A Venture Capitalist, to Nikola Tesla:

You're not going to show a Deck, are you?

Paul Ford:

Learning the Python programming language will give you a certain kind of power over computers, but being amazing at PowerPoint is how you gain control over other people.

Horace Dediu:

Padcasting ... is clearly the future of presentations.

Paul Ford:

One day you are putting numbers into spreadsheet cells, and the next those numbers feed into budgets, and the budgets turn into requests to Human Resources, which turn into postings ... Just one number in a cell in Excel, plus human beings with checkbooks, and suddenly you've created an absence that must be filled. Houses are sold and bought. Kids have to move from their schools and attend new schools.

Kieran Healy:

The authoritarian spirit is not much troubled with Bayes; it can barely conceive of any error, let alone multiple Types of Error. Everyone is guilty of something ... It is just a matter of determining what an individual is guilty of, and, then, discretion in stripping that individual of all property, independence and dignity, or selling the privilege of immunity.

Simon Singh:

Among the infinity of numbers, fewer than 100 exhibit narcissism.

Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger:

Robert McNamara relied on the figures, fetishized them. With his perfectly combed-back hair and his flawlessly knotted tie, McNamara felt he could comprehend what was happening on the ground only by staring at a spreadsheet -- at all those orderly rows and columns, calculations and charts, whose mastery seemed to bring him one standard deviation closer to God.

Pope Francis:

We must not focus on occupying the spaces where power is exercised, but rather on starting long-run historical processes. We must initiate processes rather than occupy spaces. God manifests himself in time and is present in the processes of history. This gives priority to actions that give birth to new historical dynamics. And it requires patience, waiting.

Jeff Bezos:

I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in the next 10 years?' And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?'

Horace Dediu:

The big question in my mind is the sustainability of the arbitrage models which underpin pretty much every internet business plan ... What would blow the internet up is if consumers could become wiser about what they are giving up and advertisers would become wiser about aggregating consumer data ... What might help is the realization of what mass state surveillance can do and the realization that internet giants have more information about us than the government could ever hope to possess.