Quotes by Authors - Page 49

History's greatest composers would be appalled to hear their greatest works reduced to distorted hold music for businesses.
michael p naughton
Of course, in television's presentation of the "news of the day," we may see the Now...this" mode of discourse in it's boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure entertainment.
Neil Postman
The technology is the independent variable, the social system the dependent variable. Social, systems are therefore determined by systems of technology; as the latter change, so do the former.
Leslie White
To live in modernity--an era contemporaneous with the triumph of the news--is to be constantly reminded that, thanks to science and technology, change and improvement are continuous and relentless. This is part of the reason we must keep checking the news in the first place: we might at any moment be informed of some extraordinary development that will fundamentally alter reality. Time is an arrow following a precarious, rapid and yet tantalizingly upward trajectory.
Alain de Botton
Sensing my delight at seeing his laptop, Tom asked me, "William, have you ever seen the Internet?""No."In a quiet conference room, Tom sat me down at his computer and explained the track pad, how the motion of my fingers guided the arrow on the screen."This is Google," he said. "You can find answers to anything. What do you want to search for?""Windmill."In one second, he'd pulled up five million page results-pictures and models of windmills I'd never even imagined.
William Kamkwamba
Software testing is a sport like hunting, it's bughunting.
Amit Kalantri
He pulled the truck onto the shoulder of the road and parked, cell phone tight in one hand, his eyes on the landscape before him. From here he could see the foothills rippling out like a blanket from the ragged edge of the mountains. They spread in loose folds until becoming the flat expanse of prairie that crossed all the way to the Great Lakes. July's bounty was a brash flare of colour: wind combed through golden tracts of wheat and sun-bright canola so brilliant he had to squint.The truck was balanced along the edge of an invisible wall which blocked Waterton from the rest of the world. He hadn't thought about how very real that barrier was; now that his phone was reconnected, it felt like a physical presence. He wasn't quite sure what he'd find on the other side.
Danika Stone
From the earliest days, videogame players were less interested in winning than in going to a new psychic place where things were always a bit different, but always the same. The gambler and the videogame player share a life of contradiction; you are overwhelmed, and so you disappear into the game.
Sherry Turkle
Looking ahead to future applications of electronics, [de Forest] grew even gloomier. He believed that 'electron physiologists' would eventually be able to monitor and analyze 'thought or brain waves', allowing 'joy and grief to be measured in define, quantitative unit.' Ultimately, he concluded, 'a professor may be able to implant knowledge into the reluctant brains of his 22nd century pupils. What terrifying political possibilities may be lurking there! Let us be thankful that such things are only for posterity, not for us.
Nicholas Carr
In the imposition of a unitary and homogeneous popular culture, disseminated now throughout the world by the spread of Western technology and communications, is to be found one of the central features of modernity's distinctive way of achieving the priority of the one over the many. Homogeneity derives from the creation of an undifferentiated social or other reality...It is not therefore the priority of the many that distinguishes modernity from other cultures, but the shape the priority of the one takes in practice. Thus both the ancient and modern eras, in so far as they can be distinguished in the way often attempted, share in a tendency to elevate the one over the many: to enslave the many to the heteronomous rule of the one. The pathos of the modern condition is that, after rejecting what it rightly sees to be the oppressive forms of unity deriving from the past, it has itself succumbed to various false universals that replicate or even exacerbate the bondage from which it had hoped to free itself.
Colin E. Gunton
Technology allows more people to tell more stories in more ways. Storytelling knows no boundaries. I believe print and web can work beautifully together.
Donna Talarico
People earnestly say to me here, 'Mr Knight, we have cellphones now, and you're going to really enjoy them.' That's their enticement for me to rejoin society. 'You're going to love it,' they say. I have no desire. And what about a text message? Isn't that just using a telephone as a telegraph? We're going backwards.
Michael Finkel
Modernism isn't a design ethos any more, it's an economy of scale, and a marketing tool to sell the ordinary as something special, the sexless as erotic. A technological device without a specific, personalized identity has a subtext: it asserts the value of instrumentality. Its design is a reflection of its role... The anonymity of these objects is part of what they are: interchangeable commodities whose uniqueness in so far as they possess any is created by what is done with them. Function is an identity. And that identity is something we are encouraged to incorporate into our perception of self, that anonymity is proposed as something to emulate. Whimsy and uniqueness are indulgences.
Nick Harkaway
Think of your attacks as the ocean during a storm. Waves come and crash. They beat on the sand over and over. Slamming into anything on its way. But then, the storm retreats. The water is calm and the waves slowly come and go. Every attack rises and falls. You either have to hold on," he squeezes my shoulders, "or stop it before the storm comes.
Lindsay Paige
We seem to feel as though the life our children have -- that we have built for them -- is just a delicate house of cards, held together by the most intricate balancing of all its carefully selected components, and that the slightest shock, the slightest jar to all our perfect orchestration, will bring the whole edifice crashing down.
Judith Warner
While doubt cannot be expelled, it can be subdued.
Richard Baxter
The need for control always comes from someone that has lost it.
Shannon L. Alder
It's simple,' Kat told them. 'You bombard them with images of what they ought to be, and you make them feel grotty for being the way they are. You're working with the gap between reality and perception. That's why you have to hit them with something new, something they've never seen before, something they aren't. Nothing sells like anxiety.
Margaret Atwood
I didn't doubt the potential value of paying attention to subconscious cues...problem was, my inner voice resembled Chicken Little: it was screaming that I was about to die, but it did that almost every time I laced up my climbing boots.
Jon Krakauer
Do not be discourage by people who reject your true purpose. Do not stop because of anxiety; stop because you are done with the mission! Don't ever be down by the susurrant call of the masses to stop, halt or abort your true purpose when you are convinced within your innermost man of how true your purpose is. A true purpose is mostly rejected, spat upon and seen as an unworthy cause by the masses until they come to a later realization of how true it is and then they accept, celebrate and enjoy it.
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment.
Judith Lewis Herman
Fear and anxiety affect decision making in the direction of more caution and risk aversion... Traumatized individuals pay more attention to cues of threat than other experiences, and they interpret ambiguous stimuli and situations as threatening (Eyesenck, 1992), leading to more fear-driven decisions. In people with a dissociative disorder, certain parts are compelled to focus on the perception of danger. Living in trauma-time, these dissociative parts immediately perceive the present as being "just like" the past and "emergency" emotions such as fear, rage, or terror are immediately evoked, which compel impulsive decisions to engage in defensive behaviors (freeze, flight, fight, or collapse). When parts of you are triggered, more rational and grounded parts may be overwhelmed and unable to make effective decisions.
Suzette Boon
I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and toward the end, his wife started crying and screaming, "I want to go, too! I want to go, too!" And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: "We are all going.
John Green
The history of the own that is grasped on too small a scale and the foreign that is treated too badly reaches an end at the moment when a global co-immunity structure is born, with a respectful inclusion of individual cultures, particular interests and local solidarities. This structure would take on planetary dimensions at the moment when the earth spanned by networks and built over by foams, was conceived as the own, and the previously dominant exploitative excess as the foreign. With this turn, the concretely universal would become operational. The helpless whole is transformed into a unity capable of being protected. A romanticism of brotherliness is replaced by a cooperative logic. Humanity becomes a political concept. Its members are no longer travellers on the ship of fools that is abstract universalism, but workers on the consistently concrete and discrete project of a global immune design. Although communism was a conglomeration of a few correct ideas and many wrong ones, its reasonable part - the understanding that shared life interests of the highest order can only be realized within a horizon of universal co-operative asceticisms - will have to assert itself anew sooner or later. It presses for a macrostructure of global immunizations : co-immunism.
Peter Sloterdijk
Some part of me believed, unassailably, and wordlessly and perhaps with a flick of justice, that they had sent me away because they were afraid of me. Like some monstrously deformed child who should never have lived beyond infancy, or a conjoined twin whose other half died under the knife, I had- simply by surviving-become a freak of nature.
Tana French
All of the wars in the world are fueled by power struggles either at individual, national or international levels
Bangambiki Habyarimana
A politician is a man in his natural state
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Politicians are a higher breed of men. They know that this world is ruthless and that they must live accordingly to cope with it
Bangambiki Habyarimana
After more than five years, some agents might be tempted to become complacent. Catherine would never become complacent. It was one of the reasons she survived when others had been arrested and hanged.
Daniel Silva
Over the years, Americans in particular have been all too willing to squander their hard-earned independence and freedom for the illusion of feeling safe under someone else's authority. The concept of self-sufficiency has been undermined in value over a scant few generations. The vast majority of the population seems to look down their noses upon self-reliance as some quaint dusty relic, entertained only by the hyperparanoid or those hopelessly incapable of fitting into mainstream society.
Cody Lundin
Let's be about leaving this world better than we find it each and every day. Our life is a testimony and through us divine loving is becoming more manifest. Greater good is calling upon us here in this world to be done this day. One of my rallying calls is let's go out and do some good. This is who we are. This is what we are about.
John Morton
Our greatest dreams and desires abide in the mental and spiritual realm. In order to transfer them in the physical plane we need to invert subject and object. You will receive from the world what you deeply long to receive the day when you give to the world what you deeply long to receive. Today could be that day.
Franco Santoro
The aim and the result of faithful, fruitful, and fulfilling service is to make God famous.
Don Cousins
A soldier serves not to take, they don't strive to have something, but rather they strive so that others might one day have something. And a blade isn't a happy friend to a soldier, but a burden, a heavy one, to be used scrupulously and carefully. A good soldier does everything they can so they do not have to kill. That's what training is for. But if we have to, we will. And when we do that we give up some part of ourselves, as we're asked to do.
Robert Jackson Bennett
In the era of angry and aggressive policing, it is an honorable service to your fellow citizens to video record police officers interactions with the common people.
Steven Magee
It is the definition of an egoist that whatever occupies his attention is, for that reason, important.
William Manchester
So, Freckles,” he said when I sat down. “Freckles?” I interrupted. “You said I couldn’t call ya, Katie-cat.” I shuddered. “I do have a given name, you know.” “I don’t want to call you what everyone else calls you.” “You don’t?” “Nope.” “Why?” I asked suspiciously. “Because I’m special.” “There goes that ego of yours again.” I held out my arms wide. “Big,” I mouthed.
Cambria Hebert
If becoming "religious" has made you more judgmental, rude, harsh, a backbiter, you need to check if you are worshiping God or your ego.
Moosa Rahat
Ego is a drum and the drum has to make a noise to tell everyone that that it is there!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Amazing, life-altering anonymous picture quotes on FaceBook: Are they created by graphic designers who steal quotes or don't bother to research the author, or are they original and just have exceptionally less ego than I do? Cos if I ever write something that brilliant it's gonna have flashing headlights.
Fierce Dolan
I spend my life constantly calling in ‘imaginary’ debts that aren’t owed to me in order to avoid the ‘real’ debts that I owe to others, and so everybody ends up bankrupt.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
She tapped out a beat on the edge of the piano as I tripped and plummeted through the refrain of “Spacebar,” trying to translate the synth chords into a piano bit on the fly. It had been a million years since I’d played it.But it was still catchy.Whoever had written this song had known what they were doing.
Maggie Stiefvater
And they can’t understand, what hurts more— Missing the other person, or pretending not to.
Khadija Rupa
It is not the best for us to lay embago on the industries that produce temptations. What we need to do is to compete, overcome and dominate the market with the products of our endurance. No battles we face, no crown will we win. No temptations exist, no conquerors are known.
Israelmore Ayivor
The rewards of tomorrow are safely hidden in the belief of never quitting and not giving up on yourself today
Johnnie Dent Jr.
Anyone who prays for the death of his enemy must consider who tempted Jesus Christ, the persecution of the apostles and the Psalm 23 of David
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Now she realized that she was not peering at a so-dark-blue-it-looked-black ocean, but rather she was looking straight through miles of incredibly clear water at something enormous and black in its nethermost depths. Maybe it was the bottom--so deep that not even light could touch it.And yet, down in those impossible depths, she thought she could see tiny lights sparkling. She stared uncertainly at the tiny glimmerings. They seemed almost like scattered grains of sand lit from within; in some places they clustered like colonies, faint and twinkling.Like stars...
Fuyumi Ono
I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.
Jack Kerouac
The postgrad at least knew enough to know that he would never know enough, lying under the stars which hung from the inky sky like bunches of inconceivably heavy, lustrous grapes, dusted with the yeast of eternity.
Will Self
Why is it people will complain, when they have an open door, where they can walk out to and gaze the stars; rather than having a closed door to lock them in?
Anthony Liccione
These are maybe the most exciting stars, those just above where sky meets land and ocean, because we so seldom see them, blocked as they usually are by atmosphere…and, as I grow more and more accustomed to the dark, I realize that what I thought were still clouds straight overhead aren’t clearing and aren’t going to clear, because these are clouds of stars, the Milky Way come to join me. There’s the primal recognition, my soul saying, yes, I remember.
Paul Bogard
In the year 3,000,002,012 the Andromeda Galaxy may collide with our Milky Way. At first this sounds miserable, like a collision of two bird flocks. But galaxy members fly farly, not tip to tip. In a galactic collision the stars do not actually collide—as with crisscrossing marching bands, only the interstices collide. (Oh to be like a galaxy, to mingle without wrecking. But then we would have to be composed of so much more sky.) The spaces between stars are so wide that thousands of galaxies have to converge before the stars will crash.
Amy Leach
Manfried imagined the stars to be jewels shining in the depths of a long-sealed crypt and, drifting off, he almost glimpsed himself prying open the lid of night and stuffing his pockets with the glittering gems.
Jesse Bullington
Each person is a vast territory of undiscovered mystery as nebulous and uncharted as the deepest oceans and expanses of space.
Bryant McGill
People in hell want snowcones.
Nora Roberts
Those freckles make you seem like a galaxy of stars, just waiting to be explored and loved.
Nikita Gill
Hawai'i is the only place in the fifty states where you can see the stars of the entire northern and southern hemispheres. Here, stars that can't be seen from the mainland are visible, along with stars that aren't visible from Australia.
John Richard Stephens
The sky is falling. The sky is falling.And I fear you won’t believe it until you’re covered in stars
Emalynne Wilder
Felipe focused on the smattering of freckles across her bare left shoulder. For the next hour, he counted each of them out of the corner of his eye--an entire universe's worth. Lost in the constellations, he barely noticed the lurch of the small plane.
Amanda Heger
When I look up at Heaven,I see the souls of those who diedBeaming down at me,Wanting to scream: “I'm still alive!”,Wishing to scribble across the sapphire sky -Letters to their loved ones,But a million dark oceans stand between us,Between those who passed and the living,Between those of us still stuck below,And those who have crossed over the threshold of time -Where what seems like eternity to us,Is really only a few minutes to them.So you see, there is no reason to weep over the shining ones -For even though the space that separates us is limitless,The wall of time that divides us is only paper-thin.And one day, we shall all reunite with them,When our souls are released like fishBack into the vast shimmering seaTo shine together likeGlittering diamonds.
Suzy Kassem