We live in an age where virtually no content is lost and virtually all content is shared. The sheer amount of information about every current idea makes those concepts difficult to contradict, particularly in a framework where public consensus has become the ultimate arbiter of validity. In other words, we’re starting to behave as if we’ve reached the end of human knowledge. And while that notion is undoubtedly false, the sensation of certitude it generates is paralyzing.
If a problem is irreversible, is there still an ethical obligation to try to reverse it?
And when they finally demanded that I had to stop keeping score and that I needed to play every future contest as an exhibition, I casually made the kind of statement sixteen-year-olds should not make to forty-six-year-old Midwestern housewives: “Why are you telling me how to do my job?” I asked. “It’s not like I show up in your kitchen and tell you when to bake cookies.
Ignorance is not bliss. That platitude is totally wrong. You will not be intellectually happier if you know fewer things. Learning should be a primary goal of living. But what if ignorance feels better – not psychologically, but physically? That would explain a lot of human incongruities.
I think the larger sect of liars are people who think they are telling the truth, but who really have no idea what the truth is.
I’m still alive, but I feel myself dying, person by person by person by person.
It’s nice to think that the weirdos get to decide what matters about the past, since it’s the weirdos who care the most.
Sid and Nancy’s relationship forever illustrates the worst part of being in love with anyone, which is that people in love can’t be reasoned with.
It also creates a problematic reflection: If a villain is the person who knows the most and cares the least, then a hero is the person who cares too much without knowing anything. It makes every hero seem like Forrest Gump. But it’s not the intelligence that people dislike; it’s the dispassionate application of that intelligence. It’s the calculation. It’s someone who views life as a game where the rules are poorly written and designed for abuse.
History is defined by people who don’t really understand what they are defining.
I believe that time is like a train, with men hanging out in front of the engine and off the back of the caboose; the man in front is laying down new tracks the moment before the train touches them and the man in the caboose is tearing up the rails the moment they are passed. There is no linear continuation: The past disappears, the future is unimagined, and the present is ephemeral. It cannot be traversed.
It will come to be seen as the persecution of a culture. This makes football akin to the Confederate flag, or Christmas decorations in public spaces, or taxpayer-supported art depicting Jesus in a tank of urine – something that becomes intractable precisely because so many people want to see it eliminated. The game’s violence would save it, and it would never go away.
I don’t think we have any idea who we are. I think we’re engaged in a constant battle to figure out who we are.
Batman never questions the logic of letting a childhood experience dictate his entire life.
The past has happened, and it can only happen the way it happened.
When Arthur Schlesinger Sr. pioneered the ‘presidential greatness poll’ in 1948, the top five were Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jefferson. Only Wilson appears to be seriously fading, probably because his support for the World War I-era Sedition Act now seems outrageous; in this analogy, Woodrow is like the Doors and the Sedition Act is Oliver Stone.
But when you’re naturally better than everyone else, and when that talent is so utterly obvious, being quiet doesn’t translate as humble. It translates as boredom.
Woody Allen made it acceptable for beautiful women to sleep with nerdy, bespectacled goofballs; all we need to do is fabricate the illusion of intellectual humor, and we somehow have a chance.
According to population expert Dr. Paul Ehrlich, we should currently be experiencing a dystopian dreamscape where “survivors envy the dead,” which seems true only when I look at Twitter.
The reason something becomes retrospectively significant in a far-flung future is detached from the reason it was significant at the time of its creation – and that’s almost always due to a recalibration of social ideologies that future generations will accept as normative.