A Quote by Neal Stephenson
..this is just like life must be for about 99 percent of the people in the world. You're in this place. There's other people all around you, but they don't understand you and you don't understand them, but people do a lot of pointless babbling anyway. In order to stay alive, you have to spend all day every day doing stupid meaningless work. And the only way to get out of it is to quit, cut loose, take a flyer, and go off into the wicked world, where you will be swallowed up and never heard from again.
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Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you're lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who've been around awhile know it's just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it's never even there in the first place.
You couldn't get me to go travel around and sit in a hotel room again. I have no interest in doing that. So everybody's happy. I am, at 74. Some people like doing it, but I never was much for that, anyway. It's a lot of work. So the only thing I miss about all of it is the camaraderie of the tour, but that doesn't offset the rest of it.
I mean, let's face it, it's 2000 and people are beginning to wake up on some level. I think that, as I was saying earlier, there's just no denying the impact that showing people the truth can have. It allows people to understand themselves, and when you understand yourself you can understand the people around you. And then you can begin to let go of all the bullshit that leads into things like world wars, racism, stereotypes, and bigotry.
I'll never, never understand why people think it's their business to comment on other people's bodies. I go to a spa in LA sometimes, a Korean day spa, and all the women there are nude. And I've never felt so in love with the human form as when I'm walking around and seeing all those bodies, thinking, Oh my god, we're all just built so differently. And every single body is beautiful. I will never understand that shame, and the reinforcement of that shame. It's crazy.
A Senegalese poet said 'In the end we will conserve only what we love. We love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.' We must learn about other cultures in order to understand, in order to love, and in order to preserve our common world heritage.
There's an awful lot of misunderstanding here about what being poor actually means. I don't think people understand that being poor means you have to work from dawn until dusk just to survive through the day. I think there's some notion that poor people lie about all day not doing anything. It is remarkable how many misconceptions there are here about life in the developing world and I think that that knowledge gap has done a lot to contribute to the imbalance quite frankly.
All I'm doing, all I have done for 40 years, is spend time with the best scientific experts, gain their confidence, and take advantage of their patience in explaining things to me over and over again in progressively simpler language that I can understand, so that I can read it back to them and get their sign off, where they say, "Yep, that's it, Al. You've got it." When I understand it, I know I can explain it to other people. When the scientists' predictions end up being true, I see that as an opportunity to say to people, "Listen carefully to what they're saying now."
We're trained to believe we should cling to one person only. Yet there are so many people who pass in and out of our lives. Good people, worth people, interesting people. Most of them stay for a little while and then move on. Some of them find a place with us and, if we let them, they enrich us. Don't close yourself off from the rest of the world, Eve. If you find someone who can make you understand a little more, laugh every now and then, give you a new experience, then never feel guilty. You'll just have more to give back to those who are closest to you.
I believe in the science. When you think about GMOs, I spend a lot of time on them, and I understand them. But I understand that my telling people on faith may not carry the day. They need to see it, understand it, [and we need to] arm them with facts, educate them, and let them make their choices.
A lot of young producers will stay at home and make beats all day but making beats is only about 20 percent of the job. The other 80 percent is networking; that's what I feel like a lot of people are lacking.
Opinions are very easily heard in our media and technology-type of world that we're in. I just try to stay focused on the people that I'm around every day that I work with, that I trust and value.
Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.
I think the biggest faults that bands tend to have in terms of drama or breaking up is bands don't learn people's personalities. When you spend as much time with people obviously it's going to rub off, and you are going to get to know the way people are. You can make sure day to day people are accommodated to and people feel positive about the experience, then you can stay together as a band, at least that is my opinion.
People clearly want to believe that the world is a just and fair place. It provides them a sense of control and makes them psychologically comfortable. But believing that the world is a just and fair place causes people to not do enough to take care of themselves and to be unprepared for when it isn't so nice. So, people need to understand their tendencies to see the world as just and fair and then be realistic about the actual conditions in which they find themselves.
You can travel from one end of the industrialized world to the other and almost the only people you will find engaging in backbreaking toil are people who are doing it for sport. To find people whose day's toil has not been lightened by mechanical invention, you must go to the non-capitalist world.
It's like Christmas every day playing in the NBA. You don't have to worry about the real world and real issues. As you get older, you get more mature and you understand that. There's so many other things going on that we have to shed light on to help these people any way we can.
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