Identity Theory Quotes

I think our generation has been called to apathy just as our grandparents were called to defeat fascism and the baby boomers were called to get divorced and fuck around for most of their adult lives before bankrupting the entire goddamn country when they retire. But we have the chance to do something really special here. Imagine a world where people didn't care enough to go to war over anything. Where some guy gets up in the morning and says, "I know God wants me to kill the infidels and keep gay people from marrying each other, but I just don't give a shit. I'm going back to bed." It would be paradise on earth. This is our mission. I think we can make it happen, but I really don't care either way. And that's called hope. ~ Paul Neilan

Barry Schlenker's self-identity theory (1982) asserts that self-presentation is an attempt to control information about your identity before real or imagined audiences - including yourself. People try to provide explanations of their own conduct; they try to construct an identity that is satisfying to themselves and that explains their behavior in a favorable light. One of the criteria of a good explanation is believability; that is, explanations must fit with existing knowledge. Schlenker argues that people are not motivated to attain cognitive consistency as an end in itself; rather, they need to provide a believable and self -beneficial account of their conduct, and consistency is a by-product of that. The need to provide explanations for your conduct results in the construction of an internally consistent view of reality. ~ James Kennedy

Faced with the numbering logic of neoliberal regimes, literature offers an intervention in order to consider identity and voice, to consider representation in both the political and artistic sense of the term... [Literature and art] cultivate tension between an unresolved past and present, between invisibility and exposure, showing the dualities of face and mask that leave their trace on identitarian struggles today. ~ Francine Masiello

Hey Pete. So why the leave from social media? You are an activist, right? It seems like this decision is counterproductive to your message and work."

A: The short answer is I'm tired of the endless narcissism inherent to the medium. In the commercial society we have, coupled with the consequential sense of insecurity people feel, as they impulsively "package themselves" for public consumption, the expression most dominant in all of this - is vanity. And I find that disheartening, annoying and dangerous. It is a form of cultural violence in many respects. However, please note the difference - that I work to promote just that – a message/idea – not myself… and I honestly loath people who today just promote themselves for the sake of themselves. A sea of humans who have been conditioned into viewing who they are – as how they are seen online. Think about that for a moment. Social identity theory run amok.

People have been conditioned to think "they are" how "others see them". We live in an increasing fictional reality where people are now not only people – they are digital symbols. And those symbols become more important as a matter of "marketing" than people's true personality. Now, one could argue that social perception has always had a communicative symbolism, even before the computer age. But nooooooothing like today. Social media has become a social prison and a strong means of social control, in fact.
Beyond that, as most know, social media is li ~ Peter Joseph

Buy it for the lady who's about to become your mother-in-law, the one who's already trying to control your life and the lives of the three children she's already pressuring you to have. Give her the book one day out of nowhere, just as a nice surprise, and when she hugs you, calmly whisper: "Don't fuck with me, Ellen. Don't even think about it. Ever." Then smile at her like everything is wonderful. Because from now on, it will be. ~ Paul Neilan

It's my job to play this role that I'm cast in to the very best of my ability, the same as any other actor. You can't possibly be yourself in the public eye. All the little things that make us human don't stand up under the scrutiny of the camera. [on being a public figure] ~ Adrian Lamo

Buy it for anyone you know who cries in the shower, who drinks in the morning, whose life only has meaning when they're asleep and dreaming that they're somebody else. They will find comfort here. And if they don't, it's not your fault. They've always been this way. Some people are just all banged up. Good for you for trying to help. You're a great person. Give yourself a hand. ~ Paul Neilan

Buy this book or I'll take it personally, and I will have my revenge. I'll steal your girlfriend or make out with your dad. It doesn't matter to me. Whichever will hurt worse. My vengeance knows no sexuality. You don't want this. Your dad does though. Yeah, like you didn't know your parents' marriage was a sham. Come on. Open your fucking eyes. ~ Paul Neilan

Something about his voice was familiar. ~ Elizabeth Horton-Newton

[Rumi] is trying to get us to feel the vastness of our true identity ... like the sense you might get walking into a cathedral ... ~ Coleman Barks

He was talking about hire purchase. precredit cards. A different way of getting the poor into debt, but I think he was right. It was nice when ordinary people could take a holiday in Spain, of course, but easy credit is what started the cultural rot. Tourism depends on lots of people everywhere with loads of disposable wealth, which means all kinds of changes through a place a cultivates it. The real, messy, informative past disappears to be overlaid with bad fiction, with simplified folklore, easy answers. Memory needs to remain complex, debatable. Without those qualities it is mere nostalgic sentimentality. Commodified identity. Souls bough and sold. ~ Michael Moorcock

Evolution is far more than a belief or an educated guess about how people came to be as they are. It is, in fact, the product of converging evidence from many, many different fields of science. Many, many thousands of studies that, in fact, have provided a theory, an organizing principal in fact, that describes how humans came to be. ~ Alan I. Leshner

It is going to be necessary that everything that happens in a finite volume of space and time would have to be analyzable with a finite number of logical operations. The present theory of physics is not that way, apparently. It allows space to go down into infinitesimal distances, wavelengths to get infinitely great, terms to be summed in infinite order, and so forth; and therefore, if this proposition [that physics is computer-simulatable] is right, physical law is wrong. ~ Richard P. Feynman

Economic theory is the most prestigious subject of instruction and study. Agricultural economics, labor economics and marketing are lower caste fields of study. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

One man's generalisation is another man's succinct yet profound summation of a complex theory or argument. ~ Stewart Stafford

A theory of motivation is defective if it renders intelligible behaviour which is not intelligible. ~ Thomas Nagel

Infinity is our true food, true shelter and true identity. Understand and abide in the beauty of infinity. Life will be beautiful. ~ Amit Ray

Sometimes I feel that I am destined for greater things, and then again sometimes I suspect that I am just an extra in an epic movie. ~ Shon Mehta

Man can be an atheist only in theory, not in practice, because the universe is too frightening and too chaotic to be too independent! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

I'll never suppress my identity -- that's like filing away your fingerprints so the money can slide into your pockets easier. ~ Jonathan Heatt

Woodrow Wilson later wrote: "The Constitution of the United States has been made under the dominion of the Newtonian theory. ~ Andrew Thomas

Your identity is altered, even though you don't want it to be. You are not the same person, and some of your friends will relate to you differently. Redefining ourselves, that is, building a new identity after the death of a loved one, is another significant task commonly forgotten in grief work. It's okay to be a different person than when you started your journey through loss. So ask yourself how much your great loss has affected your identity as a person and how you will rebuild it. ~ Louis E. LaGrand

I think that Utopia is a theory of human action ... ~ Cory Doctorow

Were we all like that? Were we all trying to change how we looked on the outside to match how we felt on the inside? Were we all trying to change how people saw us? ~ Cecil Castellucci

In fact it is remarkable that this theory has had progressively greater influence on the spirit of researchers, following a series of discoveries in different scholarly disciplines. The convergence in the results of these independent studies - which was neither planned nor sought - constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory. ~ Pope John Paul I

The true test of a brilliant theory [is] what first is thought to be wrong is later shown to be obvious. ~ Assar Lindbeck

Every socialist wishes to revolutionize society from the economic angle and all the blessings he expects are to come through a change in economic institutions. This of course implies a theory about social causation - the theory that the economic pattern is the really operative element in the sum total of the phenomena that we call society. ~ Joseph Alois Schumpeter

Hardly any aspect of my life, from where I had lived to my education to my employment history to my friendships, had been free from the taint of racial inequity, from racism, from whiteness. My racial identity had shaped me from the womb forward. I had not been in control of my own narrative. It wasn't just race that was a social construct. So was I. ~ Tim Wise

Denial is our very real, personal response to our own trauma. But denial is the normative response to trauma - by everyone. Society may deny that anything bad ever happened to us. It may deny that DID exists. But that doesn't mean to say it's right. All it says is that like global warming, our histories and our stories are an "inconvenient truth".͏ ~ Carolyn Spring

In one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies, Amadeus, Salieri looks with wide-eyed astonishment at a manuscript of Mozart's and says, "Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall."

In this, Salieri captured the essence of perfection. His two sentences define precisely what we mean by perfection in many contexts, including theoretical physics. You might say it's a perfect definition.

A theory begins to be perfect if any change makes it worse. That's Salieri's first sentence, translated from music to physics. And it's right on point. But the real genius comes with Salieri's second sentence. A theory becomes perfectly perfect if it's impossible to change it significantly without ruining it entirely-that is, if changing the theory significantly reduces it to nonsense. ~ Frank Wilczek

Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them
the one, in fact, which is not a mask. ~ W. H. Auden

I have never believed that central banks should have rigid inflation targeting. That is not a good thing to stabilize. There is nothing in economic theory to back this. ~ Robert Mundell

I have tried to set forth a theory that enables us to understand and to assess these feelings about the primacy of justice. Justice as fairness is the outcome: it articulates these opinions and supports their general tendency. ~ John Rawls

As Sommerfeld said in his famous text "Spectral Lines and Atomic Constitution," on which a generation of physicists learned the subject, "In the fine structure constant e is the representative of the electron theory, h the appropriate representative of the quantum theory, c comes from relativity and characterizes it in contrast to classical theory. ~ Emilio Segre

The White House usually followed the seagull theory of management: fly in, squawk and flap and shit, and fly away. ~ John Frohnmayer

Part of America's genius has always been its ability to absorb newcomers, to forge a national identity out of the disparate lot that arrived on our shores. ~ Barack Obama

Gang violence in America is not a sudden problem. It has been a part of urban life for years, offering an aggressive definition and identity to those seeking a place to belong in the chaos of large metropolitan areas. ~ Dave Reichert

A theory of everything is a palliative story just like reality was in The Matrix. Something we tell ourselves in order to armor ourselves from the frightening reality of how mediocre and pathetic we really are. While ~ James McGirk

The egalitarian doctrine is manifestly contrary to all the facts established by biology and by history. Only fanatical partisans of this theory can contend that what distinguishes the genius from the dullard is entirely the effect of postnatal influences. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Instead of spelling stories you spread silence, which was outside the alphabet. ~ Lauren Slater

Two centuries ago Carl Friedrich Gauss, one of the greatest mathematicians and a founder of number theory, described his brainchild as "the queen of mathematics." Queens are regal, but they are also largely decorative, and this nuance was not lost on Gauss. ~ Ian Stewart

I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion ... Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined ... Finally, [the nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings. ~ Benedict Anderson

The gods of the realms are many and varied
or they are the many and varied names and identities tagged onto the same being. I know not
and care not
which. ~ R.A. Salvatore

Toxic shame, the shame that binds us, is experienced as the all-pervasive sense that "I am flawed and defective as a human being." Toxic shame is no longer an emotion that signals our limits; it is a state of being, a core identity. Toxic shame gives you a sense of worthlessness, a sense of failing and falling short as a human being. Toxic shame is a rupture of the self with the self. It is like internal bleeding - exposure to oneself lies at the heart of toxic shame. A shame-based person will guard against exposing his inner self to others, but more significantly, he will guard against exposing himself to himself. Toxic shame is so excruciating because it is the painful exposure of the perceived failure of self to the self. In toxic shame the self becomes an object of its own contempt, an object that can't be trusted. As an object that can't be trusted, one experiences oneself as untrustworthy. ~ John Bradshaw

There is nothing so simple as being the Self. It requires no effort, no aid. One has to leave off the wrong identity and be in his (her) eternal, natural, inherent state. ~ Ramana Maharshi

I've never been a fan of personality-conflict burgers and identity-crisis omelets with patchouli oil. I function very well on a diet that consists of Chicken Catastrophe and Eggs Overwhelming and a tall, cool Janitor-in-a-Drum. I like to walk out of a restaurant with enough gas to open a Mobil station. ~ Tom Waits

Under unitary executive theory, the [George W.]Bush administration has claimed the right to seize American citizens in the United States and imprison them indefinitely without a charge. ~ Dick Durbin

The Republican Party is doubling down on this trickle-down theory that says, 'Thou shalt concentrate wealth at the very top of our society. Thou shalt remove regulation from wherever you find it, even on Wall Street. And thou shalt keep wages low for American workers so that we can be more competitive.' ~ Martin O'Malley

Axioms are delightful in theory, but impossible in practice. ~ Antoine Rivarol

In theory, especially in the case of Stone, those who have human hearts would remain cognizant of their behavior and in control of themselves. Those who are Katagaria ... ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

When faced with a challenge, happy families, like happy people, just add a new chapter to their life story that shows them overcoming the hardship. This skill is particularly important for children, whose identity tends to get locked in during adolescence. ~ Bruce Feiler

Disconnect from society's pressure to conform. Do things your own way. ~ Fennel Hudson

What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down. ~ John Ciardi

Your gender identity is who you are. Sexual identity is who you bounce that off of. ~ Andrew Solomon

In my career, I've really wanted to sort of be a morpher and not show my own identity. ~ Lynn Collins

You can't lose this war, because your Father has already won. This isn't a battle of skin and bones, flesh and blood. This is about your faith, about your identity. When you discover who you truly are, you discover there is no war left to fight at all. ~ Rachelle Dekker