Michael Foley Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

Snobbery management is as difficult and necessary as anger management.

Michael Foley
After a lifetime of engaging in long, passionate discussions I have come to the conclusion that it is a waste of time trying to convince anyone of anything.

Michael Foley
Being constantly the hub of a network of potential interruptions provides the excitement and importance of crisis management. As well as the false sense of efficiency in multitasking, there is the false sense of urgency in multi-interrupt processing.

Michael Foley
The 1970s was the decade of liberation, of anger at injustice and demands for recognition and rights. But over time, the demand for specific rights degraded into a generalized sense of entitlement, the demand for specific recognition into a generalized demand for attention and the anger at specific injustice into a generalized feeling of grievance and resentment. The result is a culture of entitlement, attention-seeking and complaint.

Michael Foley
Put any two people together and each will seek ways of feeling superior to the other. If a ship went down in the Pacific and a single sailor managed to swim to a desert island, would he be pleased to see, ten minutes later, another sailor emerging from the surf? Quite possibly - but only if the new arrival accepted that the first man was now a landed aristocrat while he himself was an illegal immigrant.

Michael Foley
However, the serious seeker of detachment will have to embrace the Holy Trinity of Ss - Solitude, Stillness and Silence - and reject the new religion of Commotionism, which believes that the meaning of life is constant company, movement and noise.

Michael Foley
It is not possible to be original by trying to be original - those who attempt this in the arts will be merely avant-garde. Originality is the product of an impulse to intense and overwhelming that it bursts the conventions and produces something new - again more by accident than design.

Michael Foley
But there is a compelling reason to develop a personal strategy for living. Rejecting issues, which often feels liberating, is actually enslavement. Those who do not produce their own solutions must be using someone else's. As Nietzsche warned 'he who cannot obey himself will be commanded'.

Michael Foley