Reversal Quotes - Page 2

• Perversity depends on reversal and substitution.

  Mason Cooley

  Substitution, Depends, Perversity

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• One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United Sates, where everything is transformed into images: only images exist and are produced and are consumes ... Such a reversal necessarily raises the ethical question: not that the image is immoral, irreligious, or diabolic (as some have declared it, upon the advent of the Photograph), but because, when generalized, it completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under cover of illustrating it.

  Roland Barthes

  Ethical Questions, Our World, Desire

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• No one supposed that dinoflagellates might actively kill fish as an evolved response for their own specific advantage, including a potential nutritional benefit for the algal cells. And yet the dinoflagellates do seem to be killing and eating fishes in a manner suggesting active evolution for this most peculiar reversal.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Cells, Peculiar, Benefits

  Stephen Jay Gould (1998). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History”, Harmony

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• I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history... The overt reversal of America's basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me.

  Jimmy Carter

  Thinking, Impact, America

  "Carter blasts Bush, Blair on Iraq". www.reuters.com. May 20, 2007.

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• Islam was something like a Christian heresy. The early heresies had been full of mad reversals and evasions of the Incarnation, rescuing their Jesus from the reality of his body even at the expense of the sincerity of his soul.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Christian, Jesus, Reality

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• People accuse journalism of being too personal; but to me it has always seemed far too impersonal. It is charged with tearing away the veils from private life; but it seems to me to be always dropping diaphanous but blinding veils between men and men. The Yellow Press is abused for exposing facts which are private; I wish the Yellow Press did anything so valuable. It is exactly the decisive individual touches that it never gives; and a proof of this is that after one has met a man a million times in the newspapers it is always a complete shock and reversal to meet him in real life.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Real, Men, Yellow

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• Almost every sin is committed for the sake of sensual pleasure; and sensual pleasure is overcome by hardship and distress arising either voluntarily from repentance, or else involuntarily as a result of some salutary and providential reversal. 'For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged; but when we are judged, we are chastened by the Lord, so that we should not be condemned with the world.' (1 Cor. 11:31-32).

  Gregory of Nazianzus

  Judging, Sensual, Hardship

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• Good technique includes quick changes, great variety and speed. It may be a system of reversals much like a concept of God and the Devil. In the speed of events, which one is really in charge? Do they change places with lightning speed? The Chinese believe so. To put the heart of the martial arts in your own heart and have it be a part of you means total comprehension.

  Bruce Lee

  Art, Mean, Warrior

  "Tao of Jeet Kune Do".

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• It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite… The reversal of fear of being touched belongs to the nature of crowds. The feeling of relief is most striking where the density of the crowd is greatest

  Elias Canetti

  Men, Opposites, Feelings

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• So at the heart of all things is the germ of their overthrow; the closer you are to the heart, the closer to the reversal. Nowhere to go but down. You reach the core and then you're blown away--

  Ahdaf Soueif

  Heart, Nowhere To Go, Germs

  Ahdaf Soueif (2012). “The Map of Love”, p.46, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Reversal by a higher court is not proof that justice is thereby better done. There is no doubt that if there were a super-Supreme Court, a substantial proportion of our reversals of state courts would also be reversed. We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final.

  Robert H. Jackson

  Justice, Doubt, Finals

  Brown v. Allen (concurring opinion) (1953)

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• Short stories amount for the most part to parlour tricks, party favours with built-in snappers, gadgets for including recognition and reversals

  Howard Nemerov

  Party, Stories, Gadgets

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• To every reversal of people's soveregnity, to every disappearance of the Republic corresponds a frank or disguised restitution in force of the regal justice. "Tell me, according to what you judge and I'll tell you who you are." No axiom in politics is more certain than this.

  Francois Mitterrand

  People, Justice, Judging

  "Le Coup d'État permanent". Book by François Mitterrand, Part III, 1964.

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• power is not a thing to be owned. But if you believe that it is such a thing, losing it becomes a possibility to fear. That fear, I think, is one reason for the dark projections of a catastrophic future that are so widespread, in our dual society. The present powerful, being committed to polarization, expect that any new deal will overturn the one that set them in authority; that the last shall be first and the first last, role reversal everywhere, men as slaves, women as masters, in a revolution of contradiction.

  Elizabeth Janeway

  Change, Powerful, Fear

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• nothing happens in August - except when something really happens in August. World War I began in August, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait began in August, al Qaida was preparing to bring down the World Trade Center in August. August, in other words, is the time when all of us should prepare our backup plans, chart our reversals of course, [and] think through possible paradigm changes.

  Anne Applebaum

  War, Thinking, August

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• An age is the reversal of an age:
  When strangers murdered Emmet, Fitzgerald, Tone,
  We lived like men that watch a painted stage.
  What matter for the scene, the scene once gone:
  It had not touched our lives.

  William Butler Yeats

  Men, What Matters, Age

  William Butler Yeats (2010). “The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol II: The Plays”, p.703, Simon and Schuster

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• In Burma, under the present Constitution, the Army can always take over all parts of government if they think this is necessary. so until the Army comes out clearly and consistently in support of the democratic process we cannot say that it's irreversible. But I don't think we need fear a reversal too much either.

  Aung San Suu Kyi

  Army, Thinking, Government

  Source: www.voanews.com

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• Women under phallocratic rule are confined to the role of vessels/carriers, directed and controlled by men. Since that role is the basic base reversal of the very be-ing of Voyaging/Spiraling women, when we direct our own Crafts/Vessels we become reversers of that deadly reversal.

  Mary Daly

  Men, Crafts, Roles

  "Gyn/ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (New Intergalactic Introduction)". Book by Mary Daly, revised edition (p. 26), 1990.

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• Jealousy seems the absolute reversal of love. It is the swinging from the sunny warmth of the Equator to the frigid cold of the North Pole.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Jealousy, Cold, Sunny

  Elbert Hubbard (1922). “Selected Writings of Elbert Hubbard ...”

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• Our parents, our tribesman, our authority figures, clearly expect us to be bad or anti-social or greedy or selfish or dirty or destructive or self-destructive. Our social nature is such that we tend to meet the expectations of our elders. Whenever this reversal took place and our elders stopped expecting us to be social and expected us to be anti-social, just to put it in gross terms, that's when the real fall took place. And we're paying for it dearly.

  Jean Liedloff

  Real, Selfish, Fall

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• History records endless struggles to enlarge those realms, inspiring ones; it also records painful reversals and setbacks.

  Noam Chomsky

  Struggle, Records, Painful

  Source: www.publicanthropology.org

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• What happened in Kosovo was the exact reversal of what happened in 'Fortress Europe' in 1943-45. Let me explain. Air Marshall 'Bomber' Harris used to say that 'Fortress Europe' was a fortress without a roof, since the Allies had air supremacy. Now, if we look at the Kosovo War, what do we see? We see a fortress without walls  but with a roof! Isn't that disappearance extraordinary?!

  Paul Virilio

  Wall, War, Air

  Source: ctheory.net

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• A lot of people think that they are really cool because they don't outline. In my writing group, they would say, "I will never outline. I let the characters take me." C'mon, man - I outline the story, but it's only like one page. It's a list of possible reversals in the story, like things where everything will just change because of this certain reveal or this certain action. Then I start really digging into the character because, to me, I don't care what the story is.

  Matt de la Pena

  Writing, Character, Men

  Source: therumpus.net

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• [Trade] was clearly a factor.That was a complete reversal of where things are normally at. Usually Republicans are all for free trade.

  Collin Peterson

  Republican, Trade, Factors

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• A sermon is a form that yields a certain kind of meaning in the same way that, say, a sonnet is a form that deals with a certain kind of meaning that has to do with putting things in relation to each other, allowing for the fact of complexity reversal, such things. Sermons are, at their best, excursions into difficulty that are addressed to people who come there in order to hear that.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Yield, Order, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

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