Benjamin > Benjamin's Quotes

“Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.”
― Joseph Heller

“The Weakest Link was a huge success, thanks to the simple device of letting Anne Robinson tell the contestants they were rubbish and stupid. Trouble is, they weren’t rubbish and stupid – the questions were often genuinely tricky. What we really want is a quiz show in which authentic dimwits have their efforts mercilessly pilloried – a version of Family Fortunes in which millions of viewers can phone a special number to collectively heckle the idiocy of everyone participating, with the resulting cacophonic abuse relayed live in the studio. Or maybe just an edition of Wheel of Fortune where John Leslie finally snaps and cracks a simpleton in the face with a broom.”
― Charlie Brooker, Screen Burn

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Consciously or not, the Senator (or his staffer) was only attempting to speak the language of the locals. He was value-adding (or adding alpha as very refined managers say). Value-adding is a mantra of modern economics: it describes the increase in value that a particular manufacturing process, or design or labelling or some other enhancement brings to a product before its sale. Those who talk a lot about value-adding often sound as if they are trying to achieve the same effect with the language: they force it into a new mould, streamline it, give it cachet. They make it into a machine with a minimum of moving parts, but with constant upgrades and (naturally) enhancements. And if you want to get reconciliation taken seriously, you had better put your case in these terms. The Senator’s imitation of the style is a remote sign of the gathering belief that the whole world – or such parts of it that function properly – can be understood either as a metaphor for free market economics and the management philosophies it has spawned, or as an actual consequence of them. That is to say, as an outcome or an event.”
― Don Watson, Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language

“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today-explode-fly-apart-disintegrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, by reading your story, will catch fire, too?”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies ? No touching that. Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up and there you are. Lots of them lying around here : lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps : damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus!* And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day! Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself that morning. Pennyweight of powder in a skull. Twelve grammes one pennyweight. Troy measure.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Abbott began the 2009 parliamentary year comatose on his office couch, and ended it by winning the Liberal leadership by one vote. Four years later, he was prime minister. Little more than six years later, he was back where he started. All of it wrought by his own hand. Is it any wonder he had trouble coming to terms with it?”
― Niki Savva, The Road to Ruin: How Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin Destroyed Their Own Government

“I'm not claiming that Stanley wasn't self-absorbed, but I don't think that just because he was obsessive-retentive he was a monomaniac, or even any more egocentric than anybody else in the movies. And I suppose that he was selfish, which doesn't exactly make him a freak in the Director's Guild (or the Writer's Guild either), nor was his particular selfishness uncharacteristic of artists in general, especially when they've acquired the reputation for genius. A powerful vision can be very fragile while it's still only in the mind, and people have gone to extraordinary lengths to protect it. He didn't think he was the only person in the world, or the only director, or even the only great director. I just think that he thought he was the greatest director, although he never said so in so many words.”
― Michael Herr

“The war was all that mattered to Hitler. Yet, cocooned in the strange world of the Wolf's Lair, he was increasingly severed from its realities, both at the front and at home. Detachment ruled out all vestiges of humanity. Even towards those in his own entourage who had been with him for many years, there was nothing resembling real affection, let alone friendship; genuine fondness was reserved only for his young Alsatian. He had described the human being the previous autumn as no more than 'a ridiculous "cosmic bacterium" (eine lächerliche "Weltraumbakterie")'. Human life and suffering was, thus, of no consequence to him. He never visited a field-hospital, nor the homeless after bomb-raids. He saw no massacres, went near no concentration camp, viewed no compound of starving prisoners-of-war. His enemies were in his eyes like vermin to be stamped out. But his profound contempt for human existence extended to his own people. Decisions costing the lives of tens of thousands of his soldiers were made — perhaps it was only thus possible to make them — without consideration for any human plight. As he had told Guderian during the winter crisis, feelings of sympathy and pity for the suffering of his soldiers had to be shut out. For Hitler, the hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed were merely an abstraction, the suffering a necessary and justified sacrifice in the 'heroic struggle' for the survival of the people.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis

“You know you are a woman who said something interesting on the internet when you receive death threats. It is like graduating, but instead of smiling at your parents you cry to your pillow for several weeks when no one is around and contemplate your own worthlessness until you get angry and creative and emerge some sort of burning, fuschine dragon.”
― Cara Ellison, Embed With Games: A Year on the Couch with Game Developers

“The bus made its way slowly through Sydney traffic and out to the electorate of Reid. It was a hat-trick of medical centres: three in three days. Outside we waited as rain fell. A large truck with the huge face of Labor’s local candidate Angelo Tsirekas plastered on the side, honked as it drove past the national media. Minutes later a bigger truck, bearing the face of the Liberal candidate Craig Laundy, drove slowly past, mugging it up for the cameras. There were a few giggles. Then, as if the whole thing had been co-ordinated, both trucks returned driving past the medical centre, up the street and around the corner, one after the other. A staff member of the medical centre leant over to his friend and spoke out of the side of his mouth: “Well isn’t this the lamest dick-measuring contest you’ve ever seen.”
― Mark Di Stefano, What a Time to Be Alive: That and Other Lies of the 2016 Campaign

“After seeing him take more than 100 selfies in just a few days, I realised Turnbull’s selfie technique was slick. There was a routine developing. He cradled the phone in his right hand. Held it out at full arm’s length. Made sure everyone was in the shot, then slightly tilted his arm so the camera was above eye level. It was optimum selfie technique, taking advantage of the high angle which slimmed the faces of those involved. He’d take 2–4 very distinct shots, so people could choose from a menu of options which one would be uploaded to Facebook as a new profile picture. Often he’d spin around before even opening the camera, aware of where the light was and how it would impact on the selfie. He was more comfortable with iPhones over Androids, sometimes stumbling over finding the camera on the phone’s screen. It might seem facile (and it was) but the selfie was often the only genuine interaction the Prime Minister had with voters.”
― Mark Di Stefano, What a Time to Be Alive: That and Other Lies of the 2016 Campaign

“But a change of personnel — the capable Austrian Colonel-General Lothar Rendulic in place of Reinhardt, and General Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller for Hoßbach — could do nothing to alter the disastrous German collapse in the face of hopeless odds, in East Prussia as on the rest of the eastern front. This proved equally true in Hitler's replacement on 17 January of Colonel-General Josef Harpe, made the scapegoat for the collapse of the Vistula front, by his favourite, Colonel-General Ferdinand Schörner, and his ill-judged appointment on 25 January of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, in the teeth of Guderian's strident objections, to take command of the newly formed and hastily constituted Army Group Vistula which aimed to stave off the Soviet advance into Pomerania. The hope that 'triumph of the will' and the toughness of one of his most trusted 'hard' men would prevail rapidly proved ill-founded. Himmler, backed by courageous but militarily inexperienced Waffen-SS officers, soon found that combating the might of the Red Army was a far stiffer task than rounding up and persecuting helpless political opponents and 'racial inferiors'. By mid-February, Hitler was forced to concede that Army Group Vistula was inadequately led.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis

“Consistent only with his own warped and peculiar brand of logic, he was prepared to take measures with such far-reaching consequences for the German population that the very survival he claimed to be fighting for was fundamentally threatened. Ultimately, the continued existence of the German people – if it showed itself incapable of defeating its enemies – was less important to him than the refusal to capitulate.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler, Vol. 2: 1936-1945 Nemesis

“Similarly, dubbing everyone whose reading of history leads them to conclusions different from the preferred ones black-armband historians; channelling frustrations felt by the politically powerless to the politically correct; isolating chattering classes and elites from a pretended mainstream – all these and many terms of political abuse are common and inevitable in democracies – and all have parallels in tyrannies.”
― Don Watson, Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language

“When the words are suspicious, go after them, insist they tell us what they mean. Go after the meaning of the words. And if the speakers say they are the kind who call things as they see them, that they don’t mince words, and call a spade a spade if not a bloody shovel, go after them even harder. They’re often the worst liars of the lot.”
― Don Watson, Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language