Cameron > Cameron's Quotes

“You can’t understand command till you’ve had it. It’s the loneliest, most oppressive job in the whole world. It’s a nightmare, unless you’re an ox. You’re forever teetering along a tiny path of correct decisions and good luck that meanders through an infinite gloom of possible mistakes.”
― Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny

“My main problem, it emerged, was a lack of patience, my inability to accept tedium. I’d wander away to look for something to read and forget that I was leaving the risotto to glue itself into a sticky glop, or I’d forget to turn the carrots in their puddle of olive oil and come back to find them seared to the bottom of the pan. (So much of cooking, it seemed, was petting and bathing and monitoring and flipping and turning and soothing: demands I associated with human infancy.) My other problem, I was told, was my insistence on innovating, which is apparently a guarantee of failure in baking. “It’s chemistry, Harold, not philosophy,” he kept saying, with that same half smile. “You can’t cheat the specified amounts and hope it’s going to come out the way it”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“The class focused on US history since the Civil War, but at every opportunity Mr. Hill guided them to the present, linking what had happened a hundred years ago to their current lives. They’d set off down one road at the beginning of class and it always led back to their doorsteps. Mr.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

“Harriet Johnson was a slight hummingbird of a woman who conducted herself in everything with furious purpose.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

“I’ll never forget your kindness,” Grandma told our hosts. “Một miếng khi đói bằng một gói khi no.” One bite when starving equals one bundle when full. “Lá lành đùm lá rách,” Mrs. Tùng replied. Intact leaves safeguard ripped leaves. “You’re welcome to stay with us at any time.” She clutched Grandma’s hand. I”
― Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, The Mountains Sing

“The twisted inversion that many children of immigrants know is that, at some point, your parents become your children, and your own personal American dream becomes making sure they age and die with dignity in a country that has never wanted them. That’s what makes caring for our elderly different from Americans caring for their elderly.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“For one thing, most available jobs for undocumented immigrants are jobs Americans will not do, which takes healthy young migrants and makes them age terribly. At a certain point, manual labor is no longer possible. Aging undocumented people have no safety net. Even though half of undocumented people pay into Social Security, none are eligible for the benefits. They are unable to purchase health insurance. They probably don’t own their own homes. They don’t have 401(k)s or retirement plans of any kind. Meager savings, if any. Elderly people in general are susceptible to unscrupulous individuals taking advantage of them, and the undocumented community draws even more vultures. According to the Migration Policy Institute, around 10 percent of undocumented people are over fifty-five years old. This country takes their youth, their dreams, their labor, and spits them out with nothing to show for it.”
― Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans

“I worked myself to death to harvest five dàn of grain. Meanwhile you took four dàn in rent,” a man said to Da Ge. “We ate the husks of rice, the husks of wheat, the husks of millet. My children have been hungry from the day they were born. But what are your tenants to you? Nothing but fertilizer!” “I gave you fair terms,” Da Ge began but he was immediately drowned out. “Fair?” The man laughed bitterly. “Pay your debts! Everyone must pay their debts!” “If you don’t settle with them now,” one of the strangers said calmly, “these landowners will wait until we’re gone, and then they will wipe you out one by one. You cannot make half a revolution.” Scorn and contempt were heaped on the landlords. The agitation increased. Another family was brought in and there were more crimes and more denunciations. Together, their stories made a claim that no one could deny. “Aren’t these your countrymen?”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“Five years of hard labour, Sparrow always reminded her, watching people who had done no wrong disappear, could not be wiped away so quickly, yet still Zhuli wanted to shake her mother, drag her mind back from the camps and make her present. What mattered was the here and now and not the life before, what mattered were the changeable things of today and tomorrow and not the ever, infinitely, unbearably unchanging yesterday.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“It was,” the man said. “But when I returned from re-education, I discovered that my supply of copper wires was gone. During the Great Leap Forward, people broke down my door and carried away all the metal. You remember the slogan, ‘Struggle to produce 10.7 million tonnes of steel.’ When Chairman Mao instructed the villages to industrialize, my neighbours discovered all my bits and pieces, even my voltage meter, my collection of batteries, pinhole cameras and metal coils, not to mention my cooking pots and metal spoons, and fed them to the smelter that you’ll see if you walk fifty paces to the east of here. They managed to produce a surprising quantity of steel but, sadly, none of it was useable.” He shrugged and one of the electric lights fizzled, dimmed and then gleamed brightly again. “Upon my release, my neighbours all came and said, ‘Isn’t it a shame, Teacher Edison, you weren’t here to help us fulfill our steel quota?’ And then I was glad that I hadn’t been present to hand over all my spatulas and wires, as well as my mother’s wedding ring and the German stein my father brought from Düsseldorf many years ago, as well as my bicycle. Sometimes it is better not to say goodbye.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“In 1989, there were only fifteen borders that were fortified with walls or fences in the world; by 2016, there were almost seventy, with more planned or under construction. Especially since the attacks of 9/11, these walls have been built in the name of security, and yet in practice they trace the line between rich and poor.”
― Matthieu Aikins, The Naked Don't Fear the Water: An Underground Journey with Afghan Refugees

“First: modern society, with its millions, is essentially ungovernable. The public must instead be controlled by manipulation. The men who do this manipulating, in government or not, are the true leaders, philosopher-kings. They need not manipulate all the people, only the few thousand who set the agenda. The drivers of history are not the people, in other words, nor the elite who influence the people, but the PR men who influence the elite who influence the people. “Those who manipulate [the] unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power,” wrote Bernays. “We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”
― Rich Cohen, The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King

“I hope the United States will keep out of this war. I believe that it will. And I give you assurance and reassurance that every effort of your government will be directed toward that end.” Did the president know of the plots developing within his own administration? Was he aware that what he was saying was, strictly speaking, untrue? “As long as it remains within my power to prevent, there will be no blackout of peace in the United States.”
― Graham Moore, The Wealth of Shadows

“Their enmity toward the democratic world is not merely some form of traditional geopolitical competition, as “realists” and so many international relations strategists still believe. Their opposition rather has its roots in the very nature of the democratic political system, in words like “accountability,” “transparency,” and “democracy.” They hear that language coming from the democratic world, they hear the same language coming from their own dissidents, and they seek to destroy them both.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

“This is the core of the problem: the leaders of Autocracy, Inc., know that the language of transparency, accountability, justice, and democracy will always appeal to some of their own citizens. To stay in power they must undermine those ideas, wherever they are found.”
― Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

“The GIs didn’t like to talk about country or flag and were embarrassed by patriotic bombast. They were all American boys, separated by eighty years only—but that separation included World War I. The Great War changed the language. It made patriotic words sound hollow, unacceptable, ridiculous, especially for the next set of young Americans sent to Europe to fight over the same battlefields their fathers had fought over. Nevertheless, as much as the Civil War soldiers, the GIs believed in their cause. They knew they were fighting for decency and democracy and they were proud of it and motivated by it. They just didn’t talk or write about it.”
― Stephen E. Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers: The U S Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany

“Hitler had recognized that his only hope for victory lay on the Western Front. His armies could not defeat the Red Army, but they might defeat the British and Americans, so discouraging Stalin that he would make a settlement. But after correctly seeing the critical theater, Hitler completely failed to see the critical battlefield. He continued to look to the Pas-de-Calais as the site where he would drive the invaders back into the sea, and consequently kept his main striking power there. To every plea by the commanders in Normandy for the panzer divisions in northwestern France to come to their aid, Hitler said no. In so saying he sealed his fate. He suffered the worst humiliation of all, the one with the most consequences—he had been outwitted.”
― Stephen E. Ambrose, Citizen Soldiers: The U S Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany

“We all impose some coherence—some meaning—on the chaotic events of our existence. We rummage through the raw images of our memories, selecting, burnishing, erasing. We emerge as the heroes of our stories, allowing us to live with what we have done—or haven’t done.”
― David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

“Sooner or later pain becomes too great for fear and when the people’s fear has gone the regime will have to go.”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“history is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave.”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“nobody knows anything, there is a total absence of facts, you’ve ceased to believe, that’s all, but you must continue to believe, there cannot be despair where there is doubt and where there is doubt there is hope.”
― Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

“If only politics really were a pantomime. If politics were just a farcical, inane, at times insane entertainment provided by characters who for the most part have got where they are, not by being in any way revolutionary or percipient or wise in their views, but by being louder, bigger, more ostentatious, more unscrupulously wanting of the play of power than those around them, if that were the beginning and end of the story it would not be so bad. Instead, they come to see that it’s not a pantomime, or it’s not just that. It’s a force so great that it has shaped every single thing on the surface of the earth that they had thought, from here, so human-proof.”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital

“Novel technology often leads to historical disasters, not because the technology is inherently bad, but because it takes time for humans to learn how to use it wisely.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“If three years of up to 25 percent unemployment could turn a seemingly prospering democracy into the most brutal totalitarian regime in history, what might happen to democracies when automation causes even bigger upheavals in the job market of the twenty-first century?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Another 2023 study prompted patients to ask online medical advice from ChatGPT and human doctors, without knowing whom they were interacting with. The medical advice given by ChatGPT was later evaluated by experts to be more accurate and appropriate than the advice given by the humans. More crucially for the issue of emotional intelligence, the patients themselves evaluated ChatGPT as more empathic than the human doctors.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“The increasing unfathomability of our information network is one of the reasons for the recent wave of populist parties and charismatic leaders. When people can no longer make sense of the world, and when they feel overwhelmed by immense amounts of information they cannot digest, they become easy prey for conspiracy theories, and they turn for salvation to something they do understand—a human.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“One analysis estimated that out of a sample of 20 million tweets generated during the 2016 U.S. election campaign, 3.8 million (almost 20 percent) were generated by bots.[48] By the early 2020s, things got worse. A 2020 study assessed that bots were producing 43.2 percent of tweets.[49] A more comprehensive 2022 study by the digital intelligence agency Similarweb found that 5 percent of Twitter users were probably bots, but they generated “between 20.8% and 29.2% of the content posted to Twitter.”[50]”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Prior to the rise of AI, one human could pretend to be another, and society punished such frauds. But society didn’t bother to outlaw the creation of counterfeit humans, since the technology to do so didn’t exist. Now that AI can pass itself off as human, it threatens to destroy trust between humans and to unravel the fabric of society. Dennett suggests, therefore, that governments should outlaw fake humans as decisively as they have previously outlawed fake money.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Stalinism and Nazism were also extremely costly experiments in how to construct industrial societies. Leaders like Stalin and Hitler argued that the Industrial Revolution had unleashed immense powers that only totalitarianism could rein in and exploit to the full. They pointed to World War I—the first “total war” in history—as proof that survival in the industrial world demanded totalitarian control of all aspects of politics, society, and the economy. On the positive side, they also claimed that the Industrial Revolution was like a furnace that melts all previous social structures with their human imperfections and weaknesses and provides the opportunity to forge perfect societies inhabited by unalloyed superhumans. On the way to creating the perfect industrial society, Stalinists and Nazis learned how to industrially murder millions of people. Trains, barbed wire, and telegraphed orders were linked to create an unprecedented killing machine. Looking back, most people today are horrified by what the Stalinists and Nazis perpetrated, but at the time their audacious visions mesmerized millions. In 1940 it was easy to believe that Stalin and Hitler were the models for harnessing industrial technology, whereas the dithering liberal democracies were on their way to the dustbin of history. The”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI