The Quiet Zone Quotes

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” concluded the seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal. The nineteenth-century Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard prescribed quiet to remedy “all the ills of the world.” The twentieth-century monk Thomas Merton embraced monastic silence as a way of coming closer to God.”
― Stephen Kurczy, The Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence

“Through the lens of our techno-normative values, the cultural significance of a dead zone is a mistake, an error to be corrected, a gap in service or infrastructure that must be addressed,”
― Stephen Kurczy, The Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence

“So much of the digital world was designed to make us feel dissatisfied, to mine our thoughts for marketable content that can be sold back in the form of Google ads and Amazon one-click purchases. I don’t want to live in that world, even if it means I occasionally get lost driving (or bicycling).”
― Stephen Kurczy, The Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence

“Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s former vice president of user growth, was quoted in the New Yorker saying Facebook was “destroying how society works—no civil discourse, no coöperation, misinformation, mistruth.” Palihapitiya said his children were “not allowed to use this shit.”
― Stephen Kurczy, The Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence

“So much of the digital world was designed to make us feel dissatisfied, to mine our thoughts for marketable content that can be sold back in the form of Google ads and Amazon one-click purchases. I don’t want to live in that world, even if it means I occasionally get lost driving”
― Stephen Kurczy, The Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence

“To listen, we have to hear. To unlock the mysteries of the universe, we have to be quiet.”
― Stephen Kurczy, The Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence

“An acoustic ecologist named Gordon Hempton today believes that only a dozen places remain in the United States where a person can hear no man-made sounds for fifteen minutes.”
― Stephen Kurczy, The Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence

“Has it not occurred to you that some people in this country cannot afford a text-enabled cellphone? Has it not occurred to you that some people live in areas without cellphone service? And has it not occurred to you that some people, with plenty of money and access such as myself, might actually choose not to partake in the toxic cesspool of social media, and might value the ability to manage their own time, deploying their mental resources on topics with more substance than tweets and the rest of the superficial banality that passes for “conversation” today? Two”
― Stephen Kurczy, The Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence

“The electro-sensitives were right: We do need a break from our devices. The hippies were right: We need to reconnect with the land. The astronomers were right: We do need to be silent to listen.”
― Stephen Kurczy, The Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence