Here's looking back at a noteworthy 2005. (You can go back to 2004, too, if you'd like to look for trends.)

We wake up thinking we know what we know, only to find that we have to think all over again.

I would create, if not true bumper stickers, then the rumor of bumper stickers.

I'm not signing anything until I read it, or someone gives me the gist of it.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles S. Peirce, and John Dewey -- what these four thinkers had in common was not a group of ideas, but a single idea -- an idea about ideas -- that ideas are social ... like germs.

When it needed cash, to pay employees or buy equipment or build camps, it dispatched someone from Chicago with a rucksack filled with bricks of hundred-dollar bills. "All the people in Iraq had to say is, 'We need a backpack,' Or, 'We need two backpacks.'" Each pack held half a million dollars.

Al Qaeda is not an organization. It is a scene.

Where Google looks at Web pages and links, Visible Path looks at people pathways.

Ideas should never become ideologies.

The Iranians insist the freeze is only temporary.

Futurists always measure their batting average by counting how many things they have predicted that have come true. They never count how many important things come true that they did not predict.

The entitlement we need to get rid of is our sense of entitlement.

Is more what we really need?
In my opinion not.
But running spies is not the NSA's job. Listening is, and more listening is what the NSA knows how to organize, more is what Congress is ready to support and fund, more is what the President wants, and more is what we are going to get.

"We're not going to rely on agency pissants."

Too many people still mistake secrets for intelligence.

Asked what's wrong with the department, he said, "It's difficult to figure out where to start."

If you can't say it in 30 seconds, you have to move on.

The Open Source Center will study obscure sources like T-shirt slogans in countries of interest.

Just because Bill Gates is ready to pour millions of dollars into a big new idea doesn't make it a good one.

Dubai, with its Disneyesque Arab souks in which you can purchase Arab handicrafts or a Cinnabon ...

The critical question is not, "How can I achieve?" but "What can I contribute?"

Perhaps humility, more than anything, is the mark of true genius.

"It is it is our destiny," said General Lord.

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.

Find an influencer, and you'll find a deeply bitter man.

Mr. Kim ordered the formation of a special prosecutor's office last November to arrest people who use South Korean expressions or slang.

Your car knows what you did last summer.

Sometimes an idea comes along that is so stupid, all you can do is stand back, give it some room, and stare.

I think the interesting blogs are the radical ones with the most emotionally divisive content. Or the funny ones. The ones that make you feel, and not the ones that make you think.

One of the best things about hockey is that it's not soccer.

The French government is not anti-hip hop.

What made rock ’n’ roll different from all other earlier kinds of pop was not the music itself but the marketing.

Until the Second World War roughly a quarter of Baghdad's population was Jewish.

The real problem in the music industry is an addiction to blockbusters.

As far as a cultural phenomenon, MySpace is as important, if not more important, than MTV.

I could have done that. I could have done that while doing all the other things that I do. Why didn't I?

"I think the mistake now is holding back when you've got a good idea. You can't underestimate the good feeling you get when people in your wider social circle think you created something really, really cool."

The typical prostitute earns more than the typical architect.

Curiously, in a world where everything is worth knowing, nothing is.

Not everything can be boiled down to a multiple-choice question.

There is no monopoly on hypocrisy.

Are people really free if they're always reachable?

The chief innovation of "Madagascar" is that it consists entirely of annoying sidekicks.

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Old control was about hierarchy, monopoly, and aggregation. New control is about flexibility, decentralization, and networked specialization.

All the current members of China's Politburo Standing Committee, the highest tier in the Communist Party, are engineers.

Albert Einstein was a hedgehog; Richard Feynman was a fox.

As Mr. Whedon knows, the fastest way to a geek's heart is a story about other geeks, albeit ones with good hair and hot bodies.

Friedman was a blip in the blogosphere before, and he is a blip now.

The blogs have become the dinner table.

Even if life were not too short, it would still be too short to read anything by Dan Aykroyd.