My book has about 65 short chapters. Each chapter has a quote at the beginning. I thought it would be fun to gather all of these together in a blog post, so here they are. (They aren’t in book order.)
It’s not all the quotes in the book. There are hundreds of block quotes and there are special “interlude” interviews with a few people. But just reading all the epigraphs together paints an interesting picture. I’m also noticing a little repetition which I might still edit.
“If Facebook’s power to swing elections is like the Ring, then the only solution is to destroy that power.” — Scott Rosenberg
“You choose the web you want.” — Brent Simmons
“We come now to the very brink, where hope and despair are akin.” — Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings
“There’s no such thing as a sure thing. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is what you think.” — Ali from Draft Day
“We keep moving forward, opening new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” — Walt Disney
“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” ― Toni Morrison
“Progress depends on our changing the world to fit us. Not the other way around.” — Halt and Catch Fire
“Most important things in life are a hassle. If life’s hassles disappeared, you’d want them back.” — Hayao Miyazaki
“You donʼt know if your idea is any good the moment itʼs created. Neither does anyone else. The most you can hope for is a strong gut feeling that it is. And trusting your feelings is not as easy as the optimists say it is. Thereʼs a reason why feelings scare us.” — Hugh MacLeod, Ignore Everybody
“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” — Thomas Jefferson
“Perhaps you think that Twitter today is a really cool and powerful company. Well, it is. But that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t have been much, much more.” — Dalton Caldwell
“There aren’t many companies that get to this level. And there aren’t many founders that choose their company over their own ego.” — Jack Dorsey’s resignation letter
“This device isn’t a spaceship; it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel; it’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels — around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we were loved.” — Don Draper
“The station structure, designed after the Qual d’Orsay, Paris, but twice as large, will be 1,500 ft. in length by 500 ft. in width, three decked, inclose 25 tracks at tunnel level, which will be approached by gradual carriage drive and walkway.” — The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Almanac, 1906
“You were the captain of a ship, sailing aimlessly through the wilds of the Web. Occasionally you would drop anchor and stop to peruse all the great content that netizens were putting out into the world.” — The Web Is Fucked
“Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.” — Richard P. Feynman
“The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.” — Nelson Henderson
“In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company.” — Jack Dorsey
“kottke.org isn’t so much a thing I’m making but a process I’m going through. A journey. A journey towards knowledge, discovery, empathy, connection, and a better way of seeing the world. Along the way, I’ve found myself and all of you.” — Jason Kottke
“Postel walked in because he had a job for Mockapetris. He wanted him to find a compromise between five different proposals for improving the way the APRAnet dealt with names and addresses. Mockapetris took the job, but he pretty much ignored the five proposals and built his own system.” — Cade Metz writing about how Paul Mockapetris created DNS
“As the web becomes more and more of a part of our every day lives, it would be a horrible tragedy if it was locked up inside of companies and proprietary software.” — Matt Mullenweg
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” — J. R. R. Tolkien
“As software developers and designers, we have a responsibility to the world to think these things through carefully and design software that makes the world better, or, at least, no worse than it started out.” — Joel Spolsky
“The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it into something extraordinary. But you wouldn’t clap yet, because making something disappear isn’t enough. You have to bring it back.” — The Prestige
“I am very aware that the original concept must do something worthwhile creatively or all the hard work to follow will be wasted.” — Mary Blair
“Micro.blog is not an alternative silo: instead, it’s what you build when you believe that the web itself is the great social network.” — Brent Simmons
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.” — John Gall
“The magic of compatibility between products, that’s a big part of what I do this for. All the great stuff is built around agreements between developers to let users move data between the products.” — Dave Winer
“That is why you need to own your little place on the Internet: otherwise you are always tilling someone else’s land.” — Om Malik
“Why bake your pages instead of frying? Well, as you might guess, it’s healthier, but at the expense of not tasting quite as good. Baked pages are easy to serve. You can almost always switch servers and software and they’ll still work.” — Aaron Swartz
“So come and walk awhile with me and share the twisting trails and wondrous worlds I’ve known. But this bridge will only take you halfway there. The last few steps you have to take alone.” — Shel Silverstein
“This particular disposition of the secondary projections relative to the primary projections which is the essential feature of the invention provides for a vast number of possible combinations of adjacent bricks.” — LEGO patent
“Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.” — André Gide
“My approach to security, and I think this is true for others involved with OAuth, is to strive for the best security that will actually work.” — Blaine Cook
“The world isn’t run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It’s run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data.” — Cosmo from Sneakers
“The technical folks in the blogging world have learned a lot of the past few years about RSS and the blogging APIs—about what works well and what doesn’t. And, despite the efforts that have gone into certain directions, we feel it’d be unfortunate this early in the game to be married to a certain direction just because we started out that way when we didn’t know as much.” — Evan Williams, Blogger API post from 2003
“One’s legacy depends on one’s impact and what better way to measure impact than by the effect of what you’ve done. But this is measuring against the wrong baseline. The real question is not what effect your work had, but what things would be like had you never done it.” — Aaron Swartz
“Declaring independence is one thing, building it is another.” — Tantek Çelik, first microblog post on his own site
“I cannot imagine the future, but I care about it. I know I am a part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond when anyone will remember me.” — Danny Hillis, The Long Now Foundation
“Big technology platforms are now singular points of failure as much as they are single points of protection against malicious intent.” — Om Malik
“The internet does not need a conversation layer. It is the conversation layer.” — Derek Powazek
“It was a land of vast silent spaces, of lonely rivers, and of plains where the wild game stared at the passing horseman.” — Theodore Roosevelt
“These are lean times in social bookmarking. The staff at del.icio.us has been eviscerated by layoffs, and the project is now being run by a skeleton crew. Magnolia, the other useful bookmarking site, has gone offline for the summer while it implements a new ‘don’t irretrievably lose everyone’s data’ feature.” — Maciej Cegłowski in 2009, developing what would become Pinboard
“The result is a loose federation of documents — many small pieces loosely joined. But in what has turned out to be simply the first cultural artifact and institution the Web has subtly subverted, the interior structure of documents has changed, not just the way they are connected to one another. The Web has blown documents apart.” — David Weinberger
“Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.” — Steve Jobs, introducing the iPhone
“To the complaint, ‘There are no people in these photographs,’ I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.” — Ansel Adams
“It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.” — Thich Nhat Hanh
“HTML documents represent a media-independent description of interactive content. HTML documents might be rendered to a screen, or through a speech synthesizer, or on a braille display. To influence exactly how such rendering takes place, authors can use a styling language such as CSS.” — HTML5 specification
“Future standards — including vocabularies for social applications, activity streams, embedded experiences and in-context actions, and protocols to federate social information such as status updates — will address use cases that range from social business applications, to cross-organization federation, to greater user control over personal data.” — Launch press release of the W3C Social Web Working Group
“If fate doesn’t exist, then we must create it.” — Jay Graber
“My good opinion once lost is lost forever.” — Pride and Prejudice
“Modularity increases the chance that at least some of it can and will be re-used, improved, which you can then reincorporate.” — IndieWeb principles
“We need something that’ll work forever.” — Eugen Rochko
“My goal isn’t to get the bits to you as fast as possible while you wait for them, but to have the bits arrive before you even know they’re there.” — Dave Winer
“To bring in someone from Berkeley, I had to change chairs to another terminal. I wished I could connect someone at MIT directly with someone at Berkeley. Out of that came the idea: Why not have one terminal that connects with all of them?” — Bob Taylor
“That’s called polling. And although it works, it’s slow and inefficient, and about as annoying as a person in the backseat asking: ‘Are we there yet?’” — Brett Slatkin and Brad Fitzpatrick in a video for PubSubHubbub
”For years, I’ve been explaining to people that daily blogging is an extraordinarily useful habit. Even if no one reads your blog, the act of writing it is clarifying, motivating and (eventually) fun.” — Seth Godin
“In terms of sheer engagement, objectionable content is the most popular.” — Why The IndieWeb?
“Understand well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand.” — Ada Lovelace
“It’s worrying how easily the most vile of fringe views can be elevated by seemingly-benign features when they’re applied at the scale of YouTube or Facebook.” — Nick Heer
“We must reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated, and even manufactured.” — Joe Biden, January 20th, 2021
“There are never purely technological solutions to societal problems.” — Molly White, Blockchain Solutionism
“Micro.blog is a small, friendly community and platform that understands the need for people to own their data but still freely express themselves on the web. A beacon of light in the darkness.” — Adam Procter
“They’ve got you looking for any flaw, that after a while that’s all you see. For what it’s worth, I’m here to tell you that it is possible.” — Vincent from Gattaca
“As you may know, @-replies were not originally part of Twitter. They were embraced by the community first, and then we built them into the system.” — 2008 post about Twitter formalizing replies
“In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.” — Karl Popper
“Technology is inherently a force multiplier, by default it amplifies the already powerful more than the less privileged, widening existing power gaps.” — Tantek Çelik
