Quotes about reality
page 18

Harry Truman photo
John Gray photo
Bernice King photo
George MacDonald photo
Cyril Connolly photo
Jane Roberts photo
John F. Kennedy photo
Sören Kierkegaard photo
Michael Moorcock photo
Frank Herbert photo
Herbert Marcuse photo
Jean Tinguely photo

“Everything moves continuously. Immobility does not exist. Don't be subject to the influence of out-of-date concepts. Forget hours, seconds and minutes. Accept instability. Live in Time. Be static - with movement. For a static of the present movement. Resist the anxious wish to fix the instantaneous, to kill that which is living.
Stop insisting on 'values' which can only break down. Be free, live. Stop painting time. Stop evoking movements and gestures. You are movement and gesture. Stop building cathedrals and pyramids which are doomed to fall into ruin. Live in the present, live once more in Time and by Time - for a wonderful and absolute reality”

Jean Tinguely (1925–1991) Swiss painter and sculptor

Original text in German:
Es bewegt sich alles, Stillstand gibt es nicht. Lasst Euch nicht von überlebten Zeitbegriffen beherrschen. Fort mit den Stunden, Sekunden und Minuten. Hört auf, der Veränderlichkeit zu widerstehen. SEID IN DER ZEIT – SEID STATISCH, SEID STATISCH – MIT DER BEWEGUNG. Fur Statik. Im Jetzt stattfindenden JETZT... Lasst es sein, Kathedralen und Pyramiden zu bauen, die zerbröckeln wie Zuckerwerk. Atmet tief, lebt Jetzt, lebt auf und in der Zeit. Für eine schöne und absolute Wirklichkeit!
In For Statics (original title: Für Statik), 1958 programmatic text for the 'Concert for Seven Pictures' in Düsseldorf: as quoted in: Arts/Canada. Vol. 25. (1968) p. 4.
Quotes, 1950's

Michael Swanwick photo

“A magician does not send messages, you know—he orchestrates reality.”

Source: Stations of the Tide (1991), Chapter 7, “Who Is the Black Beast?” (p. 119)

José Ortega Y Gasset photo
David Bohm photo
George Holmes Howison photo
Piet Mondrian photo
William Thomson photo

“It is impossible by means of inanimate material agency, to derive mechanical effect from any portion of matter by cooling it below the temperature of the coldest of the surrounding objects. [Footnote: ] If this axiom be denied for all temperatures, it would have to be admitted that a self-acting machine might be set to work and produce mechanical effect by cooling the sea or earth, with no limit but the total loss of heat from the earth and sea, or in reality, from the whole material world.”

William Thomson (1824–1907) British physicist and engineer

Mathematical and Physical Papers, Vol.1 http://books.google.com/books?id=nWMSAAAAIAAJ p. 179 (1882) "On the Dynamical Theory of Heat with Numerical Results Deduced from Mr Joule's Equivalent of a Thermal Unit and M. Regnault's Observations on Steam" originally from Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, March, 1851 and Philosophical Magazine iv, 1852
Thermodynamics quotes

Northrop Frye photo

“Art is not simply an identity of illusion and reality, but a counter-illusion: its world is a material world, but the material of an intelligible spiritual world.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

1:73
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

Nisargadatta Maharaj photo
Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Nisargadatta Maharaj photo
Chuck Palahniuk photo
Aron Ra photo
Paz de la Huerta photo

“I love the fact that the present is the only real reality we have.”

Paz de la Huerta (1984) American actress

Blackbookmag interview http://www.blackbookmag.com/movies/paz-de-la-huerta-bares-all-1.28620

Jack McDevitt photo
Don DeLillo photo
Charles Seeger photo
Arthur C. Clarke photo

“There was no substitute for reality; one should be aware of imitations.”

Source: The Fountains of Paradise (1979), Chapter 23 “Moondozer” (p. 129)

Adam Gopnik photo
Robert Maynard Hutchins photo
Max Horkheimer photo
Paulo Freire photo
Jonah Goldberg photo
Jean Paul Sartre photo

“I think there are three possible scenarios for the future of Chinese writing, in all of which the government plays a major role. In the first, and at present apparently the least likely scenario, the government abandons its hostility to an expanded role for Pinyin and instead fosters a climate of digraphia and biliteracy in which those who can do so become literate in both characters and Pinyin, and those who cannot are at least literate in Pinyin. This is essentially a reversion to the Latinization movement of the 1930s and 1940s, when Mao Zedong and other high Communist Party officials like Xu Teli, the commissioner of education in Yan'an, lent their prestigious support to the New Writing. Such a change within the governing bureaucracy would in all likelihood result in an explosion of activity that might end in Pinyin ascendancy in use over characters in less than a generation.
In the second scenario the government adopts a policy of benign indifference that involves abandoning its hostility toward Pinyin but without actively supporting it, leaving it up to the rival protagonists of the two systems to contest for supremacy among themselves. This is likely to result in a somewhat longer struggle.
In the third scenario the government continues its present policy of repression, resulting in a much more protracted struggle (though surely not as long as the fascinating parallel struggle between Latin and Italian in Italy, where it took 500 [! ] years after Dante’s start in 1292 for academics, the last holdouts, to finally abandon their long resistance and start using Italian in university lectures).47 In this long struggle, PCs and mobile phones and other innovations still to come will undoubtedly allow more and more advocates of writing reform to escape the stranglehold of officialdom, to the point where (in a century or so?) characters are finally relegated to the status of Latin in the West.
My own view is that this is actually the least likely scenario, the most probable one being that the Chinese pragmatism that has manifested itself so strongly in economics will extend further into writing, and that, perhaps sooner rather than later, given the success of the promotion of Mandarin, some influential Party bureaucrats will finally arrive at the conclusion that the "some day in the future" anticipated by Mao has arrived, and that wholehearted Party support should now be unleashed for his anticipated "basic reform."”

John DeFrancis (1911–2009) American linguist

In any case it is basically all a matter of time. And the decisive factor that will seal the ultimate fate of Chinese characters is the new reality, noted by a perceptive observer, that "the PC is mightier than the Pen."
"The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform" (2006, p. 20-21) http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp171_chinese_writing_reform.pdf
"The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform" (2006)

F. J. Duarte photo

“Reality, after all, is what civilization attempts to mitigate.”

Kathleen Parker (1951) American journalist

Source: Cant we aim higher than 'Honey Boo Boo'?, Washington Post, 2014-01-06, Parker, Kathleen, 2013-01-08 http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kathleen-parker-the-trouble-with-honey-boo-boo/2013/01/08/1e72fcc0-59d3-11e2-88d0-c4cf65c3ad15_story.html,

Ray Comfort photo
Alfred Kinsey photo
Jacques Ellul photo
Stanley Baldwin photo
Tom Cruise photo
Ellen Willis photo
B.K.S. Iyengar photo
Alfred Binet photo

“It is necessary to protect oneself from over exaggeration; one must not suppose that there exists, even in the realm of partial memory, an absolutely pure auditory type; real life does not make such schemas… In reality, when one says that a person belongs to the auditory type… one wants to say simply that with regard to that person the auditory memory is preponderant.”

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test

Alfred Binet (1894). Psychologies des grands calculateurs et joueurs d’echecs. Paris: Hachette. p. 71; As cited in: John Carson, "Minding matter/mattering mind: Knowledge and the subject in nineteenth-century psychology." in: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C. 30.3 (1999): p. 363

Charles de Gaulle photo

“Politics, when it is an art and a service, not an exploitation, is about acting for an ideal through realities.”

Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) eighteenth President of the French Republic

La politique, quand elle est un art et un service, non point une exploitation, c'est une action pour un idéal à travers des réalités.
Press conference, June 30 1955
Fifth Republic and other post-WW2
Source: "Le Général de Gaulle et la construction de l'Europe" https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wg4ZAQAAIAAJ (1967), pg 33. note: 1950s

Nisargadatta Maharaj photo
Clarence Thomas photo
Hillary Clinton photo
Henri of Luxembourg photo

“Long has reality belied ethnicity-oriented conceptions of the Nation. In a country where resident foreigners make up almost half of the population, and where foreigners constitute two thirds of the working population, it no longer makes any sense. Wider conceptions of the Nation have come into being.”

Henri of Luxembourg (1955) Grand Duke (head of state) of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg

Déi éischter ethnesch orientéiert Konzeptioun vun der Natioun ass zanter laangem vun de Realitéiten dementéiert ginn. An engem Land ewéi äist, wou praktesch d’Halschent Net-Lëtzebuerger wunnen a wou se zwee Drëttel vun der aktiver Populatioun ausmaachen, ergëtt dat kee Sënn méi. Aplaz hu sech vill méi offe Konzeptiounen vun der Natioun imposéiert.
Speech on National Day, http://www.monarchie.lu/fr/actualites/discours/2014/06/23062014-fetnat/index.html (23 June 2014)
Luxembourg, Immigration

Peter Mandelson photo
Gloria E. Anzaldúa photo
Arthur Koestler photo
George E. P. Box photo
Colin Wilson photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Ayumi Hamasaki photo
Harold Wilson photo
Michelangelo Antonioni photo
Georges Braque photo
Jack McDevitt photo
Revilo P. Oliver photo
Sergio Leone photo

“Even in the greatest Westerns, the woman is imposed on the action, as a star, and is generally destined to be “had” by the male lead. But she does not exist as a woman. If you cut her out of the film, in a version which you can imagine, the film becomes much better. In the desert, the essential problem was to survive. Women were an obstacle to survival! Usually, the woman not only holds up the story, but she has no real character, no reality. She is a symbol. She is there without having any reason to be there, simply because one must have a woman, and because the hero must prove, in some way or another, that he has "sex-appeal."”

Sergio Leone (1929–1989) Italian film director, screenwriter and producer

Christopher Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone (1981), p. 129. Quoted in The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization (2007), ed. R. Wilson, ‎C. L. Connery, Ch. 6: "'But I Did Not Shoot the Deputy': Dubbing the Yankee Frontier" by Louis Chude-Sokei, pp. 158–159, as well as in The A to Z of Westerns in Cinema (2009) by Paul Varner, p. 198, and in The Quick, the Dead and the Revived: The Many Lives of the Western Film (2016) by Joseph Maddrey, p. 104.

Steve Blank photo
Jacques Barzun photo
Ilana Mercer photo

“The strength of ideas rests on their relationship to reality.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"MacKinnon's Textual Harassment" http://www.unz.org/Pub/AmConservative-2006jan16-00033 The American Conservative, January 16, 2006.
2000s, 2006

Svetlana Alexievich photo
Mark Tobey photo

“Reality must be expressed by a physical symbol.”

Mark Tobey (1890–1976) American abstract expressionist painter

Bahai lecture, New York, October 30, 1951; as quoted in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 10
1950's

Thomas Carlyle photo
Neal Stephenson photo
Philip K. Dick photo
Graham Greene photo
Max Tegmark photo
Leo Tolstoy photo
Sister Nivedita photo
Robert Delaunay photo
Dallin H. Oaks photo

“I submit that religious values and political realities are so inter-linked in the origin and perpetuation of this nation that we cannot lose the influence of religion in our public life without seriously jeopardizing our freedoms.”

Dallin H. Oaks (1932) Apostle of the LDs Church

" Dallin H Oaks - Religious Liberty's Canterbury Medal http://www.deseretnews.com/topics/561/Dallin-H-Oaks.html", Becket Fund for Religious Liberty Statement

Ayaan Hirsi Ali photo
Alan Charles Kors photo
John Gray photo
David Bohm photo
Rousas John Rushdoony photo