Raoul Peck Quotes

Educate yourself: Read up on current events and books.

I stay up on current events. I read 'The New Yorker' and 'The Economist.' I go to community meetings to see what concerns the people in my neighborhood. I studied literature in college, so I also continue to read poetry, literature, and novels.

I may be biting off more than I can chew, but with 'The Simpsons' and with 'Futurama,' what I'm trying to do in the guise of light entertainment, if this is possible - is nudge people, jostle them a little, wake them up to some of the ways in which we're being manipulated and exploited.

With that radio I was always swimming with the current political streams in the West. I was never stranded.

I'm barely reading the 'New York Times!' But I do try to keep abreast of things.

I like to go back over history and check out what people have written and whether I agree with it or not.

History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.

It's so important for people to pay attention to history and learn from it, because it's the only thing we've got that's going to help us figure out where we are going. Especially the way things are manipulated in the press today. You have to sort through so much stuff to figure out what is real and what is not. It gets harder every day.

Books that kids read should be about what is going on in the world.

I think they are paying a lot more attention to news now, by the way, in part because of national-security issues. A lot of young people have friends or family in the military today.

I'm a very political person, and I think things through clearly, even when I was 18 years old.

I do a lot of reading of news so I can be smarter, and I do a lot of watching TV news so I can know why Americans aren't very smart. Then I can point out the hypocrisy of politicians or the media.

Modern young news consumers want not only to know what happened but why it happened.

The careful study of the past enlarges our foresight in contemporary affairs and affords to citizens and to monarchs lessons of incitement or warning in the ordering of public policy

There is so much going on in our country and in the world today... We're getting the headlines for a second, shaped by corporate delivery most of the time, but what's really the story there? Well, I'm turned on by that kind of stuff.

I have been a politically conscious citizen. I've been an artist, a reader, and have been chiselled by that.

I don't read the paper.

I don't really read the papers.

Constantly referring to past wrongdoings can become a substitute for developing a deeper analysis of today's foreign-policy challenges, of understanding what is new and different.

I always read the papers, the political bits.

Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.

A scientist is no more a collector and classifier of facts than a historian is a man who complies and classifies a chronology of the dates of great battles and major discoveries.

Physics is a good framework for thinking. ... Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there.

It's basically the same in all periods of societies. If you belong to the majority, you can avoid thinking about lots of troubling things.' 'And those troubling things are all you /can/ think about when you're one of the few.' 'That's about the size of it,' she said mournfully. 'But maybe, if you're in a situation like that, you learn to think for yourself.' 'Yes, but maybe what you end up thinking for yourself /about/ is all those troubling things.

I've always had a social awareness. My favorite channel on TV is BBC News 24. For a while, I had to have it on repeat in my house. I've always been interested in what's going on in the world.