Michael > Michael's Quotes

“during this century (the twentieth) we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport - the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn't need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don't (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

I expect that history will show "normal" mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. 'Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn't do anything? Didn't everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?'

Yes, child, that's why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.'

What was the Restoration again, please, miss?'

The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.”
― Douglas Adams

“The woman will sit eternally in the tall black armchair. I will be the one woman you will never have... excessive living weighs down the imagination: we will not live, we will only write and talk to swell the sails.”
― Anaïs Nin

“To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.”
― Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays

“My intellectual achievement was retarded when I went to high school. I sort of sank into a black hole because I had to go to the high-achieving, academic public high school.”
― Noam Chomsky, Propaganda and the Public Mind

“An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie. It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There's a punishment for it, and it's usually crucifixion.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“In a room where
people unanimously maintain
a conspiracy of silence,
one word of truth
sounds like a pistol shot.”
― Czesław Miłosz

“Neoliberal democracy. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless.

In sum, neoliberalism is the immediate and foremost enemy of genuine participatory democracy, not just in the United States but across the planet, and will be for the foreseeable future.”
― Noam Chomsky

“If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you're saying, because it's too hard to believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience. And that makes sense. If you've resisted the temptation to tell the teacher, "You're an asshole," which maybe he or she is, and if you don't say, "That's idiotic," when you get a stupid assignment, you will gradually pass through the required filters. You will end up at a good college and eventually with a good job.”
― Noam Chomsky

“The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history.”
― Noam Chomsky

“The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Well, I'm not sure the New York Times was consciously trying to trivialise me, but the effect of it is to put everything in the same category as the gossip you read in the magazines you pick up at supermarket counters. I was asked, for example, why I thought there were so many euphemisms for genitalia. It's not a serious question. Whatever the purpose of such a tone is, the effect is to make it appear that anyone who departs from orthodox political doctrine is in some ways laughable.”
― Noam Chomsky

“The more you can increase fear of drugs, crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all of the people.”
― Noam Chomsky

“I fear being like everyone I hate, I fear failure, I fear losing control. I love balancing between chaos and control with everything I do. I always have a fear of going one way or another, getting lost in something, or losing everything to get lost in. And I fear being a completely acceptable sheep in society.”
― Marilyn Manson

“If you want to control someone, all you have to do is to make them feel afraid.”
― Paulo Coelho

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”
― Mark Twain

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
― Albert Einstein

“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“War is what happens when language fails.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die.”
― Herbert Hoover

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
― Voltaire

“There are perhaps many causes worth dying for, but to me, certainly, there are none worth killing for.”
― Albert Dietrich, Army GI, Pacifist CO: The World War II Letters of Frank Dietrich and Albert Dietrich

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
― Plato

“If you win, you need not have to explain...If you lose, you should not be there to explain!”
― Adolf Hitler

“All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.”
― John Steinbeck

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference

“War is over ... If you want it.”
― John Lennon

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”
― Howard Zinn

“Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.