Guy Burgess Quotations

Search for Common Ground has done some very interesting things. They've figured out that costs of mass media productions in third-world countries is miniscule, especially given the new technologies, compared to what you'd expect to spend to make it into the mass TV market in the United States.

One of the big problems with the conflict resolution field and one of the real challenges is to move beyond its table-oriented view of itself.

One of the reasons we're so fascinated by the Internet, is that it has the ability to eliminate what we call information friction.

The problem of dealing with conflict on a large, sort of society-wide scale, is a bit analogous to building a complex aircraft. You need a whole lot of different parts. You can't fly an airplane with just a jet engine, you need wings, you needs control surfaces, you need avionics, you need a seat for the pilot, fuel tanks, all sorts of stuff.

We can't make the whole system with which society deals with conflict perfect. Can't design it. But we can identify pathological dynamics that make it especially bad. And some of these we know how to fix. There are terrible conflicts that arise out of misunderstandings and people just think someone else is doing something terrible when they're not, and we know how to fix that.

We have different personalities and different skills and the kind of things that we do, we can do together that neither of us can do separately. We've been working together so closely that it's kind of hard to decide what's my work and what's her work, it's ours really.

The United States is a country that prides itself on building gadgets. We have great engineers and a few things we excel at and one of those is gadgets. And gadgets imply that you have an engineer who goes out and knows what he wants the machine he's going to build to do, and he goes out and designs it and builds it.

Sometime they don't let you know that they know that they don't know everything, but the core of the medical approach is that you try to identify pathologies, which are subsystems within the human body or the larger system that are having undesirable consequences.

That same kind of destructive stuff is done on the left as well as the right, though at the moment I'm finding the right to be in particular, as we are talking the day after John Kerry's defeat in his bid to beat George Bush.

The mass media in the days of newspapers and television it's hard to be able to find a story that's about just what you're interested in at the time you're interested in it.

The roster of Nobel Peace Prize winners, though it has some strange people on it from time to time, tends to feature folks who fought for social justice in a nonviolent and constructive way somehow.

Disarming behavior, where you have two sides involved in a conflict that everybody has stereotypes of the evil other side that is convinced that they would never ever do something reasonable. If a leader on one of those sides were to defy those stereotypes then it would change everything.

The difference between an ant walking down the sidewalk and the International Space Station orbiting the Earth is about four orders of magnitude. I never really timed how fast an ant goes. Then I was thinking about a lot of the intractable contemporary conflicts that plague the world today.