Abnormal is so common, it's practically normal.

Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the history of the world. This is not a bad thing.

Terrorism is about magnifying one mediagenic act of violence into one hundred billion acts of terrorized authoritarian idiocy.

The United States of America was a pirate nation for the first one hundred years of its existence, ripping off the patents and trademarks of the imperial European powers it had liberated itself from by blood. By keeping their GDP at home, the U.S. revolutionaries were able to bootstrap their nation into an industrial powerhouse. Now, it seems, their descendants are bent on ensuring that no other country can pull the same trick off.

Skipping school isn't a crime. It's an infraction. They're totally different.

He hated it when adults told him he only felt the way he did because he was young. As if being young was like being insane or drunk, like the convictions he held were hallucinations caused by a mental illness that could only be cured by waiting five years.

Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.