Mary Douglas Quotes

We can be incredibly disconnected in this day and age with computers and cell phones.

We are in an age of technology where we sit in our little cubicles and we IM each other and Skype each other and never connect as human beings.

We have to wonder whether digital technology, rather than making it easier to communicate, is actually doing the opposite. We now sit alone at a keyboard, firing off zeros and ones into the ether. Offices are silent.

The smartphones and the computer separates everybody, makes you think that you don't need nobody else.

It's amazing how you cross paths with people. You work intimately, and then you never see them again the rest of your life, or even speak.

We have a million ways to get ahold of people, and we're the loneliest we've ever been.

I was always making new friends, then losing them.

We walked for some time, and grew to know each other, as best as we'd allow. These are some of the high points. They lack continuity. I don't apologize. I merely pointed it out, adding with some truth, I feel, that most liaisons lack continuity. We find ourselves in odd places at various times, and for a brief span we link our lives to others and then, our time elapsed, we move apart. Through a haze of pain occasionally, usually through a veil of memory that clings, then passes, sometimes as though we have never touched.

As efficiently as our phones connect us to one another, and as much as we take advantage of that, we must remember that they have the power to alienate us, too.

You look at my career, everywhere I went - Miami, Green Bay, Cleveland, Philly - they were always bringing in draft picks and former first-rounders and guys with free-agent deals to take my job.

In this day and age, technology has overtaken our lives and we are disconnected from reality.

I think, to many people in the company, I am somewhat of an outsider.

When I was young as a teenager, that was the biggest mystery in the world to me: Why don't people connect?

A man who lives unrelated to other human beings dies. But a man who lives unrelated to himself also dies.

I certainly think we're losing a lot of our connections with other people. I fear in my most pessimistic moments that the computer is simply another step down the road which we have already taken quite a few steps on. We're talking to each other on computers because we don't talk across the fence.

I had gotten so used to being alone, but never entirely used to it. Never used to it enough to stop wanting the alternative.

The very flexibility and ease which make men's friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the easier to destroy and forget. And a man who has a few friends, or one who has a dozen (if there be any one so wealthy on this earth), cannot forget on how precarious a base his happiness reposes; and how by a stroke or two of fate --a death, a few light words, a piece of stamped paper, a woman's bright eyes --he may be left, in a month, destitute of all.

There is a horrifying loneliness at work in this time. No, listen to me. We lived six and seven to a room in those days, when I was still among the living. The city streets were seas of humanity; and now in these high buildings dim-witted souls hover in luxurious privacy, gazing through the television window at a faraway world of kissing and touching. It is bound to produce some great fund of common knowledge, some new level of human awareness, a curious skepticism, to be so alone.

Nobody knows anybody. Not that well.

Maybe we had just gotten too used to being alone-- and maybe that needed to change.

A world that was crowded with people could still be a very lonely place.

She watched the prairies the rivers, the towns slipping past at an untouchable distance below - and she noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer. - Dagny Taggart

We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.

They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn't laugh or be sad with him.

Because we fail to listen to each other's stories, we are becoming a fragmented human race.