Quote of the day

[DLaurent]

“Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character. We extend this into all our thinking. Between us and the realities of social life we build up a mass of generalizations, abstract ideas, ancient glories, and personal wishes. They simplify and soften experience. It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves. We worry about their fate and forget their original content.”
― Walter Lippmann, A Preface To Politics

 

[version]

"Paint not the thing itself, but the effect that it produces."

 

[version]

"The irruption of radical uncertainty into all fields and the end of the comforting universe of determinacy is not at all a negative fate, so long as uncertainty itself becomes the new rule of the game."​

Shame he stuck "radical" in front of uncertainty, but there we go.

 

[catalog]

Nihilism looms up from the chasm between intelligibility and meaning, as the ramifications of scientific reason exceed their instrumentality for pragmatic human ends: the more intelligible the universe becomes, by virtue of the mediation of an increasingly complex conceptual apparatus, the more distant seems the prospect of its yielding any meaningful message for us.

 

[IdleRich]

"Everything in the world is about sex, except sex, sex is about power" - disputed.