Richard Thaler Quotes

Postmodernism is an academic theory, originating in academia with an academic elite, not in the world of women and men, where feminist theory is rooted.

There was no intellectual movement in American history called social Darwinism. The people who were supposedly the leaders of the social Darwinist movement never embraced something called social Darwinism. It didn't exist.

We are so caught up in our media, in our jobs, in our gossip, and in our consuming that we genuinely feel like we don't have the time or energy to bother ourselves with the tribulations of nations near and far.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

In the past, we spoke of poverty, misery only in the south. Now there is a lot of misery, a lot of bad that creates victims in the north as well. This has become manifest: the global system was not made to serve the good of all, but to serve multinational companies.

It's always more interesting to make a movie about what is relevant in your society. What's the political global backdrop? What are our threats? What are we vulnerable to? Because that's what an audience vibes on - that is what people are interested in, universally.

I think the good thing about Dogme is that it forces you into an extreme sense of reality because there's no artificial light and no set design and all of those icings on the cake that you usually have on a movie.

Organizations like the ACLU fought and won the good fight back in the 1960's, but it's clear that nowadays they've run out of useful things to do since they now spend most of their time defending the scum of the Earth from getting what they rightly deserve.

If we wish to discuss knowledge in the most highly developed contemporary society, we must answer the preliminary question of what methodological representation to apply to that society.

Critics and academics often employ theories and philosophers in order to help them understand and dissect movies and books.

The Left has always sought single, non-values-based explanations for human behavior.

Our aims in political activism are not, and should not be, to create a perfect utopia.

Rapid changes - the machine age, the advent of universal and rapid communication, and many other new factors - have brought new problems. Succeeding generations have attempted to keep pace by reforming in piecemeal fashion this or that attendant abuse. As a result evils overlap and reform becomes confused and frustrated. We lose sight, from time to time, of our ultimate human objectives.

It's a good thing about George R.R. Martin: He's prepared to kill off the main guys. You don't get the feeling that the good guy is going to last forever, like James Bond.

The good thing about India, and the good thing about Melbourne, is that it's very, very hard on this planet of ours to find two places that are almost diametrically opposed.

I want 'Flash' to reflect the world we live in.

The important thing is to think about theory in life in that way. And I think we don't have to be theorists, we don't have to have gone to the academy, or to the university to learn theory and to be a theorist of gender.

I think part of the success which Structuralist or post-Structuralist thought in critical theory has had in literary studies in American universities is due to a theoretical vacuum.

At the beginning of this marvelous era it was natural to expect, and it was expected, that laborsaving inventions would lighten the toil and improve the condition of the laborer; that the enormous increase in the power of producing wealth would make real poverty a thing of the past... From Progress and Poverty, To those who, seeing the vice and misery that spring from the unequal distribution of wealth and privilege, feel the possibility of a higher social state and would strive for its attainment.

I'm a bit of a deconstructionist myself. It's kind of exciting - the last intellectual thrill left. Like sawing through the branch you're sitting on.

No theater could sanely flourish until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world.

So long as untouchability disfigures Hinduism, so long do I hold the attainment of Swaraj to be an utter impossibility.

I must confess that I and a few others are burdened with heavy responsibilities regarding the future of criticism. I am certainly, if not the inventor, then at least one of the first systematizers of an absurd critical practice that, as soon as it had peeked its beak out of the nest, flapping its new wet wings, took flight in the minds of the young, becoming a wild ox and sowing avant-garde literature with the mighty tomes of what might as well be called the abstract bear.

Haitians weren't screwed-up, but everything political, intellectual, and material around them is.

Once upon a time, the most successful Democratic leader of them all, FDR, looked south and said I see one third of a nation ill-housed, ill clad, ill nourished. Today our national Democratic leaders look south and say, I see one third of a nation and it can go to hell.