Unlike real relationships, virtual relationships are easy to enter and to exit. They look smart and clean, feel easy to use, when compared with the heavy, slow-moving, messy real stuff.

The carrying power of a bridge is not the average strength of the pillars, but the strength of the weakest pillar. I have always believed that you do not measure the health of a society by GNP but by the condition of its worst off.

The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something we have lost sight of.

In a consumer society, people wallow in things, fascinating, enjoyable things. If you define your value by the things you acquire and surround yourself with, being excluded is humiliating.

Forgiving is giving up the wish that things could have been different. They weren't. That's the past. Let it go.

Outsourcing, in and of itself, isn't responsible for the erosion of America's high tech infrastructure. The short-term thinking that led to a lot of bad outsourcing decisions is the root cause. And short-term thinking isn't a problem confined to the executive suite. It's a problem in Washington and in our society as a whole.

Maybe politically it wasn't wise but when people have different view points I think the public has a right to hear it and the public has a right to make decisions based on those view points.

I didn't grow up watching movies and thinking, 'Oh, I wanna be in those!'