Lawrence Douglas famous quotes

If money doesn't come with misery, then it's not at all interesting and it's not at all fair. It seems if you have all this money, and no misery, you're really in a world of unalloyed happiness, and that seems to violate some deep principle of universal justice. We tend to live in a culture now where people have unbelievable, inconceivable amounts of money without any kind of remorse.
-- Lawrence Douglas

#People #Justice #Interesting

It seems when the madness sets in the mix of wealth and seductiveness, it's never the first generation that acquired the wealth; they had to be quite savvy. That savvy-ness probably meant you were some sort of alpha person. That alpha stuff in the later generations, you still have the intelligence, but it tends to manifest itself in bipolar disorders and inestimable amounts of depression.
-- Lawrence Douglas

#Bipolar #Madness #Wealth

It does seem like if you're an interesting person and you have endless amounts of money to indulge your fantasies, then those fantasies will be plagued with guilt about that level of indulgence. It really becomes a self-defeating exercise in pursuing hedonistic desires in any sort of normal or guiltless fashion.
-- Lawrence Douglas

#Fashion #Exercise #Interesting

I do think it's interesting when people are born into families that at one point had huge amounts of money and that money has kind of vanished over the generations and they're sort of the last vestiges. You see that these people live really quite modestly and yet, somehow the way the clothes fit them, they still have some kind of strange genetic advantage over the rest of us. There's always these weird things in which you detect the legacy. There's a pair of cufflinks that you look at and go, "Oh, my God! These had to come from the Romanovs."
-- Lawrence Douglas

#Thinking #People #Interesting

Aristocratic depression has this cosmic dimension to it, where it's asking these big questions about, "Why?" "What is the purpose of all this?" Neuroses of the middle class is the banishment of aristocratic depression, because it's kind of this obsession with quotidian detail that pushes these larger questions away.
-- Lawrence Douglas

#Purpose #Kind #Obsession

I think for much of the middle classes, nothing could be more fantastic than to have a contact with fame. But once you have that contact with fame and find out how vacuous it is, that it doesn't answer anything or supply any ultimate revelation to cosmic dilemmas and you're still left with yourself, then it's back to the drawing room with fading light and one light bulb out in the very expensive chandelier that no one has bothered to replace.
-- Lawrence Douglas

#Thinking #Fame #Fantastic

Nothing is drearier than just always telling the truth about yourself. Rousseau, who as far as I can tell was a pathological liar, made this wonderful distinction between lying, which he said there was something wrong with if you were trying to extract an advantage for yourself or evade responsibility for some nasty thing you'd done. But if all you're really trying to do is impress or keep it young or make life more vivid and interesting, go for it! There's no real harm in doing something like that. I think people can be overly saddled to the truth.
-- Lawrence Douglas

#Real #Liars #Lying

It's not success that makes a person's life worthy of legend. It's provocative defeat, someone who struggled mightily and lost. And that loss can't just be gratuitous - there has to be something about his or her character that whittles that loss into something provocative.
-- Lawrence Douglas

#Character #Loss #Defeat

Often we want people to pray for us and help us, but we always defeat our object when we look too much to them and lean upon them. The true secret of union is for both to look upon God, and in the act of looking past themselves to Him they are unconsciously united.

The question of boundaries is a major question of the Jewish people because the Jews are the great experts of crossing boundaries. They have a sense of identity inside themselves that doesn't permit them to cross boundaries with other people.

There are a lot of people who know me who can't understand for the life of them why I would got to work on something as unserious as baseball. If they only knew.

My goal has been to encourage jointness, to push people to think of affiliations rather than to operate as solo entrepreneurs.

Major sports are major parts of society. It's not anomalous to have people who love sports come from other parts of that society.

Science fiction is a field of writing where, month after month, every printed word implies to hundreds of thousands of people: 'There is change. Look, today's fantastic story is tomorrow's fact.

Those who deplore our militants, who exhort patience in the name of a false peace, are in fact supporting segregation and exploitation. They would have social peace at the expense of social and racial justice. They are more concerned with easing racial tension than enforcing racial democracy.

The best product should be bought, the best man should be rewarded more. Interfering factors which befuddle this triumph of virtue, justice, truth, and efficiency, etc., should be kept to an absolute minimum or should approach zero as a limit.

The interesting adults are always the school failures, the weird ones, the losers, the malcontents, this isn’t wishful thinking. It’s the rule.

I like people with depth, I like people with emotion, I like people with a strong mind, an interesting mind, a twisted mind, and also someone that can make me smile.