Chuck Klosterman Quotes
Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age.
Quotes to Explore
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The utterly fallacious idea at the heart of the pro-war argument is that it is the duty of the anti-war argument to provide an alternative to war. The onus is on them to explain just cause.
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For someone with a background of economic justice, what scared me about climate change is not just that the sea level will rise and we'll have more storms - it's how this intersects with that cocktail of inequality and racism.
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All performers get on stage because they need to feel love from an audience. I might appear confident, but those three seconds before I get out there, I'm a mess. But I have to take the risk; otherwise, I'd be miserable and would feel like I wasn't seeing through my personal destiny.
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You can't win if you don't play as a unit.
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In some ways, I had a traditional 'old South' upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an inoculum of the military ethic that is still with me today: honor, duty, loyalty.
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Cleanliness becomes more important when godliness is unlikely.
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The idea was never for me to be a career bureaucrat or career technocrat; it was more about where I could implement ideas and reform programs.
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When I first got Yves Saint Laurent Couture, I didn't know how to take off a cape. I would ask Katoucha and Dalma - the real divas of the runway - 'Can you show me?' I've never been afraid to ask for help.
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The men and women of my generation are heirs to that great collective success which has been admired worldwide and of which we are so proud. It is now up to us to pass it on to the coming generations.
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When I got '227' and broke out from the rest of the cast, I became a workaholic, and I was very lonely.
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Well, I just wanted to be a person. I just wanted them to keep writing me as humanistic as possible.
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Any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.
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No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.
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I was very lucky: I started acting in this highly subsidized German theater world, so there was not so much job insecurity. We had great working conditions, long rehearsal times, well paid.
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I am not an oligarch. I am a servant and I try to align my interests and those of my investors.
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Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.
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I've had loss in my life, and I like to think my mother's energy lives on in some faintly Buddhist way. I do find some comfort there.
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History rarely repeats itself, but its echoes never go away.
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The kitchen is the heart of the house.
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Talk to people no one else is talking to. Who would have thought that giving a speech at a funeral at age 12 would introduce me to a man who would introduce me to my first business contact who would introduce me to several other important people in my life. That's luck. That's randomness.
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The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak; when you’re present in the current moment; when you’re resonating with the excitement of this thing that you’re experiencing; when you are fully alive.
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I really found this campaign odious. I couldn't get up for it. The quality of the candidates and the campaign, I just found the whole thing second-rate. I didn't know how to explain to my granddaughter that I was spending my dotage writing about Al Gore and George W. Bush.
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How can you tell a story with one frame that, by its simplicity, manages to tell a story, a gag that evokes an emotion in you? That became my motto throughout all my life. Simplicity.
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Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age.
