The Guest Lecture Quotes

“This self was not really you, it didn't sufficiently encompass what you care about or what you want to say. Because at the end of the day, you are uniquely ill-equipped to convey to the world what you care about or what you want to say.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“I felt also, for the first time that evening, the pinch of my own deep loneliness, never far from me in those days, always just out past the edge of my so-called self-awareness.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“But for some reason reading works, reading in particular. The mental release, the distraction, or maybe just the voice, the company.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Reading and writing being the only good methods I have ever found for emptying my insomnia mind, and calming it.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Now the box is open, reality spills out, and there's no way to stuff it back in. Judgment has been meted out, the first sentence handed down, first of many because once this trial gets going there is no going back. The proceedings are irreversible, the stakes existential, the accusations keep piling up, the prosecution is relentless, the prosecution never rests, the defense never rests, nobody in this whole damn place ever rests.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Even an imagined togetherness beats being alone.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Perhaps the real revelation is simply that life has caught up with you. All this time, when you thought you were fooling everyone, that was only because no one was paying attention. But eventually the world does pay attention, and suddenly it is you who are on trial, not the world but you. The trial you'd managed to put off for years is finally underway and you see, now, that you are not the plaintiff, as you'd always assumed, but the defendant, not the accuser but the accused.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“There was the pessimism of the revolutionaries, as Keynes called it, the worry of those who thought the world so doomed that the only hope was to turn everything upside down. Then there was the pessimism of the reactionaries, those who thought the world so doomed that any sort of change at all would send civilization reeling into the abyss.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Ignorance doesn't make you good at anything. You don't free yourself by unlearning. You have to learn past all you've learned.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“You enjoy speaking your ideas but you also hate it, and finally you hate it more than you enjoy it. Hearing yourself form words and project them toward people, who will probably not care much anyway. Who might at best watch curiously as your words sail past them and bounce off the back wall.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Words shaped the world economy and the human body, both.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“I’d been caught up in myself, my grand entrance to humanity. But humanity was just a bunch of people I didn’t know standing on the far side of a pool, and none of them seemed very impressed.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Plato, who was a total elitist, by the way, and hated democracy, because he thought average people were too dumb to make their own decisions and ought to be governed by philosophers, because philosophers alone understand “essential truths.” Apparently he never met anyone from our philosophy department”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“You put yourself out there, take on a thing like this, because you think that you should, or need to. Not because you want to, not at all because you want to, but because you are painfully aware of how greatly you would prefer to say no, to stay home, to climb into bed and read a book or watch something on your laptop, and you worry that's not healthy or good. Your natural inclinations seem counterproductive and not good. So you make yourself say yes, you force yourself, out of fear that you will live your whole life not "having lived" or whatever. But then here you are, living, and it's miserable! Not a meaningful corrective to your natural inclinations, just a terrible series of tortures with no redeeming value.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“It's far too stressful when everything you're saying has to be exactly right all the time. To check yourself with every sentence. It's exhausting.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Ideology is a big bubble that surrounds you. It's all the assumptions you make about how to live, and you live so deeply inside these assumptions that it's very difficult, on a day-to-day basis, to remember which parts of your reality are natural and inevitable, versus which parts are things people just made up.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Uncertainty is a fact of life and an important part of what makes life lively. Risk is the spirit of courage you bring to things you care about. On the other hand, risking your own safety and stability won't necessarily help anybody else, either. There's courage, then there's ill-conceived idealism. Being stripped of your own safety and stability might make you more empathetic to other people's problems, but more likely it will just make you mean. Too much money makes people greedy, and too much security makes people spineless, but a basic amount of money and security makes it much easier for a person to be decent and good.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Sir Thomas More tries to make up for this by suggesting that in the absence of private property, and thus of greed, most of our vile pastimes wouldn't interest us anyway.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“As long as there's private property, we are never going to get our acts together. We are always going to make ourselves and each other miserable wanting what everyone else has.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Consciously or unconsciously, every day you decide which constructs to accept and which to question, about yourself and about the world. You can't question everything. You should work on yourself, be aware of yourself, try to better yourself, but you can't always treat yourself as the problem.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“The removal of private property is the big one, because it addresses what More sees as the central issue of humanity, the "parent of all plagues," his permanent problem, which is pride. "Pride" in the sense of needing to be better than other people, which I guess is more like vanity.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“It must have been very sad. And confusing. The death of a very gifted person is strange for their friends, even if they haven't seen each other for a while. Trying to balance, emotionally, the cost to the world and the cost to yourself. The feeling that you lost something all your own, alongside the feeling that the culture, which is also yours, lost something as well. Two losses that overlap but are fundamentally different. That in some ways might even contend with one another, yet you have to make sense of them together.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“A woman's autonomy is not just about rights or laws, she's saying. A woman literally needs her own room.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“History is the nightmare from which I am trying to fall asleep.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Events that happened years ago, that are utterly lost to the past and have no consequences for the present, should not hit you in the middle of the night with an onrush of shame and self-loathing. Mistakes made when you were young that barely even mattered at the time should not revisit you years later and make your whole body cringe. There needs to be a statute of limitations.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“It's not that you fail to pay attention in such moments, but that you pay so much attention there's no room for anything else.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“This is what's wrong with the world. Purely and simply wrong. That two people who are alone and who know each other can't manage to reach out to one another, to offer company, because of the hour and the roles we play. Landlady. Tenant. Stupid roles for a stupid world. Stupid rules! We force ourselves to follow them, but we're the ones who suffer.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“There is nothing we can do for each other, in the end we are all alone.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Life is hard enough. You were born into a homogeneous wasteland, a society that champions sameness but treats people differently, a culture orchestrated to sell you things. You found a way out, a way of understanding yourself and growing, of breaking through intellectual boundaries, but you carried forth from your upbringing a deep-seated resistance to other sorts of messiness—emotional, interpersonal—and fear of confrontation in any form. You enjoy a theoretical generosity toward humanity, but in many ways you are kind of an asshole.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture

“Consciously or unconsciously, every day you decide which constructs to accept and which to question, about yourself and about the world. You can’t question everything.”
― Martin Riker, The Guest Lecture