A game is a series of interesting choices

-Sid Meier

"Many people today resent the suggestion that they’re in charge of the way they feel."

--Mike Rowe

How did we go from character to personality without realizing that we had sacrificed something meaningful along the way?

--Susan Cain, in Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking

The drive to eliminate paradoxes at any cost, especially when it requires the creation of highly artificial formalisms, puts to much stress on bland consistency, and too little on the quirky and bizarre, which make life and mathematics interesting.

--Douglas Hofstadter, in Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

Free Culture and Permission Culture:

That tradition is the way our culture gets made. As I explain in the pages that follow, we come from a tradition of “free culture”—not “free” as in “free beer” (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the free- software movement²), but “free” as in “free speech,” “free markets,” “free trade,” “free enterprise,” “free will,” and “free elections.” A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a “permission culture”—a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.
--Lawrence Lessig

We can no longer safely delegate our security because our delegates may be compelled to secretly violate our trust.

--Steve Gibson

Serious history talks back to slogans.

But in the contest for public attention, slogans usually win.
--Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, author of Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History