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Joining up the dots in a way that isn't the way they joined up the dots.

The hive mind, instead of leading to a new plurality or a new richness, leads to a growing simplicity.

To say "you're wrong" is to raise an argument.

People have experiences out of which they form ideas, and those ideas have an effect on the world.

Systems that purport to be open and free - systems like the internet - are becoming ways of shutting debate down.

If you tell untruths to yourself about your own past, you'll tell even greater ones about your future.

Where people do set out to have conspiracies, they don't ever end up like they're supposed to. History is a series of unintended consequences resulting from confused actions, some of which are committed by people who may think they're taking part in a conspiracy, but it never works out the way they intended.

At a time when there isn't anything to give you confidence beyond yourself - you live in the "empire of the self" - then it is inevitable that you will seek those like you, because it will give you a sense of collective purpose. It will give you a sense of collective security. On the internet, you're constantly monitoring other people's choices to see what those people who you think are like you do, and they say, "OK I'll do that to be like that". And what that leads to is Balkanisation.

Once an idea gets legs, it has its own internal logic that tends to take over.

What people suffer from is being trapped within themselves - in a world of individualism everyone is trapped within their own feelings, trapped within their own imaginations.

The unbearably loving lightness in you casts even more shadow on the darkness in me.

People prefer to be the hero of their life story rather than the villain.

The banal and the weird are one and the same thing.