Inversions Quotes

• The sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great ones, indicates a strange inversion.

  Blaise Pascal

  Men, Matter, Strange

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• In the history of mankind there are recorded two great Inversions. The first, set forth by the Nazarene to the effect that love is a greater power and more real than vengeance. The second proclaimed the earth to be a sphere revolving in its course around the sun. These affirmations were made in the face of all evidence sacred to the contrary.

  Louis Sullivan

  Real, Love Is, Two

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• We witness a strange inversion: on the one hand, the endeavor to turn the social contract into a less calculating and more feeling connection among its members; on the other hand, the endeavor to turn the erotic relationship into a contractual one.

  Allan Bloom

  Hands, Erotic, Feelings

  Allan David Bloom (1993). “Love and Friendship”

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• Memory as an inversion of historical time is the essence of interiority.

  Emmanuel Levinas

  Memories, Essence, Historical

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• We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

  Ayn Rand

  Gun, Government, Historical

  Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden, Alan Greenspan, Robert Hessen (1986). “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal”, p.320, Penguin

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• Furthermore, America suffers not only from a lack of standards, but also not infrequently from a confusion or an inversion of standards.

  Irving Babbitt

  America, Confusion, Suffering

  Irving Babbitt (2005). “On Literature, Cultures, and Religion”, p.136, Transaction Publishers

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• For, with pure water the inversion of cane sugar scarcely proceeds and subsequently it required very thorough, difficult studies before this effect and its order of magnitude were established.

  Wilhelm Ostwald

  Order, Water, Sugar

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• I think in the old days, the nexus of weirdness ran through Southern California, and to a degree New York City. I think it's changed so that every bizarre story in the country now has a Florida connection. I don't know why, except it must be some inversion of magnetic poles or something.

  Carl Hiaasen

  Country, New York, Thinking

  "Carl Hiaasen reports from 'Paradise': Con artists and land developers". Interview with Todd Leopold, www.cnn.com. November 9, 2001.

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• I maintain that inversion is the effect of neither a prenatal choice nor an endocrinal malformation nor even the passive and determined result of complexes. It is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Children, Choices, Determined

  "Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr". Book by Jean-Paul Sartre, 1952.

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• If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from the physical life-process.

  Friedrich Engels

  Men, Historical, Cameras

  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (1970). “The German Ideology”, p.47, INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS CO

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• There are two synergistic approaches for increasing productivity that are inversions of each other:
  1. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20).
  2. Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson's Law).
  The best solution is to use both together: Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines.

  Tim Ferriss

  Law, Two, Important

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• We assume that all statements must be mild inversions of the truth, because it's too weird to imagine people who aren't casually lying, pretty much all the time.

  Chuck Klosterman

  Lying, People, Assuming

  Chuck Klosterman (2009). “Eating the Dinosaur”, p.183, Simon and Schuster

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• Meditation is a great way to stay centered and I think inversions are great for aging. Specifically, I think the Kundalini yoga is really a life changer.

  Miranda Kerr

  Life Changing, Yoga, Thinking

  "Exclusive: Miranda Kerr Gets Her Shortest Haircut Ever". Interview with Alexandra Tunell, www.harpersbazaar.com. February 13, 2016.

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• How deep congenital sex-inversion roots may be gathered from the fact that the pleasure-dream of the male Urning has to do with male persons, and of the female with females.

  Richard von Krafft-Ebing

  Dream, Sex, Roots

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• I don't believe any experiment until it is confirmed by theory. I find this is a witty inversion of "conventional" wisdom.

  Arthur Eddington

  Witty, Believe, Theory

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• The appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and "psychic hermaphroditism" made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of "perversity"; but it also made possible the formation of a "reverse" discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or "naturality" be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified.

  Michel Foucault

  Strong, Psychics, Vocabulary

  "The History of Sexuality, Volume I: The Will to Knowledge". Book by Michel Foucault, 1978.

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• In an interesting inversion of status, the reigning breed in the dog park these days is the really-oddball-unidentifiable-mixed-breed-mutt-found-wandering-the-street or its equivalent. The stranger the mutt the better; the more peculiar the circumstance of it coming into your life, the better.

  Susan Orlean

  Dog, Interesting, Mutts

  "The Social Animal" by Susan Orlean, www.newyorker.com. October 1, 2011.

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• To justify Christian morality because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion.

  T. S. Eliot

  Christian, Atheism, Foundation

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “The Idea of a Christian Society”, p.67, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The inversion of external compulsion into the compulsion of conscience ... produces the machine-like assiduity and pliable allegiance required by the new rationality.

  Max Horkheimer

  Machines, Produce, Allegiance

  "The Essential Frankfurt School Reader" by Max Horkheimer, (p. 34), 1982.

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• All problems in computer graphics can be solved with a matrix inversion.

  Jim Blinn

  Computer, Problem, Computer Graphics

  Jim Blinn (1998). “Jim Blinn's Corner: Dirty Pixels”, p.250, Morgan Kaufmann

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• By His gracious condescension God became man and is called man for the sake of man and by exchanging His condition for ours revealed the power that elevates man to God through his love for God and brings God down to man because of His love for man. By this blessed inversion, man is made God by divinization and God is made man by hominization. For the Word of God and God wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of His embodiment.

  Maximus the Confessor

  Christian, Blessed, Men

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• Maybe Formula One should have an inversion rule in qualifying.

  Bob Varsha

  Should Have, Formulas, Qualifying

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• Faith drives a wedge between ethics and suffering. Where certain actions cause no suffering at all, religious dogmatists still maintain that they are evil and worthy of punishment. . . . And yet, where suffering and death are found in abundance their causes are often deemed to be good. . . . This inversion of priorities not only victimizes innocent people and squanders scarce resources; it completely falsifies our ethics.

  Sam Harris

  Religious, Punishment, Suffering And Death

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• I think companies trying to exercise a so-called inversion should be hit with an exit tax. So I want to change behaviors, and I am deeply distressed about quarterly capitalism, because I think it is causing businesses to make decisions that are not helping the long-term profitability of American corporations or the success of our economy.

  Hillary Clinton

  Exercise, Thinking, Long

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

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• And I think this is the real epiphany: the ways in which culture is distributed become profoundly more intriguing as a cultural artifact itself. What we've experienced is an inversion of consumption, one in which we've come to prefer the acts of acquisition over that which we are acquiring, the bottles over the wine.

  Kenneth Goldsmith

  Real, Wine, Thinking

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