Attention Quotes - page 39
In the city of Denver, while I was vice-president, a big husky policeman kept following me around until I asked him what he was doing. He said he was guarding my person. I said: "Your labor is in vain. Nobody was ever crazy enough to shoot at a vice-president. If you will go away and find somebody to shoot at me, I'll go down in history as the first vice-president who ever attracted enough attention even to have a crank shoot at him."
Thomas R. Marshall
There is another form of selection best illustrated by the automatic telephone exchange. You dial a number and the machine selects and connects just one of a million possible stations. It does not run over them all. It pays attention only to a class given by a first digit, and so on; and thus proceeds rapidly and almost unerringly to the selected station.
Vannevar Bush
A culture where a) little girls are gang raped b) raped little girls are murdered in order to protect the community's honour is dark barbarism of such an extent that is difficult for a Western person to understand. Further cognitive dissonance is caused for the tolerantly aware by maintaining their faith in the wonderfulness of the Islamic culture and, in general, the equality of all cultures. That's why discussion of the actual subject is avoided like the plague, and attention is moved to something that has nothing at all to do with the subject, for example, to the under-representation of women in stock-listed companies, or domestic violence.
Jussi Halla-aho
You nobles, you sons of my leading men, soft and dandified, trusting in your birth and your wealth, paying no attention to my command and your advancement, you neglected the pursuit of learning and indulged yourselves in the sport of pleasure and idleness and foolish pastimes. By the King of the heavens I think nothing of your nobility and your beauty. Others can admire you. Know this without any doubt; unless you rapidly make up for your idleness by eager effort, you will never receive any benefit from Charlemagne.
Charlemagne
Up to now sculptors have preferred the mass and neglected or paid little attention to such an important component of mass as space.... we consider it as an absolute sculptural element. I do not hesitate to affirm that the perception of space is a primary natural sense which belongs to the basic senses of our psychology.
Naum Gabo
As it turns out, Mailer comes close to solving the mystery [of Lee Harvey Oswald], but he never establishes the tragedy. Dreiser's tale was tragic and American because it happened every day. Oswald made only one notch in the calendar. It was meaningless; he just renamed an airport, violently.
...Oswald's life was not a cry of pain so much as a squawk for attention. He achieved geopolitical significance by the shortest possible route. He was not an example of post-modern absurdity but one of its messiahs: an inspiration to the glazed loner. He killed Kennedy not to impress Jodie Foster. He killed Kennedy to impress Clio - the muse of history.
Martin Amis
Exploitative is the key word here. It suggests that while you are free to be as sexually miserable as you like, the moment you exchange hard cash for a copy of Playboy, you are in the pornography perpetuation business, and your misery becomes political.
The truth is that pornography is just a sad affair all around. It is there because men in their hundreds of millions want it to be there. Killing pornography is like killing the messenger. The extent to which Larkin was "dependent" on pornography should be a measure our pity, or even our sympathy. But Motion hears the beep of his political pager, and he stands to attention.
Martin Amis
Glenn Beck: And it goes nowhere if you go onto 'compassion, compassion, compassion, compassion' or well, 'They should've put it out, what is the fire department for?' No, what is the 75 dollars for. To keep the firemen available, to keep the firetrucks running, to pay for the fire department to have people employed to put the fire out. If you don't pay your 75 dollars then that hurts the fire department. They can't use those resources, and you would be sponging off your neighbor's 75 dollars if they put out your neighbor's house and you didn't pay for it - I mean, if your neighbor didn't pay for it, you did, and they put out their house - your neighbor is sponging off of your 75 dollars.
Pat Gray: And as soon as they put out the fire of somebody who didn't pay the 75 bucks,
(in unison) no one
Pat Gray: will pay the 75 dollars.
Glenn Beck: Why would you pay the 75 dollars, you don't have to, they're gonna put it out anyway? Nobody pays attention.
Glenn Beck
Statistical methods had taken fire in America around 1942, following a series of ten-day intensive courses for engineers, initiated by Stanford University on a suggestion from this author. The war department also gave courses at factories of suppliers. Brilliant applications attracted much attention, but the flare of statistical methods by themselves, in an atmosphere in which management did not know their responsibilities, burned, sputtered, fizzled and died out.
W. Edwards Deming
