I know we don’t need everyone in the world to agree for this to work, but there’s got to be a critical mass of covered-dish people or we’ll never win. Okay. Gretyl broke her silence—she’d been proddin...
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.
He’d heard of it. It gave you ironic distance—a very now kind of high. Conspiracy people thought it was too zeitgeisty to be a coincidence, claimed it was spread to soften the population for its miser...
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...
From there, it was time for dinner: roaring fires, meat popping on spits, tofu sizzling on skillets ((it's northern California, a vegetarian option is not optional), and a style of eating and drinking...
But what if all the workers we went to said the same thing? What if, everywhere he [the boss] went, there were workers saying, 'We are worth so much,' and 'We will not be treated this way,' and 'You c...
Beneath the red crosses was another insignia: CHP. California Highway Patrol. They were State Troopers.
Anytime someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you and doesn’t give you a key, that lock is not there for your benefit.
Any complex system is sport for a hacker;
You want to double your success rate, triple your failure rate.
All this important stuff has *no one in charge of it.* Some people claim to be, but they're in charge of one tiny piece of it, and maybe they think *their* piece is a brake or a steering wheel, but th...
You’re taking the bus around Burbank? Lester said. Christ, Perry, this is Los Angeles. Even homeless people drive cars.
The Bill of Rights was written before data-mining, he said. He was awesomely serene, convinced of his rightness. The right to freedom of association is fine, but why shouldn't the cops be allowed to m...
People actually like supporting the artists whose work they like. It makes them feel happy. You don’t have to force them. And if you force them, they don’t feel as good.
I’m suspicious of any plan to fix unfairness that starts with ‘step one, dismantle the entire system and replace it with a better one,’ especially if you can’t do anything else until step one is done....
It's the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most people never think to ask the stupid questions.
In theory, we’re selfish assholes who want more than our neighbors, can’t be happy with a lot if someone else has a lot more.
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.
I think you have to be a mathematician to appreciate how full of shit economists are, how astrological their equations are.
I think that I was too self-centered to ever develop good skills as a peacemaker. In my younger days, I assumed that it was because I was smarter than everyone else, with no patience for explaining th...