Abstract Quotes - Page 36

• In a sense, a cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense – a ‘final’ irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the ‘West’s’ escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space.

  Donna J. Haraway

  Men, Self, Space

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• The unique, compelling, and earnest voice that characterizes Jedediah’s weekly columns comes alive with increased vitality in OUTNUMBERED. She shatters leftist stereotypes about conservatives and exposes the myth of liberal tolerance as she relates her interactions with liberals in everyday life. This narrative, interlaced with commentary and impressions, gives us insight into liberals that books merely about abstract principles do not capture. A fascinating read.

  David Limbaugh

  Book, Unique, Voice

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• The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who use the abstract words of glory, honor, and patriotism to mask the cries of the wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief.

  Chris Hedges

  War, Grief, Honor

  "On War". www.nybooks.com. December 16, 2004.

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• Abstract art has helped us to experience the emotional power inherent in pure form.

  Anton Ehrenzweig

  Art, Emotional, Form

  Anton Ehrenzweig (1967). “The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination”, p.147, Univ of California Press

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• Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot physically see with his eyes... Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an explosion into unknown areas.

  Arshile Gorky

  Art, Eye, Men

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• The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity—and until they do (and find the cure), all ideal plans will fall into quicksand.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Real, Philosophical, Fall

  Richard P. Feynman (2015). “The Quotable Feynman”, p.279, Princeton University Press

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• The works of 'abstract' art are subtle creations of order out of simple contrasting elements.

  Jan Tschichold

  Art, Simple, Order

  Jan Tschichold (1967). “Asymmetric Typography”, New York : Reinhold Publishing Corporation

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• The seasons and the years came and went...and always...one was, as the crow flies, about 2,000 km away - but from where? - and day by day hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one's qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract.

  W. G. Sebald

  Years, Crow, Quality

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• We claim we believe in compassion, which is an abstract, and when it's personified we discredit the man

  Mort Sahl

  Believe, Men, Compassion

  Mort Sahl (1976). “Heartland”, New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

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• At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there'd be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you.

  Lee Krasner

  Two, Drawing, People

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• For the anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility of every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities and talents with which nature has endowed them, and turn them to social account.

  Rudolf Rocker

  Philosophical, Development, Talent

  Rudolf Rocker (2004). “Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice”, p.16, AK Press

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• I thought, enough of this, I'm not an abstract painter, what the hell am I going to do? Should I get a job in a shoe store, sell real estate, or what? I was really depressed by the whole thing, because I felt like a painter, yet I couldn't make paintings.

  Ralph Goings

  Jobs, Real, Shoes

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• God is the shaper of your heart. God does not display his work in abstract terms. He prefers the concrete, and this means that at the end of your life one of three things will happen to your heart: it will grow hard, it will be broken, or it will be tender. Nobody escapes

  Ravi Zacharias

  Heart, Mean, Broken

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• It's very nice to have someone that you can have a completely abstract conversation with and leave the room, feel like everything's fine, and then realize that if you pick it apart, you have absolutely no idea what either of you said.

  Tim Burton

  Nice, Ideas, Rooms

  "Tim Burton Explains His 'Abstract' Relationship With Johnny Depp" by Eric Ditzian, www.mtv.com. September 1, 2009.

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• Education as the practice of freedom--as opposed to education as the practice of domination--denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as reality apart from people. Authentic reflection considers neither abstract man nor the world without people, but people in their relations with the world. In these relations consciousness and world are simultaneous: consciousness neither precedes the world nor follows it.

  Paulo Freire

  Independent, Reflection, Reality

  Paulo Freire (2014). “Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition”, p.81, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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• Any combining, mixing, adding, diluting, exploiting, vulgarizing, or popularizing of abstract art deprives art of its essence and depraves the artist's artistic consciousness. Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all.

  Donald Judd

  Art, Essence, Mixing

  American Dialog Vol. 1-5, p.9, 1964.

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• I don’t abstract from anything.…I am involved with real space, the room itself, real light, and real surface.

  Robert Ryman

  Real, Light, Space

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• I think that if you can turn off the mind and look only with the eyes, ultimately everything becomes abstract.

  Ellsworth Kelly

  Eye, Thinking, Mind

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• I abstract it in my photographs: I like large planes and spaces, areas of texture and light, like deserts or oceans or monumental places.

  Herb Ritts

  Ocean, Light, Space

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• Where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible.

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Real, Light, Earth Life

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• Music, I find, gets you out of a trap [when screenwriting], because it speaks to your emotions directly, it's an abstract thing, it's not concerned with plot or story. And so music really helps - often I'll listen to the music and just write anything, just to get through.

  Tony Grisoni

  Writing, Plot, Stories

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• It is not an individual act, architecture. You have to consider your client. Only out of that can you produce great architecture. You cannot work in the abstract

  I. M. Pei

  Clients, Architecture, Individual

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• Hope isn't an abstract theory about where human aspirations end and the impossible begins; it's a never-ending experiment, continually expanding the boundaries of the possible.

  Paul Rogat Loeb

  Impossible, Boundaries, Ends

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• All human populations are in some sense immigrants. All hostility between different cultures in one place has an aspect of the classic immigrant grudge against the next boatload approaching the shore. To defend one’s home and fields and ancestral graves against invasion seems a right. But to claim unique possession – to compound the fact of settlement with the aspect of a landscape into an abstract of eternal and immutable ownership – is a joke.

  Neal Ascherson

  Home, Unique, Population

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• I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. We can know only that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree.

  Giorgio Morandi

  Believe, Tree, World

  Karen Wilkin, Giorgio Morandi (1997). “Giorgio Morandi”, Rizzoli International Publications

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