The Guest Lecture Quotes

“This self was not really you, it didn't sufficiently encompass what you care about or what you want to say. Because at the end of the day, you are uniquely ill-equipped to convey to the world what you care about or what you want to say.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“But for some reason reading works, reading in particular. The mental release, the distraction, or maybe just the voice, the company.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Reading and writing being the only good methods I have ever found for emptying my insomnia mind, and calming it.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“I felt also, for the first time that evening, the pinch of my own deep loneliness, never far from me in those days, always just out past the edge of my so-called self-awareness.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Words shaped the world economy and the human body, both.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“You enjoy speaking your ideas but you also hate it, and finally you hate it more than you enjoy it. Hearing yourself form words and project them toward people, who will probably not care much anyway. Who might at best watch curiously as your words sail past them and bounce off the back wall.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Ignorance doesn't make you good at anything. You don't free yourself by unlearning. You have to learn past all you've learned.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Now the box is open, reality spills out, and there's no way to stuff it back in. Judgment has been meted out, the first sentence handed down, first of many because once this trial gets going there is no going back. The proceedings are irreversible, the stakes existential, the accusations keep piling up, the prosecution is relentless, the prosecution never rests, the defense never rests, nobody in this whole damn place ever rests.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Perhaps the real revelation is simply that life has caught up with you. All this time, when you thought you were fooling everyone, that was only because no one was paying attention. But eventually the world does pay attention, and suddenly it is you who are on trial, not the world but you. The trial you'd managed to put off for years is finally underway and you see, now, that you are not the plaintiff, as you'd always assumed, but the defendant, not the accuser but the accused.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Even an imagined togetherness beats being alone.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“There was the pessimism of the revolutionaries, as Keynes called it, the worry of those who thought the world so doomed that the only hope was to turn everything upside down. Then there was the pessimism of the reactionaries, those who thought the world so doomed that any sort of change at all would send civilization reeling into the abyss.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“I’d been caught up in myself, my grand entrance to humanity. But humanity was just a bunch of people I didn’t know standing on the far side of a pool, and none of them seemed very impressed.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Plato, who was a total elitist, by the way, and hated democracy, because he thought average people were too dumb to make their own decisions and ought to be governed by philosophers, because philosophers alone understand “essential truths.” Apparently he never met anyone from our philosophy department”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Consciously or unconsciously, every day you decide which constructs to accept and which to question, about yourself and about the world. You can’t question everything.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Which is perhaps a special case of the general theory of having a family at all. It makes you less crazy than you’d otherwise be, but it doesn’t allow you to get as crazy as you sometimes need to.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“I wanted to talk about the problem of translation, how an idea clear in concept never remains so in practice, how social and economic forces remake ideas in their own image, how it’s not just capitalism that does this, it’s any system at all, and how Keynes and his ideas were a poignant example precisely because, even though he was in his own way radically optimistic, he wasn’t some dippy idealist.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“He delineates two kinds of needs. Absolute needs are the ones that can be adequately filled: food, shelter. Relative needs are the things you think you need in order to make yourself feel superior to”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Everybody in the world is in the wrong place at the wrong time,”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Uncertainty is a fact of life and an important part of what makes life lively. Risk is the spirit of courage you bring to things you care about. On the other hand, risking your own safety and stability won't necessarily help anybody else, either. There's courage, then there's ill-conceived idealism. Being stripped of your own safety and stability might make you more empathetic to other people's problems, but more likely it will just make you mean. Too much money makes people greedy, and too much security makes people spineless, but a basic amount of money and security makes it much easier for a person to be decent and good.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“It's far too stressful when everything you're saying has to be exactly right all the time. To check yourself with every sentence. It's exhausting.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“You put yourself out there, take on a thing like this, because you think that you should, or need to. Not because you want to, not at all because you want to, but because you are painfully aware of how greatly you would prefer to say no, to stay home, to climb into bed and read a book or watch something on your laptop, and you worry that's not healthy or good. Your natural inclinations seem counterproductive and not good. So you make yourself say yes, you force yourself, out of fear that you will live your whole life not "having lived" or whatever. But then here you are, living, and it's miserable! Not a meaningful corrective to your natural inclinations, just a terrible series of tortures with no redeeming value.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“It's not how you fit, but what you can contribute. It is amazing what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit, said Obama, quoting Truman, I think.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“How I managed to get this far without everyone seeing what a phony I am is a total mystery.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“It's a lost possibility, the sort that open up as you grow, then start closing down as you get older, as you make your choices or they're made for you.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Distances always seem longer when you're heading out. Especially heading out for the first time, going anywhere takes forever.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“But when she asked herself how she got there, it was like walking into a mist. All she came up with was a handful of stories from her past, people she'd known who had shaped her. Who were responsible, to some extent, for the person she'd become. Emphasizing nurture because nature is really just yourself, whatever came in the original packaging, the basic model with whatever manufacturer defects.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Nothing is bad, everything is good, just being used badly. Hello, story of my life! "She had a lot of energy, but she used it badly," the epitaph will read. "She had energy to spare in the middle of the night, in the useless hours of the morning. Her insomnia energy could have fueled a small nation sustainably. She cared about the right things—she did!—but she did not pursue them as fully or as openly as she might have.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Questioning her own enthusiasm, feeling pretentious and shitty and wanting to escape herself by taking what she assumed would be the most practical path—who made that enormous life-shaping decision. Having no idea, of course, where it would lead.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Everything I'd been doing, here at the start of adulthood, seemed suddenly kind of cheap. As if knowledge was a trick you played on yourself, a riddle to solve.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“A single college day contained more "life experience" than an entire month of high school.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture