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“Disdaining the wasteful, elitist space where bands hankered after record-company expense accounts that would pay for hookers and villas in the South of France, Silicon Valley presented itself as the tribune of average-Joe air guitarists who never got their shot at the American Dream. It was easy to stoke resentment against the perks enjoyed by the pros while spreading the easy gospel of democratic cultural production. Every boy and girl could be Virginia Woolf and Keith Richards and David Foster Wallace depending on what day of the week it was, thanks to fun new digital software that ushered in a freshly branded universe of frictionless self-gratification in which all movies and books and music would be free, because they should be free, because they were made to be free, because paying for stuff is an unconscionable rip-off in a world where stuff was meant to be free, and who else does art belong to if not to the people, right? And so, the tech moguls could pose as liberators and revolutionaries who would cut out the middlemen while sucking up the market cap of the music business, the newspaper business, and other sadly benighted industries. The paradoxical result of these acts of creative destruction has been the elevation of a handful of recording artists like Beyoncé, Kanye West, Katy Perry, and Justin Bieber to previously unseen levels of wealth and fame, in the same moment that the product on which their fame is, or was, based—namely, music—has been rendered worthless.”
— David Samuels, n+1
Tagged: Celeberity, celebrity, Fandom, Music
“So God has never been made. He has always been. Then slowly, with the increase of consciousness, when people discovered that they could make different ideas about the deity, they came to the conclusion that it was nothing but an idea, and they quite forgot the real phenomenon that is behind all the ideas. You see, they became so identical with the products of their own consciousness that they thought they had created him. But such abuse brings about its own revenge. The more people created ideas about God, the more they depleted and devitalized nature. And then it looked as if that primordial fact of the world had only taken place in imagination. Of course, be that process we created consciousness, but we have built up a thick wall between ourselves and primordial facts, between ourselves and the divine presence. We are so far away that nobody knows what one is talking about when one speaks of that divine presence, and if anybody discovers it suddenly, he thinks it is most amazing; yet it is the most simple fact. But we are no longer simple enough on account of that thick wall of ideas; we have so many preconceived ideas about what the divine presence ought to be, that we have deprived ourselves of the faculty of seeing it. Yet the primordial facts are still in the world; they happen all the time, only we have given them so many names that we don't see the wood any longer on account of the trees”
— Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939
Tagged: Consciousness, Theology
“Quartz is a business-news site owned by Atlantic Media and edited by Kevin Delaney, a former managing editor at The Wall Street Journal. It operates a mobile optimized website, rather than native apps, and drives audience growth through daily email newsletters.”
— The New York Times, The New York Times Innovation Report
Tagged: Newsletters, Quartz, The New York Times Innovation Report
“It even crossed his mind, as he stood idly waiting, his hand resting on the wallpaper books, that maybe he ought to get a rifle. Why not? His father had taken him hunting as a boy; the memory rose in his mind with wonderful vividness— creeks, trees, sunlight, squirrels scampering along high, leafy branches, the sky bright blue, like the ceiling at his parents' church. He'd never been hunting since. Ellen had hated guns. Her irrational fear of them had gotten under his skin, her weird conviction— only now did he fully realize how weird it was— that Mickelsson was a man too dark-spirited and moody to be safe with a rifle in the house. He shook his head. Odd what a man could take for reasonable and natural, if the poison was slipped in subtly enough, over a long enough period of time.”
— John Gardner, Mickelsson's Ghosts
Tagged: Relationships, Slowly Dying
“The world of business really separates into two groups. Entrepreneurs who are disrupting the status quo are attackers. Large organizations are defenders.”
— Steve Case, The New York Times Innovation Report
Tagged: Business, Disruption, The New York Times Innovation Report
“Culturally, I think we have operated as if we had the formula figured out, and it was all about optimizing, in its various constituent parts, the formula. Now it is about discovering the new formula.”
— Satya Nadella, The New York Times Innovation Report
Tagged: Disruption, Insights, The New York Times Innovation Report
“Hallmarks of disruptive innovators: introduced by an 'outsider,' / less expensive than existing products/ targeting underserved or new markets/ initially inferior to existing products/ advanced by an enabling technology.”
— The New York Times, The New York Times Innovation Report
Tagged: Disruption, Facts, Technology, The future, The New York Times Innovation Report
“If you are a dedicated reader in Brooklyn fond of sliding bills across smooth countertops in exchange for tantalizing tomes in independent bookstores, you have probably encountered the Middling Millennials. They are largely white women who are almost totally in the dark about their privilege, many bolstering a blinkered neoliberal feminism that demands a rectifying army of Mikki Kendalls and Djuna Barneses. They often confuse the act of literary engagement with coquettish pom-pom flogging. They are somewhere between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-three and are often found on Tumblr interspersing 'fun facts' and JPEGs with quotes that, despite the lofty intent, are more self-help than literary. These relentlessly unchallenging digital shrines are frequently adorned with a bean-boosting 'THIS' appended to the head of a calcified, well-tread, self-righteous sentiment that is reblogged — that is, if the MMs are not too busy Gchatting with others about the latest literary gossip. Some of the more pathetic specimens lean closer to forty and are often enlisted to interview esteemed authors before a small crowd under the mistaken impression that the interviewer is the center of attention. This group is not to be confused with the fine young minds and respectable hustlers who run and contribute to The New Inquiry, Open Letters Monthly, Jacobin, Hazlitt, Full Stop, HTML Giant, The American Reader, and Triple Canopy (to name but a few), who have all proven to be promising and proficient readers of a wide range open to lively and respectful challenge. To be perfectly pellucid, we are identifying disproportionate tadpoles who respond to any form of disagreement with a knee-jerk 'Dead to me!' block on social media and return to their cheery consumerist chatter, blissfully unaware of greater global problems.”
— Edward Champion, Emily Gould, Literary Narcissism, and the Middling Millennials
Tagged: and the Middling Millennials, Emily Gould, Literary Narcissism, Middling Millenials, Tumblr IRL
“The time lags imposed by stocks allow room to maneuver, to experiment, and to revise policies that aren't working. ”
— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Tagged: Systems, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
“A stock takes time to change, because flow takes time to flow. ”
— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Tagged: Systems, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Time
“The elements, the parts of systems we are most likely to notice, are often (not always) least important in defining the unique characteristics of the system—unless changing an element also results in changing relationships or purpose.”
— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Tagged: Systems, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
“A system generally goes on being itself, changing only slowly if at all, even with complete substitutions of its elements—as long as its interconnections and purposes remain intact. ”
— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Tagged: Systems, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
“Changing [a system's] elements usually has the least effect on the system.”
— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Tagged: Systems, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
“...one of the most frustrating aspects of systems is that the purposes of subunits may add up to an overall behavior that no one wants.”
— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Tagged: Systems, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Truths
“If a frog turns right and catches a fly, and then turns left and catches a fly, and then turns around backward and catches a fly, the purpose of the frog has to do not with turning left or right or backward but with catching flies. If a government proclaims its interest in protecting the environment by allocates little money or effort toward that goal, environmental protection is not, in fact, the government's purpose. Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals. ”
— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Tagged: Facts, Insights, Rhetoric, Systems, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Truths
“Many interconnections in systems operate through the flow of information. ”
— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Tagged: Systems, Systems theory, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
“Do the parts together produce an effect that is different from the effect of each part on its own?”
— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Tagged: Good questions, Systems
“You think that because you understand 'one' that you must therefore understand 'two' because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand 'and.'”
— Sufi teaching story, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Tagged: Insights, Systems, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Wow
“A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something.”
— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Tagged: Systems, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
“You can be doing something that has always worked and suddenly discover, to your great disappointment, that your action no longer works.”
— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Tagged: Systems, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
“The system, to a large extent, causes it's own behavior. An outside event may unleash that behavior, but the same outside event applied to a different system is likely to produce a different result. ”
— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Tagged: Self-similarity, Systems, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
“A system is a set of things—people, cells, molecules, or whatever—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time. The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered, or driven by outside forces. But the system's response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world. ”
— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
Tagged: Systems, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
“Depth over breadth, man. I believe in diving deeply into a small pool of information. ”
— Josh Waitzkin, The Fighter's Mind: Inside the Mental Game
Tagged: Notes to self, The Fighter's Mind, Work
“Basically, his opponent made a beginner's blunder; he gave Josh a piece on an error. The error that was so weirdly obvious, so big, that it was almost impossible for Josh to see. When you read the game now, it's simply mystifying. They were both embroiled in computations of this deep position, getting deeper and deeper, and missing the obvious, but feeding on each other. ”
— Sam Sheridan, The Fighter's Mind: Inside the Mental Game
Tagged: Heh, Perception, The Fighter's Mind
“The way to win a game like that involves maintaining and increasing the tension. The person who makes the first break, who releases the tension, it's going to go against them, partly because they've broken the tension and now the other guy has the first move to exploit the new play dynamic.”
— Josh Waitzkin, The Fighter's Mind: Inside the Mental Game
Tagged: Facts, strategy, The Fighter's Mind
“If I have a slightly better position, and I'm improving my position, then all the tactics are hovering like potential energy. ”
— Josh Waitzkin, The Fighter's Mind: Inside the Mental Game
Tagged: Self-improvement, strategy, The Figher's Mind
“War is a continuation of policy by other means. ”
— Carl von Clausewitz, On War
Tagged: Facts, Insights, The Figher's Mind, War
“Greg has an interesting way, unique to New Mexico, of recharging his batteries. He grew up with a strong sense of local history, and one of his favorite hobbies is 'ghost towning,' where you get maps and track down old ghost towns in the New Mexican wilderness.

'It's incredible, these abandoned towns. Such hard work went into it and now nature is reclaiming everything. You come over a ridge and find a town that has been essentially unchanged for 130 years. It's a window into history. I get a sense of my own mortality. You find shoes, and books—they just up and left everything.'”
— Sam Sheridan, The Fighter's Mind: Inside the Mental Game
Tagged: Ideas, Notes to self, The Figher's Mind
“[Amazing athletes] are at peace with failure or success; as [Peter] Schjeldahl wrote, they take 'an impersonal joy' in what they do. They see themselves from the outside, as impersonal constructs, which may lead to the oft-ridiculed referencing themselves in the third person.”
— Sam Sheridan, The Fighter's Mind: Inside the Mental Game
Tagged: Hm, Perception, Reality, The Figher's Mind
“'Only an animal does useful things,' he said at last, after a long silence. 'An animal gets food, finds a place to sleep, tries to keep comfortable. But I wanted to do something that was not useful, not like an animal at all. Something only a human being would do.' ”
— Gerard d'Aboville , The Fighter's Mind: Inside the Mental Game
Tagged: Heh, Hm, Insights, The Figher's Mind

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This page was created by our editorial team. Each page is manually curated, researched, collected, and issued by our staff writers. Quotes contained on this page have been double checked for their citations, their accuracy and the impact it will have on our readers.

Kelly Peacock is an accomplished poet and social media expert based in Brooklyn, New York. Kelly has a Bachelor's degree in creative writing from Farieligh Dickinson University and has contributed to many literary and cultural publications. Kelly assists on a wide variety of quote inputting and social media functions for Quote Catalog. Visit her personal website here.

Kendra Syrdal is a writer, editor, partner, and senior publisher for The Thought & Expression Company. Over the last few years she has been personally responsible for writing, editing, and producing over 30+ million pageviews on Thought Catalog.