Public Quotes - page 83
These men have replaced mind with platitude, and the dogmas by which they are legitimated are so widely accepted that no counterbalance of mind prevails against them. They have replaced the responsible interpretation of events with the disguise of events by a maze of public relations.
C. Wright Mills
America - a conservative country without any conservative ideology - appears now before the world a naked and arbitrary power, as, in the name of realism, its men of decision enforce their often crackpot definitions upon world reality. The second-rate mind is in command of the ponderously spoken platitude. In the liberal rhetoric, vagueness, and in the conservative mood, irrationality, are raised to principle. Public relations and the official secret, the trivializing campaign and the terrible fact clumsily accomplished, are replacing the reasoned debate of political ideas in the privately incorporated economy, the military ascendancy, and the political vacuum of modern America.
C. Wright Mills
Both of them have seen many young Western men arrive here on business missions and completely lose control of their sphincters and become impediments to any kind of organized activity. Daily hired Wall because, like Daily, he is a stable family man who has his act together...and they seem to be making excellent progress toward their goal, which is to run two really expensive wires across the Malay Peninsula. They tend to be absolutely straight shooters.... Their openness would probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life in the United States today. On the other hand, if I had an unlimited amount of money and woke up tomorrow morning with a burning desire to see a 2,000-hole golf course erected on the surface of Mars, I would probably call men like Daily and Wall, do a handshake deal with them, send them a blank check, and not worry about it.
Neal Stephenson
It's the ultimate Boston transportation. On land...all those slow cars get in the way. There's public transit – the T - but if you're in good shape, it's usually faster to walk. Bicycles aren't bad. But on water, nothing stops you and there isn't anything important in Boston that isn't within two blocks of being wet. The harbor and the city are interlocked like wrestling squid, tentacles of water and land snaking off everywhere, slashed with bridges or canals.
Neal Stephenson
[On book reviewing] I will only turn down a book if I know I won't be able to muster enough interest to read the bloody thing. Or if I realize that I despise the author, and that I'm just going to become hysterical in my dispraise. A couple of times in my life I've disobeyed my own rule, and later regretted it. [...] It's a delicate business. All too often, if one writes a favorable notice, it's seen as a product of the old-boy network, and if one dispraises a book, it's seen as envy. Nobody seems able to accept that I review books as a book reviewer, not as a competing novelist. When I review, I'm being as honest as I can. And I'm saying to the reading public - the minuscule segment of the reading public that reads reviews - that this is my judgment.
John Banville
My friends tell me I must stop saying in public that I ‘hate all my novels'. What I mean is that I am profoundly dissatisfied with everything I have done simply because it is not good enough by my standards. But my standard is perfection, and as we know, perfection is not allowed to such as us. On the other hand, I begin every new book in the complete conviction that this time, this time I shall get it right. Rationally I know this will not be so, but art has its reasons.
John Banville
Money in politics is the cancer underlying all the others. The only way to heal it is thru public funding of federal campaigns plus a constitutional amendment. Til then, health insurance, big Pharma, gun manufacturers, oil & gas, food, chem & defense contractors run this country.
Marianne Williamson
We should have total public funding of federal campaigns. That is the only way to get the dark money out of politics. As president that will be my first piece of legislation to submit because the undue influence of money on our politics is the cancer underlying all other cancers.
Marianne Williamson
A person disconnected from empathy is a sociopath, but making that all about the president is to displace our outrage & responsibility from where it belongs. Our public policies have lacked empathy for decades. He did not create the spiritual void; the spiritual void created him.
Marianne Williamson
Economic system of the US was created & designed before women had a voice in the public realm. We do have a voice now; it's important that we use it not to fit into the system but to change the system. The main engine of our economy should be the care & nurturance of our children.
Marianne Williamson
