Jews From The United States

"My goal was never to make Facebook cool."

"Understanding who you serve is always a very important problem, and it only gets harder the more people that you serve. We try to pay a lot of attention to this by a combination of very rigorous quantitative and qualitative feedback. But if you’re serving 1.2 billion people, it’s very hard."

"I think that some decisions that we made early on to localize the website and keep it separate for each college on the network kept it really useful, because people could only see people from their local college and friends outside. That made it so people were comfortable sharing information that they probably wouldn't otherwise, which made it useful in the long term for people to look up information about other people on the site."

"To a certain extent, the website is unfortunate because it oversimplifies things. Everybody’s concept of having a friend is different. It can definitely blur the relationships that exist between people. But in the end, I think that Facebook can only reinforce preexisting communities."

"It’s not unusual for us to receive an email from somebody saying, “I spend all of my time on your website and now I have less of a social life than I had before.” We would much rather have people meet people through the website and go out and party than stay at home on a Friday night reading other people’s profiles. And it’s surprising, but we have actually received far less complaints about stalking than we otherwise would have expected."

"Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Zuckerberg: Just ask Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuckerberg: People just submitted it. Zuckerberg: I don't know why. Zuckerberg: They "trust me" Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks"

"I remember your internal post about how Instagram was our threat and not Google+. You were basically right. One thing about startups though is you can often acquire them. (private message to colleague on April 9, 2012 when Instagram was purchased)"

"It is better to buy than compete. (from a 2008 email)"

"My goal is to not have a job. Making cool things is just something I love doing, and not having someone tell me what to do or a timeframe in which to do it is the luxury I am looking for in my life."

"Issues about violating people’s privacy don't seem to be surmountable, I’m not willing to risk insulting anyone."

"I understood that some parts were still a little sketchy and I wanted some more time to think about whether or not this was really appropriate to release to the Harvard community."

"My experience with first-time directors is that they’re all extremely prepared, because I guess they’re worried. They spend weeks preparing everything, and they have to get used to the fact that once you get there, everything goes wrong and you have to make everything up."

"And nothing inhibited fourth-century orators in the assembly and the law-courts from indulging in savage slander, without a touch of humour in it."

"In Rome much pamphleteering took the form of verses and songs, circulated orally, or of libelli , defamatory placards or broadsheets (whence our word "libel")."

"A genuinely political society, in which discussion and debate are an essential technique, is a society full of risks."

"Historical explanation is not identical with moral judgment."

"" man is by nature designed to live in the polis, the highest form of koinonia, community; that is man's end or goal if he achieves the full potentiality of his nature."

"What I am arguing, in effect, is that the full democratic system of the second half of the fifth century B.C. would not have been introduced had there been no Athenian empire."

"What is good for a country? What is the national interest?"

"for it is conflict combined with consent, not consent alone, which preserves democracy from eroding into oligarchy."

"If I had to choose one which best characterized the condition of being a political leader in Athens, the word would be "tension"."

"Faction is the greatest evil and the most common danger. "Faction" is the conventional English translation of the Greek stasis, one of the most remarkable words to be found in any language."

"From Aristophanes to Aristotle, the attack on the demagogues always falls back on the one central question: in whose interest does the the leader lead?"

"The Athenians made mistakes. Which governmental system has not? The familiar game of condemning Athens for not having lived to some ideal of perfection is a stultifying approach."

"Political leaders, lacking documents that could be kept secret (apart from the occasional exception), lacking media they could control, were of necessity brought into a direct and immediate relationship with their constituents, and therefore under more and direct and immediate control."

"We must consider not only why the classical theory of democracy appears to be in contradiction with the observed practice, but also why the many different responses to this observation, though mutually incompatible, all share the belief that democracy is the best form of political organization."

"Ideal goals are a menace in themselves, as much in more modern philosophers as in Plato."

"In the western world today everyone is a democrat."

"Perhaps the best known, and certainly the most vaunted, "discovery" of modern public opinion research is the indifference and ignorance of a majority of the electorate in western democracies."

"I think that this is Schumpeter’s main legacy to economics: the role of technological and organizational innovation in driving and shaping the growth trajectory of capitalist economies."

"I don't think that Solow, in particular, has ever tried to come to grips with any of these issues except by making jokes."

"It is possible to see Keynesian and Schumpeterian ideas as complementary. Keynes is about short-run economic fluctuations brought about by erratic variations in the willingness of investors and governments to spend; Schumpeter is about the long-run trajectory driven by the erratic march of technological progress. This complementarity only became clear later, after both men had died, when economic growth became an explicit objective of public policy and topic of systematic analysis. Schumpeter was left frustrated by the younger generation’s affinity for his rival. In any case, the “preliminary volume” never materialized. The world turns. Today, some sixty years after their deaths, Schumpeter’s star probably outshines Keynes’s. The business cycle has receded in importance, partly because the large industrial economies have sprouted a more stable structure, and partly because the lessons that Keynes taught have been learned by central banks and finance ministries. Instead, long-term economic growth has moved to the top of the political and intellectual agenda, and that was Schumpeter’s topic. As Robert Lucas memorably put it, once you have begun to think about economic growth, it is hard to think about anything else. It is a pity that troubled old Schumpeter did not live to see the triumph of his obsession."

"In my view—and that of most contemporary economists, I believe—Schumpeter’s most original and most lastingly significant book was Theory of Economic Development, which appeared in 1911 (and was translated into English in 1934). It was at the University of Czernowitz, not far from the beginning of his career as an economist, that he worked out his conception of the entrepreneur, the maker of “new combinations,” as the driving force and characteristic figure of the fits-and-starts evolution of the capitalist economy. He was explicit that, while technological innovation was in the long run the most important function of the entrepreneur, organizational innovation in governance, finance, and management was comparable in significance."

"In recollecting Schumpeter, it is hard to tear oneself away from the exotic manner, the dubious politics, the carefully crafted image, the hidden self-doubts, the convoluted life story, the complicated relations to three wives and several non-wives."

"More generally, Schumpeter seemed to be playing the role of grand seigneur, and he tended to flatter where flattery was not due, no doubt satirically. All this went along with his reputation as a casual and easy grader. We used to say that he threw the exam books up a staircase: the ones that stuck at the top got an A, the ones that fell to the bottom an A minus. I was surprised to learn that in Austrian universities he had the reputation of a stern taskmaster."

"Well, I certainly was not going to study physics, and I knew I was not going to study biology, but I could have become a sociologist or an anthropologist. However, I found sociology a little soft. I think that somewhere in my mind, I probably already had the notion – which turned out to be right – that if I was going to be a social scientist of some kind, I would like a rigorous social science. The analytical aspect of economics already appealed to me. That must have been so. It was not really a matter of chance. But if my wife had said ‘oh, no, economics was terribly boring’, I would probably have found something else to do."

"If you see something that needs doing, do it. It is not easy for me to explain what I mean by this guideline, but I think it has been deeply ingrained in me for a long time. I rather believe that I was once promoted to Acting Corporal at the age of 19 because of this trait. I suppose that it entails a partial contradiction of the conventional injunction to get your priorities straight before acting. To my mind, the priorities are not so certain that one ought to pass up any opportunity to get something useful done. Perhaps it also reflects my belief that much more good is done by tinkering than by starting over from scratch. I claim for this approach that it fits in with the Hippocratic injunction to the doctor to "do no harm" and that gradient methods are a good all-purpose method for local optimization. What about global optimizations? Good point. I suppose I worry that enthusiastic seekers after global maxima run the risk of falling off steep cliffs. On the bad side, I know I sometimes find myself doing meaningless busywork when I could presumably spend my time at something more useful. My wife reminds me that once, when we discovered that the automatic wake-up mechanism in our hotel room was not working, I spent an hour and a half trying to fix it. (I got it to work. Once.) No recipe for coping is perfect."

"Suppose someone sits down where you are sitting right now and announces to me that he is Napoleon Bonaparte. The last thing I want to do with him is to get involved in a technical discussion of cavalry tactics at the Battle of Austerlitz. If I do that, I'm getting tacitly drawn into the game that he is Napoleon Bonaparte. Now, Bob Lucas and Tom Sargent like nothing better than to get drawn into technical discussions, because then you have tacitly gone along with their fundamental assumptions; your attention is attracted away from the basic weakness of the whole story. Since I find that fundamental framework ludicrous, I respond by treating it as ludicrous – that is, by laughing at it – so as not to fall into the trap of taking it seriously and passing on to matters of technique."

"You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics."

"Everything reminds Milton of the money supply. Well, everything reminds me of sex, but I keep it out of the paper."

"Whatever deficiencies the leaders of the American Revolution may have had, reticence, fortunately, was not one of them."

"Defiance to constituted authority leaped like a spark from one flammable area to another, growing in heat as it went."

"In no obvious sense was the American Revolution undertaken as a social revolution. No one, that is, deliberately worked for the destruction or even the substantial alteration of the order of society as it had been known. Yet it was transformed as a result of the Revolution...What did now affect the essentials of social organization— what in time would help permanently to transform them—were changes in the realm of belief and attitude. The views men held toward the relationships that bound them to each other—the discipline and pattern of society—moved in a new direction in the decade before Independence."

"The categories within which the colonists thought about the social foundations of politics were inheritances from classical antiquity, reshaped by seventeenth century English thought."

"On the evening of October 14, 1774, the Massachusetts delegates were invited to Carpenters' Hall by a group of Philadelphians to do "a little business.""

"At first the relevance of chattel slavery to libertarian ideals was noted only in individual passages of isolated pamphlets."

"Up and down the the still sparsely settled coast of British North America, groups of men-intellectuals and farmers, scholars and merchants, the learned and the ignorant-gathered for the purpose of constructing enlightened governments."

"The most powerful presentations were based on legal precedents, especially Calvin's Case (1608), which, it was claimed, proved on the authority of Coke and Bacon that subjects of the King are by no means necessarily subjects of Parliament."

"What Americans were really objecting to had nothing to do with constitutional principles. their objection was not to Parliament's constitutional right to levy certain kinds of taxes as opposed to others, but to its effort to collect any."

"Never had Parliament or the crown, or both together, operated in actuality as theory indicated sovereign powers should."