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Chris Lavergne

4,407 Quotes
President of Thought.is
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4,407 quotes curated by Chris Lavergne:

“Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord. You firemen provide a circus now and then at which buildings are set off and crowds gather for the pretty blaze, but it's a small sideshow indeed, and hardly necessary to keep things in line. So few want to be rebels anymore. And out of those few, most, like myself, scare easily. Can you dance faster than the White Clown, shout louder than 'Mr. Gimmick' and the parlor 'families'? If you can, you'll win your way, Montag. In any event, you're a fool. People are having fun.'”
— Professor Faber, Fahrenheit 451
Tagged: Media Manipulation, Rebellion
“Let you alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”
— Guy Montag, Fahrenheit 451
“My journeys since have often repeated this message: human consciousness, from this perspective, is just a way for plants to move plant and bacterial genes around, but we have apparently forgotten this and take ourselves to be the center of planetary telos.”
— Richard M. Doyle, Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere
Tagged: Consciousness, Psychedelics
“Camcorders and VCRs gave people the ability to make their own media, and demystified the process through which the media they watched was created. Stars lost some of their allure, commercials lost their impact, and newscasters lost their authority.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc
Tagged: Demystification, History Of Communication
“But real people don't engage with the world via big ideas. We engage through activities that are scaled to real life. Big ideas—at least the kind we recognize as big ideas—are for big entities: corporations, countries, continents. If we're going to begin operating on a human scale at least some of the time, then we must abandon the one-size-fits-all way of doing things. That's just another artifact of the Industrial Age and its bias toward highly mechanized, repeatable manufacturing.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Life Inc
Tagged: Change the World, Human Scale, Scale, Small is Big
“A major national newspaper could have the highest-paid technology writer in the world. But what happens to that writer when it turns out that the columns read by more, and recommended by most, are written by eighteen-year-old bloggers? The New York Times used to have the power to say who was the most significant . A much more democratic force does that now.”
— Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
Tagged: Cultural Gatekeepers, Mass Control, Cultura, Cultural Elitism vs. Democratic Consumerism
“For a perspectival realist, the strongest claims a scientist can legitimately make are of a qualified, conditional form: 'According to this highly confirmed theory (or reliable instrument), the world seems to be roughly such and such.' There is no way legitimately to take the further objectivist step and declare unconditionally: 'This theory (or instrument) provides us with a complete and literally correct picture of the world itself.'”
— Ronald N. Giere, Scientific Perspectivism
Tagged: Epistemology, Perspectivism, Science, Importance of Multiple Database Entries
“Instead of trying to get everyone to conform to a simple set of commands, a great manager, organizer, or leader strives instead to create an environment or provide the tools through which people naturally cooperate.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Get Back in the Box
Tagged: Management
“Everyone's perspective is different; everyone's perspective matters.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Get Back in the Box
Tagged: Perspectivism, Thought Catalog, Let Everyone Be Heard, All People Have Value
“Your business must be structured so that the more they know, the better you look, and the better you really are.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Get Back in the Box
Tagged: Business, Transparency