Quotes about function
page 13

“So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

The Moral Equivalent of War http://www.constitution.org/wj/meow.htm 1910s, Memories and Studies (1911)

War

“Thus, though the Fascist conception of property refused to countenance collective possession as such, individual ownership rights were understood to be strictly subordinate to collective discipline. It was not the individual ownership of property that concerned Fascists, but it subordination to collective control. Property was understood to perform social functions rather than to manifest individual rights. It was clear that the conception of property as a social function was broad enough to include socialization of the means of production, should that be required by the national interests as interpreted by the state.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 305

“Women now fly heavy planes successfully; they help build planes, do mechanics' work. In England they've taken over a large share of all material labor in fields and factories; they've taken over police and home defence duties. In China a corps of 300,000 women under the supreme command of Madame Chiang Kai-shek perform the dangerous function of saving lives and repairing damage after Japanese air raids. This huge female strong- arm squad is officered efficiently by 3,000 women. Here in this country we've started a Women's Auxilary Army and Navy Corps that will do everything men soldiers and sailors do except the actual fighting. Prior to the First World War nobody believed that women could perform these feats of physical strength. But they're performing them now and thinking nothing of it. In this far worse: war, women will develop still greater female power; by the end of the war that traditional description the weaker sex" will be a joke-it will cease to have any meaning.”

William Moulton Marston (1893–1947) American psychologist, lawyer, inventor and comic book writer

As interviewed by Richard, Olive, "Our Women are Our Future": Sylvia Family Circle, (Aug 14, 1944) 14-17, 19 as quoted in The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times, edited by Joeph J Darowski, p.7 in the essay "William Marston's Feminist Agenda", in Containing Wonder Woman: Fredric Wertham's Battle Against the Mighty Amazon by Craig This, p.32.

Women, Men, War, World

“A child learning his [her] mother tongue is learning how to name; he [she] is building up a meaning potential in respect of a limited number of social functions. These functions [instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal, heuristic, and imaginative] constitute the semiotic environment of a very small child, and may be thought of as universals of human culture”

Michael Halliday (1925–2018) Australian linguist

Michael Halliday (1978, p. 121) as cited in: Harry Daniels, Michael Cole, James V. Wertsch (2007) The Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky. p. 148.
1970s and later

Imagination, Learning, Universe, Personality

“On the one hand, the student has been informed by some writers that the only certain way lies in the use of the entropy-function and the thermodynamic potentials; on the other hand, he is told with equal authority that the method used by the original investigators has been the consideration of cyclic processes, and that the former method is nothing but a mathematical (perhaps unnecessary) refinement of the results obtained by the latter. These extreme attitudes appear to me to be unfortunate, and more especially when one observes the physical clearness introduced by the use of cyclic processes, but at the same time remembers that most of the results obtained by separate investigators using cyclic processes had, with a great many more, previously been found by J. Willard Gibbs by means of a purely analytical method.”

J. R. Partington (1886–1965) British chemist

A Text-Book of Thermodynamics with Special Reference to Chemistry (1913)

Way, Mathematics, Appearance, Time

“During the early stages of an industry, when the functionality and reliability of a product isn't yet adequate to meet customer's needs, a proprietary solution is almost always the right solution -- because it allows you to knit all the pieces together in an optimized way.
But once the technology matures and becomes good enough, industry standards emerge. That leads to the standardization of interfaces, which lets companies specialize on pieces of the overall system, and the product becomes modular. At that point, the competitive advantage of the early leader dissipates, and the ability to make money migrates to whoever controls the performance-defining subsystem.
In the modular PC world, that meant Microsoft and Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), and the same thing will happen in the iPod world as well. Apple may think the proprietary iPod is their competitive advantage, but it's temporary. In the future, what will matter will be the software inside that lets users find exactly the kind of music they want to listen to, when and where they want to, with minimal effort.”

Clayton M. Christensen (1952–2020) Mormon academic

2006 interview in Business Week, cited in: Rebutting Clayton Christensen on Apple's 'Troubled' Future http://seekingalpha.com/article/5633-rebutting-clayton-christensen-on-apples-troubled-future-aapl-msft-dell in Seeking Alpha (11 January 2006) 2000s

Money, World, Music, Way

“Historical, political economic systems theory. The Marxian approach to system theorizing clearly points us to sociologically important phenomena: the material conditions of social life, stratification and social class, conflict, the reproduction as well as transformation of capitalist systems, the conditions that affect group mobilization and political power, and the ways ideas functions as ideologies.”

Tom R. Burns (1937) American sociologist

Source: Systems theories (2006), p. 2.

Life, Way, Idea

“Historically, it may be useful to fancy playfulness and piety as being the respective residues of the aristocratic and priestly backgrounds of the intellectual function. The element of play seems to be rooted in the ethos of the leisure class, which has always been central in the history of creative imagination and humanistic learning. The element of piety is reminiscent of the priestly inheritance of the intellectuals: the quest for and the possession of truth was a holy office. As their legatee, the modern intellectual inherits the vulnerability of the aristocrat to the animus of Puritanism and egalitarianism and the vulnerability of the priest to anticlericalism and popular assaults upon hierarchy. We need not be surprised, then, if the intellectual’s position has rarely been comfortable in a country which is, above all others, the home of the democrat and the antinomian.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), pp. 32-33

Truth, Home, Imagination, History

“Let us now pose the question again: is recourse to the "human" really enough to preserve and firmly ground the reality of leisure? I intend to show that such recourse to mere Humanism is not enough.
It could be said that the heart of leisure consists in "festival." In festival, or celebration, all three conceptual elements come together as one: the relaxation, the effortlessness, the ascendancy of "being at leisure" […] over mere function.”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), Leisure, the Basis of Culture, p. 50

Question, Reality, Heart

“The Functions of the Executive remains today, as it has been since its publication, the most thought-provoking book on organization and management ever written by a practicing executive.”

Kenneth R. Andrews (1916–2005) Business scholar

Kenneth Andrews (1968: xxi), cited in: Mahoney, Joseph T., and Paul Godfrey. The Functions of the Executive'at 75: An Invitation to Reconsider a Timeless Classic. No. 14-0100. 2014. Online at illinois.edu.
Quote

Books

“The idea of having an ambient space-time of some specific dimension seems to play less of a role of string theory than in conventional physics, and certainly less than the kind of role that I would myself feel comfortable with. It is particularly difficult to assess the functional freedom that is involved in a physical theory unless one has a clear idea of its actual space-time dimensionality.”

Roger Penrose book Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe

Ch. 1, Mathematical Elegance as a Driving Force, p. 62 https://books.google.com/books?id=T09kCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA62. Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe (2016)

Feeling, Idea, Freedom, Time

“Where cultural representations do not reach out beyond themselves, there is the danger that they will function as the surrogates for activism, that they will constitute both the beginning and the end of political practice.”

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

"Black Nationalism: The Sixties and the Nineties." Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle, Wash: Bay Press, 1992), 324.

“Discipline 'makes' individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise. It is not a triumphant power…it is a modest, suspicious power, which functions as a calculated, but permanent economy.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Discipline and Punish (1977)

Exercises

“We return, then, to the strict concomitance of the two series, as all that can in exact science be meant by the functional relation between the brain and the sense-perceptive consciousness.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Human Immortality: its Positive Argument, p.299

Sense, Science

“In the United Kingdom, for example, the sheer overwhelming dominance of London makes it extremely for provincial cities to develop more than a very restricted financial function. London, in that sense, is akin to the notorious upas tree, a fabulous Javanese tree so poisonous that it destroys all life for many miles around itself.”

Peter Dicken (1938) British geographer

Source: Global Shift (2003) (Fourth Edition), Chapter 13, The Financial Services Industries, p. 467

Life, Sense, Tree

“Test this out on yourself. Imagine that for a month you have neither had your garbage picked up nor an opportunity to read about new anthropological discoveries. Which would you pay more money to remedy? A society that functions effectively adjusts the pay until the supply matches the need. Failure to make these adjustments not only leaves streets filled with garbage, but also leaves unemployment lines filled with anthropologists.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 211.

Money, Imagination, Failure, Reading

“For thought and speech are of a thinking and speaking subject, and if the life of the latter depends on the performance of a superimposed function, it depends on fulfilling the requirements of this function — thus it depends on those who control these requirements.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 128

Life, Thinking, Dependency

“Nature has a million answers. Even as I observe tree trunks, roots, branches, idling in some corner, to be burnt down as wood, it affords an excellent laboratory to the mind. It is exciting, sensuous and intoxicating. If one submits oneself to the form and the raw energy of the tree even when it can no longer bear fruit and leaves, one can see great poetry and lyricism in its intertwining branches and roots. The functional sculptures and paintings are a result of this experiment. The process takes over thereafter, but it is just an ode to nature's beauty.”

Manav Gupta (1967) Indian artist

As quoted in "Indian Design and Interiors" IDI Magazine (October 2006)
2000s

Beauty, Nature, Tree, Painting

“[T]he male …. tries to convince himself and women - he's succeeded best at convincing women - that the female function is to bear and raise children and relax, comfort and boost the egos of the male, that her function is such as to make her interchangeable with every other female. In actual fact, the female function is to relate, groove, love and be herself, irreplacable by anyone else; the male function is to produce sperm. We now have sperm banks.”

Valerie Solanas (1936–1988) American radical feminist and writer. Attempted to assassinate Andy Warhol.

Source: SCUM MANIFESTO (1967), p. 6 (hyphens (not en- or em-dashes); "the egos of the male" so in original & "irreplacable" so in original).

Love, Women, Children

“One of the principal functions of war, and particularly… hegemonic war, is to determine the international hierarchy of prestige and thereby determine which states will in effect govern the international system.”

Robert Gilpin (1930–2018) Political scientist

p, 125
War and Change in World Politics (1981)

War

“Given the five parts of the organization - operating core, strategic apex, middle line, technostructure, and support staff - we may now ask how they all function together. In fact, we cannot describe the one way they function together, for research suggests that the linkages are varied and complex. The parts of the organization are joined together by different flows - of authority, of work material, of information, and of decision processes”

Henry Mintzberg (1939) Canadian busines theorist

themselves informational
Source: The structuring of organizations (1979), p. 35

Way, Support, Decision, Parting

“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

“The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters. This whole notion was advanced by Mary McCarthy and many others years ago, that the main function of the novel was to carry out a kind of moral criticism of life. But the writer has no business making moral judgments or trying to set himself up as a one-man or one-woman magistrate's court. I think it's far better, as Burroughs did and I've tried to do in my small way, to tell the truth.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

"J.G. Ballard on William S. Burrough's Naked Truth" by Richard Kadrey in Salon (2 September 1997) http://web.archive.org/web/20000511215816/http://www.salon.com/sept97/wsb2970902.html

Life, Truth, Way, Business

“The second period, which commenced in the middle of the seventeenth century, and lasted for about a century, was characterized by the application of the powerful analytical methods provided by the new Analysis to the determination of analytical expressions for the number π in the form of convergent series, products, and continued fractions. The older geometrical forms of investigation gave way to analytical processes in which the functional relationship as applied to the trigonometrical functions became prominent. The new methods of systematic representation gave rise to a race of calculators of π, who, in their consciousness of the vastly enhance means of calculation placed in their hands by the new Analysis, proceeded to apply the formulae to obtain numerical approximations to π to ever larger numbers of places of decimals, although their efforts were quite useless for the purpose of throwing light upon the true nature of that number. At the end of this period no knowledge had been obtained as regards the number π of the kind likely to throw light upon the possibility or impossibility of the old historical problem of the ideal construction; it was not even definitely known whether the number is rational or irrational. However, one great discovery, destined to furnish the clue to the solution of the problem, was made at this time; that of the relation between the two numbers π and e, as a particular case of those exponential expressions for the trigonometrical functions which form one of the most fundamentally important of the analytical weapons forged during this period.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Squaring the Circle (1913), pp. 11-12

Way, Nature, Knowledge, Problem

“A real-time computer system may be defined as one which controls an environment by receiving data, processing them, and taking action or returning results sufficiently quickly to affect the functioning of the environment at that time.”

James Martin (author) (1933–2013) British information technology consultant and writer

Martin (1967) Design of real-time computer systems; cited in: John R. Ellis (1998) Objectifying Real-Time Systems. p. 249

Time

“The personnel man should regard personal resistance as entirely normal and simply as presenting problems that he has to contend with. At the same time, he must have a clear idea of his own role and functions. He must be prepared to explain them fully when asked. He must also be prepared to take a firm initiative in cases where others take such actions as may jeopardize his role.”

William Foote Whyte (1914–2000) American sociologist

Source: Making Mondragón, 1965, p. 170; As cited in: Ickis (2014)

Idea, Problem, Time, Personality

“Robinson (1952) pointed out some limits to approaching map symbolization and design from a purely artistic viewpoint, as he suggested was the guiding perspective at the time. Maps, like buildings that are designed primarily for artistic impact, are often not functional… Robinson (1952) argued that treating maps as art can lead to "arbitrary and capricious" decisions. He saw only two alternatives: either standardize everything so that no confusion can result about the meaning of symbols, or study and analyze characteristics of perception as they apply to maps so that symbolization and design decisions can be based on "objective" rules… Robinson's dissertation, then, signaled the beginning of a more objective approach to map symbolization and design based on testing the effectiveness of alternatives, an approach that followed the positivist model of physical science. In his dissertation, Robinson cited several aspects of cartographic method for which he felt more objective guidelines were required (e. g., lettering, color, and map design). He also suggested that this objective look at cartographic methods should begin by considering the limitations of human perception. One goal he proposed was identification of the "least practical differences" in map symbols”

Alan MacEachren (1952) American geographer

e.g., the smallest difference in lettering size that would be noticeable to most readers
Source: How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995), p. 2-3

Art, Color, Decision, Study

“There are seven types of entities in the human body. These are connected to different celestial spheres. They are connected to different heavens and are further connected with different functions within the human body. If these entities are strengthened with light they then resemble the person they are in and travel to many places at the same time. They can travel to the gatherings of Saints and Prophets and even talk to God and see God.”

Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi (1941–2001) Pakistani Sufi spiritual leader, poet, author

An introduction to this book
The Religion of God (2000)

God, Travel, Light, Time

“Although a separate function of some kind is implicit in the very existence of a separate department, there may be, especially in manufacturing procedure, certain general functions, appearing in some form of departments, which in turn may require organized supervision and correlation. Thus we have cross-functionalism.”

James D. Mooney (1884–1957) American businessman

Source: Onward Industry!, 1931, p. 46-47

Appearance

“Sacrifice has always been regarded as the most convincing proof of loyalty; and its most common form involves a foregoing of the use of some organic function, as in the case of celibacy or fasting. Of at least equal significance, however, is a sacrifice of the use of reason - credo quia impossibile - and the more incredible the assertion, the stronger the proof of the devotion manifested by its acceptance. The Catholic theologians are quite explicit about this, and openly say that by affirming what to the human reason appears absurd, a believer proves his love for God. Although they are never so frank about it, the secular sects make similar demands.”

Stanislav Andreski (1919–2007) Polish-British sociologist

Social Sciences as Sorcery (1972)

Love, God, Appearance, Loyalty

“The successful public administrator is curious about everything. Perhaps you don't see just why it is that a public administrator should go about continually asking questions of everything and everybody about him. Well, let us take one functional phase of public administration in a municipal government.
One of the best administrators that I ever knew had a great curiosity about garbage. He was the head of the refuse disposal department of the District of Columbia. He asked all sorts of questions of the garbage cans and the ash cans and trash barrels, because in that city we imposed upon the householders a three way system of refuse removal. You couldn't put your trash and your garbage and your ashes all in one container, you had to have three containers, and also, at that particular time, the collectors were divided into three different crews. So this man with this curiosity made a study of what he found in the rubbish cans, and the results. If that study were plotted on a map, and as the result of the study of that map the routings were rearranged, the whole system of garbage collection was rearranged; not only of collection, but of disposal.”

Louis Brownlow (1879–1963) American mayor

Source: "What Is an Administrator?" 1936, p. 6-7; As cited in Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 658

Way, Question, Study, Time

“It is the function of a judge not to make but to declare the law, according to the golden mete-wand of the law and not by the crooked cord of discretion.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Preface to Brissot's Address (1794)
1790s

Law

“The lecture concludes with a demonstration showing that a free body in hyperbolic non Euclidean space may be so fashioned as in real time to carry out the actual motions of the top. The form of such a body and the forces to actuate it are specified. Klein lays great stress on the beauty of this generalization. …The full geometry of this case is not carried out in these lectures, however, and Klein regrets that the development of the automorphic functions has recently fallen into abeyance.”

Carl Barus (1856–1935) U.S. physicist

"The Mathematical Theory of the Top" (April 8, 1898)

Beauty, Fashion, Time

“Writers are not, by nature, respectable: their function is to be subversive.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

Nature

“We have to ensure that it is structured organically, so that it functions like a person functions internally, like the organs function... First in the examination of the matter. Secondly in that one develops a concept of.... a social order that have never existed before. That simply means: to realize freedom, democracy and socialism – free democratic socialism.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

1970's, Every Man an Artist: Talks at Documenta 5', 1972

Democracy, Freedom, Personality

“On notable classmate was Dan Friedan. Friedan stunned me, and I think everyone else, at his Ph. D. seminar, when he showed that Einstein's equation, the basic equation of general relativity, could be interpreted in terms of one of the basic objects in QFT, the β function that governs the energy scale. I did not see what this could possibly mean, but a few years later it showed up as one of the key ideas in string theory.”

Joseph Polchinski Memories of a Theoretical Physicist

Memories of a Theoretical Physicist, arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.09093, 2017 https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.09093, (pp. 30–31)

Idea, Thinking

“The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. The fight with nature which primitive man has to wage for his bodily existence attains in this modern form its latest transformation. The eighteenth century called upon man to free himself of all the historical bonds in the state and in religion, in morals and in economics. Man’s nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered. In addition to more liberty, the nineteenth century demanded the functional specialization of man and his work; this specialization makes one individual incomparable to another, and each of them indispensable to the highest possible extent. However, this specialization makes each man the more directly dependent upon the supplementary activities of all others. Nietzsche sees the full development of the individual conditioned by the most ruthless struggle of individuals; socialism believes in the suppression of all competition for the same reason. Be that as it may, in all these positions the same basic motive is at work: the person resists to being leveled down and worn out by a social technological mechanism. An inquiry into the inner meaning of specifically modern life and its products, into the soul of the cultural body, so to speak, must seek to solve the equation which structures like the metropolis set up between the individual and the super-individual contents of life. Such an inquiry must answer the question of how the personality accommodates itself in the adjustments to external forces.”

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) German sociologist, philosopher, and critic

Source: The Metropolis and Modern Life (1903), p. 409

Life, Religion, Soul, Motivation

“What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office, or function, or district of man's work, has he not remembered? What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?”

Ralph Waldo Emerson Music

Shakespeare; or, The Poet
1850s, Representative Men (1850)

Life, Religion, Behavior, Lovers

“Racism rests upon and functions as a kind of seesaw: the persecutor rises by debasing and inferiorizing his victim.”

Albert Memmi (1920) French writer

Racism (1982)

“Decision theory can be pursued not only for the purposes of building foundations for political economy, or of understanding and explaining phenomena that are in themselves intrinsically interesting, but also for the purpose of offering direct advice to business and governmental decision makers. For reasons not clear to me, this territory was very sparsely settled prior to World War II. Such inhabitants as it had were mainly industrial engineers, students of public administration, and specialists in business functions, none of whom especially identified themselves with the economic sciences. Prominent pioneers included the mathematician, Charles Babbage, inventor of the digital computer, the engineer, Frederick Taylor and the administrator, Henri Fayol.
During World War II, this territory, almost abandoned, was rediscovered by scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians concerned with military management and logistics, and was renamed “operations research” or “operations analysis.””

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

So remote were the operations researchers from the social science community that economists wishing to enter the territory had to establish their own colony, which they called “management science”.
1960s-1970s, "Rational decision making in business organizations", Nobel Memorial Lecture 1978

War, World, Communication, Understanding

“All ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject. … ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!”

Louis Althusser book Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays

Source: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1968), "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", p. 117

Way, Imagination

“Law is necessary, but in a more functional culture, it would presumably be less necessary than it is now, because people would know what to do.”

Ursula Goodenough (1943) American biologist

Uncommon Knowledge (2005)

People, Law

“I wish that people would be persuaded that psychological experiments, especially those on the complex functions, are not improved (by large studies); the statistical method gives only mediocre results; some recent examples demonstrate that. The American authors, who love to do things big, often publish experiments that have been conducted on hundreds and thousands of people; they instinctively obey the prejudice that the persuasiveness of a work is proportional to the number of observations. This is only an illusion.”

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test

Alfred Binet (1903). L’Etude experimentale de l’intelligence. Paris: Schleicher Freres and Cie. p. 299; As cited in: Carson (1999, 360)

Love, People, Study

“We may say that a poem in the first place should offer us new perceptions, not only of the exterior universe, but of human experience as well; it should add, in other words, to what we have already seen. This is the elementary function for the reader. The corresponding function for the poet is a sharpening and training of his sensibilities; the very exigencies of the medium as he employs it in the act of perception should force him to the discovery of values which he never would have found without the convening of all the conditions of that particular act, conditions one or more of which will be the necessity of solving some particular difficulty such as the location of a rhyme or the perfection of a cadence with disturbance to the remainder of the poem.”

Yvor Winters (1900–1968) American poet and literary critic

The Morality of Poetry
Primitivism and Decadence : A Study of American Experimental Poetry (1937)

Universe, Perfection, Training

“I think the basic question you ask is a good one: if we were to withdraw our own beating people over the heads with clubs, would it necessarily follow that somebody else would take that role, or are there other alternatives? Well yeah, there are other alternatives. For example, the alternatives that are favored by the overwhelming majority of the population of the United States. I mentioned one piece of it: let the UN function. The UN isn't perfect, a lot of things wrong with it, just like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights isn't perfect… But one step would be to pay some respect to the "decent opinion of mankind", to quote the famous author, and let international institutions function so as to reduce the likelihood that anybody will use force…”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Talk titled "The Idea of Universality in Linguistics and Human Rights" at MIT, March 15, 2005 https://techtv.mit.edu/videos/16001-the-idea-of-universality-in-linguistics-and-human-rights Quotes 2000s, 2005

People, Quotes, Question, Thinking

“For two years now, my office has had the honour and the privilege of sponsoring seminars on the functioning of government in this country for Eastern Europeans. These seminars and exchanges have brought together representatives from such nations as Bulgaria, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak Republic, Roumania, Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the Ukraine, all of them anxious to learn what makes a society as diverse as Canada work and how our institutions make it governable.”

John Allen Fraser (1931) Canadian politician

Afterword, p. 173
The House Of Commons At Work (1993)

Learning, Country

“The organism—in isolation nothing but a separate pole of "meaningless" subjective processes—becomes a Self by embarking with others upon the construction of an "objective" and moral universe of meaning. Thereby the organization transcends its biological nature.
It is in keeping with an elementary sense of the concept of religion to call the transcendence of biological nature by the human organism a religious phenomenon. As we have tried to show, this phenomenon rests upon the functional relation of Self and society. We may, therefore, regard the social processes that lead to the formation of Self as fundamentally religious.”

Thomas Luckmann (1927–2016) American-Austrian sociologist

Source: The invisible religion, 1967, p. 48

Religion, Nature, Sense, Universe

“As a theory of [satyagraha] which must of necessity grow and expand because it carries within itself the immortal function of life. The fire of satyagrha had been kindled in the temple or ashrama where Mahatma Gandhi is the high priest or guru.”

Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949) Indian politician, governor of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh from 1947 to 1949

In "Sarojini Naidu: An Introduction to Her Life, Work and Poetry", pp=62-63

Life

“This Court, limited in function in accordance with that premise, does not serve its high purpose when it exceeds its authority, even to satisfy justified impatience with the slow workings of the political process. For when, in the name of constitutional interpretation, the Court adds something to the Constitution that was deliberately excluded from it, the Court, in reality, substitutes its view of what should be so for the amending process.”

John Marshall Harlan II (1899–1971) American judge and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court (1899-1971)

Dissenting in Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, 624-25 (1964).

Reality

“The free market tide has now receded. In its place has come state capitalism, a system in which the state functions as the leading economic actor and uses markets primarily for political gain.”

Ian Bremmer (1969) American political scientist

"State Capitalism Comes of Age," http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/64948/ian-bremmer/state-capitalism-comes-of-age Foreign Affairs (May/June 2009).

“You take after your dad, a high-functioning sociopath with an incurable organic personality disorder. It’s one of the special-sauce variety, the kind with a known genetic cause.
Your uncle Albert was something different, and worse: He was a man of faith.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 22, “Toymaker: Happy Families” (p. 248)

Faith, Personality

“Evolutionary psychology was the organizing framework—the source of “explanatory adequacy” or a “theory of the computation”—that the science of psychology had been missing. Like vision and language, our emotions and cognitive faculties are complex, useful, and nonrandomly organized, which means that they must be a product of the only physical process capable of generating complex, useful, nonrandom organization, namely, natural selection. An appeal to evolution was already implicit in the metatheoretical directives of Marr and Chomsky, with their appeal to the function of a mental faculty, and evolutionary psychology simply shows how to apply that logic to the rest of the mind.”

Steven Pinker (1954) psychologist, linguist, author

Steven Pinker, "Foreword" in: Buss, David M., ed. The handbook of evolutionary psychology. John Wiley & Sons, 2005. p. xiv

Nature, Science

“I suggest that the psychophysical function that maps physical parameter space into a species' psychological space has been shaped over evolutionary history so that consequential regions for that species, although variously shaped, are not consistently elongated or flattened in particular directions.”

Roger Shepard (1929) American psychologist

Source: "Toward a universal law of generalization for psychological science," 1987, p. 1319

History

“But what would become of mass production and its system of financial expansion if technical perfection, durability, social efficiency, and human satisfaction were the guiding aims. The very conditions for current financial success — constantly expanding production and replacement — works against these ends. To ensure the rapid absorption of its immense productivity, megatechnics resorts to a score of different devices: consumer credit, installment buying, multiple packaging, non-functional designs, meretricious novelties, shoddy materials, defective workmanship, built-in fragility, or forced obsolescence through frequent arbitrary changes of fashion. Without constant enticement and inveiglement by advertising, production would slow down and level off to normal replacement demand. Otherwise many products could reach a plateau of efficient design which would call for only minimal changes from year to year.”

Lewis Mumford book The Myth of the Machine

Megatechnic Costs and Benefits
The Myth of the Machine (1967-1970), The Pentagon of Power (1970)

Fashion, Change, Success, Perfection

“Simulation is the use of models and/or the actual conditions of either the thing being modeled or the environment in which it operates, with the models or conditions in physical, mathematical, or some other form. The purpose of simulation is to explore the various results which might be obtained from the real system by subjecting the model to representative environments which are equivalent to, or in some way representative of, the situations it is desired to understand or investigate. Simulation may involve system hardware and the actual physical environment, or it may involve mathematical models subjected to mathematical forcing or disturbance functions representative of the systems conditions to be studied.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), p. 111 as cited in

Way, Mathematics, Understanding, Study

“There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing… I am a recording instrument… I do not presume to impose "story "plot" "continuity"… Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function… I am not an entertainer.”

William S. Burroughs book Naked Lunch

Atrophied Preface
Naked Lunch (1959)

Sense

“The selecting of men is one of the important functions in business and yet one that has not received much scientific attention. I feel sure that the time is ripe for action for two reasons. The psychologists have during the past few years made distinct advance in Mental Tests. My proposal is this: You get from your Class A members data as to their methods of selecting men. Any statements as to actual experience and as to principles or methods will be very valuable. I would make a study of these data and would have some of the men from our School of Commerce go over them with me. We would try to criticize them constructively. Perhaps we could make some suggestions that would be worth while. We would try to indicate the good points used and thus be of assistance to all members of the organization.”

Walter Dill Scott (1869–1955) President of Northwestern university and psychologist

Source: Influencing men in business, 1911, p. 398 ; cited in: Edmund C. Lynch. "Walter Dill Scott: Pioneer Industrial Psychologist," The Business History Review, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Summer, 1968), pp. 149-170

Men, School, Feeling, Business

“Too often in a modern building the work of art is an afterthought – a piece of decoration added to fill a space that is felt to be too empty. Ideally the work of art should be a focus round which the harmony of the whole building revolves – inseparable from the design, structurally coherent and aesthetically essential... He [the sculptor] will want to consider both external proportions and internal space volumes in relation to the size and style of sculpture that might be required – not merely the decorative function of sculpture... I am thinking of the didactic and symbolic functions of sculpture in Gothic architecture, inseparable from the architectural conception itself…”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote of Moore, as cited by Unesco, International Conference of artists, Venice 1952; typescript, in HMF Library
1940 - 1955

Art, Thinking

“One demand for a concept of need arises because the concept of demand itself has serious weaknesses and limitations. It assumes away, for instance, a serious epistemological problem. The very idea of autonomous choice implies first that the chooser knows the real alternatives which are open to him, and second that he makes the choice according to value criteria or a utility function which he will not later regret. Both the image of the field of choice and the utility function have a learning problem which, by and large, economists have neglected. This problem is particularly acute in the case of medical care, where the demander is usually a layman faced with professional suppliers who know very much more than he does. The demand for medical care, indeed, is primarily a demand for knowledge or at least the results of knowledge…”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Kenneth Boulding (1967) "The Concept of Need for Health Services" as cited in: Gregory Parston (1980) Planners, Politics, and Health Services. p. 99
1960s

Idea, Knowledge, Problem, Learning

“Systems Are Seductive. They promise to do a hard job faster, better, and more easily than you could do it by yourself. But if you set up a system, you are likely to find your time and effort now being consumed in the care and feeding of the system itself. New problems are created by its very presence. Once set up, it won't go away, it grows and encroaches. It begins to do strange and wonderful things. Breaks down in ways you never thought possible. It kicks back, gets in the way, and opposes its own proper function. Your own perspective becomes distorted by being in the system. You become anxious and push on it to make it work. Eventually you come to believe that the misbegotten product it so grudgingly delivers is what you really wanted all the time. At that point encroachment has become complete. You have become absorbed. You are now a systems person.”

John Gall (1925–2014) American physician

Source: General systemantics, an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., 1975, p. 90 as cited in: Robert B. Seidensticker (2006) Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change. p. 45

Way, Problem, Effort, Time

“For commitment theorists, political and economic ideologies that obey transcendent behavioral laws do for people pretty much what religious belief in the supernatural is supposed to do. One frequently cited example of religious-like ideology is Lenin's doctrine of dialectical materialism. An equally plausible candidate is what financier George Soros calls "market fundamentalism." Like more familiar religious doctrines, these promissory ideologies seem to maintain the faith no matter how many contrary facts or reasons they face. But if such secular ideologies perform the same functions as religious ideologies, then why did at least 50 percent of Marx-fearing Russians feel the need to preserve their belief in the supernatural (survey by Subbotsky 2000)? And why is the overwhelming majority of market believers also God-fearing (Novak 1999; Podhoretz 1999). What is it about belief in the supernatural that thwarts social defection and deception, underpinning moral orders as no secular ideology seems able to do for long?”

Scott Atran (1952) Anthropologist

Introduction: an evolutionary riddle, p. 14
In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002)

God, People, Fear, Faith

“The physicist who states a law of nature with the aid of a mathematical formula is abstracting a real feature of a real material world, even if he has to speak of numbers, vectors, tensors, state-functions, or whatever to make the abstraction.”

Hilary Putnam (1926–2016) American philosopher

in What is Mathematics, in [Hilary Putnam, Mathematics, matter, and method, Cambridge University Press, 1979, 0521295505, 60]

World, Law, Mathematics, Nature

“Public administration is the use of managerial, political, and legal theories and processes to fulfill legislative, executive, and judicial governmental mandates for the provision of regulatory and service functions for the society as a whole or for some segments of it.”

David H. Rosenbloom (1943) American academic

David H. Rosenbloom Public Administration, 2nd Edition, p. 6

“An hiatus in government is so detested and abhorred, that the law says, "the King never dies," that there may never be a "cesser" of regal functions for a moment.”

John Eardley Wilmot (1709–1792) English judge

Case of John Wilkes (1763), 19 How. St. Tr. 1130.

Law

“Graphics owes its special significance to its double function as a storage mechanism and a research instrument.”

Jacques Bertin (1918–2010) French geographer and cartographer

Source: Semiology of graphics (1967/83), p. 2

“In the department of physical optics, the phenomena of halos and parhelia have been explained, upon principles not entirely new, but long forgotten: the functions of the eye have been minutely examined, and the mode of its accommodation to the perception of objects at different distances ascertained: the various phenomena of coloured light have been copiously described, and accurately represented by coloured plates; and some new cases of the production of colours have been pointed out, and have been referred to the general law of double lights, by which a great variety of the experiments of former opticians have also been explained; and this law has been applied to the establishment of a theory of the nature of light, which satisfactorily removes almost every difficulty that has hitherto attended the subject.”

Thomas Young (scientist) (1773–1829) English polymath

Preface
A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts (1807)

Law, Nature, Light

“While this bourgeois order found its rich—and even affirmative—representation in art and literature, … it remained an order which was over-shadowed, broken, refuted by another dimension which was irreconcilably antagonistic to the order of business, indicting it and denying it. And in the literature, this other dimension is represented not by the religious, spiritual, moral heroes (who often sustain the established order) but rather by such disruptive characters as the artist. the prostitute, the adulteress, the great criminal and outcast, the warrior, the rebel-poet, the devil, the fool—those who don't earn a living, at least not in an orderly and normal way. To be sure, these characters have not disappeared from the literature of advanced industrial society, but they … perform a function very different from and even contrary to that of their cultural predecessors. They are no longer images of another way of life but rather freaks or types of the same life, serving as an affirmation rather than negation of the established order.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 58-59

Life, Fools, Art, Way

“Those skilled in mathematical analysis know that its object is not simply to calculate numbers, but that it is also employed to find the relations between magnitudes which cannot be expressed in numbers and between functions whose law is not capable of algebraic expression.”

Antoine Augustin Cournot Researches into the Mathematical Principles of the Theory of Wealth

Source: Researches into the Mathematical Principles of the Theory of Wealth, 1897, p. 3 ; Cited in: Robert Edouard Moritz. Memorabilia mathematica; or, The philomath's quotation-book https://archive.org/stream/memorabiliamathe00moriiala#page/198/mode/2up, (1914) p. 33: About the nature of mathematics

Law, Mathematics

“By making social hierarchies and the reproduction of these hierarchies appear based upon the hierarchy of ‘gifts’, merits, or skill established and ratified by its sanctions, or, in a word, by converting social hierarchies into academic hierarchies, the educational system fulfils a function of legitimation which is more and more necessary to the perpetuation of the ‘social order’ as the evolution of the power relationship between classes tends more completely to exclude the imposition of a hierarchy based upon the crude and ruthless affirmation of the power relationship.”

Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1973), p. 84

Education, Appearance

“For millennia, the dialectic of vilification and deification and, more generally, of invalidation and validation—excluding the individual from the group as an evil outsider or including him in it as a member in good standing—was cast in the imagery and rhetoric of magic and religion. … With the decline of the religious world view and the ascent of the scientific method during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the religious rhetoric of validation and invalidation was gradually replaced by the scientific. One of the most dramatic results of this transformation is the lexicon of psychiatric diagnoses functioning as a powerful, but largely unacknowledged, rhetoric of rejection and stigmatization.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

"The Sane Slave: Social Control and Legal Psychiatry," American Criminal Law Review, vol. 10 (1971), p. 333.

World, Religion, Evil

“This volume is an analysis of the American party system, an account of the structure, processes and significance of the political party, designed to show as clearly as possible within compact limits what the function of the political party is in the community. My purpose is to make this, as far as possible, an objective study of the organization and behavior of our political parties. It is hoped that this volume may serve as an introduction to students and others who wish to find a concise account of the party system; and also that it may serve to stimulate more intensive study of the important features and processes of the party. From time to time in the course of this discussion significant fields of inquiry have been indicated where it is believed that research would bear rich fruit. In the light of broader statistical information than we now have and with the aid of a thorough-going social and political psychology than we now have, it will be possible in the future to make much more exhaustive and conclusive studies of political parties than we are able to do at present. The objective, detailed study of political behavior will unquestionably enlarge our knowledge of the system of social and political control under which we now operate. But such inquiries will call for funds and personnel not now available to me.”

Charles Edward Merriam (1874–1953) American political scientist

Source: The American Party System, 1922, p. v; Preface lead paragraph

Hope, Behavior, Communication, Knowledge

“Each of our senses makes its own space, but no sense can function in isolation. Only as sight relates the touch, or kinaesthesia, or sound, can the eye see.”

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

1970s, The argument: causality in the electric world (1973)

Sense

“So, we’ve reached the state that George Will described. He said there’s a certain kind of liberal that wants diversity in everything, except thought. And so, we do need certain kinds of diversity. But the key to remember is that, diversity by its very nature is divisive, and so, what’s the function of your group? If your group needs cohesion, you don’t want diversity. If your group needs good, clear thinking and you want people to challenge your prejudices, then you need it. So in the academic world, we need that kind of diversity, and we don’t have it.”

Jonathan Haidt (1963) American psychologist

"The Psychology Behind Morality" (12 June 2014) http://www.onbeing.org/program/jonathan-haidt-the-psychology-behind-morality/transcript/6347#main_content

People, World, Nature, Thinking

“The device [electronic I Ching calculator] also functioned as an ordinary calculator, but only to a limited degree. It could handle any calculation which returned an answer of anything up to 4. …anything above 4 it represented merely as "A Suffusion of Yellow." Dirk was not certain if this was a programming error or an insight beyond his ability to fathom, but he was crazy about it anyway, enough to hand over twenty pounds of ready cash for the thing.”

Douglas Adams The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 10

Error

“Just as a primitive sextant functions on the illusion that the sun and stars rotate around the planet we are standing on, our senses give us the illusion of stability in the universe, and we accept it, because without that acceptance, nothing can be done.
Virginia Vidaura, pacing the seminar room, lost in lecture mode.
But the fact that a sextant will let you navigate accurately across an ocean does not mean that the suns and stars do rotate are us. For all that we have done, as a civilization, as individuals, the universe is not stable, nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating and decaying, and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self-knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy.”

Richard K. Morgan book Altered Carbon

Source: Altered Carbon (2002), Chapter 28 (pp. 354-355)

Star, Knowledge, Reality, Sense

“Depth, in a pictorial, plastic sense, is not created by the arrangement of objects one after another toward a vanishing point, in the sense of the Renaissance perspective, but on the contrary (and in absolute denial of this doctrine) by the creation of forces in the sense of push and pull. Nor is depth created by tonal gradation (another doctrine of the academician which, at its culmination, degraded the use of color to a mere function of expressing dark and light).”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 44
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Color, Sense, Light

“[O]ur élite is primarily and increasingly managerial. A managerial élite manages. A crisis, unfortunately, requires thought. Thought is not a management function.”

John Ralston Saul book The Unconscious Civilization

The Unconscious Civilization (1995)

“The original Lucas version of the new-classical macroeconomics combined the undeniable appeal of rational expectations with two more dubious assumptions inherited from Friedman (1968), that is, continuous market clearing and imperfect information, to form the foundation of the famous “Lucas supply function” (more justly, the Friedman-Lucas supply function). Soon Sargent and Wallace (1975) extracted from Lucas’s model its implication for monetary policy, the famous “policy-ineffectiveness proposition.” The demonstration by Barro (1977) that one could interpret historical U. S. data to be consistent with the proposition and the theory brought new-classical economics to its shortlived period of peak influence.”

Robert J. Gordon (1940) American economist

"Fresh Water, Salt Water, and other Macroeconomic Elixirs", 1989

“The functional order maintained within living systems seems to defy the Second Law; nonequilibrium thermodynamics describes how such systems come to terms with entropy.”

Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003) physical chemist

Part 1; Cited in: Evgenii Rudnyi (2013) " Thermodynamics of evolution http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2013/04/thermodynamics-of-evolution.html" on blog.rudnyi.ru, April 20, 2013. · Thermodynamics of Evolution (1972)

Law

“In the Critique of Cynical Reasoning, a great bestseller in Germany (Sloterdijk, 1983), Peter Sloterdijk puts forward the thesis that ideology's dominant mode of functioning is cynical which renders impossible - or, more precisely, vain - the classical critical-ideological procedure. The cynical subject is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he none the less still insists upon the mask”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

Source: The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), pp.29, "Cynicism as a Form of Ideology"

Reality

“When we say a character in my films doesn't function, we mean he doesn't function as a person, but he does function as a character — that is, until you take him as a symbol. At that point it is you who are not functioning. Why not simply accept him as a character, without judging him? Accept him for what he is. Accept him as a character in a story, without claiming that he derives or acquires meaning from that story. There may be meanings, but they are different for all of us.”

Michelangelo Antonioni (1912–2007) Italian film director and screenwriter

Encountering Directors interview (1969)

Personality

“The news had stirred him strangely. He listened for bulletins on the radio, which he had seldom turned on after finding that its basic function was advertising things for sale.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 7 (pp. 201-202)

“There is no peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic social and political institutions. The failure of these institutions to function and the instability of these regimes in Muslim countries, manifest in frequent changes and coups d'état, is most often the consequence of their a priori opposition to Islam, as the fundamental and foremost feeling of the people in those countries. Claiming its right to order its own world alone, Islam clearly rules out the right and the possibility of the application of any foreign ideology in its own region. there is, therefore, no lay principle, and the state ought to be a reflection of and to support the moral concepts of the religion.”

Alija Izetbegović (1925–2003) Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Source: The Islamic Declaration (1970), p. 30, as quoted in The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia: Nationalism and War in the Balkans, Aleksandar Pavković, Springer Science+Business Media https://books.google.com/books?id=u3paCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA96&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjUhfPIl43WAhVHro8KHReTDhEQ6AEINzAD#v=onepage&q&f=false,

People, World, Peace, Faith

“Here we could use the distinction elaborated by Kovel's White Racism - between dominative and aversive racism. In Nazi ideology, all human races form a hierarchical, harmonious, whole (the 'destiny' of the Aryans at the top is to rule, while the Blacks, Chinese and others have to serve) a all races except the Jews: they have no proper place; their very identity is fake, it consists in trespassing the frontiers, in introducing unrest, antagonism, in destabilizing the social fabric. As such, Jews plot with other races and prevent them from putting up with their proper place - they function as a hidden Master aiming at world domination: they are a counter-image of the Aryans themselves, a kind of negative, perverted double; their is why they must be exterminated, while other races have only to occupy their proper place.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

143
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

World

“The ownership of land is not merely an enjoyment, it is a stewardship. It has been reckoned as such in the past, and if the owners cease to discharge their functions in seeing to the security and defence of the country, looking after the broken in their villages and in their neighbourhoods, the time will come to reconsider the conditions under which land is held in this country.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Limehouse, East London (30 July 1909), quoted in Better Times: Speeches by the Right Hon. D. Lloyd George, M.P., Chancellor of the Exchequer (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), p. 155.
Chancellor of the Exchequer

Time, Past, Country

“The rhetorical process functioned in many areas other than speech: Curtius wrote about 'rhetorical landscape representations' while Serpieris speaks of 'la retorica al teatro' (the rhetorical use of theatrical space), and music historians have learned that the language and approach of musical theory in the Middle Ages were borrowed directly from medieval grammar and rhetoric.”

Thomas Binkley (1931–1995) lutenist

"The work is not the performance", Companion to Medieval & Renaissance Music. (1997). Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198165404.

Age, Music, Learning

“User needs determine what functions should be provided, and different functions require different structures.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

B.C. Vickery (1971) "Structure and function in retrieval languages," Journal of Documentation, 27(2), p. 74; As cited in: Alan Gilchrist, Judi Vernau (2012) Facets of Knowledge Organization: Proceedings of the ISKO UK. p. 293.

“Money is indispensable to a long-circuit heavy load energy system. It must be used when a sufficient surplus is being produced to allow a margin for exchange, and cost of transport, over a considerable distance. Money represents a storage battery when idle, and a generalized mode of the conversion of energy when it is in motion, with a function of equating time and space.”

Isabel Paterson (1886–1961) author and editor

Source: The God of the Machine (1943), p. 32

Money, Time

“There is the growing influence of biology and the application of biological principles to the human faculties, thought among the rest. Man is said to have brains because they enable him to survive. Intelligence is construed as an organic function and reason as developed or evolved intelligence.”

Ralph Barton Perry (1876–1957) American philosopher

[describing the historical causes of the modern tendency to make intellect the servant of alien interests]
The Integrity of the Intellect (July 1920)

Intelligence

“Our government belongs to the people. Our property belongs to the people. It is distributed. They own it. The taxes are paid by the people. They bear the burden. The benefits of government must accrue to the people. Not to one class, but to all classes, to all the people. The functions, the power, the sovereignty of the government, must be kept where they have been placed by the Constitution and laws of the people. Not private will, but that public will, which speaks with a divine sanction, must prevail.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Law and Order (1920)

People, Law

“In 1968 Ian Wilson made his final sculpture. Since then, he has explored the idea of oral communication as an art form… Wilson’s work is very hard to track down, even in terms of documentation. He has been compared to the Socratic philosophers but if there is a similarity between his practice and theirs, it probably lies mainly in the fact that everything we have from that period of philosophy takes the form of secondary fragments embedded in other texts. Wilson’s work functions almost like archaeological or geological evidence: it consists of objects that we examine in order to deduce, from scanty clues, what must have happened.”

Edward Allington (1951–2017) sculptor

Edward Allington. " About Time http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/about_time/," in Frieze, Issue 92 June-August 2005

Art, Communication, Idea

“The term "instrumentalism," which has largely superseded the broader term "pragmatism," emphasizes the subordination of the intellect to ends beyond itself. But the organic analogy does in fact point to quite a different conclusion. Most organic functions are interested in their own behalf. I may even breathe for the sake of breathing. I may identify my soul with my lungs. … Or consider the predatory instinct. This evidently has its place in the economy of life by virtue of providing food for carnivorous animals; but hunting is also an art and a pastime, which many have thought worth cultivating as an end in itself. What is true of respiration and huntsmanship can scarcely be denied of an activity so developed, so varied, so self-conscious, as that of the intellect. Nor in this case any more than the others, does the subordinate role contradict the autonomous role. The devotee of breathing or of hunting need not cease to breathe or hunt for vital purposes; nor need the intellectualist, the scientist, the speculative philosopher, because he has cultivated the art of knowing for its own sake, therefore cease to use his mind for the conduct of affairs.”

Ralph Barton Perry (1876–1957) American philosopher

The Integrity of the Intellect (July 1920)

Life, Food, Art, Soul

“Capitalism is the only system where such men are free to function and where progress is accompanied, not by forced privations, but by a constant rise in the general level of prosperity, of consumption and of enjoyment of life.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

Life, Men

“The Constituent Assembly has got two main functions to perform. The first is the very onerous and responsible task of framing the future constitution of Pakistan and the second of functioning as a full and complete sovereign body as the Federal Legislature of Pakistan.”

Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948) Founder and 1st Governor General of Pakistan

Address to the Constituent Assembly (1947)

Future

“The human brain became large by natural selection (who knows why, but presumably for good cause). Yet surely most “things” now done by our brains, and essential both to our cultures and to our very survival, are epiphenomena of the computing power of this machine, not genetically grounded Darwinian entities created specifically by natural selection for their current function.”

Stephen Jay Gould book An Urchin in the Storm

"Cardboard Darwinism", pp. 48–49
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

Nature

“How does artificial intelligence refer to social relationships – for example, the functioning of one or another political system? Well, the evolution of the world is not a closed and completed process. For sure, we are awaiting a change in social relations due to moving of the labor market, especially as a result of transferring the burden of performing various activities on the devices. The invention of machines during the English Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries resulted in mass strikes and revolts, because many workers were afraid that they would be replaced by the machines. The societies has somehow coped with it. Will they defend themselves in the situation of the next step towards the automation of everything? It's an open matter.”

Zygmunt Vetulani (1950) Polish mathematician

Polish Press Agency (July 17, 2018): Polish Scientist warns against cyborgization perils https://polandinenglish.info/38094623/polish-scientist-warns-against-cyborgization-perils.

World, Intelligence, Change

“Inside there was a wall three feet away. And between the wall and the door, in this unbelievably tiny space, a girl in a lemon-coloured shirt sat at a desk, with word processor, potted plant, mug of pencils, furry gonk, and wadges of orange paper. It was incredible that anyone or anything could function in such a space. It was like suddenly discovering a family of otters in one of your shoes.”

Hugh Laurie book The Gun Seller

The Gun Seller (1996)

Family, Shoe, Girl

“Neural computing is the study of cellular networks that have a natural property for storing experimental knowledge. Such systems bear a resemblance to the brain in the sense that knowledge is acquired through training rather than programming and is retained due to changes in node functions. The knowledge takes the form of stable states or cycles of states in the operation of the et. A central property of such nets is to recall these states or cycles in response to the presentation of cues.”

Igor Aleksander (1937) scientist

Aleksander & Morton (1989) Neural computing architectures: the design of brain-like machines. p.2 as cited in: M.A. Lovell et al. (1997) Developments in petrophysics. p.169

Nature, Knowledge, Sense, Study

“I submit that all psychotherapy is manipulation; that as psychiatrists we do not heal people, but manipulate their neuroses into functional modes.”

Lucius Shepard book Green Eyes

Source: Green Eyes (1984), Chapter 6, p. 46

People

“People may wonder why I am content to prescribe such a general and apparently vague formula as "Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better" for all and every ailment. The reason is, strange as it may seem, that our subconscious mind does not need the details. The general suggestion that everything "in every way" is going well is quite sufficient to set up the procedure of persuasion which will carry its effects to the different organs and improve every function. I have had remarkable demonstration of this in the course of my long teaching and experiments. Time and again I have seen patients cured, not only of the particular disease for which they sought relief, but also of minor disabilities which they had almost forgotten.”

Emile Coué (1857–1926) French psychologist and pharmacist

Source: Autosuggestion : My method (2014), Chapter III: Auto-suggestion in practice.

People, Disease, Way, Time

Quotes about function page 13

Quotes about function
page 13