“In order to get tenure you must not arrive at conclusions that members of tenure committees can disagree with. In math and the sciences, you can prove what you’re saying. Or adjust your conclusions so you’re not claiming anything false (“6 of 8 subjects had lower blood pressure after the treatment”). In the humanities you can either avoid drawing any definite conclusions, or draw conclusions so narrow that no one cares enough to disagree with you.

“Ruby, unlike less flexible languages, lets you alter the value of a constant.

“The great lesson of direct mail was that long letters always do better than short ones. That’s because once you’ve sold me, I’ll stop reading. But if I’m not sold and I get to the end, you lose.

It’s okay to be long, if you’re chunky.

“I don’t have time to test on Opera. Sucks to be Opera. Startup web browsers don’t stand a chance.

“If you discover that users are afraid or resistant to what you’re trying to get them to do, more information is almost always the incorrect response. The effective technique involves peer pressure and support.

“When you’re working on something that isn’t released, problems are intriguing. In something that’s out there, problems are alarming.

“We conservatives are fonder of old ways than you [liberals] are. That’s in our definition. Some of our people are obtuse; so are some of yours. While we second-guess the status quo less than you do, we second-guess putative reforms more than you do. Our standard of “information” is a bit tougher than the blips and fads you fall for. Sometimes, these inclinations lead us astray. But over the long run, they’ve served us and society pretty well. It’s just that you notice all the times we were wrong and ignore all the times we were right.

“Individual units at Google don’t have to worry about making money, they don’t all have to be profitable. Most of them are just there to make the consumer happy. One of the things that consumers do when they’re happy is view ads, and we get paid for that.

“Arrogance without humility is a recipe for high-concept irrelevance; humility without arrogance guarantees unending mediocrity. Figuring out how to be arrogant and humble at once, figuring out when to watch users and when to ignore them for this particular problem, for these users, today, is the problem of the designer.