Discourse Quotes - Page 15

• To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Running, Exercise, Risk

  "American right vows to settle score as Bush's nemesis turns up the heat" by Lawrence Donegan, Paul Harris, www.theguardian.com. June 26, 2004.

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• All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Humility, Advice, Way

  Michel de Montaigne (2009). “Essays”, p.1603, The Floating Press

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• I am comfortable with my level of public discourse.

  Neil Armstrong

  Levels, Public Discourse, Comfortable

  "Armstrong's Code" by Kathy Sawyer in Washington Post Magazine (p. 10), www.washingtonpost.com. July 11, 1999.

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• Be not too hasty to trust or to admire the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels, but they live like men.

  Samuel Johnson

  Teacher, Angel, Men

  Samuel Johnson (2009). “Samuel Johnson: Selected Writings”, p.294, Harvard University Press

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• Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him (i.e. Jesus) by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Religious, Jesus, Ignorance

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• Words themselves - the very material of our discourse increasingly take on masks or disguises

  Dennis Potter

  Mask, Disguise, Materials

  Dennis Potter (1994). “Waiting for the Boat: On Television”, GuildAmerica Books

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• We want to create, never mind the leaders or the bishops or chief rabbis or imams, or Popes. We want to create a grassroots movement where people will become attuned to uncompassionate discourse in the same way as we are now attuned to sort of gender imbalance in our speech.

  Karen Armstrong

  People, Leader, Mind

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 16, 2009.

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• Passions are liken'd best to floods and streams:
  The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb;
  So, when affection yields discourse, it seems
  The bottom is but shallow whence they come.
  They that are rich in words, in words discover

  Walter Raleigh

  Passion, Romantic Love, Yield

  Sir Walter Raleigh, “The Silent Lover I”

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• And let no one suppose that I claim that just living can be taught for, in a word, I hold that there does not exist an art of the kind which can implant sobriety and justice into depraved natures.  Nevertheless, I do think that the study of political discourse can help more than any other thing to stimulate and form such qualities of character

  Isocrates

  Art, Character, Thinking

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• Spend your leisure time in cultivating an ear attentive to discourse, for in this way you will find that you learn with ease what others have found out with difficulty.

  Isocrates

  Ears, Ease, Way

  Isocrates (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of Isocrates (Illustrated)”, p.15, Delphi Classics

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• I wish to put together an imaginary nation. It is my belief that no other nation is possible, or rather, I believe that authors who count take responsibility for a map which is addressed to travellers of the earth, the world, and the spirit. Each issue is composed as a map of this land and this glory, images of our cities and of our politics must join our poetry. I want a nation in which discourse is active and scholarship is understood as it should be, the mode of our understanding and the ground of our derivations.
  -Robin Blaser (June 3, 1967)

  Robin Blaser

  Believe, Responsibility, Issues

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• Universal design systems can no longer be dismissed as the irrelevant musings of a small, localized design community. A second modernism has emerged, reinvigorating the utopian search for universal forms that marked the birth of design as a discourse and a discipline nearly a century earlier.

  Ellen Lupton

  Discipline, Design, Community

  Ellen Lupton (2014). “Thinking with Type”, p.174, Chronicle Books

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• And all these questions I ask myself. It is not in a spirit of curiosity. I cannot be silent. About myself I need know nothing. Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric.

  Samuel Beckett

  Knowledge, Thinking, Curiosity

  Samuel Beckett (2009). “Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable”, p.288, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• As the growing emphasis on feelings crowds out reason, facts will play a smaller role in public discourse.

  Paul Craig Roberts

  Play, Feelings, Liberty

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• ...But why discourse Upon the Virtues of the Horse? They are too numerous to tell Save when you have a Horse to Sell.

  Josh Billings

  Horse, Virtue, Sells

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• Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden and name her "Health": if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.

  Naomi Wolf

  Self Esteem, Names, Iron

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• The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.

  Alain de Botton

  Love, Two, People

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• That which you or I think is most unique about ourselves we hide. In ordinary discourse, in the normal state, we share our common self, our superficial self. Yet what is most unique about us is what has the greatest potential for bonding us. When we share our uniqueness, we discover the commonality in greatness that defines everyone on the planet.

  Robert E. Quinn

  Relationship, Unique, Greatness

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• The moment our discourse rises above the ground-line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that always a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought.... This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper creation.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Communication, Passion, Men

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• Surely in much talk there cannot choose but be much vanity. Loquacity is the fistula of the mind,--ever-running and almost incurable, let every man, therefore, be a Phocion or Pythagorean, to speak briefly to the point or not at all; let him labor like them of Crete, to show more wit in his discourse than words, and not to pour out of his mouth a flood of the one, when he can hardly wring out of his brains a drop of the other.

  Herbert Spencer

  Running, Men, Vanity

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• While the intelligence profession oftentimes demands secrecy, it is critically important that there be a full and open discourse on intelligence matters with the appropriate elected representatives of the American people.

  John O. Brennan

  People, Important, Demand

  Remarks by the President in Nomination of Secretary of Defense and CIA Director, obamawhitehouse.archives.gov. January 7, 2013.

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• Visual art and writing don't exist on an aesthetic hierarchy that positions one above the other, because each is capable of things the other can't do at all. Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.

  William S. Burroughs

  Art, Writing, Pages

  William S. Burroughs (2001). “Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997”, Semiotext

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• The conscious mind is a maelstrom of fleeting thoughts, images, sensations, feelings, conflicting desires, and doubts; barely able to confine its attention to a single clear objective for a microsecond before secondary thoughts begin to adulterate it and provoke yet further trains of mental discourse. If you do not believe this, then attempt to confine your conscious attention to the dot at the end of this sentence without involving yourself in any other form of thinking, including thinking about the dot.

  Peter J. Carroll

  Believe, Thinking, Feelings

  "Liber Kaos". Book by Peter J. Carroll, January 15, 1992.

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• No longer is the body a temple to be worshipped as the house of God; it has become a commodified and regulated object that must be strictly monitored by its owner to prevent lapses into health-threatening behaviors as identified by risk discourse. For those with the socioeconomic resources to indulge in risk modification, this discourse may supply the advantages of a new religion; for others, this discourse has the potential to create anxiety and guilt, to promote hopelessness and fear of the future.

  Deborah Lupton

  Indulge In, House, Anxiety

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• I'd like to see much more understanding of emotional issues around hurt, abandonment, disappointment, longing, failure and shame, where they stem from and how they drive people and policies brought into public discourse.

  Susie Orbach

  Hurt, Disappointment, Emotional

  "Britain's intellectuals: leading thinkers have their say" by Alain de Botton, AC Grayling, Susie Orbach, Paul Gilroy, Will Self, Mary Beard, Brian Cox, Lionel Shriver, James Lovelock and Lisa Jardine, www.theguardian.com. May 7, 2011.

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