Jonathon Keats Quotes - Page 2

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• Architects in urban planning are talking about this but they're not talking about it yet I don't think at that level that [Buckminster] Fuller is talking about when he talked about putting a dome over Manhattan, which is to say an attempt at integrating all of these different technologies in a way that makes for a city that, without having an actual dome, thermodynamically manages the heat flow for that urban environment and therefore makes it so that it is a highly efficient machine for a living or a dwelling machine as he would have preferred in terms of thermodynamically optimizing it.

  Jonathon Keats

  Technology, Thinking, Talking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Since I live part of the year in Italy, I live in a society in which I'm the optimistic American relative to the people who I'm around there. And that has actually brought to my attention the fact that I do have some sort of optimism and has made me think about it enough that I can attempt an answer.

  Jonathon Keats

  Optimistic, Thinking, Years

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I don't think that I am hopeful because I have some data that you don't, that I am going to share with you and going to convince you on that basis.

  Jonathon Keats

  Thinking, Data, Hopeful

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I don't really know what that job [experimental philosopher] entails.

  Jonathon Keats

  Jobs, Philosopher, Knows

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I set my life since then attempting to figure out how to do that, basically how to have a sort of public discourse in which anything and everything are open to conversation and in which the thought experiment is a means by which to posit all manner of different realities, potential futures.

  Jonathon Keats

  Mean, Reality, Anything And Everything

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• It isn't a matter of hope. It's a matter of - between the options of trying nothing and trying something, let's try something but let's also be very thoughtful about what that something is.

  Jonathon Keats

  Thoughtful, Trying, Matter

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I work on everything all at once, which is maybe the worst way to go about it. But I think that actually it works really well in terms of the serendipitous connections between all of these many different projects and these many different realms.

  Jonathon Keats

  Thinking, Way, Connections

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Serendipity looks a lot like creativity, at least at a distance, and if I can tap into these ways in which one thing resembles another.

  Jonathon Keats

  Distance, Creativity, Serendipity

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Let's not be optimistic in the irreversibly irresponsible way that tends to happen with the crazies of geo-engineering. But let's talk about what sorts of changes we can make.

  Jonathon Keats

  Optimistic, Engineering, Way

  Source: therumpus.net

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• That is to say that despair does not seem to be in any way potentially to be productive.

  Jonathon Keats

  Despair, Way, Doe

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I think that I feel that I have no choice but to operate under the illusion, which may be a delusion, that we can somehow get past the destruction that we have brought and that we are causing today.

  Jonathon Keats

  Thinking, Past, Choices

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I would say that what the value of talking about and thinking about a dome over Manhattan is that [Buckminster] Fuller has identified a scale of action I think is actually really compelling.

  Jonathon Keats

  Thinking, Talking, Domes

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• [Buckminster] Fuller's idea of progress is a very 1950s organization man out of the military sort of idea of progress. So as a result, you have something like: we've got bad weather in New York City; let's put a dome over it. And so I don't want to put a dome over Manhattan and I hope that nobody who ends up reading the book wants to do so as a result.

  Jonathon Keats

  New York, Military, Book

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I was interested first of all in trying to capture this myth that was always changing and to create some sort of a master story, some version of the myth that resonated with me, since I could have taken more or less any detail that I wanted or the opposite and try to put that down on the page in a way that I could express from that outset for myself and for our readers what it was that was so magical about [Buckminster] Fuller's way of putting together the world.

  Jonathon Keats

  Taken, Opposites, Trying

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I'm not especially interested in the job of the historian or journalist of trying to figure out what was true and what was not.

  Jonathon Keats

  Jobs, Trying, Figures

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Just getting totally absorbed in that and therefore when I came back around to [Buckminster Fuller] and found that much of it was made up, I realized that nevertheless, it really was crucial, crucial for how he understood himself, I believe, and certainly crucial for how anyone else ever engaged in his ideas and therefore as a starting point, how can we engage in his ideas today, but with a remove of knowing that it is a myth and being able to navigate it in that sort of level, at that level of reading him as a story.

  Jonathon Keats

  Reading, Believe, Ideas

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I was totally taken in and totally taken by that myth starting in 1999, rather carelessly writing about this archive and starting to read [Buckminster Fuller] self-representation, misrepresentation, whatever you want to call it.

  Jonathon Keats

  Taken, Writing, Self

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Writing a book about [Buckminster Fuller] in the sense of deciding how much to - how much biographically to gloss over and how much I can leave out is relatively easy as it is because the true believers already know everything. They know a lot of things that are not true and they know a lot of things that I thought were (and seems there's very good evidence not to believe) and therefore, my starting point was I think to tell his myth because that's what grabbed me.

  Jonathon Keats

  Book, Believe, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I became really absorbed but again I was at that point - and I still remain today - an outsider who has no interest in becoming an insider, let alone in what that insider perspective on [Buckminster Fuller] has come to be and come to represent.

  Jonathon Keats

  Perspective, Buckminster Fuller, Today

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I didn't grow up with [Buckminster Fuller]. I never met him. I was once close to meeting him as a child at a ski resort one summer. He died in 1983. Only in 1999 or so, 2000, when I was working as an editor at San Francisco Magazine, did I really come back around to that name because Stanford University had just acquired the archive.

  Jonathon Keats

  Summer, Growing Up, Children

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The interesting thing writing about [Buckminster] Fuller is really to attempt to resurrect all of that and to do so for a new generation that has not grown up with him.

  Jonathon Keats

  Writing, Interesting, Buckminster Fuller

  Source: therumpus.net

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• All sorts of problems and the interconnectedness between them that [Buckminster Fuller] was able to perceive sometimes rightly, often wrongly, always interestingly and also the fact that he was looking at solutions often that were not feasible in his own time but potentially could be applied today.

  Jonathon Keats

  Facts, Buckminster Fuller, Able

  Source: therumpus.net

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• First of all, [Buckminster Fuller's] identification of the problems that are all that much more pertinent, all that much more pressing in the world today than in his own lifetime from sustainability in terms of the environment to income inequality.

  Jonathon Keats

  Today, Firsts, Buckminster Fuller

  Source: therumpus.net

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• To me, the reason to write about [Buckminster] Fuller is because I think that he has ideas that are incredibly pertinent.

  Jonathon Keats

  Writing, Thinking, Ideas

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I think it was impossible not to come upon a lot of confabulation simply because any good scholarship that has been done since [Buckminster Fuller] death has really delved in that.

  Jonathon Keats

  Thinking, Buckminster Fuller, Done

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

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