You either have commercial pressure or ideological pressure. I prefer commercial pressure; otherwise, you can be at the mercy of one or two idiots.
Interpretation
The quote suggests a preference for commercial challenges over ideological ones, highlighting the dangers of being influenced by a few misguided individuals.
Milos Forman's quote reflects the complexities of decision-making in creative processes, particularly in the arts and media. He emphasizes that commercial pressure, although challenging, can be more manageable compared to the unpredictability and potential harm of being swayed by a small number of individuals with extreme ideologies. The implication is that commercial demands often align better with broader audience expectations, while ideological pressures can lead to narrow-mindedness and conflict.
In practice
In a discussion about managing creative projects, this quote can highlight the importance of commercial viability.
The worst evil is - and that's the product of censorship - is the self-censorship, because that twists spines, that destroys my character because I have to think something else and say something else, I have to always control myself.
A modern hero is very ambiguous. I went through some very rough times in Czechoslovakia - the occupation by the Germans at the end of the war. We had people going against their tanks with brooms. Are they nuts, or are they heroes?
Because if you lived, as I did, several years under Nazi totalitarianism, and then 20 years in communist totalitarianism, you would certainly realize how precious freedom is, and how easy it is to lose your freedom.
Mediocrity never goes away - but neither, I hope, do those who are willing to challenge it.
In my youth I regarded the universe as an open book, printed in the language of equations, whereas now it appears to me as a text written in invisible ink, of which in our rare moments of grace we are able to decipher a small segment.
[Hermes addresses Prometheus :] To you, the clever and crafty, bitter beyond all bitterness, who has sinned against the gods in bestowing honors upon creatures of a day--to you, thief of fire, I speak.
Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine.
Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.
Without restoring an ethos of social responsibility, there can be no meaningful and sustained economic recovery.
Small miseries, like small debts, hit us in so many places, and meet us at so many turns and corners, that what they want in weight, they make up in number, and render it less hazardous to stand the fire of one cannon ball, than a volley composed of such a shower of bullets.
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