Top 89 Quotes & Sayings by Alex Gibney - Page 2

Long ago I had a professor who told me, 'Embrace the contradictions.' I think that is what is most interesting about people like Jobs.

Whether or not he came to believe it - so many people, when they have a mission, come to believe something in a way that may have started out as a slogan. You know, L. Ron Hubbard, not to make a random comparison, started Scientology as a scam.

What a terrible world it would be if we only did films that were poster boards for political causes.

In the case of the Catholic Church, it's hard to understand how they so willfully sacrifice the children.

Steve Jobs was one of the first people to understand that the computer wasn't just a tool, but that it could be an extension of ourselves, and he positioned Apple that way. The iPod was this revolutionary device with the idea of 1,000 songs in your pocket, and then that machine represents who you are.

As the power of governments wanes, corporations become ever more powerful. Sometimes they do things that aren't so good. We should pay attention. Steve Jobs was saying, "Don't pay attention to all that stuff. Pay attention to the product you've got in your hand."

Jobs' incredible skill was as a storyteller, a salesman. He could captivate our imaginations and reel us in. He was more P.T. Barnum than Thomas Edison.

If people are portrayed as monsters, we become disconnected from them, and to me that is not remotely interesting.

I don't think Steve [Jobs] started Apple as a scam. But he understood early on the power of marketing. The idea of the computer as a bicycle for the human mind - I think that was something he believed.

Suicides aren't heroic in my opinion. And I don't think anybody ever really knows why somebody commits suicide.

I'm still an Apple person, but let's just say the magic aura is gone. In a way that was a sad thing to lose, but I feel better for it. It's just a machine now, not linked with any greater mission or mystique.

In many ways, I'm a big admirer still of Julian Assange. He had balls to do what he did and his motivations in terms of holding the powerful to account are tremendously inspiring to me.

You can't expect the institution to learn, if it doesn't accept any sense of justice.

As the power of governments wanes, corporations become ever more powerful. Sometimes they do things that aren't so good. We should pay attention.

No one likes documentaries.

Bill Gates, who is the classic computer nerd, as opposed to Steve who is, like the coolest guy in the world. And who is really doing things to make the world a better place?

Jobs would have ever have asserted that Bill Gates was not serious about technology. He was a huge pioneer in that world, albeit doing something quite different in approach from what Steve did. He was dismissive of Gates' foundation work as something he did to make himself feel better.

Steve Jobs did not start started Apple as a scam. But he understood early on the power of marketing. The idea of the computer as a bicycle for the human mind - I think that was something he believed. He believed in making people comfortable with these machines, which is why he spent so much time thinking about how to design them a certain way, how to make them so user-friendly and interactive, and why he spent so much time studying the Zeitgeist.

The Church must be all-powerful. You discover these horrors within institutions because predators find ways of hiding in plain sight.

What made so many people so upset when Steve Jobs died was that he was a kind of combination of daddy - in this relationship between the machine and ourselves - and also he was our guide. He was the one who led us to look into the mirror. He created these devices that became extensions of ourselves. Suddenly, he wasn't going to hold our hand as we went from product to product, which became increasingly about who we were.

In a busy world, even as information is moving so rapidly, we have to learn who to trust in that regard even as we ourselves have to become more critical of the people who we want to trust. It's a weird situation.

The internet connects us all and provides this fabulous fact-checking mechanism, and yet at the same time, the power of lies is conveyed much more efficiently now because they're accepted so fast.

One of the things about Steve Jobs is that he gives us an opportunity to look at the disjuncture between that world and the world he claimed that Apple represented, the "Think different" world of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and Gandhi.

The stuff about film being a collaborative medium is no joke.

I feel that Julian Assange came to be both paranoid and self-regarding in ways that ultimately undermined his own mission.

What's great about the Sundance Film Festival is the festival takes over that town as it's intended to do. But, it's very focused on a lot of other filmmakers and distributors so it almost feels like, while they're a lot of so-called civilians there, it's an opportunity that you have to see, to show your stuff to the other folks, your peers really, and to get that reaction.

The funny thing about being Catholic, and I was raised Catholic, is that you identify with the Church, just as part of your character. Nevermind what you believe, it's just who you are.

It's easy to get armchair analysts to talk, but to get people on the inside to talk is very, very hard.

I think many articles in the New Yorker have a strong point of view, but they are so rigorously fact-checked. I wouldn't call them objective, but they feel fair.