"People resist a census, but give them a profile page and they'll spend all day telling you who they are."
- Max Barry
"You come to work every day but you hardly get to know anyone. I don't even know the names of half the people I see in the elevators. They say the company is a big family, but I don't know them. And ev..."
"I read once that you need two things to be happy: any two of health, money, and love. You can cover the absense of one with the other two... But now I realized this was unmitigated bullshit, because h..."
"She had been in situations like this, where people said, Convince me, and in none of those had they actually wanted to be convinced. She could lay down a perfect argument and they just invented new bu..."
"All empires fall, eventually.” “But why? It’s not for lack of power. In fact, it seems to be the opposite. Their power lulls them into comfort. They become undisciplined. Those who had to earn power a..."
"It was always this way: The more people talked, the more they obscured. You didn't need to argue for the truth. You could see it."
"Good words were the difference between Emily eating well and not. And what she had found worked best were not facts or arguments but words that tickled people’s brains for some reason, that just amuse..."
" 'You can't stop me. Your word voodoo, it doesn't work on me. Right? So how do you think you're going to-' Eliot produced a pistol. He didn't seem to pull it from anywhere. He just suddenly had it. Wi..."
"Last month we had to sit through a presentation on eliminating redundancy, and it was a bunch of Power Point slides, plus a guy reading out what was on the slides, and then he gave us all hard copies...."
"There are stories — legends, really — of the “steady job.” Old-timers gather graduates around the flickering light of a computer monitor and tell stories of how the company used to be, back when a job..."