“Getting information out of them was like extracting gold from ore—a lot of labour and time, and why bother to do it when you know there’s a store just around the corner?”

“I guess I just don't get the point. It's like, why should you bother getting attached to anything if,

A: It's never gonna last, and
B: It hurts like hell when it's over?”

“Gold, he learned, was considered to be a reliable store of value because extracting it from the ground required a certain amount of effort that tended to remain stable over time. When new, easy-to-mine gold deposits were found, or new mining technologies developed, the value of gold tended to fall. It didn’t take a huge amount of acumen, then, to understand that the value of virtual gold in the game world could be made stable in a directly analogous way: namely, by forcing players to expend a certain amount of time and effort to extract a certain amount of virtual gold…”

“Why do you bother asking, when you know the answer and you also know that you don't intend to believe it?”

“When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can't make them change if they don't want to, just like when they do want to, you can't stop them.”

“Countries that do not control knowledge and information tend to do better because the average guy who is exposed to a lot of information can get ideas and profit from them.”

“Where Plenty smiles - alas! she smiles for few,
And those who taste not, yet behold her store,
Are as the slaves that dig the golden ore,
The wealth around them makes them doubly poor.”

“There is so much stupid information, misinformation around. You can’t really get anywhere until you get out from under all that.”

“Why is it that every time a girl says a guy is bothering her, it's fluffed off with oh, he just likes you, as if that makes it okay?”

“When the Twin Towers collapsed do you know what was in the basement? […] Lots of gold. Do you know where it is? […] Nobody does. It disappeared. Did those buildings drop down to cover a great crime being committed? Somebody is taking all this gold out of the Twin Tower basement. Makes you wonder.”