People

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"With much care and skill power has been broken into fragments in the American township, so that the maximum possible number of people have some concern with public affairs."

"I should say that when people talk about capitalism its a bit of a joke. Theres no such thing. No country, no business class, has ever been willing to subject itself to the free market, free market discipline. Free markets are for others. Like, the Third World is the Third World because they had free markets rammed down their throat. Meanwhile, the enlightened states, England, the United States, others, resorted to massive state intervention to protect private power, and still do. Thats right up to the present. I mean, the Reagan administration for example was the most protectionist in post-war American history. Virtually the entire dynamic economy in the United States is based crucially on state initiative and intervention: computers, the internet, telecommunication, automation, pharmaceutical, you just name it. Run through it, and you find massive ripoffs of the public, meaning, a system in which under one guise or another the public pays the costs and takes the risks, and profit is privatized. Thats very remote from a free market. Free market is like what India had to suffer for a couple hundred years, and most of the rest of the Third World."

"The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe. It is the cause and the end of all things; everything rises out of it and is absorbed back into it."

"I appeal to all pupils, students and young people, asking you to focus on the horizons that are opening up for you, and which you could only dream of a year ago. Our future will depend on your desire for education and moral values as well as on your entrepreneurial spirit."

"We have created a wealthy society with tens of millions of talented, resourceful individuals who play virtually no role whatsoever as citizens. Bringing these people in — with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources — is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve our problems."

"We are shocked when we see educators, timid before criticism and confused about first principles, betray their trust. And we wonder what can be that philosophy of education which believes that young people can be trained to the duties of citizenship by wrapping their minds in cotton wool."

"Today, you are hated throughout the world. If you dont know this, you should. The peoples burn your flag. The Islamic peoples all over the world chant: "Death to America!"

"The amount of pain it [murder] causes to everyone who ever cared about you, and innocent people, outweighs anything you are going through right now."

"The most extreme types, like Murray Rothbard, are at least honest. Theyd like to eliminate highway taxes because they force you to pay for a road you may never drive on. As an alternative, they suggest that if you and I want to get somewhere, we should build a road there and charge people tolls on it. Just try generalizing that. Such a society couldnt survive, and even if it could, it would be so full of terror and hate that any human being would prefer to live in hell."

"Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, etc., if they could; they have tried their talents at one or the other, and have failed; therefore they turn critics."

"Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along."

"The possibility to create the context in which people’s lives really matter is undoubtedly the most profound opportunity available to anyone, ever."

"Space, as our mathematicians have it, is spoken of as having three dimensions, which one may call Length, Breadth, and Thickness, and is always definable by reference to these planes, each at right angle to the others. But some philosophical people have been asking why three dimensions particularly—why not another direction at right angles to the other three?—and have even tried to construct a Four Dimensional geometry."

"Mister Toombs was willing to dissolve the Union to save slavery, Mister Phillips, to save liberty; while Mister Seward, denounced and derided by both, declared that the deepest instinct of the American people was for union. Reserved rights. State rights, limited powers, the advantages of union and disunion, were the cucumbers from which we were busily engaged in distilling light, overlooking the fact of nationality in discussing the conditions of union. We were speculating upon costume. We gravely proved that the clothes were the clothes of a woman, or of a child, without seeing that whatever the clothes might be there was a full-grown man inside of them. "The Constitution is a contract between sovereign States", shouted Mister Toombs, "let Georgia tear it and separate". "The Constitution is a league with hell", calmly replied Mister Phillips, "let New York cut off New Orleans to rot alone". "Oh, dear! it"s a dreadful dilemma", whimpered President Buchanan. "States have no right to secede, and the United States have no right to coerce. Oh, dear me! it"s perfectly awful! I"m the most patriotic of men, but what shall I do? what shall I do?" Separate! Cut off! Secede! It was of a living body they spoke, which, pierced anywhere, quivered everywhere."

"To have success in science, you need some luck. But to succeed in science, you need a lot more than luck. And its not enough to be smart — lots of people are very bright and get nowhere in life. In my view, you have to combine intelligence with a willingness not to follow conventions when they block your path forward."

"If the proverbial man of the planet Mars would come to this earth and inquire about the difference between "leader" and "ruler" he would learn that "rulers" are strange people who dressed in ermine, wore crowns, married foreign women, kept strictly to themselves, and had the inclination to administer the country without asking the people about their wishes. A "leader," on the other hand, he would be told, is a regular fellow in a simple uniform who embodies his nation, who tries desperately to create by propaganda complete unison between his ideas and the people. A leader, he might hear, was a local boy who made good, who spoke everybodys language, who never traveled abroad and disliked titles and royal paraphernalia."

"Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small _trivial_ project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, youll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Dont think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesnt solve some fairly immediate need, its almost certainly over-designed. And dont expect people to jump in and help you. Thats not how these things work. You need to get something half-way _useful_ first, and then others will say "hey, that _almost_ works for me", and theyll get involved in the project."

"The fact that were all connected, the fact that weve got this information space — does change the parameters. It changes the way people live and work. It changes things for good and for bad. But I think, in general, its clear that most bad things come from misunderstanding, and communication is generally the way to resolve misunderstandings — and the Webs a form of communications — so it generally should be good. But I think, also, we have to watch whether we preserve the stability of the world — like we dont want to watch this phenomenon like the stock market becoming unstable when it became computerized, for example. We need to look at the whole society and think, "Are we actually thinking about what were doing as we go forward, and are we preserving the really important values that we have in society? Are we keeping it democratic, and open, and so on?"

"When the word leader, or leadership, returns to current use, it connotes a relapse into barbarism. For a civilized people, it is the most ominous word in any language."