Margaret Heffernan Quotes

I try to preserve whatever balance society has between public and personal life. I never try to eat on the subway. I never try to listen to loud music on the subway.

We have the alternative. "Do I want to be on the subway looking at these people, or do I want to be in my phone looking at my people?"

I'm not a lawmaker, but I was thinking that if you have a really loud ring tone, maybe you should be stabbed in the ear?

I get uncomfortable in large groups of people and loud music.

Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone.

L.A.'s a better place to live than it is to visit.

In New York you can just walk out and be among people. You're on the subway among people, you go to cafes, you can talk to people.

Apparently we love our own cell phones but we hate everyone else's.

I've always lived in a city.

I live in England, so I take a lot of trains, and you can't really go anywhere without somebody talking on their mobile phone behind you, forcing you to listen to their conversation. With the Internet, with texting, with networking sites, there's already information everywhere.

Street lights, dog-doo and parking meters are not my cup of tea.

Think about back in the day when we had Archie Bunker, 'The Jeffersons.' We had stuff to sit down and share and laugh at. The Internet has made it so we don't have to sit together anymore. It's so self-absorbed. No one has to talk to each other anymore, and people don't realize that that is killing us.

Music forced into the air you breathe is an invasion of privacy!

Usually, I'm so self-absorbed that my companion could be bleeding to death, and I might not notice.

When I go around in Kolkata, I do not get hassled.

Except for the pollution, I love everything about Delhi.

When you're hot, you stride confidently down the street, extending your form to hail a taxi to take you from place to place. My body is designed for squeezing into packed subway cars and apologizing to those whose feet I clumsily step on.

You sit or stand in the subway, and you look around - I do, because I don't have a phone so I'm not playing a game - and you see people.

The advent of the mobile phone was a disaster. We are forced to listen, open-mouthed, to other people's intimate conversations. Increasingly, we are all in our virtual bubbles when we are out in public, whether we are texting, listening to iPods, reading or just staring dangerously at other people.

The greatest inspiration I draw upon is, is this city (New York) and riding the subway and watching people and I find that's kind of like the best, the best acting teacher. You know, I wonder, like people who have huge celebrity, sometimes I feel bad, should this be one of their methods 'cause I don't know how they can observe life anymore, because they become the observed. So, I, I appreciate that New York can still do that.

When did the cell phone become a license to be rude? And why must I be subjected to your personal conversations?

On a train, why do I always end up sitting next to the woman who's eating the individual fruit pie by sucking the filling out through the hole in the middle?

It is difficult to estimate the misery inflicted upon thousands of persons, and the absolute pecuniary penalty imposed upon multitudes of intellectual workers by the loss of their time, destroyed by organ-grinders and other similar nuisances.

A population may be too crowded, though all be amply supplied with food and raiment. It is not good for a man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species.

Often whole days pass without my speaking to anyone.