Unfamiliar Famous Quotes

The Nine Most Social Fears: 1. Being the center of attention 2. Having to speak or perform in front of an audience 3. Being Teased 4. Being introduced to strangers 5. Making eye contact 6. Eating in front of people, especially when it's something messy 7. Being stared at 8. Talking with an "important" or famous adult 9. Being in any unfamiliar social situation

The elephants in our heads—our reflexive reactions—perceive anything unfamiliar as just plain wrong. Familiar things feel right, right, RIGHT! This is the sensation comedian Stephen Colbert famously dubbed “truthiness.” It’s like being drunk or high: delicious in the short term, ultimately toxic. The righteous mind can temporarily overwhelm our sense of truth, including our allegiance to justice and fairness. When our righteous mind is in control, we lose the way of integrity and become weirdly, obviously self-contradictory, like proponents of world peace who advocate war against anyone who disagrees with them. Because violence and the righteous mind are closely linked, I don’t call destructive actions sins of violence, as Dante does. I think of them as “errors of righteousness.” They are psychological mistakes we make when our irrational rejection of the unfamiliar takes over our thinking.

Because of that, we’re biologically programmed to identify with the people who look, act, dress, talk, and think the way we do. The downside of this is a universal human tendency to mistrust anyone who seems different from our in-groups. Many tribal groups, from the South African Khoikhoi to the Siberian Yupiit, call themselves by names that in their languages mean “the real people.” This implies, of course, that folks from outside the group are not real people. This is called “othering,” and everyone does it. From early childhood, we see anything unfamiliar as weird and unnerving. The eighteenth-century social reformer Robert Owen pointed this out in his famously ironic statement, “All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer.

In The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Philip Rieff famously argued that the typical American has come to think of himself less as a citizen than as a kind of patient, whose life purpose is to develop, sustain, and fine-tune his psychological well-being. For Rieff, this therapeutic turn is a logical consequence of civic and spiritual decline. Somehow our sense of the purpose of living has slipped out of joint from the social conditions that once sustained it. We are no longer at home with ourselves, never quite comfortable with our place in the world. Instead, we are like castaways on a strange island, unfamiliar with local conditions, unable to rely on the old ways of going on. Perhaps something about the way we live now produces this distance from one another, or perhaps we distance ourselves from one another and live the way we do as a result. Either way, we have become more narcissistic, but narcissistic in a way that is peculiarly dependent on things outside ourselves: that is to say, what other people are saying and thinking about us. Rieff puts it this way, “When so little can be taken for granted, when the meaningfulness of social existence no longer grants an inner life at peace with itself, every man must become something of a genius about himself.”33

In The Heart’s Code, psychologist Paul Pearsall chronicles arresting accounts of our body’s cellular emotional intelligence. He tells of Claire Sylvia, the famous heart-lung transplant recipient who suddenly began craving new kinds of food—chicken nuggets and beer— as well as experiencing unfamiliar emotions. But why? Stunningly, in dreams, she had conversations with her donor (whose identity had been kept anonymous, standard hospital policy), which allowed her to locate his parents. They confirmed that her new tastes and feelings were those their son had too.

The word caste finds its etymological roots in the Latin term castus, meaning "pure" or "chaste." This purity-based connotation undergirds much of how the caste system has been historically understood—especially by external observers—as a rigid hierarchy structured around notions of ritual cleanliness. The term entered the Indian lexicon via the Portuguese word casta, used by colonial seafarers and administrators in the 16th century to categorize the unfamiliar, complex social divisions they encountered on the western coast of India. This importation of the term marked a profound epistemic shift. As Nicholas Dirks argues in Castes of Mind (2001), colonial rule did not merely document Indian caste hierarchies; it reified, codified, and bureaucratized them. The colonial state transformed caste from a fluid, local, and context-specific social structure into a rigid administrative category essential to governance. Prior to this colonial intervention, Indian society spoke of varna and jati. Varna, meaning "color" in Sanskrit, refers to the idealized four-fold division of society into Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (traders), and Shudras (laborers). However, the everyday lived reality of caste was mediated through jatis, localized, birth-based communities linked to specific occupations and ritual statuses. Jatis are numerous—over 3,000 castes and 25,000 sub-castes exist across India—and form the actual basis of caste identity and exclusion. The colonial flattening of these complexities into the singular term caste was not an act of innocent taxonomy; it was, as Dirks shows, a political maneuver that essentialized caste as the defining feature of Indian civilization, thereby justifying British imperial rule as a civilizing mission. Sociologically, caste has been defined as a hereditary, endogamous, and hierarchical group characterized by common traditional occupations, social status, and restrictions on mobility. Louis Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus (1966) famously theorized caste as a system of ritual hierarchy organized around the oppositional categories of purity and pollution. In his structuralist framework, the Brahmin is the apex of purity, while the "Untouchable" (now self-identified as Dalit) is the embodiment of pollution. Although Dumont’s work remains foundational, it has been widely criticized for ignoring the material realities of caste, including land ownership, labor exploitation, and violence. B.R. Ambedkar, the foremost anti-caste intellectual and architect of the Indian Constitution, directly opposed such idealist readings. For Ambedkar, caste was not a religious or ritual order but a system of graded inequality rooted in birth-based discrimination and enforced through violence and denial of rights. In his seminal work Annihilation of Caste (1936), Ambedkar rejected the metaphysical justifications of caste and called instead for its total dismantling, arguing that no reform could succeed without challenging its structural core.

The word caste finds its etymological roots in the Latin term castus, meaning "pure" or "chaste." This purity-based connotation undergirds much of how the caste system has been historically understood—especially by external observers—as a rigid hierarchy structured around notions of ritual cleanliness. The term entered the Indian lexicon via the Portuguese word casta, used by colonial seafarers and administrators in the 16th century to categorize the unfamiliar, complex social divisions they encountered on the western coast of India. This importation of the term marked a profound epistemic shift. As Nicholas Dirks argues in Castes of Mind (2001), colonial rule did not merely document Indian caste hierarchies; it reified, codified, and bureaucratized them. The colonial state transformed caste from a fluid, local, and context-specific social structure into a rigid administrative category essential to governance. Prior to this colonial intervention, Indian society spoke of varna and jati. Varna, meaning "color" in Sanskrit, refers to the idealized four-fold division of society into Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (traders), and Shudras (laborers). However, the everyday lived reality of caste was mediated through jatis, localized, birth-based communities linked to specific occupations and ritual statuses. Jatis are numerous—over 3,000 castes and 25,000 sub-castes exist across India—and form the actual basis of caste identity and exclusion. The colonial flattening of these complexities into the singular term caste was not an act of innocent taxonomy; it was, as Dirks shows, a political maneuver that essentialized caste as the defining feature of Indian civilization, thereby justifying British imperial rule as a civilizing mission. Sociologically, caste has been defined as a hereditary, endogamous, and hierarchical group characterized by common traditional occupations, social status, and restrictions on mobility. Louis Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus (1966) famously theorized caste as a system of ritual hierarchy organized around the oppositional categories of purity and pollution. In his structuralist framework, the Brahmin is the apex of purity, while the "Untouchable" (now self-identified as Dalit) is the embodiment of pollution. Although Dumont’s work remains foundational, it has been widely criticized for ignoring the material realities of caste, including land ownership, labor exploitation, and violence. B.R. Ambedkar, the foremost anti-caste intellectual and architect of the Indian Constitution, directly opposed such idealist readings. For Ambedkar, caste was not a religious or ritual order but a system of graded inequality rooted in birth-based discrimination and enforced through violence and denial of rights. In his seminal work Annihilation of Caste (1936), Ambedkar rejected the metaphysical justifications of caste and called instead for its total dismantling, arguing that no reform could succeed without challenging its structural core.

It is almost necessary to say nowadays that a saint means a very good man. The notion of an eminence merely moral, consistent with complete stupidity or unsuccess, is a revolutionary image grown unfamiliar by its very familiarity, and needing, as do so many things of this older society, some almost preposterous modern parallel to give its original freshness and point. If we entered a foreign town and found a pillar like the Nelson Column, we should be surprised to learn that the hero on the top of it had been famous for his politeness and hilarity during a chronic toothache. If a procession came down the street with a brass band and a hero on a white horse, we should think it odd to be told that he had been very patient with a half-witted maiden aunt. Yet some such pantomime impossibility is the only measure of the innovation of the Christian idea of a popular and recognized saint. It must especially be realized that while this kind of glory was the highest, it was also in a sense the lowest. The materials of it were almost the same as those of labour and domesticity: it did not need the sword or sceptre, but rather the staff or spade. It was the ambition of poverty. All this must be approximately visualized before we catch a glimpse of the great effects of the story which lay behind the Canterbury Pilgrimage.