A Quote by Barbara Ehrenreich
Anyone who has invented a better mousetrap, or the contemporary equivalent, can expect to be harassed by strangers demanding that you read their unpublished manuscripts or undergo the humiliation of public speaking, usually on remote Midwestern campuses.
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Mankind invented the atomic bomb,
but no mouse would ever construct
a mousetrap.
You can't write a book and just expect it to sell itself, you know. We're not building that better mousetrap and waiting for the world to beat a path to our dear. You've got to build a market for your book.
For most of the movies that I've done, we've shot in a contemporary house, in contemporary clothes, speaking in a contemporary way. So, I really enjoy that. It really helps.
A collector recently bought at public auction, in London, for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakespeare; but for nothing a school-boy can read Hamlet and can detect secrets of highest concernment yet unpublished therein.
Personal humiliation was painful. Humiliation of one's family was much worse. Humiliation of one's social status was agony to bear. But humiliation of one's nation was the most excruciating of human miseries.
Basically, there are two things we know: Everybody has less time, and the general public is demanding better food - better in terms of quality and better in terms of flavor.
While I'm not an expect in psychology, I'm of the opinion that anyone - even strangers - can sense the urgency of a request, and most people will usually do the right thing.
I've seen unpublished manuscripts where the writer doesn't know they are making fun of the villain - but they are. If you aren't afraid of your villain, how can your hero be afraid?
If you're CEO of a company, you have to be a public person. You're speaking to the press, you're speaking to investors, you're speaking to employees, you're the public face of the company and so kind of naturally you become more extroverted, more outwards facing.
Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas.
It's a sick thing, right: people are afraid of public speaking. I do public speaking, except my public speaking involves the audience only having one type of emotion and one type of reaction. If they have anything other than laughter, it's a failure. That's an absurd thing for a human to try to seek. The main thing to realize is that whatever I say, it's my truth and I believe in it, and if I don't get a laugh off that, then it's not working.
... the object of learning was not to build a better mousetrap but to ask a better question.
Today, if you invent a better mousetrap, the government comes along with a better mouse.
If you build a better mousetrap, you will catch better mice.
Well, Americans expect our president to be human beings, and as imperfect as all of us are. They expect us to make mistakes and all that. But one thing the American public likes is, if you make a mistake, you do that, you cross that line that they expect you to behave under, then you apologize or then you correct that behavior and said you have learned, you are going to do better, you are going to achieve better, and you are going to serve a higher purpose than that.
A lot of people think that public speaking means that you are standing at a podium giving a speech, but public speaking comes in lots of different formats.
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