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.

Karen Weise:

Home values are now at three times the median income -- that's 15 percent higher than they have historically been, relative to what Americans earn.

As rates rise and push mortgage payments higher, people are going to realize that homes -- and not just mortgage payments -- are overpriced for what the nation as a whole earns, which in turn could send home prices tumbling again.

Norimitsu Onishi:

Sales figures for single-family homes in Santa Clara and San Mateo, the two main counties in Silicon Valley, show median prices have risen about 30 percent in the past year while the inventory of available homes has fallen by roughly half, according to an analysis of local multiple listing service data by the Silicon Valley Association of Realtors. The median prices for March -- $735,000 in Santa Clara and $925,000 in San Mateo -- only hint at the current market's frenzy.

Each property now typically attracts between 10 and 30 offers, eventually selling from 5 percent to 25 percent above the asking price, said Moise Nahouraii, the owner of Referral Realty in Cupertino. Jeff Barnett, a former president of the association and a regional vice president at Alain Pinel Realtors, said 30 percent to 40 percent of sales were paid in cash.

"Last year, the market came up," Mr. Barnett said. "This year, it's on fire; it's just unreal."

Agustino Fontevecchia:

Case-Shiller data for January showed the 10-city composite jumped 7.3% over the past 12 months, while the 20-city index surged 8.1%, its fastest levels since before the housing collapse. Some suggest the current state of the housing market is artificial, and that it will eventually face a correction.

Roberto G. Quercia:

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

Man in bed:

I just shipped the bed!

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.

Bono on Jony Ive:

You cannot get people this smart to work this hard just for money.

Kevin Ashton:

Creating consumes. It is all day, every day. It knows neither weekends nor vacations. It is not when we feel like it. It is habit, compulsion, obsession, vocation.

Steven J. Harper:

The billable-hour system is the way most lawyers in big firms charge clients, but it serves no one. Well, almost no one. It brings most equity partners in those firms great wealth. Law firm leaders call it a leveraged pyramid. Most associates call it a living hell.

Marco Arment:

Always have one foot out the door. Be ready to go.

This isn't cynical or pessimistic: it's realistic, pragmatic, and responsible.

Ted Gup:

Challenge and hardship have become pathologized and monetized.

David Simon:

Only cash still has meaning to those who claim to represent us. And the cash will always be there, more with every election cycle. Unsatisfied with the profits that can be achieved within the context of actual representative government, capital has instead succeeded in buying the remnants of representative government at wholesale prices, so that profit can always be maximized and any other societal need or priority can be ignored.

Rolf Dobelli:

We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press. If you think you can compensate with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong.

Stanley McChrystal:

You have to not lose confidence in what you are doing.

You have to be able to go to the edge of the abyss without losing hope.

Sarah Kendzior:

Hope is something you should have for other people, not for yourself.

Elizabeth Smither:

The sea asks "How is your life now?"
It does so obliquely, changing colour.
It is never the same on any two visits.

It doesn't presume to wear a white coat
But it questions you like a psychologist
As you walk beside it on its long couch.

Rebecca Brock:

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

Rachel DeWoskin:

Is it possible to re-imagine what you can't remember?

My friend, the writer Emily Rapp,
who just lost her baby, Ronan, to Tay-Sachs,
likes to respond,
"Yes, you can,"
when people say, "I can't imagine."

David Foster Wallace:

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

Wislawa Szymborska:

Even a simple "Hi there," when traded with a fish, make
both the fish and you
feel quite extraordinary.