Binary Oppositions Quotes

This assumption of the intrinsically repressive nature of collective experience and redemptive power of individuation is a staple of contemporary art theory and criticism. I would argue that a closer analysis of collaborative and collective art practices can reveal a more complex model of social change and identity, one in which the binary oppositions of divided vs. coherent subjectivity, desiring singularity vs. totalizing collective, liberating distanciation vs. stultifying interdependence, are challenged and complicated. ~ Grant H. Kester

By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials - worse: with their artificial resurrection in the systems of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and shortcircuits all its vicissitudes. ~ Jean Baudrillard

Woman is the opposite, the 'other' of man: she is non-man, defective man, assigned a chiefly negative value in relation to the male first principle. But equally man is what he is only by virtue of ceaselessly shutting out this other or opposite, defining himself in antithesis to it, and his whole identity is therefore caught up and put at risk in the very gesture by which he seeks to assert his unique, autonomous existence. Woman is not just an other in the sense of something beyond his ken, but an other intimately related to him as the image of what he is not, and therefore as an essential reminder of what he is. Man therefore needs this other even as he spurns it, is constrained to give a positive identity to what he regards as no-thing. Not only is his own being parasitically dependent upon the woman, and upon the act of excluding and subordinating her, but one reason why such exclusion is necessary is because she may not be quite so other after all. Perhaps she stands as a sign of something in man himself which he needs to repress, expel beyond his own being, relegate to a securely alien region beyond his own definitive limits. Perhaps what is outside is also somehow inside, what is alien also intimate - so that man needs to police the absolute frontier between the two realms as vigilantly as he does just because it may always be transgressed, has always been transgressed already, and is much less absolute than it appears. ~ Terry Eagleton

It seems to me that the binary opposition that is so much embedded in Western thought and language makes it nearly impossible to project a complex response. ~ Bell Hooks

Derrida… labels as 'metaphysical' any such thought system which depends on an unassailable foundation, a first principle or unimpeachable ground upon which a whole hierarchy of meanings may be constructed. It is not that he believes that we can merely rid ourselves of the urge to forge such first principles, for such an impulse is deeply embedded in our history, and cannot - at least as yet - be eradicated or ignored. Derrida would see his own work as inescapably 'contaminated' by such metaphysical thought, much as he strives to give it the slip. But if you examine such first principles closely, you can see that they may always be 'deconstructed': they can be shown to be products of a particular system of meaning, rather than what props it up from the outside. ~ Terry Eagleton

I rather doubt he had the sense to see the truth: that there are wounds worse than fatal, which the law's little binary distinctions-guilty/innocent, criminal/victim-cannot fathom, let alone fix. The law is a hammer, not a scalpel. ~ William Landay

Yet I felt it was unfair to be labeled when I had yet to find a label for myself, and when binary, fixed identities held no meaning or safety for me. ~ Carrie Brownstein

Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them. ~ Orson Welles

In the end, it all comes down to 0 and 1 ~ Vineet Goel

No one knows how old E. coli is precisely, but estimates hover between three and four billion years. The organism has no nucleus and reproduces by the primitive but extremely efficient process known as asexual binary fission (in other words, by splitting in two). Imagine a cell filled, essentially, with DNA, that can take in nutrients (usually from other cells that it attacks and absorbs) directly through its cellular wall. Then imagine that it can simultaneously copy several ~ Eben Alexander

It is bizarre to treat all differences as oppositions, ~ Kate Chopin

All the watchmaker needs is a mechanism to count the back-and-forth oscillations - and counting is one of the simple tasks that binary logic gates can perform. In the digital watch a logic gate called a JK flip-flop counts the vibrations of the crystal. ~ T.R. Reid

If you say renewable, I'll think energy. If you say fore, I'll think play. If you say binary, I'll think anal defibrillator. ~ Jarod Kintz

Let us narrow the arguments down further. In certain respects, the theme of supplementarity is certainly no more than one theme among others. It is in a chain, carried by it. Perhaps one could substitute something else for it. But it happens that this theme describes the chain itself, the being-chain of a textual chain, the structure of substitution, the articulation of desire and of language, the logic of all conceptual oppositions taken over by Rousseau ... It tells us in a text what a text is, it tells us in writing what writing it, in Rousseau's writing it tells us Jean-Jacque's desire etc ... the concept of the supplement and the theory of writing designate textuality itself in Rousseau's text in an indefinitely multiplied structure - en abyme. ~ Jacques Derrida

But oppositions have the illimitable range of objections at command, which need never stop short at the boundary of knowledge, but can draw forever on the vasts of ignorance. ~ George Eliot

But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It's had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white ancestors for example. ~ Henry Louis Gates

To say a scientist is not at all responsible is wrong. But to say that someone who invents a piece of knowledge or technology is responsible for all future uses is ridiculous. It doesn't have to be that binary. ~ Astro Teller

Not a boy or a girl, not any binary, rigid definition of a person. Just my everything. ~ Leah Raeder

I was merely making more perceptible that binary rhythm which love adopts in all those who have too little confidence in themselves to believe that a woman can ever fall in love with them, and also that they themselves can genuinely fall in love with her. They know themselves well enough to have observed that in the presence of the most divergent types of woman they felt the same hopes, the same agonies, invented the same romances, uttered the same words, and to have realised therefore that their feelings, their actions, bear no close and necessary relation to the woman they love, but pass to one side of her, splash her, encircle her, like the incoming tide breaking against the rocks, and their sense of their own instability increases still further their misgivings that this woman, by whom they so long to be loved, does not love them. ~ Marcel Proust

We can safely say, therefore, that whereas some moralists may find it possible to make a distinction between two spheres and reigns-one of flesh, the other of the spirit, one of time, the other of eternity-where ever love arises such definitions vanish, and a sense of life awakens in which all such oppositions are at one. ~ Joseph Campbell

Beyond the obvious demands - an end to sexual violence, an end to the wage gap - feminism must be class-conscious, and aware of the limiting culture of the gender binary. It needs to recognise that disabled people aren't inherently defective, but rather that non-disabled people have failed at creating a physical world that serves all. Feminism must demand affordable, decent, secure housing, and a universal basic income. It should demand pay for full-time mothers and free childcare for working mothers. It should recognise that we live in a world in which women are constantly harangued into being lusted after, but punishes sex workers for using that situation to make a living. Feminism needs to thoroughly recognise that sexuality is fluid, and we need to dream of a world where people are not violently policed for transgressing rigid gender roles. Feminism needs to demand a world in which racist history is acknowledged and accounted for, in which reparations are distributed, in which race is completely deconstructed. ~ Reni Eddo-Lodge

In the animal world, there are all kinds of behaviors that are binary: for example, to flee or to fight. In any evolutionary environment, knowing your opponent's decision would not be advantageous for long because your opponent would evolve the same recognition mechanism to also know you. ~ Chris Adami

Why? Because true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal ~ John Berger

If you had to give a name to the whole apparatus, what would you call it?" "Hmmm," Waterhouse says. "Well, its basic job is to perform mathematical calculations - like a computer." Comstock snorts. "A computer is a human being." "Well . . . this machine uses binary digits to do its computing. I suppose you could call it a digital computer." Comstock writes it out in block letters on his legal pad: DIGITAL COMPUTER. ~ Neal Stephenson

In rallies like those in Johnson's Ohio tour, friends, neighbors, colleagues and family members who do not conform to the ideology are gradually dehumanized. They are tainted with the despised characteristics inherent in the godless. This attack is waged in highly abstract terms, to negate the reality of concrete, specific and unique human characteristics, to deny the possibility of goodness in those who do not conform. Some human beings, the message goes, are no longer human beings. They are types. This new, exclusive community fosters rigidity, conformity and intolerance. In this new binary world segments of the human race are disqualified from moral and ethical consideration. And because fundamentalist followers live in a binary universe, they are incapable of seeing others as anything more than inverted reflections of themselves. If they seek to destroy nonbelievers to create a Christian America, then nonbelievers must be seeking to destroy them. This belief system negates the possibility of the ethical life. It fails to grasp that goodness must be sought outside the self and that the best defense against evil is to seek it within. When people come to believe that they are immune from evil, that there is no resemblance between themselves and those they define as the enemy, they will inevitably grow to embody the evil they claim to fight. It is only by grasping our own capacity for evil, our own darkness, that we hold our own capacity for evil at bay. When evil is purely e ~ Chris Hedges

The Leader of the Opposition's constitutional obligation - the obligation to Parliament - it's the reason we did the merger! - is to make sure Canadians have an alternative for government. ~ Stephen Harper

Yes. You do understand, you do. I knew you would. It was that analogy you made to the Quran that got me thinking in the first place. Metaphors: knowledge existing in several states simultaneously and without contradiction. The stag and the doe and the trap. Instead of working with linear strings of ones and zeroes, the computer could work with bundles that were one and zero and every point in between, all at once. If, if, if you could teach it to overcome its binary nature."
"That sounds very complicated indeed."
"It should be impossible, but it isn't." Alif began typing furiously. "All modern computers are pedants. To them the world is divided into black and white, off and on, right and wrong. But I will teach yours to recognize multiple origin points, interrelated geneses, systems of multivalent cause and effect. ~ G. Willow Wilson

Comma in 'Beginning with a Comma' is the hiccup, not only a pause. One can never imagine where a breath pauses, where adolescence can get acquainted with adulthood, its shadow lines, blurred realities that make the appearance and likeliness a mere binary to each other! Comma is a mental conflict, therefore, I call it a hiccup, an 'uncomfortable' pause- one that either continues till you gulp down something else or vanishes forever, miraculous!
Gita, Crusades, Khalsa or Jihad- War has never been alien to world religions. But it is not the physical combat these wars symbolise, but the inner conflicts. In Gita, while Arjuna symbolizes a person who seeks salvation, Krishna is the God himself and it is the mental conflict which is Kurukshetra.

Epilogue, Beginning with a Comma ~ Amrit Sinha

XML combines the efficiency of text files with the readability of binary files ~ Andrew S. Tanenbaum

Since we do operate in a binary world, if there's something that cannot be this or that, it drives us crazy. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

I believe that we must reach our brother, never toning down our fundamental oppositions, but meeting him when he asks to be met, with a reason for the faith that is in us, as well as with a loving sympathy for them as brothers. ~ Dorothy Day

Yet this was not in fact the strategy that Powers chose. A simpler soul in his position might have seen only a binary decision to make - to talk or not to talk. But the "deluded jerk from Virginia" assumed from the start that if he was to have any chance of saving his life, his honor, and the U-2's most precious secrets, he would have to use his wits. He ~ Giles Whittell

Where there is oppression, there would be oppositions. Where there is "Knowledge" there would be progression. Where there is "HATE" evil will always prevail. Where there is forgiveness, there's a better Future. Where there is ignorance, there's a lack of Wisdom. Change is an ongoing process. ~ Henry Johnson Jr

It must be obvious that in the high Middle Ages there was no possibility of the sort of naturalism which reduces the whole of reality to a mere sum of sense impressions any more than of a total replacement of feudal forms of rule by the bourgeois manner of life, nor again of any radical abolition of the spiritual dictatorship of the Church for a free and untrammelled secular culture. In art, as in all other fields of culture, what we find is just a certain balance between freedom and restraint. Gothic naturalism is an unstable equilibrium of world-affirming and world-denying impulses, just as the whole of chivalry is permeated by an inner contradiction, and just as the whole religious life of the period fluctuates between dogma and inwardness, between clerical creeds and lay piety, between orthodoxy and subjectivism. The same inner contradiction, the same spiritual polarity, manifests itself in all these social, religious and artistic oppositions. ~ Arnold Hauser

I want to be the top player in the league, and I want to bring my game to another level. I want to play against the opposition's best players-and I want to beat them. ~ Jarome Iginla

The loss of a Netlimb was a queer sensation, a kind of panicked tickling as the brain strained to maintain its binary illusion that there actually was a limb where a limb no longer existed. ~ Gary A. Ballard

Any black person who clings to the misguided notion that white people represent the embodiment of all that is evil and black people all that is good remains wedded to the very logic of Western metaphysical dualism that is the heart of racist binary thinking. Such thinking is not liberatory. Like the racist educational ideology it mirrors and imitates, it invites a closing of the mind. ~ Bell Hooks

It's the binary of normative/transgressive that's unsustainable, along with the demand that anyone live a life that's all one thing. ~ Maggie Nelson

Politics of Friendship is, in other words, only a book between covers. For the real text, you must enter the classroom, put yourself to school, as a preview of the formation of collectivities. A single "teacher's" "students," flung out into the world and time, is, incidentally, a real-world example of the precarious continuity of a Marxism "to come," aligned with grassroots counterglobalizing activism in the global South today, with little resemblance to those varieties of "Little Britain" leftism that can take on board the binary opposition of identity politics and humanism, shifting gears as the occasion requires. ~ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

I think we can get respect for Parliament back providing governments and oppositions are frank. ~ John Major

To lose a problem, do not oppose, let go of any need to control, perhaps it's all an illusion we project, more like a game we play than real? ~ Jay Woodman

An ideal first date should involve things like a candle-lit dinner, soft music, and a binary anal defibrillator, with a guest appearance by Renaldo. ~ Jarod Kintz

Our failure to be a "peculiar" people in maintaining our standards, despite the jeers and the criticisms of the crowd, will be our failure to be chosen for that calling to which we are called.
The Lord has told us, "Behold, there are many called, but few are chosen" (D&C 121:34), and then in the same revelation points out two reasons why men fail of their blessings. The first reason he gives is that their hearts are set so much upon the things of this world, and the second is that they aspire so much to the honors of men. So then as Church members let us beware lest we set our hearts upon the things of this world and lest we aspire so much to the honors of men that we compromise our standards. If we do so, we will be cut off in the Day of Judgment and will lose our blessings. Our reward for daring to live the gospel despite the oppositions from the outside world will be to have blessings added upon our heads forever and forever. ~ Harold B. Lee

Just like an organic to be so binary in their logic. A thing can be a thing and also not a thing, you know. ~ Daniel Jose Older

I cross two fingers, a binary precaution against hex, effective as superconductor or simple superstition. ~ Neil Gaiman

Those who stand for different causes during different generations often experience the same oppositions and the same difficulties as those of the previous and the next generations. That is the basis of history repeating itself. ~ Criss Jami

A film is sort of binary - it either works or it doesn't work. It has nothing to do with how good a job you do. If you bring it up to an adequate level where the audience goes with the movie, then it works, that is all. ~ George Lucas

As a child, a teen, a young adult, I developed a firm belief in my solitude, the not-novel concept that we are each alone in the world. Some parts self-reliance, some parts self-protection, this belief offers a binary perspective - powerhouse or victim, complete responsibility or total divorcement, all in or out the door. Carried to its extreme, the idea gives license to the belief that one's own actions do not matter much; we traverse the world in our own bubbles, occasionally breaking through to one another but largely and ultimately alone. ~ Piper Kerman

I was extremely curious about the alternatives to the kind of life I had been leading, and my friends and I exchanged rumors and scraps of information we dug from official publications. I was struck less by the West's technological developments and high living standards than by the absence of political witch-hunts, the lack of consuming suspicion, the dignity of the individual, and the incredible amount of liberty. To me, the ultimate proof of freedom in the West was that there seemed to be so many people there attacking the West and praising China. Almost every other day the front page of Reference, the newspaper which carded foreign press items, would feature some eulogy of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. At first I was angered by these, but they soon made me see how tolerant another society could be. I realized that this was the kind of society I wanted to live in: where people were allowed to hold different, even outrageous views. I began to see that it was the very tolerance of oppositions, of protesters, that kept the West progressing.

Still, I could not help being irritated by some observations. Once I read an article by a Westerner who came to China to see some old friends, university professors, who told him cheerfully how they had enjoyed being denounced and sent to the back end of beyond, and how much they had relished being reformed. The author concluded that Mao had indeed made the Chinese into 'new people' who would regard what was misery to a Weste ~ Jung Chang

True translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal. One reads and rereads the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them to reach, to touch, the vision or experience that prompted them. One then gathers up what one has found there and takes this quivering almost wordless "thing" and places it behind the language it needs to be translated into. And now the principal task is to persuade the host language to take in and welcome the "thing" that is waiting to be articulated. ~ John Berger

And as a director, you make 1,000 decisions a day, mostly binary decisions: yes or no, this one or that one, the red one or the blue one, faster or slower. And it's the culmination of those decisions that define the tone of the film and whether or not it moves people. ~ Jason Reitman

If there are more than two sexes, then so be it and, of course, the assumption that there are two helps shape, as many have argued, the binary logic that underpins much of the history of western philosophy. ~ Alison Assiter

Binary

There are two kinds of people in the world.
Male and Female.
Gay and Straight.
Black and White.
Normal and Weird.
Cis and Trans.
There are two kinds of people in the world.
Saints and Sinners.
Victims and Villains.
Cruel and Kind.
Guilty and Innocent.
There are two kinds of people in the world.
Just two.
Just two.
Only two. ~ Dashka Slater