People now live their lives like an open wound to be famous - they do bad things because they're rewarded for it.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the obsession with fame and the lengths people will go to achieve it.
Ricky Gervais highlights a societal trend where individuals seek fame at any cost, often engaging in negative or harmful behaviors because they are incentivized by the rewards associated with notoriety. This observation raises questions about values, morality, and the influence of media on personal actions, suggesting that the desire for fame can corrupt and lead to unethical choices.
In practice
In a speech about social media influences, one might say, 'As Ricky Gervais pointed out, people act like an open wound for fame.'
You should make something. You should bring something into the world that wasn't in the world before. It doesn't matter what it is. It doesn't matter if it's a table or a film or gardening-everyone should create. You should do something, then sit back and say, 'I did that.'
It's better to create something that others criticise than to create nothing and criticise others. Go create, have fun!!
Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it finds things out. Science is humble. It knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn’t know. It bases its conclusions and beliefs on hard evidence -- evidence that is constantly updated and upgraded. It doesn’t get offended when new facts come along. It embraces the body of knowledge. It doesn’t hold on to medieval practices because they are tradition.
I used to believe in God. The Christian one, that is (There are a few thousand to choose from. But I was born in a country where the dominant religion was Christianity so I believed in that one. Isn't it weird how that always happens?). Luckily I was also interested in science and nature. And reason and logic. And honesty and truth. And equality and fairness. By the age of eight I was an atheist.
A Christian telling an atheist they're going to hell is as scary as a child telling an adult they're not getting any presents from Santa.
It’s a strange myth that atheists have nothing to live for. It’s the opposite. We have nothing to die for. We have everything to live for.
Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that of all the information passed by our cultural assets it is precisely the elements which might be of the greatest importance to us and which have the task of solving the riddles of the universe and of reconciling us to the sufferings of life -- it is precisely those elements that are the least well authenticated of any.
The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.
When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser.
[The captain] looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love and was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.
So much is not known about disability and so much feared. I can understand that because if we're not everywhere, if access and attitudes means we don't get to mingle and be in the same places as everyone else, then how do you know who we are?
It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.
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