A Quote by George Saunders
We have to move toward specificity, intelligence, facts, proof, and mutual affection. What I think people have to do now is be very, very assertive about the utter essentiality of intellectual undertakings.
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Intelligence is a separate gift, for the benefit of students, so that they may think of themselves as intellectual and not very intelligent, or intelligent and not very intellectual. One hopes, of course, that they try to bring the two virtues, the two elements, into their lives at the same time.
As the property market is very steep right now I think people should invest their capital in a mix of equity and debt instruments, through reputed mutual funds and maybe some in gold and silver. Regular savings are very very important.
But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed.
I utter this word with deepest affection and from the very bottom of my heart.
I'm very aware of the influence I've had, and I'm very pleased with that, because it proves that my work was necessary, that people liked it, and that it was right for its time which is a big compliment. But of course, this means I now have to move on. If more people are doing what I'm doing, I have to evolve. I'm pushed toward a new direction, and I have to let myself be tempted, find out where I can go.
I think there's going to be something that happens now, where books move in two directions, one toward digitized formats and one toward remembering what's nice about the physicality of them.
[The scientist] believes passionately in facts, in measured facts. He believes there are no bad facts, that all facts are good facts, though they may be facts about bad things, and his intellectual satisfaction can come only from the acquisition of accurately known facts, from their organization into a body of knowledge, in which the inter-relationship of the measured facts is the dominant consideration.
Think about all the great leaders. Think about Obama. Think about Clinton. Think about Nelson Mandela. Think about all the people that we know who are very successful in business, in politics and religion. What are they? They tell purposeful stories. They move people to action by aiming at the heart.
Jewish, black, Filipino, whatever the specificity is, it's specificity that makes a good story. And I think people are tired of seeing the same old shtick on network television. It's just a group of white people hanging out talking about their jobs. Who cares? We've seen that.
When we are young and again when we are old, we depend heavily on the affection of others. Between these stages we usually feel that we can do everything without help from others and that other people's affection is simply not important. But at this stage I think it is very important to keep deep human affection.
I've been criticized by many anarchists as believing that anarchism is impossible without affluence. On the contrary, I think affluence is very destructive to anarchism. If you are absorbed by that commodity world then you're not going to move toward any radical positions, you're going to move toward a stance of protectiveness.
I'm very rational, so sometimes I need the facts, and if I don't have the facts, then I get huffy, and I move on.
It was very definitely architectural. I was using the words on the page as some kind of equivalent of a physical model. But I never thought at that point that I wanted to move toward architecture. I wanted to move toward real space. Sure, that's probably another way of saying, I want to move toward architecture. But I didn't define real space in terms of architecture, then.
I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful...With artificial intelligence we're summoning the demon.
I do not believe that Russians changed the outcome of the election. I want to be clear about that. But I do think that it is very - some of the things we saw are very reminiscent of the active measures that Russian intelligence and before that Soviet intelligence agencies used to try to undermine the government or individual politicians in foreign countries.
Affection would not be affection if it was loudly and frequently expressed; to produce it in public is like getting your household furniture out for a move. It did very well in its place, but it looks shabby or tawdry or grotesque in the sunshine.
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