“In the fall of 2004, my freshman students and I analyzed a speech of John Kerry's and found it confused, contradictory, inchoate, and weak. Six weeks later I went out and voted for John Kerry. What I was doing in class was subjecting Kerry's arguments to an academic interrogation. Do they hang toget…”— Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own TimeTagged: Complexity, Infinte Registers, Liberal Arts, Openness
“We are so fragile that without architecture and clothing, our bodies could not survive. Maybe we are like hermit crabs that are always looking for their shells. Maybe there is a human instinct to be always searching for an extension of one's body.”— Andrea Zittel, allanmccollum.netTagged: Architecture, Technology
“There are so many rules in our culture. Anything from how you build a space to what you can inject into your body is dictated by rules. And the only way that I think you can be free from external rules is to create your own personal set of rules that are even more rigid, but because they are your ow…”— Andrea Zittel, Yorku.caTagged: Govereance, Rules, Boundary Breaks
“In few other professions are you required, each and every day, to weigh so many competing claims— between different sets of constituents, between the interests of your state and the interests of the nation, between party loyalty and your own sense of independence, between the value of service and ob…”— Barack Obama, The Audacity of HopeTagged: Competing Interests, Complexity of Political Situations, (Example of Good Tags), Weight of Too Many Choices
“Sometimes, distractions can actually serve a purpose. Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, they warn us— when we feel ourselves regularly succumbing to them— that our work is not well defined, or our tasks are menial, or the whole project we're engaged in is fundamentally pointless. Instead…”— Jason Fried, Remote: Office Not RequiredTagged: Distractions, Work Strategies
“I no longer want to read bad writing. Information is not the same as writing. Just because you can type, that does not make the result readable. Then again, writing, good writing, is rarely profitable, so the whole Internet is laden with link-bait, which I occasionally click on, illustrating that th…”— Bob Lefsetz, Lefsetz.comTagged: Clickbait, Writing, Populist Economics
“Life propagates itself by ceaselessly adding to itself what it successively acquires — like a memory… Something passes, something grows, through the long chain of living creatures.”— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future Of ManTagged: Conservation
“And that music is so powerful, that it's quite beyond my control. And, ah… when I'm in the grips of it, I don't feel pleasure and I don't feel pain, either physically or emotionally. Do you understand what I'm talking about? Have you ever, have you ever felt like that? When you just, when you just,…”— Iggy Pop, Vimeo.comTagged: Flow, Music, Creation Processes, This Is Creating
“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not…”— T. S. Eliot, Selected EssaysTagged: Relationalism
“Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, 'tradition' should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better…”— T. S. Eliot, T. S. EliotTagged: Conservation
“Clear-cut and unequivocal am I too. Yet a vast inheritance of experience is packed in me. I have lived thousands of years. I am like a worm that has eaten its way through the wood of a very old oak beam. But now I am compact; now I am gathered together this fine morning.”— Virginia Woolf, The WavesTagged: Conservation
“A corporate headquarters, like Random House's imposing skyscraper at 1745 Broadway in New York, may look to the casual observer like the house of a well-ordered bureaucracy where all procedures have been formalized and standardized, but in reality it is more like a conservatory that houses a plurali…”— John B. Thompson, Merchants of CultureTagged: Book Publishing, Plurality
“Organizations become bureaucratic as soon as people define their job around a specific rule, or feature, rather than a goal. For example, if you tell me my job is to cook the french fries, I will resist anything that threatens the existence of french fries, since when they go away, so does my job. B…”— Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: WordPressTagged: Against Bureaucracy
“The sun and earth will be my coffin.”— Zhuang Zhou, The Book of Dead PhilosophersTagged: Death, Earth, Last Words
“It is quite true that today a great deal of art grows out of exhibitionist impulses. Certainly some of the worst does. Maybe some of the best. It may even be possible that all art involves a certain exhibitionism at least of some vague sublimated kind.”— Walter Ong, SLU.EDUTagged: Art, Exhibitionism, Liberal Arts, Reality Hunger
“By contrast, the sceptic is simply sceptical about the possibility of belief as such. Their counsel is to look at both sides of an issue and practise a suspension of judgement, or what was called an epoché, in all matters. In Philo's words, 'There is nothing firm we can say about anything.' The scep…”— Simon Critchley, The Book of Dead PhilosophersTagged: Openness, Scepticism
“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”— Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”— Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
“Inelegantly, and without my consent, time passed.”— Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than YouTagged: MirandaJuly, ShortStories, Time
“To die, it's easy. But you have to struggle for life.”— Vladek Spiegelman, MausTagged: GraphicNovel, Holocaust, LifeandDeath, Memoir