Gregg Easterbrook Quotes & Sayings

It was actually a very nice little book done by a gift book company. They illustrated it with pictures from 1920s football, before there were face guards. — Gregg Easterbrook

Though environmental orthodoxy holds that Third World deforestation is caused by rapacious clear-cutters and ruthless cattle barons, penniless peasants seeking fuel wood may be the greatest threat to our forests. — Gregg Easterbrook

The consensus of the scientific community has shifted from skepticism to near-unanimous acceptance of the evidence of an artificial greenhouse effect. Second, while artificial climate change may have some beneficial effects, the odds are we're not going to like it. Third, reducing emissions of greenhouse gases may turn out to be much more practical and affordable than currently assumed. — Gregg Easterbrook

I think professional sports, football, to use it as an example, it's fundamentally a form of entertainment. — Gregg Easterbrook

When television producers say it is the parents obligation to keep children away from the tube, they reach the self satire point of warning that their own product is unsuitable for consumption — Gregg Easterbrook

Now, for pure bloggers, for individual people who are just posting their own thoughts, they would still run the same risk of saying something wrong or embarrassing, but they wouldn't harm their institutions by doing so. — Gregg Easterbrook

Heroic people take risks to themselves to help others. There's nothing heroic about accepting $5 million to go out and run around chasing a ball, although you may show fortitude or those other qualities while you do it. — Gregg Easterbrook

You know, some of the good part of blog theory was that blogs would be like diaries that the world could read. They would be spontaneous, whatever pops into your mind, as a diary would be. — Gregg Easterbrook

But by showing us live coverage of every bad thing happening everywhere in the world, cable news makes life seem like it's just an endless string of disasters - when, for most people in most places today, life is fairly good. — Gregg Easterbrook

Even though Rush is not me and the situations were very different, I think, in the Rush Limbaugh thing, ESPN was criticized for not acting, and you remember that after a couple days of controversy over Rush. — Gregg Easterbrook

Inevitably, these sorts of things are going to come back to blow up in people's faces. — Gregg Easterbrook

If our goal in legislating against carbon releases is not simply punishing the West and its power companies but truly trying to reduce the accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, the main event will be in the developing world. We must use the smartest possible economics, and that means investing in China and India. — Gregg Easterbrook

Jewish persecution is a historical memory of the present generation and people fear it in the present day, and that's why those references are so much more powerful. I just understand that better now. — Gregg Easterbrook

A transition from material want to meaning want is in progress on an historically unprecedented scale-involving hundreds of millions of people-and may eventually be recognized as the principal cultural development of our age. — Gregg Easterbrook

Stereotypes involving Christian identity, Christian persecution is so far back in history now that no one fears it being revived, unless you live in China, I guess. — Gregg Easterbrook

The only reason runaway global warming seems unstoppable is that we have not yet tried to stop it. — Gregg Easterbrook

I behaved poorly by starting this whole thing and I made some mistakes in dealing with it, and they made some mistakes in dealing with me, and taking down all my stuff was probably one of them. — Gregg Easterbrook

I think the thing that I most appreciate now is that stereotypes involving Jewish identity activate fears of persecution that exist in the present day. — Gregg Easterbrook

I think that might have been an element in it, and people have asked me that very thing. Remember, Disney is the majority shareholder, but it is not an operating division of Disney. — Gregg Easterbrook

I don't think there are many larger lessons to be found in sports. — Gregg Easterbrook

For what I wrote that started this whole controversy, I deserved to be criticized, and I felt bad about writing it. I felt bad mainly as a writer and a thinker. — Gregg Easterbrook

Count your blessings for selfish reasons! Psychological studies show that people who are aware of their blessings and feel grateful for them live longer than non-grateful people, have fewer medical problems such as hypertension, earn more and achieve longer marriages. — Gregg Easterbrook

I'm a smart guy, I know the history of this issue and why people care about it. — Gregg Easterbrook

Autumn truly is what summer pretends to be: the best of all seasons. It is as glorious as summer is tedious; as subtle as summer is obvious; as refreshing as summer is wearying. Autumn seems like paradise. — Gregg Easterbrook

But if you could make that mistake and press the send button and the entire world sees it forever. — Gregg Easterbrook

Torture numbers and they will confess to anything — Gregg Easterbrook

Seek happiness and you may or may not find it; seek grievances and you are guaranteed success. — Gregg Easterbrook

I didn't view myself as attacking the boss. I viewed my boss at ESPN as the publisher and president of ESPN. — Gregg Easterbrook

I'm working seven days a week in the fall. I couldn't possibly keep that up. This is only for the fall. In the last couple of years I've tended to do most of my serious writing in the winter, when there's nothing going on with football. — Gregg Easterbrook

The Blue Hose of Presbyterian College and the Ichabods of Washburn University are perhaps the most amusing nicknames in collegiate sports; Blue Hose refers to stockings, not to melancholy courtesans. — Gregg Easterbrook

Set aside the many competing explanations of the Big Bang; something made an entire cosmos out of nothing. It is this realization-that something transcendent started it all-which has hard-science types ... using terms like 'miracle.' — Gregg Easterbrook

Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything. — Gregg Easterbrook

How many times have you bought something thinking it would make you happy, and found it does not? — Gregg Easterbrook

It was Orwellian. I completely disappeared, and disappeared the same day. It was by early that evening when the Times story ran. That was an overreaction. All human beings under pressure behave poorly. — Gregg Easterbrook

And then ESPN fired me. I did not think that was a fitting punishment. — Gregg Easterbrook

Peace on earth and mercy mild are still possible. On Christmas Eve, all things are possible. — Gregg Easterbrook

Everyone needs a certain amount of money. Beyond that, we pursue money because we know how to obtain it. We don't necessarily know how to obtain happiness. — Gregg Easterbrook

Instant-doomsday hyperbole caused the world's attention to focus on the hypothetical threat of global warming to the exclusion of environmental menaces that are real, palpable, and awful right now. — Gregg Easterbrook

The science has changed from ambiguous to near-unanimous ... Based on the data I'm now switching sides regarding global warming, from skeptic to convert. — Gregg Easterbrook

A spacecraft is a metaphor of national inspiration: majestic, technologically advanced, produced at dear cost and entrusted with precious cargo, rising above the constraints of the earth. The spacecraft carries our secret hope that there is something better out there-a world where we may someday go and leave the sorrows of the past behind. The spacecraft rises toward the heavens exactly as, in our finest moments as a nation, our hearts have risen toward justice and principle. — Gregg Easterbrook

And if there was something, suppose I wanted to write something really damning or embarrassing about one of the owners, that would really be a problem on the NFL's site. — Gregg Easterbrook