What you need for a participatory system to work: "a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain."

It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.

Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming - not producing, not sharing - and we should say, 'No.'

There's no such thing as information overload-only filter failure.

The waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work.

Civic participants don't aim to make life better merely for members of the group. They want to improve even the lives of people who never participate.

We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

A revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new tools. It happens when society adopts new behaviors

Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.

The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.

You don't have to do something every day that scares you. There's no fun in being terrified. Do one thing every day that makes you happy.

If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.

As long as I've got a chance to beat you I'm going to take it.

When you have less revenue coming in the door, you have more money going out the door. You have to find ways of trimming.

The kundalini rises and the kundalini is hot, it's a hot energy. Sometimes you feel it cascading up your spine, and it's kind of searing or it's tingling, it almost feels sexual.

I think people assume I'm perfect. I'm not. I make mistakes. I do things I regret. I'm stubborn.

I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.

In the new world, it is not the big fish which eats the small fish, it's the fast fish which eats the slow fish.

He’s not like you, Tod. Aside from a couple of notable exceptions, you tend to think things through, but Nash is ruled by his heart—

For example, the dwarfs found out how to turn lead into gold by doing it the hard way. The difference between that and the easy way is that the hard way works.