Lecturer: What’s the difference between ignorance and apathy?
Class: Zzzzzzzz…..
Lecturer: Oh come on — surely someone knows the difference!
Bored student: I don’t know and I don’t care.
From a talk given by Jeremy Hunt MP at the launch of the Open University’s Ethics Centre.
Leadership makes change possible. Management makes change happen.
Karan Bilimoria, founder of Cobra Beer, overheard on TV by Chris Blackmore.
Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.
John Milton: Areopagitica
The case for the blogosphere, in a nutshell.
Writing about horticulture has suddenly reminded me of something Dorothy Parker once said. She was challenged to come up with an interesting sentence with the word ‘horticulture’ in it and responded:
“You can bring a whore to culture, but you cannot make her think.”
Now, back to work.
“Time was on the side of the enemy, and we were in a position of not being able to win, not being able to get out…only being able to lash out…And so the war went on, tearing at this country; a sense of numbness seemed to replace an earlier anger. There was, Americans were finding, no light at the end of the tunnel, only greater darkness.”
The late David Halberstam, writing about Vietnam in The Best and the Brightest, 1972.
“There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat.”
George Tenet, former Director of the CIA, in his forthcoming memoirs, as described by the New York Times
If your business has any kind of online service, you should prepare your Google contingency plan, and pray that you never have to use it!
Quoted on Good Morning Silicon Valley
“The only known way to make software idiot-proof is to take away their computers.”
[Found on the web.]
I’ve always liked Sam Goldwyn, the movie boss, if only for the charmed way he mangled the English language. He arrived in the US from Poland as Schmuel Gelbfisz, a name deemed unpronounceable by the US immigration official who dealt with him and promptly renamed him Goldfish. He then formed a partnership with a guy called Selwyn, and changed his name by combining the first half of Goldfish with the second half of Selwyn. (Wags later reasoned that if he’d done it the other way round he would have wound up as Selfish.)
Some of the stories about him are incomprehensible without footnotes. Take this one from Lillian Hellman’s memoirs:
At a postwar banquet for Field Marshal Montgomery, Goldwyn rose and proposed a toast to “Marshall Field Montgomery”. After a stunned silence, Jack L. Warner corrected him, “Montgomery Ward”.
Footnote 1: Marshall Field was (maybe still is, for all I know) a prominent Chicago Department Store.
Footnote 2: Montgomery Ward was a leading US mail-order chain.
Hellman also recounts a time when the head of his script department told him that the studio would be unable to film her play The Children’s Hour because it dealt with lesbians. “OK”, Sam said, “we make them Albanians”.
(Details courtesy of The Guinness Book of Humorous Anecdotes, edited by Nigel Rees.)
Zadie Smith, quoted by William Gibson…
“But the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, ‘I should sit here and I should be entertained.’ And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true.”