Adam Curtis
Director
1955-05-26
Adam Curtis is an English documentary filmmaker known for essay-style films produced for the BBC.
Quotes by Adam Curtis
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In our age of individualism, we see computers as ways through which we can express our individuality. But the truth is that the computers are really good at spotting the very opposite. The computers can see how similar we are, and they then have the ability to agglomerate us together into groups that have the same behaviours.
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Both individuals and societies tell themselves stories to simplify and make sense of the messy chaos of reality.
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At its heart, 'South Park' has a touching faith in human beings: that despite their absurdities and flaws, people have the capacity to create a better world.
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When you bring God into politics, very strange things happen.
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As well as our relationship with Afghanistan, I am researching the legacy of other European empires - in Africa. We think of those empires as history, but actually, they still haunt our everyday lives in the strangest of ways.
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I have a suspicion that the politicians' revival of the old behaviourist ideas and techniques will be helped and reinforced by a powerful ally - the machines we have built. The computers.
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Events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of control. Donald Trump, Brexit, the War in Syria, the endless migrant crisis, random bomb attacks.
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The idea of elegance and aristocratic indulgence of an ocean cruise was born out of the image of the rich men and women who ruled the British Empire slowly sailing to India and the Far East while sipping gin and tonic on deck - served by men in white jackets.
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Tony Blair believed in a consumerist idea of democracy.
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The latest rule is: you cannot have protectionism - otherwise you will get a world war. Other rules say you cannot have collective ideas that involve the surrender of the individual to the group - otherwise, you get totalitarianism or, even worse, religion.
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James Goldsmith is important because he used the power of the markets to break up the cosy patrician elite that ran Britain and its industries in the 1950s and '60s. In the process, Goldsmith helped transfer power in this country away from politics and towards the markets and the financial sector.
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Together, the western elites and Gaddafi helped to lead us into a simplistic two-dimensional vision of the world - full of exaggerations and falsehoods. A fake bubble of certainty that has imprisoned us in the West - and is now preventing us from understanding what is really going on in the world outside.
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There is a lurking sense that there is a kind of seedy corruption underlying a lot of public life today. But while journalism does a very good job of describing that corruption, it is failing to bring it into a bigger focus. To explain what it is all about.
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Henrietta Lacks' cells are immortal. They are known as the HeLa cell line, and they have become deeply involved in all sorts of medical and genetic research - sometimes in the most unexpected ways.
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There are two - parallel - universes of science. One is the actual day-to-day work of scientists, patiently researching into all parts of the world and sometimes making amazing discoveries. The other is the role science plays in the public imagination - the powerful effect it has in shaping how millions of ordinary people see the world.
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Nobody trusts anyone in authority today. It is one of the main features of our age. Wherever you look, there are lying politicians, crooked bankers, corrupt police officers, cheating journalists and double-dealing media barons, sinister children's entertainers, rotten and greedy energy companies, and out-of-control security services.
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BP is accused of destroying the wildlife and coastline of America, but if you look back into history, you find that BP did something even worse to America. They gave the world Ayatollah Khomeini.
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The Kurds had always had a bad time. They were oppressed by the Ottoman empire. Then, at the end of the First World War, they were promised a homeland, but the new Turkish state refused to give them any land, while the British went and created the new state of Iraq and sent aircraft to bomb the Kurds there into submission.
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