Businesspeople From The United States

"Myspace hurts my eyes."

"I don't see any particular problem with that."

"I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it."

"I think that argument is completely morally bankrupt, and I think people know that when they make it. There's a very big difference between having a sincere, passionate interest in a topic and being a paid shill … Particularly for PR firms, it's something they should really very strongly avoid: ever touching an article."

"Quite frankly, several of the people who contributed to the article should be banned from coming near a keyboard until they have learned to engage in proper encyclopedia writing."

"IAR is policy, always has been."

"We've always had a love/hate relationship with numbers."

"It turns out a lot of people don’t get it. Wikipedia is like rock’n’roll; it’s a cultural shift."

"We come from geek culture, we come from the free software movement, we have a lot of technologists involved. If we had done the same sort of comparison on poets or artists, I think that we would not have fared nearly as well."

"It is pretty weird. A few years ago, I was just some guy sitting in front of the internet. Now I send an e-mail or edit an article and it makes headlines around the world … I used to be just a guy — now I'm Jimmy Wales."

"We are Wikipedians. This means that we should be: kind, thoughtful, passionate about getting it right, open, tolerant of different viewpoints, open to criticism, bold about changing our policies and also cautious about changing our policies. We are not vindictive, childish, and we don't stoop to the level of our worst critics, no matter how much we may find them to be annoying."

"Wiki editing thrives on local knowledge, but 'local' in an epistemological sense, not necessarily in a geographical sense. For example, I personally know a lot more about world news on topics that interest me and could synthesize much better in those areas, than I know about local politicians where I live"

"The primary issue is how seriously we take our chosen obligations to people in the developing world who do not have Internet connections. … Frankly, and let me be blunt, Wikipedia as a readable product is not for us. It's for them. It's for that girl in Africa who can save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around her, but only if she's empowered with the knowledge to do so.."

"We are growing from a cheerful small town where everyone waves off their front porch to the subway of New York City where everyone rushes by. How do you preserve the culture that has worked so well?"

"Freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education."

"Most people understand the need for neutrality. The real struggle is not between the right and the left — that's where most people assume — but it's between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks. And no side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on either of those qualities."

"Ideally, our rules should be formed in such a fashion that an ordinary helpful kind thoughtful person doesn't really even need to know the rules. You just get to work, do something fun, and nobody hassles you as long as you are being thoughtful and kind."

"Wikipedia is first and foremost an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language. Asking whether the community comes before or after this goal is really asking the wrong question: the entire purpose of the community is precisely this goal."

"When someone just writes 'f**k, f**k, f**k', we just fix it, laugh and move on. But the difficult social issues are the borderline cases — people who do some good work, but who are also a pain in the neck."

"[Wikipedia is] like a sausage: you might like the taste of it, but you don't necessarily want to see how it's made."

"I have no plans at all to be running an asylum. This is a serious encyclopedia project. We *do* have to make our changes conservatively and slowly, so as to make sure that we preserve our open spirit to the maximal degree possible. But some people are just not suitable for editing here, and that's just a simple brute fact."

"I frequently counsel people who are getting frustrated about an edit war to think about someone who lives without clean drinking water, without any proper means of education, and how our work might someday help that person. It puts flamewars into some perspective, I think."

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."

"Dude, you rock."

"What if we could get everyone in the world together to record what they know in one place?"

"I am often asked how I got into the business. I didn't. The business got into me."

"Friction makes sparks and sparks start creative conflagrations."

"Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read."

"I have learned that any fool can write a bad ad, but that it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one."

"You have come to a place which doesn't tolerate anything but the best. You have come to a place where you can be heard. You have come to a place where you can grow."

"Creative ideas flourish best in a shop which preserves some spirit of fun. Nobody is in business for fun, but that does not mean there cannot be fun in business."

"Fun without sell gets nowhere, but sell without fun tends to become obnoxious."

"When you reach for the stars, you may not get one, but you won't get a handful of mud either."

"A good basic selling idea, involvement and relevancy, of course, are as important as ever, but in the advertising din of today, unless you make yourself noticed and believed, you ain't got nothin'."

"I did not make this film about Frank Abagnale because of what he did . . but because of what he has done with his life the past 30 years."

"He understood whatever those hidden mechanisms are that convince people to trust you. I kind of watched him and absorbed what I could from him."

"His chutzpah and his imagination in the scams and stings he pulled off were so imaginative and so courageous. Amazing. I loved the fact that he could pull off all of those professions. In a way, he's sort of the anti-hero that you root for, even though you know he's going to have to pay a price and go to jail"

"Frank Abagnale could write a check on toilet paper, drawn on the Confederate States Treasury, sign it 'U.R. Hooked' and cash it at any bank in town, using a Hong Kong driver's license for identification."

"I stole every nickel, dime and dollar and blew it on fine threads, luxurious lodgings, fantastic foxes and other sensual goodies. I partied in every capital in Europe and bask on all the worlds most famous beaches."

"If I had to place any blame for my future nefarious actions, I'd put it on the Ford. That Ford fractured every moral fiber in my body. It introduced me to girls, and I didn't come to my senses for six years. They were wonderful years."

"I made a lot of exits through side doors, down fire escapes or over rooftops. I abandoned more wardrobes in the course of five years than most men acquire in a lifetime. I was slipperier than a buttered escargot."

"Remember what being an adult is: It has nothing to do with money or awards."

"What I did in my youth is hundreds of times easier today. Technology breeds crime."

"If my forgeries looked as bad as the CBS documents, it would have been Catch Me In Two Days."

"The interior of the earth is extremely hot - several million degrees."

"In some areas of Poland, children are regularly taken underground into deep mines to gain some respite from the buildup of gases and pollution of all sorts in the air. One can almost imagine their teachers emerging tentatively from the mine, carrying canaries to warn the children when it’s no longer safe for them to stay above the ground."

"The democratization of knowledge by the print medium brought the Enlightenment. Now, broadband interconnection is supporting decentralized processes that reinvigorate democracy."

"Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It's a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It's a platform, in other words, for reason. But the Internet must be developed and protected, in the same way we develop and protect markets — through the establishment of fair rules of engagement and the exercise of the rule of law. The same ferocity that our Founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the Internet. The stakes are the same: the survival of our Republic. We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas."

"The remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way — a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response."

"We have created a wealthy society with tens of millions of talented, resourceful individuals who play virtually no role whatsoever as citizens. Bringing these people in — with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources — is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve our problems."