Ambiguity Quotes - Page 9

• That's what I love about being mayor. Even if the problem is getting the cat out of the tree - from that to the biggest problem, you're in charge. No ambiguity. Leaders lead.

  Shirley Franklin

  Cat, Tree, Leader

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• To embrace luck, you have to enhance your tolerance for ambiguity.

  Twyla Tharp

  Tolerance, Luck, Embrace

  Twyla Tharp, Mark Reiter (2003). “The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life”, Simon and Schuster

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• We're teaching a generation of students who've been schooled to produce quick, right answers on demand. They are not comfortable with ambiguity. The implications of that in the long term are discomforting.

  Carol Ann Tomlinson

  Teaching, Long, Generations

  Source: blogs.edweek.org

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• I am sorry to be so blunt, but I do not see much ambiguity here. [Barack] Obama was late to affirm the Egyptian revolution as a democratic movement, and even then he was eager to have installed those military leaders who were known for their practices of torture. And now he is quick to make allies with the Muslim Brotherhood for tactical reasons as well (though earlier that same administration stoked Islamophobic fear about that very political party).

  Judith Butler

  Sorry, Military, Party

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• We want to live in ambiguity. This is the human condition.

  Frank Moore Cross

  Want, Human Condition, Humans

  Source: www.biblicalarchaeology.org

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• The faster you can sample sound when you are digitizing it, the higher the frequency, the less phase ambiguity at the higher frequencies.

  Owsley Stanley

  Sound, Phases, Faster

  Source: medium.com

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• I try to write about complex issues--young people in an adult world-- full of irony and contradiction in a narrative style that relies heavily on suspense with a texture rich in emotion and imagery. I take a great deal of satisfaction in using popular forms-- the adventure, the mystery, the thriller-- so as to hold my reader with the sheer pleasure of a good story. At the same time I try to resolve my books with an ambiguity that compels engagement. In short, I want my readers to feel, to think, sometimes to laugh. But most of all I want them to enjoy a good read.

  Avi

  Book, Writing, Adventure

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• I love the necessary ambiguity of short stories - there simply isn't time to render every detail, so much of the story that orbits the literal prose must happen in the reader's imagination. Who knows, maybe the dwindling attention spans means a lucrative future for short story writers.

  Matthew Healy

  Mean, Imagination, Story Writers

  Source: blog.superstitionreview.asu.edu

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• A young girl would go into the wood as trustingly as Red Riding Hood to her granny's house but this light admits no ambiguities and, here, she will be trapped in her own illusion because everything in the woods is exactly as it seems.

  Angela Carter

  Girl, Light, House

  Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

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• In the face of ambiguity, uncertainty, and conflicting demands, often under great time pressure, leaders must make decisions and take effective actions to assure the survival and success of their organizations. This is how leaders add value to their organizations. They lead them to success by exercising good judgment, by making smart calls when especially difficult and complicated decisions simply must be made, and then ensuring that they are well executed.

  Warren G. Bennis

  Smart, Exercise, Organization

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• ...one of hallmarks of a creative person is the ability to tolerate ambiguity, dissonance, inconsistency, things out of place. But one of the rules of a well-run corporation is that surprise is to be minimized. Yet if this rule were applied to the creative process, nothing worth reading would get written, nothing worth seeing would get painted, nothing worth living with and using would ever get designed.

  Ralph Caplan

  Running, Reading, Creative

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• Among all the complaints you hear these days about the crimes of the media, it seems to me the critics miss the big one. It is that especially TV, but also we of the print press, tend to reduce mess and complexity and ambiguity to a simple story line that doesn't reflect reality so much as it distorts it. ... What bothers me about the journalistic tendency to reduce unmanageable reality to self-contained, movielike little dramas is not just that we falsify when we do this. It is also that we really miss the good story.

  Meg Greenfield

  Drama, Simple, Reality

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• Most people like to believe something is or is not true. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you'll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won't get started. It requires a lovely balance.

  Richard Hamming

  Believe, Science, Greatness

  "'You and Your Research' - 1986 Speech by Dr. Richard W. Hamming". www.valueinvestingworld.com. September 21, 2009.

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• Myths, whether in written or visual form, serve a vital role of asking unanswerable questions and providing unquestionable answers. Most of us, most of the time, have a low tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. We want to reduce the cognitive dissonance of not knowing by filling the gaps with answers. Traditionally, religious myths have served that role, but today — the age of science — science fiction is our mythology.

  Michael Shermer

  Religious, Knowing, Tolerance

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• The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, not into some predetermined, clearly delineated plan for the future. The next step discloses itself only out of a discernment of God acting in the desert of the present moment. The reality of naked trust is the life of the pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God has signaled the movement and offered it his presence and his promise.

  Brennan Manning

  Reality, Decision, Promise

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• He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.

  Don DeLillo

  Pain, Self, World

  Don DeLillo (2011). “White Noise”, p.24, Pan Macmillan

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• Occasionally, the whole class struggle may be summed up in the struggle for one word against another word. Certain words struggle amongst themselves as enemies. Other words are the site of an ambiguity: the stake in a decisive but undecided battle

  Louis Althusser

  Struggle, Class, Enemy

  Louis Althusser (2001). “Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays”, p.8, NYU Press

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• The real secret to freedom seems to lie in the ability to deal with ambiguity, the capacity to tolerate noise and yet hear within its wild randomizing abandon the possibilities of innovation and transformations.

  William Thompson

  Real, Lying, Adventure

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• All my novels are about the ambiguities that lie beneath the sharp edges of the law.

  Scott Turow

  Lying, Law, Novel

  "To hell with Perry Mason". Interview with Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. November 24, 2002.

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• To know the truth of history is to realize its ultimate myth and its inevitable ambiguity.

  Roy Basler

  History, Realizing, Inevitable

  Roy Prentice Basler (1973). “A Touchstone for Greatness: Essays, Addresses, and Occasional Pieces about Abraham Lincoln”, Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press

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• Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light; light and shade reveal these forms; cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders or pyramids are the great primary forms which light reveals to advantage; the image of these is distinct and tangible within us without ambiguity. It is for this reason that these are beautiful forms, the most beautiful forms. Everybody is agreed to that, the child, the savage and the metaphysician.

  Le Corbusier

  Beautiful, Children, Eye

  "Vers une architecture (Towards a New Architecture)". Book by Le Corbusier, 1927.

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• The Russian proposal over Iran's uranium enrichment program is considerable, but it has some problems and ambiguities to be clarified in future talks.

  Ali Larijani

  Iran, Problem, Proposal

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• For most of my life I had operated under a simple schematic of winning and losing, but cancer was teaching me a tolerance for ambiguities.

  Lance Armstrong

  Cancer, Teaching, Winning

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• If it can be verified, we don't need faith... Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Faith, Lying, Joy

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art”, p.21, Convergent Books

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• That was a good time in my life, in spite of having the sensation of floating on a cloud, surrounded by both lies and things left unspoken. Occasionally I thought I glimpsed the truth, but soon found myself once again lost in a forest of ambiguities.

  Isabel Allende

  Lying, Clouds, Floating

  Isabel Allende (2016). “Eva Luna: A Novel”, p.143, Simon and Schuster

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