For no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are. It is not important that those who ask the questions arrive at my answers or Marshall McLuhan's (quite different answers, by the way). This is an instance in which t...
Think of Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or Billy Graham, or even Albert Einstein, and what will come to your mind is an image, a picture of face, (in Einstein's case, a photograph of a face). Of words, nothing will come to mind. This is the difference...
Of course, in television's presentation of the "news of the day," we may see the Now...this" mode of discourse in it's boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without con...
I suppose if we gain anything from this unsought experience it will be an appreciation for honesty- frankness on the part of our politicians, our friends, our loves, ourselves. No more liars in public places. (And the bed and the bar are, in their wa...
It is fascinating that Baghdad had more than 100 public libraries in the year 891, Cordoba had 70 public libraries at the end of 10th century, while the royal library of Caliph al-‘Aziz, in the year 988, of the Fatimids in Cairo perhaps had more th...
Note found in the patron suggestion box: "You have SIGNS up near the computers that say BE QUIET, but people don't be quiet. They laugh out loud and talk out loud. Libraries used to be quiet, but they aren't anymore because you let all the assholes i...
The public has a right to art The public is being ignored by most contemporary artists. ... Art is for everybody. ... I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many different individual id...
Their job as leader was not to solve the problem – the president really has little control over the economy – but to convince the public not only that he has a plan but that he is altogether confident in the plan's success and that only a cynic o...
Absolute hospitality would in no way amount to the absence of violence. To the contrary, it would enthrone violence precisely under the guise of nonviolence because it would leave the violators unchanged and the consequences of violence unremedied.
In all societies, public rhetoric involves some measure of lying, and history -- political history and art history -- is made when someone effectively confronts the lie. But in really scary societies public conversation is an exercise in using words ...
DMV Clerk: I'm sorry, sir, but we don't provide motorist information to the general public. Trevor Reznik: I'm not just a member of the general public. This guy's a friend of mine. DMV Clerk: But you don't know your friend's address? Trevor Reznik: W...
Just as there are legal guidelines concerning the police use of provocateurs, there must be limits to how far the media can go in setting up a misleading situation ... I, for one, can simply not accept that telling a lie is an acceptable way of repor...
You'll have a good, secure life when being alive means more to you than security, love more than money, your freedom more than public or partisan opinion, when the mood of Beethoven's or Bach's music becomes the mood of your whole life … when your ...
I don't like publicity, being in the limelight.
Morals are private. Decency is public.
The public always picks quality.
The public is a bad guesser.
Everyone has a private self and a public self.
I'm not sure the public knows what it wants.
The public has become my fairy godmother.
The publicity and hoopla was never important to me.