It is precisely because of all those years of anticipating and designing for failure that they are alive today.

We scrutinise a photograph with a sense that we are scrutinising the actual objects themselves, although they are distanced from us in time and space.

You need to know the reason you're there at that surgical table with a knife in your hand. You have to be clear that you are using these sophisticated tools (tools which can cause a lot of harm) to fundamentally and primarily help that entity, that child in front of you.

If you fail many times in life, it can be frustrating, but, if you look differently at that, you can see that if you fail many times, you get up many times. If you didn't get up after the first fall, you could never have fought. Failure just means you got knocked down.

Images are mediations between the world and human beings. Human beings 'ex-ist,' i.e. the world is not immediately accessible to them and therefore images are needed to make it comprehensible.

In the long-term there is no way to reconcile the conflict of interest between serving the user and the advertiser.

It takes intellectuals to come up with some of the most moronic ideas possible.

Capital has poured into San Francisco and the Bay Area but the growth hasn't distributed itself beyond the top percentile of the community. If you are in one of these companies, you may have a stable and survivable life in the Bay Area, but if you're not? You're going to have to make some incredible trade-offs.

I'm particularly interested in the human propensity to copy behaviours that lack any kind of knowable causal structure. This is how we learn arbitrary conventions—and I think it originates in a distinctively human way of building group identities. I describe ritual actions as causally opaque. We engage in this kind of behaviour even more enthusiastically when we're anxious about being excluded or left out.

Women perform two-thirds of all labour and produce more than half of the world's food. Yet, women own only about one percent of the world's assets, and represent 70 percent of those living in absolute poverty.

Financial markets depend on trust, and we had precious little trust as it was. The LIBOR scandal has done nothing to restore that trust. We have to do a lot more work on our regulations, procedures and regulators to re-establish that level of trust.

One reason conflict resilience has declined is that it's become easier to fire off a snarky message or simply block someone and move on. If we share physical space, avoidance has limits; I can leave the room, but I might still run into you in the hallway. Online, though, I can just delete, mute, or block you with no further engagement.