A Quote by Jaron Lanier

The interesting thing about advertising is that the things that annoy us sometimes about it are really human. It's us looking at ourselves - and like all human endeavors it's imperfect.
What can the redwoods tell us about ourselves? Well, I think they can tell us something about human time. The flickering, transitory quality of human time and the brevity of human life - the necessity to love.
It's when people come at you on Twitter and say really crazy things. That's the kind of stuff that I insulate myself from. All of that is not very interesting or helpful, but we have critics who sometimes really love us or sometimes don't, and it's really interesting for me to see what they don't like about it.
We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing — by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.
It's extraordinary how self-obsessed human beings are. The things that people always go on about is, 'tell us about us', 'tell us about the first human being'. We are so self-obsessed with our own history. There is so much more out there than what connects to us.
"Bhagavad Gita" is an examination of consciousness and the desire of human beings and the quest that we have as human beings to understand ourselves; that it was a map, you might say, for exploring the territory that leads us to find out things about ourselves.
I don't know what it is about human beings but most of us really like reading about or observing sexual tension and romance. It's just so much fun. I don't know if there is some Darwinian thing in us that really responds to that, but I think the most memorable scenes to me in books and movies are the ones where a couple is about to kiss.
What's interesting about science is that we're constantly discovering new things about the universe, about ourselves, about our bodies, about diseases, about the possibilities of the future. It's amazing. Science is one of the coolest things about being a human being - without a doubt.
The interesting thing about a song like 'Bulletproof Heart' - it was [originally] called 'Trans Am' - the interesting thing about the amalgamation of that song was that the song also lived within us, like we all got to live with the song and it was around for about a year before we recorded it again, so the song got to really transform, which you don't really get to do.
It is difficult to see ourselves as we are. Sometimes we are fortunate enough to have good friends, lovers or others who will do us the good service of telling us the truth about ourselves. When we don't, we can so easily delude ourselves, lose a sense of truth about ourselves, and our conscience loses power and purpose. Mostly, we tell ourselves what we would like to hear. We lose our way.
I am always talking about the human condition and about American society in particular: what it is like to be human, what makes us weep, what makes us fall and stumble and somehow rise and go on from darkness into darkness and that darkness carpeted.
About 1.2% of the human genome is made up of genes, things that encode for proteins, the stuff that we consider us. There is about 8.3% that's a virus. In other words we're probably about seven times more virus than we are human genes, which is kind of a weird way to thinking about yourself.
All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.
All of us are imperfect human beings living in an imperfect world.
If we listen human instinct actually tells us what we need, but advertising makes us want things we don't need and things we can't have.
By making us stop for a moment, poetry gives us an opportunity to think about ourselves as human beings on this planet and what we mean to each other.
What children don't understand, and can't understand until they grow up some, is how much the whole fabric and process of human society depends on everybody agreeing to ignore, most of the time, the fact that all of us are, most of the time, inadequate, incompetent, pitiful, and, in fact, naked to our enemies. None of us really has very much in the way of spiritual, moral clothing. We dress ourselves in rags. And we agree to say nothing about it. To a very large extent, it is human charity that clothes us.
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