End of Secrets Quotes

“Some people are bound to be average. Isn’t that a statistical certainty?” “My understanding of what it means to be average has nothing to do with statistics. The average American is truly average only in the ways he falls short of his own potential, particularly when he is motivated by the expectations of others. There is always someone more to the right or left of you, someone more or less attractive than you, someone richer or poorer, someone who claims to know how you should live your life better than you know it. People are average when they are driven by a motivation to fit in. The American challenge, then, is to be oneself—only, exactly, and totally.”
― Ryan Quinn, End of Secrets

“You ever notice how the people who most need to see or read something are the most oblivious or resentful of its existence?”
― Ryan Quinn, End of Secrets

“I didn’t excel at school. It’s amazing what talents get ignored when a person doesn’t thrive in a typical education setting.”
― Ryan Quinn, End of Secrets

“Television was for passive audiences; computers were for builders.”
― Ryan Quinn, End of Secrets

“Because of our freedom to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. People assume the most important word in that sentence is ‘freedom,’ when, in fact, it is ‘pursue.’ If we don’t pursue life, we are just as free to waste it. Our averageness is the degree to which we fail to attempt that pursuit.”
― Ryan Quinn, End of Secrets

“She liked to know what the world was being told about what was happening in the world.”
― Ryan Quinn, End of Secrets

“People are average when they are driven by a motivation to fit in. The American challenge, then, is to be oneself—only, exactly, and totally.” “Why is that American?” “Because of our freedom to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. People assume the most important word in that sentence is ‘freedom,’ when, in fact, it is ‘pursue.’ If we don’t pursue life, we are just as free to waste it.”
― Ryan Quinn, End of Secrets

“If there is no positive facial recognition ID from surveillance footage, no phone or computer use, no credit card transactions—we can’t account for it.”
― Ryan Quinn, End of Secrets

“You know as well as I do that it is humans who turn computers into cyberthreats.”
― Ryan Quinn, End of Secrets

“He intended to be clear that there were certain activities in which he would not take part.”
― Ryan Quinn, End of Secrets

“He was just a computer nerd whose paycheck came from installing software that he would have been able to crack in under a minute.”
― Ryan Quinn, End of Secrets

“Just because he’s conscious of his privacy doesn’t automatically implicate him in anything criminal.”
― Ryan Quinn, End of Secrets

“It’s redaction city when it comes to his online identity.”
― Ryan Quinn, End of Secrets

“Don’t confuse a reliance on electronic technology with life itself.”
― Ryan Quinn, End of Secrets

“As our daily interactions and transactions become more digitized, our behavior becomes increasingly datatized.”
― Ryan Quinn, End of Secrets

“Work is what people do to survive. That kind of work is rarely interesting, least of all to the people who are doing it. The things we choose to pursue in our own time are what matter.”
― Ryan Quinn, End of Secrets

“she would get used to the other extremes that in the city were routine, like the absurd monthly apartment lease payments or the trash bags piled to shoulder height along the streets and the rats that darted from beneath them.”
― Ryan Quinn, End of Secrets

“Guilt, he thought, must be the most useless human emotion. Fear alerted one to danger and therefore saved lives. Love alerted one to living and therefore improved lives. But guilt—guilt was so uselessly after-the-fact, so absent as a tool of prevention and yet so powerful as a tool of misery. Guilt rotted men in cells and suburbs and churches. Guilt destroyed lives.”
― Ryan Quinn, End of Secrets

“information about the past and the present contains the very instructions to build the future.”
― Ryan Quinn, End of Secrets

“Perfect information about the past and the present contains the very instructions to build the future.”
― Ryan Quinn, End of Secrets