Roger Cohen Quotes

PowerPoint makes us stupid.

People do not read stupidities with impunity.

It sounded stupid, but of course everything does when you're just getting the bare bones facts, only the basics.

Everything comes to us in fifteen-second sound bites and photo opportunities. All possibility for ambiguity - the most precious trait of any adequate analysis - is erased.

TV has taken reflection out of the human condition. People didn't use to have a ready answer for everything, whether they knew something about it or not. People think they have to have an answer for everything because the guys on TV have an answer for everything.

To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.

Today, our attention is less than the television advertisement. We're looking at six or seven problems constantly. We're living in the disturbed societies of cities. I think modern technology is one of the worst things human beings have invented.

The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span.

All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that's an alibi for my ignorance.

Henry Kissinger once told me he was very concerned about the Internet's impact on people's ability to absorb information in a concentrated way, because we've become accustomed to looking up something, getting a snippet and being satisfied with that - as opposed to reading through and considering a weighty tome that goes into great depth.

We do not talk - we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.

The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring.

Every game, and almost every life situation, has short cuts: ways you can get better without learning the entire literature of the game from beginning to end.

We've got to dumb America up again.

I don't know about you, but all this modern technology that's supposed to save us time and effort has actually ended up making things more complicated in my life, eating up extra time.

Just because you've Googled something doesn't mean you've learned.

I'm generally pessimistic about the dumbing down of America - especially with summer movies.

I do think digital media encourages speed-reading, which can be fine if one is simply seeking information. But a serious novel or work of history or volume of poetry is an experience one should savor, take time over.

People are losing the capacity to listen to words or follow ideas.

Sometimes I think that our culture lives in its soundbites.

If it doesn't go [fit] on a bumper sticker, we don't listen.

It's a bumper sticker culture. People have to get it like that, and if they don't, if it takes three seconds to make them understand, you're off their radar screen.

We have to deal in 30 second sound bites. It's not your fault. It's not our fault.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

The questions that our society must ask revolve around whether the time-consuming demands of the deep-reading processes will be lost in a culture whose principal mediums advantage speed, multitasking, and processing the next and the next piece of information.