Tim Parks:

Is it age, wisdom, senility? ... I'm enjoying it thoroughly, and then the moment comes when I just know I've had enough. It's not that I've stopped enjoying it. I'm not bored, I don't even think it's too long. I just have no desire to go on enjoying it.

Greg Smith:

I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.

"Lloyd Blankfein":

At Goldman, we pride ourselves on our ability to scour the world's universities and business schools for the finest sociopaths money will buy. Once in our internship program, these youths are subjected to rigorous evaluations to root out even the slightest evidence of a soul. But, as the case of Mr. Smith shows, even the most time-tested system for detecting shreds of humanity can blow a gasket now and then. For that, we can only offer you our deepest apology and the reassurance that one good apple won't spoil the whole bunch.

Casey A. Gollan:

We see life where there is only code, code falling for other code, us falling for code. It can't be long until code really does fall for us.

Sam Knight:

High Frequency Trading now accounts for about 75 percent of all US equity transactions.

Casey A. Gollan:

Part of the reason systems are hard to see is because they're an abstraction. They don't really exist until you articulate them.

However, if you can manage to divine the secret connections and interdependencies between things, it's like putting on glasses for the first time. Your headache goes away and you can focus on how you want to change things.

Atul Gawande:

Making systems work is the challenge of our generation.