Jonathan Miller Quotes (50 Quotes)


    You spend ten years of your life being trained to do one thing, and you're being taught to think that it's the most serious thing that anyone could possibly do, and then suddenly you find yourself doing something that in some respects is the epitome of frivolity.

    It's amazing we have 4 million people who access us over broadband, because we make it difficult to access us over broadband,

    People are already self-selected by the time they've decided to become scientists.

    I became startled by the extraordinary difference between something whose surface is completely invisible which only makes itself present by virtue of what it reflects, and a window, which doesn't make itself apparent at all, in the ideal case.

    It's not that Shakespeare is frivolous, but you spend your time just getting people to dress up in other people's costumes and pretending to be people that they're not, and you think, after the years go by, well, what on earth was all that about?


    The thing about science is that it's an accurate picture of the world.


    Some developers have not caught on to this new reality. Sellers are in denial that the market has shifted, ... On projects that appear to have stalled, the developer kept ratcheting up the prices systematically - which was the norm for the past few years

    You have to look at the opera as not being about fidelity, but who you think you are and what happens when you pretend to be someone else and you discover you are that someone else.

    I'm not against asking the audience to work, but I think what you have now is a sort of gratuitous deconstruction as a result of a fashion of literary deconstructionism indicating that there are no meanings.

    I wasn't driven into medicine by a social conscience but by rampant curiosity.

    Willingness to live on the ground floor is at a much higher level today than it was in the mid-1980s.

    The burden of the past is only, I think, oppressive when you've got to go on the experience of the avant garde.

    Across the country downtowns have been reinvigorated and become destination points for 24-hour living.

    This year, we are certainly creating some pressure on the bottom line by this move in the US to broadband. That's a conscious decision. It is a classic short-term versus long-term trade-off.

    He's trying to use the strategy of Greenspan-speak - to temper homebuyers' euphoria,

    As we know from the work of certain fundamental physicists, people like Einstein were very dependent upon conjuring up visual images in order to imagine things which otherwise were not easily formulated.

    Now, that is in a way also what scientists are trying to do they're trying to get people to see that the world can be represented in an alternative way and that it's right.


    Someone like Einstein was quite clearly a moralist, and he had a very highly developed political vision and was very spiritual in his way, and there are many biologists and physicists of the first order who are like that.

    The idea of trying to seed them was very, very difficult.

    The boom is continuing - just not at the torrid pace of the first half of 2005, ... This is a return to more normal behavior for a healthy real estate market.

    Since finding out what something is, is largely a matter of discovering what it is like, the most impressive contribution to the growth of intelligibility has been made by the application of suggestive metaphors

    Argumentative exhibitions bring issues to life in a way that very much irritates traditional curators who want to see their pictures valued for themselves.

    The industry is in the middle of a truly massive change.

    People can't draw now and don't feel it's necessary. Art students don't seem to want to draw.

    What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.

    Video consumption is exploding on-line and on-demand is going to be the dominant way to consume content.

    I definitely don't think there is enough of that. We need older, more experienced GLBT men and women showing up in all ways and having dialogues about how to live and be okay with whom we are.

    Wall Street accounts for only about 6 percent of the jobs in New York but 25 percent of the economic activity. Every time there's an up-tick in bonuses, there's an up-tick in the real estate market.

    Humor is vague, runaway stuff that hisses around the fissures and crevices of the mind, like some sort of loose physic gas

    I was trained as a neurologist, and then I went into the theater, and if you're brought up to think of yourself as a biological scientist of some sort, pretty well everything else seems frivolous by comparison.

    A lot of high-level scientists are in fact people of almost universal interest.

    Attitudes to museums have changed. If it had Marilyn Monroe's knickers or Laurence Olivier's jockstrap they would flock to it.

    It is only right that we help provide financial security for the families of those brave men and women who are providing for our nation's security, ... That's what the Military Families' Bill of Rights is all about.

    Errors of taste are very often the outward sign of a deep fault of sensibility.

    You can't use a credit card on it. If you've got a dime, you can call.


    What I did was a terrible thing, ... Words cannot describe how I'd feel if someone took my daughter away. I can still watch my daughter grow while in prison. I took that away from you, and for that I am so, so sorry.

    Despite some lingering trepidation due to mixed local, national and international economic conditions, the Manhattan housing market continued to improve.

    I've learned more about leadership from these officers than I have in any class.

    Falling ill is not something that happens to us, it is a choice we make as a result of things happening to us

    This is the second consecutive quarter where we've seen moderating appreciation. The market has appeared to make a transition from a double-digit frenzied growth to a more modest growth.

    What we're seeing is more entry-level sales and a more moderate appreciation of property than we've seen in previous quarters.

    Being a doctor has taught me a lot about directing. You're doing the same thing: You're reconstructing the manifold of behavior to the point where an audience says, yes, that's exactly like people I know.

    What people want is not what some would call imaginative and often austere productions but very lavish productions which cast back into the auditorium an image of their affluence.

    Besides, science creates its own agenda. There are problems leftover at the end of the day which you have to solve the next morning.

    I spend a lot of my time trying to draw the attention of actors to the minute and subtle details of human behavior, which was the sort of thing I was looking at when I was a neurologist.

    You're seeing America Online and other AOL Time Warner divisions really working together now, ... You saw the starting point today.

    Like many fast-growing companies, we went through a period where cost management was not a priority. That ends now,


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