Some consumers buy products not because they are ‘better” in any way, but simply because they are popular. What they’re buying is not just a product, but also a piece of popularity itself.

In the psychology of aesthetics, there is a name for the moment between the anxiety of confronting something new and the satisfying click of understanding it. It is called an 'aesthetic aha.

The line from psychologists is, if you’ve seen it before, it hasn’t killed you yet.

Posting dramatic charts or funny pictures is good and giving people smart reasons to believe what they already think is great.

The trick is learning to frame your new ideas as tweaks of old ideas, to mix a little fluency with a little disfluency—to make your audience see the familiarity behind the surprise.

People have all day to talk about what makes them ordinary. It turns out that they want to share what makes them weird.

Congress must go further to protect the right to privacy, to end the NSA's dragnet surveillance of ordinary Americans, to make the intelligence community more transparent and accountable.

This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves.

The culture at Valve is pretty much crowdsourced. The handbook is a wiki. One of the first things we say to new hires is, 'You have to change something in the handbook.'

I'm not stupid. I would like to have some businesses that grow so I won't have to be out there on the road when I'm 44.

I would like to be able to do a song with Ray Charles, before we both get too old.

So many of my books, I don't want to say they have messages, but they have important things to say.

I feel there is something nice about not talking. Like you can say more by actually saying less.

I haven't really written my plays and books - I've heard them. The stories are there already, singing in your genes and in your blood.

We should live as if we were in public view, and think, too, as if someone could peer into the inmost recesses of our hearts-which someone can!

Humility is to joyfully, voluntarily and quietly submit one's whole life to God's will, to finally use the gift of agency to give one's life back to Him.