Shimon

“You have had a life. There have been moments when you were having a life. Of course you don’t remember too much about it; but there are photographs to prove it. This was probably happening round about the time of your adolescence, or just after. How great your appetite for life was, then! Existence seemed so rich in new possibilities.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Whatever

“Vincent Canby’s overview may have been Olympian, but it was well informed. ‘“Heaven’s Gate’—the phenomenon not the movie— has been a long time coming, but to blame it on any one director or corporate management is vastly to oversimplify what’s been happening to commercial American movies over the last several decades … the cost of making a movie, even a modest one, has soared even faster than the cost of everything else in the economy,” he wrote, correctly pointing out that “the hits make more money than ever, while people won’t go to see a Hop even if it’s tree. The pressure to find movies with some kind of built-in appeal grows greater day by day. Thus the emphasis on sequels, on ‘properties’ that have been pre-sold as best-selling books or hit plays, by name writers, by casts with great film or television celebrity, or by the reputations of those directors who have become ‘bankable.’”....The weaknesses and foolishness of an entire industry had been focused and exposed by Heaven’s Gate and United Artists....”
― Steven Bach, Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists

“When it comes to untimely questions, the challenge is not simply to find answers. We can have those without inquiring. We can even have true answers (“right opinion”) without inquiring. What inquiry gets us are answers that are both true and stable. When we have not really reasoned our way to a conclusion, it is easily reversed—especially under conditions of urgency. The preference for knowledge over mere “right opinion” is the preference for answers that have been stabilized by inquiry.”
― Agnes Callard, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life

“Being like Socrates” just means being open-minded, and willing to admit when you are wrong, and unafraid to ask challenging questions. This is not an ethical theory. It is more like a critical-thinking “sauce” that can be poured over any ethical theory, or simply over common sense.”
― Agnes Callard, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life