Semantics Quotes - Page 2

• It is not new for the older generation to bewail the indolence of the young, and there is a tendency for the latter to maintain much of the older ethic screened by a new semantics and an altered ideology.

  David Riesman

  Generations, Ethics, Indolence

  David Riesman (1964). “Abundance for What?”, p.177, Transaction Publishers

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• So long as mathematicians can impose up-and-down semantics upon students while trafficking personally in the non-up-and-down advantages of their concise statements, they can impose upon the ignorance of man a monopoly of access to accurate processing of information and can fool even themselves by thought habits governing the becoming behavior of professional specialists, by disclaiming the necessity of, or responsibility for, comprehensive adjustment of the a priori thought to total reality of universal principles.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Ignorance, Responsibility, Reality

  "Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure". Book by R. Buckminster Fuller, p. 234, "The Designers and the Politicians" (1962), 1969.

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• From semantics to shipbuilding, from dream theory to propositional logic, any specialist ... is invariably astonished to discover that modern knowledge was foreshadowed at the time. ... Should we not replace these foreshadowings by the study of the influences of Hellenistic thought on modern thought?

  Lucio Russo

  Dream, Logic, Study

  Lucio Russo, Silvio (translator) Levy (2013). “The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why it Had to Be Reborn”, p.228, Springer Science & Business Media

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• If you want to understand the nature of something, to find out the truth, that is one thing. If you want to play semantics, make up wild thought 'experiments', that is another thing. I am not so interested in the latter, though I do appreciate that it can be fun, however unproductive.

  Patricia Churchland

  Fun, Play, Appreciate

  "Causal machines". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 10, 2012.

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• Identity is invariably false to facts.

  Alfred Korzybski

  Self Esteem, Identity, Facts

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• With his eyes and those hands there won't be a woman safe in all the world when he starts hunting after the ladies.' 'Courting, dear,' my father corrected gently. 'Semantics,' she shrugged.

  Patrick Rothfuss

  Father, Eye, Hunting

  Patrick Rothfuss (2010). “The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chonicle:”, p.79, Hachette UK

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• Philosophers who pay for their semantics by drawing checks on Darwin are in debt way over their heads.

  Jerry Fodor

  Drawing, Debt, Pay

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• It seemed to a number of philosophers of language, myself included, that we should attempt to achieve a unification of Chomsky's syntax, with the results of the researches that were going on in semantics and pragmatics. I believe that this effort has proven to be a failure. Though Chomsky did indeed revolutionize the subject of linguistics, it is not at all clear, at the end the century, what the solid results of this revolution are. As far as I can tell there is not a single rule of syntax that all, or even most, competent linguists are prepared to agree is a rule.

  John Searle

  Believe, Numbers, Effort

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• The use of the high level language made each programmer a factor of 5 to 10 more productive in a coding sense and more concerned with the semantics than the syntax of modules.

  Fernando J. Corbato

  Syntax, Use, Levels

  "A Managerial View of the Multics System Development". Talk at the Conference on Research Directions in Software Technology, Providence, Rhode Island, www.multicians.org. October 1977.

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• C is not clean – the language has many gotchas and traps, and although its semantics are simple in some sense, it is not any cleaner than the assembly-language design it is based on.

  Erik Naggum

  Simple, Design, Language

  Re: teaching and learning with LISP/Scheme (Usenet article), groups.google.com. June 20, 2000.

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• For me, Christianity is not a genre. It's faith. The Gospel is not a genre either. It's faith. I definitely understand the semantics of naming things to give them some kind of distinction but I think my faith is pretty distinct. If you want to call it hip hop, essentially it is. That's the art form.

  LeCrae

  Art, Thinking, Giving

  "A conversation with Christian hip hop artist Lecrae". Interview with Chad Bonham, www.beliefnet.com.

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• When one has an image about oneself one is surely insane, one lives in a world of illusion.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Self Esteem, Insane, World

  Jiddu Krishnamurti (1973). “Flight of the Eagle”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• Nobody wants to say that the man [Obama] is a Marxist. Okay, so he's not a Marxist. He's a progressive! This is semantics.

  Glenn Beck

  Men, Want, Progressive

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• There's never been a better time to change the way you think. Replace every 'I can't' with 'How can I?' It might sound like semantics, but I promise it will bring whatever you want to accomplish much closer to becoming a reality.

  Maynard Webb

  Reality, Thinking, Promise

  "The “Spirit of And”: Part 2" by Maynard Webb, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 20, 2010.

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• Von Neumann languages do not have useful properties for reasoning about programs. Axiomatic and denotational semantics are precise tools for describing and understanding conventional programs, but they only talk about them and cannot alter their ungainly properties. Unlike von Neumann languages, the language of ordinary algebra is suitable both for stating its laws and for transforming an equation into its solution, all within the "language."

  John Backus

  Law, Understanding, Ordinary

  "Can Programming Be Liberated From the von Neumann Style?". John Backus' 1977 Turing Award lecture, published in "Communications of the ACM", Volume 21, No. 8 (pp. 639-640), August 1978.

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• I heard you're campaigning on my behalf." He walked over to me. "That wouldn't be because you'd miss me too much if I were gone,would it?" "Don't be absurd," I scoffed. "I don't condone murder, even for people like you." "People like me,huh?" He cocked an eyebrow. "You mean devilishly handsome, debonair young men who come to sweep rebellious princesses of their feet?" "You came to kidnap me, not sweep me off my feet," I said,but he waved his hand at the idea. "Semantics.

  Amanda Hocking

  Princess, Mean, Men

  Amanda Hocking (2014). “Trylle: The Complete Trilogy”, p.298, Pan Macmillan

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• The continuation that obeys only obvious stack semantics, O grasshopper, is not the true continuation.

  Guy Steele

  Grasshoppers, Obvious, Continuation

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• Faith is a continuum, and we each fall on that line where we may. By attempting to rigidly classify ethereal concepts like faith, we end up debating semantics to the point where we entirely miss the obvious - that is, that we are all trying to decipher life's big mysteries, and we're each following our own paths of enlightenment.

  Dan Brown

  Fall, Missing, Enlightenment

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• Initially, I studied philosophy, because it claimed to give you answers to the meaning of existence, but it didnt: It was basically a semantics game.

  Talulah Riley

  Philosophy, Games, Giving

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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