“I decided to start with the reproductive system, not only because of its prurient interest but also because it seemed like the point of departure for all things.”

—  James Matisoff

Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman (2003) (p.x)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 17, 2022. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I decided to start with the reproductive system, not only because of its prurient interest but also because it seemed l…" by James Matisoff?
James Matisoff photo
James Matisoff 3
linguist 1937

Related quotes

William Saroyan photo

“She cried a little, but only inside, because long ago she had decided she didn't like crying because if you ever started to cry it seemed as if there was so much to cry about you almost couldn't stop, and she didn't like that at all.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

Source: Madness in the Family: Stories

David Foster Wallace photo

“And I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
Essays

Donald Barthelme photo

“Well chaps first I'd like to say a few vile things more or less at random, not only because it is expected of me but also because I enjoy it.”

Donald Barthelme book Snow White

Source: Snow White

Eugene V. Debs photo

“We live in the capitalist system, so-called because its dominated b the capitalist class. In this system the capitalists are the rulers and the workers the subjects. The capitalists are in a decided minority and yet they rule because of the ignorance of the working class.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

Working Class Politics (1910)

“If an environmental trace is in close connection with the Ego system it will not only be in communication with the particular time structure of that system with which it communicated at the time of its formation; but because of the coherence of the whole temporal Ego system it will be in communication with later strata also.”

Kurt Koffka (1886–1941) German psychologist

Source: Principles of Gestalt Psychology, 1935, p. 522

Gerhard Richter photo

“So I started to paint like crazy, from figurative to abstract. Then after a year, I put it all on a bonfire in the courtyard of the academy. I suppose there was some ritual involved, but I didn't tell anyone before I did it, so it wasn't public, and I felt the work had to be burned because people were already taking things and paintings were starting to circulate. I had to prevent that because I realized it was time to start from scratch. Photographs were the way forward. I'm shocked now that the story seems clear, because it didn't seem clear at the time.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

Bertrand Russell photo

“My desire and wish is that the things I start with should be so obvious that you wonder why I spend my time stating them. This is what I aim at because the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1910s, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918)

Ludwig Wittgenstein photo

“The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which our arguments have their life.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book On Certainty

On Certainty (1969)
Context: 105. All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments; no it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which our arguments have their life.

Allan Kaprow photo

“[something like] a badly constructed or repaired motor, or like that wonderful event of Tinguely's, where he made a huge contraption in the backyard of the Museum of Modern Art called 'Homage to New York', which was a machine that destroyed itself in various humorous ways. It's that breakdown system along with slippages that you can't predict I find most interesting, not because I want to make a point about society as being a broken down system or that all life is entropic — I don't, but rather that its process is unforeseeable.”

Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) American artist

In an interview with Robert C. Morgan, 1991; in the 'Journal of Contemporary Art, 4', no. 2, p. 56-69
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MqsWqBX4wQ

Russell L. Ackoff photo

“Because the Systems Age is teleologically oriented, it is preoccupied with systems that are goal-seeking or purposeful, that is, systems that can display choice of either means or ends, or both. It is interested in purely mechanical systems only.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1970s, Redesigning the future, 1974, p. 18.

Related topics