Growing up in the days when you still had to punch buttons to make a telephone call, I could recall the numbers of all my close friends and family. Today, I'm not sure if I know more than four phone numbers by heart. And that's probably more than most.

There is a short window at the beginning of one's professional life, when it is comparatively easy to take big risks. Make the most of that time, before circumstances make you risk averse.

We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, or invention, or insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least.

We've outsourced our memories to digital devices, and the result is that we no longer trust our memories. We see every small forgotten thing as evidence that they're failing us.

On the diffusion of education among the people rest the preservation and perpetuation of our free institutions.

You have all this education theory, and people try to make larger statements than maybe what their data would back up, because they've done these small experiments that are tied to a very particular case with a very particular implementation... theory definitely matters, but I think dogma matters less.

My mother didn't set out to surround us with white students or colleagues. My mother just sought a quality education. People have these expectations of who they think you should be. And I say it's because they don't really understand Malcolm X - or his wife.

What's got me excited about the education space is the growth of the Internet over the next 10, 20, 30 years.