Tech, culture, democracy. Scope, scale, speed. Loyal but disobedient.
Update: earliest instance of this quote is by Deborah Lonrau LeKashman, Quora, Aug 15, 2017. Thanks to Matt Popke (@Polackio) for the keen eyes and good memory.
“Do you believe that you’re in charge of deciding if our brilliant ideas are good or not? All these talented people with this money and TV credits, they come up here and you get to decide what’s good and what’s not good and we believe you. And what the hell do you know about it? Nothing. You know nothing. You’ve never written a show. Most of you aren’t funny — probably all of you — you wouldn’t be here if you were funny, you wouldn’t need to come to this. But just think of how you would feel if I came into your office and said “I don’t like the things you say at these meetings. I don’t know anything about your business. I don’t have a reason. I don’t even work here. I just thought I’d come in off the street and give you a piece of my mind. And what gives me the authority? I bought 2 drinks.”
“The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice, not in theory.”
“…a dark, mysterious force that somehow pulsates ominously in an unknown recess”
“Those who read own the world. Those who watch television lose it.”
“There were some filmmakers speaking in an auditorium like this one about how documentaries should be made, how we should be like a fly on the wall and not interfere. And I just couldn’t take it anymore so I grabbed the mic and said, “No! We are directors. We are creators. We should be the hornets that sting.’ ”
Herzog continues: "There was a roar of disgust against me so I shouted, 'Happy New Year losers!'
“If we had started 20 years ago…such a plan might have made sense.”
“Smart people are beginning to understand the size of the problem, but they haven’t yet figured out the timing; they haven’t yet figured out that the latest science shows that this wave is already breaking over our heads.”
“There is one day when all things are tired, and the very smells as they drift on the heavy air are old and used. One cannot explain, but it feels so. Then there is another day—to the eye nothing whatever has changed—when all the smells are new and delightful and the whiskers of the Jungle People quiver to their roots, and the winter hair comes away from their sides in long draggled locks. Then, perhaps, a little rain falls, and all the trees and the bushes and the bamboos and the mosses and the juicy-leaved plants wake with a noise of growing that you can almost hear, and under this noise runs, day and night, a deep hum. That is the noise of the spring—a vibrating boom which is neither bees nor falling water nor the wind in the tree-tops, but the purring of the warm, happy world.”
Everything is subject to change.
“If the primary goal of school is to teach students to build products, the answer might be yes. But interviews my research team has conducted with educators and parents show that Americans maintain broad and complex aims for education. They want students to develop interpersonal skills and citizenship traits. They want schools to teach critical thinking and an array of academic skills. They want young people to be exposed to arts and music, to have opportunities for play and creativity, and to be supported socially and emotionally.”
“The thinking that if ‘only we can find the right school design model then all kids will have a great education’ disregards the fundamental problems that do harm public education: devastating funding inequities that disadvantage the poorest of the country’s schools; curriculum deficits; issues facing teachers, including training, retention, lack of diversity, low pay and lack of authority in their own classrooms; and issues facing students, including poverty, trauma, poor health, unstable family life and learning disabilities.”
“The U.S. public education system is not a charity. It is a civic institution, the most important, many argue, in the country, and it educates the vast majority of America’s children — the well-off ones and middle-class ones and those who are so poor that they turn up in class with flea collars around their ankles (as one superintendent told me). It is in some areas of the country a brilliant success and in other places a crushing failure, differences that reflect embedded inequality in the U.S. society and economy.”
Frank Nelson in the forecastle : or, The sportsman's club among the whalers, by Harry Castlemon, 1876, no known copyright restrictions
“STICK TO THE BOAT, is your true motto in whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when LEAP FROM THE BOAT, is still better.”
“Here is the essential truth. We are better together than we are apart.
Indivisibility is our essence. Isn’t this the gift that the people of New Orleans have given to the world? We radiate beauty and grace in our food, in our music, in our architecture, in our joy of life, in our celebration of death; in everything that we do. We gave the world this funky thing called jazz, the most uniquely American art form that is developed across the ages from different cultures. Think about second lines, think about Mardi Gras, think about muffaletta, think about the Saints, gumbo, red beans and rice. By God, just think.
All we hold dear is created by throwing everything in the pot; creating, producing something better; everything a product of our historic diversity.”
Remarks delivered May, 2017 by the mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, upon the removal of the last of the city’s several Confederate monuments. Transcript (NY Times)
“After 1945, every subsequent president knew what nuclear holocaust looked like and thus to avoid it. How they did so can be instructive. For example: President John F. Kennedy’s thoughtful if lucky handling of the Cuban missile crisis, warding off nuclear war by ignoring his more trigger-happy military advisers. Having just read Barbara Tuchman’s book “The Guns of August,” about the madcap rush into World War I, Kennedy said, “I am not going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time, ‘The Missiles of October.’”
“We’ve read enough books.”
“A few hundred thousand years ago in early human (or hominid) prehistory, growth was so slow that it took on the order of one million years for human productive capacity to increase sufficiently to sustain an additional one million individuals living at subsistence level. By 5000 bc, following the Agricultural Revolution, the rate of growth had increased to the point where the same amount of growth took just two centuries. Today, following the Industrial Revolution, the world economy grows on average by that amount every ninety minutes.
… It is impressive that an amount of economic growth that took 200 years seven thousand years ago takes just ninety minutes now, and that the world population growth that took two centuries then takes one and a half weeks now.”
“Listening to senators and an appellate judge extol the virtue of adhering to precedent, one would reasonably conclude that most fact patterns are identical, and finding applicable precedent a simple matter of reading the law. If that were true, we could indeed rely on algorithms to mine case law and apply the law.
In reality, however, the facts of a case rarely fit nicely into precedent. In fact, no two cases are exactly alike, and when the facts of a case fit into a particular precedent, there’s not much for lawyers to dispute or judges to decide. Reading any given case gives a clear understanding that a controversy may require a judge to wade through dozens of precedents in making a decision. Not surprisingly, judges applying the same precedents come to conflicting conclusions in the circuit courts; that’s how disputes get to the Supreme Court.”
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