Helping convene global stakeholders to establish a set of measurable, actionable and consensus-built goals focused on extreme poverty is invaluable.
Bill GatesRead
Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on humanity's detached observation of historical events through media, often without emotional engagement.
Conor Cruise O'Brien's quote highlights a critical view of how people consume historical narratives as mere entertainment, often reacting with minimal emotional involvement. It suggests that while viewers may be momentarily shocked or outraged by what they see, the overall response is one of apathy, indicating a troubling disconnection from the real impact of history and its consequences.
In practice
During a lecture on media ethics, you might use this quote to illustrate the dangers of desensitization to historical events.
Helping convene global stakeholders to establish a set of measurable, actionable and consensus-built goals focused on extreme poverty is invaluable.
In these night recitations we create a space between things as we felt them at the time and as we speak them now. This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.
It seems to me a worthy goal: try to create a representation of consciousness that's durable and truthful, i.e., that accounts, somewhat, for all the strange, tiny, hard-to-articulate, instantaneous, unwilled things that actually go on in our minds in the course of a given day, or even a given moment.
National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right.
All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the first place.
The question is very understandable, but no one has found a satisfactory answer to it so far. Yes, why do they make still more gigantic planes, still heavier bombs and, at the same time, prefabricated houses for reconstruction? Why should millions be spent daily on the war and yet there's not a penny available for medical services, artists, or for poor people? Why do some people have to starve, while there are surpluses rotting in other parts of the world? Oh, why are people so crazy?
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