“If you don’t take the money, they can’t tell you what to do. That’s the key to the whole thing.”
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Category Archives: quotes
Blue Marble
What NASA is calling “Blue Marble 2012”:
Of the original Blue Marble photo, Leonard Shlain had this to say:
“Like a Chinese ideograph, NASA’s photograph of our blue marble conveyed multiple values simultaneously, values more intuitive than rational. The masculine perception of nature and the Earth itself as ‘things’ to be conquered made the space program possible. The photo it generated began to instill in everyone who saw it an understanding that the Earth must be honored, protected, and loved. That many environmentalists are men confirms this change in orientation. NASA’s photograph of the Earth floating in space provided people with ‘the big picture.’ One sees the big picture with the entire retina and the combined hemispheres. The inviting, mute image of the home planet floating in dark space did more to change the consciousness of its residents than the miles of type concerning the subject generated by the world’s writers.”
Posted in books, photography, quotes
Question You Already Know the Answer To
“In a rotten economy, or really in any economy, how many people with PhDs in American cultural studies do you think we actually need?”
Related post: “An Important Lesson.”
Writing at Home
“I have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home.”
—David Ogilvy
(Via Letters of Note.)
Work of the Mind
“The acts that are at once the means and ends of education, knowing, thinking, understanding, judging, are all committed in solitude. It is only in a mind that the work of the mind can be done.”
—Richard Mitchell, The Graves of Academe
(Via Michael Leddy.)
Routine
“‘Okay, Marlowe,’ I said between my teeth. ‘You’re a tough guy. Six feet of iron man. One hundred and ninety pounts stripped and with your face washed. Hard muscles and no glass jaw. You can take it. You’ve been sapped down twice, had your throat choked and been beaten half silly on the jaw with a gun barrel. You’ve been shot full of hop and kept under it until you’re as crazy as two waltzing mice. And what does all that amount to? Routine.’”
—Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely
Remember
“I am so nerdy that when I was a kid in the late seventies, before home video became common, I used to record the audio tracks of my favorite TV shows on a Realistic tape recorder – the mono kind, where you had to press play and record at the same time. Then I’d stay up and listen to the tapes and try to remember the images.”
Posted in media, quotes, television
Cliff’s Notes
“In my high school French class we were supposed to read Hugo’s Les Miserables. I don’t think any of us knew French well enough to make our way through this enormous book. Like the rest of the class, I just skimmed the Cliff’s Notes. When we were given a test on the book, I noticed that the questions sounded odd. They were full of long words that our teacher wouldn’t have used. Where had these questions come from? From the Cliff’s Notes, it turned out. The teacher was using them too. We were all just pretending.”
1, 2, 3
The Guardian: Why do you think you inspire enmity?
Bernard-Henri Lévy: Number one, I don’t know. Number two, I don’t care. And number three, the pack always loses against a writer or an artist.
Clay Shirky
“Web philosophy is an idiom devoid of objective, impersonal thinking. In 2008, the Columbia Review of Journalism interviewed a man named Clay Shirky about the pitfalls of modern Luddism and the meaning of information overload. Shirky teaches interactive telecommunications at NYU and wrote a book about social media called Here Comes Everybody. In the CRJ interview, Shirky said things like ‘I’m just so impatient with the argument that the world should be slowed down to help people who aren’t smart enough to understand what’s going on.’ This is the message net-obsessed people always deliever; the condescending phrase most uttered by frothing New Media advocates is ‘You just don’t get it.’ The truth of the matter is that Clay Shirky must argue that the Internet is having a positive effect – it’s the only reason he’s publicly essential. Prior to 1996, no one wanted to interview Clay Shirky about anything.”
—Chuck Klosterman, “Fail”
