Concrete Quotes - Page 5

• Everything abstract is ultimately part of the concrete. Everything inanimate finally serves the living. That is why every activity dealing in abstraction stands in ultimate service to a living whole.

  Edith Stein

  Unity, Abstract, Whole

  Edith Stein (2012). “Edith Stein Essays on Woman”, p.11, ICS Publications

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• [T]he man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Block, Struggle, Men

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• If you would stick to the concrete, and put your discoveries in the form of entertaining anecdotes about your adventures with women, your conversation would be easier to follow.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Adventure, Discovery, Anecdotes

  George Bernard Shaw (2015). “George Bernard Shaw: The Collected Plays (Illustrated): 60 plays including Caesar and Cleopatra, Pygmalion, Saint Joan, The Apple Cart, Cymbeline, Androcles And The Lion, The Man Of Destiny, The Inca Of Perusalem and Macbeth Skit”, p.1165, e-artnow

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• Journal what you love, what you hate, what's in your head, what's important. Journaling organizes your thoughts; allows you to see things in a concrete way that otherwise you might not see. Focus on what you think you need to find in your art.

  Kay WalkingStick

  Art, Hate, Thinking

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• Identity is marketed in national capitalism as a property. It is something you can purchase, or purchase a relation to. Or it is something you already own that you can express: my masculinity, my queerness . But identity need not be simply a caption for an image of an unchangeable concrete self. It is also a theory of the future, of history.

  Lauren Berlant

  Self, Identity, Needs

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• Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.

  Willa Cather

  Art, Believe, Eye

  Willa Cather (1988). “Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art”, p.125, U of Nebraska Press

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• Understanding people's difficulties and-just as crucial-helping people understand their own difficulties and teaching them concrete ways to help themselves will help them better deal with their own lives and, in turn, ours.

  Kathryn Erskine

  Teaching, People, Empathy

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• Economy and ideology. The claim (presented as an essential postulate of historical materialism) that every fluctuation of politics and ideology can be presented and expounded as an immediate expression of the structure, must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism, and combated in practice with the authentic testimony of Marx, the author of concrete political and historical works.

  Antonio Gramsci

  Expression, Practice, Political

  "Selections from the Prison Notebooks". Book by Antonio Gramsci, 1971.

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• Everyone complains that we can no longer intake huge chunks of text. I find that a reason to celebrate. It's something that has deep roots in modernism, stretching from the Futurists' use of typography to Pound's use of ideograms to concrete poetry.

  Kenneth Goldsmith

  Roots, Complaining, Use

  Source: logger.believermag.com

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• Lofty talk about 'social justice' or 'fairness' boils down to greatly expanded powers for politicians, since those pretty words have no concrete definition. They are a blank check for creating disparities in power that dwarf disparities in income - and are far more dangerous.

  Thomas Sowell

  Dwarves, Creating, Justice

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• Terrorists do not actually need nuclear weapons. They have been conveniently supplied with 103 nuclear power plants scattered throughout the United States (438 of these deadly facilities exist throughout the world). A planned meltdown at one of these facilities would make the World Trade Center attacks seem like child's play. The massive concrete containers protecting the reactors are not strong enough to withstand the impact of a jumbo jet.

  Helen Caldicott

  Strong, Children, War

  Helen Caldicott (2013). “The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush's Military-Industrial Complex”, p.12, The New Press

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• It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a little glint of flame. Do you know how sometimes on very fine days the sun will shine with a particular intensity that makes the most mundane objects in the landscape glow with an unusual radiance, so that buildings and structures you normally pass without a glance suddenly become arresting, even beautiful? Well, they seem to have that light in Australia nearly all the time.

  Bill Bryson

  Beautiful, Australia, Light

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• Typography must be as beautiful as a forest, not like the concrete jungle of the tenements It gives distance between the trees, the room to breathe and allow for life.

  Adrian Frutiger

  Life, Beauty, Beautiful

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• Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin], your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold.

  Peter Kropotkin

  Ideas, Action, Unworthy

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• The road is a word, conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it: a word made concrete and thrust among us.

  Wendell Berry

  Country, Made, Elsewhere

  Wendell Berry (2009). “Remembering”, p.96, Counterpoint Press

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• Like the Good Samaritan, may we not be ashamed of touching the wounds of those who suffer, but try to heal them with concrete acts of love.

  Pope Francis

  Touching, Suffering, Trying

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• Science condemns itself to failure when, yielding to the infatuation of the serious, it aspires to attain being, to contain it, and to possess it; but it finds its truth if it considers itself as a free engagement of thought in the given, aiming, at each discovery, not at fusion with the thing, but at the possibility of new discoveries; what the mind then projects is the concrete accomplishment of its freedom.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Discovery, Accomplishment, Mind

  Simone de Beauvoir (2011). “The Ethics of Ambiguity”, p.39, Open Road Media

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• Style offers concrete rules you can follow. You can use it as a resource rather than a barrier to feeling good about yourself.

  Stacy London

  Feel Good, Feelings, Style

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• Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction.

  Ezra Pound

  Writing, Expression, Land

  Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound (2009). “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition”, p.9, Fordham Univ Press

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• The cybernetics phase of cognitive science produced an amazing array of concrete results, in addition to its long-term (often underground) influence

  Francisco Varela

  Long, Phases, Cybernetics

  Eleanor Rosch, Evan Thompson, Francisco J. Varela (1992). “The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience”, p.38, MIT Press

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• Fresh pitsand, however, in spite of all its excellence in concrete structures, is not equally useful in stucco, the richness of which, when the lime and straw are mixed with such sand, will cause it to crack as it dries on account of the great strength of the mixture. But river sand, though useless in "signinum" on account of its thinness, becomes perfectly solid in stucco when thoroughly worked by means of polishing instruments.

  Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

  Mean, Rivers, Excellence

  "De architectura". Book by Vitruvius. Book II, Chapter IV, Section 3,

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• General Systems Theory is a name which has come into use to describe a level of theoretical model-building which lies somewhere between the highly generalized constructions of pure mathematics and the specific theories of the specialized disciplines. Mathematics attempts to organize highly general relationships into a coherent system, a system however which does not have any necessary connections with the "real" world around us. It studies all thinkable relationships abstracted from any concrete situation or body of empirical knowledge.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Real, Lying, Names

  "General Systems Theory - The Skeleton of Science". Management Science, Volume 2. No. 3, pp. 197-208, www.panarchy.org. April 1956.

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• Talking to a peasant one day, I suggested to him the hypothesis that there might indeed be a God who governs heaven and earth, a Consciousness or Conscience of the Universe, but that even so it would not be sufficient reason to assume that the soul of every man was immortal in the traditional and concrete sense. And he replied, "Then what good is God?

  Miguel de Unamuno

  Men, Talking, Heaven

  Miguel de Unamuno (1977). “The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations”, p.7, Princeton University Press

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• The way you confront an organization like that is twofold. No. 1, you kill their militants. There is no room for discussion or negotiation when it comes to an ISIS or an Al Qaeda militant. They don’t want anything concrete. And if you want nothing that’s measurable or concrete, there is nothing to talk about. You must be destroyed.

  Reza Aslan

  Isis, Organization, Want

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• Birth Control which has been criticized as negative and destructive, is really the greatest and most truly eugenic method, and its adoption as part of the program of Eugenics would immediately give a concrete and realistic power to that science. . . as the most constructive and necessary of the means to racial health.

  Margaret Sanger

  Mean, Eugenics, Giving

  Margaret Sanger, Michael W. Perry, H. G. Wells (2003). “The Pivot of Civilization in Historical Perspective: The Birth Control Classic”, p.372, Inkling Books

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