Mark Twain – Corn-Pone Opinions
“We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. It is held in reverence. Some think it the voice of God.”
Quotes
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
“If there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.”
Kellyanne Conway (counselor to President Donald Trump)
“You’re saying it’s a falsehood. And they’re giving…our press secretary gave alternative facts.”
Karl Rove
“[You] in what we call the reality-based community…believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We create our own reality.” (Acting as senior adviser to President George W. Bush)
Kurt Andersen – Fantasyland
“Skepticism, after all, is an antonym for credulity. But when both are robust and overheated, they can fuse into conspiracy-mindedness.”
Kurt Andersen – Fantasyland
“… mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.”
Lee McIntyre – Post-Truth
“How ironic that the Internet, which allows for immediate access to reliable information by anyone who bothers to look for it, has for some become nothing but an echo chamber. And how dangerous. With no form of editorial control over what is now sometimes presented as “news,” how can we know when we are being manipulated?”
Lee McIntyre – Post-Truth
“Why search for scientific disagreement when it can be manufactured? Why bother with peer review when one’s opinions can be spread by intimidating the media or through public relations? And why wait for government officials to come to the “right” conclusion when you can influence them with industry money?”
Sigmund Freud – Letter to Fiancée 1884
“So I gave my lecture yesterday. Despite lack of preparation, I spoke quite well and without hesitation, which I ascribe to the cocaine I had taken beforehand. I told about my discoveries in brain anatomy, all very difficult things that the audience certainly didn’t understand, but all that matters is that they get the impression that I understand it.”
Dale Maharidge
“Old-school journalism was a trade, and legacy journalists find today’s brand of personality journalism, with its emphasis on churning out blog posts, aggregating the labor of others, and curating a constant social-media presence, to be simply foreign. And the higher-ups share the new bias. One editor of a major national publication, who himself is well over 40, confided to me that he’s reluctant to hire older journalists, that “they’re stuck in the mentality of doing one story a week” and not willing to use social media.”