"Does Religion Poison Everything?", Festival of Dangerous Ideas, October 2009.
2000s, 2009
Context: If this was the plan - was it made by someone who likes us? And if so, why have 99.9% of all the other species that have ever been created already died out? And part of what plan was that?; If it is a plan or a design, the planner must be either very capricious - really toying with his creation; and/or very clumsy, very tinkering and fantastically wasteful - throw away 99.9% of what you've made; or very cruel and very callous; or just perhaps very indifferent; or some combination of all the above. And so it's no good saying that He moves in mysterious ways, or that He has purposes that are opaque to us, because even that kind of evasion has to make itself predicate on the assumption that the person saying this knows more than I do about the supernatural, and I haven't yet met anyone who does have a private line to the creator, of the sort that would be required even to speculate about it. In other words, I haven't met anyone, in holy orders or out of it, who isn't also a primate. And neither have you. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVvJf9wTQXo
“If there is a God, his plan is very similar to someone not having a plan.”
“To Bach, notes were not just sounds but the very stuff of creation.”
Leonard Bernstein, "Leonard Bernstein discusses material & structure in Bach's St. Matthew Passion," Bernstein Century - Bach: St. Matthew Passion / Nypo, Et Al (1999) (at 6:31)
Letter to General Gates (7 September 1776), in Battle of Valcour on Lake Champlain, October 11th, 1776 by Peter Sailly Palmer(1876) p. 5
www.youtube.com/watch?v=THHapkLeSGo?t=24m23s
Christopher Hitchens vs John Lennox - Is God Great? [2009]
2000s, 2009
As quoted in "Ingmar Bergman: Summing Up A Life In Film" http://web.archive.org/web/20110913212122/http://bergmanorama.webs.com/kakutani_nyt83.htm by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times Magazine (26 June 1983)].
Context: I am very much aware of my own double self... The well-known one is very under control; everything is planned and very secure. The unknown one can be very unpleasant. I think this side is responsible for all the creative work — he is in touch with the child. He is not rational, he is impulsive and extremely emotional. Perhaps it is not even a "he," but a "she."
“The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.”
Source: Hopes and Prospects
On her Imitation of Christ project, interview http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/825182/this-is-not-a-fashion-show-accidental-designer-tara-subkoffs# with Blouinartinfo, September 2012
“Very often design is the most immediate way of defining what products become in people's minds.”
In an interview for the BBC (January 2002)
“Indifference and pride look very much alike, and he probably thought I was proud.”
Source: The End of the Affair
