heroes, villains, and a happy ending

Megan McArdle:

We don’t want ambiguity and complex systems; we want heroes, villains, and a happy ending.

art at the service of…

Jose Abreu:

No longer putting society at the service of art, and much less at the services of monopolies of the elite, but instead art at the service of society, at the service of the weakest, at the service of the children, at the service of the sick, at the service of the vulnerable, and at the service of all those who cry for vindication through the spirit of their human condition and the raising up of their dignity.

hope

Naomi Klein:

As Studs Terkel, the great oral historian, used to say: “Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up.”

we are most blind

John Mauldin begins his 2010 forecast letter with these quotations:

“Lying here, during all this time after my own small fall, it has become my conviction that things mean pretty much what we want them to mean. We’ll pluck significance from the least consequential happenstance if it suits us and happily ignore the most flagrantly obvious symmetry between separate aspects of our lives if it threatens some cherished prejudice or cosily comforting belief; we are blindest to precisely whatever might be most illuminating.”

– from Transition, by Iain M. Banks

Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest

– The Boxer, by Paul Simon

1 of 25 blasphemous quotes

Bjork:

I do not believe in religion, but if I had to choose one it would be Buddhism. It seems more livable, closer to men… I’ve been reading about reincarnation, and the Buddhists say we come back as animals and they refer to them as lesser beings. Well, animals aren’t lesser beings, they’re just like us. So I say fuck the Buddhists.

i see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me

Noam Chomsky:

… (We must) overcome the marginalization and atomization of the public so that they can become “participants,” not mere “spectators of action,”…

Richard Nelson Bolles

The Internet is just a new way to avoid rejection.

link

miles and miles

Werner Herzog:

I try to understand the ocean beneath the thin layer of ice that is civilization. There’s miles and miles of deep ocean, of darkness and barbarism. And I know the ice can break easily.

emptiness is something

Stephen King:

When the narrator of “The Fling” finally faces up to the fact that he has no love or comfort to give his father, he says of himself, “I was all smooth surface with nothing inside except emptiness.”

once upon a time

Philip Pullman:

…”Thou shalt not” might reach the head, but it takes “Once upon a time” to reach the heart.

one of the greatest threats we face

Hillary Clinton:

One of the greatest threats we face is from people who believe they are absolutely, certainly right about everything.

no one knows what lies behind the masquerades

Oscar Wilde:

Man is least himself when he talks in his own persona.  Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.

men are scary

Michael Chabon:

This is an essential element of the business of being a man: to flood everyone around you in a great radiant arc of bullshit, one whose source and object of greatest intensity is yourself.

with things of interest

Alfred Brendel:

One should live and hopefully fill one’s existence with things of interest. But why one lives is a question that is unanswerable.

they would be killed immediately

Gore Vidal:

Don’t ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren’t any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I’m never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it.

Elbert Hubbard

Little minds are interested in the extra-ordinary; great minds in the commonplace.

Grey’s Anatomy S6E1

In medical school we have a hundred classes that teaches us how to fight off death and not one lesson in how to go on living.

what we measure

Joseph Stiglitz:

What we measure affects what we do. If we have the wrong metrics, we will strive for the wrong things.

and the bridge is love

Newsweek:

In a speech after the 9/11 attacks, Tony Blair made an inspired citation of the book’s closing peroration on love, and how it endures through cruelty and death. “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead,” it concludes, “and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

find things beautiful

Vincent van Gogh:

Find things beautiful as much as you can, most people find too little beautiful.