Latest Quotes

“In AD 1500, Europe was turning out about 200,000 volumes per year, while China had been producing about 800,000 a year for centuries: a million books, say 500 tons of paper. At the turn of the millennium, the world produced some ten billion books a year – about 50 million tons of paper, for books al…”

— John Mann, Alpha Beta: How 26 Letters Shaped the Western World

“Homo sapiens has been in existence for between 30,000 and 50,000 years. The earliest script dates from only 6000 years ago.”

— Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy

“The body is a convenient boundary for the definition of the self.”

— Caleb Crain, Steamthing.com

“Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of the self.”

— Sarah Manguso, The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir

“Blogs are likely to be better for readers than for capitalists, while I love the medium, I’ve always been skeptical about the value of blogs as businesses.”

— Nick Denton, nymag.com

“With truth, you need to get rid of it as soon as possible and pass it on to someone else. As with illness, this is the only way to be cured of it. The person who keeps truth in his hands has lost.”

— Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“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

“Gawker is the hardest of our sites to define. It started out as a Manhattan media gossip site — and retains that initial personality. But that topic only appeals to 100,000 or so people. And Gawker.com now has a monthly global audience of 10m. It needs that scale to get internet advertising and to s…”

— Nick Denton, Gawker.com

“One thing about open source is that even the failures contribute to the next thing that comes up. Unlike a company that could spend a million dollars in two years and fail and there’s nothing really to show for it, if you spend a million dollars on open source, you probably have something amazing th…”

— Matt Mullenweg, memeburn.com

“While there are few problems in today’s world that the United States can solve alone, there are even fewer that can be solved without the United States.”

— Hillary Clinton, Hard Choices

“What stares us in the face is often the most difficult to perceive.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man

“What would we do without our enemies? Exterior emergencies or shocks are indispensable to force individuals out of their natural laziness and set routines — and also to periodically break the collective frameworks that imprison them.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Human Phenomenon

“The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!”

— Noam Chomsky, theguardian.com

“John Pilger: Does that right of free expression, in your view, extent to everybody? Noam Chomsky: I mean, if we don’t believe in free expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all. John Pilger: Would you support the right of terrorists calling for murder of Salman Rushdie to speak…”

— Noam Chomsky, Freedom of Speech: Words are Not Deeds

“Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his blood. Write with blood, and you will find that blood is spirit… He that writes with blood and proverbs does not want to be read, but learned by heart. In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak, but for that route yo…”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things, or the Nothingness, behind it. Grammar and Style— to me they seem to have become as i…”

— David Shields, Reality Hunger

“There was a reason the church was the main cultural unifier in Western Europe: it had the best distribution network and the most mass-produced item— the Bible.”

— David Shields, Reality Hunger

“Here everything is admissible— philosophy, ethics, divinity, criticism, poetry, humor, fun, mimicry, anecdote, jokes, ventriloquism— all the breadth and versatility of the most liberal conversation, highest and lowest personal topics: all are permitted, and all may be combined into one speech.”

— David Shields, Reality Hunger

“We are all so afraid. We are all so alone. We all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.”

— David Shields, How Literature Saved My Life

“When strongly disagreeing with another, most of us have a tendency to see things solely through our own world view.… In these circumstances, it can be constructive to take a minute to understand why the other person has reached the conclusion that they have. For instance, what in their background ha…”

— Jeff Weiner, Linkedin.com