Patrick Martin

“I quickly realized there was more thinking going on in the bike shop than in my previous job at the think tank.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

“Of course misfortunes have opened the way to blessings you would never have thought to hope for, that you would not have been ready to understand as blessings if they had come to you in your youth, when you were uninjured, innocent. The future always finds us changed.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Lila

“It may be of some interest to note, in this connection, that the crossword puzzle became a popular form of diversion in America at just that point when the telegraph and the photograph had achieved the transformation of news from functional information to decontextualized fact. This coincidence suggests that the new technologies had turned the age-old problem of information on its head: Where people once sought information to manage the real contexts of their lives, now they had to invent contexts in which otherwise useless information might be put to some apparent use.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business