People are more likely to search for specific books in which they are actively interested and that justify all of that effort of r...eading them. Electronic images and sounds, however, thrust themselves into people's environments, and the messages are received with little effort. In a sense, people must go after print messages, but electronic messages reach out and touch people. People will expose themselves to information in electronic media that they would never bother to read about in a book.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer g...oing to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It's going to be commercial and nasty at the same time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basically old- fashioned machine, it e...nshrines a basically old-fashioned idea: freedom. In terms of pollution, noise and human life, the price of that freedom may be high, but perhaps the car, by the very muddle and confusion it causes, may be holding back the remorseless spread of the regimented, electronic society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The war was won on both sides: by the Vietnamese on the ground, by the Americans in the electronic mental space. And if the one si...de won an ideological and political victory, the other made Apocalypse Now and that has gone right around the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall w...as opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
White lies are at the other end of the spectrum of deception from lies in a serious crisis. They are the most common and the most ...trivial forms that duplicity can take. The fact that they are so common provides their protective coloring. And their very triviality, when compared to more threatening lies, makes it seem unnecessary or even absurd to condemn them. Some consider all well-intentioned lies, however momentous, to be white; I shall adhere to the narrower usage: a white lie, in this sense, is a falsehood not meant to injure anyone, and of little moral import.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A complete woman is probably not a very admirable creature. She is manipulative, uses other people to get her own way, and works w...ithin whatever system she is in.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Do they merit vitriol, even a drop of it? Yes, because they corrupt the young, persuading them that the mature world, which produc...ed Beethoven and Schweitzer, sets an even higher value on the transient anodynes of youth than does youth itself.... They are the Hollow Men. They are electronic lice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Adults find pleasure in deceiving a child. They consider it necessary, but they also enjoy it. The children very quickly figure it... out and then practise deception themselves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »