"It this terrible simplification that there is one Africa, and things go on in one way in Africa. We have to stop that, it is not respectful, and it's not very clever to think that way. I had the fortune to live and work for a time in the United States. I found out that Salt Lake City and San Francisco were different. And so it is in Africa, it's a lot of difference. What do we think it would be concurrency? And what is concurrency? In Sweden, we have no concurrency. We have serial monogamy. Vodka New Year's Eve, new partner for the spring, vodka Midsummer Eve, new partner for the fall, vodka, and it goes on like this, you know, and you collect a big number of ex's, and we've got a terrible chlamydia epidemic."

"Fundamentally, a society that asks questions and has the power to answer them is a healthier society than one that simply accepts what it’s told from a narrow range of experts and institutions."

"Our growing affluence has allowed us to shift from being bargain shoppers buying branded (or even unbranded) commodities to becoming mini-connoisseurs, flexing our taste with a thousand little indulgences that sets us apart from others."

"For the first time in history, hits and niches are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability."

"The world of shelf space is a zero-sum game: One product displaces another."

"We are turning from a mass market back into a niche nation, defined now not by our geography but by our interests."

"In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distributions, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare."

"A Long Tail is just culture unfiltered by economic scarcity."

"Talent is not universal but it is widely spread: Give enough people the capacity to create, and inevitably gems will emerge."

"Never underestimate the power of a million amateurs with keys to the factory."

"The Web is the ultimate marketplace of ideas, governed by the laws of big numbers."

"The ultimate cost reduction is eliminating atoms entirely and dealing only in bits."

"For a generation of customers used to doing their buying research via search engine, a company’s brand is not what the company says it is, but what Google says it is."

"In a world of infinite choice, context—not content—is king. (Chris Anderson quoting Rob Reid)"

"Broadly, the Long Tail is about abundance. Abundant shelf space, abundant distribution, abundant choice."

"Remember, in the tyranny of physical space, an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all."

"Blockbusters are the exception, not the rule, and yet we see an entire industry through their rarefied air."

"We are entering an era of unprecedented choice. And that’s a good thing."

"Order it wrong and choice is oppressive; order it right and it’s liberating."

"This is the end of spoon-fed orthodoxy and infallible institutions, and the rise of messy mosaics of information that require—and reward—investigation."

"But sometimes reality chooses not to conform to our preferences."

"What we can’t do is demand that the universe scratch our explanatory itches. Curiosity is a virtue, and it’s good to look for answers to “Why?” questions whenever we might be able to find them, or when we think that asking such questions might help us to understand things better. But we should be at peace with the possibility that, for some questions, the answer doesn’t go any deeper than “That’s what it is.” We’re not used to that—our intuition assures us that every event can be explained in terms of some reason why. To understand why we have that impression, we need to dig more deeply into how our actual universe has evolved."

"The “reasons” and “causes” why things happen, in other words, aren’t fundamental; they are emergent. We need to dig in to the actual history of the universe to see why these concepts have emerged."

"Metaphysical principles are tempting shortcuts but not reliable guides. There are good reasons why things often seem to happen for reasons—and also reasons why that’s not a bedrock principle."

"The momentary or Laplacian nature of physical evolution doesn’t have much relevance for the choices we face in our everyday lives. For poetic naturalism, the situation is clear. There is one way of talking about the universe that describes it as elementary particles or quantum states, in which Laplace holds sway and what happens next depends only on the state of the system right now."

"What we’re seeing is a manifestation of the layered nature of our descriptions of reality. At the deepest level we currently know about, the basic notions are things like “spacetime,” “quantum fields,” “equations of motion,” and “interactions.” No causes, whether material, formal, efficient, or final. But there are levels on top of that, where the vocabulary changes."

"Poetic naturalism is a philosophy of freedom and responsibility. The raw materials of life are given to us by the natural world, and we must work to understand them and accept the consequences. The move from description to prescription, from saying what happens to passing judgment on what should happen, is a creative one, a fundamentally human act. The world is just the world, unfolding according to the patterns of nature, free of any judgmental attributes. The world exists; beauty and goodness are things that we bring to it."

"Meaning in life can’t be reduced to simplistic mottos. In some number of years I will be dead; some memory of my time here on Earth may linger, but I won’t be around to savor it."

"The broader ontology typically associated with atheism is naturalism—there is only one world, the natural world, exhibiting patterns we call the “laws of nature,” and which is discoverable by the methods of science and empirical investigation. There is no separate realm of the supernatural, spiritual, or divine; nor is there any cosmic teleology or transcendent purpose inherent in the nature of the universe or in human life. “Life” and “consciousness” do not denote essences distinct from matter; they are ways of talking about phenomena that emerge from the interplay of extraordinarily complex systems. Purpose and meaning in life arise through fundamentally human acts of creation, rather than being derived from anything outside ourselves. Naturalism is a philosophy of unity and patterns, describing all of reality as a seamless web."

"... I just want to understand the large-scale story that string gas cosmology is trying to sell us. We have nine dimensions of space — they are all very small — and in three dimensions they start unwinding and getting bigger. Is that the basic idea?"

"People don't like to read papers — they like to read titles."

"When exactly does an observation occur? ... What were the laws of physics doing before there was anyone measuring things? And what do you mean by a measurement, anyway? Does it have to be a consciousness human being? ... Can a rock or a virus or an earthworm do an observation?"

"All of my advice comes from remembering what I did wrong and then telling people not to do it. ... Don't wait to read the most recent research papers. ... Wonder how you could do better. ... Do your own research projects. Take the initiative. ... Ask your own questions — try to answer them. ... At some point you stop being a student and you start being a scientist. ... And it's a completely different skill set ...""

"There probably are more forces than we know about, but they’re only going to be of direct interest to physicists, I’m afraid. No tractor beams."

"Inflation is a simple idea: imagine that the universe begins in a tiny patch of space dominated by the potential energy of some scalar field, a kind of super-dense dark energy. This causes that patch to expand at a terrifically accelerated rate, smoothing out the density and diluting away any unwanted relics. Eventually the scalar field decays into ordinary matter and radiation, reheating the universe into a conventional Big Bang state, after which things proceed as normal."

"The mystery of the arrow of time comes down to this: Why were the conditions in the early universe set up in a particular way, in a configuration of low entropy that enabled all of the interesting and irreversible processes to come?"

"In contrast to the arbitrarily complicated evolution of a (nonintegrable) classical system, all a quantum state ever does is move in circles."

"Even if we don't know the answer, a change of perspective can help us improve the question."

"It can't be stressed enough that the multiverse is utterly hypothetical—but that doesn't mean it isn't real."

"But the very fact that matter in the cosmos is still moving, rather than at rest, is the single most surprising thing about the universe."

"If man was devolving into a psychotic pit of rotted plasma, [Karl] Rove would be the Alpha of such grime."

"Many have defined the neocon movement based on the highly intellectual, albeit warped, musings of Strauss and Bloom. Yet one could hardly call the current leadership intellectual or even capable of digesting this philosophy. Even neocon thinkers are jumping off the ship. Do you believe this is simply trickle-down Machiavellianism in much the same way that Communism trickled down as an aberration of its original intent?"

"No oath of office or obligation of duty demands that a particular political party be supported, preserved, defended, protected, and adhered to — because no political party defines what an American is."

"Perhaps [Condoleezza Rice] would have made a more timely cameo in New Orleans had a Chevron tanker caught fire. Jane Crow seems to be just as willing as old Jim was."

"I say we pardon the turkeys, but not our elected officials."

"If you consider, for example, that democracy is much like a religion then 9/11 is akin to finding the body of God."

"Our duty - as citizens - to the Constitution transcends every other point of disagreement that every person and/or every group of people can have with one another, no matter how deeply felt. Watching our entire country implode under the self-serving ideologies of those so eager to claim everything but the Constitution as their guide leaves at least half of us without a home. We may live on the same land, but our nation and the citizens of that nation have been exiled into a national wilderness."