QuoteLog

“You’re not officially a writer until someone interrupts you while you’re typing, and you try to be nice about it, but you secretly want to start screaming like Nicholson in ‘The Shining.’ ”

“We want to invest in the New York Stock Exchange. We want to have Pepsi Cola, Coca-Cola. We don’t want confrontation and aggression and, you know, to fight anymore. It’s over. It’s behind us now.”

“If you want to reach millions you book an ad on TV. If you want to reach one person you use e-mail or the telephone. But if you want to reach between 5 and 500 people a blog is the ideal tool to communicate.”

“Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both.”

“After we have aired our grievances we remember the essential point: Saddam is gone. A man who is cured of cancer does not complain about a common cold.”

“There is a myth that though we love freedom, others don’t; that our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture; that freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law are American values or Western values; that Afghan women were content under the lash of the Taliban; that Saddam was somehow beloved by his people; that Milosevic was Serbia’s savior. Members of Congress, ours are not Western values. They are the universal values of the human spirit, and anywhere, any time ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police. The spread of freedom is the best security for the free. It is our last line of defense and our first line of attack.”

“Iraq today is the only Muslim country where all shades of opinion - from the extremist Islamists of the Hezbollah to Stalinists, and passing by liberals, socialists, Arab nationalists and moderate Islamists - have full freedom to compete in an open market of ideas. Better still, all are now represented in the newly created Governing Assembly (Majlis al-Hukum). Iraq is also the only Muslim country where more than 100 newspapers and weeklies, representing all shades of opinion, appear without a police permit and are subjected to no censorship.”

“The biggest boost ever for ‘web standards’ would be if Google gave an extra PageRank point or two to pages using valid markup. Overnight, the commercial web would start taking the issue seriously.”

“You’ll think I’m off my trolley when I say this, but the Bush administration is the most radical, in a positive sense, in the approach to Africa since Kennedy.”

“[Lawrence] Lessig looks like the cashier whose line you want to avoid at Starbucks.”

“If we are eager for Iraqis and Iranians to blog, we certainly should be eager for AOLers to blog.”

“In summary, don’t let your ego take up more bandwidth than your site.”