Latest Quotes

“The moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is; we get entangled in a description of qualities he necessarily shares with others like him; we begin to describe a type or a 'character' in the old meaning of the word, with the result that his spec…”

— Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition: Second Edition

“Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.”

— Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition: Second Edition

“Action reveals itself fully only to the storyteller, that is, to the backward glance of the historian, who indeed always knows better what it was all about than the participants.”

— Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

“Philosophers have merely interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

— Karl Marx , marxists.org

“Beauty! I can't bear the thought that man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom. What's still more awful is that man with the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not renounce the ideal of the Madonna, and his heart may be on fire with the ideal, genuin…”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Dmitri Karamazov, The Brothers Karamazov

“The technical structure of the media virtually compels adherence to conventional thoughts; nothing else can be expressed between two commercials, or in seven hundred words, without the appearance of absurdity that is difficult to avoid when one is challenging familiar doctrine with no opportunity to…”

— Edward Herman, Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“Book publishers needed only to listen to Jeff Bezos himself to have their fears stoked. Amazon’s founder repeatedly suggested he had little reverence for the old 'gatekeepers' of the media, whose business models were forged during the analogue age and whose function it was to review content and then…”

— Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

“The U.S. media do not function in the manner of the propaganda system of a totalitarian state. Rather, they permit—indeed, encourage—spirited debate, criticism, and dissent, as long as these remain faithfully within the system of presuppositions and principles that constitute an elite consensus, a s…”

— Herman Edward, Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

“When I think of the past twenty-five years within myself I am astonished at their emptiness. I can scarcely say that I have lived.”

— Yukio Mishima, Mishima: A Biography

“Media is saying something in the way it finds its stories, churns them out, swallows them again, redigests them, and spits them out once again. This is more than a simple cultural bulimia. This is a complex but, on some level, effective form of mass catharsis and self-observation that our society em…”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture

“The question, 'Is it real?' is less important than, 'Is it newsworthy?”'”

— Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“I don't like to tell people what I think is good or bad about the social and psychic changes caused by new media, but if you insist on pinning me down about my own subjective reactions as I observe the reprimitivization of our culture, I would have to say that I view such upheavals with total person…”

— Marshall McLuhan, ucdavis.edu

“I'm making explorations. I don't know where they're going to take me… My writings constitute the process rather than the completed product of discovery; my purpose is to employ facts as tentative probes, as means of insight, of pattern recognition, rather than to use them in the traditional and ster…”

— Marshall McLuhan, ucdavis.edu

“I must explore and experiment. I am never satisfied with my work. I resent the limitations of my own imagination.”

— Walt Disney, How to Be Like Walt

“Think beyond your lifetime, if you want to do something truly great. Make a fifty-year master plan. A fifty-year master plan will change how you look at the opportunities in the present.”

— Walt Disney, How to Be Like Walt: Capturing the Disney Magic Every Day of Your Life

“To follow the daily or hourly news cycle is the media equivalent of day-trading: it's frenzied, pointless and usually unprofitable. I'd much rather read an item which just showed me the photos or documents. And if you're going to write some text, take a position or explain something to me. Give me o…”

— Nick Denton, thewire.com

“If you want to succeed you've got to be okay to just lose control.”

— Alexis Ohanian, Ted.com

“When you have a platform as powerful as what we've invented (a.k.a. the Internet), it is a crying shame when it's used for cat videos.”

— Patrick Chung, allthingsd.com

“Writing for the press cannot be recommended as a permanent resource to anyone qualified to accomplish anything in the higher departments of literature or thought: not only on account of the uncertainty of this means of livelihood, especially if the writer has a conscience, and will not consent to se…”

— John Stuart Mill, The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill

“Opinion-sharing sessions are like junk food: they fill you up with starch and leave you feeling both sated and hungry. A sustained inquiry into the truth of a matter is an almost athletic experience; it may exhaust you, but it also improves you.”

— Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time