Franklin Foer QUOTES

1 " Soccer isn't the same as Bach or Buddhism. But it is often more deeply felt than religion, and just as much a part of the community's fabric, a repository of traditions. "

― Franklin Foer , How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

2 " Critics of soccer contend that the game inherently culminates in death and destruction. They argue that the game gives life to tribal identities which should be disappearing in a world where a European Union and globalization are happily shredding such ancient sentiments. Another similar widely spread thesis that holds that the root cause of violence can be found in the pace of the game itself. Because goals come so irregularly, fans spend far too much time sublimating their emotions, anticipating but never releasing. When those emotions swell and become uncontainable, the fans erupt into dark, Dionysian fits of ecstatic violence. "

― Franklin Foer , How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

3 " There's a strange uniformity in the vocabulary European soccer fans use to hate black people. The same primate insults get hurled. Although they've gotten better over time, the English and Italians developed the tradition of making ape noises when black players touched the ball. The Poles toss bananas on the field. This consistency owes nothing to television, which rarely shows these finer points of fan behavior. Nor are these insults considered polite to discuss in public. This trope has simply become a continent-wide folk tradition, transmitted via the stadium, from fan to fan, from father to son. "

― Franklin Foer , How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

4 " It's a basic, intuitive right, worthy of enshrinement: Citizens, not the corporations that stealthily track them, should own their own data. "

― Franklin Foer , World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

5 " Back in the seventies, Herbert Simon, the Nobel-winning economist, took these inchoate sentiments and explained them rigorously: “What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. "

― Franklin Foer , World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

6 " there's a long history of resistance movements igniting in the soccer stadium. In the Red Star Revolution, Draza, Krle, and the other Belgrade soccer hooligans helped topple Slobodan Milosevic. Celebrations for Romania's 1990 WOrld Cup qualification carried over into the Bucharest squares, culminating in a firing squad that trained its rifles on the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife. The movement that toppled the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner had the same sportive ground zero. "

― Franklin Foer , How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

7 " The tech companies are destroying something precious, which is the possibility of contemplation. They have created a world in which we’re constantly watched and always distracted. Through their accumulation of data, they have constructed a portrait of our minds, which they use to invisibly guide mass behavior (and increasingly individual behavior) to further their financial interests. They have eroded the integrity of institutions—media, publishing—that supply the intellectual material that provokes thought and guides democracy. Their most precious asset is our most precious asset, our attention, and they have abused it. "

― Franklin Foer , World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

8 " The contemplative life remains freely available to us through our choices—what we read and buy, how we commit to leisure and self-improvement, the passing over of empty temptation, our preservation of the quiet spaces, an intentional striving to become the masters of our mastery. "

― Franklin Foer , World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

9 " As the Protestants celebrate a goal, they're egged on by the team captain, a long-haired Italian called Lorenzo Amoruso, who has the look of a 1980s male model. Flailing his arms, he urges them to sing their anti-Catholic songs louder. The irony is obvious: Amoruso is a Catholic. For that matter, so are most of the Rangers players. Since the late nineties, Rangers routinely field nearly as many Catholics as Celtic. Their players come from Georgia, Argentina, Germany, Sweden, Portugal and Holland, because money can buy no better ones. Championships mean more than religious purity. "

― Franklin Foer , How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

10 " Facebook would never put it this way, but algorithms are meant to erode free will, to relieve humans of the burden of choosing, to nudge them in the right direction. Algorithms fuel a sense of omnipotence, the condescending belief that our behavior can be altered, without our even being aware of the hand guiding us, in a superior direction. That's always been a danger of the engineering mindset, as it moves beyond its roots in building inanimate stuff and beings to design a more perfect social world. We are the screws and rivets in their grand design "

― Franklin Foer , World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

11 " Indeed, this is an important characteristic of the globalization debate: the tendency toward glorifying all things indigenous even when they deserve to be left in the past. "

― Franklin Foer , How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

12 " it's the most familial-based societies where the sense of obligation is strongest, that breed the worst nepotism and cronyism. "

― Franklin Foer , How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

13 " (The paradox of Italian soccer). As everyone knows, Italian men are the most foppish representatives of their sex on the planet. They smear on substantial quantities of hair care products and expend considerable mental energies color-coordinating socks with belts. Because of their dandyism, the world has Vespa, Prada, and Renzo Piano. With such theological devotion to aesthetic pleasure, it is truly perplexing that their national style of soccer should be so devoid of this quality. "

― Franklin Foer , How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

14 " Politically I am absolutely honest, which is to say, as honest as possible; which is to say, honest more or less; which is to say, far more honest than the general. "

― Franklin Foer , Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Politics and Culture in America

15 " I believe that the rising of the proletariat, if it ever comes in this country, will end in a colossal victory for capitalism—that capitalism, as at present and in the past, will play off one mob against another, and pick the pockets of both. "

― Franklin Foer , Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Politics and Culture in America

16 " If we believe we’re being watched, we’re far less likely to let our minds roam toward opinions that require courage or might take us beyond the bounds of acceptable opinion. We begin to bend our opinions to please our observer. "

― Franklin Foer , World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

17 " But in the end, the hackers were misunderstood figures. They wanted nothing more than to belong, to subsume their brilliant selves in an even more incandescent whole, to lose themselves in the poetry of community. "

― Franklin Foer , World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

18 " Just as the world took a neoliberal turn, the National Science Foundation conceived a multi-year plan for privatizing the internet….The euphoria of capitalism’s triumph set the tone for the internet’s emergence. "

― Franklin Foer , World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

19 " Even though Silicon Valley’s monopolies exist for the sake of profit, they view themselves as revolutionary agents, elevating the world to the state of oneness that Brand spent his life chasing. "

― Franklin Foer , World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

20 " Just as Nabisco and Kraft wanted to change how we eat and what we eat, Amazon, Facebook, and Google aspire to alter how we read and what we read. "

― Franklin Foer , World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech