Kara Swisher Quotes

Someone recently talked about mass surveillance and the NSA revelations as being the atomic moment for computer scientists. The atomic bomb was the moral moment for physicists. Mass surveillance is the same moment for computer scientists, when they realize that the things they produce can be used to harm a tremendous number of people.

Cover your glass in France or Germany --even worse, in England - and in the voice of someone who has personally affronted, your host will ask why you're not drinking. 'Oh, I just don't feel like it this morning.' 'Why not?' 'I guess I'm not in the mood?' 'Well, this'll put you in the mood. Here. Drink up.' 'No, really, I'm OK.' 'Just taste it.' 'Actually, I'm sort of...well, I sort of have a problem with it.' 'Then how about half a glass?

Google says young people don't care about privacy, but when asked if they'd let their parents see their phone bills and other stuff they say no.

Society develops a type of self-censorship, with the knowledge that surveillance exists - a self-censorship that is even expressed when people communicate with each other privately.

I remember a time when it was ok to make fun of politicians and powerful people. Now, it's not ok anymore. We've forgotten how to laugh.

I can't count the times that upon telling someone I am vegetarian, he or she responded by pointing out an inconsistency in my lifestyle or trying to find a flaw in an argument I never made. (I have often felt that my vegetarianism matters more to such people than it does to me.)

I find it very hard to believe that people would prefer an awkward picture with me than a normal conversation.

When a glass sits on a table here, people don't wonder if it's half filled or half empty. They just hope it's good beer.

I've noticed in England once people reach a certain level they feel they have to get married.

I was horribly bookish, to the point of coming right out and saying it, which I knew was not socially acceptable. I particularly loved the adjective bookish, which I found other people used about as often as ramrod or chum or teetotaler.

The problem in this case was you can't be a middle-aged virgin in America without something being wrong with you. People can't conceive of a virtue in someone else that they can't conceive in themselves. Instead of believing you're stronger, it's so much easier to imagine you're weaker.

When they first arrive, really, my eyes bleed! It's only when they're about to leave that they become people you might want to know.

We live in a culture that wants to put a redemptive face on everything, so anger doesn't sit well with any of us. But I think women's anger sits less well than anything else. Women's anger is very scary to people, and to no one more than other women who think: Oh, goodness, well, if I let the lid off, where would we be?

Asian culture has a profoundly different relationship to work. It rewards people who are persistent.

My twitter fans are all pretty weird. A lot of them are kind of weirdly sexually aggressive. Some of them made me laugh and then I instantly tried to forget them, because I'd hate to find myself in a bar kind of drunk and accidentally use one.

The vulgar only laugh, but never smile; whereas well-bred people often smile, but seldom laugh.

I get thirsty people glasses of water, even if that thirsty person is just me.

I think people loosely use the term 'free speech.' If the market wants to be such that people don't want to watch someone, so be it.

Most people who have grown up introverted in this very extroverted culture of ours have had painful experiences of feeling like they are out of step with what's expected of them.

It is the way of my people to use light words at such times and say less than they mean. We fear to say too much. It robs us of the right words when a jest is out of place.

Most people are shaped to the form of their culture because of the enormous malleability of their original endowment. They are plastic to the moulding force of the society into which they are born. It does not matter whether, with the Northwest Coast, it requires delusions of self-reference, or with our own civilization the amassing of possessions. In any case the great mass of individuals take quite readily the form that is presented to them.

Many people think that we have no shared value system in the world today but we actually do.

Ordinary people seem to not like me. They tend to think that I’m a little weird.

The shy man does have some slight revenge upon society for the torture it inflicts upon him. He is able, to a certain extent, to communicate his misery. He frightens other people as much as they frighten him. He acts like a damper upon the whole room, and the most jovial spirits become, in his presence, depressed and nervous.

The common people do not judge of vice or virtue by morality or immorality, so much as by the stamp that is set upon it by men of figure.