Eliot Peper > Eliot's Quotes

“Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection. My brief forays into the formal ethics of analytic philosophy felt dry as a bone, missing the messiness and weight of real human life.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

“Like memory, history was synthetic. Humans thought of both as factual records, but study after study confirmed that they were more like dreams, narratives constructed and reconstructed by the mind to fit the demands of the present, not the reality of the past.”
― Eliot Peper, Bandwidth

“Shankar Vedantam wrote that those who travel with the current will always feel they are good swimmers, while those who swim against the current may never realize they are better swimmers than they imagine,”
― Eliot Peper, Bandwidth

“Critical thinking without hope was cynicism, while hope without critical thinking was naïveté.”
― Eliot Peper, Bandwidth

“My statistician friend says they’re harnessing the power of social validation to reinforce a certain worldview. It’s like gardening, only they’re cultivating ideology.”
― Eliot Peper, Bandwidth

“If we are the stories we tell ourselves, what happens when someone else controls the narrative? What does it take for a cynic to rediscover authenticity? How is technology changing the structure and exercise of power?”
― Eliot Peper, Bandwidth

“To risk sounding melodramatic, the story of Oakland is the story of America.”
― Eliot Peper, Cumulus

“building something meaningful requires you to let go of the obsession with perfection. It requires empowering others and trusting them to do their part, even if they do it differently than you might have. But trust is a two-way street. Autonomy means you’re held accountable.”
― Eliot Peper, Bandwidth

“It was far easier to stop something from getting done in Washington than it was to get anything done at all.”
― Eliot Peper, Bandwidth

“there’s one truism that’s worsened the impact of every human misstep, it’s that there’s profit in tragedy.”
― Eliot Peper, Bandwidth

“He was nothing. A short-lived speck on a meaningless rock orbiting an insignificant star in a forgotten galaxy in a universe bound by the unflinching laws of thermodynamics to descend into ultimate heat death.”
― Eliot Peper, Bandwidth

“But like so much else, the prize was diminished by possession.”
― Eliot Peper, Bandwidth

“Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes

“Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters

“To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Familiar Studies of Men and Books

“Is it not miraculous, reader, the power of the mind to believe and not believe at once?”
― Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning

“The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.”
― Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History

“The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.”
― Will Durant, The Lessons of History

“Tweets are not diseased rings of glitchy minds. They’re epigrams, aphorisms, maxims, dictums, taglines, captions, slogans, and adages. Some are art, some are commercial; these are forms with integrity.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art

“If all three major American TV networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC) had been broadcasting for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for sixty years, they wouldn’t have created the amount of content uploaded to YouTube in two weeks.”
― Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet

“As I sat alone at the computer hour after hour it seemed I was learning “computers.” In fact, I was learning culture.”
― 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

“History was badly plotted and written by committee.”
― Eliot Peper, Bandwidth

“There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark.”
― Eliot Peper, Bandwidth

“How we treat people defines humanity.”
― Eliot Peper, Bandwidth

“Everyone worries about the future.” His voice lost its affected madness. He was quiet now, incisive. “They freak out about technology. They obsess over how tomorrow might be different. But it’s the things that do not change that we should pay attention to. If you want to make sense of the world, focus on finding the constants. They’re the rare truths that everyone’s too busy to bother with.”
― Eliot Peper, Borderless