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Chris Lavergne

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

“It is manifestly clear that mainstream media outlets will increasingly find themselves a step behind in the reporting of news worldwide. These organizations simply cannot move quickly enough in a connected age, no matter how talented their reporters and stringers are, and how many sources they have. Instead, the world’s breaking news will continually come from platforms like Twitter: open networks that facilitate information-sharing instantly, widely and in accessible packages. If everyone in the world has a data-enabled phone or access to one— a not-so-distant reality— then the ability to 'break news' will be left to luck and chance, as one unwitting civilian in Abbottabad, Pakistan, discovered after he unknowingly live-tweeted the covert raid that killed Osama bin Laden. ”
— Eric Schmidt, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business
Tagged: Media, Twitter
“The individual doesn’t matter. You, Dad, in the large scheme of things, don’t matter. I, Dad, don’t matter. We’re vectors on the grids of cellular life. We carry 10 to 12 genes with mutations that are potentially lethal. These mutations are passed on to our children—you to me, me to Natalie. Aging followed by death is the price we pay for the immortality of our genes. You find this information soul-killing; I find it thrilling, liberating. Life, in my view, is simple, tragic, and eerily beautiful.”
— David Shields, The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead
Tagged: Death
“If we discover that not everything can be cloned, simulated, programmed, genetically and neurologically managed, then whatever survives could truly be called 'human': some inalienable and indestructible human quality could finally be identified. Of course, there is always the risk, in this experimental adventure, that nothing will pass the test—that the human will be permanently eradicated.”
— Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion
Tagged: Progress, Science
“Everyone knows that the light of the stars needs a very long time to reach us; sometimes we perceive it after the star itself has disappeared. This gap between the star as a virtual source and its perception by us, this non-simultaneity, is an inescapable part of the illusion of the world, the absence at the heart of the world that constitutes the illusion. And again, this distortion is beneficial. For the simultaneous perception of the light of all the stars would be equivalent to an absolute daylight, and this would be unbearable for us. All the energy of life proceeds from this vital alternation of day and night, and more generally, from this vital mediation. Illusion is the general rule of the universe; reality is but an exception.”
— Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion
Tagged: Illusion, Reality, The Exception, Don’t Let It All Through
“If in the evolution of consciousness we include the growth of consciousness out of the unconscious, it is evidently impossible completely, or even significantly, to plan what the next stage of consciousness will be. Consciously developed plans may affect the next stage of consciousness but they themselves will not define it. What will define the new stages will be their relationship not simply to our conscious planning but, more basically, their relationship to the unconscious organization underlying our conscious planning. We had better do our conscious planning humbly, paying attention not only to what we think we can make ourselves to be but to what we really are. Out of what we are, and our relationship to what we are, comes the future. Discovering what we are and acknowledging what we are has never been easy for human beings. It is always an ongoing project.”
— Walter Ong, Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness
Tagged: Consciousness, Epistemology, Evolution, Unreason
“Critical consciousness, thought in general, perhaps, always comes after the fact, a day too late, like Kafka’s Messiah—or it comes at the close of the day, like Hegel’s owl. It is nothing but retrospective prophecy, or some platonic shadow dancing on the wall of events, in the cavern of history. 'If I speak of time,' Queneau wrote, 'it is because we are already out of time.' History doesn’t offer a second seating (L’histoire ne repasse pas les plats)—only critique does.”
— Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion
Tagged: Consciousness, Theory
“When the first market towns emerged in Italy, they didn’t magically create some higher-level group consciousness. They simply widened the pool of minds that could come up with and share good ideas. This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It’s not that the network itself is smart; it’s that the individuals get smarter because they’re connected to the network.”
— Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
Tagged: Network, Relationalism
“The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.”
— Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
Tagged: Openness
“Indeed, when liberal arts education is doing its job properly, it is just like poetry because, like poetry, it makes no claims to efficacy beyond the confines of its performance. A good liberal arts course is not good because it tells you what to do when you next step into the ballot box or negotiate a contract. A good liberal arts course is good because it introduces you to questions you did not know how to ask and provides you with the skills necessary to answer them, at least provisionally. And what do you do with the answers you arrive at? What do you do with the habits of thought that have become yours after four or more years of discussing the mind/body problem, or the structure of DNA, or Firmat’s theorem, or the causes of World War I? Beats me! As far as I can tell those habits of thought and the liberal arts education that provides them don’t enable you to do anything, and, even worse, neither do they prevent you from doing anything. The view I am offering of higher education is properly called deflationary; it takes the air out of some inflated balloons. It denies to teaching the moral and philosophical pretensions that lead practitioners to envision themselves as agents of change or as the designers of a “transformative experience,” a phrase I intensely dislike. I acknowledge a sense in which education can be transformative. A good course may transform a student who knew little about the material in the beginning into a student who knows something about it at the end. That’s about all the transformation you should or could count on. Although the debates about what goes on in our colleges and universities are often conducted as if large moral, philosophical, and even theological matters are at stake, what is really at stake, more often than not, is a matter of administrative judgment with respect to professional behavior and job performance. Teaching is a job, and what it requires is not a superior sensibility or a purity of heart and intention—excellent teachers can be absolutely terrible human beings, and exemplary human beings can be terrible teachers—but mastery of a craft. Teachers who prefer grandiose claims and ambitions to that craft are the ones who diminish it and render it unworthy.”
— Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time
Tagged: Education, Liberal Arts
“Her words were ended. But Aeneas, warned by Jove, held still his eyes; he struggled, pressed care back within his breast. With halting words he answers her at last: “I never shall deny what you deserve, the kindnesses that you could tell; I never shall regret remembering Elissa for as long as I remember my own self, as long as breath is king over these limbs. I’ll speak brief words that fit the case. I never hoped to hide—do not imagine that—my flight; I am not furtive. I have never held the wedding torches as a husband; I have never entered into such agreements. If fate had granted me to guide my life   460 by my own auspices and to unravel my troubles with unhampered will, then I should cherish first the town of Troy, the sweet remains of my own people and the tall rooftops of Priam would remain, my hand would plant again a second Pergamus for my defeated men. But now Grynean Apollo’s oracles would have me seize great Italy, the Lycian prophecies tell me of Italy: there is my love,  there is my homeland.”
— Virgil, The Aeneid
Tagged: Duty, Love