Apple:

This is it. This is what matters.

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

Will it make life better? Does it deserve to exist?

We spend a lot of time on a few great things, until every idea we touch enhances each life it touches.

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

This is our signature, and it means everything.

Evgeny Morozov:

The benefits to consumers are already obvious; the potential costs to citizens are not.

Steven Aftergood:

Somebody is going to be unhappy at the end of this process. I hope it's somebody else.

Mike Tyson:

I've learned that when people congratulate me, that's when I focus on my flaws. That way I don't allow my narcissism to fly sky-high and allow me to think that I can act out without any consequences.

Tyler Cohen:

I think of humility as a virtue, a practical virtue that's making a comeback.

Screwtape:

No man who says I'm as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did.

Sasha Weiss:

... Underneath the pomp and idealism our political leaders are con men, telling us a story about ourselves that may not be true.

Jonathan Chait:

But it feels true, and that is the important thing.

James Surowiecki:

It seems that con artists, for all their vices, represent many of the virtues that Americans aspire to. Of course, the fundamental difference between entrepreneurs and con artists is that con artists ultimately know that the fantasies they're selling are lies.

Tom Nichols:

Your political analysis as a layman ... probably isn't -- indeed, almost certainly isn't -- as good as you think it is.

Michael Hobbes:

We're just magnifying what we know, zooming in on the crumbs as if it will reveal where they lead.

Evgeny Morozov:

No laws and tools will protect citizens who, inspired by the empowerment fairy tales of Silicon Valley, are rushing to become data entrepreneurs, always on the lookout for new, quicker, more profitable ways to monetise their own data – be it information about their shopping or copies of their genome. These citizens want tools for disclosing their data, not guarding it. Now that every piece of data, no matter how trivial, is also an asset in disguise, they just need to find the right buyer.

Dwight Garner:

I'd never own one, even if I could. But I miss it already.

Jenna Brager:

Are you really that guilty about your guilty pleasures? What exactly were you hoping for anyway?

Molly Crabapple:

Winning does not scale. Don't pretend that everyone can win.

Alexis Madrigal:

No matter how hard you sprint for the horizon, it keeps receding. There is always something more.

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

That the enemy is us, is never easy to take.

Tony Hoagland:

In the big store window of the travel agency downtown,
a ten-foot sign says, WE WILL NEVER FORGET.

The letters have been cut with scissors out of blue construction paper
and pasted carefully to the sign by someone's hand.

What I want to know is, who will issue the ticket
for improper use of the collective pronoun?
What I want to know is, who will find and punish the maker
of these impossible promises?

Rebecca Brock:

You can't even remember what I'm trying to forget.

Kellan Elliott-McCrea:

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

Richard Holbrooke:

Only with hindsight can one look back and see that the smartest course may not have been the right one.

Charles Montgomery:

We are pushed and pulled according to the systems in which we find ourselves, and certain geometries ensure that none of us are as free as we might think.

An industry executive:

We don't want to keep these records. Truthfully, we just don't want to do it.

Pope Francis:

Many think that changes and reforms can take place in a short time. I believe that we always need time to lay the foundations for real, effective change. And this is the time of discernment.

From "Mending Wall", by Robert Frost:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out

From "Doing Without", by David Ray:

Doing without
is a great protector of reputations
since all places one cannot go
are fabulous, and only the rare and
enlightened plowman in his field
or on his mountain does not overrate
what he does not or cannot have.

Clarinda Harriss:

The Tragedy of Hats is that you can never see the one you're wearing,
that no one believes the lies they tell,
that they grow to be more famous than you,
that you could die in one but you won't be buried in it.

Bobbie Johnson:

At the heart of what we do is an ambition to tell real, true stories that help people understand the world around them. And if we don't have a reputation, we don't have anything ... If we lose credibility, we lose everything we have built.

Genscape Chief Executive Matthew Burkley:

No one can stop us from doing what we do.

Shawn Musgrave:

The police inadvertently released to the Globe the license plate numbers of more than 68,000 vehicles that had tripped alarms on automated license plate readers over a six-month period. Many of the vehicles were scanned dozens of times in that period alone.

Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., Purdue's president:

A lot of people would rather not be measured and held accountable.

Supreme Court, in Global-Tech Appliances, Inc. v. SEB S.A. (2011):

The doctrine of willful blindness is well established in criminal law. Many criminal statutes require proof that a defendant acted knowingly or willfully, and courts applying the doctrine of willful blindness hold that defendants cannot escape the reach of these statutes by deliberately shielding themselves from clear evidence of critical facts that are strongly suggested by the circumstances.

Frank Chimero:

If something can be anything, it usually becomes everything.

Paul Ford:

Everything is so anticlimactic.

Tavi Gevinson:

Nothing lasts forever, of course, but Nothing doesn't resonate with a teenager the way Forever does, because, for better or worse, it's hard to imagine ever not feeling this way, being this person, having this life.

Edward Hoagland:

Friendship provokes us to pause a moment, shrug off our workaday carapace, and just be flesh and blood. Like a guardian spirit, a friend may ask and then reorient us a bit, a leverage like New Year's Eve. Traction, context: to remain among the living, hugged and germane, is the idea. When we blossom, does our bouquet have a scent? Life is not a dogfight. We pile together like puppies for warmth and sniffing, or wriggle, wag, and stilt-walk instead of quarreling. Make me not feel nightmarishly alone, or even lonesome. People who for one reason or another can't boast of having enough friends will enlarge the circle by imagining they register in the lives of folk who barely acknowledge them with a nod.

Natalie Angier:

We lavish $70 billion a year on weddings, more than we spend on pets, coffee, toothpaste and toilet paper combined.

Tim Kreider's married friend:

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

Sharon Waxman:

You've got to be in the game, and to be in the game, you gotta be first.

Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify:

The question of when we'll be profitable actually feels irrelevant. Our focus is all on growth. That is priority one, two, three, four and five.

Dave Murrell, who calls himself Fyrare:

If you're not padding your numbers, you're not doing it right. It's part of the game.

Rattle:

I think Decius and I should start practice claiming that MemeStreams is worth four billion while keeping a straight face.

Gregory Aharonian:

The general rule is, the more patents a company has, the more closely the quality of their patent portfolio approaches the quality of all patents, which is to say the majority of all of these patents are invalid.

Pierce Gleeson:

Twitter had created a system that demanded the attention of intelligent people, individuals capable of assuming the entire false persona of a global brand without lapses, but there was no reward for that attention. It was a responsibility, not an opportunity.

Alexis Madrigal:

Of course, the metabot does not want to create a single fake account that looks human. It wants to create tens of thousands of fake accounts that look sort of human. And it knows it should not overwhelm one user with 10,000 fake followers (though that's what happened). Rather, the bots should be spread out among many people, so that no one gets suspicious that thousands of porny spambots are following them.

Joseph Lawler:

State Department officials spent $630,000 to get more Facebook "likes," ... the agency's inspector general says.

Despite the surge in likes, the IG said the effort failed to reach the bureau's target audience, which is largely older and more influential than the people liking its pages.