995) [W]e now live in an age of what a Microsoft researcher, Linda Stone, called continuous partial attention. I love that phrase. It means that while you are answering your e-mail and talking to your kid, your cell phone rings and you have a conversation. You are now involved in a continuous flow of interactions in which you can only partially concentrate on each.

"If being fulfilled is about committing yourself to someone else, or some experience, that requires a level of sustained attention," said Ms. Stone. And that is what we are losing the skills for, because we are constantly scanning the world for opportunities and we are constantly in fear of missing something better. That has become incredibly spiritually depleting.

Thomas L. Friedman
"Cyber-Serfdom"
New York Times (1/30/2001)
found on a webpage belonging to
Neal Stephenson

996) Talk-show culture has tended to suggest that we can trace all our problems to past abuse of one kind or another, and that once explained, we are absolved. Talk-show culture has been the last refuge of the Enlightenment belief that to understand all is to forgive all.

Ron Rosenbaum
"Staring Into the Heart of the Heart of Darkness"
New York Times Magazine (6/4/95)

997) When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.

John F. Kennedy
Speech at Amherst College (10/26/63) [ODQ]
posted by Todd McMasters [IQM] (6/2/95)

998) We have, I fear, confused power with greatness.

Stewart L. Udall
Commencement address, Dartmouth College (6/13/1965)
posted by Todd McMasters [IQM] (6/2/95)

999) You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everythinghe's no longer in your power - he's free again.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The First Circle (1968) [ODQ]
posted by Todd McMasters [IQM] (6/2/95)

1000) When I finally decided to get out of politics, academia, and the aerospace industry and try my hand at writing, [Robert] Heinlein was enormously helpful. Years later, when I was an established writer, I asked him how I could pay him back.

"You can’t," he said. "You don’t pay back, you pay forward." I never forgot that...

Jerry Pournelle
quoting Robert Heinlein in
Starswarm (1997) [WQ]
posted by Tom Parsons [UAQ] (6/2/95)

1001) The Ethiopians make the gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say they have blue eyes and red hair. If cattle and horses, or lions, had hands and could draw with their feet and produce the work which men do, they would draw the forms of gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make the gods' bodies the same shape as their own.

Xenophanes
Fragment 15 (c. 500 BC) [B16]
posted by William C. Waterhouse [UAQ] (6/2/95)

[Note: cf #532 Montesquieu]

Sources

[B16] - Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th edition (1993)
[IQM] - Internet Quotations mailing list
[ODQ] - Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 4th edition (1992)
[UAQ] - Usenet alt.quotations newsgroup
[WQ] - Wikiquote


Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 604 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

993) WHY WE OBSESS

Because we are scientists, who can't help being appalled at this caricature of the scientific method. Because we are lawyers, who can't help being appalled at this parody of the legal mind. Because we are communicators, who can't help being appalled at what is being communicated here. Because we are teachers, who don't want to have to teach the true significance of what is being acted out here.

Because we cling desperately to the hope that "Equal Justice Under Law" is more than just a motto, but actually means something. And because we fear that, in the end, it may be the only fortress we (and our children) may have against an increasingly venal age. And because we recognize that the "rich man's" defense threatens that notion of equality to its very foundations.

Because we apprehend the wellsprings of emotion that the defense team has tried to tap into here, and put to such bastardized purposes. And because we know that those great themes (race, due process, the individual against the state, etc.) have nothing to do with the facts of this case, but if successfully exploited (in bastardized form) here, and broadly applied (in bastardized form) elsewhere, will ultimately amount to nothing more than a simple license to kill, available to anyone with the chutzpah - and the cash - to claim it. And because that license to kill is deeply, deeply threatening to us.

Because we, like most children of the modern age, have been supersaturated with advertising, commercialism, promotion, and hype, and have become profoundly cynical of it as a result. Because we recognize, to our horror, what Goebbels recognized: that human emotions are infinitely malleable, and capable of being put to any conceivable purpose with the right application of lies, hatreds, ignorance, and fear. And because we see those same propaganda methods being matter-of-factly employed here (in this latest version of the "thrilla in Manilla"), on multiple levels.

Because, like Kurtz, we travel in grim fascination to the heart of darkness, in order to know what true horror really is, lest we lose our innocence by default from our failure to recognize it. And because we know, on some level, that our own innocence somehow depends upon our willingness to look unflinchingly upon the ugliness, ugliness, ugliness of it all.

Because, as Americans have always been, we are profoundly ambivalent about heroism and villainy. Because we desperately need our heroes, and desperately need to see them ripped apart in calumny when they fall, as they surely must; and because we love our villains and love to hate them and hate to love them. And because outlawry is (perversely enough) one of the highest forms of artistic and heroic expression in America, and always has been. (Darth Vader? Billy the Kid? The Wild One? Petrified Forest? Bonnie and Clyde?)

Because we are all refugees of the sixties, and came away from that time with the idyllic vision that racial harmony was achievable; because we don't want to let go of that idyllic vision, and know that the "race card" being played here can only come to a bitter end, no matter what the outcome.

Because we know full well that a brutal, murderous, raging evil stalks the land, and are profoundly mesmerized by the utter banality with which that evil expresses itself in this courtroom. And because we foolishly imagine that our participation in it can somehow ennoble it above the banalities in which it is now mired.

Because this melodrama has everything that the dream machine could possibly hope to marshall, all in one script: sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, violence, glamour, heroes, heroines, and villains, race, who-dunnit, sports, ritual, ignorance, greed, ineptitude, pride, politics, high-tech, history, stubbornness, Ben Matlock, Perry Mason and Grace Van Owen, insanity, farce, gospel, World War II, John Wayne, you name it. We've got it.

Tom Fellows
"Why We Obsess"
posted on the Court TV O.J. Simpson discussion board (5/31/95)

994) Another way to put it is this: The only obstacle to the establishment of the guilt of O.J. Simpson is legal. The whole of the epistemological apparatus of the modern world - psychology, science, logic, reason - establishes that he is guilty. Only the law stands in the way of the application, paradoxically, of justice.

William F. Buckley
"The DNA Is Persuasive: Will The Law Go Along"
op-ed in the New York Post (5/30/95)
posted by Sharon Rose on the Court TV O.J. Simpson discussion board (5/31/95)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 604 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.

I can't decide.

966) Well, for me, that whole business of narrative - I'm always uncomfortable with that. I wish I didn't have to do that. I'd like to be able to write books that don't need verbs. Just large collections of nouns and modifiers would work for me. [Laughs.] The ongoing descriptions of things is where the pleasure is in writing. But there's always the editor in the back of my head saying, Now wait a minute, these people have to be doing something and going somewhere.

William Gibson
science fiction author and screenwriter of the film
Johnny Mnemonic (1995)
interviewed by Rogier van Bakel in
"Remembering Johnny" in Wired (6/95)

967) Punk was the last viable bohemia that we've seen, perhaps the last bohemian movement of all time. I'm afraid that bohemians will eventually come to be seen as a byproduct of the industrial civilization; and if we're in fact at the end of industrial civilization, there may be no more bohemians. That's scary. It's possible that commercialization has become so sophisticated that it's no longer possible to do the bohemian thing. [...] Look what they did to those poor kids in Seattle! It took our culture literally three weeks to go from a bunch of kids playing in a basement club to the thing that's on the Paris runways. At least, with punk, it took a year and a half. And I'm sad to see the phenomenon disappear. I think bohemians are the subconscious of industrial society. Bohemians are like industrial society, dreaming.

William Gibson
science fiction author and screenwriter of the film
Johnny Mnemonic (1995)
interviewed by Rogier van Bakel in
"Remembering Johnny" in Wired (6/95)

968) Although he sympathized with the fanaticism of his colleagues [on the Xanadu project], [programmer Rob] Jellinghaus also began to question whether a hypertext revolution required the perfect preservation of all knowledge. He saw the beauty of the Xanadu dream - "How do you codify all the information in the world in a way that is infinitely scalable?" - but he suspected that human society might not benefit from a perfect technological memory. Thinking is based on selection and weeding out; remembering everything is strangely similar to forgetting everything. "Maybe most things people do shouldn't be remembered," Jellinghaus says. "Maybe forgetting is good."

Gary Wolf
"The Curse of Xanadu" in Wired (6/95)

969) The performer's copyright performance is vested in this performer. It is not given nor assigned to any other party who might claim this as a necessity to protect the performer's interests, collect their royalties, and defend their copyright at law throughout the world.

(A few words to the young musician: if a manager looks you in the eye and claims this necessity, that you might assign to them your copyright for your own best interests, know well that your manager is lying to you.)

The phonographic copyright in these performances is operated by Discipline (GM) [Global Mobile] Records on behalf of the artist. Disc. Glob. Mob. accepts no reason for artists to give away such copyright interests in their work by virtue of a "common practice" which is out of tune with the time, was always questionable and is now indefensible.

The copyrights of the composer's improvised compositions rest with the composer, who recognizes no good reason to assign them to the publisher as an inevitable, necessary, useful or helpful part of the business of collecting publishing royalties.

Crimson Music is currently administered by FujiPacific in Japan, Golden Pony in Hong Kong, and BMG for the rest of the world.

The right of Robert Fripp to be identified as the owner of this and these works is asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act (1988) and in pointed disregard of efforts within the music industry to limit and restrict the moral rights of those who bring music into the world. The formal view of Crimson Music and Discipline GM is that (widespread) business practices which seek to deprive the creative element of its authority are short-sighted.

Let us acknowledge, experience shows that some men will lie for money.

Robert Fripp
liner notes for 1999 (CD recording, 1995)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 610 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.