Arthur Schopenhauer:

The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public.

A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.

Joe Queenan:

I do not avoid books ... merely because I believe that life is too short. Even if life were not too short, it would still be too short to read anything by Dan Aykroyd.

Jonathan Franzen:

The appeal of [Sherry Turkle's] "Reclaiming Conversation" lies in its evocation of a time, not so long ago, when conversation and privacy and nuanced debate weren't boutique luxuries. It's not Turkle's fault that her book can be read as a handbook for the privileged. She's addressing a middle class in which she herself grew up, invoking a depth of human potential that used to be widespread. But the middle, as we know, is disappearing.

Horace Dediu:

Improvements which are not asked for but which change behavior suggest that the product is valued because it changes the buyer.

David Lazarus:

To be sure, time marches on. Yet for many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.

Mark Bittman:

I believe that there has to be a way to regularly impose some thoughtfulness, or at least calm, into modern life.

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.

Gary E. Sparks:

It's better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

Kathryn Schulz:

No language could have too many ways to express the pleasure of emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual connection -- or, for that matter, too many ways to simply say yes. Saying yes as often as possible is, famously, the first rule of improv, vital to maintaining energy, imagination, and humor. It is also, I have long thought, a sure sign that you're falling in love, not to mention crucial to sustaining that love over the long haul. And, while sometimes impractical, dangerous, or just plain dumb, saying yes to as much stuff as possible is, over all, a pretty good strategy for getting through life.

Lauren Clark:

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

Sterling Hayden:

Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?

Maciej Ceglowski:

The people who are most exposed to risk aren't the ones who would have to pay the bill. As the banking crisis of 2008 showed us, we treat sufficiently cataclysmic events as acts of God rather than failures of risk management. If enough people ignore a risk, they can successfully argue after the fact that no one could have foreseen it. Those who do prepare for diaster end up looking like chumps. Why act to mitigate a potential disaster when you know the rest of the country will bail you out?

Anil Dash:

We build systems that let us pass the buck to someone else, in exchange for passing them a few bucks. We could respond by stepping up and saying where we want to take responsibility.

Graham Allison:

Americans have a tendency to lecture others about why they should be "more like us." In urging China to follow the lead of the United States, should we Americans be careful what we wish for?

Since the financial crisis, nearly 40 percent of all growth in the global economy has occurred in just one country: China.

Adele Peters:

China is proposing to assess its citizens' behavior over a totality of commercial and social activities, creating an uber-scoring system. When completed, the model could encompass everything from a person's chat-room comments to their performance at work, while the score could be used to determine eligibility for jobs, mortgages, and social services.

Caitlin Dewey:

Imagine every interaction you've ever had suddenly open to the scrutiny of the Internet public.

John Eligon:

The strategy, known as predictive policing, combines elements of traditional policing, like increased attention to crime "hot spots" and close monitoring of recent parolees. But it often also uses other data, including information about friendships, social media activity and drug use, to identify "hot people" and aid the authorities in forecasting crime.

The use of computer models by local law enforcement agencies to forecast crime is part of a larger trend by governments and corporations that are increasingly turning to predictive analytics and data mining in looking at behaviors.

Samantha Power:

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

Sherry Turkle:

Even a silent phone disconnects us.

Liliana Segura:

The truth is, yes, even "hello" can feel like an unwelcome demand.

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.

Sherry Turkle:

In solitude we find ourselves; we prepare ourselves to come to conversation with something to say that is authentic, ours. If we can't gather ourselves, we can't recognize other people for who they are. If we are not content to be alone, we turn others into the people we need them to be. If we don't know how to be alone, we'll only know how to be lonely.

Some of the most crucial conversations you will ever have will be with yourself.

Jack Cheng:

Remember that no matter where you go, you always end up alone with your thoughts.

Jaron Lanier:

If you love a medium made of software, there's a danger that you will become entrapped in someone else's recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that!

Mat Johnson:

Instead of a wealthy lifestyle made possible by sweatshops and slave wages in distant lands, the Positron Project's innovation is that now the exploited and those who benefit from the exploitation are the same people.

Christopher Hawthorne:

Three decades ago, according to Fortune, about 70% of American 17-year-olds had a driver's license; the figure today is 46%.

Seth Godin:

Making products for your customers is far more efficient than finding customers for your products.

Dieter Zetsche, the chief executive of Daimler:

We do not plan to become the Foxconn of Apple.

David Orr:

The speaker will be claiming "ages and ages hence" that his decision made "all the difference" only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn't a salute to can-do individualism; it's a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.

Leslie Jamison:

Every paradise is made possible by blindness.

Richard Feynman:

I feel a responsibility as a scientist who knows the great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, and the progress made possible by such a philosophy, progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought. I feel a responsibility to proclaim the value of this freedom and to teach that doubt is not to be feared, but that it is to be welcomed as the possibility of a new potential for human beings.

Liel Leibovitz:

The designer through the game, teaches us that the true joy is the joy of learning, of our own free will, to love the game and the designer above all, to abandon all other ways of being in the world, all other claims on subjectivity or agency, and instead embrace the true happiness that comes with understanding one's place in the world.

Julian Schnabel:

Being in the water alone, surfing, sharpens a particular kind of concentration, an ability to agree with the ocean, to react with a force that is larger than you are.

Decius:

I've gotten old enough that I now understand why adults seek to escape reality.

Caitlin Flanagan:

They wanted comedy that was 100 percent risk-free, comedy that could not trigger or upset or mildly trouble a single student. They wanted comedy so thoroughly scrubbed of barb and aggression that if the most hypersensitive weirdo on campus mistakenly wandered into a performance, the words he would hear would fall on him like a soft rain, producing a gentle chuckle and encouraging him to toddle back to his dorm, tuck himself in, and commence a dreamless sleep -- not text Mom and Dad that some monster had upset him with a joke.

Chris Rock:

Kids raised on a culture of "We're not going to keep score in the game because we don't want anybody to lose." Or just ignoring race to a fault. You can't say "the black kid over there." No, it's "the guy with the red shoes." You can't even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.

Sarah Silverman:

My only problem with colleges is that they're just a sea of cellphones. Comedy is such a group experience that it's a bummer to be talking to a bunch of empty vessels through which Facebook expresses itself.

Christina Xu:

Many of WeChat's features are subtly optimized for "saving face" ...

Jaron Lanier:

If you love a medium made of software, there's a danger that you will become entrapped in someone else's recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that!

Steven Johnson:

In 1982, the musical 1-percenters took in only 26 percent of the total revenues generated by live music; in 2003, they captured 56 percent of the market, with the top 5 percent of musicians capturing almost 90 percent of live revenues.

Jad Mouawad:

In 2013, China's high-speed rail lines accrued more passenger-kilometers than the rest of the world combined -- about four times the volume in France and two and a half times that of Japan.

Robin Harding:

Whereas 90 per cent of dwellings sold in the US or UK are second-hand, in Japan that figure is just 15 per cent, showing the dominance of new houses.

Alex Morris:

More than 90 percent of corn and soybeans grown in the U.S. are genetically modified.

P. W. Singer and August Cole:

More than three-quarters of the field-programmable gate arrays in the F-35 strike fighter are made in China and Taiwan.

Chavie Lieber:

75 percent of bridal jewelry purchases made at Signet stores are bought on credit.

Dominic Brown:

On average, 69% of an organization's data is has no business, legal, or regulatory value.

J. Nathan Matias:

Even seemingly small online actions -- clicking the "like" button, changing one's profile photo -- are being tracked and analyzed.

Arunpreet Singh:

Only full visibility allows detection, everything else will inevitably fail.

Paul Moore:

You can forget Tor, a VPN and your favorite proxy site... if you have javascript enabled and you've been profiled, there's a very good chance they'll identify you.

The problem is... do you know when you're being profiled?

Bob Lefsetz:

We all leave artifacts. And the loss of privacy is creepy, but to be able to sift through the ashes is fascinating.

David Bromwich:

If we think candor is a trait of considerable social as well as intellectual value, we should take care how we modify the conditions that have made candor possible.

Natasha Singer:

Because the technology can be used covertly, civil liberties advocates say its popularization has the potential to undermine people's ability to conduct their personal business anonymously in stores, hotels and other public spaces.

Eugene Wei:

Beware your nostalgia for an age you never lived in. It was probably worse then than it is now.

L.P. Hartley:

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

A senior administration official, who was given permission to be interviewed, but on the condition of anonymity because of the topic's sensitivity:

The encryption issue ... both in this country and abroad is going to have a major impact on how law enforcement and intelligence do their jobs.

Mike McConnell, Michael Chertoff and William Lynn:

We believe that the greater public good is a secure communications infrastructure protected by ubiquitous encryption at the device, server and enterprise level without building in means for government monitoring.

Jason Fried:

The right idea could start out life as the wrong idea.

Joseph Stiglitz:

Just because you've heard it before doesn't mean we shouldn't try it again.

James Comey:

Have we really tried?

Cooper:

We've always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments. These moments when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known. We count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we lost all that. Or perhaps we've just forgotten that we are still pioneers. And we've barely begun.

Paul Saffo:

Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.