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Chris Lavergne

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

“Philosophers have merely interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”
— Karl Marx , marxists.org
Tagged: Theory and Practice
“Beauty! I can't bear the thought that man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom. What's still more awful is that man with the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not renounce the ideal of the Madonna, and his heart may be on fire with the ideal, genuinely on fire, just as in his days of youth and innocence.”
— Dmitri Karamazov, The Brothers Karamazov
Tagged: Theory and Practice
“The technical structure of the media virtually compels adherence to conventional thoughts; nothing else can be expressed between two commercials, or in seven hundred words, without the appearance of absurdity that is difficult to avoid when one is challenging familiar doctrine with no opportunity to develop facts or argument.”
— Edward Herman, Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
Tagged: Media, Revolution
“Book publishers needed only to listen to Jeff Bezos himself to have their fears stoked. Amazon’s founder repeatedly suggested he had little reverence for the old 'gatekeepers' of the media, whose business models were forged during the analogue age and whose function it was to review content and then subjectively decide what the public got to consume. This was to be a new age of creative surplus, where it was easy for anyone to create something, find an audience, and allow the market to determine the proper economic reward. ‘Even well meaning gatekeepers slow innovation,’ Bezos wrote in his 2011 letter to shareholders. ‘When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried, because there’s no expert gatekeeper ready to say that will never work! And guess what — many of those improbable ideas do work, and society is the beneficiary of that diversity.”
— Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
Tagged: Amazo, Book Publishing
“The U.S. media do not function in the manner of the propaganda system of a totalitarian state. Rather, they permit—indeed, encourage—spirited debate, criticism, and dissent, as long as these remain faithfully within the system of presuppositions and principles that constitute an elite consensus, a system so powerful as to be internalized largely without awareness.”
— Herman Edward, Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
Tagged: Media, Quiet Power, U.S Media
“When I think of the past twenty-five years within myself I am astonished at their emptiness. I can scarcely say that I have lived.”
— Yukio Mishima, Mishima: A Biography
Tagged: LifeandDeath, Living, Suicide
“Media is saying something in the way it finds its stories, churns them out, swallows them again, redigests them, and spits them out once again. This is more than a simple cultural bulimia. This is a complex but, on some level, effective form of mass catharsis and self-observation that our society employs to monitor and then modify itself.”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture
Tagged: Culture, Media
“The question, 'Is it real?' is less important than, 'Is it newsworthy?”'”
— Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America
Tagged: Media, Simulacrum
“I don't like to tell people what I think is good or bad about the social and psychic changes caused by new media, but if you insist on pinning me down about my own subjective reactions as I observe the reprimitivization of our culture, I would have to say that I view such upheavals with total personal dislike and dissatisfaction. I do see the prospect of a rich and creative retribalized society — free of the fragmentation and alienation of the mechanical age — emerging from this traumatic period of culture clash; but I have nothing but distaste for the process of change. As a man molded within the literate Western tradition, I do not personally cheer the dissolution of that tradition through the electric involvement of all the senses: I don't enjoy the destruction of neighborhoods by high-rises or revel in the pain of identity quest.”
— Marshall McLuhan, ucdavis.edu
Tagged: Tradition
“I'm making explorations. I don't know where they're going to take me… My writings constitute the process rather than the completed product of discovery; my purpose is to employ facts as tentative probes, as means of insight, of pattern recognition, rather than to use them in the traditional and sterile sense of classified data, categories, containers… As an investigator, I have no fixed point of view, no commitment to any theory — my own or anyone else's. As a matter of fact, I'm completely ready to junk any statement I've ever made about any subject if events don't bear me out, or if I discover it isn't contributing to an understanding of the problem. I just sit down and start to work. I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I try out different sequences — until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open.”
— Marshall McLuhan, ucdavis.edu
Tagged: Pattern Recognition, Work Strategies