#specialists

The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail. The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius - a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in in general circulation. "A genius working alone," he says, "is invariably ignored as a lunatic." The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find; a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. "A person like this working alone," says Slazinger, "can only yearn loud for changes, but fail to say what their shaped should be." The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain everything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. "He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting," says Slazinger. "Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a Christmas turkey. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#revolution #revolution-movements #specialists #art

I was born into a world full of 'specialists'. I'm not sure whether it's the result of our education system or just natural entropy, but it's very uncommon to know a poet with even a mediocre knowledge about art, or an artist with a good taste in poetry, and so on and on. What this really is: lack of general education in a structural sense: god knows how many people I've met that are actually PROUD about proclaiming their ignorance about another field: it is as if it signifies their 'devotion to one path' while in reality they really only look like a buffoon if you ask me. New is that I am encountering 'Literary Critics' that proudly proclaim to 'never have read any foreign poetry' as if a 'movie critic' that only has watched Dutch films would be somehow capable of criticizing them in any true sense of the word. ↗

— Martinus Hendrikus Benders

#specialists #art

When we know as much about people as hog specialists know about hogs, we'll be better off. ↗

— Lewis B. Hershey

#better #better off #hog #hogs #know

The only thing most people do better than anyone else is read their own handwriting. ↗

— John Adams

#penmanship #specialists #humor

Thinking about the universe has now been handed over to specialists. The rest of us merely read about it. ↗

— Mason Cooley

#been #handed #merely #now #over

What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists! One understands absolutely nothing and it's charming. ↗

— Edgar Degas

#absolutely nothing #charming #conversation #delightful #nothing

You see and work with many of the same people over and over again; they are all specialists in what they do. I could never do their jobs, and they say they wouldn't know how to start to do a warm-up. ↗

— Randy West

#could #how #i #jobs #know

Specialists are people who always repeat the same mistakes. ↗

— Walter Gropius

#mistakes #people #repeat #same #specialists

Personally, I can't stand violence. In any standard American mainstream movie, there's 20 times more violence than in any one of my films, so I don't know why those directors aren't asked why they're such specialists for violence. ↗

— Michael Haneke

#any #asked #directors #films #i

The wars of the future will be fought by computer technicians and by lawyers and high-altitude specialists, and that may mean war will be increasingly abstract, hard to think about and hard to control. ↗

— Michael Ignatieff

#abstract #computer #control #fought #future