"Though President Donald Trump has spent his career boasting of his wealth, he claimed in the 1990s that outfitting apartments in his residential high-rise buildings with sprinkler systems would be too expensive—and lobbied against regulations that may have been able to save the life of a man who was killed in a"

"Consider, for example, the following quiz posted to Facebook by San Benito Tire Pros, a tire and auto repair shop in California. It asks Facebook users, “What car did you learn to drive stick shift on?”

I hope this is painfully obvious, but for many people the answer will be the same as to the question, “What was the make and model of your first car?”, which is one of several “secret questions” most commonly used by banks and other companies to let customers reset their passwords or gain access to the account without knowing the password."

"How did we get into this preposterous mess? Answering this question requires an understanding of (among other things) the peculiar nature of digital technology, the ideology of Silicon Valley, the astonishing political naivety of Zuckerberg, the ethical tunnel vision of software engineers and – most important – the business model that has come to be known as “surveillance capitalism”."

"Harlan Ellison is probably one of the best writers of the last century, but he may be more famous (or infamous) for his irascibility, his lawsuits, and his reputed bad behavior."

"I called Mark Zuckerberg a modern-day colonizer, and it made some international news. After a couple of weeks of these headlines and the two sides going back and forth, he dropped the lawsuit. We did win that battle. It’s still ongoing. There are no lawsuits anymore but they still haven’t gotten the land back, and Zuckerberg still has a wall built around his property. These Hawaiians are just looking to fish, or get to the beach. This issue has really brought some of the injustices we’ve been facing for years to the attention of the world."

"There’s a new playbook for oppression today. Instead of outright totalitarian rule, you construct the appearance of democracy, while controlling it by subtly — in some cases perhaps not even consciously — restricting the options available to individual voters; by controlling a tiered system of “representative” electors behind the scenes; or by simply outright stuffing the ballot box. (There can be much sound and fury about the distinctions between the available candidates, but if you’ve done your job correctly, and made democracy as awful as possible, in general only establishment candidates or easily manipulated narcissists will ever be nominated.)"

"We are idealists and we are realists. We are dreamers and we are builders. We are experiencers and we are experimenters. We long for certainties, yet we ourselves are full of the ambiguities of the Mona Lisa and the I Ching. We ourselves are a part of the yin-yang of the world. | Alan Lightman, Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine"