A Quote by Naomi Alderman

Gaming is our cultural bogeyman - we blame it for everything from child obesity to violence to short attention spans. But any explanation that fits every situation ultimately explains nothing.

Naomi Alderman

Quote Topics

Any Attention Attention Span Blame Child Child Obesity Cultural Every Everything Explains Explanation Fits Gaming Nothing Obesity Our Short Short Attention Span Short Attention Spans Situation Ultimately Violence

Quote Author

Naomi Alderman
English - Novelist
Born: 1974

We live in a time of short attention spans and long stories. The short attention spans are seen as inevitable, the consequence of living our lives in thrall to flickering streams of information. The long stories are the surprise, as is the persistence of the audience for them.

Tom Junod

Attention spans are short. Like, eight seconds short. That's why it's necessary to grab people's attention immediately.

John Rampton

The argument from design is ultimately an appeal to miraculous causes, i.e., causes that do not, and cannot, occur in the natural course of events. This is why an explanation via design is not a legitimate alternative to scientific and other naturalistic modes of explanation. To refer to a miraculous cause is to refer to something that is inherently unknowable, and this sanctuary of ignorance explains nothing at all. However much it may soothe the imagination of the ignorant, it does nothing to satisfy the understanding of a rational person.

George H. Smith

The media, the polls and our legislatures fortunately have short attention spans.

John Gutfreund

It's not our fault our generation has short attention spans, Dad. We watch an appalling amount of TV.

Yeardley Smith

The ultimate pitch for an era of short attention spans begins with a single word - and doesn't go any further.

Daniel H. Pink

Land of snap decisions, land of short attention spans, nothing is savored long enough to really understand.

Joni Mitchell

I love the necessary ambiguity of short stories - there simply isn't time to render every detail, so much of the story that orbits the literal prose must happen in the reader's imagination. Who knows, maybe the dwindling attention spans means a lucrative future for short story writers.

Matthew Healy

It is a view of God that compensates every thing else, and enables the soul to rest in His bosom. How, when the child in the night screams with terror, hearing sounds that it knows not of, is that child comforted and put to rest? Is it by a philosophical explanation that the sounds were made by the rats in the partition? Is it by imparting entomological knowledge? No; it is by the mother taking the child in her lap, and singing sweetly to it, and rocking it. And the child thinks nothing of the explanation, but only of the mother.

Henry Ward Beecher

Any explanation or logic that explains everything so easily has a hidden trap in it. I'm speaking from experience. Somebody once said if it's something a single book can explain, it's not worth having explained. What I mean is don't leap to any conclusions.

Haruki Murakami

Any political situation has many sides... We intellectualize the whole situation any way... We make our intellectual decisions based on our cultural background and how we live.

Richard Gere

Although violence and the use of force may appear powerful and decisive, their benefits are short-lived. Violence can never bring a lasting and long term resolution to any problem, because it is unpredictable and for every problem it seems to solve, others are created. On the other hand, truth remains constant and will ultimately prevail.

Dalai Lama

Our cultural discussion of fat bodies and how we clothe them has nothing to do with health concerns, the obesity epidemic, or the comfort of fat people. It has everything to do with what we expect from women, what we've been told by the fashion industry, and the value we place on 'perfect' bodies.