"What will you do today that will make you proud in a year?"

"If I can make one suggestion, something that really worked for me in achieving at least minimal “success” in my field was to stop looking at other people for direction. To be honest, I have no idols, heros or people who I look to for answers and guidance. What I do is write my end goal down and then write down all of the steps I think it will take me to reach that goal. We each have our own process and it’s important to focus on OUR next move rather than the end result or the advice of others as they both tend to distract."

"Distraction rules the Web, so about the best that social game makers can hope to achieve is the delivery of great amusement. Like pinball, the secret to social game design is thus to be quick and simple, obvious and unconcerned about grander ideals. Keeping things simple (to the point of lame) is a good fit for the Facebook platform because the rest of the world really is only a click away, and as humans we are notoriously bad at paying attention unless all distractions are removed."

"The revolutions of the future will appear in forms we don’t even recognise—in a language we can’t read. We will be looking out for twists on the old themes but not noticing that there are whole new conversations taking place. Just imagine if all the things about which we now get so heated meant nothing to those who follow us—as mysteriously irrelevant as the nuanced distinctions between anarcho-syndicalism and communist anarchism. At least we can hope for that. As the cybernetician Stafford Beer once said to me: ‘If we can understand our children, we’re all screwed.’"

"If you never do anything, you never become anyone."

"It is late at night. Parker stretches back on an easy chair and bemoans what he sees as the scarcity, in contemporary culture, of revolutionary thinkers on the level of, say, Jim Morrison and Jack Kerouac. “They were capable of folly,” he says, “and willing to take risks in terms of their message. We live in an extremely repressive era, and we fail to realize how repressive it is, because we’re told that all these outlets for rebellion, like listening to rock music, are no longer satanic. Smoking weed—that’s sort of O.K. and acceptable in some circles.” To Parker, the implication is that people in his position have almost an obligation to do what they can with the tools at their disposal—software and the Internet—to free up society through disruptive technology. As he muses, it is clear that he sees entrepreneurship and invention as handmaidens of social transformation."

"Some of the most productive creative minds rely on a periodic self-administered dose of randomness to stay stimulated. Stimulation is not only necessary when developing new ideas, but is also critical when refining solutions to a particular problem. Every brain benefits from new angles that often escape your traditional point of view"

"Why are we here, that is the question… In this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting."

"If the only alternative is slow and painful failure, the way to get unstuck is to blow up a constraint, deal with the pain and then run forward. Fast."