Configuration Quotes

• The Universe was a silly place at best...but the least likely explanation for it was the no-explanation of random chance, the conceit that abstract somethings 'just happened' to be atoms that 'just happened' to get together in ways which 'just happened' to look like consistent laws and some configurations 'just happened' to possess self-awareness and that two 'just happened' to be the Man from Mars and a bald-headed old coot with Jubal inside.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Silly, Men, Self

  Robert A. Heinlein (1987). “Stranger in a Strange Land”, p.135, Penguin

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• A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others,thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.

  Jacques Barzun

  Lines, May, Three

  Jacques Barzun (1989). “The Culture We Deserve”, p.89, Wesleyan University Press

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• Reality has been around since long before you showed up. Don't go calling it nasty names like 'bizarre' or 'incredible'. The universe was propagating complex amplitudes through configuration space for ten billion years before life ever emerged on Earth. Quantum physics is not 'weird'. You are weird.

  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Reality, Years, Names

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• Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day's end. They were manifesting as the earth's bright-colored nerve endings, the sun's descent urging them into activity, filling them individually with life nectar, the life nectar then being passed into the world, out of each beak, in the form of that bird's distinctive song, which was, in turn, an accident of beak shape, throat shape, breast configuration, brain chemistry: some birds blessed in voice, others cursed; some squeaking, others rapturous.

  George Saunders

  Song, Blessed, Fall

  George Saunders (2013). “Tenth of December: Stories”, p.57, Random House

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• I'm a big non-believer in manual driver and kernel configuration, be it visual or not.

  Linus Torvalds

  Bigs, Non Believer, Drivers

  Source: www.osnews.com

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• No matter how children came to be living with just one parent, they need to be told, again and again, that your family's configuration is the result of an adult decision or an act of fate that has nothing whatsoever to do with them.

  Marge M. Kennedy

  Children, Fate, Parent

  Marge M. Kennedy (1994). “The Single-parent Family: Living Happily in a Changing World”, Three Rivers Press (CA)

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• This decade is strewn with examples of bright people who thought they built a better mousetrap that could consistently extract abnormal returns from the financial markets. Some succeed for a time. But while there may occasionally be mis-configurations among market prices that allow abnormal returns, they do not persist.

  Alan Greenspan

  People, Abnormal, May

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• I became interested in the delay, having sounds recorded and played back and then come back. I did many different configurations of sending signals from one track back to another track, or to the same track, or crisscrossing them and so forth. I worked on masking the delays so when I played into the machine, I would make long tones and collect sounds in such a way that you didn't hear the delay, although sometimes you did.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Long, Track, Delay

  Source: www.artpractical.com

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• When you expand the definition of marriage beyond one man and one woman, society can expect other consenting adults in other configurations to say that their choices deserve recognition.

  Emily Yoffe

  Men, Choices, Adults

  "This Holiday Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us". Interview with Emily Yoffe, www.slate.com. May 13, 2013.

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• The Internets distinct configuration may have made cyberattacks easy to launch, but it has also kindled the flame of freedom.

  Jonathan Zittrain

  Flames, May, Internet

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• The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.

  George Steiner

  Impact, Media, Vision

  George Steiner (1991). “Real Presences”, p.27, University of Chicago Press

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• If you are engaging rationality, you are already engaging a place that makes you unavailable. Only when I recognize that inspiration has announced itself to my availability will I then say I need to use my mind to calculate exposure, my emotions to position myself and arrange a configuration of shapes that need to come into being, my body to put it all in place because we have been given a message and it has come through inspiration through being available.'

  Paul Caponigro

  Inspiration, Availability, Mind

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• There is no beginning and there is no end. Nothing is final. There is no absolute. There is no highest point, nor is there a lowest point. These configurations are ideas. Ideas are primitive constructs, symbolic representations, reflections in a mirror.

  Frederick Lenz

  Reflection, Mirrors, Ideas

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• It seems a little paradoxical to construct a configuration space with the coordinates of points which do not exist.

  Louis de Broglie

  Space, Littles, Paradoxical

  "Quantum Theory at the Crossroads: Reconsidering the 1927 Solvay Conference". Book by Guido Bacciagaluppi and Antony Valentini, Cambridge University Press, p. 346, 2009.

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• Every production network has spatiality - the particular geographical configuration and extent of its component elements and the links between them.

  Peter Dicken

  Elements, Links, Particular

  Peter Dicken (2007). “Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contours of the World Economy”, p.17, SAGE Publications Ltd

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• Contemplate the wonders of creation, the Divine dimension of their being, not as a dim configuration that is presented to you from a distance, but as the reality in which you live.

  Abraham Isaac Kook

  Distance, Reality, Dimensions

  Abraham Isaac Kook, Ben Zion Bokser (1978). “Abraham Isaac Kook: The Lights of Penitence, The Moral Principles, Lights of Holiness, Essays, Letters, and Poems”, p.207, Paulist Press

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• To work around and be successful in a round configuration in the theater, you have to connect with everyone.

  Chukwudi Iwuji

  Successful, Theater, Rounds

  Interview with Emma Brown, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 27, 2016.

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• The merging of the military-industrial complex, surveillance state and unbridled corporate power points to the need for strategies that address what is specific about the current warfare and surveillance state and the neoliberal project and how different interests, modes of power, social relations, public pedagogies and economic configurations come together to shape its politics.

  Henry Giroux

  Military, Surveillance State, Together

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• The notion of the enduring authority focuses on the fact that some people think that notions like authority of Scripture's is passé, while others say that the present configuration of the doctrine of inerrancy is a late addition. And to both we want to say, No we're talking about the enduring authority of Scripture, grounded first and foremost in its relevatory status, something given by God and utterly reliable.

  D. A. Carson

  Thinking, Talking, People

  Source: www.booksataglance.com

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• We did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked. But, given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved, we assess that we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence.

  James Comey

  Would Be, Actors, Mail

  James Comey's Statement on the Investigation of Secretary Hillary Clinton’s Use of a Personal E-Mail System, www.fbi.gov. July 5, 2016.

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• I was out in California over the holidays and I was working with some photographs I took out there just now, actually, which were all different photographs of the sunset. They're really interesting because El Niño has changed the cloud configuration, not only the sea, but also the whole makeup of the clouds, the sunset, and the different gradations of color and tonality. So it'll be interesting to work with that.

  Michelle Stuart

  Holiday, Sunset, Makeup

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• A shudder runs through the viewer of old photographs. For they make visible not the knowledge of the original but the spatial configuration of a moment; what appears in the photograph is not the person but the sum of what can be subtracted from him or her.

  Siegfried Kracauer

  Running, Moments, Photograph

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• I am interested in what I term gestalts; picture circumstances which bring together disparate images or ideas so as to form new meanings and new configurations.

  Robert Heinecken

  Ideas, Together, Gestalt

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• There are over a million types of fish in the sea as there are flowers in all of the world's gardens. There are at least a million different types of rocks/minerals as there are species of birds or monkeys. To believe we are the only "intelligent beings" on this earth and beyond is ignorance. The possible configurations of lifeforms that could be created from a single atom are infinite. There are at least a billion people on this earth, and no two faces look the same. It is very arrogant to assume that we have seen all of God's miracles.

  Suzy Kassem

  Believe, Flower, Ignorance

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• People think that the art market is about opportunists and hedge-fund managers getting broken art, but what really happened is that there was a new configuration of bourgeois values in the U.S. and an acceptance among the bourgeoisie of contemporary art as an idea. I think that bourgeois people are horrible.

  Liam Gillick

  Art, Acceptance, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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