A Quote by Jean Piaget
It was while teaching philosophy that I saw how easily one can say ... what one wants to say. ... In fact, I became particularly aware if the dangers of speculation ... It's so much easier than digging out the facts. You sit in your office and build a system. But with my training in biology, I felt this kind of undertaking precarious.
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I drifted into a career in academic philosophy because I couldn't see anything outside the academy that looked to be anything other than drudgery. But I wouldn't say I 'became a philosopher' until an early mid-life crisis forced me to confront the fact that, while 'philosophy' means 'love of wisdom', and 'wisdom' is the knowledge of how to live well, the analytic philosophy in which I had been trained seemed to have nothing to do with life.
It is an odd fact of evolution that we are the only species on Earth capable of creating science and philosophy. There easily could have been another species with some scientific talent, say that of the average human ten-year-old, but not as much as adult humans have; or one that is better than us at physics but worse at biology; or one that is better than us at everything. If there were such creatures all around us, I think we would be more willing to concede that human scientific intelligence might be limited in certain respects.
How many times did we hear [Barack] Obama say, 'You didn't build that. You didn't build that - no, you need government.' We even saw Hillary Clinton say - remember her phrase - 'It takes a village to raise a child.' In other words, your children are not your children - they belong to the community.
I think moral philosophy is speculation on how we ought to live together done by people who have very little clue how people work. So I think most moral philosophy is disconnected from the species that we happen to be. In fact, they like it that way. Many moral philosophers insist that morality grows out of our rationality, that it applies to any rational being anywhere in the universe, and that it is not based on contingent or coincidental facts about our evolution.
It is a precarious undertaking to say anything reliable about aims and intentions.
Every time a colony wants independence, the questions on the agenda are: a) how do you get the imperialists out, and b) what kind of society do you build? There are usually the bourgeois nationalists who say, 'Let's just change the flag and keep everything as it was.' Then there are the revolutionaries who say, 'Let's change the property laws.' It's always a critical moment.
I felt voiceless for so long, I wasn't ever able to say what I felt out loud. I didn't know how to say it. Posting online presented itself as a comfortable medium. I could say what I wanted to say in a way I still felt comfortable. Whenever, however I wanted to.
It's much easier to point out the problem than it is to say just how it should be solved.
There's a problem with political polling in that you have so much pressure to do what your client wants you to do and say what your client wants you to say. I've never felt that pressure. I am independent of the political parties.
I think there is a kind of laconic Australian leg-pulling sense of humor that is certainly in some of my stories, or is an element in some of my books, and that's probably a direct result of where I've grown up. But other than that I don't draw particularly on the Australian landscape or the Australian biology and so on. So I don't think there's anything you could point to and say is particularly Australian.
Nice distinctions are troublesome. It is so much easier to say that a thing is black, than to discriminate the particular shade of brown, blue, or green, to which it really belongs. It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion.
It's always harder than you think to make a good film. Feature films are a hell of a marathon to say the least. It's kind of your endurance. How much can I push? How much do I care? How much time it takes is a nice reminder.
I do sense, as compared with let's say the early '50s, there's somewhat more of a careerism. I don't think it's anything special to economics; it's equally true with physics or biology. A graduate education has become a more career-oriented thing, and part of that is because of the need for funding. In fact, that's a much worse problem in the natural sciences than it is in economics. So you can't even do your work in the natural sciences, particularly, and even to some extent in economics, without funding.
I was fortunate to write pretty much a year out of film school and start making movies in the Hollywood studio system. But with each progressive film it became more frustrating not being able to speak and say things I wanted to say.
I've always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was... I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it.
When I saw contestants fighting for their lives on 'The Biggest Loser,' I realized I just wanted to be healthy - to have fun playing soccer with my son or teaching my daughter to shoot hoops. Then it was so much easier to say no to carbs, soda, or dessert, and the weight just came off.
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