Good Representation Quotes

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We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity.
Carmen Maria Machado (In the Dream House)
It is futile and knackering to try and make all your tiny choices representative of your moral compass then beat yourself up when this plan inevitably fails. Feminists can get waxed. Priests can swear. Vegetarians can wear leather shoes. Do as much good as you can. The weighty representation of the world cannot rest on every decision you make.
Dolly Alderton (Everything I Know About Love)
Good customer care representatives will possess good knowledge to answer any questions without beating around the bush and delaying the issue for a few more days until they find somebody else to look into it.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
The representation of women in the society, especially through mass media has been the most delusional act ever done on the grounds of human existence.
Abhijit Naskar (The Bengal Tigress: A Treatise on Gender Equality (Humanism Series))
If every single person in this room made it a rule that wherever you are, whenever you can, you will try to act a little kinder than is necessary--the world really would be a better place. And if you do this, . . . someone else, somewhere, someday, may recognize in you, in every single one of you, the face of God. . . . or whatever politically correct spiritual representation of universal goodness you happen to believe in.
R.J. Palacio
Do as much good as you can. The weighty representation of the world cannot rest on every decision you make.
Dolly Alderton (Everything I Know About Love)
NOT to my contemporaries, not to my compatriots but to mankind I commit my now completed work in the confidence that it will not be without value for them, even if this should be late recognised, as is commonly the lot of what is good. For it cannot have been for the passing generation, engrossed with the delusion of the moment, that my mind, almost against my will, has uninterruptedly stuck to its work through the course of a long life. preface to the second edition of "the world as will and representation
Arthur Schopenhauer
the idea of representation is important. And I think the world of gaming needs people from all walks of life to speak up and represent the positive side of what we love. Because, let’s be real: gaming’s reputation is NOT good in that area right now.
Felicia Day (You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost))
One morning I fell to sketching a face: what sort of a face it was to be, I did not care or know. I took a soft black pencil, gave it a broad point, and worked away. Soon I had traced on the paper a broad and prominent forehead and a square lower outline of visage: that contour gave me pleasure; my fingers proceeded actively to fill it with features. Strongly-marked horizontal eyebrows must be traced under that brow; then followed, naturally, a well-defined nose, with a straight ridge and full nostrils; then a flexible-looking mouth, by no means narrow; then a firm chin, with a decided cleft down the middle of it: of course, some black whiskers were wanted, and some jetty hair, tufted on the temples, and waved above the forehead. Now for the eyes: I had left them to the last, because they required the most careful working. I drew them large; I shaped them well: the eyelashes I traced long and sombre; the irids lustrous and large. "Good! but not quite the thing," I thought, as I surveyed the effect: "they want more force and spirit;" and I wrought the shades blacker, that the lights might flash more brilliantly--a happy touch or two secured success. There, I had a friend's face under my gaze; and what did it signify that those young ladies turned their backs on me? I looked at it; I smiled at the speaking likeness: I was absorbed and content. Is that a portrait of some one you know?" asked Eliza, who had approached me unnoticed. I responded that it was merely a fancy head, and hurried it beneath the other sheets. Of course, I lied: it was, in fact, a very faithful representation of Mr. Rochester. But what was that to her, or to any one but myself? Georgiana also advanced to look. The other drawings pleased her much, but she called that 'an ugly man.
Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)
My goofiest-sounding secret is that I also believe in magic. Sometimes I call it God and sometimes I call it light, and I believe in it because every now and then I read a really good book or hear a really good song or have a really good conversation with a friend and they seem to have some kind of shine to them. The list I keep of these moments in the back of my journal is comprised less of times when I was laughing or smiling and more of times when I felt like I could feel the colors in my eyes deepening from the display before me. Times in which I felt I was witnessing an all-encompassing representation of life driven by an understanding that, coincidence or not, our existence is a peculiar thing, and perhaps the greatest way to honor it is to just be human. To be happy AND sad, and everything else. And yeah, living is a pain, and I say I hate everyone and everything, and I don’t exude much enthusiasm when sandwiched between fluorescent lighting and vinyl flooring for seven hours straight, and I will probably mumble a bunch about how much I wish I could sleep forever the next time I have to wake up at 6 AM. But make no mistake about it: I really do like living. I really, truly do.
Tavi Gevinson
A man may be convinced in all good faith that he has no religious ideas, but no one can fall so far away from humanity that he no longer has any dominating representation collective.
C.G. Jung (The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works))
Chikondi is not interested in sex, with me or anyone else. But when he comes to my cabin, we engage in another kind of sharing, one that's every bit as good and every bit as intimate.
Becky Chambers (To Be Taught, If Fortunate)
It is an animus, she decides, the representation of the Logos in the female, as the anima is the representation of Eros in the male. In its negative aspect it is opinionated, conventional, banal, self-righteous, argumentative . . . In its positive aspect, it conveys spirit, feistiness, the capacity for reflection and self-knowledge, the capacity to handle philosophical and religious ideas at the higher levels.
Michael Gruber (The Good Son)
I think that a good portrait reveals a suggestion of the subject’s mind, and not just a representation of how they look. It’s by no means easy; to snatch the right moment can feel impossible, like capturing fairies.
Elizabeth Ross (Belle Epoque)
There's a class of things to be afraid of: it's "those things that you should be afraid of". Those are the things that go bump in the night, right? You're always exposed to them when you go to horror movies, especially if they're not the gore type of horror movie. They're always hinting at something that's going on outside of your perceptual sphere, and they frighten you because you don't know what's out there. For that the Blair Witch Project was a really good example, because nothing ever happens in that movie but it's frightenting and not gory. It plays on the fact tht you do have a category of Those Things Of Which You Should Be Afraid. So it's a category, frightening things. And only things capable of abstraction can come up with something like the caregory of frightenting things. And so Kali is like an embodied representation of the category of frightening things. And then you might ask yourself, well once you come up with the concept of the category of frightening things, maybe you can come up with the concept of what to do in the face of frightening things. Which is not the same as "what do you do when you encounter a lion", or "what do you do when you encounter someone angry". It's a meta question, right? But then you could say, at a philosophical level: "You will encounter elements of the category of all those things which can frighten and undermine you during your life. Is there something that you can do *as a category* that would help you deal with that." And the answer is yeah, there is in fact. And that's what a lot of religious stories and symbolic stories are trying to propose to you, is the solution to that. One is, approach it voluntarily. Carefully, but voluntarily. Don't freeze and run away. Explore, instead. You expose yourself to risk but you gain knowledge. And you wouldn't have a cortex which, you know, is ridiculously disproportionate, if as a species we hadn't decided that exploration trumps escape or freezing. We explore. That can make you the master of a situation, so you can be the master of something like fire without being terrified of it. One of the things that the Hindus do in relationship to Kali, is offer sacrifices. So you can say, well why would you offer sacrifices to something you're afraid of. And it's because that is what you do, that's always what you do. You offer up sacrifices to the unknown in the hope that good things will happen to you. One example is that you're worried about your future. Maybe you're worried about your job, or who you're going to marry, or your family, there's a whole category of things to be worried about, so you're worried about your future. SO what're you doing in university? And the answer is you're sacrificing your free time in the present, to the cosmos so to speak, in the hope that if you offer up that sacrifice properly, the future will smile upon you. And that's one of the fundamental discoveries of the human race. And it's a big deal, that discovery: by changing what you cling to in the present, you can alter the future.
Jordan B. Peterson
Choose a leader who will build bridges - not walls. A leader who will promote peace - not wars. A leader who believes in equality - not discrimination. A leader who is transparent - not secretive. A leader who will speak for all - not just animals.
Mizan Chaudhury
Something of this kind, I replied:–God is always to be represented as he truly is, whatever be the sort of poetry, epic, lyric or tragic, in which the representation is given. Right. And is he not truly good? and must he not be represented as such? Certainly.
Plato (The Republic)
Good signiors, both, when shall we laugh? Say, when? You grow exceeding strange: Must it be so? Salar. We'll make our leisures to attend on yours.
William Shakespeare (Shakespeare's play of the Merchant of Venice Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre, with Historical and Explanatory Notes by Charles Kean, F.S.A.)
A representation learning algorithm can discover a good set of features for a simple task in minutes, or for a complex task in hours to months.
Ian Goodfellow (Deep Learning (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning series))
This is what death is like. Less than nothing. Less than blackness. The edge of vision is a good representation of the edge of consciousness. Life then death. It’s a foretaste.
Ian McEwan
A nonhuman animal had better have a good lawyer. In 1508, Bartholomé Chassenée earned fame and fortune for his eloquent representation of the rats of his French province. These rats had been charged with destroying the barley crop and also with ignoring the court order to appear and defend themselves. Bartholomé Chassenée argued successfully that the rats hadn't come because the court had failed to provide reasonable protection from the village cats along the route.
Karen Joy Fowler (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves)
Imagination is not, as some poets have thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. As long as art remained primarily mimetic, the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature. Again, as long as it was treated as an amusement, the evil which it could do was limited in scope. But in an age when the connection between imagination and figuration is beginning to be dimly realized, when the fact of the directionally creator relation is beginning to break through into consciousness, both the good and the evil latent in the working of imagination begin to appear unlimited. We have seen in the Romantic movement an instance of the way in which the making of images may react upon the collective representations. It is a fairly rudimentary instance, but even so it has already gone beyond the dreams and responses of a leisured few. The economic and social structure of Switzerland is noticeably affected by its tourist industry, and that is due only in part to increased facilities of travel. It is due not less to the condition that (whatever may be said about their ‘particles’) the mountains which twentieth-century man sees are not the mountains which eighteenth-century man saw. It may be objected that this is a very small matter, and that it will be a long time before the imagination of man substantially alters those appearances of nature with which his figuration supplies him. But then I am taking the long view. Even so, we need not be too confident. Even if the pace of change remained the same, one who is really sensitive to (for example) the difference between the medieval collective representations and our own will be aware that, without traveling any greater distance than we have come since the fourteenth century, we could very well move forward into a chaotically empty or fantastically hideous world. But the pace of change has not remained the same. It has accelerated and is accelerating. We should remember this, when appraising the aberrations of the formally representational arts. Of course, in so far as these are due to affectation, they are of no importance. But in so far as they are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has in some way or other experienced the world he represents. And in so far as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who are themselves willing to make a move towards seeing the world in that way, and, ultimately therefore, seeing that kind of world. We should remember this, when we see pictures of a dog with six legs emerging from a vegetable marrow or a woman with a motorbicycle substituted for her left breast.
Owen Barfield
Persons with anything life sustaining to sell, fellow citizens as well as foreigners, were refusing to exchange their goods for money. They were suddenly saying to people with nothing but paper representations of wealth, “Wake up, you idiots! Whatever made you think paper was so valuable?” ***
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Galápagos)
Because our Savior lives, we do not use the symbol of His death as the symbol of our faith. But what shall we use? No sign, no work of art, no representation of form is adequate to express the glory and the wonder of the Living Christ. He told us what that symbol should be when He said, ‘If ye love me, keep my commandments’ (John 14:15). As His followers, we cannot do a mean or shoddy or ungracious thing without tarnishing His image. Nor can we do a good and gracious and generous act without burnishing more brightly the symbol of Him whose name we have taken upon ourselves. And so our lives must become a meaningful expression, the symbol of our declaration of our testimony of the Living Christ, the Eternal Son of the Living God.
Gordon B. Hinckley
We're forced to walk a difficult line by this insistence that we only write about our personal journeys," I told the audience. "We end up in this position of only being allowed to represent ourselves, but having to make sure we don't misrepresent everyone. This creates some division in our communities - everyone has their own opinion about what's good representation and what isn't, and you can't please them all." (p. 231)
Juliet Jacques (Trans: A Memoir)
(from his random observations after reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens) In the Old Curiosity Shop I discovered that in the character of Dick Swiveller, Dickens provided P.G. Wodehouse with pretty much the whole of his oeuvre. In David Copperfield, David's bosses Spenlow and Jorkins are what must be the earliest fictional representations of good cop/bad cop.
Nick Hornby (The Polysyllabic Spree)
I examined it cautiously. On the opposite side of the chain from the wolf, there now hung a brilliant heart-shaped crystal. It was cut in a million facets, so that even in the subdued light shining from the lamp, it sparkled. I inhaled in a low gasp..." "But I thought it was a good representation,' he continued. 'It's hard and cold.' He laughed. 'And it throws rainbows in the sunlight.' 'You forgot the most important similarity,' I murmured. 'It's beautiful.' 'My heart is just as silent,' he mused. 'And it, too, is yours.
Stephenie Meyer
The reality is that you have been conditioned since you were a child to believe in white superiority through the way your history was taught, through the way race was talked about, and through the way students of color were treated differently from you. You have been educated by institutions that have taught white superiority through curricula that favor a white-biased narrative, through the lack of representation of BIPOC, and through the way these institutions handled acts of racism.
Layla F. Saad (Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor)
We say food is a weapon, which is another way to say that food is a means of protest, but good food can also be a tool of liberation.
Jon Gray (Ghetto Gastro Presents Black Power Kitchen)
I never did repent for doing good, Nor shall not now. This comes too near the praising of myself;
William Shakespeare (Shakespeare's play of the Merchant of Venice Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre, with Historical and Explanatory Notes by Charles Kean, F.S.A.)
Good preservation is a life preserver thrown to us in a shipwreck. Good preservation keeps us in touch with the graces of this life. It's bricks and mortar, yes. It's arguments about true colors and authenticity and representation. But true preservation is like the hand that shelters a fire from the wind. It protects the spark of life." -- Howard Mansfield, The Same Ax, Twice
Howard Mansfield
We receive no message in the strict sense of the word when a friend enters a room and says "good morning." The word has no function to select from an ensemble of possible states, though situations are conceivable in which it would have. The most interesting consequence of this way of looking at communication is the general conclusion that the greater the probability of a symbol's occurrence in any given situation, the smaller will be its information content. Where we can anticipate we need not listen. It is in this context that projection will do for perception.
E.H. Gombrich (Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation)
Tess's feminine hope - shall we confess it - had been so obstinately recuperative as to revive in her surreptitious visions of a domiciliary intimacy continued long enough to break down his coldness even against his judgement. Though unsophisticated in the usual sense, she was not incomplete; and it would have denoted deficiency of womanhood if she had not instinctively known what an argument lies in propinquity. Nothing else would save her, she knew, if this failed. It was wrong to hope in what was of the nature of strategy, she said to herself; yet that sort of hope she could not extinguish. His last representation had now been made, and it was, as she said, a new view. She had truly never though so far as that, and his lucid picture of possible offspring who would scorn her was one that brought deadly conviction to an honest heart which was humanitarian to its centre. Sheer experience had already taught her that, in some circumstances, there was one thing better than to lead a good life, and that was to be saved from leading any life whatever. Like all who have been previsioned by suffering, she could, in the words of M. Sully-Prudhomme, hear a penal sentence in the fiat, 'You shall be born,' particularly if addressed to potential issue or hers.
Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D’Urbervilles)
Ummiye is currently working on a screenplay called "Footless on Her Own Feet." It tells the story of a handicapped girl whose fifty-year-old mother pushes her to school every day in a wheelbarrow. Eventually, she wins a national drawing contest, making a super-realistic picture of herself in the wheelbarrow. With the prize money, she buys a wheelchair. Like the Arslankoy theatre, the girl's drawing uses artistic representation to change the thing represented. By drawing a truthful picture of the humiliating wheelbarrow, she transforms it into a dignified wheelchair-- much as a theatre, by representing the injustice of village women's life, might make that life more just. Nabokov once claimed that the inspiration for Lolita was an art work produced by an ape in the Jardin des Plantes: a drawing of the bars of its cage. It's a good metaphor for artistic production. What else do we ever draw besides the bars of our cage, or the wheelbarrow we rode in as crippled children? How else do cages get smashed? How else will we stand on our own feet?
Elif Batuman
department rejected, he claimed, because it was too simple and too much fun. It provides a schema for analyzing every story ever written, whether fiction or nonfiction. A vertical axis represents the continuum from good fortune to bad, with good at the top, bad at the bottom. The horizontal axis represents the passage of time. One of the story types that Vonnegut isolated was “Man in a Hole,” in which the hero experiences great fortune, then deep misfortune, before climbing back up to achieve even greater success. It struck me that this was a pretty good representation of Churchill’s first year as prime minister
Erik Larson (The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz)
I thought I had lowered my standards pretty much, when I decided that any woman would be good for me as long as she respects me. It didn't took me long to realize that would never happen. I was being naive about the real state of the world. It's not that one shouldn't have low standards, or high, or medium, but that most people are such a disgusting representation of themselves, that they can't stop themselves being like this until they die. And maybe they do appreciate what they had when they lose it, but they quickly forget about it when getting it back. Forgiving people that apologize too often has been another naive behavior of mine.
Robin Sacredfire
Her character was simply to hold you by the particular spell;any other--the good nature of home, the relation of her mother, her friends, her lovers, her debts, the practice of virtues, or industries, or vices--was not worth speaking of. These things were the fictions and shadows, the representation was the deep substance.
Henry James (The Tragic Muse (Penguin Classics))
She would have cursed the Almighty had she been able to shout out a blasphemy. Providence had deceived her for over sixty years, by treating her as a gentle, good little girl, by amusing her with lying representations of tranquil joy. And she had remained a child, senselessly believing in a thousand silly things, and unable to see life as it really is, dragging along in the sanguinary filth of passions. Providence was bad; it should have told her the truth before, or have allowed her to continue in her innocence and blindness. Now, it only remained for her to die, denying love, denying friendship, denying devotedness. Nothing existed but murder and lust.
Émile Zola (Thérèse Raquin)
We have to find a way to unfreeze time-to represent time without turning it into space. I have no idea how to do this. I can't conceive of a mathematics that doesn't represent a world as if it were frozen in eternity. It's terribly hard to represent time, and that's why there's a good chance that this representation is the missing piece.
Lee Smolin (The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next)
At every instant the objects and events in the world around us bombard us with impressions. As they do so they produce a phantasia, a mental impression. From this the mind generates a perception (hypolepsis), which might best be compared to a print made from a photographic negative. Ideally this print will be an accurate and faithful representation of the original. But it may not be. It may be blurred, or it may include shadow images that distort or obscure the original. Chief among these are inappropriate value judgments: the designation as “good” or “evil” of things that in fact are neither good nor evil. For example, my impression that my house has just burned down is simply that—an impression or report conveyed to me by my senses about an event in the outside world. By contrast, my perception that my house has burned down and I have thereby suffered a terrible tragedy includes not only an impression, but also an interpretation imposed upon that initial impression by my powers of hypolepsis. It is by no means the only possible interpretation, and I am not obliged to accept it. I may be a good deal better off if I decline to do so. It is, in other words, not objects and events but the interpretations we place on them that are the problem. Our duty is therefore to exercise stringent control over the faculty of perception, with the aim of protecting our mind from error.
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
Fiction is a set of observable manifestations, as represented and frozen in language, that triggers a profoundly subjective and individual experience. Ultimately, this is the kind of productive dilemma that can allow fiction to get to places that other media does not. Fiction is exceptionally good at providing models for consciousness, and at putting readers in a position to take upon themselves the structure of another consciousness for a short while. It is better at this than any other genre or media, and can do it in any number of modes (realistic or metafictional, reliably or unreliably, representationally or metafictionally, etc.). But for it to be able to do this as well as it possibly can, it must clear a space. This is where, for me, doing without becomes most crucial. The subtractions that we find in innovative fictions (even when those subtractions, as in Joyce's work, are followed by further ornamentations and encrustations) are there to facilitate the simulation of consciousness. What is subtracted is the significance and meaning designed to let us classify an experience without entering into it. Doing without such things opens the door wider for experience, putting the reader in a position where they are experiencing fiction in lieu of understanding it. By paying more attention to what we leave out than to how readers are going to interpret or work after the fact, we refuse to let fiction be assimilable, digestible, and safe. We keep it from being mere fodder for criticism and instead accept it as valid, vital experience.
Brian Evenson
Surely part of the moral meaning of representative government is that the representatives from all parts of a vast nation coming together in a great mosaic not only represent the interests and visions of their respective localities but also then learn from each other, affect each other, reason together, diminish their respective provincialisms, and shape something nearer to the common good.
William Lee Miller (Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography)
This conception of representation appears throughout The Federalist Papers. No. 57 urges that: “The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.
Cass R. Sunstein (Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America)
Part of reparative reading is trying to think about how a story cannot do everything. Nothing can do everything. If you’re reading every text, fiction, or criticism looking for it to tick a bunch of boxes — like if it represents X, Y, and Z appropriately to my definitions of appropriate, and if it’s missing any of those things, it’s not good — you’re not really seeing the close focus that it has on something else.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
How much more would I have longed for and needed to see myself in my books if I’d been disabled, gay, black, non-Christian or something else outside the mainstream message? By this time – the mid-1980s – writers’ and publishers’ consciousnesses of matters of sex, race and representation had started to be raised. The first wave of concern had come in the 1960s and 70s, mainly – or perhaps just most successfully – over the matter of heroines. There were some. But not many. And certainly not enough of the right – feisty, non-domestic, un-Meg Marchish – sort. Efforts needed to be made to overcome the teeny imbalance caused by 300 years of unreflecting patriarchal history. It’s this memory that convinces me of the importance of role models and the rightness of including (or as critics of the practice call it, ‘crowbarring in’) a wide variety of characters with different backgrounds, orientations and everything else into children’s books. If it seems – hell, even if it IS – slightly effortful at times, I suspect that the benefits (even though by their very nature as explosions of inward delight, wordless recognition, relief, succour, sustenance, those benefits are largely hidden) vastly outweigh the alleged cons. And I’m never quite sure what the cons are supposed to be anyway. Criticisms usually boil down to some variant of ‘I am used to A! B makes me uncomfortable! O, take the nasty B away!’ Which really isn’t good enough.
Lucy Mangan (Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading)
So you thereby challenge Spinozist or Nietzschean ethics, which separate movements of being-more from those of being-less, of action and reaction? - Yes , let us dread to sec the reappearance of a whole morality or politics under the cover of these dichotomies, their sages , their militants , their tribunals and their prisons . Where there is intensity, there is a labyrinth, and to fi x the meaning of the passage, of suffering or of joy, is the business of consciousnesses and their directors . It is enough for us that the bar turns in order that unpredictable spirals stream out, it is enough for us that it slows down and stops in order to engender representation and clear thought. Not good and bad intensities , then, but intensity or its decompression. And as has been said and will be said again, both dissimulated together, meaning hidden in emotion, vertigo in reason. Therefore no morality at all, rather a theatrics; no politics, rather a conspiracy.
Lyotard, Jean-François
Again, it is important to stress that this belief is not necessarily a consciously chosen one. It is a deeply hidden, unconscious aspect of white supremacy that is hardly ever spoken about but practiced in daily life without even thinking about it. The reality is that you have been conditioned since you were a child to believe in white superiority through the way your history was taught, through the way race was talked about, and through the way students of color were treated differently from you. You have been educated by institutions that have taught white superiority through curricula that favor a white-biased narrative, through the lack of representation of BIPOC, and through the way these institutions handled acts of racism. You have been conditioned by media that continues to reinforce white superiority through an overrepresentation of celebrities and leaders who look like you, through the cultural appropriation of BIPOC fashion, language, and customs, and through the narrative of the white savior.
Layla F. Saad (Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor)
The underlying principles, accidental and incoherent though their evolution may have been, have been exported around the globe for good reason: the presumption of innocence and burden of proof, the right to a fair trial, the right to independent legal representation, equality of arms, an independent judiciary, non-partisan tribunals of fact and the other fiercely debated, non-exhaustive aspects of the rule of law on which our present settlement is premised, all stand as self-evidently necessary to our instinctual conceptions of justice.
The Secret Barrister (The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken)
The apparatus of corrective penality acts in a quite different way. The point of application of the penality is not the representation, but the body, time, everyday gestures and activities; the soul, too, but in so far as it is the seat of habits. The body and the soul, as principles of behaviour, from the element that is now proposed for punitive intervention. Rather than on an art of representations, this punitive intervention must rest on studied manipulation of the individual:'I have no more doubt of every crime having its cure in moral and physical influence...'; so, in order to decide on punishments, one 'will require some knowledge of the principles of sensations, and of the sympathies which occur in the nervous system'. As for the instruments used, these are no longer complexes of representation, reinforced and circulated, but forms of coercion, schemata of constraint, applied and repeated. Exercises, not signs: time-tables, compulsory movements, regular activities, solitary meditation, work in common, silence, application, respect, good habits. And, ultimately, what one is trying to restore in this technique of correction is not so much the juridical subject, who is caught up in the fundamental interests of the social pact, but the obedient subject, the individual subjected to habits, rules, orders, an authority that is exercised continually around him and upon him, and which he must allow to function automatically in him. There are two quite distinct ways, therefore, of reacting to the offence: one may restore the juridical subject of the social pact, or shape an obedient subject, according to the general and detailed form of some power.
Michel Foucalut
...but what I want you, my students, to take away from your middle-school experience," he continued, "is the sure knowledge that, in the future you make for yourselves, anything is possible. If every single person in this room made it a rule that wherever you are, whenever you can, you will try to be a little kinder than is necessary, someone else, somewhere, someday, may recognize in you, in every single one of you, the face of God." He paused and shrugged. "Or whatever politically correct spiritual representation of universal goodness you happen to believe in.
R.J. Palacio (Wonder (Wonder, #1))
The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many divergences of philosophers by it. Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries, when philosophizing, to sink the fact of this temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making a more sentimental or more hardhearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it. He feels men of the opposite temper to be out of key with the world’s character, and in his heart he considers them incompetent and “not in it,” in the philosophic business, even though they may far excel him in dialectical ability. (James 1975a, p. 11)1
Richard J. Bernstein (The Pragmatic Turn)
As one leading Supreme Court scholar, Sanford Levinson, has noted, Supreme Court cases necessarily deal only with the “litigated Constitution,” those provisions that are open to interpretation and become fodder for lawyers and judges. At the same time, the “hard-wired Constitution,” structural elements of great significance like the over-representation of small states in the United States Senate, remain beyond the reach of any court. “The fixation on the litigated Constitution,” Levinson writes, leads people to “overestimate the importance of courts and judges, for good and for ill.
Linda Greenhouse (The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
Adam and Eve, placed in the garden of Eden, find themselves forbidden to eat of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17). Catholic theologians believe this “knowledge” forbidden by Elohim-Yahweh is neither omniscience nor moral discernment, but the ability to decide what is good or evil. Jewish theology is more subtle. The “tree” of the knowledge is interpreted as the representation of a world where good and evil “are in a combined state,” where there is no absolute Good and Evil. In other words, the “tree” is a foreshadowing of the real world we live in, a world where nothing is absolutely clear cut, where moral imperatives are tied to human values, and where everything of any greatness and importance always takes place beyond good and evil. Furthermore, in the Hebrew tradition “to eat” means “to assimilate.” To eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is therefore to personally enter this real world where human initiative “combines” good and evil. Adam’s transgression, from which all the others are derived, is clearly “that of autonomy,” accordingly, as emphasized by Eisenberg and Abecassis, this would be “the desire to conduct his own history alone in according to his own desire and his own word or law.
Alain de Benoist (On Being a Pagan)
Exaggerated Emotional Coherence (Halo Effect) If you like the president’s politics, you probably like his voice and his appearance as well. The tendency to like (or dislike) everything about a person—including things you have not observed—is known as the halo effect. The term has been in use in psychology for a century, but it has not come into wide use in everyday language. This is a pity, because the halo effect is a good name for a common bias that plays a large role in shaping our view of people and situations. It is one of the ways the representation of the world that System 1 generates is simpler and more coherent than the real thing. You meet a woman named Joan at a party and find her personable and easy to talk to. Now her name comes up as someone who could be asked to contribute to a charity. What do you know about Joan’s generosity? The correct answer is that you know virtually nothing, because there is little reason to believe that people who are agreeable in social situations are also generous contributors to charities. But you like Joan and you will retrieve the feeling of liking her when you think of her. You also like generosity and generous people. By association, you are now predisposed to believe that Joan is generous. And now that you believe she is generous, you probably like Joan even better than you did earlier, because you have added generosity to her pleasant attributes.
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
In every age a general misdirection of what may be called sexual "taste"... [is] produce[d by the devil and his angels]. This they do bu working through the small circle of artists, dressmakers, actresses, and advertisers who determine the fashionable type. The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely. Thus [they] have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females-and there is more in that than you might suppose. As regards the male taste [they] have varied a good deal. At one time [they] have directed it to the statuesque and aristocratic type of beauty, mixing men's vanity with their desires and encouraging the race to breed chiefly from the most arrogant and prodigal women. At another, [they] have selected an exaggeratedly feminine type, faint and languishing, so that folly and cowardice, and all the general falseness and littleness of mind which go with them, shall be at a premium. At present [they] are on the opposite tack. The age of jazz has succeeded the age of the waltz, and [they] now teach men to like women whose bodies are scarcely distinguishable from those of boys. Since this is a kind of beauty even more transitory than most, [they] thus aggravate the female's chronic horror of growing old (with many [successful] results) and render her less willing and less able to bear children. And that is not all. [They] have engineered a great increase in the license which society allows to the representation of the apparent nude (not the real nude) in art, and its exhibition on the stage or the bathing beach. It is all a fake, or course; the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them to appear firmer and more slender and more boyish than nature allows a full-grown woman to be. Yet at the same time, the modern world is taught to believe that it is being "frank" and "healthy" and getting back to nature. As a result [they] are more and more directing the desires of men to something which does not exist-making the role of the eye in sexuality more and more important and at the same time making its demands more and more impossible.
C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)
3. The child is allowed to experience and express ordinary impulses, such as jealousy, rage, sexuality and defiance, because the parents have not disowned these feelings in themselves. 4. The child does not have to please the parent and can develop his own needs at his own developmental pace. 5. The child can depend on and use his parents because they are separate from him. 6. The parents’ independence and good boundaries allow the child to separate self and object representation. 7. Because the child is allowed to display ambivalent feelings, he can learn to regard himself and the caregiver as “both good and bad,” rather than splitting off certain parts as good and certain parts as bad. 8. The beginning of true object love is possible because the parents love the child as a separate object.
John Bradshaw (Healing the Shame that Binds You)
(From an interview with Daniel Kahneman) Q. Is it possible that one barrier for women trying to work in male-dominated fields is that such an environment demands extra mental effort on behalf of the women? A. Being self-conscious takes up mental capacity and is certainly not good for performance. Furthermore, the more self-conscious you are, the more likely you are to interpret (and sometimes misinterpret) the attitudes of others as gender-based, which is bound to make things worse. However, there is hope: self-consciousness is likely to diminish when you are in a stable environment, interacting with people you know well. The trend appears to be favorable: improving attitudes of men, rising representation of women in many male-dominated occupations, so the future is likely to be better than the past.
Steven D. Levitt
In any events, however seemingly dire, there is nothing to prevent us from searching for its hidden opportunity. It is a failure of the imagination not to do so. But to seek out the opportunity in situations requires a great deal of courage, for most people around you will persist in interpreting events in the grossest terms: success or failure, good or bad, right or wrong. These simplistic, polarized categories obscure more creative—and useful—interpretations of events that are far more advantageous and interesting! The wise person knows it is fruitless to project hopes and fears on the future. This only leads to forming melodramatic representations in your mind and wasting time. At the same time, one shouldn’t passively acquiesce to the future and what it holds. Simply doing nothing does not avoid risk, but heightens it.
Epictetus (The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness)
Dr Silay said the poor girl should have a Sunni Muslim funeral, but he thinks the family were probably secretly Yazidi, because she said you were her Peacock Angel,” Joannes said. “She said crazy things like that,” I said. “What’s the difference between Muslim and Yazidi?” “Well, Muslims here refer to Yazidi as devil worshippers, but that’s too simple, a lot of cultural baggage, as always,” Joannes said. “And I’m no expert, but I think their God is much like anyone else’s. They don’t believe in an evil entity like Satan, they believe all evil is man made, but we have the choice to be good or evil. The Peacock Angel embodies all that is good, a representation of God, so she must have really respected you. And I think they have some form of reincarnation too, not sure about that. I’m sorry for my hostility towards you last night, you didn’t deserve it,” Joannes said.
Gerard Cappa (Blood from a Shadow (Con Maknazpy, #1))
Now everyone knows that to try to say something in the mainstream Western media that is critical of U.S. policy or Israel is extremely difficult; conversely, to say things that are hostile to the Arabs as a people and culture, or Islam as a religion, is laughably easy. For in effect there is a cultural war between spokespersons for the West and those of the Muslim and Arab world. In so inflamed a situation, the hardest thing to do as an intellectual is to be critical, to refuse to adopt a rhetorical style that is the verbal equivalent of carpet-bombing, and to focus instead on those issues like U.S. support for unpopular client re­gimes, which for a person writing in the U.S. are somewhat more likely to be affected by critical discussion. Of course, on the other hand, there is a virtual cer­tainty of getting an audience if as an Arab intellectual you passionately, even slavishly support U.S. policy, you attack its critics, and if they happen to be Arabs, you invent evi­dence to show their villainy; if they are American you confect stories and situations that prove their duplicity; you spin out stories concerning Arabs and Muslims that have the effect of defaming their tradition, defacing their history, accentuating their weaknesses, of which of course there are plenty. Above all, you attack the officially ap­ proved enemies-Saddam Hussein, Baathism, Arab na­tionalism, the Palestinian movement, Arab views of Israel. And of course this earns you the expected accolades: you are characterized as courageous, you are outspoken and passionate, and on and on. The new god of course is the West. Arabs, you say, should try to be more like the West, should regard the West as a source and a reference point. · Gone is the history of what the West actually did. Gone are the Gulf War's destructive results. We Arabs and Mus­lims are the sick ones, our problems are our own, totally self-inflicted. A number of things stand out about these kinds of performance. In the first place, there is no universalism here at all. Because you serve a god uncritically, all the devils are always on the other side: this was as true when you were a Trotskyist as it i's now when you are a recanting former Trotskyist. You do not think of politics in terms of interrelationships or of common histories such as, for instance, the long and complicated dynamic that has bound the Arabs and Muslims to the West and vice versa. Real intellectual analysis forbids calling one side innocent, the other evil. Indeed the notion of a side is, where cultures are at issue, highly problematic, since most cultures aren't watertight little packages, all homogenous, and all either good or evil. But if your eye is on your patron, you cannot think as an intellectual, but only as a disciple or acolyte. In the back of your mind there is the thought that you must please and not displease.
Edward W. Said (Representations of the Intellectual)
It takes some getting used to,' Mr. Forkle said. 'But what you're seeing is a visual representation of each other's moods.' 'So that means if I do this...' Keefe tickled Sophie's neck. 'GAH--everything just went supersonic!' Fitz said. Sophie snatched Keefe's wrist as he reached to tickle her again. 'Don't. You. Dare.' 'Whoa, now everything's red and ripply,' Fitz said. 'Is that because she's angry?' 'Precisely, Mr. Vacker. Every time her emotions shift, the patterns and colors will change. And with practice, you'll learn to interpret what you see.' 'Okay, but...can't they just say, "Hey, I'm feeling this?"' Keefe asked. 'People aren't always honest about their feelings--even with themselves,' Mr. Forkle told him. 'Plus, many telepathic missions involve stealth and secrecy. So for this exercise I'm going to need both of you to forget everything around you. Let the world drop away, leaving only you two.' Keefe sighed. 'Just tell them to stare into each other's eyes and they'll be good.' 'None of that, Mr. Sencen. From this moment on, you have one job and one job only: to judge their translations of the various emotions I'll be triggering.' 'Triggering how?' Sophie asked. 'You'll see soon enough. And you'll go first, Miss Foster. For this to work, Mr. Vacker, it's crucial that you not react externally. No yelling or thrashing or screaming or--' 'Uhhh, what are you going to do to me?' Fitz asked. 'Nothing you won't survive. Consider it an exercise in self-control. And try not to listen to his thoughts, Miss Foster. Study only the changes in his emotional center and make your deduction. We begin now.' Sophie closed her eyes and focus on the colors weaving around Fitz's mind. She was about to ask if she was missing something when the pattern exploded into a swirl of pale blue tendrils. The color felt to bright to be sad, but also too wild to be peaceful. 'Tension?' she guessed. 'Kinda close,' Keefe told her. The laughter in his voice made her wonder what had happened to poor Fitz. She tried to think of other emotions as his mind turned electric blue. 'Shock?' she guessed. 'That counts,' Keefe said. 'Though the best answer would've been "surprise."' 'Is that an emotion?' she asked. 'Indeed it is,' Mr. Forkle said. 'One of the most common emotions you'll experience as you navigate someone's mind--hence why I chose it as our starting point.' 'Can I talk now?' Fitz asked. 'Because that was seriously disgusting!' Sophie opened her eyes and tried not to laugh when she saw red fruit smashed all over Fitz's face. He wiped his cheeks on his sleeves, but that only smeared the pulp. 'I think I'm going to like this assignment,' Keefe said. 'What else can we fling at Fitz?' 'Nothing for the moment,' Mr. Forkle told him. 'It's his turn to interpret. Everyone close your eyes. And remember, no cues of any kind, Miss Foster.' Sophie counted the seconds, bracing for the worst--and when nothing chaned, she opened her eyes and found Mr. Forkle with his finger over his lips in a 'shhh' sign. 'Um...confusion,' Fitz guessed. 'That works,' Keefe said. 'It started as anticipation, but then it shifted.' 'Very good,' Mr. Forkle said. 'And well done, Mr. Sencen. I wasn't sure you'd recognize confusion. It's one of the more challenging emotions for Empaths.' 'Maybe on other people,' Keefe said. 'But on Foster it's easy. Why are her emotions so much stronger?' 'Honestly, I'm not sure,' Mr. Forkle admitted. 'I suspect it stems from the combination of her inflicting ability and her human upbringing. But it was one of the surprises of her development. Much like her teleporting. Okay, Miss Foster, it's your turn to guess again.' She closed her eyes and watched as the lines of color in Fitz's mind blossomed to a snowflake of purple. 'Pride?' she guessed. Keefe laughed. 'Wow, add more fail points to Sophitz.' 'Quiet,' Mr. Forkle told him.
Shannon Messenger (Neverseen (Keeper of the Lost Cities, #4))
From *the form of time and of the single dimension* of the series of representations, on account of which the intellect, in order to take up one thing, must drop everything else, there follows not only the intellect’s distraction, but also its *forgetfulness*. Most of what it has dropped it never takes up again, especially as the taking up again is bound to the principle of sufficient reason, and thus requires an occasion which the association of ideas and motivation have first to provide. Yet this occasion may be the remoter and the smaller, the more our susceptibility to it is enhanced by interest in the subject. But, as I have already shown in the essay *On the Principle of Sufficient Reason*, memory is not a receptacle, but a mere faculty, acquired by practice, of bringing forth any representations at random, so that these have always to be kept in practice by repetition, otherwise they are gradually lost. Accordingly, the knowledge even of the scholarly head exists only *virtualiter* as an acquired practice in producing certain representations. *Actualiter*, on the other hand, it is restricted to one particular representation, and for the moment is conscious of this one alone. Hence there results a strange contrast between what a man knows *potentia* and what he knows *actu*, in other words, between his knowledge and his thinking at any moment. The former is an immense and always somewhat chaotic mass, the latter a single, distinct thought. The relation is like that between the innumerable stars of the heavens and the telescope’s narrow field of vision; it stands out remarkably when, on some occasion, a man wishes to bring to distinct recollection some isolated fact from his knowledge, and time and trouble are required to look for it and pick it out of that chaos. Rapidity in doing this is a special gift, but depends very much on the day and the hour; therefore sometimes memory refuses its service, even in things which, at another time, it has ready at hand. This consideration requires us in our studies to strive after the attainment of correct insight rather than an increase of learning, and to take to heart the fact that the *quality* of knowledge is more important than its quantity. Quantity gives books only thickness; quality imparts thoroughness as well as style; for it is an *intensive* dimension, whereas the other is merely extensive. It consists in the distinctness and completeness of the concepts, together with the purity and accuracy of the knowledge of perception that forms their foundation. Therefore the whole of knowledge in all its parts is permeated by it, and is valuable or troubling accordingly. With a small quantity but good quality of knowledge we achieve more than with a very great quantity but bad quality." —from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne in two volumes: volume II, pp. 139-141
Arthur Schopenhauer
The more intense this hegemonic process of forced integration and integral reality is, the more singularities will rise against it. There will be more "rogue states" - states (like Iran, Palestine) that deliberately exclude themselves from the international community without waiting to be excluded, that exclude themselves from the universal and play their own game, at their own risk and peril. There will be more "rogue events" and more refusal of society by individuals. One could say, inverting Holderlin, that "Where Good grows, there grows the Genie of Evil," ("Da, wo des Gute wiichst, wiichst auch der Genius des Bosen"). This more or less clandestine insurrection of antagonistic forces against the integrist violence of the system is less an effect of the mind, the will or even the desire of human beings than the evil genius of the world itself in refusing globalization. To find the only adversary who will face this allpowerful hegemony, we must look for those beings that are strangers to will, exiled from dialogue and representation, exiled from knowledge and history.
Jean Baudrillard (The Agony of Power)
Eeh, but whah’s the use, the fuckin’ use?” Dixon resting his head briefly tho’ audibly upon the Table. “It’s over . . . ? Nought left to us but Paper-work . . . ?” Their task has shifted, from Direct Traverse upon the Line to Pen-and-Paper Representation of it, in the sober Day-Light of Philadelphia, strain’d thro’ twelve-by-twelve Sash-work, as in the spectreless Light of the Candles in their Rooms, suffering but the fretful Shadows of Dixon at the Drafting Table, and Mason, seconding now, reading from Entries in the Field-Book, as Dixon once minded the Clock for him. Finally, one day, Dixon announces, “Well,— won’t thee at least have a look . . . ?” Mason eagerly rushes to inspect the Map of the Boundaries, almost instantly boggling, for there bold as a Pirate’s Flag is an eight-pointed Star, surmounted by a Fleur-de-Lis. “What’s this thing here? pointing North? Wasn’t the l’Grand flying one of these? Doth it not signify, England’s most inveterately hated Rival? France?” “All respect, Mason,— among Brother and Sister Needle-folk in ev’ry Land, ’tis known universally, as the ‘Flower-de-Luce.’ A Magnetickal Term.” “ ‘Flower of Light’? Light, hey? Sounds Encyclopedistick to me, perhaps even Masonick,” says Mason. A Surveyor’s North-Point, Dixon explains, by long Tradition, is his own, which he may draw, and embellish, in any way he pleases, so it point where North be. It becomes his Hall-Mark, personal as a Silver-Smith’s, representative of his Honesty and Good Name. Further, as with many Glyphs, ’tis important ever to keep Faith with it,— for an often enormous Investment of Faith, and Will, lies condens’d within, giving it a Potency in the World that the Agents of Reason care little for. “ ’Tis an ancient Shape, said to go back to the earliest Italian Wind-Roses,” says Dixon, “— originally, at the North, they put the Letter T, for Tramontane, the Wind that blew down from the Alps . . . ? Over the years, as ever befalls such frail Bric-a-Brack as Letters of the Alphabet, it was beaten into a kind of Spear-head,— tho’ the kinder-hearted will aver it a Lily, and clash thy Face, do tha deny it.” “Yet some, finding it upon a new Map, might also take it as a reassertion of French claims to Ohio,” Mason pretends to remind him. “Aye, tha’ve found me out, I confess,— ’tis a secret Message to all who conspire in the Dark! Eeh! The old Jesuit Canard again!
Thomas Pynchon (Mason & Dixon)
Tolkien preferred the still, small voice of Elijah to the resounding horns of Sinai. Accordingly, his commitment to myth as his medium was dogged. He repeatedly denied that The Lord of the Rings was allegory. The reason is this: allegory intends that this particular thing in the story is meant to be that particular thing known outside the story. In a way, it is coercive, forcing the reader to see things in a certain way. For example, Lewis’s lion in the Narnia books, Aslan, is meant to be understood by the reader as a representation of Christ. Tolkien, in fact, was annoyed with Lewis for engaging in allegory, which he found heavy-handed. (Lewis, for his part, denied that his Narnia books were only allegory.) He believed myth to be a more artistically subtle device. Tolkien did not, for instance, intend his War of the Ring to be a battle of good versus evil. He didn’t see matters in such black-and-white terms and did not believe in absolute evil. During the Great War, he didn’t view the Germans as all bad and the English as all good. In the Lord of the Rings, even Sauron, like Lucifer, did not start as evil. Evil for Tolkien was a personal battle within each and every individual. A battle might be won or lost, but the war was unending.
Wyatt North (J.R.R. Tolkien: A Life Inspired)
There is no psychology in a fairy tale. The characters have little interior life; their motives are clear and obvious. If people are good, they are good, and if bad, they’re bad. Even when the princess in ‘The Three Snake Leaves’…inexplicably and ungratefully turns against her husband, we know about it from the moment it happens. Nothing of that sort is concealed. The tremors and mysteries of human awareness, the whispers of memory, the promptings of half-understood regret or doubt or desire that are so much part of the subject matter of the modern novel are absently entirely. One might almost say that the characters in a fairy tale are not actually conscious. They seldom have names of their own. More often than not they’re known by their occupation or their social position, or by a quirk of their dress: the miller, the princess, the captain, the Bearskin, Little Red Riding Hood. When they do have a name it’s usually Hans, just as Jack is the hero of every British fairy tale. The most fitting pictorial representation of fairy-tale characters seems to me to be found not in any of the beautifully illustrated editions of Grimm that have been published over the years, but in the little cardboard cut-out figures that come with the toy theatre.
Philip Pullman (Philip Pullman's Grimm Tales)
The demand to be intimate or honest with a public can be invasive when the experiences of racial others are commodified as stories or objects that might be traded as evidence of intimacy, as proof of 'being good,' for nonracial others. In this way, intimacy might act as surveillance, through which some people--women of color, for instance--must reveal themselves to bear the burden of representation ('You are here as an example') and the weight of pedagogy ('Teach us about your people'). Intimacy can be a force--especially when others set its terms and conditions. So what if you don't love the (white) girls who exhaust you, who want too much from you, who want to turn you into a commodity or a badge or an experience to share? What if you become a girl in opposition to other girls? This is also the problem with definitions of racism as ignorance, and ignorance as the absence of intimacy--which posits that intimacy is the solution to ignorance. This gives us terrible, stupid disavowals like 'I'm not racist, I have black friends,' as if intimacy is a shield that protects the wearer from harm. It limits our sense of what racism is to the scale of the interpersonal, when it is in fact this enormous constellation of forces and moving parts that structures our institutions--and so-called institutions--profoundly.
Mimi Thi Nguyen
In conformity with this spirit and aim of the Stoa, Epictetus begins with it and constantly returns to it as the kernel of his philosophy, that we should bear in mind and distinguish what depends on us and what does not, and thus should not count on the latter at all. In this way we shall certainly remain free from all pain, suffering, and anxiety. Now what depends on us is the will alone, and here there gradually takes place a transition to a doctrine of virtue, since it is noticed that, as the external world that is independent of us determines good and bad fortune, so inner satisfaction or dissatisfaction with ourselves proceeds from the will. But later it was asked whether we should attribute the names *bonum et malum* to the two former or to the two latter. This was really arbitrary and a matter of choice, and made no difference. But yet the Stoics argued incessantly about this with the Peripatetics and Epicureans, and amused themselves with the inadmissible comparison of two wholly incommensurable quantities and with the contrary and paradoxical judgements arising therefrom, which they cast on one another. An interesting collection of these is afforded us from the Stoic side by the *Paradoxa* of Cicero." —from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Paye in two volumes: volume I, pp. 88-89
Arthur Schopenhauer
The only genuinely photographic subjects are those which are violated, taken by surprise, discovered or exposed despite themselves, those which should never have been represented because they have neither self-image nor selfconsciousness. The savage - like the savage part of us - has no reflection. He is savagely foreign to himself. The most seductive women are the most selfestranged (Marilyn). Good photography does not represent anything: rather, it captures this non-representability, the otherness of that which is foreign to itself (to desire, to self-consciousness), the radical exoticism of the object. Objects, like primitives, are way ahead of us in the photogenic stakes: they are free a priori of psychology and introspection, and hence retain all their seductive power before the camera. Photography records the state of the world in our absence. The lens explores this absence; and it does so even in bodies and faces laden with emotion, with pathos. Consequently, the best photographs are photographs of beings for which the other does not exist, or no longer exists (primitives, the poor, objects). Only the non-human is photogenic. Only when this precondition is met does a kind of reciprocal wonder come into play - and hence a collusiveness on our part vis-a-vis the world, and a collusiveness on the part of the world with respect to us.
Jean Baudrillard (The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena)
At the risk of oversimplifying a topic that deserves entire books, we can summarize like this: During enslavement, many Black cooks learned their way around kitchens because their lives could depend on having that knowledge and skill. After slavery was abolished, many took to slinging fried chicken (or cooking in general) as one way to make a living. Interestingly, it wasn’t until Black folks began navigating their supposed freedoms-applying to schools, looking for paid work, seeking housing-that cartoonish, offensive images of Black folks eagerly consuming chicken or stealing chickens began to appear in essays, comics, advertisements, and postcards, perpetuating a narrative by white society that Black people were subhuman and needed to be controlled, policed, and locked out of mainstream opportunities. Exacerbated by the deep white resentment of Black people’s increasing social and political mobility (this period saw the largest representation of Black people in Congress than any time since), the idea took root that being Black meant that you loved fried chicken so much that you couldn’t resist it. This narrative is a painful legacy of slavery that wasn’t of our own making and is ironic, given that people all over the world get down with wings and things. But the essence of this stereotype persists. We know folks who refuse to eat fried chicken around white people, or chefs who don’t cook it in their restaurants, because they feel that’s the only thing certain diners expect from them…American fried chicken tastes good. It’s also complicated.
Jon Gray (Ghetto Gastro Presents Black Power Kitchen)
In this impossibility of reapprehending the world through images and of moving from information to a collective action and will, in this absence of sensibility and mobilization, it isn't apathy or general indifference that's at issue; it is quite simply that the umbilical cord of representation is severed. The screen reflects nothing. It is as though you are behind a two-way mirror: you see the world, but it doesn't see you, it doesn't look at you. Now, you only see things if they are looking at you. The screen screens out any dual relation (any possibility of 'response'). It is this failure of representation which, together with a failure of action, underlies the impossibility of developing an ethics of information, an ethics of images, an ethics of the Virtual and the networks. All attempts in that direction inevitably fail. All that remains is the mental diaspora of images and the extravagant performance of the medium. Susan Sontag tells a good story about this pre-eminence of the medium and of images: as she is sitting in front of the television watching the moon landing, the people she is watching with tell her they don't believe it at all. 'But what are you watching, then?' she asks. 'Oh, we're watching television!' Fantastic: they do not see the moon; they see only the screen showing the moon. They do not see the message; they see only the image. Ultimately, contrary to what Susan Sontag thinks, only intellectuals believe in the ascendancy of meaning; 'people' believe only in the ascendancy of signs. They long ago said goodbye to reality. They have gone over, body and soul, to the spectacular.
Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact (Talking Images))
Approximately 80 percent of criminal defendants are indigent and thus unable to hire a lawyer. Yet our nation's public defender system is woefully inadequate. The most visible sign of the failed system is the astonishingly large caseloads public defenders routinely carry, making it impossible for them to provide meaningful representations to their clients. Sometimes defenders have well over one hundred clients at a time; many of these clients are facing decades behind bars or life imprisonment. Too often the quality of court-appointed counsel is poor because the miserable working conditions and low pay discourage good attorneys from participating in the system. And some states deny representation to impoverished defendants on the theory that somehow they should be able to pay for a lawyer, even thought they are scarcely able to pay for food or rent. In Virginia, for examples, fees paid to court-appointed attorneys for representing someone charged with a felony that carried a sentence of less than twenty years are capped at $428. And in Wisconsin, more than 11,000 poor people go to court without representation each year because anyone who earns more than $3,000 per year is considered able to afford a lawyer. In Lake Charles, Louisiana, the public defender office has only two investigators for the 2,500 felony cases and 4,000 misdemeanor cases assigned to the office each year. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta sued the city of Gulfport, Mississippi, alleging that the city operated a 'modern day debtor's prison' by jailing poor people who are unable to pay their fines and denying them the right to lawyers.
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
The American republic now extended across a third of a continent, and was unlikely to stop there. How then could the British time bomb of generosity—the ocean of land ceded in 1783—fail to revive familiar protests of “no taxation without representation”? Where, if that happened, would Hamilton’s “UNION” be? Madison solved these issues of time and space by shifting scale. In doing so he drew, knowingly or not, 65 on Machiavelli. For only in republics, the Florentine had observed, could the “common good” be “looked to properly.” By expanding the number who benefited, the influence of the few who didn’t could be reduced: not all parts, submerged in wholes, need drown. 66 Scale could be the life preserver. There were, Madison acknowledged, dangers in this: By enlarging too much the number of electors [voters], you render the representative too little acquainted with all their local circumstances and lesser interests; as by reducing it too much, you render him unduly attached to these, and too little fit to comprehend and pursue great and national objects. But surely there existed “a mean, on both sides of which inconveniences will be found to lie.” In this way balancing factions—a Burkean enterprise—could put “inconveniences” to good use: Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other. The proposed Constitution “forms a happy combination in this respect; the great and aggregate interests being referred to the national, the local and particular to the State legislatures.” 67
John Lewis Gaddis (On Grand Strategy)
Sadly though, this side of heaven, we can only attempt to have a fore-shadow of the romance to come. Even the best marriages and the men and women who valiantly strive to follow the Bible’s model of marriage fall short. I am sure many of us have failed in obtaining the type of earthly relationship God planned and intended to display His love. Pre-marital sex, extra-marital sex, homosexuality, sex outside of a marriage covenant, and love-less, dysfunctional marriages are just the beginning. Many have been abused, sold, objectified, molested, even raped. All manner of perversion and depravity have marred the beauty God intended. We are broken, injured, hurt, marginalized, left feeling like so much less than what God requires. If you are one broken, please hear this: It should not have been. It was not God’s way or His will that you were treated like anything less than His highly valued, flawless beauty—His beloved. If you are one who lost your way and engaged in things beneath your royal standing, He died, arose and lives to forgive and restore. Yes, we know a good and solid Biblical marriage gives the closest representation of godly intimacy. But let’s get real for a minute. So few of us have ever experienced that for ourselves or grew up in homes where that was our example, we desperately need to trust God for our own healing and restoration in this area before we can ever hope to experience it in our relationships. I am convinced God’s priority for us is to learn about spiritual intimacy with Him. He can restore marriages, liberate from sexual addictions, save spouses, give us a godly man. But I think, for the most part, those things happen after we realize and accept our need for Christ. His priority will always be our spirit intimately one with His, because He puts the spirit above the flesh. We have to lay our souls bare and ask for His touch. God alone can reclaim our perception of intimacy for His holy and righteous glory. He can restore our hearts and minds to righteousness, clean and pure so we might experience holy intimacy through the Spirit until we see Him face to face in glory.
Angie Nichols (Something Abundant)
It’s not a crass relativism, Morton’s idea; his point is not that morality and ethics are, or should be, relative to our situation. He is outlining the limitations our fetishizing of empathy causes: the way protecting our image as a moral person can keep us from being exactly who we want to be—good at understanding the world and others, at preventing atrocities, at helping people to heal and change. He’s also suggesting why we do this: in everyday life, in order to get along quickly with others, we need clear distinctions between moral and atrocious acts, without the kind of extensive knowledge of their contexts that it takes to really and deeply understand. And when we begin questioning the centrality and accuracy of our own perspective, searching out the details that matter so we can get a more accurate representation of the other, we find too much similarity, that too many “ordinary actions are continuous with many atrocious ones,” and we can’t function. It is easier to choose to see others as mirrored inversions of our false sense of decency—to imagine that when they do selfish or violent things, it must be decency they abhor. When it speaks through us, sometimes, the narcissism script helps us do this, valorizing closeness and empathy as the ultimate moral good, and as what is increasingly lacking in others, so we can perform astonishment at the boyfriend, Milgram’s subjects, the Nazis, the millennials, the world—in exactly that moment when, if we were to acknowledge the difference in context, we might find too threatening a similarity. In the case of the bad boyfriend, the millennial, and the murderer, it’s not just decency that keeps us from being able to actually understand and feel the other, but our beliefs about the opposition between human and inhuman, and our beliefs about mental “health.” In fact, the mistake the script repeats and repeats—that what is human is the opposite of what is inhuman—may be partly responsible for keeping us, for centuries, from this deeper understanding of what it actually means to do what Morton calls “empathy’s work.” The narcissism of decency, then, does exactly what we decent people fear: it prevents a deep sharing of feeling. But that sharing is the very feeling of being alive, and somewhere on the other side of our everyday moralizing, it is always there.
Kristin Dombek (The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism)
I see over and beyond all these national wars, new "empires," and whatever else lies in the foreground. What I am concerned with — for I see it preparing itself slowly and hesitatingly — is the United Europe. It was the only real work, the one impulse in the souls, of all the broad-minded and deep-thinking men of this century — this reparation of a new synthesis, and the tentative effort to anticipate the future of "the European." Only in their weaker moments, or when they grew old, did they fall back again into the national narrowness of the "Fatherlanders" — then they were once more "patriots." I am thinking of men like Napoleon, Heinrich Heine, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Schopenhauer. Perhaps Richard Wagner likewise belongs to their number, concerning whom, as a successful type of German obscurity, nothing can be said without some such "perhaps." But to the help of such minds as feel the need of a new unity there comes a great explanatory economic fact: the small States of Europe — I refer to all our present kingdoms and "empires" — will in a short time become economically untenable, owing to the mad, uncontrolled struggle for the possession of local and international trade. Money is even now compelling European nations to amalgamate into one Power. In order, however, that Europe may enter into the battle for the mastery of the world with good prospects of victory (it is easy to perceive against whom this battle will be waged), she must probably "come to an understanding" with England. The English colonies are needed for this struggle, just as much as modern Germany, to play her new role of broker and middleman, requires the colonial possessions of Holland. For no one any longer believes that England alone is strong enough to continue to act her old part for fifty years more; the impossibility of shutting out homines novi from the government will ruin her, and her continual change of political parties is a fatal obstacle to the carrying out of any tasks which require to be spread out over a long period of time. A man must to-day be a soldier first and foremost that he may not afterwards lose his credit as a merchant. Enough; here, as in other matters, the coming century will be found following in the footsteps of Napoleon — the first man, and the man of greatest initiative and advanced views, of modern times. For the tasks of the next century, the methods of popular representation and parliaments are the most inappropriate imaginable.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergencies of philosophers by it. Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it. He feels men of opposite temper to be out of key with the world's character, and in his heart considers them incompetent and 'not in it,' in the philosophic business, even tho they may far excel him in dialectical ability....But the one thing that has COUNTED so far in philosophy is that a man should see things, see them straight in his own peculiar way, and be dissatisfied with any opposite way of seeing them. There is no reason to suppose that this strong temperamental vision is from now onward to count no longer in the history of man's beliefs. .... Rationalism usually considers itself more religious than empiricism, but there is much to say about this claim, so I merely mention it. It is a true claim when the individual rationalist is what is called a man of feeling, and when the individual empiricist prides himself on being hard-headed. In that case the rationalist will usually also be in favor of what is called free-will, and the empiricist will be a fatalist—I use the terms most popularly current. The rationalist finally will be of dogmatic temper in his affirmations, while the empiricist may be more sceptical and open to discussion. I will write these traits down in two columns. I think you will practically recognize the two types of mental make-up that I mean if I head the columns by the titles 'tender-minded' and 'tough-minded' respectively. THE TENDER-MINDED Rationalistic (going by 'principles'), Intellectualistic, Idealistic, Optimistic, Religious, Free-willist, Monistic, Dogmatical. THE TOUGH-MINDED Empiricist (going by 'facts'), Sensationalistic, Materialistic, Pessimistic, Irreligious, Fatalistic, Pluralistic, Sceptical.
William James
Exilic Intellectuals 1 "It is part of morality not to be at home in one's home." —Theodore W. Adorno "[I am] the outlander, not only regionally, but down bone deep for good...my Texas grandfather has something to do with that." —C. Wright Mills Edward Said's Representations of the Intellectual must be considered a landmark in radically reawakening the crucial consciousness of that critical community of counter-interpreters we have habitually called "The Intellectuals." It appears that the problem of intellectuals in the United States is reformulated periodically as a crucial barometer of issues and concerns centered around, but much beyond, the immediate conception of this social category. It was in Democracy in America that Tocqueville opened his second, theoretically more significant, volume with the startling pronouncement that: I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States. The Americans have no philosophical school of their own, and they care but little for all the schools into which Europe is divided, the very names of which are scarcely known to them. 2
Anonymous
I've never been a good representation of me.
J. Andrew Schrecker (Insomniacs, We)
Can the splitting of representations explain multiplicity? Not at all, for two reasons.20 First, a split is into two, not many. The splitting of self and object representations manifest polarity: self-object, good-bad, male-female, friend-foe, and so on, whereas alters generally don't (though they may). Second, hosts and alters are intentional subjects or agents, entities capable of uttering "I." Indeed, one may profitably regard alter as short for alter ego, literally "other I." A given "I" has intentional objects that are its respective self and object representations. In other words, a split representation, even of the self, is an object of thought, not a thinker, not a subject or agent or "I.
Donald B. Beree (Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders: DSM-V and Beyond)
Controversy remains about what kind of ceremony is carried out in Ge 15:9–21. What/whom do the pieces represent (possibilities: sacrifice for oath, God if he reneges, nations already as good as dead, Israelites in slavery)? Whom do the birds of prey represent (nations seeking to seize available land, e.g., Ge 14, or to plunder Israel)? Whom do the implements represent (God and/or Abram)? These issues cannot currently be resolved, but a few observations can help identify some of the possible connections with the ancient world. Before we look at the options, a word is in order about what this is not. 1. It is not a sacrifice. There is no altar, no offering of the animals to deity and no ritual with the carcasses, the meat or the blood. 2. It is not divination. The entrails are not examined and no meal is offered to deity. 3. It is not an incantation. No words are spoken to accompany the ritual and no efficacy is sought—Abram is asleep. The remaining options are based on where animals are ritually slaughtered in the ancient world when it is not for the purposes of sacrifice, divination or incantation. Option 1: A covenant ceremony or, more specifically, a royal land grant ceremony. In this case the animals typically are understood as substituting for the participants or proclaiming a self-curse if the stipulations are violated. Examples of the slaughter of animals in such ceremonies but not for sacrificial purposes are numerous. In tablets from Alalakh, the throat of a lamb is slit in connection to a deed executed between Abba-El and Yarimlim. In a Mari text, the head of a donkey is cut off when sealing a formal agreement. In an Aramaic treaty of Sefire, a calf is cut in two with the explicit statement that such will be the fate of the one who breaks the treaty. In Neo-Assyrian literature, the head of a spring lamb is cut off in a treaty between Ashurnirari V and Mati’ilu, not for sacrifice but explicitly as an example of punishment. The strength of these examples lies in the contextual connection to covenant. The weakness is that only one animal is killed in these examples, and there is no passing through the pieces and no torch and firepot. Furthermore, there are significant limitations regarding the efficacy of a divine self-curse. Option 2: Purification. The “torch” (Ge 15:17) is a portable, handheld object for bringing light. The “smoking firepot” (15:17) can refer to a number of different vessels used to heat things (e.g., an oven for food, a kiln for pottery). Here the two items are generally assumed to be associated with God, but need not be symbolic representations of him. These implements are occasionally used symbolically to represent deities in ancient Near Eastern literature, but usually sun-gods (e.g., Shamash) or fire-gods (e.g., Girru/Gibil). Gibil and Kusu are often invoked together as divine torch and censer in a wide range of cultic ceremonies for purification. Abram would have probably been familiar with the role of Gibil and Kusu in purification rituals, so that function would be plausibly communicated to him by the presence of these implements. Yet in a purification role, neither the torch nor the censer ever pass between the pieces of cut-up animals in the literature available to us. Further weakness is in the fact that Yahweh doesn’t need purification and Abram is a spectator, not a participant, so neither does he. In the Mesopotamian Hymn to Gibil (the torch), the god purifies the objects used in the ritual, but the only objects in the ritual in Ge 15 are the dead animals, and it is difficult to understand why they would need to be purified.
Anonymous (NIV, Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible: Bringing to Life the Ancient World of Scripture)
After a session of working with a model, computer or mental, it’s a good idea to step back for a moment and remember that it is not the “real world” we have been experiencing, but a representation that is “realistic” in some respects, “unrealistic” in others. The task is to find insight in the model from those features of the scenarios that seem “realistic.
Donella H. Meadows (Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update)
Our guest”—she gave Nicolas a hard look, willing him to behave himself—“is not bound because Monsieur le Comte de Brillac has expressed a desire to become our ally.” Miss Gwen snorted. “Oh, is that what he’s calling himself now?” Miles looked at Miss Gwen with interest. “Do you mean the count thingy, or ally?” Nicolas stepped into the middle of the room with the grace of a born performer. “Both, I assure you, are true. The title of Comte de Brillac comes to me from my mother’s husband. Ally, I hope, is a title I may earn.” He bowed towards the door, where four marines were staggering beneath the burden of an unconscious Braganza. “May Her Majesty Queen Maria be the first token of my good intentions.” “Rather a large token,” muttered Miles. “The size of the token,” said Nicolas, with a courtly bow, “is a representation of the sincerity of my commitment.” Or of Queen Maria’s fondness for biscoitos, but Jane decided not to press that point.
Lauren Willig (The Lure of the Moonflower (Pink Carnation, #12))
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You took a good whack to the thigh,” he pointed out while she filled a couple of frosted mugs with water. She twisted around so she could see the bruises. “Yeah. It’s a little tender to the touch but nothing major.” “You should let me check the rest of you over.” She gave him a cold glass of water and an arched eyebrow. “For bruises, I mean, though you do look sexy as hell with a dirty face, wearing nothing but a T-shirt.” Putting a hand on her hip, which drew the hem of her T-shirt up a tantalizing half-inch, she scowled at him. “When I made you my fake fiancé, I had no idea you had this weird dirty-face fetish.” “I didn’t have it before I became your fake fiancé.” He took a long drink of water. “And it’s not a fetish. I told you, it turns me on that you work hard and you play hard. The dirt’s just a visual representation of that, I guess.” “That’s very deep of you.” “Plus, it means you’ll be showering soon and I like you all soaped up and slippery, too.” A slow flush burned up her neck. “Dirty. Clean. Doesn’t matter to you, does it?” He was going to tell her no, it didn’t matter—that he’d take her any way he could get her—but he kept his mouth shut. It was true, of course, but nothing good would come of her knowing that. She didn’t need to know that sometimes when they were curled up on the couch watching television or arguing about white versus wheat bread at the store, he would sometimes forget they were pretending to be a couple. And she really didn’t need to know it sometimes bummed him out when he remembered.
Shannon Stacey (Yours to Keep (Kowalski Family, #3))
Simply put, the representation of events in the media does not track their frequency in the world. As sociologist Barry Glassner notes, the murder rate in the United States declined by 20% over the course of the 1990s, yet during that time period the presence of gun violence on American news increased by 600%. If you want to be a good intuitive Bayesian—if you want to naturally make good predictions, without having to think about what kind of prediction rule is appropriate—you need to protect your priors. Counterintuitively, that might mean turning off the news.
Brian Christian (Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions)
Allow me to explain. Social Justice can mean many things. Gay rights, minority rights, women's rights — all good civil rights stuff. The problem comes when social justice is defined by of things like media representation, cultural appropriation, language policing, etc. Because no one deserves a right to control how others speak or express themselves. Social Justice only makes sense to the extent that it doesn't effect freedom of speech and stuff.
T.J. Kirk
The characters so many Bollywood actresses portray are ultimately flat, uncomplicated, two-dimensional stock characters that typically range between the girl-next-door and the diva. They may be flawed in small ways, but ultimately lack nuance, conform to and reinforce cultural expectations of a wholesome but ultimately submissive Indian women. The likability of these flat and boring characters hold the actresses' off screen reputations in good stead but reinforce the very norms that imprison and render so many Indian women vulnerable to disrespect and sexism.
Sharanya Haridas
And before you think rats might not be a good representation of human nature, you should know their genetic, biological, and behavioral characteristics closely resemble those of humans, making them excellent test subjects.
Annie Grace (This Naked Mind: Transform your life and empower yourself to drink less or even quit alcohol with this practical how to guide rooted in science to boost your wellbeing)
The regular distribution of power into distinct departments; the introduction of legislative balances and checks; the institution of courts composed of judges holding their offices during good behavior; the representation of the people in the legislature by deputies of their own election: these are wholly new discoveries, or have made their principal progress towards perfection in modern times.
Alexander Hamilton (The Federalist Papers)
Time to Bury All Divide (The Sonnet) It's time we bury the nationality nonsense, Person is known by their behavior not nation. It's time we bury the holy book nonsense, Person becomes holy by compassion not religion. It's time we bury the representation nonsense, Social reform starts with civic duty not delegation. It's time we bury the intellectualism nonsense, Society is civilized by heart not cocky argumentation. It's time we abolish the royalty nonsense, Humans are known by behavior, animals by bloodline. It's time we dissolve all moronity of hierarchy, True advancement lies in the abolition of divide. Even the mighty sun doesn't differentiate between first world and third world humanity. It is only the lowly beings who can't help but practice some good old exclusivity.
Abhijit Naskar (Mucize Misafir Merhaba: The Peace Testament)
What is a good correlation? How high should it be? These are commonly asked questions. I have seen several schemes that attempt to classify correlations as strong, medium, and weak. However, there is only one correct answer. The correlation coefficient should accurately reflect the strength of the relationship. Take a look at the correlation between the height and weight data, 0.705. It’s not a very strong relationship, but it accurately represents our data. An accurate representation is the best-case scenario for using a statistic to describe an entire dataset.
Jim Frost (Regression Analysis: An Intuitive Guide for Using and Interpreting Linear Models)
However, the position of my books, and of post-modernism in general, which regards all representations, or maps, or models, as probabilistic and relative to their social context, Gross and Levitt dismissively call “perspectivism” (a good word in my estimation, so I cheerfully accept it). Gross and Levitt see perspectivism as an insidious threat to their One True Faith and a pathway downward to the bottomless abyss of nihilism.
Robert Anton Wilson (Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death)
From cave paintings depicting hunting grounds to the Babylonian tablets capturing the "whole world" (as they experienced it). Through the advancements of the Middle Ages, especially from Islamic scholars and Chinese cartographers. Massive strides came about with the Renaissance, as exploration and expansion abounded. Then on to the massive leaps to modern surveying and satellite imagery. The journey has been astonishing! I cannot help but think that this mirrors the path of our understanding of God and the world They created. Our sincere, yet limited perspectives began to expand as our experience and understanding grew. The reality of that which we sought to "map out" was (and is) often our best efforts, complicated by ignorance, limitations, bias, and more. We imperfectly stumble towards better, more honest representations. Even then, our growing understanding helps us see the limitations of our own attempts to bring meaning to that which is so much bigger than our capacity to fully understand. Just as we know that the Mercator projection map is deeply problematic and, in many ways, wildly incorrect, so too do so many of our understandings of the Divine often fail to meet our own standards. And in the same way, we also hold on to them because they are familiar and we are so deeply invested in them. And in the end, no matter how good and accurate and true our "maps" are, they will always and only ever be mere representations- pale reflections of a much grander, complex, and ever-changing reality.
Jamie Arpin-Ricci
I genuinely love how organized Sabrina is... But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. And when you're mentioning bowel movements on your group vacation schedule, I think you've hit it.
Emily Henry (Happy Place)
The whole area was crowded with media-generated representations, holographic advertising inducing consumers to imagine that synthetic drugs would bring them good health, that cellular phones would break down the walls of isolation, and that vacations would restore the land and the ocean to them. They wanted consumers to console themselves with the idea that this paltry forgery, this fraudulent, counterfeit luxury surrounding them was really theirs to wallow in, that it existed, that it was real, atmospherically. In whatever direction I looked, the city appeared more and more deserted, the surroundings more desolate, and I was overcome by an unbearable sense of loneliness.
Brandon W. Teigland (Metapatterning for Disconnection)
the challenge with being given limited representation in the first place is that we mistake valid critique as a call for no representation (“So, you’d rather us not have this person/story/movie?”),
Michelle MiJung Kim (The Wake Up: Closing the Gap Between Good Intentions and Real Change)
The concept of internalization helps us understand what kids need to separate successfully; kids literally have to “take in” something from a parent so they can hold on to the good feelings of the relationship even when a parent says goodbye. English pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott introduced the idea that children create a mental representation of the parent-child relationship so that they can access the feelings of the relationship even when a parent is absent. Transitional objects help children with this process; a blanket or stuffed animal or object from home becomes a physical representation of the parent-child bond, reminding a child that parents still exist and are “there” for you even when they are not right in front of you. I always recommend transitional objects to parents whose kids struggle with separation anxiety—they are a way to help make tricky transitions feel more manageable. After all, to ease separation anxiety, we have to help kids “hold on to us” in our absence.
Becky Kennedy (Good Inside: A Practical Guide to Resilient Parenting Prioritizing Connection Over Correction)
If we are present at a church service, where a censer is swinging, we may either attend to the whole representation or we may select for attention the actual movement to and fro of the censer. in the latter case, if we are a Galileo, we may discover the law of the pendulum. It is a good thing to discover the law of the pendulum. It is not such a good thing to lose, for that reason, all interest in, and ultimately even perception of, the incense whose savour it was the whole purpose of the pendulum to release. Participation ceases to be conscious precisely because we cease to attend to it. But, as already pointed out, participation does not cease to be a fact because it ceases to be conscious. It merely ceases to be what I have called 'original' participation.
Owen Barfield (Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry)
ANNE THORNDIKE, A primary care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, had a crazy idea. She believed she could improve the eating habits of thousands of hospital staff and visitors without changing their willpower or motivation in the slightest way. In fact, she didn’t plan on talking to them at all. Thorndike and her colleagues designed a six-month study to alter the “choice architecture” of the hospital cafeteria. They started by changing how drinks were arranged in the room. Originally, the refrigerators located next to the cash registers in the cafeteria were filled with only soda. The researchers added water as an option to each one. Additionally, they placed baskets of bottled water next to the food stations throughout the room. Soda was still in the primary refrigerators, but water was now available at all drink locations. Over the next three months, the number of soda sales at the hospital dropped by 11.4 percent. Meanwhile, sales of bottled water increased by 25.8 percent. They made similar adjustments—and saw similar results—with the food in the cafeteria. Nobody had said a word to anyone eating there. BEFORE AFTER FIGURE 8: Here is a representation of what the cafeteria looked like before the environment design changes were made (left) and after (right). The shaded boxes indicate areas where bottled water was available in each instance. Because the amount of water in the environment was increased, behavior shifted naturally and without additional motivation. People often choose products not because of what they are, but because of where they are. If I walk into the kitchen and see a plate of cookies on the counter, I’ll pick up half a dozen and start eating, even if I hadn’t been thinking about them beforehand and didn’t necessarily feel hungry. If the communal table at the office is always filled with doughnuts and bagels, it’s going to be hard not to grab one every now and then. Your habits change depending on the room you are in and the cues in front of you.
James Clear (Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones)