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Quotes by Critic
"And all I could do while I listened to this dude tell me how punk rock saved his life was think, Wow. Why did my friend waste all that time going to chemotherapy? I guess we should have just played him a bunch of shitty Black Flag records."
10
"Crazy things seem normal, normal things seem crazy."
10
"People will look at the world without seeing anything beyond their unconscious expectation."
10
"Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no 'normal,' because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously."
10
"We spend our lives learning many things, only to discover (again and again) that most of what we've learned is either wrong or irrelevant. A big part of our mind can handle this; a smaller, deeper part cannot. And it's that smaller part that matters more, because that part of our mind is who we really are (whether we like it or not)."
10
"Wishing for control is like wishing for the rapture."
10
"Every night, we're all having multiple metaphysical experiences, wholly constructed by our subconscious. Almost one-third of our lives happens inside surreal mental projections we create without trying. A handful of highly specific dreams, such as slowly losing one's teeth, are experienced unilaterally by unrelated people in unconnected cultures. But these events are so personal and inscrutable that we've stopped trying to figure out what they mean."
10
"Both men and women remain in dysfunctional, loveless relationships when it is materially opportune."
9
"I tell them that love is always there"that nothing can keep us from love if we dare to seek it and to treasure what we find."
9
"TV takes away our freedom to have whatever thoughts we want. So do photographs, movies, and the Internet. They provide us with more intellectual stimuli, but they construct a lower, harder ceiling."
9
"I've had the great pleasure of meeting Newt Gingrich and having a chat with the fellow on a staircase, ex"Sex Pistols vocalist John Lydon once told Rolling Stone. 'I found him completely dishonest and totally likable, because he doesn't care."
9
"Just watch any husband arguing with his wife about something insignificant; listen to what they say and watch how their residual emotions manifest when the fight is over. It's so formulaic and unsurprising that you wouldn't dare re-create it in a movie. All the critics would mock it. They'd all say the screenwriter was a hack who didn't even try. This is why movies have less value than we like to pretend - movies can't show reality, because honest depictions of reality offend intelligent people."
9
"The desire to be cool is-ultimately-the desire to be rescued."
9
"The dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough."
9
"Mass media has convinced us to think that silence is only supposed to happen as a manifestation of supreme actualization, where both parties are so at peace with their emotional connection that it cannot be expressed through the rudimentary tools of the lexicon; otherwise, silence is proof that the magic is gone and the relationship is over (hence the phrase 'We just don't talk anymore)."
9
"I wake up, I feel the inescapable oppression of the sunlight pouring through my bedroom window, and I am struck by the fact that I am alone. And that everyone is alone. And that everything I understood seven hours ago has already changed, and that I have to learn everything again."
9
"And I'm probably wrong. Maybe not completely, but partially. And maybe not today, but eventually."
9
"It's far easier to write why something is terrible than why it's good. If you're reviewing a film and you decide 'This is a movie I don't like,' basically you can take every element of the film and find the obvious flaw, or argue that it seems ridiculous, or like a parody of itself, or that it's not as good as something similar that was done in a previous film. What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive."
9
"Nothing can be appreciated in a vacuum."
9
"It appears that countless women born between the years of 1965 and 1978 are in love with John Cusack. I cannot fathom how he isn't the number-one box office star in America, because every straight girl I know would seel her soul to share a milkshake with that motherfucker."
9
"There is not, in a material sense, any benefit to being right about a future you will not experience. But there are intrinsic benefits to constantly probing the possibility that our assumptions about the future might be wrong: humility and wonder."
9
"Women intrinsically understand human dynamics, and that makes them unstoppable. Unfortunately, the average man is less adroit at fostering such rivalries, which is why most men remain average; males are better at hating things that can't hate them back (e.g., lawnmowers, cats, the Denver Broncos, et cetera). They don't see the big picture."
9
"Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views-even the awful ones-improve with age."
9
"The ultimate failure of the United States will probably not derive from the problems we see or the conflicts we wage. It will more likely derive from our uncompromising belief in the things we consider unimpeachable and idealized and beautiful. Because every strength is a weakness, if given enough time."
8
"We are losing the ability to understand anything that's even vaguely complex."
8
"Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake. Every comparison becomes impractical. This is why the impractical has become totally acceptable; impracticality almost seems cool."
8
"But the future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along."
8
"The drive to Santa Fe on I-25 is midly zen. There are public road signs that say 'Gusty Winds May Exist'. This seems more like lazy philosophy than travel advice."
8
"Within these strangely specific conditions, everything is perfect. We are perfect."
8
"If you play 'I Don't Want To Know' by Fleetwood Mac loud enough - you can hear Lindsey Buckingham's fingers sliding down the strings of his acoustic guitar. ...And we were convinced that this was the definitive illustration of what we both loved about music; we loved hearing the INSIDE of a song."
8
"Perhaps we humans are still in command, and perhaps there really will be a conventional robot war in the not-so-distant future. If so, let's roll. I'm ready. My toaster will never be the boss of me. Get ready to make me some Pop-Tarts, bitch."
8
"In Western culture, virtually everything is understood through the process of storytelling, often to the detriment of reality. When we recount history, we tend to use the life experience of one person - the 'journey of a particular 'hero, in the lingo of the mythologist Joseph Campbell - as a prism for understanding everything else."
7
"In a roundabout way, Boba Fett created Pearl Jam."
7
"If rain is God crying, I think God is drunk and his girlfriend just slept with Zeus."
7
"The deeper reality is that I'm not sure if what I do is real. I usually believe that I'm certain about how I feel, but that seems naive. How do we know how we feel? There is almost certainly a constructed schism between (a) how I feel, and (b) how I think I feel. There's probably a third level, too-how I want to think I feel."
7
"I honestly believe that people of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they're all so envious of it."
7
"If a problem is irreversible, is there still an ethical obligation to try to reverse it?"
7
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