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Last sync: 19 Feb 2025 at 5:00:02 AM
👨‍💻 This list is curated by a human.

A collection of quotes that made me think or that I still need to think about.

“Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?”

9 Feb 2025 at 9:35 pm
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
Horowitz, Ben

“From the capitalist’s point of view, this working day is, of whatever length it turns out to be, divided into two parts. […] Part of the day is what’s called the necessary labor part of the day. That’s the part of the working day in which the worker reproduces his or her own cost, and for which he or she is paid through the wage. […] The other part of the working day, called the surplus labor part of the day, is the part in which the worker continues to produce goods or services, but for which she or he is not paid. This is the process that produces surplus value, and it’s the source of all of the capitalist’s profits.”

12 Jan 2025 at 8:02 pm
Consequences of Capitalism
Noam Chomsky

“It is also critical to point out that nothing enters our brains or minds unfiltered.”

30 Dec 2024 at 9:34 pm
Consequences of Capitalism
Noam Chomsky

“Propaganda will never die out. Intelligent men must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help to bring order out of chaos.”

30 Dec 2024 at 8:58 pm
Propaganda
Edward Bernays

“A man sits in his office deciding what stocks to buy. He imagines, not doubt, that he is planning his purchases according to his own judgment. In actual fact his judgment is a mélange of impressions stamped on his mind by outside influences which unconsciously control his thought.”

22 Dec 2024 at 7:56 pm
Propaganda
Edward Bernays

“In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion without anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issue so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public question; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time.”

10 Nov 2024 at 9:44 PM
Propaganda
Edward Bernays

“Always thinking far ahead, his aim was not to urge the buyer to demand the product now, but to transform the buyer’s very world, so that the product must appear to be desirable as if without the prod of salesmanship.”

10 Nov 2024 at 9:26 PM
Propaganda
Edward Bernays

“What impresses is the form of the argument. For Thoreau’s obsession with calculation runs deep. . . . He says: keep calculating, keep weighing. What exactly do I gain, or lose?”

28 Aug 2024 at 9:38 PM
Digital Minimalism
Cal Newport

“UPF is not food, like a banana or a piece of chicken, but rather a separate category of addictive edible substance.”

18 Aug 2024 at 10:00 PM
Ultra-Processed People
Chris van Tulleken

“We should all take responsibility for our diets, but overeating isn’t simply a failure of willpower or discipline. It’s much more insidious than that. Our brains regulate intake subconsciously, using ancient, evolved systems to manage metabolic rate, hunger, and satiety. The energy we pour into producing and processing our food transforms it from a source of nourishment to something more akin to a drug. The highly processed, flavor-engineered foods that dominate our supermarket shelves and commercials easily overwhelm our brain’s capacity to regulate energy balance.”

15 Jul 2024 at 9:37 PM
Burn
Herman Pontzer PhD

“Starting from the principle that the brain must infer the hidden causes of its sensory inputs, we’ve reached a new understanding of why and how our inner universe is populated with everything from coffee cups to colours to causality-ness – things that seem to be properties of an external objective reality, where this seeming-to-be is itself a property of perceptual inference.”

8 Jul 2024 at 9:05 PM
Being You : A New Science of Consciousness
Seth, Anil

“Advertisers don’t like the public sphere, where audiences are relatively small, upsetting controversy takes place, and the settings are not ideal for selling goods. Their preference for entertainment underlies the gradual erosion of the public sphere under systems of commercial media”

8 Jul 2024 at 6:36 PM
Manufacturing Consent
Edward S. Herman

“This was extraordinary. Morita deeply mistrusted customer surveys, and Sony prided itself on never consulting consumers in developing new products. “The public does not know what is possible,” he wrote in his memoirs. “We do.”

30 Apr 2024 at 9:24 PM
Pure Invention
Matt Alt

“How many hours of our youths—and adulthoods—were spent plugged in to various iterations of karaoke machines, Walkmans, and Game Boys? These things were more than the fads of a global consumer society. They had a strange ability to nourish our dreams as they entertained, to deliver and cultivate new fantasies in us.”

16 Apr 2024 at 7:32 AM
Pure Invention
Matt Alt

“But if you make your best effort just to continue your practice with your whole mind and body, without gaining ideas, then whatever you do will be true practice. Just to continue should be your purpose. When you do something, just to do it should be your purpose.”

16 Mar 2024 at 9:56 PM
Zen mind, beginner's mind
Shunryū Suzuki