“Communication always involves slippage, and intellectual discourse is particularly liable to being twisted since a recipient can only accommodate novelty by fitting it into a preexisting structure of ideas.”

The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian's Memoir (2005)

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William H. McNeill43

Canadian historian 1917–2016

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“Even discourse which does not acknowledge "musical coherence" as "intellectual communication" does not in fact succeed in treating it as anything else; it is only by locating their concerns in domains where the "musical" aspects of music are peripherally or not at all involved that musical discourses can circumvent the fact that when the "object of thought" consists of the contents of a musical composition just the recognition of the identities of any of these contents (or even of the undivided single identity of them taken all together as a "unit") involves (to varying degrees) the same considerations that are involved in a discourse that explicitly--and hence with a better chance of cognitive particularity--regards such a composition as an instance of communicative thought.”

Benjamin Boretz (1934) American composer

from Meta-Variations: studies in the foundations of musical thought Red Hook, N.Y. : Open Space, 1995.

“Globalization reinforces preexisting gender structures, barriers, and relationships, only now on a global scale.”

George Ritzer (1940) American sociologist

Source: Globalization - A Basic Text (2010), Chapter 15, Global Inequalities II: Global Majority-Minority Relations, p. 455

“Humor, since it depends on so many emotional, social, and intellectual facets of human beings, is particularly immune to computer simulation.”

John Allen Paulos (1945) American mathematician

Source: Mathematics and Humor: A Study of the Logic of Humor (1980), Chapter 3, “Self-Reference and Paradox” (p. 51)

“Now, as there is an infinity of possible universes in the Ideas of God, and as only one of them can exist, there must be a sufficient reason for God's choice, which determines him toward one rather than another. And this reason can be found only in the fitness, or the degrees of perfection, that these worlds contain, since each possible thing has the right to claim existence in proportion to the perfection it involves.”

Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) German mathematician and philosopher

Or, comme il y a une infinité d'univers possibles dans les idées de Dieu, et qu'il n'en peut exister qu'un seul, il faut qu'il y ait une raison suffisante du choix de Dieu qui le détermine à l'un plutôt qu'à l'autre. Et cette raison ne peut se trouver que dans la convenance, dans les degrés de perfection que ces mondes contiennent, chaque possible ayant droit de prétendre à l'existence à mesure de la perfection qu'il enveloppe.
La monadologie (53 & 54).
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“Ever since then, the place has accommodated people with the necessary level of imbalance required to come up with new ideas.”

João Magueijo (1967) Portuguese scientist

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“To a certain extent, the website is unfortunate because it oversimplifies things. Everybody’s concept of having a friend is different. It can definitely blur the relationships that exist between people. But in the end, I think that thefacebook can only reinforce preexisting communities.”

Mark Zuckerberg (1984) American internet entrepreneur

"Exclusive Interview With Mark Zuckerberg" (Nov. 30, 2004) http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~fbar/comm570/Readings/markzuckerberginterview.pdf

“The idea of community presupposes the idea of something in common as well as the idea of community members who have in common what is held in common. [...] Perhaps there is only one and the same reality, one and the same essence, of community and its members. Let us give a name right away to this single and essential reality of the community and its members: life. So, we can already say that the essence of community is life; every community is a community of living beings.”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology, Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 118-119
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“It is a delicate & difficult art fitting rhythm to an idea…communicating momentary phases in a poet's mind.”

T. E. Hulme (1883–1917) English Imagist poet and critic

Speculations (Essays, 1924)

“It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum. There is no question but that nominally religious scientists like Francis Collins and Kenneth R. Miller are doing lasting harm to our discourse by the accommodations they have made to religious irrationality.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris, "The Politics of Ignorance" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/the-politics-of-ignorance_b_5053.html (2 August 2005) <br class="br">2000s

“Humanity takes a long time to understand its relation to its structures of discourse and sociability. People have usually mistaken the forms of inquiry and discourse, exchange and community, to which they are accustomed for flawed approximations to the true face of reason or society. More often than not, they have cast this prejudice aside only to replace it with a more modest, halfhearted reformulation of the same belief.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987), p. 97

“Communication always involves slippage, and intellectual discourse is particularly liable to being twisted since a recipient can only accommodate novelty by fitting it into a preexisting structure of ideas.”

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William H. McNeill43

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