Words & Letters“The greater the inequality in any society, the more perverse the use of experts will be. Because actual knowledge, actual expertise threatens those on the happy end of the inequality. The truth can be a weapon for anyone, so you can’t just let anyone have it.” – Michael Lewis
“We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive.” ― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
“The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance” ― Carl Sagan
“Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” – George Orwell
“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” ― Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means
“Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.” ― Allen Saunders
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
“We are so overwhelmed with quantities of books, that we hardly realize any more that a book can be valuable, valuable like a jewel, or a lovely picture, into which you can look deeper and deeper and get a more profound experience very time. It is far, far better to read one book six times, at intervals, than to read six several books.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse
“Criticizing is easy and fast. Creating is difficult and slow. The two hours you spent on a book or movie usually took two years to produce. Anyone can tear down someone else’s work. The true test of insight is whether you can help them improve it or build something of your own.” – Adam Grant
“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” ― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own