harvey1966

[harvey1966]

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

Abba Eban

[harvey1966]

"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality."

-Lewis Carroll

[harvey1966]

[harvey1966]

"...the disingenuous reporter meets the insufficiently self-aware subject, and blood is spilled."

Adam Gopnik writing for the New Yorker, on Lillian Ross' damaging piece on Hemingway

[harvey1966]

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

– Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

[harvey1966]

I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.

- Antonio Gramsci

[harvey1966]

There is nothing surprising about the flourishing of extremist ideology at times when people believe that their individual and collective survival are at stake. Just as in the interwar years, people of many nations no longer believe that the political establishment has what it takes to steer them out of a permanent and life-threatening crisis. In such conditions, false prophets and conspiratorial thinking can take hold of people’s minds, particularly when aided by new technologies of mass communication.

- Thomas Weber, historian

[harvey1966]

The event is the event. What we make it mean, is the value it all of a sudden has.

- Demi Moore

[harvey1966]

The fatal danger is to conflate the circumstances taking us towards authoritarianism with the individual actor; to assume that by removing one human being, like a piece plucked from the board, you change the rules of the game. This is hardly ever the case and modern political life is even more complicated than chess. In it, economically secure, well-educated and well-defended societies provide little space for populists, never mind tyrants. Societies collapsing or in peril produce one such figure after another. We must always dig deeper. We must always look for political answers.

-Andrew Marr, the New Statesman

[harvey1966]

We are obligated to make our best attempts to become the thing we wish to be, otherwise we forever remain the sorry consorts of our own defeat.

- Nick Cave

[harvey1966]

The climate catastrophe is screwing with the weather and the seasons. It is amplifying unpredictability—ginning up freak storms, early fires, unexpected mudslides, sudden heat waves. By the time a crisis hits, it is too late for places to plan, and the results will be what they always are: Everyone is rendered vulnerable, though people with money have options that people without money do not.

Our country’s response is too late and all wrong, at a fundamental level. This is the underlying issue, of course: We should have started weaning ourselves off fossil fuels earlier. We need to wean ourselves off fossil fuels faster.

But we are in an emergency now.

-Annie Lowrey

[harvey1966]

The Sachs quote ‘Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives’ is a bit pompous, definitely privileged, but also a reminder to try…to shake off the shackles preventing us from being our truest selves.

[harvey1966]

“Someone who grew up in a household of abuse and rejection, then being rejected by what probably felt like the whole entire world, re-traumatizing her in front of the world, it made me feel demoralized as a woman.”

Musician Kathleen Hannah on Sinéad O'Connor (and the hostility she faced after tearing up a photo of the Pope)

[harvey1966]

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

-Michael Crichton

[harvey1966]

“Dear heart, try to understand a mole too used to the dark to believe in light.”

-John le Carré in a letter to Susan Kennaway, with whom he began an affair in 1964

[harvey1966]

The United States used to be called the New World. It’s a new world again, maybe the way it was becoming new in the 1910s. (Journalist Walter) Lippmann was pragmatic, in many ways conservative, in no way a utopian, but back at that chaotic, pivotal moment he quoted Oscar Wilde’s line that “a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at,” because social progress only comes by navigating toward hopeful visions of perfection. “Our business is not to lay aside the dream,” Lippman explained, “but to make it plausible. Drag dreams out into the light of day, show their sources, compare them with fact, transform them to possibilities … a dream … with a sense of the possible.”

Kurt Andersen, Evil Geniuses

[harvey1966]

Strikers love to win; goalies hate to lose.

-Saying among soccer players.