Screens Quotes

“We look at other people's lives, & we see what looks like a beautiful, adventurous, wonderful or tragic life. But so seldom do we see or even understand that what we see isn't their lives. Especially nowadays with news feeds, & statuses, we see only the surface, with not hint at the inner workings.To me, it's like a movie. We see the culmination of ones efforts, work, hardships, difficulties, progress, & pains. On a big screen that is life, but so rare & seldom, do we every acknowledge nor see the directorial point of view. The metaphorical behind the screens.So while we view others lives with a romantic envy, sweet longing, disheartened sympathy, or joyous reverence. We are so oblivious to the fact that their lives take the same trials, hardships, wonders, difficulties, & joys as we, it's merely manifested in a different on screen production. My longing, is to see that which is off screen. The inner workings, mundane & trivial, as well as the intense & breathtaking because without it, the picture it culminated in would not be.If we only take things at face value, we'll miss the wonders of the inner working. That which lies beyond sight, hidden away within. While it is what appears without that we all see, that which lies within makes what we see make sense.And it's in understanding someone's life & situation, that you can come to value their life & them.”

“Politicians in our times feed their clichés to television, where even those who wish to disagree repeat them. Television purports to challenge political language by conveying images, but the succession from one frame to another can hinder a sense of resolution. Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is ”breaking” until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean.The effort to define the shape and significance of events requires words and concepts that elude us when we are entranced by visual stimuli. Watching televised news is sometimes little more than looking at someone who is also looking at a picture. We take this collective trance to be normal. We have slowly fallen into it.More than half a century ago, the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens, the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, and the associated difficulties of thought. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, firemen find and burn books while most citizens watch interactive television. In George Orwell’s 1984, published in 1949, books are banned and television is two-way, allowing the government to observe citizens at all times. In 1984, the language of visual media is highly constrained, to starve the public of the concepts needed to think about the present, remember the past, and consider the future. One of the regime’s projects is to limit the language further by eliminating ever more words with each edition of the official dictionary.Staring at screens is perhaps unavoidable, but the two-dimensional world makes little sense unless we can draw upon a mental armory that we have developed somewhere else. When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading. So get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books. The characters in Orwell’s and Bradbury’s books could not do this—but we still can.”

“Ignorance screens the truth. It is on that screen that people paint pictures and write underneath their labels "god" and "not-god" and "theism.' and "atheism" .”

“People are so busy positioning themselves before the screen and talking on the damn cellphones, communicating, that we're not reading, and in fact we're not really communicating, either. We're not talking to each other. There's just all these screens and wires and technology in between.”

“The United States has never been in a united state, it has never been a united state. It never will. Lines on screens and paper do not change that.”

“And when you lay in bed with your wife,are you mentally there or with the women on TV? Or the women who you've been intimate with though the screens? You not only compare your wife to these women but also love her as though she was someone elsePhysically present when making love to her but mentally absent from herYou kiss her lips while your heart kisses the "screen woman”

“Celebrity mentality sometimes misguides us to make wrong choices. That’s why T.V screens sometimes lie to us!”

“I've been in auditions without screens, and I can assure you that I was prejudiced. I began to listen with my eyes, and there is no way that your eyes don't affect your judgement. The only true way to listen is with your ears and your heart. (p.251)”

“Woe betides anyone getting in the way of people that keep on muddying the waters, throwing up smoke screens and clouding issues, so as to conceal their dubious motivations. ("Could the milkman be the devil?")”

“Zawinski: Sometimes. I end up doing all the sysadmin crap, which I can't stand-I've never liked it. I enjoy working on XScreenSaver because in some ways screen savers-the actual display modes rather than the XScreenSaver framework-are the perfect program because they almost always start from scratch and they do something pretty and there's never a version 2.0. There's very rarely a bug in a screen saver. It crashes-oh, there's a divide-by-zero and you fix that.”