91 Distraction Quotes

Successful people are the ones who think up things for the rest of the world to keep busy at.

Television will enormously enlarge the eye's range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.

The idea of enemies is awful it makes one stop remembering eternity and the fear of death. That is what enemies are. Possessions are the same as enemies only less so, they too make one forget eternity and the fear of death.

The best people renounce all for one goal, the eternal fame of mortals; but most people stuff themselves like cattle.

Happy family: The existence and maintenance of [this] is thought to make a politician fit for public office. According to this theory, the public are less concerned by whether or not they are effectively represented than by the need to be assured that the penises and vaginas of public officials are only used in legally sanctioned circumstances.

There is always some frivolity in excellent minds; they have wings to rise, but also stray.

What is now happening to the people of the East as of the West is like what happens to every individual when he passes from childhood to adolescence and from youth to manhood. He loses what had hitherto guided his life and lives without direction, not having found a new standard suitable to his age, and so he invents all sorts of occupations, cares, distractions, and stupefactions to divert his attention from the misery and senselessness of his life. Such a condition may last a long time.

Unable to create a meaningful life for itself, the personality takes its own revenge: from the lower depths comes a regressive form of spontaneity: raw animality forms a counterpoise to the meaningless stimuli and the vicarious life to which the ordinary man is conditioned. Getting spiritual nourishment from this chaos of events, sensations, and devious interpretations is the equivalent of trying to pick through a garbage pile for food.

It occurs to me it is not so much the aim of the devil to lure me with evil as it is to preoccupy me with the meaningless.

The whole visible world is perhaps nothing other than a motivation of man's wish to rest for a moment - an attempt to falsify the fact of knowledge, to try to turn the knowledge into the goal.

But he had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for his head.

It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them.

If you wanna get away with murder, shoot him in the head and put a demo tape in their pocket!

The great Big Black Things that have loomed against the horizon of my life, threatening to devour me, simply loomed and nothing more. The things that have really made me miss my train have always been sweet, soft, pretty, pleasant things of which I was not in the least afraid. [Pg. 61.]

In theory there is nothing to hinder our following what we are taught; but in life there are many things to draw us aside.

I believe global warming is grossly exaggerated as a problem. It's a real problem, but it's nothing like as serious as people are led to believe. The idea that global warming is the most important problem facing the world is total nonsense and is doing a lot of harm. It distracts people's attention from much more serious problems.

The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from tackling the matter at hand.

As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair. [citation needed]

I believe that the greatest trick of the devil is not to get us into some sort of evil but rather have us wasting time. This is why the devil tries so hard to get Christians to be religious. If he can sink a man's mind into habit, he wil prevent his heart from engaging God.

They keep you doped with religion and sex and TV, And you think your so clever, and classless and free, But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see.

An' there began a lang digression About the lords o' the creation.

There have always existed three ways of keeping the people loving and loyal. One is to leave them alone, to trust them and not to interfere. This plan, however, has very seldom been practised, because the politicians regard the public as a cow to be milked, and something must be done to make it stand quiet. So they try Plan Number Two, which consists in hypnotizing the public by means of shows, festivals, parades, prizes and many paid speeches, sermons and editorials, wherein and whereby the public is told how much is being done for it, and how fortunate it is in being protected and wisely cared for by its divinely appointed guardians. Then the band strikes up, the flags are waved, three passes are made, one to the right and two to the left; and we, being completely under the hypnosis, hurrah ourselves hoarse. Plan Number Three is a very ancient one and is always held back to be used in case Number Two fails. It is for the benefit of the people who do not pass readily under hypnotic control. If there are too many of these, they have been known to pluck up courage and answer back to the speeches, sermons and editorials. Sometimes they refuse to hurrah when the bass-drum plays, in which case they have occasionally been arrested for contumacy and contravention by stocky men, in wide-awake hats, who lead the strenuous life. This Plan Number Three provides for an armed force that shall overawe, if necessary, all who are not hypnotized. The army is used for two purposes-to coerce disturbers at home, and to get up a war at a distance, and thus distract attention from the troubles near at hand. Napoleon used to say that the only sure cure for internal dissension was a foreign war: this would draw the disturbers away, on the plea of patriotism, so they would win enough outside loot to satisfy them, or else they would all get killed, it really didn't matter much; and as for loot, if it was taken from foreigners, there was no sin. A careful analyst might here say that Plan Number Three is only a variation of Plan Number Two-the end being gained by hypnotic effects in either event, for the army is conscripted from the people to use against the people, just as you turn steam from a boiler into the fire-box to increase the draft. ...

(To Trish Stratus) Hey Mama! How you doin'? How you- no no no no no! The Rock's gotta go. Don't look at the People's Package. (To Tyson Tomko) Hell, you too, don't look! But it's cool, man! It's all good, I like your show, 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy'. It's all good!

I'm going back to my tour where I belong. The attention was more than I expected. The golf course wasn't a problem. It was just the things around it. All the preparation I've done in the last month weighed on me.

'Throwing white elephants and red herrings at each other.' (a warning he used in the Dail once).

A man may feel so completely thwarted that he seeks no form of satisfaction, but only distraction and oblivion. He then becomes a devotee of 'pleasure.' That is to say, he seeks to make life bearable by becoming less alive. Drunkenness, for example, is temporary suicide.

If our condition were truly happy we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it. (170)

When you're as hollow as Enoch Kane, the emptiness aches. He's desperate to fill it, but he doesn't have the patience or the commitment to fill it with anything worthwhile: So a man like Kane obsesses on one thing after another - sex, money, food, power, drugs, alcohol - anything that seems to give meaning to his days, but that requires no real self-discovery or self-sacrifice.

What's going on? What do we do now? 'DONT FUCK ANYONE; YOU'LL DIE! Never mind, here comes MC Hammer.'

Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed... and this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.

In the march up to the heights of fame, there comes a spot close to the summit in which a man reads nothing but detective stories.

Labels seem to give satisfaction. We accept the category to which we are supposed to belong as a satisfying explanation of life. We are worshippers of words and labels; we never seem to go beyond the symbol, to comprehend the worth of the symbol. By calling ourselves this or that, we ensure ourselves against further disturbance, and settle back. One of the curses of ideologies and organized beliefs is the comfort, the deadly gratification they offer. They put us to sleep, and in the sleep we dream, and the dream becomes action. How easily we are distracted! And most of us want to be distracted; most of us are tired out with incessant conflict, and distractions become a necessity, they become more important than 'what is'.

I don't really live on compliments. As a matter of fact, they have a way of distracting me. I know a whole lot of musicians, artists out there who hears the compliments and thinks 'wow, I must have been really great' and so they get fat and satisfied and they get lost and forget about their actual talent and start living in another world.

If Marx were functioning today, he would have been hard put to avoid saying that imaginary sex is the opiate of the people.

Miles started to track the vote, but by the time the roll came around to him, had taken to jotting repeated iterations of Lady Ekaterin Nile Vorkosigan intertwined with Lord Miles Naismith Vorkosigan in his fanciest handwriting down the margins of his flimsy.

Those who challenge the 'Right to Lie', as Chomsky describes it, can expect to be met with vilification and distortion. Such vilification campaigns succeed by making the accusation against the critics the topic of debate. By forcing critics into an endless defence of their position, the propaganda system distracts attention from the substantive issues. --Milan Rai, Chomsky's Politics, 1995 [195]

It doesn't have as much fat as the Haagen-Dazs, does it?

On the street. I was talking to you and you found something better to do. ~ 'Carlos (Don't Let It Go To Your Head)

It was W. C. Fields who hated to appear in the same scene with a child, a dog, or a plunging neckline - because nobody in the audience would be looking at him. Jennifer Aniston has the same problem in this movie even when she's in scenes all by herself.

I'll come no more behind your scenes, David [Garrick]; for the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities.

Writers, poets, painters, musicians, philosophers, political thinkers, to name only a few of the categories affected, must woo their readers, viewers, listeners, from distraction. To this we must add, for simple realism demands it, that these same writers, painters, etc., are themselves the children of distraction. As such, they are peculiarly qualified to approach the distracted multitudes. They will have experienced the seductions as well as the destructiveness of the forces we have been considering here. This is the destructive element in which we do not need to be summoned to immerse ourselves, for we were born to it.

They say that dogs lick their own genitalia because they can. But I think it's at least partially because they don't have the Internet.

Have you summoned your wits from wool-gathering?

But let me get to the point, let's roll another joint. And turn the radio loud, I'm too alone to be proud. You don't know how it feels, you don't know how it feels to be me.

When a reviewer says that Malamud is second only to Bellow, it means he really isn't thinking about either of them. When he's reading Malamud he's thinking about Bellow, and when he's reading Bellow he's thinking about Roth. This is the essence of the ratings game: distraction. Children play it all the time. 'Is this the biggest bridge in the world?' 'No, it's the third biggest.' 'Oh.' They lose all interest in the bridge.

[Driving backward, flipping off the driver of the car next to him] It's real nice, I got it at Target, it's on sale.

Ralph waved the conch. 'Shut up! Wait! Listen!' He went on in the silence, borne on in his triumph. 'There's another thing. We can help them to find us. If a ship comes near the island they may not notice us. So we must make smoke on top of the mountain. We must make a fire.' 'A fire! Make a fire!' At once half the boys were on their feet. Jack clamored among them, the conch forgotten. 'Come on! Follow me!' The space under the palm trees was full of noise and movement. Ralph was on his feet too, shouting for quiet, but no one heard him. All at once the crowd swayed toward the island and was gone- following Jack. Even the tiny children went and did their best among the leaves and broken branches. Ralph was left, holding the conch, with no one but Piggy.

It is important that I leave now to avoid further distraction from the ongoing mission of FEMA.

It is thy very energy of thought Which keeps thee from thy God.

After all human beings have to live dogs too so as not to know that time is passing, that is the whole business of living to go on so they will not know that time is passing, that is why they get drunk that is why they like to go to war, during a war there is the most complete absence of the sense that time is passing a year of war lasts so much longer than any other year. After all that is what life is and that is the reason there is no Utopia, little or big young or old dog or man everybody wants every minute so filled that they are not conscious of that minute passing. It's just as well they do not think about it you have to be a genius to live in it and know it to exist in it and express it to accept it and deny it by creating it. ~ Ch. 4

Do you like pie?

Lillian: Rock, we heard the news earlier today. You're gonna be defending at Unforgiven, your WCW title against Shane McMahon and Booker T. How do you feel about that? The Rock: Who are you just Barbara Walters all of a sudden, Lillian? Since when did you become all business, Lillian? How about a simple 'Hey Rock'. 'How you doin Rock?'. 'Did you enjoy lunch today Rock?'. 'Did you like your pancakes Rock?'. How about something like that. Lillian: But Rock, like I said, at Unforgiven. You're gonna... The Rock: Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. Lillian. Lillian. You need to let your feelings go. The Rock knows you have feelings for him. The Rock knows that you think about The Rock. The Rock knows that you get that funny feeling in the bottom of your stomach, Lillian. The Rock knows that each and every single time you go right out there in the middle of The People's ring and you ring announce, you think about The Rock looking at you. Admit it Lillian, that you go to bed every single night dreaming about marrying The Rock. Dreaming of one day to become Mrs. Lillian 'Rockcia'. Admit it Lillian, you get wet... with perspiration standing this close to The Rock... Now, Llilian, The Rock knows how you feel about pie. But how do you feel about strudel? Lillian, would you like to try some of The Rock's strudel? Lillian: More than anything in the world, Rock. The Rock: What in the blue hell is wrong with you? The Rock was just informed that he had a match at Unforgiven. A handicap match between The Rock, Booker T and Shane McMahon and the only thing you can think about and talk about is dessert? A little professionalism, Lilian Garcia, please! (Lillian begins to speak) Shh. Shh. Shhhhhh. (Camera focuses on The Rock, while he turns to the camera) Shane McMahon, you wanna book the match between the Rock and Booker T? Well, The Rock says 'why don't we just cut right to the chase?' Shane McMahon, The Rock sees how you look at Booker T. Booker T, The Rock sees how you look at Shane McMahon. So why not get it over with and have a damn baby? The Rock can see it now. Little Booker Mac. First words out of his mouth: (high-pitched voice) 'Can you dig it, sucka?' (performs the Shane 'O Mac Shuffle) You see, Shane McMahon. At Unforgiven... At Unforgiven, 19 days, 19 nights from this night forward, at Unforgiven, it's gonna be you two who'll have to forgive The Rock for taking his right boot and his left boot, turn 'em sideways and sticking them straight up both your candy asses! (Camera zooms out to include Lillian holding the WCW Championship) Now, Lillian Garcia. Back to your question. How does The Rock feel about Unforgiven? Well, The Rock feels about Unforgiven, just as he feels about tonight's eight man Tag Match, right here in T.O. The Rock feels about 'em just as he feels about everything else and that is simply electrifying. If you smell what The Rock... Lillian, stop thinking about The People's Strudel... is cooking! - September 4, 2001 episode of SmackDown!, Air Canada Centre, Toronto, Canada

And then [he] wondered why he would think of such a useless question at a time like this

I live a thug life losin' my focus, baby...I'm Troublesome

Dangerous and ambitious, while schemin on gettin riches/I'm spittin at tricks cause I'm addicted to pretty bitches

Go to work on an egg.

Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other.

Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption. It is not only an interruption, but also a disruption of thought.

I'll show you politics in America. Here it is, right here. 'I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs.' 'I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking.' 'Hey, wait a minute, there's one guy holding out both puppets!' 'Shut up! Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control. Here's Love Connection. Watch this and get fat and stupid. By the way, keep drinking beer, you fucking morons.'

Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye.

We're all too busy working, entertaining ourselves With forty hours of television and prescription pills Well, I take two a day to help my brain behave It never does, but who's to say? At least my doctor gets paid.

'It is significant that whenever the public mind is to be diverted from great social wrong, a crusade is inaugurated against indecency.'

Only when human sorrows are turned into a toy with glaring colors will baby people become interested - for a while at least. The people are a very fickle baby that must have new toys every day.

The powers know that the people at large are like children whose despair, sorrow, and tears can be turned into joy with a little toy. ... An army and navy represents the people's toys.

My girlfriend always giggles during sex. No matter what she's reading.

Ce qui nous empeche souvent de nous abandonner a un seul vice est que nous en avons plusieurs.

'I used to go missing quite a lot... Miss Canada, Miss United Kingdom, Miss World.'

My books I'd fain cast off, I cannot read, 'Twixt every page my thoughts go stray at large Down in the meadow, where is richer feed, And will not mind to hit their proper targe.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at.

How did the party go in Portman Square? I cannot tell you; Juliet was not there. And how did Lady Gaster's party go? Juliet was next me and I do not know.

I have wandered all my life, and I have also traveled; the difference between the two being this, that we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.

I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in and invite God and his angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door.

I read sometime around 1938 of Jewish fines and some street actions against them. But I was too concerned with U-Boats and the naval problems to be concerned about Jews.

Friday. Five o'clock in the afternoon. Maybe the hardest time to move unobserved through a city. Or, maybe the easiest. Because at five o'clock on a Friday nobody pays attention to anything. Except the road ahead.

'All of us are mere mortals and must consult. The spectacle of Parliament and the antics of our politicians serve only to distract us from the very real problems that we face as a nation.'

In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.

There is, I discover, a regular propaganda on foot; a long time ago - no man can recall how far back - the Wholesale Pickpockets made the discovery of the ease with which a man's pockets could be rifled while he was preoccupied with spiritual exercises, and they began offering prizes for the best essays in support of the practice.

O, she walked unaware of her own increasing beauty That was holding men's thoughts from market or plough,

'I was in a testy mood. I'd been inside my head all day - some days that just happens. You get lost doing just one task, and suddenly you look up and it's dark out, but you still don't want to leave your headspace, and the she comes up behind you with a 150 KHz marine emergency blow horn and lets off one big parp that has you shitting out your eyes, ears, and nostrils, and when you turn around, you discover that your evil co-workers were videoing the entire prank, and you get furious and you scream for everybody to fuck off and die. 'Aw shucks, it was only a joke,' but the fact remains that because of that one loud parp you'll never be able to parse C++ code again because you fried those dendrites that dictate logic patterns, and in a flash you see yourself as a future object of pity, forced to work at a TacoTime outlet, feeding disrespectful larvae of the middle classes while taking soiled orange PVC trash bags out to the back alley, where you see a grease storage drum, and wistfully remember that earlier, more charmed portion of your life when you once knew the chemicals and procedures necessary to convert restaurant grease into clean-burning planet-friendly ethanol, and that was just one of the many feats your brain was capable of, back before the parping, back before people whispered when they saw you walking their way, hoping they wouldn't have to make small talk with you, back before they dumbed themselves down to the verbal level of Pebbles Flintstone to make you understand them.