Ambiguity Quotes - Page 10

• I began dividing life in absolutes... Things and people were either perfectly bad, or perfectly good, and when life didn't obey this black-and-white rule, when things or people were complex or contradictory, I pretended otherwise. I turned every defeat into a disaster, every success into an epic triumph, and separated all people into heroes or villains. Unable to bear ambiguity, I built a barricade of delusions against it.

  J. R. Moehringer

  Hero, Black And White, Epic

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• There has to be certainty and there has to be clarity. There can't be ambiguity, .. This has to be certain, clear in all respects from all the parties so nobody is in any doubt about what the future holds.

  Tony Blair

  Party, Doubt, Clarity

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• Heaven preserve me from littleness and pleasantness and smoothness. Give me great glaring vices, and great glaring virtues, but preserve me from the neat little neutral ambiguities. Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be reckless, be dissolute, be despotic, be a suffragette, be anything you like, but for pity's sake be it to the top of your bent. Live fully, live passionately, live disastrously. Let's live, you and I, as none have ever lived before.

  Violet Trefusis

  Drunk, Giving, Brave

  Said to Sackville-West. "Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson". Book by Nigel Nicolson, p. 148, 1998.

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• That was the problem ... with trusting to the written word ... We were human, mortal and fallible. We forgot, we made errors, argued ambiguities, and twisted meanings to suit our own ends. And in doing so, mayhap we reshaped the gods themselves.

  Jacqueline Carey

  Errors, Suits, Problem

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• This is positively not an album to play while you do a doctorate thesis on "Bergson, Webern and Charles the Vicious, Paradox or Ambiguity?"

  Bob Brookmeyer

  Music, Play, Albums

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• This false distance is present everywhere: in spy films, in Godard, in modern advertising, which uses it continually as a cultural allusion. It is not really clear in the end whether this 'cool' smile is the smile of humour or that of commercial complicity. This is also the case with pop, and its smile ultimately encapsulates all its ambiguity: it is not the smile of critical distance, but the smile of collusion

  Jean Baudrillard

  Distance, Spy, Use

  Jean Baudrillard (1998). “The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures”, p.121, SAGE

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• You can have large projects and implement them by means of a few of the smallest things. Or you can use weak means that are more effective than strong ones, as Paul also said in his First Letter to the Corinthians. [...] The wisdom of discernment redeems the necessary ambiguity of life and helps us find the most appropriate means, which do not always coincide with what looks great and strong.

  Pope Francis

  Strong, Mean, Looks

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• The way innovating companies are designed leaves ambiguities, overlaps, decision conflicts or decision vacuums in some parts of the organisation. People rail at this, curse it-and invent innovative ways to overcome it.

  Rosabeth Moss Kanter

  Business, People, Decision

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• I capture reality, never pose it. But once captured, is it still reality? I've always tried to play with the false impression of reality, with the ambiguity of appearances. Things are what they seem to be, or maybe something else. I use people as unconscous actors in little dramas they don't know they're in. These pictures are about Earthlings, but I'll let you in on a secret: I'm an Earthling myself.

  Richard Kalvar

  Drama, Reality, Play

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• To accpet the world as boring or accpet oneself as boring? Which is really more agreeable? There's bound to be some amount of ambiguity and uncertainty.

  Nisio Isin

  World, Boring, Oneself

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• Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Atheist, Writing, Hands

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• Part of teaching is helping students learn how to tolerate ambiguity, consider possibilities, and ask questions that are unanswerable.

  Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

  Teaching, Helping, Students

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• Screw ambiguity. Perversion and corruption masquerade as ambiguity. I don`t trust ambiguity. John Wayne

  John Wayne

  Corruption, Wayne, Masquerade

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• The United States has been ambiguous on the current situation in Nepal. They have not actually come out very strongly in terms of pushing the king to take measures on the detentions or abuses by the army. China continues to provide military equipment.

  Irene Khan

  Kings, Military, Army

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• If it doesn’t have ambiguity, don’t bother to take it. I love that, that aspect of photography - the mendacity of photography. It’s got to have some kind of peculiarity in it, or it’s not interesting to me.

  Sally Mann

  Photography, Interesting, Photographer

  "Dog Bone Prints: Sally Mann". Art in the Twenty-First Century Interview, art21.org. September 2001.

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• Into The Wild" had a great sense of wild, unpredictable freedom that I loved and "Unforgiven" is just a great western with characters that walked the line between right/wrong with an ambiguity that felt very true to frontier life.

  Brendan Fletcher

  Character, Lines, Very True

  "Meet the 2011 Sundance Filmmakers | “Mad Bastards” Director Brendan Fletcher". www.indiewire.com. January 11, 2011.

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• In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book -- leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity.

  Toni Morrison

  Book, Writing, Doors

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• No need to choose; become choiceless. And whatsoever happens happens; whatsoever happens is good. Let things happen rather than trying to do, and you will be surprised that all ambiguity disappears. It is a by-product of the chooser's mind, the choosing mind, that creates ambiguity. Otherwise there is no dilemma. Negative and positive are perfectly balancing in life.

  Rajneesh

  Mind, Trying, Negative

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• I believe that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitable for and accessible alike to professionals and interested laypeople. The concepts of science, in all their richness and ambiguity, can be presented without any compromise, without any simplification counting as distortion, in language accessible to all intelligent people. I hope that this book can be read with profit both in seminars for graduate students and if the movie stinks and you forgot your sleeping pills on the businessman's special to Tokyo.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Believe, Book, Sleep

  "Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History". Book by Stephen Jay Gould. Preface, p. 16, 1989.

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• The law is more easily understood by few than many words. For all words are subject to ambiguity, and therefore multiplication of words in the body of the law is multiplication of ambiguity. Besides, it seems to imply (by too much diligence) that whosoever can evade the words is without the compass of the law.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Law, Body, Too Much

  Thomas Hobbes (2015). “Leviathan”, p.672, Thomas Hobbes

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• I like ambiguity. I think it's so much more interesting to play than an overtly good or an overtly evil person.

  Evangeline Lilly

  Thinking, Play, Evil

  Source: collider.com

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• There's the ambiguity of human relationships, for instance. A relationship between two people, just like a sequence of words, is ambiguous if it is open to different interpretations. And if two people do have differing views about their relationship - I don't just mean about its state, I mean about its very nature - then that difference can affect the entire course of their lives.

  Elliot Perlman

  Mean, Views, Two

  "Seven Types of Ambiguity". Book by Elliot Perlman, 2003.

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• It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.

  Colm Toibin

  Country, Reading, Thinking

  "History students will no longer tolerate or believe grand narratives" by Colm Toibin, www.theguardian.com. August 10, 2013.

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• We've never thought too deeply about the roles things like forgetting or partisanship or inefficiency or ambiguity or hypocrisy play in our political or social life. It's been impossible to get rid of them, so we took them for granted, and we kind of thought, naively, that they're always the enemy.

  Evgeny Morozov

  Play, Hypocrisy, Political

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• The Russian proposal is ambiguous. If they want to propose enrichment (only) in Russia we have said it is not acceptable. But if it is a complementary or parallel plan, we will study that.

  Hamid-Reza Assefi

  Russia, Want, Study

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