“What the media are telling you to be afraid of are the wrong things…”
Interview with filmmaker Michael Moore, Rolling Stone (January 2003)
2003
Context: What the media are telling you to be afraid of are the wrong things... Fear is a necessary ingredient of our survival instincts.
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Michael Moore 71
American filmmaker, author, social critic, and liberal acti… 1954Related quotes
“I'm a media tart. You tell me one politician that's not a media tart, tell me one that's not.”
As quoted in "Beattie an unashamed 'media tart'" in AM Archive (11 May 2000) http://www.abc.net.au/am/stories/s125625.htm
“Do not doubt him who tells you he is afraid, but be afraid of him who tells you he has no doubts.”
Original German text: "Zweifle nicht an dem der dir sagt er hat Angst, aber hab Angst vor dem der dir sagt, er kennt keinen Zweifel."
from "100 Gedichte ohne Vaterland", pub. 1978.
1880s, 1884, Letter to Theo (Nuenen, Oct. 1884)
Context: I tell you, if one wants to be active, one must not be afraid of going wrong, one must not be afraid of making mistakes now and then. Many people think that they will become good just by doing no harm - but that's a lie, and you yourself used to call it that. That way lies stagnation, mediocrity.
Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring you in the face like some imbecile. You don't know how paralyzing that is, that stare of a blank canvas is, which says to the painter, You can't do a thing. The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerises some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of 'you can't' once and for all.
Life itself, too, is forever turning an infinitely vacant, dispiriting blank side towards man on which nothing appears, any more than it does on a blank canvas. But no matter how vacant and vain, how dead life may appear to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, who knows something, will not be put off so easily. He wades in and does something and stays with it, in short, he violates, "defiles" - they say. Let them talk, those cold theologians.
