“The problem is our brains are intuitively suited to the sorts of risk management decisions endemic to living in small family groups in the East African highlands in 100,000 BC, and not to living in the New York City of 2008.”

• Bruce Schneier

“The truth is that these companies won’t fundamentally change because their entire business model relies on generating more engagement, and nothing generates more engagement than lies, fear and outrage.”

• Sacha Baron Cohen speaking about Facebook, Google et. al.

“One of the best short definitions of neoliberalism I have encountered is the one by Will Davies, namely, the dependence upon the strong state to pursue the disenchantment of politics by economics. If that sounds like an oxymoron, well, maybe that’s the nub of the project.”

• Philip Mirowski

”It is dumbfounding to observe how everyone suddenly reverts to being a strict nominalist when they encounter Neoliberalism. They circle round the word as if it were a dead animal in the middle of the road, crushed and distended, trying to figure out what to call it, even though, strictly speaking, they reserve judgment over whether it is really there.”

• Philip Mirowski

“Blameless people are always the most exasperating”

• George Eliot

“Victories no longer assume the form that they are expected to assume or that they had assumed in the past. If victory has historically been associated with the defeat of the adversary in a climactic pitched battle, this vision is now a relic from a bygone era. This is not how wars end in the 21st century.”

• Cian O’Driscoll

“Foundations are an unaccountable, nontransparent, perpetual, and lavishly tax-advantaged exercise of power.”

• Robert Reich, former US Secretary of Labour and author of Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better

“We are in the dot-com bubble 2.0, except it’s not happening in the public markets but in the private markets.”

• Vitaliy Katsenelson, the CEO of Investment Management Associates, talking to the Wall Street Journal about WeWork, Über et al.

”The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.”

• E.M. Forster