All human endeavor, all human civilization, is the act of solving collective action problems. Should we put out our own fires, or should we have a fire department? Should we build roads, or should we hack our way through the woods from one factory to another?
That's the power of fiction, that it can take the collective and make it personal.
Real people do real things. A collective of a whole bunch of people who do things in their own locale, in their own neighborhoods - the sum is bigger than the parts, and the parts will grow.
I don't decide to represent anything except myself. But that self is full of collective memory.
Movies are the work of a collective conscious. It takes 500-800 people on a movie to complete a vision.
A writer's main tool is his memory - his own memory, the collective memory of his people. And the strongest memory is the one that is created by a wound to the heart.
Our collective memories are welcoming places, and one image, that of Jesus, has absorbed and appropriated elements of other traditions and aspirations in order to shape our communal remembering.
Americans enjoy the exciting, cinematic vision of a squad of muscle-bound Goliath boasting Olympian speed, strength, and precision - a group whose collective success is the inevitable consequence of the individual strengths of its members and the masterful planning of a visionary commander.
You're not just this person who's from your own specific experiences, but the collective experience of what makes you who you are because of time.
At the end of the day, every decision I make about my music is about creating a collective.
I also urge the Obama administration - both on its own and in cooperation with other responsible governments around the world - to use all legal means necessary to shut down WikiLeaks before it can do more damage by releasing additional cables. WikiLeaks' activities represent a shared threat to collective international security.
The great and abiding lesson of American history, particularly the cold war, is that the engine of capitalism, the individual, is mightier than any collective.
Encouragement of higher education for our youth is critical to the success of our collective future.
In a way, I think of the press as my colleagues. I don't want to throw hand grenades at people who do something that's pretty similar to what I do. But at the same time, we all need to take ourselves seriously and be responsible as professionals. And there was a collective failure in the treatment of Christopher Jefferies.
The president is the face of the State of Israel around the world: not a representative of a specific ideology but of the collective creativity and history of the Jewish people.
Think about multicellularity on this Earth. Every living thing originally came from bacteria. So, who do you think made up the rules for how to perform collective behaviors? It had to be the bacteria.
In the past goodness was always a collective experience. Then goodness became privatised.
There is a collective as well as an individual humor inclining peoples to sadness or cheerfulness, making them see things in bright or somber lights. In fact, only society can pass a collective opinion on the value of human life; for this the individual is incompetent.
Collective European Union action could mean no hiding places for evaders, no safe haven for tax avoiders, and no treasure islands for money launderers.
Imagine the action of a vaccine not just in terms of how it affects a single body, but also in terms of how it affects the collective body of a community.
There's lots of problem solving in any marriage, but when you have this collective goal that is a human being, it's an inspiring rally point.
Since St. Augustine announced that Eve - and, hence, collective woman - was responsible for original sin, rabid sexism has been a major pillar of patriarchal religious tradition.
What is true for book publishing is true for civilization: the books that survive the test of time are humanity's backlist, our collective memory.
Collective human actions are transforming, even ravaging, the biosphere - perhaps irreversibly - through global warming and loss of biodiversity.
When you work with Mourinho, you have to know that the group, the collective is above the individual.
In my own life, I think legends of supernatural, mythic things are really just a manifestation of the collective unconscious. So I don't really get freaked out. I mean certainly, you read about things people did to each other in the pursuit of some mystical or occult goal, and it's horrifying. But that's just human nature.
War of aggression, war which does not imply defense of one's country, is a collective crime.
America always pivots between collective responsibility and the idea that the individual can pull himself up by his bootstraps.
If we are going to reverse the race to the bottom, workers must have the right to engage in collective bargaining.
Iran is the only country in the world that's threatening to erase another country from the map as part of a collective genocide.
Musicians like James Blake were a big influence on me. How he uses his vocals is amazing. And then Yeasayer and Animal Collective, who aren't pop bands exactly, but they do something that is so catchy and undeniable and so much fun.
