Latest Quotes

“All observational claims made about the object are made in some perspective or other. Before the seventeenth century, the Milky Way, as part of a commonsense perspective on the world, was perceived using human eyes simply as a broad band of light extending across the night sky. From the perspective…”

— Ronald N. Giere, Scientific Perspectivism

“The word planet derives from a Greek word meaning wanderer.”

— Ronald N. Giere, Scientific Perspectivism

“Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.”

— Mae West, The Wit and Wisdom of the Mae West

“If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.”

— David Sedaris, Barrel Fever

“Mashable’s raise-layoff-pivot may also prove a harbinger of what’s to come for venture-backed publishers. As Facebook-driven hockey-stick growth flattens, many of these companies will face the same tough choices as Mashable.”

— Alex Magnin, Mashable And The Challenge Of Venture-Funded Media

“When the apocalypse comes, it won’t just be cockroaches that survive. It will also be herpes and that random bottle of crème de menthe you bought years ago.”

— Mamrie Hart, You Deserve A Drink

“Total explicitness is impossible. The effort of formal logic to make thought entirely explicit, while an admirable and in many ways indispensable and fantastically productive effort, is ultimately doomed to failure and entails deep psychological strain because of its unreality. Thought can only be m…”

— Walter Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture

“I told you the truth about my distancing myself. I roll on a wave and look at white clouds. Growing small, I disappear in the immense, more and more free.”

— Czeslaw Milosz, Conversation With Jeanne

“Objects can’t be presented directly because they are not inert but parts of a process, and the relations between things are important than the things themselves.”

— Jacob Korg, Winter Love: Ezra Pound and H.D

“I thought I must have died. This couldn’t happen to somebody, and come back. It’s the most challenging, enlightening, astonishing, terrifying, joyous, strange thing in the world. I don’t mean to scare anyone off but these are bizarre dimensions of extraordinary power and beauty. People should be ver…”

— Terence McKenna, Terence McKenna on DMT

“We were never poetry, we were never metaphors. We were a state of organized chaos. We were never the things that people write songs about or someone says, 'That. I want that.' We were the laundry piling up on the couch because no one bothered to put it away and dirty footprints on the tile because i…”

— Kendra Syrdal, I Loved Him To An Uncomfortable Degree

“His memories had increasingly occurred to him without context, outside of linear time, like single poems on sheets of computer paper, instead of pages from a book with the page number and book title on top.”

— Tao Lin, Taipei (Vintage Contemporaries)

“Student loans are destroying the imagination of youth. If there’s a way of a society committing mass suicide, what better way than to take all the youngest, most energetic, creative, joyous people in your society and saddle them with, like $50,000 of debt so they have to be slaves? There goes your m…”

— David Graeber, Baffler No. 22 Launch Party

“Why don’t we transfer this thinking to the states? 10 guys sitting in a room in D.C. can’t possibly have that much an advantage in knowledge or experience over 500 guys sitting in 50 different rooms, competing and collaborating with each other.”

— Charles Neill, Coloring Outside The Lines: The Problem With Our Two-Party System

“Polarization primarily reflects not the growing polarization of voters, but the declining responsiveness of American politicians to the electoral middle.”

— Jacob S. Hacker, Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class

“The debate should not be over whether government is involved in the formation of markets. It always is. The debate should be over whether it is involved in a manner conducive to a good society.”

— Jacob S. Hacker, Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class

“The center will hold because there is no center.”

— Alexis C. Madrigal, What Is Medium?

“The lack of video, the lack of audio, the lack of ways to change the forking outcomes of plot is a feature of literature, not a bug. And, as it turns out, books are interactive. They’re recipes for the imagination. Conversely, video is restrictive—it tells you what things look like, what they sound…”

— Richard Nash, What is the Business of Literature?

“Publishing has no particular ability to discern what is good or not, what is successful or not. This is true not just at the level of predicting commercial success, but also at predicting critical success. I already discussed great writers who almost vanished, books that slipped through the corporat…”

— Richard Nash, What is the Business of Literature?

“By defining books as against technology, we deny the power of the book.”

— Richard Nash, What is the Business of Literature?