“It seemed to me that we knew something about how issues were decided, but that we knew much less about how they got to be issues in the first place.”

Source: White Night

University of Havana address (2005)
Context: Here is a conclusion I’ve come to after many years: among all the errors we may have committed, the greatest of them all was that we believed that someone really knew something about socialism, or that someone actually knew how to build socialism. It seemed to be a sure fact, as well-known as the electrical system conceived by those who thought they were experts in electrical systems. Whenever they said: “That’s the formula”, we thought they knew. Just as if someone is a physician. You are not going to debate anemia, or intestinal problems, or any other condition with a physician; nobody argues with the physician. You can think that he is a good doctor or a bad one, you can follow his advice or not, but you won’t argue with him. Which of us would argue with a doctor, or a mathematician, or a historian, or an expert in literature or in any other subject? But we must be idiots if we think, for example, that economy is an exact and eternal science and that it existed since the days of Adam and Eve, and I offer my apologies to the thousands of economists in our country.

Source: Infinite Jest

Source: By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

PENN Address (2004)

''A quoted comment from the Taoiseach, in a news report about his proposals for economic recovery'', The Irish Times, 9 January 2009, 2010-06-12 http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0109/1231406001456.html,
2009

Ranking "the 20 best political films of the past two decades" in "The Big Picture: Roger Ebert" in MotherJones (May/June 1996) http://www.motherjones.com/arts/film/1996/05/ebert.html

Source: The Lazarus Project

Source: Unwind