“Except for cases of pathological incapacity, one can and must communicate, and thereby contribute in a useful and easy way to the peace of others and oneself, because silence, the absence of signals, is itself a signal, but an ambiguous one, and ambiguity generates anxiety and suspicion. To say that it is impossible to communicate is false; one always can.”

— Primo Levi , book The Drowned and the Saved

The Drowned and the Saved (1986)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Primo Levi 44

Italian chemist, memoirist, short story writer, novelist, e… 1918–1987

Gavin de Becker book The Gift of Fear

Source: The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

“Occasionally one speaks… of signals or signal chains.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

It should be noted that the word signal means the transmission of signs and hence concerns the very principle of causal order...
The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

“Psychological or spiritual development always requires a greater capacity for anxiety and ambiguity.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

“Appeal to ignorance — the claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa (e. g. There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore UFOs exist — and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Or: There may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but not one is known to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so we're still central to the Universe.) This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Referring to an aphorism of Martin Rees. (see Misattributed below)
Source: The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995), Ch. 12 : The Fine Art of Baloney Detection, p. 221

“No one can by monopolization deprive others of the instruction necessary for their happiness; the instruction must be communal.”

François-Noël Babeuf (1760–1797) French political agitator and journalist of the French Revolutionary period

Nul ne peut par l'accumulation de tous les moyens priver l'autre de l'instruction nécessaire pour son bonheur; l'instruction doit-être commune.
[in Gracchus Babeuf avec les Egaux, Jean-Marc Shiappa, Les éditions ouvrières, 1991, 49, 27082 2892-7, ; Manifeste des Plébéien]
On education

“There are benefits to be gained from the ambiguities of scientific discourse. Of the four previously identified functions served by ambiguity, two remain outside the boundaries of scientific work. The function of attaining enlightenment through the intuition of indeterminacy belongs to mysticism, or perhaps to philosophy and poetry, not to the disciplined activity of science. And the protection of one's meanings and intentions through ambiguously opaque utterance, while perhaps useful as a protective ploy in scientific competition, cannot be sanctioned as appropriate conduct for a scientific enquirer. Through its two other functions, however — the evocative representation of complex meanings and the bonding of a community through diffuse symbols — ambiguity has long served and will continue to serve the general objectives of scientific activity. It is useful for scientific formulations to express an abundance of meanings, for these can ignite a cluster of insights that in turn lead to novel explorations.”

Donald N. Levine (1931–2015) sociologist

Donald N. Levine (1988), The Flight from Ambiguity: Essays in Social and Cultural Theory. p. 218; Partly cited in: David L. Sills, ‎Robert King Merton (2000), Social Science Quotations: Who Said What, When, and Where. p. 129-130

“Life's hard. To be in peace with oneself, one must speak the truth. To be in peace with others, one must lie.”

Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–1999) Argentine novelist

"La vida es difícil. Para estar en paz con uno mismo hay que decir la verdad. Para estar en paz con el prójimo hay que mentir."
Descanso de caminantes, 2001.

“There is a limit to the number of (and I'm going to use this word in an entirely neutral sense) aliens who can be brought into a nation, particularly as close-knit and concentrated a nation as Britain is, without breaking the bounds of that society and setting up intolerable frictions and stresses as damaging to one side as to the other. Now, this is a question of number. But the relationship between number and difference is clearly important, because the more different they are – and colour is a signal, an outward signal of differences (not significant in itself, but it signalizes other differences that one can't deny) – the greater the difference, the smaller the numbers that can at any one time be accepted without breaking, or being thought to break (which comes to the same thing if we're talking about psychology), the framework of a nation and a society. So it's numbers.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: The Trouble with Enoch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nN6sTBSAp-A&feature=youtu.be&t=12m8s (recorded 19 May 1969)
1960s

“Hell is the incapacity to be other than the creature one finds oneself ordinarily behaving as.”

Aldous Huxley book Eyeless in Gaza

Source: Eyeless in Gaza

“A certain ambiguity of rhythm is one of the beauties of a poem”

Anne Ridler (1912–2001) English poet, editor

The Anatomy of Poetry, Marjoie Boulton, Routledge & Kegan, London 1953.

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Primo Levi 44

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