Constructs Quotes - Page 18

• Armament should be an illegality everywhere, and some sort of international force should patrol a treaty-bound world. Partial armament is one of those absurdities dear to moderate-minded 'reasonable' men. Armament itself is making war. Making a gun, pointing a gun, and firing it are all acts of the same order. It should be illegal to construct anywhere upon earth any mechanism for the specific purpose of killing men. When you see a gun it is reasonable to ask: 'Whom is that intended to kill?'

  H. G. Wells

  War, Gun, Men

  H. G. Wells (2007). “The New World Order”, p.114, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.

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• The catastrophist constructs theories, the uniformitarian demolishes them.

  William Whewell

  Theory, Demolish

  William Whewell (1858). “Novum organon renovatum”, p.25

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• The system of patriarchy is a historic construct; it has a beginning; it will have an end. Its time seems to have nearly run its course—it no longer serves the needs of men or women and in its inextricable linkage to militarism, hierarchy, and racism it threatens the very existence of life on earth. What will come after, what kind of structure will be the foundation for alternate forms of social organization we cannot yet know. We are living in an age of unprecedented transformation. We are in the process of becoming.

  Gerda Lerner

  Life, Running, Men

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• A writer has many tools: eyes, ears, nose, sensations, thoughts feelings and imagination. The tools can construct a house of stories.

  Mark Rubinstein

  Eye, Imagination, House

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• Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

  David Foster Wallace

  Mean, Exercise, Thinking

  "This Is Water". David Foster Wallace's commencement speech at Kenyon College, www.youtube.com. May 21, 2005.

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• Our civilization is characterized by the word "progress." Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure. And even clarity is sought only.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Civilization, Progress, Clarity

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• What I've done serves mostly to show that nearly all limits are self-imposed, a false construct of the mind. You can take on mind-boggling challenges. It may cause you grief, it may test your relationships and cause you to question your sanity, but you can do it! Yes, a fifty-seven year-old man can run across the United States and break a couple or records in the process. People of any age can accomplish what few others have done; we can endure the trials, overcome the obstacles, put up with the pain to realize our dreams. Why not try?

  Marshall Ulrich

  Running, Dream, Pain

  Marshall Ulrich (2011). “Running on Empty: An Ultramarathoner's Story of Love, Loss, and a Record-Setting Run Across Ameri ca”, p.117, Penguin

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• Normally, I'm a very controlling director. Directors are controlling. It's part of the job, but there's various degrees of it and the constructs I normally work on are very controlling constructs.

  Danny Boyle

  Jobs, Directors, Degrees

  "Danny Boyle Exclusive Interview 127 HOURS; Plus Updates on Shekhar Kapur’s PAANI, FRANKENSTEIN, the Olympics, and a Lot More". Interview with Ron Messer, collider.com. November 7, 2010.

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• The Anasazi did manage to construct in stone the largest and tallest buildings erected in North America until the Chicago steel girder skyscrapers of the 1880s.

  Jared Diamond

  America, Chicago, Steel

  Jared Diamond (2011). “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: Revised Edition”, p.131, Penguin

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• All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.

  Stefan Zweig

  Ideas, People, World

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• I feel that works of art are an opportunity for people to construct meaning, so I don't usually tell what they mean. It conveys to people that they have to participate.

  Jasper Johns

  Art, Mean, Opportunity

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• I spent a long time learning how to construct clothes, which is important to do before you can deconstruct them.

  Alexander McQueen

  Clothes, Long, Important

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• You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings. Even when the servant (reasoning) comes back empty-handed, the master (intuition) doesn't change his judgment.

  Jonathan Haidt

  Strong, Struggle, Elephants

  Jonathan Haidt (2012). “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion”, p.50, Vintage

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• I was also thinking about isolation on an evolutionary scale as well, like when you think of an island like Madagascar where things are free to evolve unfettered by outside powers. That starts to reach into the underlying narrative, which is more of a literal story that I used as a construct to build songs around.

  Colin Stetson

  Song, Thinking, Islands

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• Space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality.

  Immanuel Kant

  Reality, Space, Mind

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• If it were true that conservatives were racist, sexist, homophobic, fascist, stupid, inflexible, angry, and self-righteous, shouldn't their arguments be easy to deconstruct? Someone who is making a point out of anger, ideology, inflexibility, or resentment would presumably construct a flimsy argument. So why can't the argument itself be dismembered rather than the speaker's personal style or hidden motives? Why the evasions?

  Ann Coulter

  Stupid, Self, Style

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• The argument is made that naming God is never really naming God but only naming our understanding of God. To take our ideas of the divine and hold them as if they correspond to the reality of God is thus to construct a conceptual idol built from the materials of our mind.

  Peter Rollins

  God, Religious, Reality

  Peter, Rollins (2006). “How (Not) to Speak of God: Marks of the Emerging Church”, p.12, Paraclete Press

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• Vonnegut's war was necessary. And yet it was massacre and screaming and confusion and blood and death. It was the mammoth projection outward of the confused inner life of men. In war, the sad tidy constructs we make to help us believe life is orderly and controllable are roughly thrown aside like the delusions they are. In war, love is outed as an insane, insupportable emotion, a kind of luxury emotion, because everywhere you look, someone beloved to someone is being slaughtered, by someone whose own beloved has been slaughtered, or will be, or could be.

  George Saunders

  Confused, War, Believe

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• Well, I think the Yoruba gods are truthful. Truthful in the sense that i consider religion and the construct of deities simply an extension of human qualities taken, if you like, to the nth degree. i mistrust gods who become so separated from humanity that enormous crimes can be committed in their names. i prefer gods who can be brought down to earth and judged, if you like.

  Wole Soyinka

  Taken, Thinking, Names

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• The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists... Keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as 'the white race' is destroyed - not 'deconstructed' but destroyed.

  Noel Ignatiev

  Believe, Race, White

  "When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories". Book by Bernestine Singley, harvardmagazine.com. 2002.

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• Give me matter, and I will construct a world out of it!

  Immanuel Kant

  Science, Giving, World

  Immanuel Kant (1900). “Kant's cosmogony as in his essay on the retardation of the rotation of the earth and his Natural history and theory of the heavens: With introduction, appendices, and a portrait of Thomas Wright of Durham”

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• I often see the materials of photography as being a type of terrain. Emulsions, liquid developers, silver salts, and fixers interact, and I construct a landscape that I need to first explore in my mind's eye if I am to make it manifest as an artful image in silver.

  Paul Caponigro

  Photography, Eye, Mind

  Paul Caponigro (2002). “New England Days”, p.9, David R. Godine Publisher

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• Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

  Henry David Thoreau

  New York, Mean, Texas

  1854 Walden, or Life in the Woods,'Economy'.

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• We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Communication, Texas, Important

  Walden ch. 1 (1854)

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• The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence.

  Erwin Schrodinger

  Memories, Science, Perception

  Erwin Schrodinger (2012). “What is Life?: With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches”, p.93, Cambridge University Press

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