Latest Quotes

“Instead of asking yourself, 'How can they think that?!' ask yourself, 'I wonder what information they have that I don’t?' Instead of asking, 'How can they be so irrational?' ask, 'How might they see the world such that their view makes sense?'”

— Douglas Stone, Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most

“When you create an authentic brand that you believe in, you need to push yourself to think about what that brand really means, and that’s not limited to a product or industry. Go deeper. Think about its values, think about how it can be tweaked, reframed, and spun into something more interesting.”

— Marc Ecko, Unlabel: Selling You Without Selling Out

“Your relevance is about as relevant as the Earth is to the billions and billions of stars in the sky.”

— Marc Ecko, Unlabel: Selling You Without Selling Out

“When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the ae…”

— Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs

“After a ten-month courtship, I married Maggie, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the novelist Thomas McGuane and the actress Margot Kidder. I was thirty-four. I did things my way. Now, three years later, we had a baby coming and lived on a ranch that I’d purchased on a whim and had no notion of how…”

— Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“One reason the Internet fosters conspiracy theories is that its system of branching, crossing tunnels is shaped like paranoid reasoning itself, and once inside the shadow maze you find yourself tracking elusive glimmers of light that recede as fast as you can follow them.”

— Walter Kirn, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade

“I am obligated to try to see the world through George Bush’s eyes, no matter how much I may disagree with him. That’s what empathy does— it calls us all to task, the conservative and the liberal, the powerful and the powerless, the oppressed and the oppressor. We are all shaken out of our complacenc…”

— Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

“Today’s politician understands this. He may not lie, but he understands that there is no great reward in store for those who speak the truth, particularly when the truth may be complicated. The truth may cause consternation; the truth will be attacked; the media won’t have the patience to sort out a…”

— Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

“When I come home, flush with all this new semi-insider gossip, my wife, Laurie, startles me by saying that during the first couple of months of my sabbatical, when I was home all the time, there had been 'no energy in the house' and how grateful she is that I’m finally doing something 'purposeful' i…”

— David Shields, Black Planet

“Is race on my brain, and am I screwed up? Or is it on everyone else’s brain, and am I just taking notes? No one ever acknowledges the true subject of our discussions; it can never get expressed directly, it simply can’t be, won’t be, isn’t allowed to be talked about openly, and so it comes out in a…”

— David Shields, Black Planet

“In college, reading all those Greek tragedies and listening to the lectures about them, I would think, rather blithely, 'Well, that tragic flaw thing is nicely symmetrical: whatever makes Oedipus heroic is also—' What did I know then? Nothing. I didn’t feel in my bones as I do now that what powers o…”

— David Shields, How Literature Saved My Life

“By 1950, roads spanned across the continent. By 1980, the Interstate Highway System reached into 48 states linking all major U.S. cities. By 2008, there were 2,734,102 miles of paved public roads in the U.S. (with an additional 1,324,245 miles of unpaved public roads). In four generations, the U.S.…”

— Anonymous, adbusters.org

“The real joy of writing lies in the opportunity of being able to sacrifice a whole chapter for a single sentence, a complete sentence for a single word.”

— Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“In writing, the most enthralling moment is that of condensation, ellipsis, rarefaction. Building up increasingly dense nuclei around which light is disoriented, and thought too, since it lost the sense of its origin.”

— Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories II: 1987-1990

“To push anything back into the past is equivalent to reducing it to its simplest elements.”

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man

“I’m finding it harder to just ‘write.’ The seeking and sculpting of found text or sound have become my primary ‘artistic’ function. Actually generating that text or music seems increasingly difficult. Lately I’ll sit down with a blank pad and feel like I really have to dig down deep to get my own vo…”

— David Shields, Reality Hunger

“Book publishing is not a conventional business. It more closely resembles a vocation or an amateur sport in which the primary goal is the activity itself rather than its financial outcome. For owners and editors willing to work for the joy of the task, book publishing in my time has been immensely r…”

— Jason Epstein, Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future

“The public sphere thus promotes ubiquitous commentators who deliberately detach themselves from the local practices out of which specific issues grow and in terms of which these issues must be resolved though some sort of committed action. What seems a virtue to detached Enlightenment reason, theref…”

— Hubert Dreyfus, socrates.berkeley.edu

“CNN was not under traditional corporate control, so it could present news without worrying about who or what was impacted; its always-on format meant the newsroom was not under the obligation to craft events into satisfying packages for a single evening broadcast; its position on the cable dial lowe…”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“Why is this so hard for so many of us? It's not because we need the email for our productivity, but because we are addicted to the possibility that there's a great tidbit in there somewhere. Like compulsive gamblers at a slot machine rewarded with a few quarters every dozen tries, we are trained to…”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now