Quote of the day

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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Emile M. Cioran

Reality is a creation of our excesses.


Or it certainly can be.

The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.

Or it certainly can be.

A garbled quotation is equivalent to a betrayal, an insult, a prejudice.

Unless, perhaps, you garble your own.

To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell.

My guess: different lines are drawn here.

Read day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget!

You do grasp this, right?

Doubt works deep within you like a disease or, even more effectively, like a faith.

We'll need a context of course.
Impenitent
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by Impenitent »

Planned parenthood facilities on "federal" lands in national parks?

"They could put up tents, have trained personnel — and be there to help people who need it."

"It's time to declare a medical emergency." - Senator Elizabeth Warren

https://www.dailywire.com/news/white-ho ... onal-parks

-Imp
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Banksy

People who enjoy waving flags don't deserve to have one.


Of course some wouldn't go that far.

...the people who run our cities don't understand graffiti because they think nothing has the right to exist unless it makes a profit...the people who truly deface our neighborhoods are the companies that scrawl giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff....any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours, it belongs to you...its yours to take, rearrange and re use. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head...

Of course some wouldn't go that far.

My main problem with cops is that they do what they're told. They say 'Sorry mate, I'm just doing my job' all the fucking time.

Unless you actually need one?

You owe the companies nothing. You especially don't owe them any courtesy. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.

Probably some companies more than others.

Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world I can't even finish my second apple pie.

The Horror! The Horror!

I'd been painting rats for three years before someone said, 'That's clever. It's an anagram of art,' and I had to pretend I'd known that all along.

Sure, it could be a true story.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Philosophy Tweets

"Let my enemies devour each other." Salvador Dali


Anyone here recall if they did?

"To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering." Friedrich Nietzsche

Either that or go cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs.

“Just because you do not take an interest in politics...does not mean that politics won't take an interest in you.” Pericles

So don't forget to not vote.

"Many are destined to reason wrongly; others, not to reason at all; and others, to persecute those who do reason." Voltaire

With or without a "condition".

“It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.” Victor Hugo

Again, it's not nothing to die. Or not for some of us.

"I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process." Vincent Van Gogh

Yeah, but look at him today!!
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Emily St. John Mandel

Sometimes you don't know you're going to throw a grenade until you've already pulled the pin.


That'll do it.

You know what I've learned about money? I was trying to figure out why my life felt more or less the same in Singapore as it did in London, and that's when I realized that money is its own country.

So, when did you realize it?

The distance is unbearable if you let yourself dwell on it.

Or sometimes even think about it at all.

No star burns forever.

Unless you call billions of years forever.

See, that illustrates the whole problem, Dieter said. The best Shakespearean actress in the whole territory, and her favourite line of text is from Star Trek.

Uh, live long and prosper?

Are you asking if I believe in ghosts?
I don't know. Maybe. Yes.
Of course not. Imagine how many there'd be.
Yes, Kirsten said, that's exactly it.


On the other hand, any ghosts here?
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Edward Abbey

The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.


You know, among other things.

Whatever we cannot understand easily we call God; this saves wear and tear on the brain tissues.

Anyone not understand this?

When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.

And, sure, the occasional cat.

My own ambition, my deepest and truest ambition, is to find within myself someday, somehow, the ability to do...nothing And find it enough.

Posting here for example.

A house built on greed cannot long endure.

Now that's a crock of course.

If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.

And thus the expression, "a snowball's chance in Hell".
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Geraldine Brooks

For to know a man's library is, in some measure, to know his mind.


Or, these days, a man's tatoos. A woman's too.

Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.

Well, so far, anyway.

If there is one class of person I have never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt.

Yo, Mr. Pinhead! You're up!!

They say the Lord's Day is a day of rest, but those who preach this generally are not women.

Let's make today the exception.

We were too intelligent, too cynical for war. Of course, you don't have to be stupid and primitive to die a stupid, primitive death.

Besides, as often as not, it's beyond your control.

How little we know, I thought, of the people we live amongst.

Virtually in particular.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Philosophy Tweets

"Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half." Gore Vidal


Let's pin this down.

"I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard." William F. Buckley Jr.

Let's check them out. Both of them.

"The brain that doesn’t feed itself, eats itself." Gore Vidal

Okay, but why do they all end up here?

"The only place where success comes before work is a dictionary." Vidal Sassoon

And not just for hair stylists.

"At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice." Gore Vidal

And not just in the voting booths.

"Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75." Benjamin Franklin

On the other hand, most people?
promethean75
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by promethean75 »

Excerpt from a 2014 interview of your favorite marxist, radical Rosa 'the red' Lichtenstein.

Interviewer: I know you have written on this in some detail on your site, but could you talk about the your view of the unexpected radicalism in Wittgenstein. Particularly on how you see Wittgenstein’s project as similar to Marx’s.

RL: I don’t think Wittgenstein’s project is at all the same as Marx’s; sure, there are a few superficial similarities, but that is about as far as it goes. Having said that, there is very clear evidence that some of Marx’s ideas filtered through to Wittgenstein via Piero Sraffa and his many Marxist friends in Cambridge and Birmingham. In the early 1930s, after long discussions with Sraffa, Wittgenstein began to adopt an “anthropological view” of language, which linked it directly with how we have developed as a species and how discourse functions as means of communication rather than as a means of representation (which is how he had pictured it in the Tractatus). I have written more about this in an article of mine The North Star has just published, but in much greater detail here.

Of course, this doesn’t mean we can’t use Wittgenstein’s ideas to help improve Marxist theory, or at least change its direction.

However, in another sense, his work is among the most radical ever to have appeared in the entire history of Philosophy, East and West (and this is what aligns it with Marx’s own approach). That is because, if he is right, his method brings to an end 2500 years of empty philosophical speculation, branding it as self-important hot air (my words, not his!). The only legitimate role for philosophy, as he saw things, is to help unravel the confusions we fall into when we misuse language, or when we confuse the means by which we represent the world for the world itself. Or, as I would put this point, when we fetishise language so that what had once been the product of the relation between human beings (language) is inverted so that it becomes a relation between things, or, indeed, those things themselves. Dialectical Marxists call this “reification”, but fail to see this accurately describes what they have done with the concepts they unwisely imported from Hegel (upside down or ‘the right way up’).

By-and-large, traditional Philosophy has always been seen as method for obtaining fundamental truths about ‘reality’, ‘being’, ‘god’, ‘consciousness’, ‘mind’, etc., — all of which were derived from language or from ‘thought’ alone. This is indeed how the discipline is viewed today, especially in what is called ‘Continental Philosophy’. Over the last thirty or forty years, even Analytic Philosophy itself has resiled from its earlier anti-metaphysical stance and has now largely returned to the traditional role Philosophy has always arrogated to itself: a sort of Super-Science. So, the main function of Philosophy these days is, it seems, to produce a theory of mind, or of perception, or of language, or of ‘consciousness’, or of time, or of ‘agency’, or of ‘subjectivity’, and so on. Again, if Wittgenstein is right (and I for one think he is), this is completely misguided –, which is partly why his work is so unpopular with academic Philosophers (and dialecticians!). Indeed, if his method actually caught on, they’d all be out of jobs!
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henry quirk
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by henry quirk »

Rosa 'the red' Lichtenstein
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PLACEBO TREATMENT OF WOMEN WITH PREMENSTRUAL SYNDROME
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Thomas Ligotti

My point, I said, is that there's hell in every handshake, never mind an outright and humiliating insult.


Never mind lots of things.

Everyone prefers to continue their existence as a mind and a self, no matter what pain it causes them, no matter how false and unreal they might be, than to face the quite obvious reality and being only a body set in motion by this mindless, soulless, and selfless force which he designated the shadow, the darkness.

Everyone not meaning you of course.

Take my advice, as someone who dabbles in tales of extraordinary doom, and walk away from all of this madness. There are enough fatalities of a mundane sort. Find a quiet place and wait for one of them to carry you off.

Let's just say that eventually I'll let you know.

The universe is not just meaningless, but malignantly useless.

Yo, God!

I can only sit and wait, knowing that one day he will turn full around, step down from his stage, and claim me for the abyss I have always feared. Perhaps then I will discover what it was I did - what any of us did - to deserve this fate.

Yo, God!

To think that another person shared my love for the icy bleakness of things.

Okay, I admit it, Maia. You down into the hole, not me up out of it. :wink:
Phil8659
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by Phil8659 »

I really do not know if this little story is even worth quoting, however, I think if one comprehend it as a metaphorical answer to many questions posed on this forum, one might do well.

Once upon a time, while walking to work, a car pulled over and the driver asked me if I wanted a blow job. I said, no thanks, I already have a job. I work for General Motors.
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Bart D. Ehrman

It should be noted that all four of these exalted roles—Jesus as messiah, as Lord, as Son of God, as Son of Man—imply, in one sense or another, that Jesus is God. In no sense, in this early period, is Jesus understood to be God the Father. He is not the One Almighty God. He is the one who has been elevated to a divine position and is God in a variety of senses.


:lol:
No, seriously.

...such human passions as sexual desire and lust were regularly deemed completely unsuitable for the God of Israel. Anger and wrath, yes; sexual love, no.

Of course that's still around.

Orthodoxy is my doxy and heterodoxy is your doxy.

Of course that's still around.

In spite of having no body they stand and move, think and talk; in short, it’s as if their naked souls were walking about clad in the semblance of their bodies.

Souls? You tell me.

In oral societies it is recognized that the telling of a story to a different audience or in a different context or for a different reason calls for a different version of the story. Stories are molded to the time and circumstance in which they are told.

The Bible: the ultimate telephone game?

The time when Christianity arose, with its exalted claims about Jesus, was the same time when the emperor cult had started to move into full swing, with its exalted claims about the emperor. Christians were calling Jesus God directly on the heels of the Romans calling the emperor God.

Too close to call?
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Brian Eno

Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.


Yeah, I can go along with that.

The reason conservatives cohere and radicals fight: everyone agrees about fears, no one about visions.

Yeah, I can go along with that.

The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.

Or the dumb thing.

If there is a new fascism, it won't come from skinheads and punks; it will come from people who eat granola and think they know how the world should be.

Now that's bullshit of course.

The dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples' attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation.

And certainly the dominant theory here of late.

The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.

Anyone here in one of them?
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iambiguous
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Re: Quote of the day

Post by iambiguous »

Steven Pinker

Though it isn't obvious from the bowdlerized versions in Walt Disney , the tales are filled with murder, infanticide, cannibalism, mutilation, and sexual abuse - grimm fairy tales indeed.


Don't tell the kids of course.

Free will is an idealization of human beings that makes the ethics game playable.

You know, if that's actually true.

As far as I’m concerned, whom is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.

Actually, that might be true.

Literate people should know how to think about grammar.

Who or whom for example.

Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.

No, really, mine were.

Good prose is never written by a committee.

Next up: a committee of pinheads.
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