Home > Topic > the fine print
1 " The big print giveth and the fine print taketh away. "
― Fulton J. Sheen
2 " In the two years after No Logo came out, I went to dozens of teach-ins and conferences, some of them attended by thousands of people (tens of thousands in the case of the World Social Forum), that were exclusively devoted to popular education about the inner workings of global finance and trade. No topic was too arcane: the science of genetically modified foods, trade-related intellectual property rights, the fine print of bilateral trade deals, the patenting of seeds, the truth about certain carbon sinks. I sensed in these rooms a hunger for knowledge that I have never witnessed in any university class. It was as if people understood, all at once, that gathering this knowledge was crucial to the survival not just of democracy but of the planet. Yes, this was complicated, but we embraced that complexity because we were finally looking at systems, not just symbols. "
― Naomi Klein , No Logo
3 " The economics we need is of the " seminar room" variety, not the " rule-of-thumb" kind. It is an economics that recognizes its limitations and caveats and knows that the right message depends on the context. The fine print is what economists have to contribute. "
4 " This is the gift of focus, or wilful denial, and it is something boys are particularly good at. Girls—at least where I grew up—tend to be more emotionally balanced and sane, and therefore find the kind of all-excluding concentration you need to care about dinosaurs, taxonomy, philately and geopolitical schemes a bit worrying and sad. Girls can grasp the bigger picture (i.e., it might be better not to destroy the world over this), where boys have a perfect grip on the fine print (i.e., this insidious idea is antithetical to our existence and cannot be allowed to flourish alongside our peace-loving, free society). Note carefully how it is probably better to let the girls deal with weapons of mass destruction. "
― Nick Harkaway , The Gone-Away World
5 " Our terminal decline into old age and death stems from the fine print of the contract that we signed with our mitochondria two billion years ago. "
― Nick Lane
