We live in an age when you can prowl the streets of major cities and find human beings offering themselves in store windows, or just reach for the yellow pages and have them delivered. It is the same mindset at work, spreading in our world, and after a while this attitude can find nothing very special about anything or anybody, let alone whales.
All cities have one key resource: the special abilities of the people who live in them. You just have to find out what they are. In the Australian city of Adelaide, for example, which is overshadowed by Sydney and Melbourne, I discovered a number of experts in the penal system. I advised them to work with these special skills.
We had one or another form of state capitalism during an extremely brief period of human history, which tells us essentially nothing about human nature. If you look at human societies and human interactions, you can find anything. You find selfishness, you find altruism, you find sympathy.
It's not given to human beings to have such talent that they can just know everything about everything all the time. But it is given to human beings who work hard at it - who look and sift the world for a mispriced bet - that they can occasionally find one. And the wise ones bet heavily when the world offers them that opportunity. They bet big when they have the odds. And the rest of the time they don't. It's just that simple.
I can't tell you how many home businesses are almost in bankruptcy court over a Yellow Pages ad only to find out that the Yellow Pages ad isn't where their market will look for them, and it cost more than they thought.
I have no ideals. I have no will that the world should be any better or worse or anything... Because I know that for every genius there exists a robbing murderer. There is nothing to do about that. The world is such that if you want to find the intensity within the genuine, you will at the same time find the criminals around the nearest corner. And if you eliminate that genetic quality in the human being, then everyone will become very inactive and very boring, but on the other hand we get rid of criminality.
By looking upon themselves as human beings, their whiteness to them isn't the yardstick of perfection or honor or anything else. And, therefore, this creates within them an attitude that is different from the attitude of the white that you meet here in America, and it was in Mecca that I realized that white is actually an attitude more so than it's a color.
Not that I ever felt the necessity of proving that all human beings suffer the same way, feel joy the same way, but it happened on my way - when I get close to these people, just by the simple intervention of translation I can actually reach them and ask them something, and their reaction is as I expected. I see that the relationship goes so smoothly, and I realize that cultural languages and specificities are nothing but simple obstacles that you can easily overcome. It's obvious that human beings are the same wherever they are.
Although human beings are incapable of talking about themselves with total honesty, it is much harder to avoid the truth while pretending to be other people. They often reveal much about themselves in a very straightforward way. I am certain that I did. There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.
This is the part of us that makes our brief, improbable little lives worth living: the ability to reach through our own isolation and find strength, and comfort, and warmth for and in each other. This is what human beings do. This is what we live for, the way horses live to run.
With Hyperloop One, the world will be cleaner, safer, and faster. It's going to make the world a lot more efficient and will impact the ways our cities work, where we live, and where we work. We'll be able to move between cities as if cities themselves are metro stops.
I always try to find better ways to do things. Whether it's a game plan, a practice, a meeting, an interview, whatever it is. I'm going to find a way to find a way to analyze it and find a better way to do it. That's my mindset. I've never been satisfied with anything. That's just my mindset. I'm always trying to find a better way to do things.
As a country, Americans have to find a way to keep our cities solvent. If large numbers of cities no longer have the necessary tax base, we have to find federal methods to intervene. If we don't, there's a risk of dozens of cities simply being left to their bankrupt fates - and I can't see how that serves anybody's interests in the long run.
The story of the Baudelaires takes place in a very real world, where some people are laughed at just because they have something wrong with them, and where children can find themselves all alone in the world, struggling to understand the mystery that surrounds them.
My world of human beings had perished. I was utterly alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter language compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure, wasted effort
Examining the world in order to find consolation is very much like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order to find our own name . ... Whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us from a true knowledge of the contents.
I'm in love with cities. I find them amazing, the quiet co-ordination of thousands of people, going about what we're trying to do, and that organism of the city nurturing human aspiration, and the actual city fabric itself being a special thing rather than just infrastructure.