“You don’t want lots and lots of upheaval in any country, but if you do have a clear moment in the past that you want to break away from, that can help speed the adoption of new technologies.

“Vim is like C in that it is close to the heart of the computer. It does finite, discrete operations very efficiently. It takes an expert to lift it up to high levels of abstraction. Emacs is like Lisp in that it is close to the heart of computation. It does broad sweeping moves, succinctly generalizing powerful principles. But it takes an expert to bring it under efficient control at a fine-grained level.

“Social networks don’t reduce our privacy, they reduce to 1 the number of public personas we can have online. In this we become more like celebrities.

“Just as houses all over America are full of chairs that are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of chairs designed 250 years ago for French kings, conventional attitudes about work are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of the attitudes of people who’ve done great things.

“The only way you can say ‘F*** you’ to fate is by saying it’s not going to affect how I live. So if somebody puts you to death, make sure you shave.

“There are more people reading more news every day than ever before—without the cost of printing and distributing a costly piece of newsprint every day. But many people in the news industry have built their lives around dead trees. As a result, with classified ads disappearing and the web thriving, the newspaper industry is over. A new industry is being built in its place, often with new people doing work that might be done far better by the old hands, if they weren’t stuck defending the wholesale slaughter of trees.

There are trees in your business too. They may not be called trees, but they’re there.

“The Hering illusion looks like bike spokes around a central point, with vertical lines on either side of this central, so-called vanishing point. The illusion tricks us into thinking we are moving forward, and causes the visual cortex to try to extrapolate to the future. Since we aren’t actually moving and the figure is static, we misperceive the straight lines as curved ones.

“The conversations you overhear tell you what sort of people you’re among.

“Bad elevator pitches go on and on about the product. Good ones boil it down to a high concept pitch. The rest of the elevator pitch should be devoted to your traction, social proof, team, and market.

“A fanatic redoubles his efforts when he has forgotten his aim.