Martin Riker > Quotes

“This self was not really you, it didn't sufficiently encompass what you care about or what you want to say. Because at the end of the day, you are uniquely ill-equipped to convey to the world what you care about or what you want to say.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“I felt also, for the first time that evening, the pinch of my own deep loneliness, never far from me in those days, always just out past the edge of my so-called self-awareness.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“But for some reason reading works, reading in particular. The mental release, the distraction, or maybe just the voice, the company.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Reading and writing being the only good methods I have ever found for emptying my insomnia mind, and calming it.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Now the box is open, reality spills out, and there's no way to stuff it back in. Judgment has been meted out, the first sentence handed down, first of many because once this trial gets going there is no going back. The proceedings are irreversible, the stakes existential, the accusations keep piling up, the prosecution is relentless, the prosecution never rests, the defense never rests, nobody in this whole damn place ever rests.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Ignorance doesn't make you good at anything. You don't free yourself by unlearning. You have to learn past all you've learned.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Perhaps the real revelation is simply that life has caught up with you. All this time, when you thought you were fooling everyone, that was only because no one was paying attention. But eventually the world does pay attention, and suddenly it is you who are on trial, not the world but you. The trial you'd managed to put off for years is finally underway and you see, now, that you are not the plaintiff, as you'd always assumed, but the defendant, not the accuser but the accused.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Even an imagined togetherness beats being alone.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“I’d been caught up in myself, my grand entrance to humanity. But humanity was just a bunch of people I didn’t know standing on the far side of a pool, and none of them seemed very impressed.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Plato, who was a total elitist, by the way, and hated democracy, because he thought average people were too dumb to make their own decisions and ought to be governed by philosophers, because philosophers alone understand “essential truths.” Apparently he never met anyone from our philosophy department”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Words shaped the world economy and the human body, both.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“You enjoy speaking your ideas but you also hate it, and finally you hate it more than you enjoy it. Hearing yourself form words and project them toward people, who will probably not care much anyway. Who might at best watch curiously as your words sail past them and bounce off the back wall.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“There was the pessimism of the revolutionaries, as Keynes called it, the worry of those who thought the world so doomed that the only hope was to turn everything upside down. Then there was the pessimism of the reactionaries, those who thought the world so doomed that any sort of change at all would send civilization reeling into the abyss.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“You were born into an era of overload. Leaving things out is the great unmastered art form of your age.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“If everyone else seems unfazed by this, the endlessness of everything, that isn't because they live any less in the midst or on the spot or under the gun but because they manage it better than you do, or at least they are better at hiding it. You're better at hiding than at hiding it, better at avoiding than bearing it, better at hoping it will all go away if you lie still eyes closed hands clenched hands clenched breathe—”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all, said Joan Robinson.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Part of you clearly thinks they are right about you, even though they can't be, they have to be wrong or else your life's work is pointless, and that is a level of personal negation you cannot possibly survive.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Ideology isn't a bad thing—we have to live inside something—but failure to recognize ideology for what it is, to bear in mind that society and culture are things we made up and can remake and improve, keeps us from changing those aspects of our lives that could be better.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“All of it exciting but none of it sticking, not that sticking was even a goal. Permanently defining myself was never a goal. More like not defining myself, always changing. "Experimental.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“A single college day contained more "life experience" than an entire month of high school.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“The removal of private property is the big one, because it addresses what More sees as the central issue of humanity, the "parent of all plagues," his permanent problem, which is pride. "Pride" in the sense of needing to be better than other people, which I guess is more like vanity.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“I'd rather form reasonable opinions about useful things than claim precise knowledge of things that are totally useless.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“You put yourself out there, take on a thing like this, because you think that you should, or need to. Not because you want to, not at all because you want to, but because you are painfully aware of how greatly you would prefer to say no, to stay home, to climb into bed and read a book or watch something on your laptop, and you worry that's not healthy or good. Your natural inclinations seem counterproductive and not good. So you make yourself say yes, you force yourself, out of fear that you will live your whole life not "having lived" or whatever. But then here you are, living, and it's miserable! Not a meaningful corrective to your natural inclinations, just a terrible series of tortures with no redeeming value.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Here I am serving myself up as some sort of expert on how to proceed through the world with intention and purpose when in fact I am utterly lost.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“A woman's autonomy is not just about rights or laws, she's saying. A woman literally needs her own room.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Whenever my mind turns to my teenage years, which is almost never, but on the off times it occasionally does, and I try to decide whether or not thinking about those years is worth the energy, I experience something like the opposite of nostalgia. I am hit with a very strong sense that high school was dumb and embarrassing.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Maybe the value of memories, as with any other commodity, is a function of scarcity. When you first notice that you have some, you have relatively few, so they seem to matter more. You are fascinated with the fact that you have them at all. Self-awareness. Growing up. But as you begin to accumulate memories with the years, their relative utility diminishes. You grow into a more realistic appreciation of their worth, then eventually even that dwindles. Finally, there are so many memories, and you are so used to having them around, so accustomed to their plentitude, that your demand curve approaches zero, and your past, your entire personal history, seems hardly worth the effort of remembering at all.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Of course, when an economist tells you not to worry, you might worry all the more. An economist's "don't worry" usually means something bloodlessly calculated, like "worrying will increase the inclination to hoard currency and decrease spending on consumer goods.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Because at the end of the day, you are uniquely ill-equipped to convey to the world what you care about or what you want to say. You know these things in your mind, or think you know them, and you are capable of saying these things or writing them, but the moment you do, you immediately doubt them.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“The person who puts herself out there is always the accused. How did this never occur to you? No doubt it occurred to a part of you, the part that kept putting it off. No doubt that's why you postponed the trial as long as possible, preferring instead to live in a juvenile state of perpetual expectation, not because of the part that assumed you would someday be amazing, but because of the part that knew you would end up here, and what now?”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture