Vigesimal System Quotes

What I saw in Washington that October were a lot of Americans who were genuinely dismayed by what their country was doing in Vietnam; I also saw a lot of other Americans who were self-righteously attracted to a most childish notion of heroism - namely, their own. They thought that to force a confrontation with soldiers and policemen would not only elevate themselves to the status of heroes; this confrontation, they deluded themselves, would expose the corruption of the political and social system they loftily thought they opposed. These would be the same people who, in later years, would credit the antiwar 'movement' with eventually getting the U.S. armed forces out of Vietnam. That was not what I saw. I saw that the righteousness of many of these demonstrators simply helped to harden the attitudes of those poor fools who supported the war. That is what makes what Ronald Reagan would say - two years later, in 1969 - so ludicrous: that the Vietnam protests were 'giving aid and comfort to the enemy.' What I saw was that the protests did worse than that; they gave aid and comfort to the idiots who endorsed the war - they made that war last longer. That's what I saw. ~ John Irving

[M]any females would, even assuming complete economic equality between the sexes, prefer residing with males or peddling their asses on the street, thereby having most of their time for themselves, to spending many hours of their days doing boring, stultifying, non-creative work for somebody else, functioning as less than animals, as machines, or, at best - if able to get a "good" job - co-managing the shitpile. What will liberate women, therefore, from male control is the total elimination of the money-work system, not the attainment of economic equality with men within it. ~ Valerie Solanas

The necessary incompleteness of even our formal systems of thought demonstrates that there is no nonshifting foundation on which any system rests. All truths - even those that had seemed so certain as to be immune to the very possibility of revision - are essentially manufactured. Indeed the very notion of the objectively true is a socially constructed myth. Our knowing minds are not embedded in truth. Rather the entire notion of truth is embedded in our minds, which are themselves the unwitting lackeys of organizational forms of influence. ~ Rebecca Goldstein

He was going to kill Russell's dream of a perfect logical system. ~ James Gleick

No doctor has ever healed anyone of anything in the history of the world, The human immune system heals and that's the only thing that heals ~ Bob Wright

I do think that the banking system is now in the most perilous state we've seen in over 70 years. ~ Nigel Farage

"The way of Cain" describes any religious system that attempts to earn God's favor by works and rituals rather than reliance on God's grace. ~ Robert Jeffress

I have to trust people. There's no system of controls that can replace trust, so I need to reinforce that trust, and part of reinforcing trust is making sure that people feel accountability, and with accountability comes some degree of autonomy. You don't have one without the other. ~ Harry West

Some people think that the people they lead are too stupid to be told the truth, and thus they must be lied to, in order for a greater good to be accomplished. Some people believe in the system that has been set up, where the strongest among us is going to lead us in a fight, otherwise everyone is the same. That's the doctrine of pirates. ~ Zach McGowan

(Sean) "Sometimes the system fails. And sometimes you have to break the rules to get what you want. ~ Jami Alden

In addition to transitioning to the cloud, our customers continue to invest in premium versions of our on-prem server products like Window Server, System Center and SQL Server. ~ Amy Hood

The determination of the average man is not merely a matter of speculative curiosity; it may be of the most important service to the science of man and the social system. It ought necessarily to precede every other inquiry into social physics, since it is, as it were, the basis. The average man, indeed, is in a nation what the centre of gravity is in a body; it is by having that central point in view that we arrive at the apprehension of all the phenomena of equilibrium and motion. ~ Adolphe Quetelet

Following your bliss is not self-indulgent, but vital; your whole physical system knows that this is the way to be alive in this world and the way to give to the world the very best that you have to offer. There IS a track just waiting for each of us and once on it, doors will open that were not open before and would not open for anyone else. ~ Joseph Campbell

Yet, in spite of this world-wide system of linkages, there is, at this very moment, a general feeling that communication is breaking down everywhere, on an unparalleled scale. ~ David Bohm

Beware the one-party state: the parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start. They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents. So support the multi-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can. Consider running for office. ~ Timothy Snyder

Neuroscience in no longer simply the science of the nervous system. It is the actual empirical science of self-awareness. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Staff will need to receive adequate training from IT staff on ways to effectively use databases. Beyond the ability to navigate a database system, staff will need additional skills such as developing queries or using spreadsheets to analyze and present data. In other words, rather than simply concentrating on the business functions that technology supports, student affairs staff should integrate assessment functions into their understanding of technology tools. ~ John H. Schuh

Descriptive grammar is an attempt to give an account of what the current system is for either a society or an individual, whatever you happen to be studying. ~ Noam Chomsky

If the veteran only has a year or two left on his contract, teams are hesitant to trade a draft pick for a player in that position. Why pay a big cap number for a guy you might only have for a short time And then there's the reality that the veteran and the agent would probably want to be on the open market anyway, figuring they'll get more money that way. The system is not conducive to making a deal for a veteran. ~ Marty Hurney

The financial system as a whole has had the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme if we look at it fundamentally. ~ Tim Lee

There's nothing mysterious about it, He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about, a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of Creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain? ~ Joseph Heller

Gouverneur Morris had often told me that General Washington believed no more of that system (Christianity) than did he himself. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Who is he that shall control me? Why may I not speak and write and think with entire freedom? What am I to the universe, or, the universe, what is it to me? Who hath forged the chains of wrong and right, of Opinion and Custom? And must I wear them? I say to the universe, Mighty One! thou art not my mother. Return to chaos if thou wilt. I shall still
exist. I live. If I owe my being, it is to a destiny greater than thine. Star by star, world by world, system by system shall be crushed,-but I shall live. ~ Samuel A. Schreiner Jr.

It's time for the human race to enter the solar system. ~ Dan C. Quayle

We Greeks want change. We know there are problems in our system. We have great potential but we need to manage our country well. Now that hasn't been done over the last decades. And that is, of course, what we are paying for. ~ George Papandreou

Reader! Bruder! What a foolish Hamburg that Hamburg was! Since his supersensitive system was loath to face the actual scene, he thought he could at least enjoy a secret part of it - which reminds one of the tenth or twentieth soldier in the raping queue who throws the girl's black shawl over her white face so as not to see those impossible eyes while taking his military pleasure in the sad, sacked village. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The virtue of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was of a severer and more laborious kind. It was the well-earned harvest of many a learned conference, of many a patient lecture, and many a midnight lucubration. At the age of twelve years, he embraced the rigid system of the Stoics, which taught him to submit his body to his mind, his passions to his reason; to consider virtue as the only good, vice as the only evil, all things external as things indifferent. ~ Edward Gibbon

The internal, and eternal, struggle, between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human. It is how we conduct ourselves in that struggle that determines how we may in time be judged by a higher power. ~ Neal Stephenson

To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central human system of thought. ~ Robert Graves

Jesus said that the meek shall inherit the earth; my interpretation is that the gentle, mature or old souls would inherit, or assume, the power, and create through wise judgments the good and just society that we all have been craving since the earliest dreams of great societies. When a social/political system is crafted that automatically allows or encourages the less aggressive and more circumspect older souls to assume positions of authority, then we will be seeing a better world. ~ Stephen Poplin

We have to change the system. The system is very rotten. The executive is corrupt, the Congress is corrupt, the judiciary is corrupt ... So what's left We really have to have a radical and surgical change to bring back the image of our country. ~ Joseph Estrada

I do not have much confidence in the political system and never did. My goal has always been to change people's minds because as long as people demand more government, they will get it. ~ Ron Paul

We are dominated on this planet by a fear-based rather than a love-based thought system. ~ Marianne Williamson

People carry around with them internalization's fixed-feature space learned early in life. Man is like other members of the animal kingdom , first, last and always a prisoner of his biological organism. No matter how hard he tries, it is impossible for him to the best himself of his own culture, where it has penetrated to the roots of his nervous system and determines how he perceives the world. ~ Edward T. Hall

Grayson Dunn is in my head. He's under my skin. He's invaded me like a deadly disease and hijacked my immune system until I don't even bother fighting it anymore. I look at him, and I'm twisted into knots. Tangled into a messy spool of desire and desperation. ~ Julie Johnson

But now science is the belief system that is hundreds of years old. And, like the medieval system before it, science is starting not to fit the world any more. Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent. Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating. But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it cannot tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it. And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways
air, and water, and land
because of ungovernable science. ~ Michael Crichton

What we have to understand that we have to believe into things which can be proved. Now the time has come that Divine itself has to be proved. That God Almighty has to be proved. That Christ as a son of God has to be proved, that His birth as immaculate conception has to be proved. Not by argument, not by reasoning, nor by blind faith but by actualization on your central nervous system. ~ Nirmala Srivastava

I began to see how everything was so wrong. When growers can have an intricate watering system to irrigate their crops but they can't have running water inside the houses of workers. ~ Studs Terkel

Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as an adult, in order to deny him consolation. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

Uneducated therapists often have an inability to cope with the behaviors of persecutory alters. They commonly focus on helping one side of the personality system and battling with the other side. When "Satan" or some similar part talks in a deep scary voice to you or to the client, it is easy to think this is a nasty perpetrator or a supernatural being, and to and to oppose it or fight with it or try to banish it. However, if you do this, you will engender the hostility of this part, who has probably been very badly hurt and told a lot of lies. You will foster internal splitting in this way, and get nowhere fast.
Once you recognize that these alters have a protective intent, you can see that working with them involves enlisting them in the service of healing, just as they were originally enlisted in the cause of safety. You will see examples of these kinds of errors, which often result in clients leaving their therapists, in survivor LisaBri's story: When therapists make mistakes. ~ Alison Miller

All right," he said. "Since you asked, Webmind is an emergent quantum-computational system based on a stable null-sigma condensate that resists decoherence thanks to constructive feedback loops." He turned to the blackboard, scooped up a piece of chalk, and began writing rapidly. "See," he said, "using Dirac notation, if we let Webmind's default conscious state be represented by a bra of phi and a ket of psi, then this would be the einselected basis." His chalk flew across the board again. "Now, we can get the vector basis of the total combined Webmind alpha-state consciousness ... ~ Robert J. Sawyer

If nobody can sell mortgage-backed securities based on trillions of dollars of unpayable instruments, there's a lot less risk in the overall system. ~ Elizabeth Warren

It should not be a surprise to find that s/m fantasy is significant in women's sex lives. Women may be born free but they are born into a system of subordination. We are not born into equality and do not have equality to eroticise. We are not born into power and do not have power to eroticise. We are born into subordination and it is in subordination that we learn our sexual and emotional responses. It would be surprising indeed if any woman reared under male supremacy was able to escape the forces constructing her into a member of an inferior slave class. ~ Sheila Jeffreys

If you're in a system where you must make profit in order to survive. You are compelled to ignore negative externalities, effects on others. ~ Noam Chomsky