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Chris Lavergne

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

“I must explore and experiment. I am never satisfied with my work. I resent the limitations of my own imagination.”
— Walt Disney, How to Be Like Walt: Capturing the Disney Magic Every Day of Your Life
Tagged: Limits, Work Strategies
“Think beyond your lifetime, if you want to do something truly great. Make a fifty-year master plan. A fifty-year master plan will change how you look at the opportunities in the present.”
— Walt Disney, How to Be Like Walt: Capturing the Disney Magic Every Day of Your Life
Tagged: Work Strategies, Aphorisms, Long-Term Thinking
“To follow the daily or hourly news cycle is the media equivalent of day-trading: it's frenzied, pointless and usually unprofitable. I'd much rather read an item which just showed me the photos or documents. And if you're going to write some text, take a position or explain something to me. Give me opinion or reference; just don't pretend you're providing news. That's not news.”
— Nick Denton, thewire.com
Tagged: Commerical Writing Strageties, Media, Opinions
“If you want to succeed you've got to be okay to just lose control.”
— Alexis Ohanian, Ted.com
Tagged: Chaos, Control, Media, Web Publishing, Aphorisms
“When you have a platform as powerful as what we've invented (a.k.a. the Internet), it is a crying shame when it's used for cat videos.”
— Patrick Chung, allthingsd.com
Tagged: Averageness, Elitism, Upworthy, Cultural Elitism vs. Democratic Consumerism
“Writing for the press cannot be recommended as a permanent resource to anyone qualified to accomplish anything in the higher departments of literature or thought: not only on account of the uncertainty of this means of livelihood, especially if the writer has a conscience, and will not consent to serve any opinions except his own; but also because the writings by which one can live are not the writings which themselves live, and are never those in which the writer does his best.”
— John Stuart Mill, The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill
Tagged: Writing, Making A Living As A Writer
“Opinion-sharing sessions are like junk food: they fill you up with starch and leave you feeling both sated and hungry. A sustained inquiry into the truth of a matter is an almost athletic experience; it may exhaust you, but it also improves you.”
— Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time
Tagged: Discussion, Opinion
“In the fall of 2004, my freshman students and I analyzed a speech of John Kerry's and found it confused, contradictory, inchoate, and weak. Six weeks later I went out and voted for John Kerry. What I was doing in class was subjecting Kerry's arguments to an academic interrogation. Do they hang together? Are they coherent? Do they respond to the issues? Are they likely to be persuasive? He flunked. But when I stepped into the ballot box, I was asking another set of questions: Does Kerry represent or speak for interests close to mine? Whom would he bring into his administration? What are likely to be his foreign policy initiatives? How does he stand on the environment? The answers I gave to the first set of academic questions had no relationship whatsoever to the answers I gave to the second set of political questions. Whether it is a person or a policy, it makes perfect sense to approve it in one venue and disapprove it in another, and vice versa. You could decide that despite the lack of skill with which a policy was defended (an academic conclusion), it was nevertheless the right policy for the country (a political decision). In the classroom, you can probe the policy's history; you can explore its philosophical lineage; you can examine its implications and likely consequences, but you can't urge it on your students. Everything depends on keeping these two judgments, and the activities that generate them, separate.”
— Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time
Tagged: Complexity, Infinte Registers, Liberal Arts, Openness
“We are so fragile that without architecture and clothing, our bodies could not survive. Maybe we are like hermit crabs that are always looking for their shells. Maybe there is a human instinct to be always searching for an extension of one's body.”
— Andrea Zittel, allanmccollum.net
Tagged: Architecture, Technology
“There are so many rules in our culture. Anything from how you build a space to what you can inject into your body is dictated by rules. And the only way that I think you can be free from external rules is to create your own personal set of rules that are even more rigid, but because they are your own, you feel like you're completely free. So rules are actually a way of liberating oneself, I've also been thinking too about the creation of rules. The progression of art until the seventies was all about breaking boundaries or rules, but creating rules is almost more difficult and more creative, because it is a more complex level of reasoning, instead of blindly trying to break them down.”
— Andrea Zittel, Yorku.ca
Tagged: Govereance, Rules, Boundary Breaks