Artifacts Quotes - Page 2

• A civilization without retail bookstores is unimaginable. Like shrines and other sacred meeting places, bookstores are essential artifacts of human nature. The feel of a book taken from the shelf and held in the hand is a magical experience, linking writer to reader.

  Jason Epstein

  Book, Taken, Hands

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• Artistic judgments are silly if expressed as dogmas, at least until we get an "artometer" which can measure objectively how many micro-michelangelos or kilo-homers of genius a given artifact has in it.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Silly, Genius, Artistic

  Source: theanarchistlibrary.org

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• A big part of making music is the discovery aspect, is the surprise aspect. That's why I think I'll always love sampling. Because it involves combining the music fandom: collecting, searching, discovering music history, and artifacts of recording that you may not have known existed and you just kind of unlock parts of your brain, you know?

  Gotye

  Thinking, Discovery, Brain

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• Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.

  Aldo Leopold

  Men, Civilization, Raw Materials

  Aldo Leopold (2013). “Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Conservation and Ecology: (Library of America #238)”, p.223, Library of America

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• Naked I came into the world, but brush strokes cover me, language raises me, music rhythms me. Art is my rod and staff, my resting place and shield, and not mine only, for art leaves nobody out. Even those from whom art has been stolen away by tyranny, by poverty, begin to make it again. If the arts did not exist, at every moment, someone would begin to create them, in song, out of dust and mud, and although the artifacts might be destroyed, the energy that creates them is not destroyed.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Song, Art, Dust

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• Humans are the reproductive organs of technology. We multiply manufactured artifacts and spread ideas and memes.

  Kevin Kelly

  Technology, Ideas, Memes

  Kevin Kelly (2010). “What Technology Wants”, p.268, Penguin

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• The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.

  Daniel Dennett

  Order, Brain, Mind

  Daniel C. Dennett (1996). “Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanins of Life”, p.365, Simon and Schuster

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• Human artifacts not only include material structures and objects, such as buildings, machines, and automobiles, but they also include organizations, organizational structures like extended families . . . tribes, nations, corporations, churches, political parties, governments, and so on. Some of these may grow unconsciously, but they all originate and are sustained by the images in the human mind.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Party, Government, Organization

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• I find greater companionship in inert figures, animals and Speechless artifacts, for I can enjoy their presence and there is no psychic drain.

  Anton Szandor LaVey

  Animal, Psychics, Companionship

  "The Devil's Notebook".

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• I would say aside from Moxie soda bottles and Masonic artifacts, there's nothing I really collect.

  John Hodgman

  Moxie, Bottles, Soda

  "Bewildered Maine resident John Hodgman takes another crack at our 11 Questions". The A.V. Club Interview, www.avclub.com. September 3, 2015.

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• I think continuity is the devil. I think it's constricting and restrictive, I think it's alienating and off-putting, and it inflicts an artifact of linear time as we experience it on something that exists outside of linear time as well as keeps new readership away by keeping comics a matter of trivia and history rather than actual stories.

  Matt Fraction

  Thinking, Devil, Stories

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• The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Book, Eye, Technology

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• Belief in God is apparently a psychological artifact of mammalian reproduction.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Belief, Psychological, Reproduction

  "The Fountains of Paradise". Book by Arthur C. Clarke (Chapter 35: Starglider Plus Eighty, p. 190), 1979.

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• Oh, for heaven's sake, she thought with droll exasperation, this certainly explains a lot. It's no wonder I haven't been able to keep my hands off the blasted man since the day I met him. He's an artifact! A Celtic one at that!

  Karen Marie Moning

  Men, Hands, Heaven

  Karen Marie Moning (2002). “The Dark Highlander”, p.234, Dell

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• But when you see personal artifacts relating to - by genealogy at least - a living human being, it was just more impressive to me than just about anything I've ever read about slavery before.

  Bob Edwards

  Slavery, Genealogy, Impressive

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• I personally have never trusted museums. ... It is because museums, broadly speaking, live off of the art and artifacts of others, often art and artifacts that have been obtained by dubious means. But they also manipulate whatever it is they present to the public; hence, until Judy Chicago, in the 1970s ... few women artists were hung in any major museum. Indian artists? Artifacts only, please. Black artists? Something musical, maybe? And so forth.

  Alice Walker

  Art, Mean, Museums

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• Money, after all, is an abstract artifact, like language - merely symbolized by the paper or coin or whatever. If you can fully grasp its abstractedness, especially in the computer age, it becomes quite clear that no group can monopolize this abstraction, except through a series of swindle. If the usurers had been bolder, they might have monopolized language as well as currency, and people would be saying we can't write more books because we don't have enough words, the way they now say we can't build starships, because we don't have enough money.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Book, Writing, People

  Source: theanarchistlibrary.org

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• When I was young, you know, the first foreign editions that would come in of anything of mine, I'd sit there and look at them as these strange and wonderful artifacts.

  Neil Gaiman

  Looks, Firsts, Strange

  Interview with Tasha Robinson, film.avclub.com. September 28, 2005.

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• Stages of life are artifacts. Adolescence is a useful contrivance, midlife is a moving target, senior citizens are an interest group, and tweenhood is just plain made up.

  Jill Lepore

  Senior, Moving, Age

  "Baby Talk" by Jill Lepore, www.newyorker.com. June 29, 2009.

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• Whoever declares another heretic is himself a devil. Whoever places a relic or artifact above justice, kindness, mercy, or truth is himself a devil and the thing elevated is a work of evil magic.

  Sheri S. Tepper

  Kindness, Evil, Justice

  "The Visitor". Book by Sheri S. Tepper, 2002.

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• The widespread inability to understand technological artifacts as fabricated entities, as social and cultural phenomena, derives from the fact that in retrospect only those technologies that prove functional for a culture and can be integrated into everyday life are 'left over.' However, the perception of what is functional, successful and useful is itself the product of social and cultural--and last but not least--political and economic processes. Selection processes and abandoned products and product forms are usually not discussed.

  Johannes Grenzfurthner

  Successful, Technology, Political

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• The dead spacecraft in orbit have become a permanent fixture around our planet, not unlike the rings of Saturn. They will be the longest-lasting artifacts of human civilization, quietly circling Earth until the Sun turns into a Red Giant, about five billion years from now.

  Trevor Paglen

  Years, Civilization, Orbit

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• My specialty is mythology.There are artifacts like the hallows scattered through just about every mythology. However, what makes the Celtic hallows so interesting is that they are a self-contained group of objects.

  Michael Scott

  Self, Interesting, Groups

  Source: emunderwood.com

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• The digital age is for me in many ways about temporal wounding. It's really messed up our ontological clocks. In the digital economy, everything is archived, catalogued, readily available, and yet nothing really endures. The links are digital encryptions that can and won't be located. That will have to be reassembled over time. It won't be exactly what it was. There will be some slightly altered version. So the book is both an immaterial and material artifact.

  Masha Tupitsyn

  Book, Age, Way

  "True Lovers are as Rare as True Rebels". The Believer interview, logger.believermag.com. October 24, 2013.

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• Like I'm dragging bundles of old clothes? I'm carrying artifacts that breathe fire. I'm talking about a language of smoke. These are three-dimensional creatures that can mate. I'd no more leave them go by the side of the trail than I would my child. I'll carry them until someone amputates my arms.

  Kate Braverman

  Children, Fire, Talking

  Kate Braverman (1998). “Small Craft Warnings: Stories”

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