“People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they'll spend all day telling you who they are.”

“She had been in situations like this, where people said, Convince me, and in none of those had they actually wanted to be convinced. She could lay down a perfect argument and they just invented new...”

“Good words were the difference between Emily eating well and not. And what she had found worked best were not facts or arguments but words that tickled peoples brains for some reason, that just amu...”

“ 'You can't stop me. Your word voodoo, it doesn't work on me. Right? So how do you think you're going to-' Eliot produced a pistol. He didn't seem to pull it from anywhere. He just suddenly had it....”

“It was always this way: The more people talked, the more they obscured. You didn't need to argue for the truth. You could see it.”

“Well, I like to know where I'm going before I try to get there. It's a mistake to try to execute a plan before you've thought of one, in my experience.”

“A disciplined mind leads to happiness, and an undisciplined mind leads to suffering.”

“We love surfers for the same reasons we have always admired doctors and pilots and firemen and shamans, for the same reasons we admire excellent soldiers: because despite themselves they have bowed...”

“Passion is a Horse Given to Us to Discipline.”

“Well, normally Im against big things. I think the world is going to be saved by millions of small things. Too many things can go wrong when they get big. Pete Seeger (on how he felt about attendin...”

“In summer the empire of insects spreads.”

“Great empires are not maintained by timidity.”

“Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.”

“As time and space are bent by gravity, so too is truth bent by power.”

“What a curious power words have.”