Quotes by Journalists - Page 89

... We need the sweet pain of anticipation to tell us we are really alive.
Albert Camus
There is a dreamlike quality to the 1936 Basque government, the fulfillment of a historic longing that was to be crushed only nine months later in carnage the scale of which had never before been seen on earth.
Mark Kurlansky
We fight for a vision of the world that is both traditional and Faustian, that allies enrootment and disinstallation, the citizen’s freedom and imperial service to the community-as-a-people, passionate creativity and critical reason, an unshakeable loyalty and an adventurous curiosity (WWF 267)
Guillaume Faye
You can be taught to write – you can’t be taught to be an artist
John Geddes
yes, writing is mostly a dream, but angels visit in dreams
John Geddes
Young Arab men are not going to walk away from extremism because they can suddenly afford a Slurpee. They will walk away when they can devote themselves to a some call to serve a cause that connects nationalism to dignity and democracy and transcends a lifetime.
David Brooks
You can't counter a heroic impulse with a mundane and bourgeois response. You can counter it only with a more compelling heroic vision.
David Brooks
Look, the thing that's going to make Disneyland unique and different,' he insisted, 'is the detail. If we loose the detail, we loose it all.
Neal Gabler
He seemed touched by a larger spirit, his course guided by something beyond him, so talented, so able, so good-natured that he did not even inspire envy in a city rich with envy.
David Halberstam
He could be as memorable an orator as his father, particularly when he was speaking on that topic that had captured his imagination;
Robert A. Caro
In the aftermath of their visions, Petit and Rice could not have imagined all that would be required of them. Neither Petit's dream of crossing the towers nor Rice's of fighting for justice came with an instruction manual. To accomplish their feats they'd have to overcome fear, test their plans against reality and maintain an unwavering focus on what their visions had revealed to them about their future selves.
Camille Sweeney
Toward the end of Carmel's life, the perception of super talls shifted dramatically, thanks largely to televised NBA games, By 1975, pretty much everyone had seen super tall people on TV, in the context of being celebrated in front of sold-out basketball arenas. This new frame of reference could not have been more positive. By 1995 Shaquille O'Neal was known as The Man of Steel, not the Traveling Human Giant. The idea of super tall people as freaks was replaced by the idea of super tall people as amazing athletes.
Arianne Cohen
The human brain takes in information from other people and incorporates it with the information coming from its own senses, neuroscientist Gregory Berns has written. Many times, the group's opinion trumps the individual's before he even becomes aware of it.
Alexandra Robbins
Nonconformists aren't just going against the grain; they're going against the brain. Either their brains aren't taking the easy way out to begin with, or in standing apart from their peers, these students are standing up to their biology.
Alexandra Robbins
Young man, Mr. Aubrey has made us so rich that we can now afford to worry about our image.
David Halberstam
When we have a narrative in mind, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it.
Nicholas Kristof
People are entitled to different opinions and views. Just because somebody doesn't agree with you doesn't mean they're wrong. Within the context of their reality they feel just as right, as you do within the context of your reality. Appreciate and respect that and perhaps in time you'll find even ground.
Deon Potgieter
Who teaches young people to be so exquisitely sensitive to perceived slights, so ready to read affronts into routine events in everyday life? Their teachers no doubt.
George F. Will
A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.
Mignon McLaughlin
Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered.
José Saramago
And for the next long years of my life, I tried to remember only the reading, not the terrible things that happened to me as I came and went up and down the stairs. The library became my sanctuary. I loved the ways the precious stories took shape but always had room to be read again. I became fascinated with how writers did that. How did they make a story feel so complete and yet to open-ended? It was like painting a picture that changed each time you looked at it.
Rene Denfeld
Everything on earth has happened before,nothing is new,but woe to the loverswho fail to discover a fresh blossomin every future kiss.
Jaroslav Seifert
Nobody wants to kiss when they are hungry.
Dorothy Dix
He dropped his head and kissed her. He kisses her and it was a kiss of utter certainty, the kind of kiss during which monarchs die and whole continents fall without your even noticing.
Jojo Moyes
I embraced her and she did not object at all. She let herself be kissed and kissed back, but coolly, without conviction, absently, as if she were smoking a cigarette.
Mihail Sebastian
Then she leant over and kissed him very slowly, with infinite tenderness. As if she had had to wait an eternity to do so.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
for Steve, less is always more, simpler is always better. Therefore, if you can build a glass box with fewer elements, it’s better, it’s simpler, and it’s at the forefront of technology. That’s where Steve likes to be, in both his products and his stores.
Walter Isaacson
So that’s our approach. Very simple, and we’re really shooting for Museum of Modern Art quality. The way we’re running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.” Apple’s design mantra would remain the one featured on its first brochure: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
Walter Isaacson
As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance.
Gabriel García Márquez
Someday, it will be hard to remember why we were once so fired up about 3G connectivity and the wonders of mobile broadband. Seamless, lightning-fast connectedness will be a given everywhere on Earth, and today's gadgets will be quaint museum pieces. At that point, all we'll care about is what kind of life these devices have created for us. And if it isn't a good life, we'll wonder what we did wrong.
William Powers
Once you get to naming your laptop, you know that you're really having a deep relationship with it.
Cory Doctorow
I point out to you, Marcus Claire Luyseyal, a lesson from past over-machined societies which you appear not to have learned. The devices themselves condition theusers to employ each other the way they employ machines.
Frank Herbert
The result is that the same generation is in danger of growing up with 170 terabytes of knowledge and information, but not more than a few bits of wisdom.
Sachin Kalbag
[Google is] an omnivorous collector of information, a hyperencyclopedic vault of human knowledge, an unerring auctioneer, an eerily skilful student of languages, behaviour, and desires.
Steven Levy
The extraordinary triumph of the cellphone among India’s poor stemmed from its ability to enable a most mundane human need, which is to chat with other people. And when the poor chat, it is not always about curing a child of diarrhea.
Manu Joseph
On its first over was the famous picture of Earth taken from space; its subtitle was "Access to Tools." The underlying philosophy was that technology could be our friend. Brand wrote on the first page of the first edition, "A realm of intimate, personal power is developing- power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.
Walter Isaacson
Memory has always been social. Now we’re using search engines and computers to augment our memories, too.
Clive Thompson
By the 1980's and 1990's, Moore's Law had emerged as the underlying assumption that governed almost everything in the Valley, from technology to business, education, and even culture. The "law" said the number of transistors would double every couple of years. It dictated that nothing stays the same for more than a moment; no technology is safe from its successor; costs fall and computing power increases not at a constant rate but exponentially: If you're not running on what became known as " Internet time," you're falling behind.
John Markoff
You can’t argue with facts. You’re not entitled to your own facts.
Steven Levy
Privacy and pollution are similar problems. Both cause harm that is invisible and pervasive. Both result from exploitation of a resource--whether it is land, water, or information. Both suffer from difficult attribution. It is not easy to identify a single pollutant or a single piece of data that caused harm. Rather, the harm often comes from an accumulation of pollutants, or an assemblage of data. And the harm of both pollution and privacy is collective. No one person bears the burden of all pollution; all of society suffers when the air is dirty and the water undrinkable. Similarly, we all suffer when we live in fear that our data will be used against us by companies trying to exploit us or police officers sweeping us into a lineup. (212-213)
Julia Angwin
The app saved three minutes of my time. But in the process, it cut a neighborhood business out of the economic equation. And, in a way, I had cut off myself from the inconvenient, maddening, but all-too-necessary messiness of human interaction.
Nick Bilton
The sensitive person's hostility to the machine is in one sense unrealistic, because of the obvious fact that the machine has come to stay. But as an attitude of mind there is a great deal to be said for it. The machine has got to be accepted, but it is probably better to accept it rather as one accepts a drug - that is, grudgingly and suspiciously. Like a drug, the machine is useful, dangerous and habit-forming. The oftener one surrenders to it the tighter its grip becomes.
George Orwell
On the rare occasions on which a movie was shown, there was as much suspense in the audience over whether the electricity would hold out to the end of the film as there was in the film itself.
Robert A. Caro
We were bleeding information from the nose and ears, though dazed and disoriented was not how I experienced it. Most of the time, I felt like I was three years old, high on chocolate cake and social networks, constantly wired, ingesting information and news about information, books and books about books, data and metadata—I was, in other words, overstimulated yet gluttonous for more.
Marilyn Johnson
Technology isn’t what makes us “post-human” or “transhuman,” as some writers and scholars have recently suggested. It’s what makes us human. Technology is in our nature. Through our tools we give our dreams form. We bring them into the world. The practicality of technology may distinguish it from art, but both spring from a similar, distinctly human yearning.
Nicholas Carr
The problem, really, is that while humanity continues to experience huge leaps in technology, we experience no equivalent leaps in our ethical capacity. In the never-ending arms race between technology and ethics, technology always wins. Researchers who tally the results of this immortal race have a name for it: history.
David J. Morris
You just can’t take for granted just how absolutely predatory the technology space is.
Sean Silcoff
Just because we grew up with the Internet, we think that the Internet is all grown up.
Patrik Svensson
In America, a pedestrian is someone who has just parked their car.
Tom Vanderbilt
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
We cannot go back to the lost oral world, any more than we can turn the clock back to a time before the clock existed. 'Writing and print and the computer,' writes Walter Ong, 'are all ways of technologizing the word'; and once technologized, the word cannot be de-technologized.
Nicholas Carr
As we've come to realize, the idea that security starts and ends with the purchase of a prepackaged firewall is simply misguided
Art Wittmann
The point is, the "best" technology or idea doesn't always prevail. Sometimes chance and the law of unintended consequences win out.
Eric Weiner
Try to imagine the calamity of that: Zack, age twenty-eight, with no management experience, gets training from Dave, a weekend rock guitarist, on how to apply a set of fundamentally unsound psychological principles as a way to manipulate the people who report to him.
Dan Lyons
All digital music listeners are equal. Acquisition is painless. Taste is irrelevant. It is pointless to boast about your iTunes collection, or the quality of your playlists on a streaming service. Music became data, one more set of 1's and 0's lurking in your hard drive, invisible to see and impossible to touch. Nothing is less cool than data.
David Sax
Individually, the experience of most people was of accelerating impotence and incomprehension. They lived in a world of superstition. They relied on voodoo - charms, fetishes, and crystal balls whose caprices they were helpless to govern, yet without which the conduct of daily life came to a standstill. Faith that the computer would switch on one more time and do as it was asked had more a religious than a rational cast. When the screen went black, the gods were angry.
Lionel Shriver
We want to empower the doctors and patients to get all the other assholes out of the way,' Clark had once told me, then laughed. 'Except for us. One asshole in the middle.
Michael Lewis
It seemed to me that transhumanism was an expression of the profound human longing to transcend the confusion and desire and impotence and sickness of the body, cowering in the darkening shadow of its own decay. This longing had historically been the domain of religion, and was now the increasingly fertile terrain of technology.
Mark O'Connell
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
Ecstatic technology isn't limited to silicon chips and display screens. As John Lilly's early research established, it's the knowledge of how to tweak the knobs and levers in our brain. When we get it right, it produces those invaluable sensations of selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and richness.
Steven Kotler