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b4c706c All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference. Neil Postman
4619d23 Prior to the age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to control some of the contingencies in their lives. What people knew about had action-value. In the information world created by telegraphy, this sense of potency was lost, precisely because the whole world became context for news. Everything became everyone's business. For the first time, we were sent informati.. communication-theory internet la-la-la Neil Postman
85323a4 What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. --Neil Postman To Ben Sasse
03c1372 Vopravdu nevim, proc se ti blazni zlobeji, kdyz je tam drzi. Clovek tam muze lezt nahej po podlaze, vejt jako sakal, zurit a kousat. Jestli by to udelal clovek nekde na promenade, tak by se lidi divili, ale tam to patri k necemu prachobycejnymu. Je tam takova svoboda, vo kerej se ani socialistum nikdy nezdalo. čeština svejk Jaroslav Hašek
61a5d06 I suspect that scientists are driven by the sense that the world out there - reality - contains a hidden order, and the scientist is trying to elucidate the hidden order in our reality. And that impulse is what the scientist shares with the mystic. The impulse to get to the bottom of things. To know how the world really works. To know the nature of things. mysticism science Michael Crichton
7dd752c The world was not how you wanted it to be. The world was how it was. Michael Crichton
422fdad This, in essence, is the problem with the scientific view of reality. Science is a kind of glorified tailoring enterprise, a method for taking measurements that describe something - reality - that may not be understood at all. science scientific-method Michael Crichton
f084faf A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there.... And at the end of your life, your whole existence has that same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day. Michael Crichton
5a455a1 You must first learn patience, if you wish to learn anything at all. Michael Crichton
0fd9c08 The kids I see are lazy. Nobody wants to work. I teach physics. It takes years to master. But all the kids want to dress like Charlie Sheen and make a million dollars before they're twenty-eight. The only way you can make that kind of money is in law, investment banking, Wall Street. Places where the game is paper profits, something for nothing. But that's what the kids want to do, these days. Michael Crichton
4beca3c People aren't studying the natural world any more, they're mining it. Michael Crichton
2f28d57 But it was one thing to release a population of virtual agents inside a computer's memory to solve a problem. It was another thing to set real agents free in the real world. Michael Crichton
03c16e7 roar!!! Michael Crichton
6fa0b43 He finally decided that children liked dinosaurs because these giant creatures personified the uncontrollable force of looming authority. They were symbolic parents. Michael Crichton
3ab9cd8 yjb 'n ykwn lnsn Hkym b`tdl wlkn lys mfrT lHkm@ Ht~ l y`rf qdrh msbq wisdom Michael Crichton
a36461e In the eyes of all of them was the hollow stare of fear, and there was hollowness in their merriment, too. Michael Crichton
d9746e3 The number of hours women devote to housework has not changed since 1930, despite all the advances. All the vacuum cleaners, washer-dryers, trash compactors, garbage disposals, wash-and-wear fabrics ... Why does it still take as long to clean the house as it did in 1930? Michael Crichton
c546e7f It isn't a matter of wanting it or not," Malcolm said, eyes closed. He spoke slowly, through the drugs. "It's a matter of what you think you can accomplish. When the hunter goes out in the rain forest to seek food for his family, does he expect to control nature? No. He imagines that nature is beyond him. Beyond his understanding. Beyond his control. Maybe he prays to nature, to the fertility of the forest that provides for him. He prays be.. Michael Crichton
2a09f4d There are lots of trips out there. It's even possible to become a conference groupie, going from one seminar to another and being a Beautiful Evolved Human Being until you start making the people around you want to throw up. spirituality trip Michael Crichton
d3b8ff3 Photographs provided a tangible reality to men who were far from home, fearful and tired; they were posed proofs of success, souvenirs to send to sweethearts and loved ones, or simply ways of remembering, of grasping a moment in a swift changing and uncertain world. Michael Crichton
cb786a4 It's hard to observe without imposing a theory to explain what we're seeing, but the trouble with theories, as Einstein said, is that they explain not only what is observed but what CAN BE observed. We start to build expectations based on our theories. And often those expectations get in the way. scientific-theories theories Michael Crichton
b7ab384 Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent. Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating. But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it cannot tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it. Michael Crichton
7ac0751 The ability to imagine is the largest part of what you call intelligence. You think the ability to imagine is merely a useful step on the way to solving a problem or making something happen. But imagining it is what makes it happen. This is the gift of your species and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings. You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the.. Michael Crichton
b53032b Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penetrative act. It takes big equipment, and it literally changes the world afterward. Particle accelerators scar the land, and leave radioactive byproducts. Astronauts leave trash on the moon. There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries. Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always. "The scientists want it that way. They have to stick their inst.. Michael Crichton
af82695 A crisis is made by men, who enter into the crisis with their own prejudices, propensities, and predispositions. A crisis is the sum of intuition and blind spots, a blend of facts noted and facts ignored. crisis Michael Crichton
3fd1ea9 The kids were probably with Grant. And if Grant was out in the park, well ... what better person to get them safely through Jurassic Park than a dinosaur expert? Michael Crichton
2a7258e Whoever you are, some evening take a step out of your house, which you know so well. Enormous space is near. Michael Crichton
abf58d5 Grant knew that people could not imagine geological time. Human life was lived on another scale of time entirely. An apple turned brown in a few minutes. Silverware turned black in a few days. A compost heap decayed in a season. A child grew up in a decade. None of these everyday human experiences prepared people to be able to imagine the meaning of eighty million years--the length of time that had passed since this little animal had died. .. Michael Crichton
8687e3b When the first giant bones were found in the 1820s and 1830s, scientists felt obliged to explain the bones as belonging to some oversize variant of a modern species. This was because it was believed that no species could ever become extinct, since God would not allow one of His creations to die. Eventually it became clear that this conception of God was mistaken, and the bones belonged to extinct animals. Michael Crichton
e6afa0a The commercialization of molecular biology is the most stunning ethical event in the history of science, and it has happened with astonishing speed. For four hundred years since Galileo, science has always proceeded as a free and open inquiry into the workings of nature. Scientists have always ignored national boundaries, holding themselves above the transitory concerns of politics and even wars. Scientists have always rebelled against secr.. copyrights innovation paid-government politicians science trademarks Michael Crichton
e3362e9 Those who commit acts of violence are surely responsible for them; they are not dupes or mechanisms of an impersonal social force, but agents with responsibility. On the other hand, these individuals are formed, and we would be making a mistake if we reduced their actions to purely self-generated acts of will or symptoms of individual pathology of 'evil'. Judith Butler
0ceca9a Are we not, ethically speaking, obligated to stop its (violence) further dissemination, to consider our role in instigating it, and to forment and cultivate another sense of a culturally and religiously diverse global political culture? Judith Butler
9708ee8 It is not as if an 'I' exists independently over here and then simply loses a 'you' over there, especially if the attachment to 'you' is part of what composes who 'I' am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who 'am' I, without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost 'you'.. grief-and-loss grieving mourning Judith Butler
bb17509 Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life. Instead, "there is a life that will never have been lived," sustained by no regard, no testimony, and ungrieved when lost. The apprehension of grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of precarious life. Grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of the living being as living, exposed to non-life from the st.. life precariousness war Judith Butler
67bc1b6 We can understand this conclusion to be the necessary result of a heterosexualized and masculine observational point of view that takes lesbian sexuality to be a refusal of sexuality per se only because sexuality is presumed to be heterosexual, and the observer, here constructed as the heterosexual male, is clearly being refused. Judith Butler
61201b4 This is a Personal Poem My self's self is thinking about itself. Trying to sell its self a new self. Don't worry, reader, I'm not trying to fool you with language, I have eyes to do that with. I have forgotten our history, I have forgotten how we met. Reader, are you upset at how fast we're moving? I'm likely with you in your bed, between your hands, somewhere in your mouth before whatever it is you'll say next. Say yes and now and love too.. Alex Dimitrov
d3961fd Not long ago you are in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers. We suffer from the condition of being addressable. Our emotional openness, she adds, is carried by our addressability. Language navigates this. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present. Your alertness, your openness, and your.. Claudia Rankine
2ddf6e0 According to Melanie Klein, we develop moral responses in reaction to questions of survivability. My wager is that Klein is right about that, even as she thwarts her own insight by insisting that it is the ego's survivability that is finally at issue. Why the ego? After all, if my survivability depends on a relation to others, to a "you" or a set of "yous" without whom I cannot exist, then my existence is not mine alone, but is to be found .. boundaries butler dissociation grief klein life loss morality otherness self-preservation seperation survival Judith Butler
672f193 Although some lesbians argue that butches have nothing to do with "being a man," others insist that their butchness is or was only a route to a desired status as a man. These paradoxes have surely proliferated in recent years, offering evidence of a kind of gender trouble that the text itself did not anticipate." Judith Butler
a216cee Where there is a lack of other connections, of meaningful moments, in our lives, music can often fill the gap. Sena Jeter Naslund
156981a Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last Sena Jeter Naslund
ab5bd62 Listening to him, I realized how long it had been since I'd felt like I had the world by the balls, how many quick birthdays had gone by since that first year in Europe when I was so ignorant and so confident that every splinter of luck made me feel like a roaring champion. Hunter S. Thompson
79f260d That gin-soaked little Nazi from the Gazette got pissed off when you didn't doff your hat for the national anthem," Burgin explained. "He kept bitching about you to the guy in charge of the press box, then he got that asshole who works for him all cranked up and they started talking about having you arrested." "Jesus creeping shit," I muttered. "Now I know why I got out of sportswriting." Hunter S. Thompson
a6a9126 It is Autumn, as you know, and things are beginning to die. It is so wonderful to be out in the crisp Fall air, with the leaves turning gold and the grass turning brown and the warmth going out of the sunlight and big hot fires in the fireplace while Buddy rakes the lawn. We see a lot of bombs on TV because we watch it a lot more, now that the days get shorter and shorter, and darkness comes so soon, and all the flowers die from freezing. Hunter S. Thompson