David Sasaki > David's Quotes

“For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organisations....

Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle.”
― Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

“Its particular interest for Ian, however, lay in its thesis about the history of the Dutch relationship to windmills, for it emphasized that these early industrial objects had originally been felt to have all the pylons' threateningly alien qualities, rather than the air of enchantment and playfulness now routinely associated with them. They had been denounced from pulpits and occasionally burnt to the ground by suspicious villagers.”
― Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

“There is something improbably about the silence in the [subway] carriage, considering how naturally gregarious we are as a species. Still, how much kinder it is for the commuters to pretend to be absorbed in other things, rather than revealing the extent to which they are covertly evaluating, judging, condemning and desiring each other. A few venture a glance here and there, as furtively as birds pecking grain. But only if the train crashed would anyone know for sure who else had been in the carriage, what small parts of the nation's economy had been innocuously seated across the aisle just before the impact: employees of hotels, government ministries, plastic-surgery clinics, fruit nurseries and greetings-card companies.”
― Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

“Logically enough, the office and the nunnery have been singularly popular in the imaginations of pornographers. We should not be surprised to learn that the erotic novels of the early modern period were overwhelmingly focused on debauchery and flagellation amongst clergy in vespers and chapels, just as contemporary Internet pornography is inordinately concerned with fellatios and sodomies performed by office workers against a backdrop of work stations and computer equipment.”
― Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

“We human beings are only part of something much larger. When we walk along we may crush a battle or simply cause a change in the air so that a fly ends up where it might not have gone otherwise. And if we think of the same example but with ourselves in the role of the insect, and the larger universe in the role we’ve just played, it’s perfectly clear that we’re affected every day by races over which we have no control than the poor beetle has over our gigantic foot as it descends upon it.”
― Arthur Golden

“do do-gooders understand that it is flawed humans, weak humans, ordinary humans, whom we love?”
― Larissa MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help

“the moral narcissist’s extreme humility masked a dreadful pride. Ordinary people could accept that they had faults; the moral narcissist could not.”
― Larissa MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help

“Excessive altruism tended to preclude real intimacy with another person, because intimacy was a business of giving and receiving, but the overly moral person could not receive, only give.”
― Larissa MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help

“To drink, to get drunk, is to lower yourself on purpose for the sake of good fellowship.”
― Larissa MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help

“However much postcolonial condescension and racism and machismo there might be mixed up in an aid worker’s urge to help suffering foreigners, that seemed less awful than isolation and unrepentant selfishness.”
― Larissa MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help

“The aim of an artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably, but to make people love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations.”
― Larissa MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help

“When something is clear to a writer, I think it’s fair to ask him not to obscure it, but when something is unclear I think it should be left that way. The honest thing is to relay my doubts, and let the conversation move one step forward: the readers may know better.”
― Álvaro Enrigue, Sudden Death

“Maybe all books are written simply because in every game the bad guys have the advantage and that is too much to bear.”
― Álvaro Enrigue, Sudden Death

“As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“And when what has kept me going for the whole of my adult life, the ambition to write something exceptional one day, is threatened in this way my one thought, which gnaws at me like a rat, is that I have to escape. Time is slipping away from me, running through my fingers like sand while I … do what?”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“You know too little and it doesn’t exist. You know too much and it doesn’t exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“I clambered onto the rear seat and leaned back. Taxis, I loved taxis. Not the ones I came home drunk in, but the ones I caught to airports or railway stations. Was there anything better than sitting in the rear seat of a taxi and being driven through towns and suburbs before a long journey?”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“the doubts that colored such a large part of my thinking never applied to the larger picture but always the smaller, the one associated with my closer surroundings, friends, acquaintances, girls, who, I was convinced, always held a low opinion of me, considered me an idiot, which burned inside me, every day it burned inside me; however, as far as the larger picture was concerned, I never had any doubt that I could attain whatever I wanted, I knew I had it in me, because my yearnings were so strong and they never found any rest.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1

“Back issues had piled up on my coffee table and then become part of recycling, landfills, and compost. They weren’t culture; they were carbon.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“Digital forms are best illuminated by cultural criticism, which uses the tools of art and literary theory to make sense of the Internet’s glorious illusion: that the Internet is life. Because”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“Cruise through the gargantuan sites—YouTube, Amazon, Yahoo!—and it’s as though modernism never existed. Twentieth-century print design never existed. European and Japanese design never existed. The Web’s aesthetic might be called late-stage Atlantic City or early-stage Mall of America.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“many apps are to the Web what bottled water is to tap:”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“Even if the social order of technocracy threatened the species with nuclear annihilation and the individual young person with psychic fragmentation, the media technologies produced by that order offered the possibility of individual and collective transformation. McLuhan's dual emphases also allowed young people to imagine the local communities they built around these media not simply as communities built around consumption of industrial products, but as model communities for a new society.”
― Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

“the intensity was so great that sometimes life felt almost unlivable, and when nothing could give me any peace of mind except books, with their different places, different times, and different people, where I was no one and no one was me. That”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, A Man in Love

“Trump made sure both the media and his opponents reacted on his terms. He wasn’t always perfectly prepared, but his preference for speed over perfection ensured that opponents were always scrambling to figure out a response. •”
― Tim Harford, Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

“Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“The habit of dwelling on victimhood dulls the impulse of self-correction.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“The easiest way to witness the stupidity and misplaced hopes of all humanity is to watch, for twenty minutes, a human using a leaf blower. With this machine, the man was saying, I will murder all quiet. I will destroy the aural plane. And I will do so with a machine that performs a task far less efficiently than I could with a rake. Sam”
― Dave Eggers, Heroes of the Frontier

“This was the march of civilization. First there is barbarism, no schools at all, all learning done at home, chaotically if at all. Then there is civil society, democracy, the right to free schooling for every child. Close on the heels of the right to free education is the right to pull these children out of the free schools and put them in private-schools—we have a right to pay for what is provided for free! And this is followed, inevitably and petulantly, by the right to pull them from school altogether, to do it yourself at home, everything coming full circle.”
― Dave Eggers, Heroes of the Frontier

“The problem is not so much that the world limits your imagination as your imagination limits the world.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 3