“The most obvious drawback of social media is that they are aggressive distractions.”

Beating up on the so-called elite media has a nice populist ring to it.

My dad was an engineer, and he became the CEO of Chevron. His was an engineer’s mind-set: Everything’s kind of a problem how do you approach the problem?

It’s a considerable source of tragedy in the world that people stay in powerful jobs long past the point where they’re a spent force.

Every technology, including the printing press, comes at some price.

The curse of a journalist is that he always has more questions than answers.

Casual reliance on unnamed sources…corrodes our credibility and, in cases that are rare but not rare enough, may abet journalistic malpractice.

The queen of aggregation is, of course, Arianna Huffington, who has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your website and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come.

I do care if religious doctrine becomes an excuse to exclude my fellow citizens from the rights and protections our country promises.

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, has on several occasions talked about transparency as an absolute principle. I don’t personally believe that.

I make a joke that I’m the Internet curmudgeon, but ‘wary’ is a good way to put it.

Whether or not Twitter makes you stupid, it certainly makes some smart people sound stupid.

One of the most important disciplines in journalism is to challenge your working premises.

I may be the old-media id, but I think I may be entitled to some credit for being a new-media pioneer.

A vote for Mitt Romney is a vote for Satan.

Twitter and Facebook are brilliant- tools, the journalistic uses of which are still being plumbed. They are great for disseminating interesting material. They are useful for gathering information, including from places that are inaccessible.

Liberation movements – operating surreptitiously and conspiratorially – thrive on discipline and suspicion, and punish deviation or dissent.

America is addicted to wars of distraction.

Creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.

I’m not the distraction in the room.’ ‘oh? And what might be?’ -nora & patch (pg 242)

There’s a lot of insincerity about the actions of our legislators; they create distractions – like this anti-gay law you alluded to – and try to mobilise, to exacerbate people’s emotions. Until the legislators started making laws, people minded, generally, their own business.

We all need to get the balance right between action and reflection. With so many distractions, it is easy to forget to pause and take stock.

At the end of the day, women are a distraction. Whether you realize it or not.

Happiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.

The lyrics are not an important thing to me. In fact, it can be a distraction.