...we spend more time gazing at luminous screens than into the eyes of our loved ones.

If technology is a drug – and it does feel like a drug – then what, precisely, are the side-effects?

The biggest teenage taboo is being strait-laced. It's easy to tell a researcher you went to a house party that turned into an orgy. It's less easy to say you like eating toast and watching QI.

My theory is that we used to have several personalities, and now we're encouraged to have one online.

Man the lifeboats. The idiots are winning.

That's not something that we've gone in thinking 'Right! How are we going to examine that now?' It's just when you take a step back you see that they're actually all sort of in that mode.

Whenever anything nice happens in the world I always expect something appalling to happen immediately afterwards.

I'm actually quite pro-technology, but I'm a worrier, so I like to envision worst-case scenarios.

Technology by default became the thing that was a new thing that had swept in and was altering it everything.

The iPad falls between two stools - not quite a laptop, not quite a smartphone. In other words, it's the spork of the electronic consumer goods world.

In summary, our world is doomed.

A little credulity helps one on through life very smoothly — better than always doubting and doubting and seeing difficulties and disagreeables in everything.

Learning to love yourself is like learning to walk—essential, life-changing, and the only way to stand tall.

Resolutely train yourself to attain peace.

How had it happened, Simon thought, that he was bound to these people—to people who thought of him as nothing more than a Downworlder, half human at best?

Through the years I've been getting better and better and better, and it's what you learn though the seasons.

Aleppo is a disaster. It's a humanitarian nightmare.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.

War contains so much folly, as well as wickedness, that much is to be hoped from the progress of reason.

Central authority is bad. The bias should be for freedom. And without a central authority, there are lots of little authorities, and we learn which ones to trust.

Never will I pursue happiness, because it is not a goal, just a by-product, and there is no happiness in having or in getting, only in giving.