15 quotes found
"Aruba has proven the world that, although we are limited in size, we can have big dreams and important goals. Maybe we inherited an arid soil, but we are blessed with an abundance of sun and wind to turn that into energy and well being for our society. We have translated those gifts into a vision to make our island totally sustainable by 2020."
"What if the powerful can use ‘information abundance’ to find new ways of stifling you, flipping the ideal of freedom of speech to crush dissent, while always leaving enough anonymity to be able to claim deniability?"
"But if the need for facts is predicated on a vision of a concrete future that you are trying to achieve, then when that future disappears, what is the point of facts? Why would you want them if they tell you that your children will be poorer than you? That all versions of the future are unpromising? And why should you trust the purveyors of facts – the media and academics, think tanks, statesmen? And so the politician who makes a big show of rejecting facts, who validates the pleasure of spouting nonsense, who indulges in a full, anarchic liberation from coherence, from glum reality, becomes attractive. That enough Americans could vote for someone like Donald Trump, a man with so little regard for making sense, whose many contradictory messages never add up to any very stable meaning, was partly possible because voters felt they weren’t invested in any larger evidence-based future. Indeed, in his very incoherence lies the pleasure. All the madness you feel, you can now let it out and it’s OK. The joy of Trump is to validate the pleasure of spouting shit, the joy of pure emotion, often anger, without any sense."
"Conspiracy is a way to maintain control. In a world where even the most authoritarian regimes struggle to impose censorship, one has to surround audience with so much cynicism about anybody’s motives, persuade them that behind every seemingly benign motivation is a nefarious, if impossible-to-prove, plot, that they lose faith in the possibility of an alternative, a tactic a renowned Russian media analyst called Vasily Gatov called ‘white jamming’."
"This is the potential nightmare of the new media: the idea that our data might know more about us than we do, and that this is then being used to influence us without our knowledge. What’s unsettling isn’t so much that ‘they’ know something about me that I considered private, hidden… more disconcerting is the idea that ‘they’ know something about me which I hadn’t realised myself, that I’m not who I think I am – one’s complete dissipation into data that is now being manipulated by someone else."
"Forty years have passed since my parents were pursued by the KGB for pursuing the simple right to read, to write, to listen to what they chose and to say what they wanted. Today, the world they hoped for, in which censorship would fall like the Berlin Wall, can seem much closer: we live in what academics call an era of ‘information abundance’. But the assumptions that underlay the struggles for rights and freedoms in the twentieth century – between citizens armed with truth and information and regimes with their censors and secret police – have been turned upside down. We now have more information than ever before, but it hasn’t brought only the benefits we expected."
"I think I was really pretty shy, so that I didn’t perhaps get into as many things as I should have."
"Well, some people don’t know how to be lazy. I think some of them need to learn how."
"Oh, I think it’s been fun. I’ve always enjoyed the teaching very much -- seeing people grow and teaching them. That’s more important to me than putting myself on the map."
"On the other hand, I always had plenty to do as a teacher and I did as much as I could. As I said, I did all my own typing, but I did enjoy the teaching end of it."
"While she was an inspiration to women, the truth is she believed in merit, and would help anyone with potential to fulfill their dreams."
"Not only did she tell women they could and should participate in electoral politics, she told men they had to move over. Her courage, integrity and quick, creative mind imbued her life long quest for a more just society."
"She did her homework, she understood issues far beyond her job and she had a broader vision, acting locally while thinking globally before that phrase had been invented."
"They couldn't deal with a 'girl from the kitchen' making big budget decisions."
"At the Paris Exhibition, the Soviet pavilion and the Italian Futurist section represented the cutting edge of artistic avant-garde. It featured the architectural concepts and theater decoration and set designs of Enrico Prampolini and Giacomo Balla, and the panels of Fortunato Depero, with their vivid colors, embroidered figures, and cloth superimposed on cloth, perfectly executed and of the finest taste, with a stylized composition that was schematic and sometimes caricatural. Some of his painted wooden puppets also attest to his inventiveness, with their summary volumes and search for curious and effective rhythms, often with happy results."