We should talk about the ultimate cause of war. It's a question we should never stop asking, because if we do, there's a chance, however remote, that we might miss an opportunity to reduce the occurrence of war.

An economy where advertisers thrive while journalists and artists struggle, reflects the values of a society more interested in deception and manipulation than in truth and beauty

One thing that I have been trying to do is bring together in places like Bosnia technologists who create ever-more destructive land mines [and convince them not to build more dangerous mines]. And that has actually worked.

I mean, you can't have advertising be the only official business of the information economy if the information economy is going to take over.

Of all the things you can spend a lot of money on, the only things you expect to fail frequently are software and medicine.

A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.

At the turn of the [21st] century it was really Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, if we give away all the information services, but we make money from advertising, we can make information free and still have capitalism. But the problem with that is it reneges on the social contract where people still participate in the formal economy. And it's a kind of capitalism that's totally self-defeating because it's so narrow. It's a winner-take-all capitalism that's not sustaining.