Quotes about context (529 quotes, page 4)

“When one of Feuerbach’s friends attempts to get him an academic position, Feuerbach writes to him: “The more people make of me, the less I am, and vice versa. I am … something only so long as I am nothing.” Hegel felt himself free in the midst of bourgeois restriction. For him, it was by no means impossible as an ordinary official … to be something and at the same time be himself. … In the third epoch of the spirit, that is, since the beginning of the “modern” world, he says … philosophers no longer comprise a separate class; they are what they are, in perfectly ordinary relationship to the state: officially appointed teachers of philosophy. Hegel interprets this transformation as the “reconciliation of the worldly principle with itself.” It is open to each and every one to construct his own “inner world” independent of the force of circumstances which has materialized. The philosopher can now entrust the “external” side of his existence to the “order,” just as the modern man allows fashion to dictate the way he will dress. … The important thing, Hegel concludes, is “to remain true to one’s purpose” within the context of the normal life of a citizen. To be free for truth and at the same time dependent on the state—to him, these two things seemed quite consistent with each other.”

Karl Löwith book From Hegel to Nietzsche

From Hegel to Nietzsche, D. Green, trans. (1964), pp. 68-69.

Life , People , Truth , World

“Above all, do not join the wrong ideological groups or movements, in order to “do something.” By “ideological” (in this context), I mean groups or movements proclaiming some vaguely generalized, undefined (and, usually, contradictory) political goals. (E. g., the Conservative Party, that subordinates reason to faith, and substitutes theocracy for capitalism; or the “libertarian” hippies, who subordinate reason to whims, and substitute anarchism for capitalism.) To join such groups means to reverse the philosophical hierarchy and to sell out fundamental principles for the sake of some superficial political action which is bound to fail.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

“What Can One Do?” The Ayn Rand Letter, Vol. 1, No. 7 (1972)

Faith

“The utopian element in politics lies in the ability to disentangle the image of possible human association from forms of life that make people's material and moral ability depend on their acceptance of predetermined hierarchical and communal divisions. The struggle of this visionary politics is to deny the identification of society with a limited repertory of social forms. Such a repertory imprisons all experiments in practical collaboration, in self-expression and reconciliation, within a determinate scheme of ranks and divisions, of authoritative ideals, and of accepted contexts for the realization of these ideals.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Plasticity Into Power: Comparative-Historical Studies on the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success (1987), p. 12

Life , People , Communication , Dependency

“The emotional quality of what we moderns call our thought produces an extreme violence of conviction combined with extreme incoherence in our arguments. I refer here to ordinary people and not to an intellectual elite. We do not involve ourselves in studying the meaning and consequences of a fact calmly and objectively. The fact asserts itself through its image and associates itself in unchallengeable fashion with other images which, in this mode of thinking, are its true context. Emotions justify as well as provoke or command opinions, which still seem intellectual and reasoned.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 211
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)

People , Fashion , Thinking , Study

“Kantians, of course, will think that I have lost the plot from the start, and that only confusion can result from failure to make these essential, utterly fundamental divisions between “is” and “ought,” fact and value, or the descriptive and the normative, in as rigorous and systematic a way as possible, just as I think they have fallen prey to a kind of fetishism, attributing to a set of human conceptual invention a significance they do not have. … In some contexts, a relative distinction between the facts and human valuations of those facts, or norms, might be perfectly useful. But the division makes sense only relative to the context, and can’t be extracted from that context, promoted, and declared to have absolute standing.”

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), pp. 16-17.

Way , Failure , Thinking , Sense

“To put it most simply, the oral traditional idiom persisted because—even in a written incarnation—it offered the only avenue to the immanent poetic tradition, the invisible but ever-present aesthetic context for all of the poems.”

John Miles Foley (1947–2012) American literary scholar

"Texts That Speak to Readers Who Hear: Old English Poetry and the Languages of Oral Tradition", in Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, ed. Allen J. Frantzen (1991), p. 155

“The suggestion that words are symbols for things, actions, qualities, relationships, et cetera, is naive, a gross simplification. Words are slippery customers. The full meaning of a word does not appear until it is placed in its context, and the context may serve an extremely subtle function -- as with puns, or double entendre. And even then the "meaning" will depend upon the listener, upon the speaker, upon their entire experience of language, upon their knowledge of one another, and upon the whole situation. Words do not "mean things" in a one-to-one relation like a code. Words, too, are empirical signs, not copies or models of anything; truly, onomatopoeia and gestures frequently seem to possess resemblance, but this resemblance does not bear too close examination. A cockerel may seem to say cook-a-doodle-do to an Englishman, but a German thinks it says kikeriki, and a Japanese kokke-kekko. Each can paint only with the phonetic sound of his own language.”

Colin Cherry (1914–1979) British scientist

Source: On Human Communication (1957), What Is It That We Communicate?, p. 10-11

Knowledge , Thinking , Appearance , Painting

“Norms guide market-oriented behaviors within organizations. More specifically, we focus on market orientation as the concrete object of these norms. If, for example, the members of an organization share the value of openness of internal communication, a specific norm related to that value is the openness of market-related internal communication. As another example, the norm of market-related responsibility of employees is a specification of the more general shared value of responsibility of the employees… The difference between values and norms is that norms guide behaviors in a specific context, whereas values represent general guidelines.”

Christian Homburg (1962) German academic

Source: "A multiple-layer model of market-oriented organizational culture", 2000, p. 451

Behavior , Communication

“Nobody disputes, I believe, that our nuclear weaponry is negligible in comparison with that of Russia: if we could destroy 16 Russian cities, she could destroy practically every vestige of life on these islands several times over. For us to use the weapon would therefore be equivalent to more than suicide: it would be genocide – the extinction of our race – in the most literal and precise meaning of that much abused expression. An officer may, in the hour of his country's defeat and disgrace, commit suicide honourably and rationally with his service revolver; but in any collective context the choice of non-existence, of the obliteration of all future hopes, is insanity.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech in Downpatrick, County Down (31 May 1983), quoted in The Times (1 June 1983), p. 4
1980s

Life , Hope , Suicide , Time

“But this I thought was the meaning of life, that the individual shook off the habit of accepting the favors of difference, should that be tempting, steeled himself against its humiliation, should that weigh down on him, in order to find the universal, what is common to all human beings, to concern oneself only with that. Oh! How beautiful to lose oneself in this way. But then I thought again that in the having of this concern the meaning of life was to be concerned for oneself as if the particular individual were all there was. Oh! How beautiful thus to find oneself in the universal! If the universal is the rule then the individual is the paradigm [corrected from demand]; if the universal is the demand then the universal is the fulfillment; if the universal is everything, if the universal says everything, then the particular individual believes that the everything is said about him-him alone. So if the place and context here did not require signature, none would be needed, for again it is infinitely inconsequential who has said it (as though the favored one said it, the one who was wronged being in no position to say it, since after all they all have it in them to do it).”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

S. Kierkegaard 1846 Journals, Hannay 1996, VII IB200, p. 252
1840s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s

Life , Beauty , Way , Universe

“Gödel's theorem shows conclusively that in pure mathematics reductionism does not work. To decide whether a mathematical statement is true, it is not sufficient to reduce the statement to marks on paper and to study the behavior of the marks. Except in trivial cases, you can decide the truth of a statement only by studying its meaning and its context in the larger world of mathematical ideas.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

Truth , World , Behavior , Mathematics

“[The construal of context as a semiotic construct accompanies the construal of language as a metafunctionally organized system because of the realizational relationship between the two. And it is this relationship which helps to explain how language is learned:]
It is this that enables, and disposes, the child to learn the lexicogrammar: since the system is organized along functional lines, it relates closely to what the child can see language doing as he observes it going on around him.”

Michael Halliday (1925–2018) Australian linguist

Source: 1970s and later, Learning How to Mean--Explorations in the Development of Language, 1975, p. 122 cited in: M.A.K. Halliday, Jonathan Webster (2006) The Language of Early Childhood. p. 289.

Learning , Help

“The inevitable lack of objectivity in political decisions, which is only the reflex to suppress the politically inherent friend-enemy antithesis, manifests itself in the regrettable forms and aspects of the scramble for office and the politics of patronage. The demand for depoliticalization which arises in this context means only the rejection of party politics, etc. The equation politics = party politics is possible whenever antagonisms among domestic political parties succeed in weakening the all-embracing political unit, the state.”

Carl Schmitt book The Concept of the Political

The Concept of the Political (1927)

Decision

“Let us summarize briefly our answer to the question, "What do people want from their jobs?" When our respondents reported feeling happy with their jobs, they most frequently described factors. related to their tasks, to events that indicated to them that they were successful in the performance of their work, and to the possibility of professional growth. Conversely, when feelings of unhappiness were reported, they were not associated with the job itself but with conditions that surround the doing of the job. These events suggest to the individual that the context in which he performs his work is unfair or disorganized and as such represents to him an unhealthy psychological work environment. Factors involved in these situations we call factors of hygiene, for they act in a manner analogous to the principles of medical hygiene.”

Frederick Herzberg (1923–2000) American psychologist

Source: The motivation to work, 1959, p. 113

People , Feeling , Question , Success

“Unless we act to end the slaughter of civilians in Syria by President Assad, Isis will continue to find a steady stream of recruits from the Syrian Sunni population driven to desperation and radicalisation. In this context no amount of military action against Isis will be able to eradicate them. … As long as these attacks persist these forces will not be able to focus – as many want to – on freeing their country from the cancer of Isis.”

Jo Cox (1974–2016) UK politician

A new progressive internationalism (17 June 2016)

Country

“Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies.”

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

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 114

“To give a valid Islamic content, as well as a creative, positive direction to the people's dreams and desires; to prepare them not only politically (in the conventional context of this word) but also spiritually and ideologically for the great goal of Pakistan: this is the supreme task awaiting our leaders.”

Muhammad Asad (1900–1992) Austro-Hungarian writer and academic

Source: This Law of Ours and Other Essays (1987), Chapter: What Do we Mean by Pakistan, p 84

People , Dreams

“Frege's pair of concepts (nominatum and sense) is compared with our pair (extension and intension). The two pairs coincide in ordinary (extensional) contexts, but not in oblique (nonextensional) contexts.”

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher

Source: Meaning And Necessity (1947), p. 124 as cited in: E. Cornell Way (1991) Knowledge Representation and Metaphor. p. 183

Sense

“World Encyclopaedia. -- Behind these lies another prospect of greater and more permanent importance; that of an attempt at a comprehensive and continually revised presentation of the whole of science in its social context, an idea most persuasively put forward by H. G. Wells in his appeal for a World Encyclopaedia of which he has already given us a foretaste in his celebrated outlines. The encyclopaedic movement was a great rallying point of the liberal revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The real encyclopaedia should not be what the Encyclopaedia Britannica has degenerated into, a mere mass of unrelated knowledge sold by high-pressure salesmanship, but a coherent expression of the living and changing body of thought; it should sum up what is for the moment the spirit of the age…
The original French Encyclopaedia which did attempt these things was, however, made in the period of relative quiet when the forces of liberation were gathering ready to break their bonds. We have already entered the second period of revolutionary struggle and the quiet thought necessary to make such an effort will not be easy to find, but some effort is worth making because the combined assault on science and humanity by the forces of barbarism has against it, as yet, no general and coherent statement on the part of those who believe in democracy and the need for the people of the world to take over the active control of production and administration for their own safety and welfare.”

John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971) British scientist

Source: The Social Function of Science (1939), p. 306-307. Chapter SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATION. The Function of Scientific Publication. See also World Brain

People , Age , World , Democracy

“We believe that, ultimately, the most important learning occurs in the context of our day-to-day life, the aspirations we pursue, the challenges we face, and the responses we bring forth.”

Peter M. Senge (1947) American scientist

The Dance of Change (1999)

Life , Learning

“I’m thinking about the mythical wonders of the world, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Tower of Babel. It’s as if the collective will comes up with something that has resonance on an individual level and so becomes mythic. I can claim to take that as a model for a way of thinking. Art can do it, and I’m going to have a damn good go. I want to occupy the territory, but the territory is an idea and a way of thinking as much as a context that generates objects.”

Anish Kapoor (1954) British contemporary artist of Indian birth

Anish Kapoor Opens the Door:Modern Artist Creates Monuments that Transcend Space & Time

World , Art , Way , Idea

“I take responsibility for ending starvation within twenty years. The Hunger Project is not about solutions. It's not about fixing up the project. It's not about anybody's good idea. The Hunger Project is about creating a context - creating the end of hunger as an idea whose time has come.”

Werner Erhard (1935) Critical Thinker and Author

Quote from 1977, re: The Hunger Project
[178, Larson's Book of World Religions and Alternative Spirituality, Bob Larson, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2004, 084236417X]
Attributed

Hunger , Quotes , Idea , Time

“Laughter is a mental mechanism which enables us to face reality without falling into despondency or delusion. As people who have sunk in apathy seldom bother us by rushing into print, delusion (leaving aside deceit) constitutes the chief obstacle to the progress of our understanding of society, and in this context is usually assumes the form of doctrinairism couched in a mystifying jargon. A sense of humour is the most reliable external indicator of the likelihood of immunity from this folly, and of the ability to appraise social situations realistically.”

Stanislav Andreski (1919–2007) Polish-British sociologist

Social Sciences as Sorcery (1972)

People , Understanding , Reality , Sense

“As for the epistemological dimension, we draw on Michael Polanyi's (1966) distinction between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is personal, context-specific, and therefore hard to formalize and communicate. Explicit or "codified" knowledge, on the other hand, refers to knowledge that is transmittable in formal, systematic language.”

Ikujiro Nonaka (1935) Japanese business theorist

Source: The Knowledge-creating Company, 1995, p. 95

Communication , Knowledge , Drawing , Personality

“Transformation does not negate what has gone before; rather, it fulfills it. Creating the context of a world that works for everyone is not just another step forward in human history; it is the context out of which our history will begin to make sense.”

Werner Erhard (1935) Critical Thinker and Author

[Lynne Twist, 2003, The Soul of Money: Transforming your Relationship with Money and Life, New York, New York, W.W. Norton., 252, 039305097]
Attributed

World , History , Sense

“Europe's immigration policy is a disaster — and for reasons that transcend the idiocy of allowing the free influx of young male Muslims from a premodern, war-torn Middle East into a postmodern, pacifist, and post-Christian Europe. Europe has not been a continent of immigrants since the Middle Ages. It lacks the ingredients necessary to assimilate, integrate, and intermarry large numbers of newcomers each year: There is no dynamic and fluid economy, no confidence in its own values, no belief that class and race are incidental, not essential, to one's persona, no courage to assume that an immigrant made a choice to leave a worse place for a better one. And all this is in the context of a class-bound hierarchy masked and excused by boutique leftism.”

Victor Davis Hanson (1953) American military historian, essayist, university professor

2010s, Europe at the Edge of the Abyss (2016)

War , Age , Confidence , Courage

“There comes a point where individual mythology and universal mythology are identical. In this context it is clear that there can be no concern with symbolism and description, memories, misty impressions, of childhood, pictoricism, sentimentalism: all this must be absolutely excluded. So must every hedonistic repetition of arguments that have already been exhausted, since the man who continues to trifle with myths that have already been discovered is an aesthete, and worse.”

Piero Manzoni (1933–1963) Italian artist

Source: For the Discovery of a Zone of Images', Piero Manzoni, 1957, pp. 18-19

Universe , Memory , Childhood

“It is characteristic of the Oxford school of criticism to understand these [metaphysical] fallacies as logical non sequiturs—as though philosophers throughout the centuries had been, for reasons unknown, just a bit too stupid to discover the elementary flaws in their arguments. The truth of the matter is that elementary logical mistakes are quite rare in the history of philosophy; what appear to be errors in logic to minds disencumbered of questions that have been uncritically dismissed as “meaningless” are usually caused by semblances, unavoidable for beings whose whole existence is determined by appearance. Hence, In our context the only relevant question is whether the semblances are inauthentic or authentic ones, whether they are caused by dogmatic beliefs and arbitrary assumptions, mere mirages that disappear upon closer inspection, or whether they are inherent in the paradoxical condition of a living being that, though itself part of the world of appearances, is in possession of a faculty, the ability to think, that permits the mind to withdraw from the world without ever being able to leave it or transcend it.”

Hannah Arendt book The Life of the Mind

Source: The Life of the Mind (1971/1978), p. 45.

Truth , Stupidity , World , School

““What about spatial relationships?” the investigator inquired, as I was looking at the books. It was difficult to answer. True, the perspective looked rather odd, and the walls of the room no longer seemed to meet in right angles. But these were not the really important facts. The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as Where?—How far?—How situated in relation to what? In the mescalin experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its Perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern. I saw the books, but was not at all concerned with their positions in space. What I noticed, what impressed itself upon my mind was the fact that all of them glowed with living light and that in some the glory was more manifest than in others. In this context position and the three dimensions were beside the point. Not, of course, that the category of space had been abolished. When I got up and walked about, I could do so quite normally, without misjudging the whereabouts of objects. Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

describing his experiment with mescaline, pp. 19-20
Source: The Doors of Perception (1954)

Books , World , Question , Problem

“Wallace's error on human intellect arose from the inadequacy of his rigid selectionism, not from a failure to apply it. And his argument repays our study today, since its flaw persists as the weak link in many of the most “modern” evolutionary speculations of our current literature. For Wallace's rigid selectionism is much closer than Darwin's pluralism to the attitude embodied in our favored theory today, which, ironically in this context, goes by the name of “Neo-Darwinism.””

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"Natural Selection and the Human Brain: Darwin vs. Wallace", p. 54
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

Error , Literature , Failure , Study

“His appearance gives no clue to what his profession might be, and yet he doesn't look like a man without a profession either. Consider what he's like: He always knows what to do. He knows how to gaze into a woman's eyes. He can put his mind to any question at any time. He can box. He is gifted, strong-willed, open-minded, fearless, tenacious, dashing, circumspect — why quibble, suppose we grant him all those qualities — yet he has none of them! They have made him what he is, they have set his course for him, and yet they don't belong to him. When he is angry, something in him laughs. When he is sad, he is up to something. When something moves him, he turns against it. He'll always see a good side to every bad action. What he thinks of anything will always depend on some possible context — nothing is, to him, what it is: everything is subject to change, in flux, part of a whole, of an infinite number of wholes presumably adding up to a super-whole that, however, he knows nothing about. So every answer he gives is only a partial answer, every feeling an opinion, and he never cares what something is, only 'how' it is — some extraneous seasoning that somehow goes along with it, that's what interests him.”

Robert Musil book The Man Without Qualities

The Man Without Qualities (1930–1942)

Sadness , Feeling , Question , Thinking

“If Soviet society is to move forward with confidence toward our great goals, each new generation must rise to an ever-higher level of learning and general cultivation, occupational skill and civic activism. One might say that such is the law of societal progress. In the context of the scientific and technological revolution, under a virtual avalanche of information, this law imposes unwontedly high demands on both those who study and those who teach—from rank-and-file classroom teachers to government ministers.”

Konstantin Chernenko (1911–1985) Soviet politician

Quoted in "Soviet Education" - Page 109 - by International Arts and Sciences Press, M.E. Sharpe, Inc - Education - 1958

Law , Confidence , Study , Learning

“I was particularly struck in this context by my honourable Friend, Mr K. S. Lo's concern at the decline in the enamelware industry as an example of the effect of lost advantages, as if this decline were a loss rather than a gain to the community. It has declined, I believe, because we have learned to use our resources of enterprise, capital and labour in other more profitable directions. That is progress. We would be in a sorry way if enamelware was still our fourth biggest industry.”

John James Cowperthwaite (1915–2006) British colonial administrator

October 9, 1970, page 114.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council

Way , Communication , Learning , Loss

“Nowhere is the difference between either/or and both/and more clearly apparent than in the context of information.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer (1938) American physicist

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 20, A Game of Beads, The wonder of quantum superposition, p. 182

“The actual infinite arises in three contexts: first when it is realized in the most complete form, in a fully independent otherworldly being, in Deo, where I call it the Absolute Infinite or simply Absolute; second when it occurs in the contingent, created world; third when the mind grasps it in abstracto as a mathematical magnitude, number or order type.”

Georg Cantor (1845–1918) mathematician, inventor of set theory

As quoted in Mind Tools: The Five Levels of Mathematical Reality (1988) by Rudy Rucker. ~ ISBN 0395468108

World , Mathematics

“But in the second half of the twelfth century A. D., we find a new type of Muslim saint appearing on the scene and dominating it in subsequent centuries. That was the sufi joined to a silsila. This is not the place to discuss the character of some outstanding sufis (…) The common name which is used for these early sufis as well as for the teeming breed belonging to the latter-day silsilas, has caused no end of confusion. So far as India is concerned, it is difficult to find a sufi whose consciousness harboured even a trace of any spirituality. By and large, the sufis that functioned in this country were the most fanatic and fundamentalist activists of Islamic imperialism, the same as the latter-day Christian missionaries in the context of Spanish and Portuguese imperialism.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume I (1990)

Appearance , Country

“Magically turning people's old scalar contexts into list contexts is a recipe for several kinds of disaster.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[199709291631.JAA08648@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

People

“This tendency to anthropomorphize flows naturally from the context in which consciousness evolved. Consciousness is a social tool for understanding the behavior of others by modelling it on one's own feelings.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

The Origin of Humankind (1994)

Behavior , Feeling , Understanding , Nature

“I'm a huge believer in evolution (not in the sense that "it happened" – anybody who doesn't believe that is either uninformed or crazy, but in the sense "the processes of evolution are really fundamental, and should probably be at least thought about in pretty much any context").”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

LKML, September 28, 2006 http://groups.google.com/group/fa.linux.kernel/msg/892dc13a2f4c5483
2000s, 2006

Sense

“This book is dedicated to the memory of my teacher Rudolf Bultmann. He encouraged me more than thirty years ago to deal more intensively with the extra-canonical writings from the early Christian period. His unwavering insistence upon the consistent application of the historical-critical method and his emphasis upon the investigation of early Christian literature in the context of the history of religions must remain basic commitments of New Testament scholarship.”

Helmut Koester (1926–2016) biblical scholar

Introduction to the New Testament (1982), Preface

Books , Religion , History , Literature

“Bearing in mind that “the market” is not an invention of capitalism but that it has existed for thousands of years in many different societies, social justice logically requires that the profits resulting from the operation of markets and infrastructures created by society be equitably shared within societies and in a larger context within the human family.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Interim report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, Alfred Maurice de Zayas http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/IntOrder/A.67.277_en.pdf.
2012

Family , Justice

“Except for Marxian theories, nearly all modern theories of the business cycle have essential elements that trace back to Knut Wicksell's turn-of-the-century writings on interest and prices. Austrians, New Classicists, Monetarists, and even Keynesians can legitimately claim a kinship on this basis. Accordingly, the recognition, that both the Austrians and the New Classicists have a Swedish ancestry does not translate into a meaningful claim that the two schools are essentially similar. To the contrary, identifying their particular relationships to Wicksellian ideas, like comparing the two formally similar business-cycle theories themselves, reveals more differences than similarities. … [T]o establish the essential difference between the Austrians and the New Classicists, it needs to be added that the focus of the Austrian theory is on the actual market process that translates the monetary cause into the real phenomena and hence on the institutional setting in which this process plays itself out.The New Classicists deliberately abstract from institutional considerations and specifically deny, on the basis of empirical evidence, that the interest rate plays a significant role in cyclical fluctuations (Lucas 1981, p. 237 151–1). Thus, Wicksell's Interest and Prices is at best only half relevant to EBCT. … Taking the Wicksellian metaphor as their cue, the New Classicists are led away from the pre-eminent Austrian concern about the actual market process that transforms cause into effect and towards the belief that a full specification of the economy's structure, which is possible only in the context of an artificial economy, can shed light on an effect whose nature is fundamentally independent of the cause.”

Roger Garrison (1944) American economist

Pages 98–99.
"New Classical and Old Austrian Economics", 1991

School , Idea , Business , Nature

“The old linear pattern of thinking by reading and describing from left to right, top to bottom has many problems in organizing information coming from eyes, ears, etc. For example, the ability to read and understand the context of a book is different from memorizing them simply as sentences.”

Tony Buzan (1942–2019) British psychologist

The Mind Map Book, Buzan and Buzan (1991)

Books , Understanding , Problem , Thinking

“"Tolerance" is not only the acceptance that people, as diverse they may be, have the right to be as they are and to live in peace together. Tolerance — in the context of business — is also the recognition that to get what you want, you have to give something in return.”

Begum Aga Khan (1963) German philanthropist

International Business and Leadership Symposium address

People , Peace , Business

“As far as I know, Nehru never defined secularism in its proper European and historical context.”

Girilal Jain (1924–1993) Indian journalist

Girilal Jain, "This is Hindu India", in : Elst, Koenraad: Ayodhya and after, Appendix I

“An idea is always abhorred when taken out of its historical context”

Ali Al-Wardi (1913–1995) Iraqi sociologist

Idea

“We can establish universally an education that recognizes in every child a tongue-tied prophet, and in the school the voice of the future, and that equips the mind to think beyond and against the established context of thought and of life as well as to move within it. We can develop a democratic politics that renders the structure of society open in fact to challenge and reconstruction, weakening the dependence of change on crisis and the power of the dead over the living. We can make the radical democratization of access to the resources and opportunities of production the touchstone of the institutional reorganization of the market economy, and prevent the market from remaining fastened to a single version of itself. We can create policies and arrangements favorable to the gradual supersession of economically dependent wage work as the predominant form of free labor, in favor of the combination of cooperation and self-employment. We can so arrange the relation between workers and machines that machines are used to save our time for the activities that we have not yet learned how to repeat and consequently to express in formulas. We can reshape the world political and economic order so that it ceases to make the global public goods of political security and economic openness depend upon submission to an enforced convergence to institutions and practices hostile to the experiments required to move, by many different paths, in such a direction.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger The Religion of the Future

Source: The Religion of the Future (2014), p. 29

Life , Hostility , World , Education

“What is called "objectivity," scientific for instance (in which I firmly believe, in a given situation) imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, firmly established, or rooted in a network of conventions … and yet which still remains a context.”

Jacques Derrida book Limited Inc

Limited Inc (1977)

“The first charge against 'measurement', in the fundamental axioms of quantum mechanics, is that it anchors there the shifty split of the world into 'system' and 'apparatus'. A second charge is that the word comes loaded with meaning from everyday life, meaning which is entirely inappropriate in the quantum context.”

John S. Bell (1928–1990) Northern Irish physicist

Against 'measurement' (1990)

Life , World

“Obama shared in the more philosophical part of the discussion as vigorously as he did in the more context-oriented part …. The impression you report, of impatience with speculative exploration, is false. It does justice neither to him nor to me to represent these conversations under the lens of philistine activist against starry-eyed theoretician. He was always interested in ideas, big and small.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Quoted in David Remnick, The Bridgeː The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (2010), p. 185 (explaining the nature of Obama's participation in the two seminars that Obama took with Unger while studying at Harvard Law School)
On Barack Obama

Justice , Idea , Parting , Falseness

“A radicalized pragmatism is the operational ideology of the shortening of the distance between context-preserving and context-transforming activities. It is thus a program of permanent revolution—however, a program so conceived that the word “revolution” is robbed of all romantic otherworldliness and reconciled to the everydayness of life as it is.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 57

Life

“Contemporary institutional theorizing in the field of organizations dates back thirty-odd years. This particularly describes what are called new or neo-institutionalisms. These terms evoke contrasts with earlier theories of the embeddedness of organizations in social and cultural contexts, now retrospectively called the ‘old institutionalism’ (Hirsch & Lounsbury, 1997; Stinchcombe, 1997). They went through a period of inattention, so that when institutional thinking came back in force after the 1960s, it seemed quite new.
Institutional theories, as they emerged in the 1970s, received much attention in the field, along with other lines of thought emphasizing the dependence of modern organizations on their environments. Perhaps surprisingly, they continue to receive attention, and seem to retain substantial measures of vigor.”

John W. Meyer (1935) Sociologist and professor at Stanford University

Source: "Reflections on institutional theories of organization,." 2008, p. 790

Thinking , Dependency

“This is indeed one of the most important general traits of a modern society: cultural homogeneity, the capacity for context-free communication, the standardization of expression and comprehension.”

Ernest Gellner (1925–1995) Czech anthropologist, philosopher and sociologist

Conditions of Liberty (1994)

Communication

“I am a sort of revolutionary. I have a strange ambition, though. I don’t want any statues. What I want is for the world to work. I want to create a context in which government, education, and families are nurturing. I want to enable, to empower, the institutions of man. Social transformation doesn’t argue against social change. Radicalism and resistance produce obvious values. But after a while, social change chases its own tail. Social change just produces social change. After most ordinary revolutions, after most social change, the world still doesn’t work. For the world to work you must have social transformation, which creates the space for effective social change.”

Werner Erhard (1935) Critical Thinker and Author

Interview with William Warren Bartley, cited in — [Bartley, William Warren, w:William Warren Bartley, Werner Erhard: the Transformation of a Man: the Founding of est, Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1978, New York, 157, 0-517-53502-5]

World , Education , Family , Change

“(The lockout) makes no sense unless you put it in the context of a wider strategy, which is to somehow weaken Canadians' commitment to Canada Post so that ultimately, when the government gets out there to privatize it, they think they can get the public on their side”

Jack Layton (1950–2011) Leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada

Feds using lockout as wedge to privatize Canada Post: Layton http://www.canada.com/news/Feds+using+lockout+wedge+privatize+Canada+Post+Layton/4965556/story.html June 17, 2011

Thinking , Sense

“Openness to the new is the virtue that describes the moral consequence of the doctrine of the relation of spirit to structure. The religion of the future inherits this doctrine from the struggle with the world, and radicalizes it. This virtue acts out the human truth of our relation to the settled contexts of our life and thought. That they are ephemeral and defective, that they cannot accommodate all the experience and insight we have reason to value, that there is always more in us, individually as well as collectively, than is, or ever can be, in them are facts giving us persistent reason to rebel against such structures.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger The Religion of the Future

Source: The Religion of the Future (2014), p. 385

Life , Truth , World , Religion

“We live today in a world which only faintly resembles that of a half century ago. The standard of living, the level of education, and the political complexion of the United States today profoundly affect both the possibilities and limitations of organizational behavior. In addition, technological changes are bringing about changes in all types of organization. In the military, for example, it is becoming increasingly difficult to manage a weapons team in the field as a typical infantry unit was managed a couple of decades ago. Such a team requires a high degree of autonomy. Instead of following explicit orders from superiors, it must be able to adjust its behavior to fit local circumstances within the context of relatively broad objectives. (It is interesting to note the attempts that are made — by "programming" for example — to retain central control over the operations of such units. Established theories of control are not abandoned easily, even in the face of clear evidence of their inappropriateness.) Underlying the principles of classical organization theory are a number of assumptions about human behavior which are at best only partially true.”

Douglas McGregor (1906–1964) American professor

Source: The Human Side of Enterprise (1960), p. 16 (2006; 23)

World , Education , Behavior , Change

“We don't have the user centricity. Until we understand context, which is way beyond presence — presence is the most trivial notion, just am I on this device or not; it doesn't say am I meeting with something, am I focused on writing something. i had to suck dicks this morning help me i gayyyyyy”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

.NET Briefing Day Speech (24 July 2002) http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/speeches/2002/07-24netstrategy.asp
2000s

Way , Understanding

“The more we devote ourselves to observing animals and their behaviour, the more we love them, on seeing how gready they care for their young; in such a context, we cannot even contemplate cruelty to a wolf. Leibnitz put the grub he had been observing back on the tree with its leaf, lest he should be guilty of doing any harm to it. It upsets a man to destroy such a creature for no reason, and this tenderness is subsequendy transferred to man.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Part II, pp. 212-213
Lectures on Ethics (1924)

Love , Tree , Wolf , Animals

“In general the claim can be supported that a view of classical political economy as committed to extreme laissez-faire or unmitigated economic individualism misrepresents or at the very least analytically overgeneralizes their circumscribed theoretical and practical aims. In general then, with regard to both political and economic liberty, the classical political economists might be seen to be united in their efforts to theorize and systematize the productive and allocating functions of the mechanism of the market as the most efficient means to engender the growth of wealth. At the same time, classicals such as Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, and Mill recognized that the market, of necessity, operated in a larger context of restriction – not only legal, but equally as important, within political, religious, moral, and conventional restrictions – which could not be readily or in some cases even desirably overcome.”

Shannon C. Stimson (1951) American political theorist

"Classical Political Economy", in Coole, Diana H.; Gibbons, Michael; Ellis, Elisabeth et al., The encyclopedia of political thought (2014); see also Adam Smith

Support , Effort , Time , Wealth

“The member of a culture … purposely avoids the relationship of intimacy; he wants the object somehow depicted and fictionalized. … He is embarrassed when this is taken out of its context of proper sentiments and presented bare, for he feels that this is a reintrusion of that world which his whole conscious effort has sought to banish. Forms and conventions are the ladder of ascent. And hence the speechlessness of the man of culture when he beholds the barbarian tearing aside some veil which is half adornment, half concealment.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 26.

World , Feeling , Tear , Effort

“It is not easy to tear any event out of the context of the universe in which it occurred without detaching from it some factor that influenced it.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 1, Scientific Method and the Social Sciences, p. 35

Tear , Universe

“The distinction between "language" and "speech" rests on easily observable facts. The theoretical aspect of the issue has been raised in contemporary literature only by de Saussure, although in the terminological sense all the languages (I refer here to our cultural circle and its traditions), beginning with the distinction … lingua and sermo in Latin, accept the difference between "language" as a system of linguistic facts and "speech" as the name of a type of action. Following de Saussure, that theoretical distinction has been adopted in all contemporary linguistics. Gardiner distinguishes between speech as an activity with clearly utilitarian ends in view, and language as a precise knowledge pertaining to communication by means of verbal signs'*. The differentiation has been adopted in the Marxist literature of the subject, linguistic, psychological, etc. In his Psychology (in Russian) S. L. Rubinshtein defines speech as language functioning in the context of individual consciousness, and compares the difference between speech and language to the difference between individual and social consciousness.”

Adam Schaff (1913–2006) Polish Marxist philosopher and theorist

Source: Introduction to semantics, 1962, p. 316

Communication , Literature , Knowledge , Sense

“I know this is going to sound peculiar but denon was the one who help me, im so glad, but you're not really conscious of what you're saying. You see a picture in front of you and it's your job to interpret that picture for the viewers at home and put what they are seeing into context with everybody else in the race. You use whatever words come into your head at the time. It's not something that you can think about.”

Murray Walker (1923) Motorsport commentator and journalist

Greg Thom (March 14, 2007) "Standing Joke", Herald Sun, p. H08.
Interviews

Home , Thinking , Time , Help

“We must begin by distinguishing between visual mental imagery and visual perception: Visual perception occurs while a stimulus is being viewed, and includes functions such as visual recognition (i. e., registering that a stimulus is familiar) and identification (i. e., recalling the name, context, or other information associated with the object). Two types of mechanisms are used in visual perception: “bottom-up” mechanisms are driven by the input from the eyes; in contrast, “top-down” mechanisms make use of stored information (such as knowledge, belief, expectations, and goals). Visual mental imagery is a set of representations that gives rise to the experience of viewing a stimulus in the absence of appropriate sensory input. In this case, information in memory underlies the internal events that produce the experience. Unlike afterimages, mental images are relatively prolonged.”

Stephen Kosslyn (1948) American psychologist

Stephen M. Kosslyn, "Mental images and the brain." Cognitive Neuropsychology 22.3-4 (2005): p. 334

Knowledge , Memory

“Since it is only in the context of a proposition that words have any meaning, our problem becomes this: To define the sense of a proposition in which a number-word occurs.”

Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) mathematician, logician, philosopher

Nur im Zusammenhange eines Satzes bedeuten die Wörter etwas. Es wird also darauf ankommen, den Sinn eines Satzes zu erklären, in dem ein Zahlwort vorkommt.
Gottlob Frege (1950 [1884]). p. 73

Problem , Sense

“The progress of science requires more than new data; it needs novel frameworks and contexts. And where do these fundamentally new views of the world arise? They are not simply discovered by pure observation; they require new modes of thought. And where can we find them, if old modes do not even include the right metaphors? The nature of true genius must lie in the elusive capacity to construct these new modes from apparent darkness. The basic chanciness and unpredictability of science must also reside in the inherent difficulty of such a task.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Flamingo's Smile

"False Premise, Good Science", p. 138
The Flamingo's Smile (1985)

Lie , World , Nature , Science

“Why did his interest in the concept of spontaneous order and the history of the doctrine of unintended social consequences undergo very little development after the 1960s? All of his political writings are in fact amazingly repetitious, exploring a small number of big themes which, however, are not further refined or extended in new contexts. As organizing concepts, they held, I am convinced, enormous potentialities but nevertheless Hayek himself failed to realize them.”

Mark Blaug (1927–2011) British economist

Hayek revisited (1993)

History

“The neglect of context, it is argued, leads to the development of theories that do not have the potential of understanding development and change over time or for understanding the subtle nuances of interaction that are critical in apprehending what is really occurring.”

Jeffrey Pfeffer (1946) American academic

Source: Organizations and organization theory, 1982, p. 75

Understanding , Change , Time

“We can consider cellular energy conversions—like all other energy conversions—in the context of the laws of thermodynamics.”

Albert L. Lehninger (1917–1986) American biochemist

Principles of Biochemistry, Ch. 1 : The Foundations of Biochemistry

Law

“The art of self-transformation for the sake of developing practical capabilities seems to have a similar content in the most varied historical circumstances. The Mamluks and the Normans suffered defeat because they failed to open up and readjust the organizational and social contexts of warfare. The Seljuqs succeeded because they did just that. The West African coastal kingdoms used an extraneous technological advantage to avoid having to change radically. But they could neither go on the offensive against the savanna states nor prepare themselves to resist their European patrons and trading partners.
In all these instances success seems to have required the dissociation and recombination of available models of the organizational and social context of military activity. To have succeeded would not have meant, for the Mamluks, becoming like the Ottomans; it would have meant creating an order that never existed before. To possess the alien, you must change it.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Plasticity Into Power: Comparative-Historical Studies on the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success (1987), pp. 169-170

Art , Suffering , Change , Success

“[A] skyhook is … an exception to the principle that all design, and apparent design, is ultimately the result of mindless, motiveless mechanicity. A crane, in contrast, is a subprocess or special feature of a design process that can be demonstrated to permit the local speeding up of the basic, slow process of natural selection, and that can be demonstrated to be itself the predictable (or retroactively explicable) product of the basic process. … [T]he physicist Steven Weinberg, in Dreams of a Final Theory (1992) … distinguishes between uncompromising reductionism (a bad thing) and compromising reductionism (which he ringingly endorses). Here is my own version. We must distinguish reductionism, which is in general a good thing, from greedy reductionism, which is not. The difference, in the context of Darwin's theory, is simple: greedy reductionists think that everything can be explained without cranes; good reductionists think that everything can be explained without skyhooks.”

Daniel Dennett book Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

Dreams , Nature , Thinking , Speed

“Regimes of racial segregation were not disestablished because of the work of leaders and presidents and legislators but rather because of the fact that ordinary people adopted a critical stance in the way in which they perceived their relationship to reality. Social realities that may have appeared inalterable, impenetrable, came to be viewed as malleable and transformable; and people learned how to imagine what it might mean to live in a world that was not so exclusively governed by the principle of white supremacy. This collective consciousness emerged within the context of social struggles.”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Closures and Continuities (2013)

People , World , Way , Imagination

“Slavery is the ultimate form of being ripped from one's context, and thus from all the social relationships that make one a human being.”

David Graeber (1961) American anthropologist and anarchist

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Seven, "Honor and Degradation", p. 168

“There is no such thing as a casual, non-significant sexual act; everyone knows this. Contrast sex with eating - you're strolling along a lane, you see a mushroom on a bank as you pass by, you know about mushrooms, you pick it and you eat it quite casually - sex is never like that. That's why virtue in connection with eating is basically a matter only of the pattern of one's eating habits. But virtue in sex - chastity - is not only a matter of such a pattern, that is of its role in a pair of lives. A single sexual action can be bad even without regard to its context, its further intentions and its motives.”

G. E. M. Anscombe (1919–2001) British analytic philosopher

Contraception and Chastity (1975)

Sex , Motivation

“It wasn't intelligence — it was propaganda. They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together.”

Karen Kwiatkowski (1960) retired military officer and author

Interview by Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest, " The Lie Factory http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html", Mother Jones, January/February 2004.

Intelligence

“When we say architecture, we include the social, political and économie context. Architecture of any sort is in fact the inévitable background, support and frame of any work.”

Daniel Buren (1938) sculptor from France

Daniel Buren (1979), cited in: A. A. Bronson, ‎Peggy Gale, ‎Art Metropole (1983). Museums by artists. p. 73
1970s

Support

“I really believe that the marijuana laws are a terrible injustice. They make no sense scientifically, ethically, legally, or any way. They cost a fortune to enforce and we incarcerate hundreds of thousands of people who have done nothing else, but possess or distribute marijuana. Maybe it's because I'm a child of the 60's and marijuana has been such a positive part of my life. I have never seen it as being addictive, having spent weeks, and months, and days of my life (and years) without using marijuana in any form. For me, it's a kind of a sacrament, something that should be used wisely and in the context of a loving family existence. […] There's a place for alcohol too, but there's no reason why adults shouldn't be allowed to do something which not only doesn't add harm to themselves or others, but is a way to enhance the beauty of life, the beauty of eating, of listening to music, of being with friends and family, of being with the one you love.”

Ann Druyan (1949) American author and producer

Ann Druyan – from her video podcast At Home in the Cosmos with Annie Druyan. — OVGuide. "Ann Druyan – A Plea for a Change in the Marijuana Laws Video" http://www.ovguide.com/ann-druyan-9202a8c04000641f8000000000008b85 (Podcast). published by Ann Druyan. Retrieved 2013-10-02.

Love , Life , People , Alcohol

“Wikipedia lacks the habit or tradition of respect for expertise. As a community, far from being elitist (which would, in this context, mean excluding the unwashed masses), it is anti-elitist (which, in this context, means that expertise is not accorded any special respect, and snubs and disrespect of expertise is tolerated).”

Larry Sanger (1968) American former professor, co-founder of Wikipedia, founder of Citizendium and other projects

"Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism" at kuro5hin (31 December 2004).

Communication

“A spurious democracy has influenced both our research methods (I am sometimes tempted to define “validity” as part of the context of an experiment demanding so little in the way of esoteric gift that any number can play at it, provided they have taken a certain number of courses) and our research subjects”

David Riesman (1909–2002) American Sociologist

it would be deemed snobbish to investigate only the best people
“Clinical and Cultural Aspects of the Aging Process,” p. 485
Individualism Reconsidered (1954)

People , Way , Democracy , Parting

“Not all words … submit equally to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of it; it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the will of the speaker.”

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) Philosopher, scholar

Source: "Discourse in the Novel" (1935), p. 294

“Since it is always the same person whose mind thinks, wills, and judges, the autonomous nature of these activities has created great difficulties. Reason’s inability to move the will, plus the fact that thinking can only “understand” what is past what neither remove it nor “rejuvenate it” … have led to the various doctrines asserting the mind’s impotence and the force of the irrational, in brief to Hume’s famous dictum that “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions,” that is, to a rather simple-minded reversal of the Platonic notion of reason’s uncontested rulership in the household of the soul. What is so remarkable in all these theories and doctrines is their implicit monism, the claim that behind the obvious multiplicity of the world’s appearances and, even more pertinently to our context, behind the obvious plurality of man’s faculties and abilities, there must exist a oneness — the old hen pan, “the all is one””

Hannah Arendt book The Life of the Mind

either a single source or a single ruler.
Source: The Life of the Mind (1971/1978), p. 70.

World , Soul , Understanding , Nature

“… sometime around now, the rules for living successfully on earth shifted, and an opportunity, unseen before, began to reveal itself. This opportunity is a context-a particular space, or way of being-which unexpectedly creates the possibility for a person’s life to truly make a difference. In this context, the way each of us answers the question, ‘What is my life really going to be about?’ can literally alter the course of humanity.”

Werner Erhard (1935) Critical Thinker and Author

"The Context for Creating a Transformed World: A World That Works for Everyone." 'Article in 'The Graduate Review (April 1980) by Mary Earle & Neal Rogin.

Life , Way , Question , Personality

“ Every individual word in a passage or poetry can no more be said to denote some specific referent than does every brush mark, every line in a painting have its counterpart in reality. The writer or speaker does not communicate his thoughts to us; he communicates a representation for carrying out, this function under the severe discipline of using the only materials he has, sound and gesture. Speech is like painting, a representation made out of given materials -- sound or paint. The function of speech is to stimulate and set up thoughts in us having correspondence with the speaker's desires; he has then communicated with us. But he has not transmitted a copy of his thoughts, a photograph, but only a stream of speech -- a substitute made from the unpromising material of sound. The artist, the sculptor, the caricaturist, the composer are akin in this [fact that they have not transmitted a copy of their thoughts], that they express (make representations of) their thoughts using chosen, limited materials. They make the "best" representations, within these self-imposed constraints. A child who builds models of a house, or a train, using only a few colored bricks, is essentially engaged in the same creative task.* Metaphors can play a most forceful role, by importing ideas through a vehicle language, setting up what are purely linguistic associations (we speak of "heavy burden of taxation," "being in a rut"). The imported concepts are, to some extent, artificial in their contexts, and they are by no means universal among different cultures. For instance, the concepts of cleanliness and washing are used within Christendom to imply "freedom from sin." We Westerners speak of the mind's eye, but this idea is unknown amongst the Chinese. that is, we are looking at it with the eyes of our English-speaking culture. A grammar book may help us to decipher the text more thoroughly, and help us comprehend something of the language structure, but we may never fully understand if we are not bred in the culture and society that has modeled and shaped the language. (p. 74)”

Colin Cherry (1914–1979) British scientist

See Gombrich in reference 348
On Human Communication (1957), Language: Science and Aesthetics

Books , Color , Communication , Idea

“Putting Hunter in context was tough.”

William McKeen (1954) American academic

Epilogue, p. 356
Outlaw Journalist (2008)

“I speculate that the genesis of the chicken-joke lies in some situation such as the one illustrated above, but over time the original context of the joke was lost, which left the chicken sadly decontextualized.”

Ryan North (1980) Canadian webcomic writer and programmer

Explaining jokes http://www.insaneabode.com/roboterotica/jokesexplained/whydidthechicken.html

Time

“The point is not that contemporaneity is insignificant. … It is rather that there is something more important at stake in the temporal character of literature: its relation to history, understood as change and development, rather than as context and frame.”

Russell Berman (1950) American academic

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 14.

History , Literature , Change

“In the last two decades we have witnessed the emergence of the "system" as a key concept in scientific research. Systems, of course, have been studied for centuries, but something new has been added… The tendency to study systems as an entity rather than as a conglomeration of parts is consistent with the tendency in contemporary science no longer to isolate phenomena in narrowly confined contexts, but rather to open interactions for examination and to examine larger and larger slices of nature. Under the banner of systems research (and its many synonyms) we have also witnessed a convergence of many more specialized contemporary scientific developments… These research pursuits and many others are being interwoven into a cooperative research effort involving an ever-widening spectrum of scientific and engineering disciplines. We are participating in what is probably the most comprehensive effort to attain a synthesis of scientific knowledge yet made.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Ackoff (1959), "Games, Decisions and Organizations," General Systems, 4 (1959), p. 145-150; cited in: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) General System Theory. p. 9.
1950s

Nature , Knowledge , Effort , Study

“A deepened, high-energy democracy does not seek to replace the real world of interests and of interest-bearing individuals with the selfless citizen and with the all-consuming theater of public life. It is not a flight into republican purism and fantasy. It wants to enhance our ordinary powers, enlarge the scope of our ordinary sympathies and ambitions, and render more intense our ordinary experience. It seeks to do so by diminishing the distance between the ordinary moves we may within institutional and ideological contexts take for granted and the extraordinary initiatives by which we challenge and change pieces of those contexts. Its agent and its beneficiary are one and the same: the real thing—the frail, self-interested, longing individual in the flesh, the victim of circumstance whom no circumstance can ever completely or definitively confine.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Left Alternative

Source: The Left Alternative (2009), p. 30-1

Life , World , Democracy , Change

“Often, the program ends up amazing. You'll say, "This is beautifully architected." Well, where did that architecture come from?
In this case, architecture means the systematic way we deal with diverse requirements. Architecture allows us, when we go to do work we need to do on the program, to find where things go. It is a system that was worked into the program by all the little decisions we made — little decisions that were right, and little decisions that were wrong and corrected. In a sense we get the architecture without really trying. All the decisions in the context of the other decisions simply gel into an architecture.”

Ward Cunningham (1949) American computer programmer who developed the first wiki

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), Working the Program

Way , Decision , Sense

“One of the most controversial issues of our time and one in which we share a keen interest is the question of abortion. I have grave concern over the serious moral questions raised by this issue. Each new life is a miracle of creation. To interfere with that creative process is a most serious act. In my view, the Government has a very special role in this regard. Specifically, the Government has a responsibility to protect life — and indeed to provide legal guarantees for the weak and unprotected. It is within this context that I have consistently opposed the 1973 decision of the Supreme Court. As President, I am sworn to uphold the laws of the land and I intend to carry out this responsibility. In my personal view, however, this court decision was unwise. I said then and I repeat today — abortion on demand is wrong.”

Gerald Ford (1913–2006) American politician, 38th President of the United States (in office from 1974 to 1977)

Letter to the Archbishop of Cincinnati (10 September 1976) http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/print.php?pid=6320
1970s

Life , Law , Question , Decision

“My whole concept of economics is based on the idea that we have to explain how prices operate as signals, telling people what they ought to do in particular circumstances. The approach to this problem has been blocked by a cost or labor theory of value, which assumes that prices are determined by the technical conditions of production only. The important question is to explain how the interaction of a great number of people, each possessing only limited knowledge, will bring about an order that could only be achieved by deliberate direction taken by somebody who has the combined knowledge of all these individuals. However, central planning cannot take direct account of particular circumstances of time and place. Additionally, every individual has important bits of information which cannot possibly be conveyed to a central authority in statistical form. In a system in which the knowledge of relevant data is dispersed among millions of agents, prices can act to coordinate the separate actions of different individuals.
Given this context, it is intellectually not satisfactory to attempt to establish causal relations between aggregates or averages in the manner in which the discipline of macroeconomics has attempted to do. Individuals do not make decisions on the basis of partial knowledge of magnitudes such as the total amount of production, or the total quantity of money. Aggregative theorizing leads nowhere.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

1960s–1970s, A Conversation with Professor Friedrich A. Hayek (1979)

Money , People , Idea , Question

“It is no doubt true that in the administration of justice — whatever the context — the appearance of impartiality as well as its reality should always be our goal. Public confidence in the administration of justice necessarily depends on public understanding. All of this should virtually go without saying. Actions that create a perception of unfairness are to be avoided. But those who administer justice cannot be required to be the guarantor of the public perception of their work. Sometimes that perception is shaped largely by extraneous forces and circumstances that are beyond the control of those who administer justice. And I would suggest that it is a dangerous policy indeed to prohibit actions which the fair administration of justice in fact requires simply because some segment — however large — of the public judges those actions to be other than just. Adopting such a policy promises to reward those who seek to undermine the faithful administration of justice by false charges of unfairness.”

Charles T. Canady (1954) American politician and judge

Some Reflections on Impeachment: Remarks of Congressman Charles T. Canady to the Miami Lawyers Division of the Federalist Society http://www.fed-soc.org/publications/detail/some-reflections-on-impeachment-remarks-of-congressman-charles-t-canady-to-the-miami-lawyers-division-of-the-federalist-society (August 1, 1999)

Faith , Justice , Confidence , Understanding