Interesting Quotes

[edepot]

Here are some quotes that happened to get sent to me that I thought others might also find interesting, so I am passing them along...
Do they contain kernels of truth about the Meaning of Life? Maybe, maybe not. But at least they are interesting for these times.
If you have any you wish to add, feel free to add to this "forum blog"


"...the increasingly feudal nature of an economy divided between the
gated, privately patrolled citadels of the rich and the legions of men
and women who strive for corporate peonage or the nomatic pickings of
a "freelance" life. [Unberto] Eco also argues that both the medieval
era and our own are dominated by the visual communication of images.
Elites live in a world of texts and logic, while a less literate mass
culture is immersed in a propagandistic sea of images distributed
through universal -- or "catholic" -- communications nets."

"TECHGNOSIS: myth, magic + mysticism in the age of information"
by Eric Davis

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Most information and communications start today as "...invisible
sentences of ones and zeros, and behind the ones and zeros lay a
babel of electrical impulses and magnetic fields: the ultimate
modern repository of replicable meaning."

Prologue, "Copies In Seconds" by David Owen

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"Television spreads a modest flood tide on a flat plain: its
waters are everywhere, and though it makes a shallow-bedded
sea, and though there are traditional landmarks--newspaper
trees and book steples and many a becoming print rooftop--
millions lose their way and slip under the shimmering images
without anyone quite noticing, least of all they themselves.
Children have been known to drown in just a few inches of
water: televison's shallows are more perilous still."

"Jihad vs. McWorld" by Benjamin R Barber

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"[One] of the cultural contradictions of capitalism--the tendency
over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings
of society."

"The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollen

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"The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure
thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating
by exertion of the imagination...Yet the program construct, unlike the
poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing
visible outputs separate from the construct itself." - Frederick Brooks

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"By "judgement", I mean the tacit or implicit component of knowledge,
the ingredient which is not merely unspecified in propositions, but
which is unspecifiable in propositions. It is the component of
knowledge which does not appear in the form of rules and which,
therefore, cannot be resolved into information or itemized in the
manner characteristic of information." - Michael Oakeshott, 1967

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Quotes by Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, Nazi Germany:

"The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine.
Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious.
In the long run only he will achieve basic results in influencing public
opinion who is able to reduce problems to the simplest terms and who
has the courage to keep forever repeating them in this simplified form
despite the objections of intellectuals."

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it,people will eventually
come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the
State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military
consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State
to use all of its powers to repress dissent,for the truth is the mortal
enemy of the lie,and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy
of the State."

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Human beings are born soft and supple.
At their death they are stiff and hard.
The grasses and trees are born tender and pliant.
At their death they are withered and dry.

Therefore the stiff and inflexible
is a disciple of death.
The gentle and yielding
is a disciple of life.

An army that is inflexible never wins.
A tree that is unbending easily snaps.

The hard and rigid will be broken.
The supple and yielding will prevail.

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu

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"...the most important thing about any communication medium is that message
receipt is really message recovery; anyone who wishes to receive a message
embedded in a medium must first have internalized the medium so it can be
"subtracted" out to leave the message behind...you have to become the medium
if you use it".

"User Interface: A Personal View", 1989 by Alan Kay

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When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land.
They said "Let us pray."
We closed our eyes.
When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

(Bishop Desmond Tutu)

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"Nothing is worse done than what is ill done for Religion. That must not be
done, in the Defense of Religion, which is contrary to Religion..."

"Nothing spoils human Nature more than false Zeal. The Good-nature of a
Heathen is more God-like than the furious Zeal of a Christian...."

"Our Fallibility and the Shortness of our Knowledge should make us peaceable
and gentle: because I may be Mistaken, I must not be dogmatical and confident,
peremptory and imperious. I will not break the certain Laws of Charity, for a
doubtful Doctrine or of uncertain Truth."

"Among politicians the esteem of religion is profitable; the principles of it
are troublesome."

From: Moral and Religious Aphorisms
by Benjamin Whichcote, 1609-1683.

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From the introduction to "The Left Hand of Darkness"
by Ursula K. Le Guin.

"Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they
don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what
they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent
in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies.

... Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth:
to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and
devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events
which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these
fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and
then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say,
There! That's the truth!

... In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that
the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every
word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find that we're
a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have
been changed a little... crossed a street we never crossed before.
But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says
in words what cannot be said in words."