Brooke Gladstone · 172 pages
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“Objectivity works to repel the attacks of critics, like a kind of ethical pepper spray.”
― Brooke Gladstone, quote from The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media
“There's a long-standing debate in the media biz over whether the news outlets should give the public what it wants, or what it needs. This debate presupposes that media execs actually know what it wants or needs. And that there actually is a unitary "public.”
― Brooke Gladstone, quote from The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media
“Speech itself, inevitable and unrelenting is the wind. It can dance like a zephyr. It can roar or shriek or wail. But it cant be stopped. Everything we hate about the media today was present at its creation; its corrupt or craven practitioners, its easy manipulation by the powerful, its capacity for propagating lies, its penchant for amplifying rage.
Also present was everything we admire: factual information, penetrating analysis, probing investigation, truth spoken to power. Same as it ever was.”
― Brooke Gladstone, quote from The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media
“Humans run on emotion, assumption and impulse. We cant function on logic alone. But emotion assumption and impulse also allow us to weave cozy cocoons of unexamined prejudice and received wisdom. They shield us from the pain of unwelcome information.”
― Brooke Gladstone, quote from The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media
“Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it. Finally suppose he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence that his belief is wrong. What will happen? The individual will frequently emerge not only unshaken but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed he may even show a new fervor for converting other people to his view.”
― Brooke Gladstone, quote from The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media
“The big threat of photoshopification is not that we will believe documents and photos are fake. Its that we'll find it easier to disbelieve documents and photos that are real, when its convenient.”
― Brooke Gladstone, quote from The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media
“Many focus on what they perceive as a loss of some vital aspect of our humanity. To me, the sessence of being human is not in our limitations. It is our ability to reach beyond our limitations. We did not stay on the ground. We did not even stay on the planet. And we are already not settling for the limitations of our biology.”
― Brooke Gladstone, quote from The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media
“Worrying about offending people drags us back to the lowest common denominator
Our enemies are not the digital bits that dance across our screens but the neural impulses that animate our lizard brains”
― Brooke Gladstone, quote from The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media
“Liza-don't let it make any difference. It won't, will it? With us, I mean."
"Of course it won't," I told her.
But I was wrong. Six months of not writing-that's a difference.
And so I lied to Annie. On top of everything else, I lied to Annie, too.”
― Nancy Garden, quote from Annie on My Mind
“This isn’t about the Ravens. This is about you. This is about everything it took you to get to this point, everything it cost you, and everyone who laughed when you dared to dream of something big and bright. You’re here tonight because you refused to give up and refused to give in. You’re here where they all said you’d never be, and no one can say you haven’t earned the right to play this game.
“All eyes are on you. It’s time to show them what you’re made of. There’s no room for doubt, no room for second guesses, no room for error. This is your night. This is your game. This is your moment. Seize it with everything you’ve got. Pull out all the stops and lay it all on the line. Fight because you don’t know how to die quietly. Win because you don’t know how to lose. This king’s ruled long enough—it’s time to tear his castle down.”
― Nora Sakavic, quote from The King's Men
“...for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainty, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers' seal of approval. But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celbrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks. What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or movie theatre, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our palaces of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveller, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them our least-fulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time.”
― Salman Rushdie, quote from The Ground Beneath Her Feet
“Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.”
― Marcel Proust, quote from Time Regained
“Es gibt einen Ort in uns, wo es praktisch die ganze Zeit regnet, die Schatten immer lang und der Wald voller Ungeheuer ist.”
― Richard Bachman, quote from The Running Man
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