Quotes by Walter Blunt

“Information has always been power, now it is also wealth. Nonmaterial and, with the aid of modern technology, extremely mobile, information can escape government control far more easily than other forms of capital. Draconian or even merely bureaucratic systems for controlling the flow or use of information tend to destroy or waste it. Economically useful information is usually original, innovative, or at least timely, nuanced, precise, complex, and challenging. Bureaucracies and governments live for delay, blunt originality, oppose innovation, abhor nuance. Governments are good at governing matter but everywhere misrule mind, especially the best and most productive minds, minds that are frustrated and demoralized by the pretensions of the merely powerful.””

“On a trip to London with Jobs, Ive had the thankless task of choosing the hotel. He picked the Hempel, a tranquil five- star boutique hotel with a sophisticated minimalism that he thought Jobs would love. But as soon as they checked in, he braced himself, and sure enough his phone rang a minute later. “I hate my room,”Jobs declared. “It’s a piece of shit, let’s go.”So Ive gathered his luggage and went to the front desk, where Jobs bluntly told the shocked clerk what he thought. Ive realized that most people, himself among them, tend not to be direct when they feel something is shoddy because they want to be liked, “which is actually a vain trait.”That was an overly kind explanation. In any case, it was not a trait Jobs had.””

“The uncertainty principle, so simple and yet so startling, was a stake in the heart of classical physics. It asserts that there is no objective reality”

“His persistence baffled me. He was known to guard his privacy, and I had no reason to believe he’d ever read any of my books. Maybe someday, I continued to say. But in 2009 his wife, Laurene Powell, said bluntly, “If you’re ever going to do a book on Steve, you’d better do it now.” He had just taken a second medical leave. I confessed to her that when he had first raised the idea, I hadn’t known he was sick. Almost nobody knew, she said. He had called me right before he was going to be operated on for cancer, and he was still keeping it a secret, she explained.””

“a laugh that was as rough and harsh and frank as the sea itself; that arose out of coarse feelings and blunted sensibilities, from natures that knew neither courtesy nor gentleness.””