Discourse Quotes - Page 17

• We can either have a twenty-first-century conversation about morality and the human well-being - a conversation in which we avail ourselves of all scientific insights and philosophical arguments that have accumulated in the last two thousand years of human discourse - or we can confine ourselves to a first-century conversation as it is preserved in the Bible.

  Sam Harris

  Philosophical, Years, Two

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• The simple record of these three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and soften mankind than all the discourses of philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists.

  William Edward Hartpole Lecky

  Bible, Simple, Years

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• None of us should be ashamed to speak of our class power or lack of it. Overcoming fear, even the fear of being immodest, and acting courageously to bring issues of class- especially radical standpoints – into the discourse of blackness is a gesture of militant defiance, one that runs counter to bourgeois insistence that we think of “money” in particular and class in general as private matters.

  Bell Hooks

  Running, Thinking, Class

  bell hooks (2012). “Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations”, p.179, Routledge

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• And I want to rise up, throw my arms open for a vast embrace, address an ample, luminous discourse to the invisible crowds. I would start like this: "O rainbow-colored gods. . .

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Rainbow, Crowds, Addresses

  Vladimir Nabokov (2011). “The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov”, p.50, Vintage

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• The good news is you can get a lot of information off the Internet for free and in a hurry. But I think the breaking up of the media, which is otherwise kind of healthy, has contributed to less actual reporting and a louder, more contentious, more divisive public discourse, highlighting conflict, sometimes falsely.

  William J. Clinton

  Thinking, Media, Healthy

  "Bill Clinton: Someone We Can All Agree On". Interview with Charles P. Pierce and Mark Warren, www.esquire.com. January 18, 2012.

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• A paradox: the same century invented history and photography. But history is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic time; and the photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Memories, Intellectual

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• Bound to seek recognition of its own existence in categories, terms, and names that are not of its own making, the subject seeks the sign of its own existence outside itself, in a discourse that is at once dominant and indifferent. Social categories signify subordination and existence at once. In other words, within subjection the price of existence is subordination.

  Judith Butler

  Names, Recognition, Social

  Judith Butler (1997). “The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection”, p.20, Stanford University Press

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• Charles Bernstein's pairs of jingles of 'public discourse' are 'simultaneous double narrative / the space between's the other narrative/as if they're opposite.' In the space between, outside representation but in the 'presence' of it, we are provoked to laugh. Bernstein alters our language to open a double range that's public and mind at once and inseparable, that is 'Poetry is patterned thought in search of unpatterned mind.' Girly Man is doing it.

  Leslie Scalapino

  Girly, Men, Opposites

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• it is my lady! *sighs* o, it is my love! o, that she knew she were! she speaks, yet she sais nothing. what of that? her eye discourses; i will answer it. i am too bold, 'tis not to me she speaks; two of the fairest stars in all the heaven, having some business, do entreat her eyes to twinkle in their spheres till they return.

  William Shakespeare

  Stars, Eye, Two

  William Shakespeare (1852). “The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare: From the text of Johnson, Steevens, and Reed: With the preface of Dr. Johnson, and a copious glossary. Complete in 1 volume”, p.118

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• Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore -- and this is the critical point -- how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails. (92)

  Neil Postman

  Knowing, Culture, Television

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• What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and god-like reason to fust in us unused.

  William Shakespeare

  Sleep, Men, Before And After

  'Hamlet' (1601) act 4, sc. 4, l. 32

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• Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

  Francis Bacon

  Believe, Book, Attention

  'Essays' (1625) 'Of Studies'

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• I believe that one of the most damning things about our culture is the adage to never talk religion and politics. Because we don't model this discourse at the dinner table and at Thanksgiving, we don't know how to do it well and we're not teaching our children about the world and about how to discuss it.

  Julianna Baggott

  Children, Believe, Teaching

  Interview with Roxane Gay, therumpus.net. May 11, 2012.

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• He looked at a world of incredible loveliness. Old distaff Celt's blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care. He lay on his back in the gravel, the earth's core sucking his bones, a moment's giddy vertigo with this illusion of falling outward through blue and windy space, over the offside of the planet, hurtling through the high thin cirrus.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Fall, Blood, Space

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• Using the passive voice is always very helpful. Mind you, a lot of that propaganda English emanates from here. The British establishment has always used the passive voice. It's been a weapon of discourse so those who committed terrible acts in the old empire could not be identified.

  John Pilger

  Passive Voice, Mind, Weapons

  Source: progressive.org

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• An average Christian, in an average church, listen to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse -- and there have been some extraordinary arrogant scientists.

  Sam Harris

  Christian, Sunday, Average

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• Not only has photography so thoroughly saturated our visual environment as to make the invention of visual images seem archaic, but it is also clear that photography is too multiple, too useful to other discourses, ever to be wholly contained within traditional definitions of art.

  Douglas Crimp

  Photography, Art, Definitions

  Douglas Crimp, Louise Lawler (1995). “On the Museum's Ruins”, p.134, MIT Press

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• The subject of feminism cannot be purely a fiction, as some postmodern writers suggest, produced by the discourses of power.

  Alison Assiter

  Feminism, Fiction, Postmodern

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I think the reporter or journalist is well served by having a responsibility to the powerless, to use a much-abused cliché. The voice of the powerless is in some danger of not being heard in the elite discourses we now have in the mainstream media.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Responsibility, Thinking, Media

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

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• Certain teachers have tremendous amounts of experience. They are articulate, and they give wonderful discourse. But at some point along the road, they themselves learned from and studied a book.

  Sakyong Mipham

  Teacher, Book, Giving

  "Earth Protector: An Interview with Sakyong Mipham (complete interview)". Interview with Ray Hemachandra, rayhemachandra.com. July 30, 2015.

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• People who write about issues like poverty or terrorism are a part of the elite, and the distance between the elite and nonelite is growing very fast. You can move around the world but meet only people who speak your language, who share the same ideas, the same beliefs, and in doing so you can lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of the world does not think or believe in or speak the everyday discourse of the elite.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Distance, Believe, Moving

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since she didn't, I should 'off' myself.

  Kathleen Parker

  Mother, Should Have, League

  Interview with Howard Kurtz, transcripts.cnn.com. October 5, 2008.

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• It seems Korean women are enjoying a passive and fragile status, intoxicated by appearance. Not only feminism, but any serious discourse ends up being swept away by popular culture in Korea.

  Kim Hyesoon

  Korea, Feminism, Culture

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I always attempt to challenge and upend discourses that appear to be disinterestedly describing the world, but that are in fact wholly grounded in historically and culturally specific hegemonic modes of thought.

  Richard Marshall

  Challenges, World, Facts

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Art photography, although long since legitimized by all the conventional discourses of fine art, seems destined perpetually to recapitulate all the rituals of the arriviste. Inasmuch as one of those rituals consists of the establishment of suitable ancestry, a search for distinguished bloodlines, it inevitably happens that photographic history and criticism are more concern with notions of tradition and continuity than with those of rupture and change.

  Abigail Solomon-Godeau

  Photography, Art, Long

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