Identify General Notion Of Quotes

The rise of loneliness as a health hazard tracks with the entrenchment of values and practices that supersede any notion of "individual choices." The dynamics include reduced social programs, less available "common" spaces such as public libraries, cuts in services for the vulnerable and the elderly, stress, poverty, and the inexorable monopolization of economic life that shreds local communities. By way of illustration, let's take a familiar scenario: Walmart or some other megastore decides to open one of its facilities in a municipality. Developers are happy, politicians welcome the new investment, and consumers are pleased at finding a wide variety of goods at lower prices. But what are the social impacts? Locally owned and operated small businesses cannot compete with the marketing behemoth and must close. People lose their jobs or must find new work for lower pay. Neighborhoods are stripped of the familiar hardware store, pharmacy, butcher, baker, candlestick maker. People no longer walk to their local establishment, where they meet and greet one another and familiar merchants they have known, but drive, each isolated in their car, to a windowless, aesthetically bereft warehouse, miles away from home. They might not even leave home at all — why bother, when you can order online? No wonder international surveys show a rise in loneliness. The percentage of Americans identifying themselves as lonely has doubled from 20 to 40 percent since the 1980s, the New York Times reported in 2016. Alarmed by the health ravages, Britain has even found it necessary to appoint a minister of loneliness. Describing the systemic founts of loneliness, the U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy wrote: "Our twenty-first-century world demands that we focus on pursuits that seem to be in constant competition for our time, attention, energy, and commitment. Many of these pursuits are themselves competitions. We compete for jobs and status. We compete over possessions, money, and reputations. We strive to stay afloat and to get ahead. Meanwhile, the relationships we prize often get neglected in the chase." It is easy to miss the point that what Dr. Murthy calls "our twenty-first-century world" is no abstract entity, but the concrete manifestation of a particular socioeconomic system, a distinct worldview, and a way of life.

The God of the Old Testament and primitive Christianity came to be identified with the general idea of God of Greek metaphysics; God is referred to as Supreme Being, substance, principle, unmoved mover. Ontology (God's being) became more important than history (God's deeds) (cf van der Aalst 1974:110f). It became more important to reflect on what God is in himself than to consider the relationship in which people stand to God. Behind all of this lies the notion that the abstract idea is more real than the historical.

An aversion – almost – towards listening to the rich multiplicity of ‘reality’ seems to be linked with a background of profound fears and to the resulting defensive postures that express themselves in a tendency to reduce knowledge in general to a set of principles from which nothing can escape. A relentless battle is waged as an attempt is made to organize everything in the light, or shadow, of the ‘best’ principles of knowledge: a chronic struggle of territorial conquest where the ‘territory’ is the set of notions and principles for constructing reality. Listening thus comes to be an essential function in the attempt to identify and monitor possible predatory aspects of our knowledge, no longer even capable of rememorizing or imagining the Parmenidean function of the ‘shepherds of being

Indeed there is a strong general cases, founded on the legitimacy of a considerable degree of egoism and self-referential altruism, and connected with what I have offered as the basic case for rights as the essential device for securing areas for the free pursuit of happiness, in favour of some private property. This is one point among many where our grounds for dissatisfaction with at least the cruder forms of utilitarianism have practical consequences. If we see the good for man as happiness, conceived as a single, undifferentiated commodity, we may also suppose that it could be provided for all, in some centrally planned way, if only we could get an authority that was sufficiently powerful and sufficiently intelligent, and also one that we could trust to be uniformly well-disposed to all its subjects; and then the natural corollary would be that all property should be owned by all in common, collectively, and applied to the maximizing of the genral happiness under the direction of this benevolent authority. But if we reject this unitary notion of happiness, and identify the good for man rather with the partly competitive pursuit of diverse ideals and private goals, then separate ownership of property will be an appropriate instrument for this pursuit.

Fire and sword laid waste the Earth. Darkness stalked the land. From the ashes of defeat and the smoke of despair, the people of Earth, searching for a future, plundered the past. It was the time of the Great Concoction, when the world was remade. In the thirty-first century of Our Lord, the Europe of the past rose again in the shape of Europa. In Europa, history was reborn. The geologic upheavals of Europa's formation resulted in an acute psychic backlash, manifested in periodic shifts in reality and embodied hallucinations. Spatial dimensions became mercurial in their behaviour. Entire counties could be crammed into a field. These anomalies were exacerbated by advances in psionics which produced dream worlds that were as close to the notion of a real supernatural as makes no odds. Spectres, poltergeists, fallen angels, unfallen angels, trolls, hobgoblins, vampires, werewolves and suchlike entities sprang into pseudo-being. It was upon this ontological quicksand that the Dominions of Europa were founded, recreations of ancient European countries, each containing several time periods. Within each of these historical eras there existed a small percentage of 'Reprises'; clones of famous figures from history artificially encoded with the appropriate personality matrix. These Reprises were prone to severe identity confusion. Yet more acute was the confusion of the fictional Reprises, clones of actors who became identified with particular roles: in these cases, it was not the actor's personality that was encoded into clone-body, but the role he played. By the thirty-third century, Europa was plunging into chaos. Reality unravelled. It was a time of heroes, whimsical worlds, blood and thunder, and general Byronic excess. Dark powers arose. Fearful villagers locked their shutters at night. Fire and sword laid waste the Earth. Darkness stalked... Excerpt from The Tenebrous Testaments of the House of Rue. chapter XIV. volume CLXVII [From Count (Baron) Dracula and Baron (Count) Frankenstein]

At its most simple, the notion underlying The Great Chain of Being, as identified in the first instance by Plato, is that the universe is essentially a rational place, in which all organisms are linked in a great chain, not on one scale of low to high (for Plato could see that even ‘lowly’ creatures were perfectly ‘adapted’, as we would say, to their niches in the scheme of things) but that there was in general terms a hierarchy which ranged from nothingness through the inanimate world, into the realm of plants, on up through animals and then humans, and above that through angels and other ‘immaterial and intellectual’ entities, reaching at the top a superior or supreme being, a terminus or Absolute.