“Logic is figure without a ground. (p. 241)”

“Pornography and obscenity…work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground -- situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

“A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.”

W. H. Auden book The Shield of Achilles

“The task confronting contemporary man is to live with the hidden ground of his activities as familiarly as our literate predecessors lived with the figure minus ground.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

“Better to be without logic than without feeling.”

Charlotte Brontë book The Professor

“The practical activity of man had to lead his consciousness to the reptetition of various logical figures thousands of millions of times in order that these figures could obtain the significance of axioms.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

“Older cliches are retrieved both as inherent principles that inform the new ground and new awareness, and as archetypal nostalgia figures with transformed meaning in relation to the new ground.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

“In Chinese, honesty is the figure of a man standing, physically standing, beside his work. That means honesty: a man stands by his work. Two things: figure / ground.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

“There is no smoke without fire, and there is no ethically repugnant principle without logic.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

“More than two millennia later…. Hawthorne puts forward a similar vision: A woman must bring the 'new truth…. in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness' (The Scarlet Letter p.241)…. With the brilliant economy of the letter A, he demonstrates why this vision is doomed to failure. The very passion that renders a woman able to see through the "iron framework" of Puritanism also disables her by causing her to be seen in the eyes of the Puritans as an impure woman, a woman who has been adulterated. This double vision… at once frees and imprisons women.”

Carol Gilligan (1936) American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist