America's Facebook generation shows a submission to standardization that I haven't seen before. The American adventure has always been about people forgetting their former selves - Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac went on the road. If they had a Facebook page, they wouldn't have been able to forget their former selves.

A remarkable thing about the Silicon Valley culture is that its status structure is so based on technical accomplishment and prowess.

Human beings either function as individuals or as members of a pack. There's a switch inside us, deep in our spirit, that you can turn one way or the other. It's almost always the case that our worst behaviour comes out when we're switched to the mob setting. The problem with a lot of software designs is that they switch us to that setting.

Musicians and journalists are the canaries in the coalmine, but, eventually, as computers get more and more powerful, it will kill off all middle-class professions.

Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.

Users are trying to discover apps; we are trying to improve the app discovery process, and developers are trying to reach users. If you step back, it's a problem we solved with search and ads in search.

We can use all the scientific tools, but it will never replace the palate or the talent of the chefs who are in the kitchen.

Marie Curie is my hero. Few people have accomplished something so rare - changing science. And as hard as that is, she had to do it against the tide of the culture at the time - the prejudice against her as a foreigner, because she was born in Poland and worked in France. And the prejudice against her as a woman.