smokelike powder? Is it one piece, several, an entire roll? These distinctions are not discussed.

"We'll be announcing additional things in that area literally very, very soon," said Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt after the company reported first-quarter profits Thursday.

I literally have more money than God, literally, and I just love the fans for that. But when you take something that you own and feel free to pass it around to people who you feel might like it, that's not rock-and-roll. That's stealing.

Pirate syndicates receive millions in ransom for crews and ships and literally get away with murder.

Suddenly I feel compelled to raise my daughter in a sensory deprivation tank.

A compendium of things you may or may not have seen before.

The Onion:

Area Man Acts Like He's Been Interested In Afghanistan All Along

Michael Lewis:

Until very recently, one of the most striking things about our economy was how common it was for young people to make a lot of money quickly. For nearly 20 years, except for a year or two in the early 90's, a college student has been able to gaze out of his dorm-room window and see a well-traveled path to millions. His ability to imagine himself getting very rich very quickly was an ingredient in the modern money culture.

That's what 27-year-olds did, strike it rich.

This youthward shift in moneymaking has had all sorts of strange social effects.

It would hardly be surprising if the pursuit of passion led ambitious young people to rethink the whole idea of success.

C.S. Lewis:

... It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons: but to have them free because you don't matter, that is much worse.

Troy McClure:

Troy: Come on Jimmy, let's take a peek at the killing floor.

Jimmy: Ohhh!

Troy: Don't let the name throw you Jimmy. It's not really a floor, it's more of a steel grating that allows material to sluice through so it can be collected and exported.

...

Troy: Don't kid yourself Jimmy. If a cow ever got the chance, he'd eat you and everyone you care about! [Image of a cow quietly chewing cud.]

Jimmy: Wow, Mr. McClure. I was a grade A moron to ever question eating meat.

Troy: [Laughs.] Yes you were Jimmy, yes you were.

Mmm, tripe:

Only the Polytron reduces an entire mouse to a soup-like homogenate in 30 seconds.

Truth:

Lisa: "Thank you. I know this giant check is very important to everyone here, but ... what's even more important is the truth."
Skinner: "No, no it isn't. Don't listen to her. She's out of her mind!"

Dress for success:

Jenny on the job: wears styles designed for victory.

My annual review is now complete. Obviously I think it's all good, but here's my take on the best of the best:

It's good to have a plan, but if something extraordinary comes your way, you should go for it.

The question to ask is not, Are we safer? The question to ask is, Are we better off?

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

I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.

It's not about left or right, it's about right and wrong.

Being "always on" is being always off, to something.

In our unending search for panaceas, we believe that happiness and "success" -- which, loosely translated, means money -- are the things to strive for. People are constantly surprised that, even though they have acquired material things, discontent still gnaws.

If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.

In all his speeches, John McCain urges Americans to make sacrifices for a country that is both "an idea and a cause". He is not asking them to suffer anything he would not suffer himself. But many voters would rather not suffer at all.

Every now and then I meet someone in Manhattan who has never driven a car. I used to wonder at such people, but more and more I wonder at myself.

A Noteworthy Year