Representations Quotes

The end of all moral speculations is to teach us our duty; and, by proper representations of the deformity of vice and beauty of virtue, beget correspondent habits, and engage us to avoid the one, and embrace the other. ~ David Hume

For to be contemporary is not necessarily to be part of any movement, to be included in the official representations of national and international art. History shows that it may well be the opposite. It may be that it is the odd, the personal, the curious, the simply honest, that at this moment, when everyone looks to the extreme and flamboyant, constitutes the most interesting manifestation of the spirit of art. ~ Patrick Swift

Databases, ontologies, and visual representations tie informatic genomes to the specific practices of computers, computational biology, and bioinformatics. ~ Anonymous

Physical things are eloquent tokens of ideas,enriched by new meanings through time even when the tokens are no more than evanescent paper representations. ~ Mary Catherine Bateson

Literature is a form of language that breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that of affirming in opposition to all other forms of discourse its own precipitous existence. ~ Michel Foucault

The idea that she'll never see Molly Notkin or the cerebral Union or her U.H.I.D. support-brothers-and-sisters or the YYY engineer or Uncle Bud on a roof or her stepmother in the Locked Ward or her poor personal Daddy again is sentimental and banal. The idea of what she's about in here contains all other ideas and makes them banal. Her glass of juice is on the back of the toilet, half-empty. The back of the toilet is lightly sheened with condensation of unknown origin. These are facts. This room in this apartment is the sum of very many specific facts and ideas. There is nothing more to it than that. Deliberately setting about to make her heart explode has assumed the status of just one of these facts. It was an idea but now is about to become a fact. The closer it comes to becoming concrete the more abstract it seems. Things get very abstract. The concrete room was the sum of abstract facts. Are facts abstract, or are they just abstract representations of concrete things? Molly Notkin's middle name is Cantrell. Joelle puts two more matches together and prepares to strike them, breathing rapidly in and out like a diver preparing for a long descent. ~ David Foster Wallace

How has it happened that we've lost sight of this ancient woman shaman and what she represents? For despite the proof of language and artifacts, despite pictorial representations, ethnographic narratives, and eyewitness accounts, the importance - no, the primacy - of women in shamanic traditions has been obscured and denied. ~ Barbara Tedlock

These Red Pill analyses of ancient texts may seem simplistic and misguided to us. In fact, they are not really producing analyses at all. Their interpretations of the Classics should be approached not as readings of the ancient world, but rather as aspirational representations of the world they wish we inhabited. ~ Donna Zuckerberg

In life you can get a feeling which is part of a person, the same as in the songs. Music is almost our representation of our fantasies and so our songs are representations of our fantasies. ~ Steve Winwood

Representations are figures of objects as objective entities deprived of their virtual support or background, and we pass from representation to sign when we are able to discern in an object that which points towards its virtual ground, towards the problem with regard to which it is an answer. To put it succinctly, every answer is a sign of its problem. ~ Anonymous

The apparatus of corrective penality acts in a quite different way. The point of application of the penality is not the representation, but the body, time, everyday gestures and activities; the soul, too, but in so far as it is the seat of habits. The body and the soul, as principles of behaviour, from the element that is now proposed for punitive intervention. Rather than on an art of representations, this punitive intervention must rest on studied manipulation of the individual:'I have no more doubt of every crime having its cure in moral and physical influence...'; so, in order to decide on punishments, one 'will require some knowledge of the principles of sensations, and of the sympathies which occur in the nervous system'. As for the instruments used, these are no longer complexes of representation, reinforced and circulated, but forms of coercion, schemata of constraint, applied and repeated. Exercises, not signs: time-tables, compulsory movements, regular activities, solitary meditation, work in common, silence, application, respect, good habits. And, ultimately, what one is trying to restore in this technique of correction is not so much the juridical subject, who is caught up in the fundamental interests of the social pact, but the obedient subject, the individual subjected to habits, rules, orders, an authority that is exercised continually around him and upon him, and which he must allow to function automatically in him. There are two quite distinct ways, therefore ~ Michel Foucalut

Considerable obstacles generally present themselves to the beginner, in studying the elements of Solid Geometry, from the practice which has hitherto uniformly prevailed in this country, of never submitting to the eye of the student, the figures on whose properties he is reasoning, but of drawing perspective representations of them upon a plane ... I hope that I shall never be obliged to have recourse to a perspective drawing of any figure whose parts are not in the same plane. ~ Augustus De Morgan

And just as the same town, when looked at from different sides, appears quite different and is, as it were, multiplied in perspective, so also it happens that because of the infinite number of simple substances, it is as if there were as many different universes, which are however but different perspective representations of a single universe form the different point of view of each monad. ~ Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

The wise person knows it is fruitless to project hopes and fears on the future. This only leads to forming melodramatic representations in your mind and wasting time. ~ Epictetus

Imagination is not, as some poets have thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. As long as art remained primarily mimetic, the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature. Again, as long as it was treated as an amusement, the evil which it could do was limited in scope. But in an age when the connection between imagination and figuration is beginning to be dimly realized, when the fact of the directionally creator relation is beginning to break through into consciousness, both the good and the evil latent in the working of imagination begin to appear unlimited. We have seen in the Romantic movement an instance of the way in which the making of images may react upon the collective representations. It is a fairly rudimentary instance, but even so it has already gone beyond the dreams and responses of a leisured few. The economic and social structure of Switzerland is noticeably affected by its tourist industry, and that is due only in part to increased facilities of travel. It is due not less to the condition that (whatever may be said about their 'particles') the mountains which twentieth-century man sees are not the mountains which eighteenth-century man saw.

It may be objected that this is a very small matter, and that it will be a long time before the imagination of man substantially alters those appearances of nature with which his figuration supplies him. But then I am taking the long view. Even so, we need not be too confi ~ Owen Barfield

It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by [city practitioners', everyday citizens'] blindness. The neworks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other. ~ Michel De Certeau

Today it is the Western democratic tradition that attracts and empowers people of all continents, creeds, and colors. When the Chinese students cried and died for democracy in Tiananmen Square, they brought with them not representations of Confucius or Buddha but a model of the Statue of Liberty. ~ Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

The world shown us in books, whether the books be confessed epics or professed gospels, or in codes, or in political orations, or in philosophic systems, is not the main world at all: it is only the self-consciousness of certain abnormal people who have the specific artistic talent and temperament. A serious matter this for you and me, because the man whose consciousness does not correspond to that of the majority is a madman; and the old habit of worshipping madmen is giving way to the new habit of locking them up. And since what we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the absolete fictitious for the contemporary real, education, as you no doubt observed at Oxford, destroys, by supplantation, every mind that is not strong enough to see through the imposture and to use the great Masters of Arts as what they really are and no more: that is, patentees of highly questionable methods of thinking, and manufacturers of highly questionable, and for the majority but half valid representations of life. The school boy who uses his Homer to throw at his fellow's head makes perhaps the safest and most rational use of him; and I observe with reassurance that you occasionally do the same, in your prime, with your Aristotle. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Three-Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing. ~ H.G.Wells

Out in Africa examines the anthropological, cultural and literary representations of male and female same sex desire, as it is at odds with an apparent context of heteronormativity and emphasis on reproduction, in a pan-African context, from the nineteenth century to the present. ~ Chantal Zabus

Art, not less eloquently than literature, teaches her children to venerate the single eye. Remember Matsys. His representations of miser-life are breathing. A forfeited bond twinkles in the hard smile. But follow him to an altar-piece. His Apostle has caught a stray tint from his usurer. Features of exquisite beauty are seen and loved; but the old nature of avarice frets under the glow of devotion. Pathos staggers on the edge of farce. ~ Robert Aris Willmott

Kitsch makes things that are pretty as representations, but ugly as art, modern artists made things that are ugly as representations but beautiful as art. ~ Mike Curran

When I was thinking about these women characters, no matter how bad a person I am - a bad writer, my limitations, my sexism, you know - the thought was, it would be useful as a writer to try to create a template for all the male writers, especially Dominican male writers, especially males of color, of how a writer can use seeing to create more nuanced representations of women. ~ Junot Diaz

This does not necessarily mean that the man whose path at this moment crosses mine will be personally endowed with each and all of the marvellous qualities which we are accustomed to attribute to our representations of God, that he will be a perfect image of the divine Majesty, a striking sign of the Presence. But then, what about ourselves, as we look doubtfully at this man? Do we ourselves perfectly mirror the Lord in our bodies, our hearts and minds, our behaviour? What matters in our meeting is not the quality of the image that he and I present of God, still less any reflections upon this quality, but precisely the setting free of that image in his depths as in mine ~ Henri Le Saux

In short, then, the religious cult is based upon the representations of sorcery between man and man, and the sorcerer is older than the priest. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

What distinguishes the various kinds of fears is the combination and amount of the raw materials involved. What ties together all instances of fear is the awareness that a threat to well-being is present or is soon very likely to occur. In short, in order to be felt as fear, components of a nonconscious defensive motivational state have to invade and become a presence98 in conscious awareness. This can only happen in organisms that have the capacity to both be aware of brain representations of internal and external events and to know in a personal, autobiographical sense that the event is happening to them - someone has to be home in the brain in order to feel fear when the defensive state knocks on the door.99 ~ Joseph E. Ledoux

The duty of criticism is neither to depreciate nor dignify by partial representations, but to hold out the light of reason, whatever it may discover; and to promulgate the determinations of truth, whatever she shall dictate ~ Samuel Johnson

Therefore psychologically we must keep all the theories in our heads, and every theoretical physicist who is any good knows six or seven different theoretical representations for exactly the same physics. ~ Richard P. Feynman

Humans invent an imaginary lover and put that mask over the face of the body in their bed. That is the tragedy of language my friend. Those who know each other only through symbolic representations are forced to imagine each other. And because their imagination is imperfect, they are often wrong. ~ Orson Scott Card

As we have seen with reference to the experiences of Gauss and Poincare, the mathematicians also discovered the fact that our representations are "ordered" before we become aware of them. B.L. van der Waerden, who cites many examples of essential mathematical insights arising from the unconscious, concludes: " ... the unconscious is not only able to associate and combine, but even to judge. The judgment of the unconscious is an intuitive one, but it is under favorable circumstances completely sure. ~ C. G. Jung

I think I'm always so much more happy with books and movies and stuff. I think I get more excited about well-done representations of life than life itself.
- Celine ~ Richard Linklater

I have written a couple of screenplays for studios, and each time has been less gratifying than the last. In my experience, they want no real representations of homosexuality, they want no complexity, they are terrified of ambiguity and unanswered questions - they don't know what they want, except that they want to make lots of money. The only freedom I've ever had as an artist has been in the theatre ... ~ Craig Lucas

The complex interplay of the emotions, however, is far beyond the understanding of functional neuroanatomists. Where, for example, are the representations of the id, ego, and and the superego? Through what pathway are ethical and moral judgments shepherded? What processes allow beauty to be in the eye of the beholder? These philosophical questions represent a true frontier of human discovery. ~ Benjamin Sadock

American cold war culture represented an age of anxiety. The anxiety was so severe that it sought relief in an insistent, assertive optimism. Much of American popular culture aided this quest for apathetic security. The expanding white middle class sought to escape their worries in the burgeoning consumer culture. Driving on the new highway system in gigantic showboat cars to malls and shopping centers that accepted a new form of payment known as credit cards, Americans could forget about Jim Crow, communism, and the possibility of Armageddon. At night in their suburban homes, television allowed middle class families to enjoy light domestic comedies like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and Leave It to Beaver. Somnolently they watched representations of settled family life, stories where lost baseball gloves and dinnertime hijinks represented the only conflicts. In the glow of a new Zenith television, it became easy to believe that the American dream had been fully realized by the sacrifice and hard work of the war generation.

American monsters in pop culture came to the aid of this great American sleep. Although a handful of science fiction films made explicit political messages that unsettled an apathetic America, the vast majority of 'creature features' proffered parables of American righteousness and power. These narratives ended, not with world apocalypse, but with a full restoration of a secure, consumer-oriented status quo. Invaders i ~ W. Scott Poole

MANO: There's no question in my mind that we've always felt, in the heart of our Western, Christian culture, that Jesus was very much female. That is why the representations of Jesus with long hair have always been predominant in art. The Virgin Mary was later presented as a harmless sort of woman to whom we can address our need for a maternal outlet in prayer, as a safer way of dealing with the fact that Jesus was as much a woman as a man, particularly when he died.

DOOR: You said that if men don't overcome their wanting of women, society will crack.
MANO: We are coming to a point where the genders are clumsily engaging in civil war with each other. There's a lot of unpleasantness in the land. Men feel terribly threatened. Women have been crucified for many years, so they understand it and have their axes to grind as well. The truth of the matter is, Jesus on the cross is the female being exploited in every which way. I mentioned intercourse being, at its best, an act of penetration, but there are many other ways in which women have been sacrificed, whether from childbirth or being sold as wives or whatever, through history. So when the male S&M devotee binds a woman to a cross, he has to realize, if he's a Christian--

DOOR: Uh, just how many Christian S&M devotees are there?
MANO: Even if he's not a Christian, he ought to realize that he is essentially binding Jesus again, because Jesus contains in him the female--very, very strongly- ~ D. Keith Mano

Intellectual representations are the activity itself, dependent on a kind of consciousness that is skeptical, engaged, unremittingly devote to rational investigation and moral judgement; and this puts the individual on record and on the line. Knowing how to use language well and knowing when to intervene in language are two essential features of intellectual action. ~ Edward W. Said

What the innate apparatus of the mind contributes is a set of abstract conceptual frameworks that organize our experience-space, time, substance, causation, number, and logic (today we might add other domains like living things, other minds, and language). But each of these is an empty form that must be filled in by actual instances provided by the senses or the imagination. As Kant put it, his treatise "admits absolutely no divinely implanted or innate representations....There must, however, be a ground in the subject which makes it possible for these representations to originate in this and no other manner....This ground is at least innate." Kant's version of nativism, with abstract organizing frameworks but not actual knowledge built in to the mind, is the version that is most viable today, and can be found, for example, in Chomskyan linguistics, evolutionary psychology, and the approach to cognitive development called domain specificity. One could go so far as to say that Kant foresaw the shape of a solution to the nature-nurture debate: characterize the organization of experience, whatever it is, that makes useful learning possible. ~ Steven Pinker

Hebb's notion, as you'll recall, is that "when an axon of cell A is near enough to excite cell B or repeatedly and consistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic changes take place in one or both cells such that A's efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased." Let's expand this idea a little so we can see how it might apply to memory, and especially to a memory of the fact that two stimuli once occurred together.

In order for two stimuli to be bound together in the mind, to become associated, the neural representations of the two events have to meet up in the brain. This means that there has to be some neuron (or a set of neurons) that receives information about both stimuli. Then, and only then, can the stimuli be linked together and an association be formed between them. ~ Joseph E. LeDoux

When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot of excitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation; he had no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems. ~ Marvin Minsky

SELFHOOD AND DISSOCIATION
The patient with DID or dissociative disorder not otherwise specified (DDNOS) has used their capacity to psychologically remove themselves from repetitive and inescapable traumas in order to survive that which could easily lead to suicide or psychosis, and in order to eke some growth in what is an unsafe, frequently contradictory and emotionally barren environment.

For a child dependent on a caregiver who also abuses her, the only way to maintain the attachment is to block information about the abuse from the mental mechanisms that control attachment and attachment behaviour.10 Thus, childhood abuse is more likely to be forgotten or otherwise made inaccessible if the abuse is perpetuated by a parent or other trusted caregiver.

In the dissociative individual, 'there is no uniting self which can remember to forget'. Rather than use repression to avoid traumatizing memories, he/she resorts to alterations in the self 'as a central and coherent organization of experience. . . DID involves not just an alteration in content but, crucially, a change in the very structure of consciousness and the self' (p. 187).29 There may be multiple representations of the self and of others.

Middleton, Warwick. "Owning the past, claiming the present: perspectives on the treatment of dissociative patients." Australasian Psychiatry 13.1 (2005): 40-49. ~ Warwick Middleton

Emotion is not just some "primitive" remnant of an earlier reptilian evolutionary past. Emotion directs the flow of activation (energy) and establishes the meaning of representations (information processing) for the individual. It is not a single, isolated group of processes; it has a direct impact on th entire mind. (p. 263) ~ Daniel J. Siegel

Computer images, like camera images today, will be seen as representations of a simulated, second-degree reality with little or no connection to the unmediated world. This is one lesson we can learn from photographs, and especially from those of the last 25 years: images exist not to be believed, but to be interrogated. ~ Andy Grundberg

we must rid ourselves of the notion that space and time are actual qualities in things in themselves . . . all bodies, together with the space in which they are, must be considered nothing but mere representations in us, and exist nowhere but in our thoughts." Biocentrism, ~ Robert Lanza

There is a gap between the mind and the world, and (as far as anybody knows) you need to posit internal representations if you are to have a hope of getting across it. Mind the gap. You'll regret it if you don't. ~ Jerry A. Fodor

There are so few representations of women that look remotely real in scripted television. ~ Brooke Elliott

Are - and yet refer to something permanent, which must, therefore, be distinct from all my representations and external to me, the existence ~ Immanuel Kant

The challenge of the politics of atypicality becomes particularly pressing within neoliberal biopolitics, particularly in that much of disability's social oppression is based on medical classifications that overindividuate bodies within categories of pathology while turning labeled subjects into generic representations of their medicalized condition group. ~ David T. Mitchell

All representations of a thing are inherently abstract. ~ John Green

Stars - spectacular representations of living human beings - project this general banality into images of permitted roles. As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations that they actually live. The function of these celebrities is to act out various lifestyles or sociopolitical viewpoints in a full, totally free manner. They embody the inaccessible results of social labor by dramatizing the by-products of that labor which are magically projected above it as its ultimate goals: power and vacations - the decisionmaking and consumption that are at the beginning and the end of a process that is never questioned. On one hand, a governmental power may personalize itself as a pseudostar; on the other, a star of consumption may campaign for recognition as a pseudopower over life. But the activities of these stars are not really free, and they offer no real choices. ~ Guy Debord

The web and its technologies are digital representations of everything we did before in a more private, bigger, faster and more empowering format than ever before. ~ David Amerland

When people see a Spanish last name, they have an image in their head of what the typical Latina looks like. I think it's important on television to have different representations of people. And I'm so proud of being Latina. I love it. ~ Kether Donohue

Plato said that we are trapped inside a cave and know the world only through the shadows it casts on the wall. The skull is our cave, and mental representations are the shadows. ~ Steven Pinker

The shirt was a screen print of a famous Surrealist artwork by René Magritte in which he drew a pipe and then beneath it wrote in cursive Ceci n'est pas une pipe. ("This is not a pipe.")

"I just don't get that shirt," Mom said.

"Peter Van Houten will get it, trust me.

There are like seven thousand Magritte references in An Imperial Affliction."

"But it is a pipe."

"No, it's not," I said. "It's a drawing of a pipe. Get it? All representations of a thing are inherently abstract. It's very clever."

"How did you get so grown up that you understand things that confuse your ancient mother?" Mom asked. "It seems like just yes-terday that I was telling seven-year-old Hazel why the sky was blue. You thought I was a genius back then."

"Why is the sky blue?" I asked.

"Cuz," she answered. I laughed. ~ John Green

[It] is nevertheless better than the theological concept, of deriving morality from a divine, all-perfect will, not merely because we do not intuit this perfection, but can derive it solely from our concepts, of which morality is the foremost one, but because if we do not do this (which, if we did, would be a crude circle in explanation), the concept of his will that is left over to us, the attributes of the desire for glory and domination, bound up with frightful representations of power and vengeance, would have to make a foundation for a system of morals that is directly opposed to morality. ~ Immanuel Kant

I liked the fact that there were so many different representations of black women and black men in the movie. It wasn't like we all had the same agenda. ~ Sanaa Lathan

None of the male characters are as powerful or as interesting as the four central female characters. The men work best as representations of the current stage of a particular female's psyche. The men function as catalysts, and are certainly important to the development of the story, but the relationships are not the goal. I do not see romance as being what's central to the success of PRETTY LITTLE LIARS. ~ Norman Buckley

We have considered the problem of mental fragmentation and arbitrariness that results when our contact with the world is mediated by representations: representations collapse the basic axis of proximity and distance by which an embodied being orients in the world and draws a horizon of relevance around itself. We noted the prominence of a design philosophy that severs the bonds between action and perception, as in contemporary automobiles that insulate us from the sensorimotor contingencies by which an embodied being normally grasps reality. The case of machine gambling gave us a heightened example of this kind of abstraction, and made clear how such a design philosophy can be turned to especially disturbing purposes in the darker precincts of "affective capitalism," where our experiences are manufactured for us. We saw that the point of these experiences is often to provide a quasi-autistic escape from the frustrations of life, and that they are especially attractive in a world that lacks a basic intelligibility because it seems to be ordered by "vast impersonal forces" that are difficult to bring within view on a first-person, human scale. I argued that all of this tends to sculpt a certain kind of contemporary self, a fragile one whose freedom and dignity depend on its being insulated from contingency, and who tends to view technology as magic for accomplishing this. For such a self, choosing from a menu of options replaces the kind of adult agency that grapples with thing ~ Matthew B. Crawford

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These "anti-realist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.

But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at al ~ Harry G. Frankfurt

I write plays and movies, I live and work at the borderline between word and image just as any cartoonist or illustrator does. I'm not a pure writer. I use words as the score for kinetic imagistic representations. ~ Tony Kushner

If there is too much sharing, our consuming services become coupled to our internal representations. This decreases our autonomy, ~ Sam Newman

When we think of the word culture, obvious representations such as how to dress, eat, speak, and act like those around us come to mind. But learning culture is more than learning conformity to external patterns of behavior. Culture is also a system of shared concepts, beliefs, and values. It is the framework from which we interpret and make sense of life and the world around us. ~ David C. Pollock

The one thing about being a dude and writing from a female perspective is that the baseline is, you suck. The baseline is it takes so long for you to work those atrophied muscles - for you to get on parity with what women's representations of men are. ~ Junot Diaz

Remind children that their successes and failures are not representations of their worth. ~ Asa Don Brown

In minority communities there's a sensitivity, often a knee-jerk reaction, to critical representations. There's a misunderstanding of what an artist does. ~ Junot Diaz

In real everyday life, I don't walk around feeling fat, and if on TV I'm considered fat, honestly, I kind of like it, because I'm a big advocate of positive unique representations of women in media. And so I like how I'm able to represent a curvier body and still be beautiful. ~ Kether Donohue

They had managed to convert their wealth, which had originally been in the form of factories or stores or other demanding enterprises, into a form so liquid and abstract, negotiable representations of money on paper, that there were few reminders coming from anywhere that they might be responsible for anyone outside their own circle of friends and relatives. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

We end up populating what we call the intelligentsia with people who are delusional, literally mentally deranged, simply because they never have to pay for the consequences of their actions, repeating moderniest slogans stripped of all depth...The principle of intervention, like that of healers, is first do not harm; even more we will argue, those who don't take risks should never be involved in decision making (p.10).

Their three flaws 1) they think in statics not dynamics 2) they think in low, not high dimensions 3) they think in terms of actions, never interactions....The first flaw is they are incapable in thinking in second steps and unaware of the need of them...The second flaw is that they are also incapable of distinguishing between multidimensional problems and their single dimensional representations. The third flaw is they can't forecast the evolution of those one helps by attaching, or the magnification one gets from feedback. (p.9) ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I'm always skeptical about representations of trans people, especially when trans people are not making the work. ~ Laverne Cox

I cannot understand why any young man - or young woman, for that matter - would wish to undergo the painful process of disfiguring the skin with various multicolored representations of people, animals, and various symbols. ~ Gordon B. Hinckley

The danger of crippling thought, the danger of obstructing the formation of the public mind by specially suppressing ... representations is far greater than any real danger that there is from such representations. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Those who suppose they are producing a materialist theory of knowledge when they make knowledge a passive recording and abandon the "active aspect" of knowledge to idealism, as Marx complains in the theses on Feuerbach, forget that all knowledge, and in particular all knowledge of the social world, is an act of construction implementing schemes of thought and expression, and that between conditions of existence and practices or representations there intervenes the structuring activity of the agents, who, far from reacting mechanically to mechanical stimulations, respond to the invitations or threats of a world whose meaning they have helped to produce. ~ Pierre Bourdieu

Where cultural representations do not reach out beyond themselves, there is the danger that they will function as the surrogates for activism, that they will constitute both the beginning and the end of political practice. ~ Angela Davis

AI systems must make concise representations of the world they have encountered so far, enabling them to anticipate what is to come. ~ Amit Ray

The struggle against subjectivism was the attempt to avoid the charge of what was then called "idealism" or "nihilism", i.e., that we know nothing more than our own representations. ~ Frederick C. Beiser

In reality, genuine epiphanies are extremely rare. In contemporary adult life maturation & acquiescence to reality are gradual processes. Modern usage usually deploys epiphany as a metaphor. It is usually only in dramatic representations, religious iconography, and the 'magical thinking' of children that insight is compressed to a sudden blinding flash. ~ David Foster Wallace

In every community, some people will fit every stereotype, and some people will fit no stereotypes, and both are valid representations for that community. ~ Tyler Oakley

We only get to receive what we internally give to ourselves through the programming of our internal representations. ~ Jacinta Mpalyenkana

Rights have to be asserted. Animals cannot make such assertions. We have to make representations to ourselves on their behalf. ~ Christopher Hitchens

The birds are literal representations of the witnesses of those ordinary and big moments, but they are also metaphors for time itself, for the passing of time. It occurred to me, many years after I had been here, thinking about this idea, that every moment we have with one another is really our only moment, and because of that our every moment could potentially be a goodbye, so we have to notice and notice and notice. ~ David Gianadda

We need to look beyond the obvious. Yes, there are minstrel images in hip-hop. Yes, there are demeaning, anti-racist, misogynistic and homophobic representations. We could make the same case about the church and our government. But hip-hop, like society, isn't one dimensional. ~ Bakari Kitwana

[Do you know] how it feels to be a clownish character? It's always complicated to imagine conveying yourself outside of your body. Inside myself I feel like this rich, complicated thing, and then I see representations of myself, especially in the media - and I think this is why it's troubling for me, because I feel so caricatured and flattened. ~ Kalan Sherrard

Unfortunately there is a standard set for it that precedes hip-hop. It would be great if corporate America didn't do this, but there is a huge market for sex and violence and anti-Black representations in America and the world that doesn't begin or end with hip-hop. ~ Bakari Kitwana

Dreams are distorted representations of desire. So are dream- analyses. ~ Mason Cooley

How should a system convince people that they do not possess their sex properly? Teach them that in their possession it is shapeless and unconditioned. Only once it has been modified, layered with experts, honeycombed with norms, overlaid with pictorial representations, and sold back to them can it fulfill itself as what its possessors "always wanted". ~ Mark Greif

It is strange the way the Western world reacts so positively and strongly to films make by foreigners or by Indian NRIs to celluloid representations of the underbelly of any Indian city. ~ Shoma A Chatterji

Heavy pillars, carved from the rock, bear the roof. Slowly, one's eyes become accustomed to the dim light; then they can make out marvelous representations from Indian mythology carved on the walls. ~ Rudolf Otto

Modern man receives a large part of his knowledge and general education by way of pictorial impressions, illustrations, photographs, films. Daily newspapers bring more pictures from year to year. In addition, the advertising business operates with optical signals as well as representations. Exhibitions and museums are indeed offspring of this visual hustle. ~ Otto Neurath

We're at this really unique time, I think, in trans representation in popular culture where homelessness, depression, mental health issues, instability-in-general are still so very real and need to be talked about, but we're aware that they've dominated "trans" stories for years and years.

And we're now finally at a place where we're seeing some really positive representations of trans folks in pop culture, and there's this new pressure -- at least, I feel it, within trans and trans-ally communities -- to only focus on the positive. Because we're trying, in some sense, to overcompensate for the years and years of too much negativity. As a writer, you might feel a pressure to push the negative stuff away. But there are consequences for that too. Anyone who's working with trans characters right now is going to have to reconcile that tension. ~ Mitch Kellaway

As you read deeper into the novel, you must modify your representations of the folk psychological representations that each character has. But since the metarepresentational load here increases dramatically with the complexity of the portrayal of the characters and their relationships to one another, it is no surprise that even partial expertise typically involves knowing how to find one's way about in the novel. It involves knowing how to locate and identify the folk psychological representations that respective characters have, and the signs of these in the novel itself. Here the representations that are the object of your own representations are located somewhere other than in your own head. In short, this understanding involves constructing a representational loop that extends beyond the head and into the minds of the fictional characters - and perhaps the narrator or even the author - with which you are engaged. ~ Robert Andrew Wilson

There have been many genocidal attempts, without and within, to destroy and/or misrepresent the histories, futures, languages, and traditional thoughts of Native peoples. But traditions, unlike doctrines, can persist and evolve at the same time. This anthology is a response to modern-day Native people becoming more and more disgruntled with spurious representations. Each writer has built a bridge between what has been "presented wrongly" and what needs to be "expressed accurately. ~ MariJo Moore

In churchmen, luxury is wrong, except in connection with representations and ceremonies. It seems to reveal habits which have very little that is charitable about them. An opulent priest is a contradiction. The priest must keep close to the poor. Now, can one come in contact incessantly night and day with all this distress, all these misfortunes, and this poverty, without having about one's own person a little of that misery, like the dust of labor? Is it possible to imagine a man near a brazier who is not warm? Can one imagine a workman who is working near a furnace, and who has neither a singed hair, nor blackened nails, nor a drop of sweat, nor a speck of ashes on his face? The first proof of charity in the priest, in the bishop especially, is poverty. ~ Victor Hugo

The idealized market was supposed to deliver 'friction free' exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers' performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that 'More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority's services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services'. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as 'market Stalinism'. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement.
[…]
It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the 'true spirit' of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only ~ Mark Fisher

Because materialists cannot understand Krsna spiritually, they are advised to concentrate the mind on physical things and try to see how Krsna is manifested by physical representations. ~ A C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

But it is a pipe."
"No, it's not," I said. It's a drawing of a pipe. Get it? All representations of a thing are inherently abstract. It's very clever. ~ John Green

When Galileo made his astonishing discovery of mountains on the moon, his telescope didn't actually have enough magnifying power to support that finding. Instead, he recognized the zigzag pattern separating the light and dark areas of the moon. Other astronomers were looking through similar telescopes, but only Galileo "was able to appreciate the implications of the dark and light regions," Simonton notes. He had the necessary depth of experience in physics and astronomy, but also breadth of experience in painting and drawing. Thanks to artistic training in a technique called chiaroscuro, which focuses on representations of light and shade, Galileo was able to detect mountains where others did not. ~ Adam M. Grant

The motive for criticizing myth, that is, its objectifying representations, is present in myth itself, insofar as its real intention to talk about a transcendent power to which both we and the world are subject is hampered and obscured by the objectifying character of its assertions. ~ Rudolf Bultmann

He quickly observed, that good sentences and excellent representations of the follies of mankind met with little regard or applause, whilst sounds, without sense, threw every body into raptures: - - but 'twas the fashion of the day to be musically mad, and those who were absurd enough to prefer a rational entertainment to a flimsy opera, were poor insipid beings, without taste or enthusiasm. ~ Eliza Parsons

The past is preserved only in darkness, the future is not raised to the level of an image, as something which can be anticipated. It is the symbolic expression which first creates the possibility of looking backward and looking forward... What occurred in the past, now separated out from the totality of representations, no longer passes away, once the sounds of language have placed their seals on it and given it a certain stamp. ~ Ernst Cassirer

What we call knowledge does not and cannot have the purpose of producing representations of an independent reality, but instead has an adaptive function. ~ Ernst Von Glasersfeld

[M]any people would accept that we do not really have knowledge of the world; we have knowledge only of our representations of the world. Yet we seem condemned by our consitution to treat these representations as if they were the world, for our everyday experience feels as if it were of a given and immediate world. ~ Francisco Varela