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Quotes of the day: Stanley Kubrick
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Published Friday, March 07, 2014 @ 5:11 AM EST
Mar 07 2014

Stanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928 - March 7, 1999) was an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, and editor who did most of his work as an expatriate in the United Kingdom. He is regarded by many as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. His films, typically adaptations of novels or short stories, are noted for their "dazzling" and unique cinematography, attention to detail in the service of realism, and the evocative use of music. Kubrick's films covered a variety of genres, including war, crime, romantic and black comedies, horror, epic and science fiction. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)

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All great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.

Any time you take a chance you better be sure the rewards are worth the risk because they can put you away just as fast for a ten dollar heist as they can for a million dollar job.

Do we lose our humanity if we are deprived of the choice between good and evil?

Hitler loved good music and many top Nazis were cultured and sophisticated men but it didn't do them, or anyone else, much good.

However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

I don't like doing interviews. There is always the problem of being misquoted or, what's even worse, of being quoted exactly.

If it can be written or thought, it can be filmed.

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.

Include utter banalities.

It's a mistake to confuse pity with love.

It's intimidating, especially at a time like this, to think of how many books you should read and never will.

Modern science seems to be very dangerous because it has given us the power to destroy ourselves before we know how to handle it. On the other hand, it is foolish to blame science for its discoveries, and in any case, we cannot control science. Who would do it, anyway?

More people read books about the Nazis than about the UN. Newspapers headline bad news. The bad characters in a story can often be more interesting than the good ones.

Never, ever go near power. Don't become friends with anyone who has real power. It's dangerous.

No philosophy based on an incorrect view of the nature of man is likely to produce social good.

One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential that one man make a film.

People can misinterpret almost anything so that it coincides with views they already hold.

The most memorable scenes in the best films are those which are built predominantly of images and music.

The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent.

The power and authority of the State should be optimized and exercized only to the extent that is required to keep things civilized.

The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning.

There has always been violence in art. There is violence in the Bible, violence in Homer, violence in Shakespeare, and many psychiatrists believe that it serves as a catharsis rather than a model.

There's something in the human personality which resents things that are clear, and conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories.

This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.

What chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it’s really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.


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45 years ago today, things changed.
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Published Tuesday, April 02, 2013 @ 12:42 AM EDT
Apr 02 2013

Remember when technology was fun?

The future ain't what is used to be...

(YouTube video: the official trailer for Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which premiered 45 years ago, on April 2, 1968.)

A linear projection into the future of any science or technology is like a form of propaganda- often persuasive, almost always wrong.
-Pamela McCorduck

All scientifically possible technology and social change predicted in science fiction will come to pass, but none of it will work properly.
-Neil Gaiman

All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent.
-David Ross Brower

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
-James Klass

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
-Arthur C. Clarke

Cheese in an aerosol can is the greatest advance in technology since fire.
-James Angove

Each fall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, football fans cheer for their favorite irrational number: “Cosine, secant, tangent, sine, three point one four one five nine!”
-Bruce Watson

Engineers are always honest in matters of technology and human relationships. That's why it's a good idea to keep engineers away from ustomers, romantic interests, and other people who can't handle the truth.
(From Engineers Explained)
-Unattributed

Even though today's technology provides us with mountains of data, it is useless without judgment.
-Felix G. Rohatyn

Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology.
-Clive James

For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.
-Alice Kahn

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
-Richard P. Feynman

Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.
-Buckminster Fuller

I may be just an empty flesh terminal relying on technology for all y ideas, memories and relationships, but I am confident that all of that, everything that makes me a unique human being, is still out there, somewhere, safe in the theoretical storage space owned by giant ulti-national corporations.
-Stephen Colbert

If the Catholic church couldn't stop Galileo, then governments won't be able to stop things now.
(re: regulation of information technology.)
-Carlo de Benedetti

If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.
-Freeman Dyson

If we had had the right technology back then, you would have seen Eva Braun on the Donahue show and Adolf Hitler on Meet the Press.
-Ed Turner

In the old days, writers used to sit in front of a typewriter and stare out of the window. Nowadays, because of the marvels of convergent technology, the thing you type on and the window you stare out of are now the same thing.
-Douglas Adams

[Information Technology] people are so hypnotized by the technology hey don't look for real results.
-Peter Drucker

Levitt's First Law of Information Technology:
If it's free, adopt it.
-Unattributed

[N]either technology nor efficiency can acquire more time for you, because time is not a thing you have lost. It is not a thing you ever had.
-James Gleick

Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.
-Stewart Brand

One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they'll be proving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.
-Anton Chekhov

Screams erupted at a nearby hotel, where Microsoft founder Bill Gates was addressing an education and technology conference.
(Associated Press report of a Seattle earthquake)
-Unattributed

Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we need not experience it.
-Max Frisch

Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.
-Unattributed

Technology is really civilization, let's face it.
-Arthur C. Clarke

Technology makes it possible for people to gain control over everything, except over technology.
-John Tudor

Technology today is the campfire around which we tell our stories. There's this attraction to light and to this kind of power, which is both warm and destructive.
-Laurie Anderson

The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology.
-Sam Harris

The human race has today the means for annihilating itself-either in a fit of complete lunacy, i.e., in a big war, by a brief fit of destruction, or by careless handling of atomic technology, through a slow process of poisoning and of deterioration in its genetic structure.
-Max Born

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.
-E.O. Wilson

There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology- the tendency to do what is reasonable even when it isn't any good.
-Robert Pirsig

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.
-Douglas Adams

We have lots of information technology. We just don't have any information.
(New Yorker cartoon caption)
-Sydney J. Harris

We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
-Carl Sagan

While modern technology has given people powerful new communication tools, it apparently can do nothing to alter the fact that many people have nothing useful to say.
-Lee Gomes


Categories: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke, Quotes of the day, Stanley Kubrick, Technology, Video, YouTube


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