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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 would have scratched until I'd stripped away all of her skin, peeled off layers of dermis and epidermis and sebaceous glands, picked away at the backbone and spine, I would have played around with the vertebrae had not Nina said, 'Softer, you're hurting me.'”
— Walter Jaffe, A Handbook for Drowning: Stories
Tagged: Core, Love, Going Closer
“The Corrections, say: I couldn't read that book if my life depended on it. It might be a 'good' novel or it might be a 'bad' novel, but something has happened to my imagination, which can no longer yield to the earnest embrace of novelistic form. ”
— David Shields, Reality Hunger
Tagged: Jonathan Franzen, Novels
“There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day. Some of the hardest work I’ve ever done has been to put such insights down on tape or in writing. The problem is that ten even more interesting ideas or images have to be lost in the effort of recording one. It is easy to understand why someone might think it’s a waste of effort going to all that trouble to set the thought down, a kind of intrusion of the Protestant Ethic. But since I live almost all my life down I’ve made the effort - successfully, I think. Incidentally, I find that reasonably good insights can be remembered the next day, but only if some effort has been made to set them down another way. If I write the insight down or tell it to someone, then I can remember it with no assistance the following morning; but if I merely say to myself that I must make an effort to remember, I never do.”
— Carl Sagan, marijuana-uses.com
Tagged: Drugs, Marijuana, Preservation
“Foreign policy experts often refer to the system of institutions, alliances, and norms built up after World War II as “architecture.” We still needed a rules-based global order that could manage interactions between states, protect fundamental freedoms, and mobilize common action. But it would have to be more flexible and inclusive than before. I came to liken the old architecture to the Parthenon in Greece, with clean lines and clear rules. The pillars holding it up— a handful of big institutions, alliances, and treaties— were remarkably sturdy. But time takes its toll, even on the greatest of edifices, and now we needed a new architecture for a new world, more in the spirit of Frank Gehry than formal Greek classicism. Where once a few strong columns could hold up the weight of the world, now a dynamic mix of materials, shapes, and structures was needed.”
— Hillary Clinton, Hard Choices
Tagged: Architecture, Baroque, Flexibility, Politcs
“That's why now when I look at Obama talking about jobs, let's create jobs for everyone. It's like who wants a fucking job?”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Livestream.com
Tagged: Capitalism, Job, Money
“If we get really, really good at fine-tuning our shamanic alchemy and we can play the brain exactly as we want; cool, but... there is something that the mushrooms tell you that a synthetic, perfectly modulated chemical won't. The mushrooms are going tell you some stuff you may not want to really hear when you're high. Like, hey you're fucking up the planet here. Hey you're cheating on your girlfriend there. Why haven't you talked to me in the last three years? ... The sacred plants have agendas. ”
— Douglas Rushkoff, Livestream.com
Tagged: Chemicals, Drugs
“Throughout history, intellectual life has been marked by the fact that only a small number of people have done the serious thinking for everybody else. ”
— John Brockman, edge.org
Tagged: Against Mediocrity, History
“In AD 1500, Europe was turning out about 200,000 volumes per year, while China had been producing about 800,000 a year for centuries: a million books, say 500 tons of paper. At the turn of the millennium, the world produced some ten billion books a year – about 50 million tons of paper, for books alone. Now add newspapers – 8,391 dailies as I write, and rising – and weekly and monthly magazines – 73,000 titles. In all, for communicating, the world produces about 130 million tons of paper a year – 50 pounds per person. In 500 years, when the world’s population has risen 13-fold, the literate population has risen 1,000-fold, and reading materials over 250,000 times, almost all the increase in this century. Per person, we consume almost 20,000 times as much as reading material as our medieval ancestors....This is a change so significant in human society that we should really declare ourselves to be a new sub-species: Homo sapiens literariensis. ”
— John Mann, Alpha Beta: How 26 Letters Shaped the Western World
Tagged: History Of Communication
“Homo sapiens has been in existence for between 30,000 and 50,000 years. The earliest script dates from only 6000 years ago.”
— Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy
Tagged: History Of Communication, History Of Writing, When Did Writing Emerge?, Emergence of Writing In History
“ The body is a convenient boundary for the definition of the self. ”
— Caleb Crain, Steamthing.com
Tagged: Identity, Self Boundaries