“Toward the end of his life, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright often said that with 20 more years he could rebuild America, and give it an architecture that was organic, natural, and truly its own. Others called him arrogant for making these claims, but he would respond that a great nation should expect its great architects to build it great buildings. ... The... human race—the struggling journalists, the embattled authors of books, the makers of music, the normal folks who have been robbed of their individuality by today’s web—should expect its... world builders to build them beautiful, honest, nourishing worlds.”

“Sevgi Ertekin is representative of the potential of America, and there's a speech where she says, ‘I cannot believe we pissed this all away. ... We surrendered to the idiot dregs of our own society.’ For me, that's the mission statement of that that element of the book. It's a lament.”

“And we got on this riff about heroes who got the paradox of the moment: that abandoned people and places are sometimes the ones who most need radical innovation; that, these days, new tools and models are practically scattered all over the ground, just waiting for people to pick them up; but that those who most need them are those who least know how to find them.”

“Publishers seem to believe that economics explains almost 'everything', but what would the rational choice brigade make of this incident? Ideally I would put this on a wiki, so that the mini-Stephen Levitt's could annotate it, explaining just what the fuck was going on.”

“Subsidiarity is a key aspect of Catholic social teaching's critique of both of those extremes [communism and libertarianism]. It corrects a major failure of both—the tendency to overlook and exclude every aspect of society other than the individual and the state. That not only fails to account for every other actor and agency in civil society... but it also distorts the true nature of individual and state, rendering the first as falsely atomistic and disconnected and the latter as falsely monolithic and removed (capable only of ‘interference’).”

“These children seemed to squirm at the implications of privilege, wealth, and power that ‘giving’ holds. The children denied their power, framing it as benign and neutral, not something actively sought out and maintained. This early conversation helped us see more clearly the children's contradictory thinking about power and authority, laying the groundwork for later exploration.”