Latest Quotes

“'Humanism,' a term first coined in 1808 to identify this Renaissance trend, refers not to some sort of humanitarian impulse, but to the solipsism and self-absorption characterizing the era’s religion, art, and science.”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back

“Innis sacrificed point of view and prestige to his sense of the urgent need for insight. A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding. As Innis got more insight he abandoned any mere point of view in his presentation of knowledge. When he interrelates the…”

— Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man

“In losing his identity, and having no perspective of his own, Pip can see that all the meanings in the world are meanings taken from one perspective or another. He can see the selfishness involved in thinking of these meanings as ultimate or final precisely because he can see that ultimately each is…”

— Hubert Dreyfus, All Things Shining

“Don’t try to see what all the colors look like when they’re added up. Instead, try to get into as many (revealing) moods as possible, as many ways of responding to the sacred as you can— and this life of serial resonances with the sacred is ultimately a kind of contentedness, happiness, even joy.”

— Hubert Dreyfus, All Things Shining

“Reconfigurers are either gods or madmen. But which of these is only determined in retrospect. If the new god actually works to reconfigure the world, and the practices organize themselves around its way of life, then the god becomes an exemplar of a whole new understanding of everything that matters…”

— Hubert Dreyfus, All Things Shining

“Homer invokes the gods in order to account for the observation that a central form of human excellence must be drawn from without. A god, in Homer’s terminology, is a mood that attunes us to what matters most in a situation, allowing us to respond appropriately without thinking.”

— Hubert Dreyfus, All Things Shining

“The frames of thought in which the observations are set are often of more significance than the observations themselves.”

— Walter J. Ong, Rhetoric,Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture

“A liberal education today must include reflection on the significance of writing and print, situating these media and all their works in their historically patterned sequences. When we speak of a sequence of media, we do not mean that new media of communications annihilate their antecedents. When me…”

— Walter Ong, Rhetoric,Romance, and Technology

“We have all heard it said that one picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, if this statement is true, why does it have to be a saying? Because a picture is worth a thousand words only under special conditions—which commonly include a context of words in which the picture is set.”

— Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy

“Is the truth best said or perhaps only said in a fiction; that is, in a lie and a falsehood? Perhaps the ghost was no ghost. Perhaps its truth, like the theater itself, was a lie.”

— Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine

“I believe that software, and in fact entire companies, should be run in a way that assumes that the sum of the talent of people outside your walls is greater than the sum of the few you have inside. None of us are as smart as all of us.”

— Matt Mullenweg, Ma.tt

“This technique is called marginalizing and is still frequently used, especially in organized reactions to media viruses. In order to generate public support for an illogical policy, leaders need to name and demonize an enemy, then whip up an emotional fury against the demon. Anyone remaining against…”

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

“It is easy to criticize a sensationalist talk show for, say, giving a neo-Nazi a platform to voice hateful rhetoric. But by exposing these sorts of people rather than censoring them, these shows reveal the underlying inconsistencies in their doctrines. Instead of appearing frightening, these people’…”

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

“The instinct for increased contact is the evolutionary imperative we feel to become something greater than ourselves. Just as atoms combined into molecules, molecules clustered into cells, and cells collected into organisms, we organisms are networking into greater levels of organization.”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed

“It calls to mind the questions posed back in the 1960s by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, who had been fascinated by the impact of spectacle and authority on soldiers’ obedience in Nazi Germany. Milgram wanted to know if German war criminals could have been following orders, as they claimed, and…”

— Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“Openness does not mean lack of organization, lack of principle, or lack of all resistance. For the human being, at least, it means quite the contrary: the strengthening of organization, principles, and resistance where needed, so that interaction with the outside can be strong and real. Indeed, para…”

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

“There is no substitute for working alongside someone in the trenches.”

— Matt Mullenweg, HBR.org

“The engineer and historian of engineering Henry Petroski presents a very elegant point. Had the Titanic not had that famous accident, as fatal as it was, we would have kept building larger and larger ocean liners and the next disaster would have been even more tragic. So the people who perished were…”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Black Swan