Quotes from 2014

That’s what technology is. It’s the world of things, some impossibly stupid, some smarter than we are, we have assembled around ourselves to cover over our fundamental weaknesses as a species. The strength we have, the advantage this gives us, is our ability to stand apart from the things we’ve made: to use them and set them aside; to make them prosthetic extensions of ourselves and to let them go.

A growing body of opinion thinks […] that PowerPoint privileges the presenter in an unhealthy way and has the effect of discouraging critical discussion and analysis. It may also encourage group-think. PowerPoint is a potentially dangerous instrument of persuasion.

Power is best when it's distributed most broadly. That's what democracy means. That's what freedom means. The right to determine your individual destiny belongs in your hands, and no one else's.

If we believe that machines are ruining mankind, it may be that we are lacking a little in distance and cannot judge the effects of transformations as rapid as those that we have undergone. What are the hundred years of mechanical history when set against the two hundred thousand years of the history of man? We have scarcely begun to settle in this landscape of mines and power stations. Our life in this modern house has only just begun, and the house is not yet even complete.

Happy 25th birthday, Web.

This is what I want to learn: to notice, but not to analyse. To still the part of the brain that’s yammering, ‘My god, what’s that? A stork, a crane, an ibis? – don’t be silly, its just a weird heron.’ Sometimes we have to hush the frantic inner voice that says ‘Don’t be stupid,’ and learn again to look, to listen. You can do the organising and redrafting, the diagnosing and identifying later, but right now, just be open to it, see how it’s tilting nervously into the wind, try to see the colour, the unchancy shape – hold it in your head, bring it home intact.

Only the unknown terrifies men. Once confronted, it is no longer the unknown.

A friend said to me – we were talking about our stage in life, when we suddenly discover that we are the grown-ups, with children and parents, and even grandparents to tend to, not to mention our pupils, patients or clients or employers – that we spend so much time dealing with it all, there is scarcely time to feel.

Perhaps, though, if we join up all these minutes we are beginning secularly to observe, we could string them together in a new kind of Sabbath, where there are no men in black blighting our lives with their notions of sin, no chaining up the children’s swings for the Lord’s day. I mean a contemplative time, a time reserved to reflect. Perhaps we would feel less imperilled.

It’s obvious, but perhaps worth repeating, that everything raised is raised deliberately, nothing falls upward by accident. Everything the city lifts above itself has been given thought and design. Thought and design, then allotted a secretive existence, glimpsed now and again by the streetbound.

The idea that a private sector obliged to provide yearly dividends to shareholders and yearly bonuses to employees would be likely to provide infrastructural improvements that would be of benefit to future generations was always absurd. Infrastructural investment, almost by definition, is undertaken to provide profit for others, who can prosper from it, and pay taxes for their prosperity, taxes that can be reinvested in providing healthy, well-educated citizens who can in turn maintain, improve and exploit that infrastructure.

Absolute scientific truth was like the speed of light, a value which could be approached but never reached.

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.