Collected Quotes

The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class — it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.

"It is quite true what philosophy says, that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle, that it must be lived forwards.”

"We live in the stories we tell ourselves."

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality."

"...the disingenuous reporter meets the insufficiently self-aware subject, and blood is spilled."

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.

There is nothing surprising about the flourishing of extremist ideology at times when people believe that their individual and collective survival are at stake. Just as in the interwar years, people of many nations no longer believe that the political establishment has what it takes to steer them out of a permanent and life-threatening crisis. In such conditions, false prophets and conspiratorial thinking can take hold of people’s minds, particularly when aided by new technologies of mass communication.

The event is the event. What we make it mean, is the value it all of a sudden has.

The fatal danger is to conflate the circumstances taking us towards authoritarianism with the individual actor; to assume that by removing one human being, like a piece plucked from the board, you change the rules of the game. This is hardly ever the case and modern political life is even more complicated than chess. In it, economically secure, well-educated and well-defended societies provide little space for populists, never mind tyrants. Societies collapsing or in peril produce one such figure after another. We must always dig deeper. We must always look for political answers.

We are obligated to make our best attempts to become the thing we wish to be, otherwise we forever remain the sorry consorts of our own defeat.

The climate catastrophe is screwing with the weather and the seasons. It is amplifying unpredictability—ginning up freak storms, early fires, unexpected mudslides, sudden heat waves. By the time a crisis hits, it is too late for places to plan, and the results will be what they always are: Everyone is rendered vulnerable, though people with money have options that people without money do not.

“Someone who grew up in a household of abuse and rejection, then being rejected by what probably felt like the whole entire world, re-traumatizing her in front of the world, it made me feel demoralized as a woman.”

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.