Nir Rosen:

"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."

Orville Schell:

In short, what used to be referred to as "the West" now finds itself confronted by an increasingly intractable situation in which the power balance is changing, a fact that few have yet quite cared to acknowledge, much less to factor into new formulations for approaching China. We remain nostalgic for those quaint days when Chinese leaders still followed Deng's admonition to his people to "hide our capacities and bide our time" (taoguang yanghui). What he meant in using this "idiom" (chengyu) was not that China should be eternally restrained but that the time to manifest its global ambition had not yet come. Now that it is stronger, however, its leaders appear to believe that their time has at last come ... What the Chinese seem to be saying without being too explicit (they have always been masters at indirection) is that they will now be reckoned with on their own terms, not ours. Like it or not, this is the world's new reality.

Peter Thiel:

There is an enormous difference between perfect competition and monopoly, and most businesses are much closer to one extreme than we commonly realize.

Rebecca Lieb, a digital advertising and media analyst at the Altimeter Group:

Facebook has deep, deep data on its users. [The new Atlas platform] can track people across devices, weave together online and offline.

Steve Cheney:

It's clear the mobile era is now spawning new platforms, which deeply impact how Google and Apple are evolving. The Apple Watch is a fine tuned system, deeply tied to everything else Apple, accelerated by innovation straight from embedded mobile IP. And just like the iPhone, Apple profits when you buy it. Meanwhile, When you use Google powered devices, Google parses through troves of data about you and ultimately profits off usage. Google is ambitious to a level we have never seen, building drones, cars and robots, all of which will be controlled through permutations of Android. And this 'platformification' of mobile operating systems and frameworks is about to accelerate by what's known as 'system wide network effects'.

Dan Kaminsky:

We've migrated so much of our economy to computer networks because they are faster and more efficient, but there are ... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

Paul Graham:

When you're young, you're given the impression that you'll get enough information to make each choice before you need to make it. But this is certainly not so with work.

Thomas Wells:

The ability to easily choose prudently is something we take for granted. We'd like to think that it is something about us, but in general it turns out to be a feature of the framing of the choices we face, like the rumble strips on motorway exit ramps designed to make you feel how fast you are still going and slow down. The idea that freedom consists in figuring all this out for yourself is a strange and unsustainable one.

Anna Della Subin:

Whatever you're doing, aren't you by nature procrastinating from doing something else? Seen in this light, procrastination begins to look a lot like just plain existing.

The voice -- societal or psychological -- urging us away from sloth to the pure, virtuous heights of productivity has become a sort of birdlike shriek as more individuals work from home and set their own schedules, and as the devices we use for work become alluring sirens to our own distraction. We are now able to accomplish tasks at nearly every moment, even if we prefer not to.

Paul Graham:

History is full of examples of young people who were working on important problems that no one else at the time thought were important, and in particular that their parents didn't think were important. On the other hand, history is even fuller of examples of parents who thought their kids were wasting their time and who were right. So how do you know when you're working on real stuff?

Penelope Trunk:

I try to celebrate each time I give something up, because then I know I'm a little closer to meeting my goals.

I am trying to figure out what it looks like to be the ideal nothing. And I'm trying to frame that in a way that makes me feel great about everything. After all, I'm the one who makes the choices. And I can pretty much choose anything, just not everything.

Peter Thiel:

The history of progress is a history of better monopoly businesses replacing incumbents.

Adam Gopnik:

The best argument for reading history is not that it will show us the right thing to do in one case or the other, but rather that it will show us why even doing the right thing rarely works out.

Emma Watson:

Stop defining each other by what we are not and start defining ourselves by what we are.

Michael Lewis:

"I'm going to Goldman," is still about as close as it gets in the real world to "I'm going to Harvard," at least for the fiercely ambitious young person who is ambitious to do nothing in particular.

People like to think they have a "character," and that this character of theirs will endure, no matter the situation. It's not really so. People are vulnerable to the incentives of their environment, and often the best a person can do, if he wants to behave in a certain manner, is to choose carefully the environment that will go to work on their characters.

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.

Moxie Marlinspike:

Look carefully at how they spend their time at work and outside of work, because this is also almost certainly how your life will look. It sounds obvious, but it's amazing how often young people imagine a different projection for themselves.

Look at the real people, and you'll see the honest future for yourself.

Jeff Bezos:

Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice.

Gifts are easy -- they're given, after all. Choices can be hard.

You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you're not careful, and if you do, it'll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

Dan Geer:

Realpolitik says that sentient opponents have always been a fact of life, but never before have they been location independent and never before have they been able to recruit mercenaries who will work for free.

Mark Buchanan:

What we gain from free services at first, we more than pay for through long-term damage to our economic lives --  as well as to democratic freedom.

Merle Travis / Tennessee Ernie Ford / George S. Davis:

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt

Samantha Power:

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

Clay Johnson:

Your clicks have consequences.

Omner Barajas:

There is undeniable evidence that our dependence on interconnected technology is defeating our ability to secure it.

Mason, Waters, Wright, and Gilmour:

And you run and run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Li Po:

We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.

John Kay:

The one certainty about the outcome [of the Scottish independence referendum] was that any close result was a bad result. It is. Those who argued in 1997 that devolution was a slippery slope were right. Last week, Scottish nationalists lost a battle. But the outcome makes it very likely they have won their war.

Christopher Jencks:

People who spend time in poor black communities often comment on how distrustful residents are of one another. The fact that the police frequently blackmail residents of these neighborhoods to inform on one another presumably contributes to such pervasive distrust.

While the police win most of the battles, they are not winning the war.

Shawn Henry, FBI executive assistant director [in 2012]:

We're not winning.

I don't see how we ever come out of this without changes in technology or changes in behavior, because with the status quo, it's an unsustainable model. Unsustainable in that you never get ahead, never become secure, never have a reasonable expectation of privacy or security.

Giles Fraser:

Just wars require not only proportionality but also a reasonable chance of success. And the problem with so much of the west's military involvement in Iraq, in particular, is that it has precious little conception of what success actually looks like.

Adam Gopnik:

The best argument for reading history is not that it will show us the right thing to do in one case or the other, but rather that it will show us why even doing the right thing rarely works out.

James Suroweicki:

The only way to win the game is simply not to play.

Taffy Brodeseser-Akner:

By March, 25 million people were dancing to "#Selfie." Was that because we liked it, or because our very means for cultural discovery had been manipulated to guarantee that we would?

David Brooks:

If you want to win the war for attention, don't try to say "no" to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say "yes" to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.

David Streitfeld:

The man who sells half the books in America seemed to want nothing more each year than for everyone to have a good time. All he asked in return was silence.

An Amazon spokesman did not respond to questions on the subject of fear.

Joshua Rothman:

We live in a consumer society premised on the idea of self-expression through novelty. We believe that we can find ourselves through the acquisition of new things. Perhaps inevitably, we have reconceived creativity as a kind of meta-consumption: a method of working your way toward the other side of the consumer-producer equation, of swimming, salmon-like, back to the origin of the workflow.

Among the many things we lost when we abandoned the Romantic idea of creativity, the most valuable may have been the idea of creativity's stillness. If you're really creative, really imaginative, you don't have to make things. You just have to live, observe, think, and feel.

Patricia Robinson:

For some reason, knowing tomorrow won't be so bad doesn't make today pass any faster. In my experience. But that awful day was Monday, and now it's Friday and I don't remember how bad I felt. Now that is a genuine blessing, because I do remember how bad I hated all the misery I can't remember.

Jose Ferreira, CEO of Knewton:

We have five orders of magnitude more data about you than Google has.

Douglas Haddow:

These are the most boring people on the planet. And it's their world now, we're just supplying the data for it.

Maciej Ceglowski:

Surveillance as a business model is the only thing that makes a site like Facebook possible.

Tim Parks:

I feel guilty. They paid for everything. What am I doing trying to hold a bit back? What if they find out?

George Friedman:

Nationalism, the remembrance and love of history and culture, is not a trivial thing.

Cosmas Mairosi:

we are here
slaving for sovereignty by selling freedom
into the captivity of patriotism.

Richard Poplak:

Eight thousand seven hundred and fifty heavily armed men and women, all here to help France pay the price for inventing countries.

Ian Bogost:

Have you not accepted your smartphone's reign over you, rather than lamenting it? The hope and promise of new computer technology has given way to the malaise of living with it.

George Friedman:

The tough part of national self-determination is the need to make decisions and live with them.

Thomas Rodham Wells:

The involvement of producers in shaping and ordering our desires means that welfare (the satisfaction of our preferences) can depart from autonomy (the sovereignty or 'ourness' of our preferences).

Mordechai Geldman:

I must look for my loss
in order to know what I'm looking for
is it an object or a thing or the thing
and was it mine before it was lost
or is it that some inner authority
is trying to bequeath me, like a Hellenistic sophist,
something I had never possessed
as for example a chance
as if I ever stood a chance

Decius, in 2004:

I've come to the conclusion that you actually want shifty, dishonest politicians elected by an apathetic populace. This means that things are working. 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.

Kevin Kelly:

This is the time that folks in the future will look back at and say, "Oh to have been alive and well back then!"

Derek Parfit, via Larissa MacFarquhar:

Most of us care about our future because it is ours -- but this most fundamental human instinct is based on a mistake. Personal identity is not what matters.

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

The citizen is lost in the labyrinth constructed by his country, when in fact straight is the gate, and narrow must always be the way. When I left for Middlebury, I had just published an article arguing for reparations. People would often ask me what change I expected to come from it. But change had already come. I had gone further down the unending path of knowing, deeper into the night. I was rejecting mental enslavement. I was rejecting the lie.

Mark Blyth:

It's not about costs, risks, or uncertainties; it's about the idea that a different future is possible.

John Fraser:

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

Neil Irwin:

No matter how entrenched our government institutions may seem, they rest on a bedrock assumption: that the leaders entrusted with power will deliver the goods.

Power is not a right; it is a responsibility. The way things are going currently isn't good enough, and voters are getting angry enough to want to do something about it.

George Friedman:

The tough part of national self-determination is the need to make decisions and live with them.

Adam Gopnik:

The best argument for reading history is not that it will show us the right thing to do in one case or the other, but rather that it will show us why even doing the right thing rarely works out.

A.O. Scott:

A crisis of authority is not for the faint of heart. It can be scary and weird and ambiguous. But it can be a lot of fun, too.

Noam Scheiber:

Every successful startup is in some sense a confidence game.

Jess Zimmerman:

In an episode of The Simpsons called Blood Feud, the ancient Mr Burns is revitalised by a transfusion from 10-year-old Bart, who shares his rare blood type. After the procedure, the usually decrepit Burns glad-hands his way around the nuclear plant he owns, trilling cheerfully: 'Hey there, Mr Brown-Shoes! How about that local sports team?' 'It's funny, Smithers,' he muses to his obsequious right-hand man. 'I've tried every tincture and poultice and tonic and patent medicine there is, and all I really needed was the blood of a young boy.'

Now, there is scientific evidence that Mr Burns was right.

Marcelo Gleiser:

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

Tim Radford:

A couple of decades ago, physicists spoke confidently of a "theory of everything" and one or two even proposed an "end to science". All has now changed. The mysteries have multiplied.

Taylor Swift:

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