The Great Man Theory Quotes

“Their signal advantage is being well fed. Yours is hunger.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“skeuomorph,”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“pusillanimous”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“Now he required some contemporaneous tether to the outside, a feeling of being plugged in to information that was dynamically changing by the second, not a book that had been typeset decades ago.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“Mom doesn’t want me drinking from cans because of BPA.” “That’s ironic, given that she—” He stopped before commenting on Jane’s injecting herself with a toxin that causes botulism, a disease often found in canned food.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“the camera’s cold eye that pretended to objectivity.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“Hegel’s dialectics, Jason, is the idea that history proceeds first as a thesis, which leads to an antithesis that negates it, which is resolved in a synthesis, which becomes the new thesis, and so on, toward progress.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“the very point of higher education was to disturb their minds, to force them to reevaluate the notions they’d unquestioningly carried for eighteen years.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“group dinners were the one time these rapacious capitalists embraced socialism.)”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“My therapist says ambitious people think if something comes too easy to them, they assign it a low value, so we choose the harder thing even if it’s not the right fit for us. And that I’d be happier if I just came to terms with the fact that being a doctor was hard because it wasn’t the right fit for me.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“Tell people what they already want, in words they understand, and they’ll start wanting the other things you tell them that they don’t understand yet.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“eager to secure health insurance at the expense of daylight.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“They see that as physical communities break down and trust in institutions corrodes, people are looking for order and meaning, to be told what to think by authority figures. They want to be literal ‘followers,’ as if they’re members of a religion. Or, worse, in a cult. And the cult leaders, like your roommate, are happy to be the dictators of their own little kingdoms, seizing the power that accrues more than ever to certain individuals, bullying people into thinking like them, even though that’s inimical to the notion of what writing and reading are supposed to be about, which is to explore a subject with humility and encourage your reader to ask further questions.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“Writers are supposed to keep some thoughts private,” he said. “Otherwise your brain will shift to thinking about what will result in maximum popularity. And you’ll start employing the debased language that others are using. Words matter—” He caught himself. “If you use their language, their internet-speak, instead of coming up with your own formulations, you’ll inevitably think like everyone else.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“I’d go for an em dash here,” he said. “Some writing books tell you that an em dash clutters up the prose and disrupts the sentence. But it can reflect a mind interrupting and refining itself, one that’s able to hold more than a single thought at the same time. Think of it as a fork in the sentence’s road, creating tension for what comes next.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“This wasn’t literature; it was narcissism sluiced through an internet router to generate social-media-trendy verbal automatisms (“I felt seen,” “the struggle is real”) classed up with pseudoacademic jargon (“discourse,” several more instances of “toxic masculinity,” anything with “spaces”) that disburdened both writer and reader from having to think through the idea at hand. And he would be enabling their intellectual laziness by feeding them this processed, preservative-laden junk.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“people with far more to lose than gain in any revolution,”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“Once humans destroy ourselves, the alien anthropologists sifting through our remains just need to read this catalog to figure out what went wrong.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“skeuomorph,’ when something new uses a design feature of an older technology even though it’s no longer necessary.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“the president wasn’t the cause so much as the symptom of numerous problems that had been festering for years and were compounded by recent paradigm shifts; if the imbecile had any genius to him, it was in his exploitation of these changes, allowing him to succeed wildly in the two fields that had been possibly the most coarsening to our culture and collective decency, social media and reality TV;”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“what Jane called “good at life”: he understood how the world operated, had the wherewithal and executive functioning to maximize his advantages,”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“intransigent”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“The first chapter? You just started? I thought you already sold it.” “I sold it by describing what I was going to write, but I hadn’t written it yet. I’ve been researching and outlining for a long time. Planning a project is half the work.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“Technological immersion has fomented the rise of right-wing extremism, giving platforms to abhorrent values once disqualified from decent society; neutered the left with a hashtagged resistance that substitutes apoplexy for action; and, perhaps most perniciously, anesthetized us all with spectacle and distraction, blinding citizens to our imminent jeopardy while smothering our desire for progress with an endemic cynicism.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“There could be a hostility to gregariousness, a refusal to permit others their antisocial tendencies.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“The accrual of the piddling insults of aging, each month a new minor complaint to track.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“When Mabel was a baby, and he and Jane weren’t yet defeated by the fatigue of parenthood and the iterative quarrels and détentes of a faltering marriage and the is-this-all-there-is nihilism of early middle age, he sometimes wondered when the paroxysm of joy that gripped him upon seeing her would peter out, as it inevitably had to. But the raw magic of her existence hadn’t yet faded; he was a fool for her, still instantly smiled upon seeing her face.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory

“. . . our subsuming addiction to screens has, more than any other economic or cultural factor, fostered today’s perilous political climate. Technological immersion has fomented the rise of right-wing extremism, giving platforms to abhorrent values once disqualified from decent society; neutered the left with a hashtagged resistance that substitutes apoplexy for action; and, perhaps most perniciously, anesthetized us all with spectacle and distraction, blinding citizens to our imminent jeopardy while smothering our desire for progress with an endemic cynicism.”
― Teddy Wayne, The Great Man Theory