Most of us would like to end our lives feeling both that we had a good time and that we left the world a little better than we found it.

A true community maximizes the potential of whatever human resources exist within it (by allowing for all possible combinations), while networks minimize such utilization, since it's limited by each individual's capacity to absorb unsettling stimuli (new combinations).

Every invention creates new needs, but the biggest needs are not for new and more advanced versions of the last invention but for solutions to the social problems the last invention created.

One of the main reasons wealth makes people unhappy is that it gives them too much control over what they experience. They try to translate their own fantasies into reality instead of tasting what reality itself has to offer.

It is a mistake - as so many over-centralized socialist societies have discovered - to try to eliminate money as an incentive. Money is one incentive among many, and has its place. But to put no limits on the impulse to accumulate money obsessively is as destructive as to place no limits on the impulse to commit violence. A viable democratic society needs a ceiling and a floor with regard to the distribution of wealth and assets.

Despair ... is the only cure for illusion. Without despair we cannot transfer our allegiance to reality - it's a kind of mourning period for our fantasies. Some people do not survive this despair, but no major change within a person can occur without it.

If we define pornography as any message from any communication medium that is intended to arouse sexual excitement, then it is clear that most advertisements are covertly pornographic.