Cacophony Quotes

• Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects.

  Stewart Dalzell

  Liberty, Speech, Firsts

  "Judges Turn Back Law To Regulate Internet Decency" by Peter H. Lewis, www.nytimes.com. June 13, 1996.

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• One needs solitude and quiet to think. The cacophony of modern culture is designed to make that impossible.

  Chris Hedges

  Thinking, Solitude, Needs

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• Out of the cacophony of random suffering and chaos that can mark human life, the life artist sees or creates a symphony of meaning and order. A life of wholeness does not depend on what we experience. Wholeness depends on how we experience our lives.

  Desmond Tutu

  Life, Artist, Order

  Desmond Tutu, Mpho Tutu (2010). “Made For Goodness: And why this makes all the difference”, p.48, Random House

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• Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument, but together they add up to an intolerable cacophony.

  Thomas Bernhard

  Together, Add, Instruments

  Thomas Bernhard (2013). “Concrete”, p.61, Faber & Faber

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• All relationships are tough. Just like with music, sometimes you have harmony and other times you have cacophony.

  Gayle Forman

  Tough, Sometimes, Harmony

  FaceBook post by Gayle Forman from Jun 07, 2014

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• Free speech is meaningless if the commercial cacophony has risen to the point where no one can hear you.

  Naomi Klein

  Freedom Of Speech, Free Speech, Risen

  Naomi Klein (2000). “No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies”, Vintage Canada

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• There was a time when I couldn't watch sitcoms for a while because it was just cacophony, it was just noise.

  Phylicia Rashad

  Watches, Noise, Sitcom

  "Phylicia Rashad: A Director's Life". Interview with Sergio Mims, www.ebony.com. June 27, 2012.

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• The wonder is not that so much cacophony appears in our actual individual lives, but that there is any appearance of harmony and progression.

  Lewis Mumford

  Progress, Wonder, Appearance

  "The Conduct Of Life". Book by Lewis Mumford, 1951.

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• The cacophony of contemporary popular culture makes it hard to discern the call of truth and wisdom. There is no area in which practicing asceticism is more important.

  Rod Dreher

  Important, Culture, Asceticism

  Rod Dreher (2010). “Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots”, p.2, Crown

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• Our world is so glutted with useless information, images, useless images, sounds, all this sort of thing. It's a cacophony, it's like a madness I think that's been happening in the past twenty-five years. And I think anything that can help a person sit in a room alone and not worry about it is good.

  Martin Scorsese

  Thinking, Past, Our World

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• It is not enough to place colors, however beautiful, one beside the other; colors must also react on one another. Otherwise, you have cacophony.

  Henri Matisse

  Beautiful, Art, Color

  Henri Matisse, Jack D. Flam (1995). “Matisse on Art”, p.216, Univ of California Press

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• Those who applaud social production and networked amateurism, the colorful cacophony that is the Internet, and the creative capacities of everyday people to produce entertaining and enlightening things online, are right to marvel. There is amazing inventiveness, boundless talent and ability, and overwhelming generosity on display. Where they go wrong is thinking that the Internet is an egalitarian, let alone revolutionary, platform for our self-expression and development, that being able to shout into the digital torrent is adequate for democracy.

  Astra Taylor

  Thinking, Self, Expression

  Astra Taylor (2014). “The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age”, p.62, Metropolitan Books

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• As financial market players know, advantage comes from reacting to news first. The same thing is true for all companies. When you start the conversation, you are recognised as someone who is plugged into the marketplace of ideas. If you talk about an idea early, you naturally get more exposure because the threads of conversation stem from what you have said. If you're in late you get lost in the cacophony.

  David Meerman Scott

  Communication, Player, Ideas

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• To me music is the sound of nature in process, either the full cacophony, one thread of it, or a deliberate composition. It's both expressive and causal and can organize reality atmosphere like a law of physics.

  Warren Jeffs

  Reality, Law, Atmosphere

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• Well, what do you owe yourself? Do you dare take time out to listen to the grass grow, or can you even afford the expense of getting far enough away from life's daily cacophony to hear it grow if you took the time?

  Vincent Price

  Enough, Grass, Dare

  Vincent Price (1959). “I like what I know: a visual autobiography”

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• The task of the intellectual is not one of blending into the opaque consciousness of the tumultuous mob around him, his voice drowned in a cacophony of misdirected protests. His task is to remind them of who they are and what they ought to be. Our values are not to be taken from conduct of our adversaries but from the great heritage of our people.

  Sanusi Lamido Sanusi

  Taken, Voice, People

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• He was a man who would never ask for sympathy. He was a man who sought only to do what was right. Such people appear in the world, every world, now and then, like a single refrain of some blessed song, a fragment caught on the spur of an otherwise raging cacophony. Imagine a world without such souls. Yes, it should have been harder to do.

  Steven Erikson

  Song, Blessed, Men

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• My singing silenced the bullies, but better than that, it silenced the demons inside me. When you're jeered at, told to shut up, sit still, stop being silly, there's a cacophony of noise rolling around in your head. When I was singing, it was peaceful.

  Susan Boyle

  Bullying, Silly, Peaceful

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• This is wine," Ghoolion said solemnly. "Wine is drinkable sunlight. It's the most glorious summer's day imaginable, captured in a bottle. Wine can be a melody in a cut-glass goblet, but it can also be a cacophony in a dirty tumbler, or a rainy autumn night, or a funeral march that scorches your tongue.

  Walter Moers

  Summer, Dirty, Wine

  Walter Moers (2009). “The Alchemaster's Apprentice: A Novel”, p.104, The Overlook Press

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• Two men with a camera, thoughtfully observing the visual cacophony of one major thoroughfare and the complicated interplay of its history, its present, and the certainty of change, have laid the groundwork for a dialogue and a vision that reaches farther than human eyes can see.

  Vicki Goldberg

  Eye, Men, Two

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• Life’s a freaking mess… there’s not one truth ever, just a bunch of stories, all going on at once, in our heads, in our hearts, all getting in the way of each other. It’s all a beautiful calamitous mess.

  Jandy Nelson

  Beautiful, Heart, Stories

  Jandy Nelson (2010). “The Sky Is Everywhere”, p.156, Penguin

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• I spent the '90s trying to hide out, trying to duck the full celebrity cacophony.

  Brad Pitt

  Ducks, Trying

  "Brad Pitt Is Finally 'Satisfied'". Interview with Dotson Rader, parade.com. September 15, 2011.

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• The crowd...a cacophony of colour

  Peter Drury

  Football, Crowds, Colour

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• The library will endure; it is the universe... We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

  James Gleick

  Reading, Past, Mirrors

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• Back in the autumn I had awakened to a growing darkness and cacophony, as if something in the depths were crying out. A whole chorus of voices. Orphaned voices. They seemed to speak for all the unlived parts of me, and they came with a force and dazzle that I couldn't contain. They seemed to explode the boundaries of my existence. I know now that they were the clamor of a new self struggling to be born.

  Sue Monk Kidd

  Struggle, Autumn, Self

  Sue Monk Kidd (2016). “When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions”, p.8, Harper Collins

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