Michael Arrington

“Women in my world are respected as much as men.”

“Journalists hold themselves apart, and above, the common person. They have rules designed to ensure their objectivity and impartiality.”

“Friendships and marriage are far more potent than financial conflicts.”

“I live a fairly simple life, and that didn't change much after I sold TechCrunch in 2010. I didn't buy a new house or even a new car. The one thing I did splurge on was a boat. Nothing too fancy or large.”

“Journalists are supposed to put the people first, even before themselves. Around the world and throughout history, journalists have died to get the truth out.”

“If a tech journalist needs financial security before doing what their conscience dictates, I'm not sure they should be calling themselves journalists at all.”

“There are lots of things that I will probably never experience in this life. Military combat. Being dictator of a small central American country. Dunking a basketball. Being a famous rock star. Or walking on Mars. But one thing I have been, and will always be, is an entrepreneur.”

“The payouts for starting a business are just terrible when you account for risk. A tiny minority of entrepreneurs ever get rich. And the majority of entrepreneurs would probably make far more money, and have more stable personal relationships, if they just worked for someone else.”

“I don't claim to be a journalist. I hold myself to higher standards of transparency and disclosure.”

“Leaving America means renouncing your citizenship, moving out of the country and leaving family and friends behind. You can retain your citizenship if you like, but you'll still be away from loved ones and still be paying taxes. You lose all the good stuff about America and have to keep all the bad stuff.”

“Our government is just way too interested in mucking around in Silicon Valley by creating and enforcing rules based on little or no understanding of the consequences.”

“I've always believed that government tends to screw up whatever it touches, but Obama in particular seemed different. He understood tech issues that left the other candidates bewildered. Part of it may be his age. But whatever the reason, I had real hope that he could help lead us into a new century of technology leadership and growth.”

“I love talking about taxes.”

“Everything's mobile these days. Let's go mo-bile! But really, that's just an IQ test. When you see bold new startups with nothing but a desktop strategy, you know they just don't get it, and you move on.”

“Our independence from AOL was so important to me that I negotiated an extremely odd provision in our purchase agreement that allowed me to disclose confidential information about AOL. It was their job never to give me that information. It was not my job to protect it in any way.”

“The main thing to know about me is that I'm a champion of entrepreneurs and the startups they build. They are my rock stars. If in doubt, I side with them, and that's clear from my writing.”

“I'm worried about privacy - the companies out there gathering data on us, the stuff we do on Twitter, the publicly scrapeable stuff on Facebook. It's amazing how much data there is out there on us. I'm worried that it can be abused and will be abused.”

“Most people have an aversion to risk, my college economics professor told me. Which means they have to be rewarded to take on that risk. The higher the risk, the higher the possible payout has to be for people to jump.”

“We have to start encouraging women to get into math and science early on in life... But to just say TechCrunch is perpetuating the problem because there aren't enough women speakers at our events is just a way to get attention and not solve the problem. So do we want to solve the problem, or do we want to just pick on me?”

“Most of the money I make now comes from investments from CrunchFund. And the vast majority of that is what's called carried interest.”