The future’s a weirder place than we thought it would be when we were little kids.
He hated it when adults told him he only felt the way he did because he was young. As if being young was like being insane or drunk, like the convictions he held were hallucinations caused by a mental illness that could only be cured by waiting five years.
The first casualty of any battle is the plan of attack.
Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.
I can’t go underground for a year, ten years, my whole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me. Freedom is something you have to take for yourself.
Once you get to naming your laptop, you know that you’re really having a deep relationship with it.
This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy.
Where there’s life, there’s hope. Living people can change things, dead people cannot.
Digital Distribution and the Whip Hand: Don’t Get iTunesed with your eBooks.
If surgeons don’t get surgeon’s block, then why are you allowed to get writer’s block?
Content isn’t king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you’d choose your friends – if you chose the movies, we’d call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.
It’s a story of little girls who are pressed into working in sweat shops in games, who spend all day doing repetitive grinding tasks like making shirts, which are then converted into gold and sold on eBay.
I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what’s going on in my life.
Freedom is something you have to take for yourself.
The right to freedom of association is fine, but why shouldn’t the cops be allowed to mine your social network to figure out if you’re hanging out with gangbangers and terrorists?
My feelings towards Scott Card are pretty mixed. Politically, he and I are pretty far apart.
The big problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.
What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Ban umbrellas! Fight the menace of lightning!
Abnormal is so common, it’s practically normal.
I’d never been a tall guy, and the girls I’d dated had all been my height – teenaged girls grow faster than guys, which is a cruel trick of nature.