Description Quotes - Page 14

• Do the structures of language and the structures of reality (by which I mean what actually happens) move along parallel lines? Does reality essentially remain outside language, separate, obdurate, alien, not susceptible to description? Is an accurate and vital correspondence between what is and our perception of it impossible? Or is it that we are obliged to use language only in order to obscure and distort reality -- to distort what happens -- because we fear it?

  Harold Pinter

  Moving, Mean, Reality

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• Monologues, in some ways, are the most scientific descriptions of consciousness and even of gatherings.

  George Saunders

  Gathering, Way, Consciousness

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• The Sage of Toronto... spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by a "global village" instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle's present vulgarity.

  Guy Debord

  Gossip, Boredom, Sage

  "Comments on the Society of the Spectacle". Book by Guy Debord, 1988.

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• Whether sociology can ever become a full-fledged "science" (a description of a class of events predictable on the basis of deductions from a constant rationale) depends on whether the terms which sociologists employ to describe events can be analyzed into quantifiable observables.

  Anatol Rapoport

  Class, Events, Sociology

  "The bulletin of mathematical biophysics" by Anatol Rapoport, (p. 183), 1949.

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• What is the elephant in all our rooms? It is the global triumph of capitalism. Democracy is fiercely disputed. Freedom is under threat even in old-established democracies such as Britain. Western supremacy is on the skids. But everyone does capitalism. Americans and Europeans do it. Indians do it. Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes do it. Even Chinese communists do it... Karl Marx would be turning in his grave. Or perhaps not, since some of his writings eerily foreshadowed our era of globalised capitalism. His prescription failed but his description was prescient.

  Timothy Garton Ash

  Writing, Elephants, Chinese

  "Global capitalism now has no serious rivals. But it could destroy itself" by Timothy Garton Ash, www.theguardian.com. February 21, 2007.

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• Bliss defies description, obviously, since it annihilates you, since you're not there to experience it. You get the lead-up and the come-down, never the zenith.

  Glen Duncan

  Zenith, Bliss

  Glen Duncan (2011). “The Last Werewolf”, p.257, Vintage

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• The writing I have in mind and sometimes indulge in myself is concerned, not with plants, mountains or birds as items of scientific description, but with experiences of nature that impinge upon our moods and emotions, enrich our imagination and reveries, and shape our sense of how we stand in relation to the environing world. In a broad sense of the term, this kind of writing is an exercise in phenomenology, an attempt to render the significance that birds, plants or whatever have for us.

  David E. Cooper

  Writing, Exercise, Indulge In

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I hope for an America where neither fundamentalist nor humanist will be a dirty word, but a fair description of the different ways in which people of good will look at life and into their own souls.

  Edward Kennedy

  Dirty, America, People

  Edward M. Kennedy' Speech at Liberty Baptist College, www.washingtonpost.com. August 26, 2009.

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• I regret very much that I have painted a picture that requires any description.

  Winslow Homer

  Regret, I Regret

  On being asked about the meaning of a painting by a dealer. Quoted by Andrea Bennett in the NewYork Times Book Review, 15 Sep 1991.

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• Selfish hedonism is not a pejorative. It is a description - an exactly accurate description of what is involved in homosexual relations.

  Alan Keyes

  Selfish, Relation, Homosexual

  Alan Keyes' Speech at the DuPage County Republican Central Committee's Party for the President, www.keyesarchives.com. September 2, 2004.

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• It is hard to see how one could begin to develop a quantum-theoretical description of brain action when one might well have to regard the brain as "observing itself" all the time!

  Roger Penrose

  Brain, Might, Action

  Roger Penrose (2016). “The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics”, p.821, Oxford University Press

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• It is hubris, claim the critics of 'absolutism', to suppose that we could ever even approximate to a true description of how the world anyway is. It is bad faith or 'bullshit', respond 'absolutists', to suppose - as the rhetoric of postmodernism implies - that we could seriously live and act with the thought that truth and value are simply our own projections. An attractive feature of 'ineffabilism', as I see it, is that it evades these accusations.

  David E. Cooper

  Bullshit, World, Absolutism

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I have a fairly strict definition of early infantile autism. That is not to say that people who don't meet that classic description don't have autism, but we might do well to narrow our definitions, and our samples, down to groups that are very similar, because I think you're more likely to find the cause.

  Darold Treffert

  Thinking, People, Autism

  "Conversations on Creativity with Darold Treffert, Part II: D". Interview with Scott Barry Kaufman, www.psychologytoday.com. April 13, 2011.

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• Women have been taught that they are not powerful; they've been given an opposite description, that they are weak. The word "effeminate" implies weakness.

  Frederick Lenz

  Powerful, Women, Opposites

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• First of all, principles should be general. That is, it must be possible to formulate them without use of what would be intuitively recognized as proper names, or rigged definite descriptions.

  John Rawls

  Names, Principles, Would Be

  John RAWLS (2009). “A Theory of Justice”, p.131, Harvard University Press

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• Photography mirrored the [nineteenth century] will towards rigor, towards defining details, the need for miniscule description, the long-distance optics, for technology at the service of truth, for concepts of credibility, of objectivity, the need to archive, for the consolidation of institutions like the museum, in short, towards a need to control memory.

  Joan Fontcuberta

  Photography, Memories, Distance

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• Western traditions of education have emphasized knowledge analysis, description and debate. They all have a part to play, but today there is a whole vast aspect of doing that has just been left out. Operacy is what keeps society going.

  Edward de Bono

  Education, Play, Analysis

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• I had a cup of tea with Michael Howard after my appointment shortly after I became Home Secretary, and without telling tales out of school, shortly after I became Home Secretary, and he said that when people used to ask him whether he enjoyed it he'd reply that "enjoy" wasn't quite the right description.

  Theresa May

  Home, School, People

  "The Conservative Party’s always stood in every seat, and I think it’s important to us". Interview with Paul Goodman and Mark Fox, conservativehome.blogs.com. February 16, 2011.

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• The modern version of Buridan's ass [a figurative description of a man of indecision] has a Ph.D., but no time to grow up as he is undecided between making a Leonardo da Vinci in the test tube or planting a Coca Cola sign on Mars.

  Erwin Chargaff

  Growing Up, Men, Mars

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• When you consider how many millions of workdays begin with hangovers great and small, it is mildly ­surprising to find how few real descriptions of the experience our literature can boast.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Real, Hangover, Literature

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• The description and explanation is the best part of music reviewing. There is such a thing, and you know it too, as a gift for judgment. If you have it, you can say anything you like. If you haven't got it, you don't know you haven't got it.

  Virgil Thomson

  Say Anything, Judgment, Explanation

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• I have talked to more people who are in politics who have said to me, "[House of Cards] is closer than you can imagine. It's the most accurate description of how politics actually works that we've ever seen." I mean, West Wing - beautiful, wonderful idea of how democracy should work. But I've had more people in politics say they think House of Cards is closer. I - don't know whether to take that as a compliment or a sad state of affairs.

  Kevin Spacey

  Beautiful, Mean, Thinking

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• Overt intelligent performances are not clues to the workings of minds; they are those workings. Boswell described Johnson's mind when he described how he wrote, talked, ate, fidgeted and fumed. His description was, of course, incomplete, since there were notoriously some thoughts which Johnson kept carefully to himself and there must have been many dreams, daydreams and silent babblings which only Johnson could have recorded and only a James Joyce would wish him to have recorded.

  Gilbert Ryle

  Dream, Thinking, Thoughtful

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• Bohr’s standpoint, that a space-time description is impossible, I reject a limine. Physics does not consist only of atomic research, science does not consist only of physics, and life does not consist only of science. The aim of atomic research is to fit our empirical knowledge concerning it into our other thinking. All of this other thinking, so far as it concerns the outer world, is active in space and time. If it cannot be fitted into space and time, then it fails in its whole aim and one does not know what purpose it really serves.

  Erwin Schrodinger

  Life, Failure, Knowledge

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• Not until Freud's writings became popular did descriptions of infants center on relationships with their mothers. The idea that children have feelings of any lasting importance for their development is a very recent invention (or insight if you wish).

  Sandra Scarr

  Mother, Children, Writing

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