Quotes from Chuck Klosterman

Let's assume it was Christopher Columbus's "destiny" to discover the New World, and let's pretend he was consciously aware of that fact. What possible difference would that have made in his day-to-day life? He still had to build the boats.

It sometimes seems like 1995 was the year the future began. This is particularly true if the last book you happened to read was W. Joseph Campbell's 1995: The Year the Future Began.

The Disco Group ABBA": They were beards and teeth and natural breasts and whiteness. I

The compulsion to reconsider the past through the ideals and beliefs of the present is constant and overwhelming. It allows for a sense of moral clarity and feels more enlightened. But it's actually just easier than trying to understand how things felt when they originally occurred.

I sometimes think I should have titled this book 'Aristotle: The Genius Who Was Wrong About Fucking Everything'.

accelerated culture does not respond well to the nonobvious.

What happens to my generation is, we don't just watch The Breakfast Club[*] two times while it's in movie theaters. We watch The Breakfast Club sixty-nine times between the ages of twelve and twenty-five and convince ourselves that The Breakfast Club is a genius movie. You have this wrapped-up nostalgia and regurgitation and overcompensation of mediocre shit . . . and I directly tie that to the video store.

There are things we cannot control about ourselves. One of these things is the degree to which we find something to be funny. It

Priscilla, Queen of the Desert needed ABBA to invent gay Australians. The

disaster that never occurred. In 2000, the emotional relationship to the internet was reversed from the way it is now: Those who viewed the internet as positive were the people using it the most, while those who hated the internet tended to be people using it the least.

As a consequence, the United States is a safe place for those who want to criticize the government but a dangerous place for those who want to advance unpopular thoughts about any other subject that could be deemed insulting or discomfiting.

No one has ever honestly said, "I hate that this joke exists, even though it's clearly hilarious." It

If we objectively balance the good things Ali did against the bad, there's no question he's ultimately heroic. But that's not the issue. The issue is that these kinds of questions are never weighed objectively. That's not how the court of public opinion operates.

I don't need to personally agree with something in order to recognize that it's true.

Literary posterity may

Sometimes writing is like talking to a stranger who's exactly like yourself in every possible way, only to realize that this stranger is as boring as shit.

If you want to avoid criticism, it's better to be good than it is to be great.

Record sales don't matter when the people who bought the records are dead and gone.

His demeanor was condescending, his body language was inelegant, and it was (apparently) better to be uninformed than annoying.

Over time,[*] the Google algorithm created something that had never previously existed: a consensus about the shared understanding of everything.

Most episodes of Seinfeld circuitously forward two worldviews: The first is that most people are bad (and not very smart). The ­second is that caring about other people is absurd (and not very practical). It is the most villainous sitcom ever made, particularly since its massive audience never seemed to fully grasp what it was literally seeing.

If you did not really care, any experience could be entertaining.

American football] fanbase resemble that of contemporary boxing: rich people watching poor people play a game they would never play themselves.

Within our aforementioned analogy, the wheel represents the internet and the axle represents the human relationship to computerized technology.