Quotes about mode
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“Stirner and Nietzsche [adopt] a mode of thinking which is personal, introspective, and which while often operating on alternative systems of belief and action does so only as a means of better grasping one dominant goal—the patterns of individual redemption. Stirner and Nietzsche are not primarily interested in critique as such. … Their work is too egoistically compelled for them ever to employ the external world as more than the repository for a series of projections of their own.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 174

World, Thinking, Personality

“Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. III (p. 104).

“We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer 'To hell with them.”

Michael Foot (1913–2010) British politician

The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do.
Speech before the 1983 General Election.
1980s

World, Way, Hell, Problem

“There is but one thing needful — to possess God. All our senses, all our powers of mind and soul, all our external resources, are so many ways of approaching the divinity, so many modes of tasting and of adoring God. We must learn to detach ourselves from all that is capable of being lost, to bind ourselves absolutely only to what is absolute and eternal, and to enjoy the rest as a loan, as a usufruct…. To worship, to comprehend, to receive, to feel, to give, to act: this our law, our duty, our happiness, our heaven.”

Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881) Swiss philosopher and poet

16 July 1848
Only one thing is necessary: to possess God — All the senses, all the forces of the soul and of the spirit, all the exterior resources are so many open outlets to the Divinity; so many ways of tasting and of adoring God. We should be able to detach ourselves from all that is perishable and cling absolutely to the eternal and the absolute and enjoy the all else as a loan, as a usufruct…. To worship, to comprehend, to receive, to feel, to give, to act: this our law, our duty, our happiness, our heaven.
As translated in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries

God, Law, Way, Feeling

“Considering mankind's indifference to freedom, their easy gullibility and their facile response to conditioning, one might very plausibly argue that collectivism is the political mode best suited to their disposition and their capacities. Under its regime, the citizen, like the soldier, is relieved of the burden of initiative and is divested of all responsibility, save for doing as he is told.”

Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) American journalist

Source: Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943), p. 319

Freedom, Indifference

“Now, I want to make clear that I am myself using these terms as metaphors for the different ways we construe fields or sets of phenomena in order to ‘work them up’ into possible objects of narrative representation and discursive analysis. Anyone who originally encodes the world in the mode of metaphor, will be included to decode it – that is, narratively ‘explicate’ and discursively analyze it – as a congeries of individualities.”

Hayden White (1928–2018) American historian

"The fictions of factual representation"

World, Way

“I answer that, It was necessary for woman to be made, as the Scripture says, as a "helper" to man; not, indeed, as a helpmate in other works, as some say, since man can be more efficiently helped by another man in other works; but as a helper in the work of generation. This can be made clear if we observe the mode of generation carried out in various living things. Some living things do not possess in themselves the power of generation, but are generated by some other specific agent, such as some plants and animals by the influence of the heavenly bodies, from some fitting matter and not from seed: others possess the active and passive generative power together; as we see in plants which are generated from seed; for the noblest vital function in plants is generation. Wherefore we observe that in these the active power of generation invariably accompanies the passive power. Among perfect animals the active power of generation belongs to the male sex, and the passive power to the female. And as among animals there is a vital operation nobler than generation, to which their life is principally directed; therefore the male sex is not found in continual union with the female in perfect animals, but only at the time of coition; so that we may consider that by this means the male and female are one, as in plants they are always united; although in some cases one of them preponderates, and in some the other. But man is yet further ordered to a still nobler vital action, and that is intellectual operation. Therefore there was greater reason for the distinction of these two forces in man; so that the female should be produced separately from the male; although they are carnally united for generation. Therefore directly after the formation of woman, it was said: "And they shall be two in one flesh"”

Thomas Aquinas book Summa Theologica

Gn. 2:24
I, q. 92, art. 1 (Whether the Woman should have been made in the first production of things?)
Summa Theologica (1265–1274)

Life, Sex, Time, Help

“The next monument visited was the great Jain temple built only a few years before by Shantidas Jhaveri, one of the wealthiest men of Gujarat in his day and high in favour both with Shah Jahan and after him with Aurangzeb. …In 1638, however, when Mandelslo visited the place, this temple which he calls ‘ the principal mosque of the Banyas ’ was in all its pristine splendour and ‘ without dispute one of the noblest structures that could be seen’. ‘It was then new,’ he adds, ‘ for the Founder, who was a rich Banya merchant, named Shantidas, was living in my time.
As Mandelslo’s description is the earliest account we have of this famous monument, which was desecrated only seven years after visit by the Orders of Aurangzeb, then viceroy of Gujarat (1645), we shall reproduce it at some length. It stood in the middle of a great court which was enclosed by a high wall of freestone. All about this wall on the inner side was a gallery, similar to the cloisters of the monasteries in Europe, with a large number of cells, in each of which was placed a statue in white or black marble. These figures no doubt represented the Jain Tirthankars, but Mandelslo may be forgiven when he speaks of each of them as ‘ representing a woman naked, sitting, and having her legs lying cross under her, according to the mode of the country. Some of the cells had three statues in them, namely, a large one between two smaller ones.’ At the entrance to the temple stood two elephants of black marble in life- size and on one of them was seated an effigy of the builder. The walls of the temple were adorned with figures of men and animals. At the further end of the building were the shrines consisting of three chapels divided from each other by wooden rails. In these were placed marble statues of the Tirthankars with a lighted lamp before that which stood in the central shrine. One of the priests attending the temple was busy receiving from the votaries flowers which were placed round the images, as also oil for the lamps that hung before the rails, and wheat and salt as a sacrifice. The priest had covered his mouth and nose with a piece of linen cloth so that the impurity of his breath should not profane the images.”

Shantidas Jhaveri (1580–1659) Indian jewellery and bullion trader during Mughal era

Description of the temple built by Shantidas Jhaveri. Mandelslo’s Travels In Western India (a.d.1638-9) https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.531053 p. 23-25

Life, Men, Flowers, Lying

“Capital, explaining the origins of the capitalist mode of production, points towards the inevitable historical decline and fall of this same social system. An economic theory based upon the historical relativity of every economic system, its strict limitation in time, tactlessly reminds Messrs the capitalists, their hangers-on and their apologists that capitalism itself is a product of history. It will perish in due course as it once was born. A new social form of economic organization will then take the place of the capitalist one: it will function according to other laws than those which govern the capitalist economy.”

Ernest Mandel (1923–1995) Belgian economist and Marxist philosopher

Introduction to Capital. Introduction to volume 1 (1976)

Law, History, Time

“The major vehicle of for the transition to the capitalist mode of production was the textile industry of eighteenth - century England. In cloth production mercantile wealth was visibly transformed into capital, as it acquired the dual function of purchasing machines and raw materials, on the one hand, and buying human energy to power their operation on the other.”

Eric Wolf (1923–1999) American anthropologist

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 9, Industrial Revolution, p. 267.

Clothes, Wealth

“It is a pity the universe doesn't use a segmented architecture with a protected mode!”

Rick Cook (1944) American writer

Wizard's Bane (1989)

Universe

“Humans are proud of themselves. The guiding principle of the modern age is "Man is the measure of all things." And our bodies have excited physiologists and philosophers to a profound awe of the basic mammalian design. But the history of the dinosaurs should teach us some humility… If our fundamental mammalian mode of adaptation was superior to the dinosaurs', then history should record the meteoric rise of the mammals and the eclipse of the dinosaurs. Our own Class Mammalia did not seize the dominant position in life on land. Instead, the mammal clan was but one of many separate evolutionary families that succeeded as species only by taking refuge in small body size during the Age of Dinosaurs. As long as there were dinosaurs, a full 130 million years, remember, the warm-blooded league of furry mammals produced no species bigger than a cat.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 17
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Life, Age, Family, History

“Now that everything is, or may be, "digital" and could contemplate its membership in an e-category, the final product should be always studied, not only in its appearance, but in its process, structure, in its modes of functioning and of presentation / fruition and also in an historical perspective.”

Caterina Davinio (1957) Italian writer

Source: Virtual Mercury House. Planetary & Interplanetary Events, p. 130

Study, Appearance

“The modern reading of ancient literature involves a mode of reception that is not merely scholarly or antiquarian. Instead, aesthetic experience allows for a direct relationship between reader and work, despite the historical distance. Today’s consumer cannot participate in the ancient economy by trying to use an Athenian coin as legal tender; but today’s reader can participate in the ancient literary imagination though an authentic engagement with the Homeric text (no matter how much contemporary circumstances necessarily also enter into that encounter with the ancient text). Thus the historicist imperative of periodization evidently stands at odds with the potential for immediacy associated with literary reception and aesthetic experience.”

Russell Berman (1950) American academic

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

Imagination, Literature, Reading

“An art mode, new or old, is for the creative mind essentially a point of beginning. Content is brought into being by the activity through which the artist translates the movement into himself. In such an appropriation, there is no difference between an ongoing movement and one that is finished. During the reign of Minimalism, a painter might realize the new through Impressionism. That art history has a schedule of continuous advances en masse is a fantasy of the historian. The shared syntax of art movements is constantly replaced by the sensibility and practice of individuals. The avant-garde art of yesterday is the only modern equivalent of an aesthetic tradition. The fading of the ideas of a movement does not mean that it can no longer be a stimulus to creation. At the very dawn of a movement, the work of its artists commences to replace the concept; instead of Cubism there appear Picasso, Braque, Gris. Compared to the activities to which they give rise, ideas in art have a brief life. In the last analysis, the vitality of art in our time depends on works produced by movements after they have died.”

Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) American writer and art critic

Source: Art on the Edge, (1975), p. 230, Art on the Edge (1975) "Shall These Bones Live?: Art Movement Ghosts"

Life, Art, History, Idea

“From Richard McKeon and Robert Brumsbaugh I learned to view the history of philosophy as a series, not of alternative solutions to the same problems, but of quite different sets of problems. From Rudolph Carnap and Carl Hempel I learned how pseudo-problems could be revealed as such by restarting them in the formal mode of speech. From Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss I learned how they could be so revealed by being translated into Whiteheadian or Hegelian terms.”

Richard Rorty book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

Preface
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)

History, Problem, Learning

“Where Church and State are habitually associated it is natural that minds, even of a high order, should unconsciously come to regard religion as only a subtler mode of police.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Dryden
Literary Essays, vol. III (1870-1890)

Religion, Nature

“In the selection of papers for this volume, two problems have arisen, namely what constitutes systems thinking and what systems thinking is relevant to the thinking required for organizational management. The first problem is obviously critical. Unless there were a meaningful answer there would be no sense in producing a volume of readings in systems thinking in any subject. A great many writers have manifestly believed that there is a way of considering phenomena which is sufficiently different from the well-established modes of scientific analysis to deserve the particular title of systems thinking.”

Fred Emery (1925–1997) Australian psychologist

Frederick Edmund Emery (ed.) (1969) Systems thinking: selected readings Penguin, p. 7: Beginning of editorial by Fred Emery.

Way, Problem, Thinking, Sense

“For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight;
His can't be wrong whose life is in the right.”

Alexander Pope An Essay on Man

"An Essay on Man"

Life, Faith, Fight

“There, the Father with the Son and all the beloved are enfolded and embraced in the bond of love, that is to say, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. It is this same unity, which is fruitful according to the bursting-out of the Persons and in the return, an eternal bond of love, which can nevermore be united. And all those who know themselves to be bound therein must remain eternally blissful. They are all rich in virtues and enlightened in contemplation and simple where they rest enjoyably, for in their turning-in, the love of God reveals itself as flowing out with all good and drawing in into unity and is superessential and without mode (method or system) in an eternal repose. And so they are united to God, by intermediary, without intermediary, and also without difference.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

The Little Book of Enlightenment (c. 1364)

Love, God, Drawing, Personality

“She had expected to encounter death as a kind of existential depth and had been disappointed. But maybe there was a deeper truth there. Maybe profundity actually is a mode of disappointment. The rhythm of the climax—joy and despair, sex and pain—is of course the currency of life. Death can only ever be a sort of anticlimactic belatedness.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 2, Chapter 3, “The Utility of Dreaming” (pp. 119-120).
Jack Glass (2012)

Life, Death, Pain, Truth

“There is a difference between the ordinary person who may discuss these things occasionally over a pint of beer at the local pub, or worry about them for a while before dropping off to sleep, and the person who makes a serious lifelong commitment to struggling with them and turns that commitment into a part of his or her very self-definition. For one cannot say, I’ve finished theology; now I’ll move on to another subject. There is a sense in which one might say something similar of Akkadian grammar or the family tree of the Hapsburg dynasty, but one cannot reasonably assert it of exploration into God’s revelation, which is, by definition infinite in its implications for human understanding. To be a theological student in the full sense of those words cannot be a temporary state or a preamble to something else, such as the ministerial priesthood or an all-round education. Rather, it is a solemn engagement to developing over a lifetime the gift of Christian wonder or curiosity, which is the specifically theological mode of faith. As theologians, then, we commit ourselves to the lifelong study and reflection which the satisfaction of such curiosity will need. Our faith is from now on, in St. Anselm’s words, fides quaerens intellectum, “a faith that quests for understanding.””

Aidan Nichols (1948) British theologian

The Shape of Catholic Theology (1991), pp. 18-19.

God, Education, Family, Faith

“In Mohammedanism the limited principle of the Jews is expanded into universality and thereby overcome. Here, God is no longer, as with the Asiatics, contemplated as existent in immediately sensuous mode but is apprehended as the one infinite sublime Power beyond all the multiplicity of the world. Mohammedanism is, therefore, in the strictest sense of the world, the religion of sublimity.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) German philosopher

Hegel, Philosophy of Mind (quoted by Slavoj Žižek in A Glance into the Archives of Islam http://www.lacan.com/zizarchives.htm, Lacan dot com, 1997).

God, World, Religion, Sense

“Living life in "emergency scan" mode self-perpetuates instead of self-corrects. Deal w/a non-emergency before it is one.”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

4 November 2010 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/318242203639809 Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy

Life

“One opinion that is trotted out for propaganda, for the propaganda parade, is my dissent in Hudson vs. McMillian. The conclusion reached by the long arms of the critics is that I supported the beating of prisoners in that case. Well, one must either be illiterate or fraught with malice to reach that conclusion. Though one can disagree with my dissent, and certainly the majority of the court disagreed, no honest reading can reach such a conclusion. Indeed, we took the case to decide the quite narrow issue, whether a prisoner's rights were violated under the 'cruel and unusual punishment' clause of the Eighth Amendment as a result of a single incident of force by the prison guards which did not cause a significant injury. In the first section of my dissent, I stated the following: 'In my view, a use of force that causes only insignificant harm to a prisoner may be immoral; it may be tortuous; it may be criminal, and it may even be remediable under other provisions of the Federal Constitution. But it is not cruel and unusual punishment.' Obviously, beating prisoners is bad. But we did not take the case to answer this larger moral question or a larger legal question of remedies under other statutes or provisions of the Constitution. How one can extrapolate these larger conclusions from the narrow question before the court is beyond me, unless, of course, there's a special segregated mode of analysis.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

Question, Support, Reading

“I maintain that learned orienting interactions, coupled with some mode of behavior that allowed for an independent recursive expansion of the domain of interactions of the organism, such as social life… and/or tool making and use, must have offered a selective basis for the evolution of the orienting behavior that in hominids led to our present-day languages.”

Humberto Maturana (1928) Chilean biologist and philosopher

Source: Biology of Cognition (1970), p. 31.

Life, Behavior, Learning

“I do not doubt that there has been some ignorance in their having reproved this mode of speech, — that the Virgin Mary is the Mother of God … I cannot dissemble that it is found to be a bad practice ordinarily to adopt this title in speaking of this Virgin: and, for my part, I cannot consider such language as good, proper, or suitable… for to say, the Mother of God for the Virgin Mary, can only serve to harden the ignorant in their superstitions.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Calvin to the Foreigners’ Church in London, 1552-10-27, in George Cornelius Gorham, Gleanings of a few scattered ears, during the period of Reformation in England and of the times immediately succeeding : A.D. 1533 to A.D. 1588 http://books.google.com/books?vid=0bbTMcT6wXFWRHGP&id=esICAAAAQAAJ&printsec=titlepage&dq=%22george+cornelius+gorham%22 (London: Bell and Daldy, 1857), p. 285.

God, Parting

“Identical in the physical processes by which he originates—identical in the early stages of his formation—identical in the mode of his nutrition before and after birth, with the animals which lie immediately below him in the scale—Man, if his adult and perfect structure be compared with theirs, exhibits, as might be expected, a marvellous likeness of organization. He resembles them as they resemble one another—he differs from them as they differ from one another.—And, though these differences and resemblances cannot be weighed and measured, their value may be readily estimated; the scale or standard of judgment, touching that value, being afforded and expressed by the system of classification of animals now current among zoologists.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Source: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 83

Lie, Birth, Animals, Perfection

“And Hindu society which constitutes the nation has been driven into a corner. Hindu leaders have been made to cry that they are not communalists, that they have renounced revivalism, that they cherish Islam as a great religion, that they regard Islamic heroes as their own heroes, that they have no use for people who regard the prevalent mode of secularism as perverse, and that they are fed up with that ‘lunatic fringe’ which still continues to take pride in the national heritage. …. The nation will never be able to get out of this tight corner till it clears up the terminological confusion, stops making use of meaningless words like communalism and revivalism, and rewrites its books of history, politics, and sociology in an exact and appropriate language. This exact language will substitute Nationalism for Hindu Communalism, National Resurgence for Hindu Revivalism, Islamic Atavism for Muslim Revivalism, and Islamic Imperialism for Muslim Communalism. Then alone the various elements and forces struggling for supremacy in the country at present will fall into their proper places, and come out in their true colours.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Muslim Separatism – Causes and Consequences (1987)

People, Books, Religion, History

“Some claim that telepathy and clairvoyance and pre-vision of the future are high-level powers characteristic of the upper reaches. I am not in a position to judge whether such powers exist or not, though on the whole I incline with much hesitation to believe that in some form or other they do. But I cannot see anything particularly lofty about them. They may be consequences of high development, but in themselves they are merely strange modes of perceiving events of commonplace order.”

Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) British novelist and philosopher

Source: Philosophy and Living (1939), Chapter VIII: Personality

Future

“At the Everyman Cinema there is a season of Satyajit Ray. He watches the Apu trilogy on successive nights in a state of rapt absorption. In Apu's bitter, trapped mother, his engaging, feckless father he recognizes, with a pang of guilt, his own parents. But it is the music above all that grips him, dizzyingly complex interplays between drums and stringed instruments, long arias on the flute whose scale or mode — he does not know enough about music theory to be sure which — catches at his heart, sending him into a mood of sensual melancholy that last long after the film has ended.”

J.M. Coetzee (1940) South African writer

Youth (2002)

Music, Mood, Parent, Success

“Classic art was like a king who has the right to govern, punish, reward, and choose his favorites from an aristocracy, obliging them to adopt conventional rules as to manners, morals, and modes of speech. The new art tries to imitate nature in its unconsciousness, its moral indifference.”

Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé (1848–1910) French diplomat, orientalist, travel writer, archaeologist, philanthropist and literary critic

Russian Novelists (1887), page 10 (translated by Jane Loring Edmands)

Art, Nature, Indifference

“As all human rights derive from human dignity, it is important to recognize that human dignity is not a product of positivism but an expression of natural law and human rationality. Although an abstract concept, human dignity has engendered concrete norms of human rights, a practical mode d’emploi strengthened by enforcement mechanisms.”

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

Law, Nature

“Every mode of technology is a reflex of our most intimate psychological experience.”

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

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 171

“The fear of missing out means today's media, more than ever before, hunts in a pack. In these modes it is like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits. But no-one dares miss out.”

Tony Blair (1953) former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Lecture on Our Nation's Future - Public Life http://web.archive.org/20071029204355/www.number10.gov.uk/output/Page11923.asp, Reuters, 12 June 2007. 2000s

People, Fear, Tear

“As with any collaboration, you have to find someone that's in your 'mode' of making music.”

Andrew Sega (1975) musician from America

Static Line interview, 1998

Music

“Who is, in the classical conception, the subject that comprehends the ontological condition of truth and untruth? It is the master of pure contemplation (theoria), and the master of a practice guided by theoria, i. e., the philosopher-statesman. To be sure, the truth which he knows and expounds is potentially accessible to everyone. Led by the philosopher, the slave in Plato’s Meno is capable of grasping the truth of a geometrical axiom, i. e., a truth beyond change and corruption. But since truth is a state of Being as well as of thought, and since the latter is the expression and manifestation of the former, access to truth remains mere potentiality as long as it is not living in and with the truth. And this mode of existence is closed to the slave — and to anyone who has to spend his life procuring the necessities of life. Consequently, if men no longer had to spend their lives in the realm of necessity, truth and a true human existence would be in a strict and real sense universal. Philosophy envisages the equality of man but, at the same time, it submits to the factual denial of equality. For in the given reality, procurement of the necessities is the life-long job of the majority, and the necessities have to be procured and served so that truth (which is freedom from material necessities) can be. Here, the historical barrier arrests and distorts the quest for truth; the societal division of labor obtains the dignity of an ontological condition. If truth presupposes freedom from toil, and if this freedom is, in the social reality, the prerogative of a minority, then the reality allows such a truth only in approximation and for a privileged group. This state of affairs contradicts the universal character of truth, which defines and “prescribes” not only a theoretical goal, but the best life of man qua man, with respect to the essence of man. For philosophy, the contradiction is insoluble, or else it does not appear as a contradiction because it is the structure of the slave or serf society which this philosophy does not transcend. Thus it leaves history behind, unmastered, and elevates truth safely above the historical reality. There, truth is reserved intact, not as an achievement of heaven or in heaven, but as an achievement of thought — intact because its very notion expresses the insight that those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 128-130

Life, Men, Truth, History

“In the industrial mode of development, the main source of productivity lies in the introduction of new energy sources, and in the ability to decentralize the use of energy throughout the production of circulation processes. In the new informational mode of development the source of productivity lies in the technology of knowledge generation, information processing and symbolic … what is specific to the informational mode of development is the action of knowledge upon knowledge itself as the main source of productivity… in a virtuous circle of interaction”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: The Rise of the Network Society, 1996, p. 16-17 as cited in: Andy Hargreaves (2003) Teaching in the Knowledge Society: Education in the Age of Insecurity. p. 16

Knowledge

“When the utter absurdity of the Mosaic account of creation became apparent to all thoughtful men, the church changed the reading of the Bible. Then it was pretended that the “days” of creation were vast periods of time. When it was shown to be utterly impossible that the sun revolved around the earth, then the account given by Joshua of the sun standing still for the space of a whole day, was changed into a figure of speech. It was said that Joshua merely conformed to the mode of speech common in his day; and that when he said the sun stood still, he merely intended to convey the idea that the earth ceased turning upon its axis. Is there a sensible man in the world who believes this wretched piece of ignorance?”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

My Reviewers Reviewed (lecture from June 27, 1877, San Francisco, CA)

Men, World, Idea, Change

“And there you In a new embrace, with a new torrent of eternal love: all the elect, angels and men, from the last to the first are embraced It is a living and fruitful unity, which is the source and the fount of all life All creatures are there without themselves as in their eternal origin, One essence and one life with God These enlightened people are lifted up with free mind above reason…To the summit of their spirit Their naked understanding is penetrated with eternal clarity as the air is penetrated by the light of the sun. The bare elevated will is transformed and penetrated with fathomless love, just as iron is penetrated by the fire [God] gives Himself in the soul’s essence…Where the soul’s powers are unified…And undergo God’s transformation in simplicity. In this place all is full and overflowing, for the spirit feels itself as one truth and one richness. And one unity with God All spirits thus raised up Melt away and are annihilated by reason of enjoyment in God’s essence They fall away from themselves and are lost in a bottomless unknowingWith God they will ebb and flow, and will always be in repose…They are drunk with love and have passed away into God in a dark luminosity must accept that the Persons yield and lose themselves whirling in essential love, that is, in enjoyable unity; nevertheless, they always remain according to their personal properties In the working of the Trinity. You may thus understand that the divine nature is eternally at rest and without mode according to the simplicity of its essence. It is why all that God has chosen and enfolded with eternal personal love, he has possessed essentially, enjoyably in unity, with essential love.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

The Little Book of Enlightenment (c. 1364)

Love, Life, Men, God

“Like Kant before him, Darwin insists that the source of all error is semblance. Analogy, he says again and again, is always a ‘deceitful guide’ (see pp. 61, 66, 473). As against analogy, or as I would say merely metaphorical characterizations of the facts, Darwin wishes to make a case for the existence of real ‘affinities’ genealogically construed. The establishment of these affinities will permit him to postulate the linkage of all living things to all others by the ‘laws’ or ‘principles’ of genealogical descent, variation, and natural selection. These laws and principles are the formal elements in his mechanistic explanation of why creatures are arranged in families in a time series. But this explanation could not be offered as long as the data remained encoded in the linguistic modes of either metaphor or synecdoche, the modes of qualitative connection. As long as creatures are classified in terms of either semblance or essential unity, the realm of organic things must remain either a chaos of arbitrarily affirmed connectedness or a hierarchy of higher and lower forms. Science as Darwin understood it, however, cannot deal in the categories of the ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ any more than it can deal in the categories of the ‘normal’ and ‘monstrous.’ Everything must be entertained as what it manifestly seems to be. Nothing can be regarded as ‘surprising,’ any more than anything can be regarded as ‘miraculous.”

Hayden White (1928–2018) American historian

"The fictions of factual representation"

Family, Law, Error, Nature

“Ethologists and comparative psychologists have discovered a host of refined adaptations in animal behavior during the past few decades. Food-finding, avoidance of predators, and behavioral adaptations to environmental stresses, including constructing shelters, nests, and burrows, all involve impressively versatile tactics on the animal's part, rather than rigid, stereotyped reflexes. Social behavior, especially courtship and care of developing young, call forth an efficiently tuned and controlled matrix of interactions among many different and potentially conflicting behavior patterns. Animal orientation and navigation have provided several striking examples of previously unsuspected modes of perception. Finally, the versatility of animal communication used to coordinate group activities has implications that can only be described as revolutionary. The flexibility and appropriateness of animal behavior suggest both that complex processes occur within their brains, and that these events may have much in common with our own conscious mental experiences.”

Donald Griffin (1915–2003) American zoologist

The Question of Animal Awareness: Evolutionary Continuity of Mental Experience https://books.google.it/books?id=2iTTlLpYaNsC&pg=PA0 (Revised and Enlarged Edition, New York: The Rockefeller University Press, 1981), chapter 1.

Food, Behavior, Communication, Past

“The Amendment nullifies sophisticated as well as simple-minded modes of discrimination.”

Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965) American judge

On the Fifteenth Amendment; writing for the court, Lane v. Wilson, 307 U.S. 268, 275 (1939).
Judicial opinions

“The success of mathematical physics led the social scientist to be jealous of its power without quite understanding the intellectual attitudes that had contributed to this power. The use of mathematical formulae had accompanied the development of the natural sciences and become the mode in the social sciences. Just as primitive peoples adopt the Western modes of denationalized clothing and of parliamentatism out of a vague feeling that these magic rites and vestments will at once put them abreast of modern culture and technique, so the economists have developed the habit of dressing up their rather imprecise ideas in the language of the infinitesimal calculus.”

Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) American mathematician

Source: Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth (1964), p. 89; partly cited in: Herman E. Daly. Steady-State Economics: Second Edition With New Essays. 1977/1991 p. 4

People, Feeling, Mathematics, Idea

“Born and nurtured when the human being first asked questions about the reason for things and their purpose, philosophy shows in different modes and forms that the desire for truth is part of human nature itself.”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

Encyclical Fides et Ratio, 14 September 1998 Source: www.vatican.va http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091998_fides-et-ratio_en.html

Truth, Question, Nature, Parting

“When they come together to make music, the Welsh sing their traditional songs, not in unison, as is done elsewhere, but in parts, in many modes and modulations. When a choir gathers to sing, which happens often in this country, you will hear as many different parts and voices as there are performers.”
In musico modulamine, non uniformiter, ut alibi, sed multipliciter, multisque modis et modulis, cantilenas emittunt. Adeo ut in turba canentium, sicut huic genti mos est, quot videas capita, tot audias carmina discriminaque vocum varia.

Gerald of Wales (1146) Medieval clergyman and historian

Book 1, chapter 13, p. 242.
Descriptio Cambriae (The Description of Wales) (1194)

Music, Singing, Parting, Country

“Tektology must clarify the modes of organization that are perceived to exist in nature and human activity; then it must generalize and systematize these modes; further, it must explain them, that is, propose abstract schemes of their tendencies and laws; finally, based on these schemes, determine the direction of organizational methods and their role in the universal process. This general plan is similar to the plan of any natural science; but the objectives of tektology are basically different. Tektology deals with organizational experiences not of this or that specialized field, but of all these fields together. In other words, tektology embraces the subject matter of all other sciences, and of all human experience giving rise to these sciences, but only from the aspect of method: that is, it is interested only in the mode of organization of this subject matter.”

Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) Physician, philosopher, writer

Variant: Tektology must clarify the modes of organization that are perceived to exist in nature and human activity; then it must generalize and systematize these modes; further it must explain them, that is, propose abstract schemes of their tendencies and laws; finally, based on these schemes, determine the direction of organizational methods and their role in the universal process. This general plan is similar to the plan of any natural science; but the objective of tektology is basically different. Tektology deals with organizational experiences not of this or that specialized field, but of all these fields together. In other words, tektology embraces the subject matter of all the other sciences and of all the human experience giving rise to these sciences, but only from the aspect of method, that is, it is interested only in the modes of organization of this subject matter.
Source: Essays in tektology, 1980, p. iii

Law, Nature, Universe, Science

“I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i. e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one.”

Ludwig Feuerbach book The Essence of Christianity

Preface to Second Edition (1843)
The Essence of Christianity (1841)

Truth, Reality, Universe

“The failure mode of clever is “asshole.””

John Scalzi (1969) American science fiction writer

The Failure Mode of Clever http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/06/16/the-failure-state-of-clever/

Failure

“For if experience has ever taught a truth, it is that a plurality in the supreme Executive will forever split into discordant factions, distract the nation, annihilate its energies, and force the nation to rally under a single head, generally an usurper. We have, I think, fallen on the happiest of all modes of constituting the Executive, that of easing and aiding our President, by permitting him to choose Secretaries of State, of Finance, of War, and of the Navy, with whom he may advise, either separately or all together, and remedy their divisions by adopting or controlling their opinions at his discretion; this saves the nation from the evils of a divided will, and secures to it a steady march in the systematic course which the President may have adopted for that of his administration.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

1820s, Letter to A. Coray (1823)

War, Truth, Thinking, Evil

“A people, entering into society, surrender such a part of their natural rights, as shall be necessary for the existence of that society. They are so precious in themselves, that they would never be parted with, did not the preservation of the remainder require it. They are entrusted in the hands of those, who are very willing to receive them, who are naturally fond of exercising of them, and whose passions are always striving to make a bad use of them.

They are conveyed by a written compact, expressing those which are given up, and the mode in which those reserved shall be secured.”

John DeWitt

On the need for a Bill of Rights, Antifederalist Papers http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?subcategory=73 John DeWitt II http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=1684 (1787) Attributed

People, Exercises, Nature, Passion

“Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Earliest source located that attributes this to Einstein is the 1975 book The Nature of Scientific Discovery: A Symposium Commemorating the 500th Anniversary of the Birth of Nicolaus Copernicus edited by Owen Gingerich, p. 585 http://books.google.com/books?id=Ub3gAAAAMAAJ&q=%22certainly+a+central%22#search_anchor. But long before that, the 1944 book Einstein: An Intimate Study of a Great Man by Dimitri Marianoff and Palma Wayne contains the following quote on p. 62: "But Einstein came along and took space and time out of the realm of stationary things and put them in the realm of relativity—giving the onlooker dominion over time and space, because time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live." It appears from the quote that the authors were giving their own description of Einstein's ideas, not quoting him. Misattributed

Thinking, Time

“All government rests upon consent, and consent is not to be had without taking counsel with the most eminent or influential or representative of the governed, and seeking their advice: the act of taking counsel cannot be separated from the act of exercising authority. All government rests also upon upon habit, upon being exercised in the same way or a similar way to that in which the governed remember or believe that it was exercised before. Brute force can break with habit; but as soon as brute force begins to turn into government, it does so by starting to observe habitual modes of behaviour. Habitual forms or institutions for counsel and consent are thus of the essence of government.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Introduction to his book The House of Lords in the Middle Ages (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), p. xi
1960s

Way, Exercises

“The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Biographia Literaria

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XIII

Imagination, Dead

“In Part II I argue that the Prison is institutionalized by the "monolithic mode of production" which creates effective monopolies not for its brands but for its products … institutionalized medicine; the universal, compulsory school; compulsory heterosexuality; … In Part III … I propose a class analysis that sees us not as ruling-class, bourgeois or proletarian, but as life-, thing- or death-oriented. In Part IV … I suggest that the new worldview implies four "primary" New Age ethics – the self-development, ecology, self reliance-cooperation and nonviolence ethics. … In Part V I try to suggest what "New Age society" might be like. … It would foster "localization" – community and regional decentralization (to whatever extent the various communities wished). And it would foster "planetization"”

Mark Satin (1946) American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher

planetary cooperation and sharing. ... In Pat VII ... I argue for a strategy that would involve ... (a) healing self, and (b) healing society.
Pages 7–8.
New Age Politics: Healing Self and Society (1978)

Life, Death, Age, School

“There are many modes of thinking about the world around us and our place in it. I like to consider all the angles from which we might gain perspective on our amazing universe and the nature of existence.”

John Archibald Wheeler Geons

[John Archibald Wheeler, Kenneth William Ford, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics‎, W. W. Norton & Company, 2000, 0393319911, 153]

World, Nature, Thinking, Universe

“I consequently tried it in such cases, and where there has not been destruction, or irreparable organic injury to the auditory apparatus, I can confidently say, I know of no means equal to hypnotism, for benefiting such cases. Of course, it cannot suit all cases, but I am satisfied it will succeed in a numerous class of cases, and in some which bid defiance to all other known modes of treatment.”

James Braid (1795–1860) Scottish surgeon, hypnotist, and hypnotherapist

The case of treating deafness by hypnotizing, in in “Neurypnology; or, The rationale of nervous sleep, considered in relation ...”, p. 223.

Confidence

“Though the war ended forever the possibility of disunion, there still remain problems between State and Federal authority. There are divisions of interest, perhaps more apparent than real, among geographical sections or social groups. The seaboard thinks it has interests in maritime transportation and overseas commerce which differ greatly from those of the interior, which is peculiarly dependent upon railroads. Difference in climate and physical conditions throughout so great a territory tend to varied social habits and modes of living which react upon the economic and political attitudes. The industrial development of some sections contrasts with the agricultural character of others. Obviously, these differences give rise to many problems in government, which must always be recognized. But it is hardly conceivable that a really menacing contest between the sovereignty of the States and of the Union could ever again arise.”

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

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

War, Problem, Thinking, Dependency

“One thing I learned a long time ago was my fretboard, in terms of all the scales in all the positions…You have to learn it - there are no two ways about it. I shift between positions so easily now that I really don't have to think about them much…I would suggest starting your scale education with the major and minor scales, and after that, diminished, augmented and whole-tone. Then depending on what kind of music you want to play, the modes should be learned. My theory about this kind of thing is that you should learn it all. Once you've learned it you can play whatever you want to play, and I think that your playing will be more advanced, and you'll have a better understanding of the instrument.”

Al Di Meola (1954) guitarist

[Denyer, Ralph, The Guitar Handbook, 2002, 102, 0-679-74275-1]

Education, Music, Way, Understanding

“The truth is that the mathematical sciences are growing in complete security and harmony. The ideas of Dedekind, Poincare, and Hilbert have been systematically developed with great success, without any conflict in the results. It is only from the philosophical point of view that objections have been raised. They bear on certain ways of reasoning peculiar to analysis and set theory. These modes of reasoning were first systematically applied in giving a rigorous form to the methods of the calculus. [According to them, ] the objects of a theory are viewed as elements of a totality such that one can reason as follows: For each property expressible using the notions of the theory, it is [an] objectively determinate [fact] whether there is or there is not an element of the totality which possesses this property. Similarly, it follows from this point of view that either all the elements of a set possess a given property, or there is at least one element which does not possess it”

Paul Bernays (1888–1977) Swiss mathematician

Paul Bernays, Platonism in mathematics http://sites.google.com/site/ancientaroma2/book_platonism.pdf (1935)

Truth, Way, Mathematics, Idea

“Physiologic facts concerning the origin of species in nature were unknown in the time of Darwin... The experience of the breeders was quite inadequate to the use which Darwin made of it. It was neither scientific, nor critically accurate. Laws of variation were barely conjectured; the different types of variability were only imperfectly distinguished. The breeders' conception was fairly sufficient for practical purposes, but science needed a clear understanding of the factors in the general process of variation. Repeatedly Darwin tried to formulate these causes, but the evidence available did not meet his requirements.
Quetelet's law of variation had not yet been published. Mendel's claim of hereditary units for the explanation of certain laws of hybrids discovered by him, was not yet made. The clear distinction between spontaneous and sudden changes, as compared with the ever-present fluctuating variations, is only of late coming into recognition by agriculturists. Innumerable minor points which go to elucidate the breeders' experience, and with which we are now quite familiar, were unknown in Darwin's time. No wonder that he made mistakes, and laid stress on modes of descent, which have since been proved to be of minor importance or even of doubtful validity.”

Hugo De Vries (1848–1935) Dutch botanist

Species and Varieties: Their Origin by Mutation (1904), The Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago, p. 5-6

Law, Understanding, Nature, Science

“Effectiveness is doing the things that get you closer to your goals. Efficiency is performing a given task (whether important or not) in the most economical manner possible. Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe.”

Timothy Ferriss book The 4-Hour Workweek

The 4-Hour Workweek (2007)

Universe

“In the hydraulic and optical part, may be enumerated an over flowing lamp; a simplification of the rules for finding the velocity of running water; remarks on the application of force to hydraulic machines; a mode of letting out air from water pipes; an analysis of the human voice; and some arrangements for solar microscopes, and for other optical instruments of a similar nature.”

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

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

Nature, Water, Parting

“The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Biographia Literaria

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XIII

Memory, Time

“Our National life is full of diversities. We have here a variety of languages, of faiths, of communities, of modes of living, and schools and styles of literature and art. This diversity reflects the abundance of our national life, and need to be preserved and promoted.”

Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1924–2018) 10th Prime Minister of India

Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha Session, Indore – September, 7-8, 1968
Quotes from ataljee.org

Life, School, Faith, Art

“Hereafter follows the “unity without difference,” For the love of God Is not only to be considered as flowing out With all good and drawing in into unity, But it is also above all distinction In essential enjoyment according to The bare essence of the Divinity. And for this reason enlightened people Have found within themselves An essential inward gazing Above reason and without reason, And an enjoyable inclination Surpassing all modes (methods or systems) And all essence, Sinking away from themselves Into a modeless abyss of fathomless beatitude, Where the Trinity of the divine Persons Possess their nature in essential unity.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

The Little Book of Enlightenment (c. 1364)

Love, God, People, Nature

“It is a melancholy reflection that our modes of population have been more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru. The evidence of this is the utter extirpation of nearly all the Indians in the most populous parts of the Union. A future historian may mark the causes of this destruction of the human race in sable colors. Although the present Government of the United States cannot with propriety be involved in the oppropbrium, yet it seems necessary however, in order to render their attention upon this subject strongly characteristic of their justice, that some powerful attempts should be made to tranquilize the frontiers, particularly those south of the Ohio.”

Henry Knox (1750–1806) Continental Army and US Army general, US Secretary of War

Report by then Secretary of War Henry Knox to the president http://www2.hawaii.edu/~rrath/hist281/IndianPolicyNewNation.html, 1790.

Justice, Color, Future, Parting

“Symbolic impoverishment ceases to be a problem precisely because the rich have found functional equivalents for a system of compelling moral demands, in analysis and art, which may be said to be a mode of self-reverence.”

Philip Rieff (1922–2006) American sociologist

The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966)

Art, Problem

“You would not easily guess
All the modes of distress
Which torture the tenants of earth;
And the various evils,
Which like so many devils,
Attend the poor souls from their birth.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

"Verses On A Cat" (1800), St. 2, as published in Life of Shelley (1858) by Thomas Jefferson Hogg, p. 21

Soul, Birth, Evil

“Human process music using both absolute and relational processing… we attend to the actual pitches and duration we hear in music, as well as their relative values. This dual mode of processing is rare among species… These modes of processing and the brain mechanisms that gave rise to them were necessary for the development of language, music, poetry, and art.”

Daniel Levitin book The World in Six Songs

The World in Six Songs (2008)

Art, Music

“It is an odd mode of diminishing one's own weakness to ask a friend to lend us the equal force of his.”

Samuel Laman Blanchard (1804–1845) British author and journalist

"That Two Heads are Better than One".
Sketches from Life (1846)

“I fell into conversation with Douglas. His is a split personality. À deux he is delightful; clever, funny, observant, drily cynical. But get him anywhere near "display mode", particularly if there are officials around, and he might as well have a corncob up his arse. Pompous, trite, high-sounding, cautiously guarded.”

Alan Clark (1928–1999) British politician

January 29, 1988; page 198.
Diaries: In Power (1993)

Personality

““To imitate Socrates” meant, in other words, to staunchly refuse imitation; refuse imitation of the person “Socrates”—or any other person, however worthy. The model of life Socrates selected, painstakingly composed and laboriously cultivated for himself might have perfectly suited his kind of person, but it would not necessarily suit all those who made a point of living as Socrates did. A slavish imitation of the specific mode of life that Socrates constructed on his own, and to which he remained unhesitatingly, steadfastly loyal throughout, would amount to a betrayal of his legacy, to the rejection of his message—a message calling people first and foremost to listen to their own reason, and calling thereby for individual autonomy and responsibility. Such an imitation could suit a copier or a scanner, but it will never result in an original artistic creation, which (as Socrates suggested) human life should strive to become.”

Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017) Polish philosopher and sociologist

Source: The Art of Life (2008), p. 79.

Life, People, Betrayal, Personality

“Taking out a commission of bankruptcy is a well-known mode of recovering a debt.”

Sir John Bayley, 1st Baronet (1763–1841) British judge

Guthrie v. Fisk (1824), 3 B & C. 183.

“In the Far West, the United States of America openly claimed to be custodians of the whole planet. Universally feared and envied, universally respected for their enterprise, yet for their complacency very widely despised, the Americans were rapidly changing the whole character of man’s existence. By this time every human being throughout the planet made use of American products, and there was no region where American capital did not support local labour. Moreover the American press, gramophone, radio, cinematograph and televisor ceaselessly drenched the planet with American thought. Year by year the aether reverberated with echoes of New York’s pleasures and the religious fervours of the Middle West. What wonder, then, that America, even while she was despised, irresistibly moulded the whole human race. This, perhaps, would not have mattered, had America been able to give of her very rare best. But inevitably only her worst could be propagated. Only the most vulgar traits of that potentially great people could get through into the minds of foreigners by means of these crude instruments. And so, by the floods of poison issuing from this people’s baser members, the whole world, and with it the nobler parts of America herself, were irrevocably corrupted.
For the best of America was too weak to withstand the worst. Americans had indeed contributed amply to human thought. They had helped to emancipate philosophy from ancient fetters. They had served science by lavish and rigorous research. In astronomy, favoured by their costly instruments and clear atmosphere, they had done much to reveal the dispositions of the stars and galaxies. In literature, though often they behaved as barbarians, they had also conceived new modes of expression, and moods of thought not easily appreciated in Europe. They had also created a new and brilliant architecture. And their genius for organization worked upon a scale that was scarcely conceivable, let alone practicable, to other peoples. In fact their best minds faced old problems of theory and of valuation with a fresh innocence and courage, so that fogs of superstition were cleared away wherever these choice Americans were present. But these best were after all a minority in a huge wilderness of opinionated self-deceivers, in whom, surprisingly, an outworn religious dogma was championed with the intolerant optimism of youth. For this was essentially a race of bright, but arrested, adolescents. Something lacked which should have enabled them to grow up. One who looks back across the aeons to this remote people can see their fate already woven of their circumstance and their disposition, and can appreciate the grim jest that these, who seemed to themselves gifted to rejuvenate the planet, should have plunged it, inevitably, through spiritual desolation into senility and age-long night.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter II: Europe’s Downfall; Section 1, “Europe and America” (p. 33)

Fate, People, Pleasure, Youth

“I remember one clear example of the problem of communicating what is to be learned. You may have heard of or gone through a similar experience with a student or your child. Years ago, the child of a friend whom I was visiting arrived home from his day at school, all excited about something he had learned. He was in the first grade and his teacher had started the class on reading lessons. The child, Gary, announced that he had learned a new word. "That's great, Gary," his mother said. "What is it?" He thought for a moment, then said, "I'll write it down for you." On a little chalkboard the child carefully printed, HOUSE. "That's fine, Gary," his mother said. "What does it say?" He looked at the word, then at his mother and said matter-of-factly, "I don't know."The child apparently had learned what the word looked like — he had learned the visual shape of the word perfectly. The teacher, however, was teaching another aspect of reading — what words mean, what words stand for or symbolize. As often happens, what the teacher had taught and what Gary had learned were strangely incongruent.As it turned out, my friend's son always learned visual material best and fastest, a mode of learning consistently preferred by a number of students. Unfortunately, the school world is mainly a verbal, symbolic world, and learners like Gary must adjust, that is, put aside their best way of learning and learn the way the school decrees. My friend's child, fortunately, was able to make this change, but how many other students are lost along the way?”

Betty Edwards (1926) American artist

Source: The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1979), p.237

World, School, Way, Home

“An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing. The thing has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to evolve modes of co-operation. The ecologist calls these symbioses. Politics and economics are advanced symbioses in which the original free-for-all competition has been replaced, in part, by co-operative mechanisms with an ethical content.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "The Land Ethic", p. 202.

Freedom, Parting

“If the people at large be not already convinced that a sufficient general case has been made out for Administrative Reform, I think they never can be, and they never will be…. Ages ago a savage mode of keeping accounts on notched sticks was introduced into the Court of Exchequer, and the accounts were kept, much as Robinson Crusoe kept his calendar on the desert island. In the course of considerable revolutions of time, the celebrated Cocker was born, and died; Walkinghame, of the Tutor's Assistant, and well versed in figures, was also born, and died; a multitude of accountants, book-keepers and actuaries, were born, and died. Still official routine inclined to these notched sticks, as if they were pillars of the constitution, and still the Exchequer accounts continued to be kept on certain splints of elm wood called "tallies." In the reign of George III an inquiry was made by some revolutionary spirit, whether pens, ink, and paper, slates and pencils, being in existence, this obstinate adherence to an obsolete custom ought to be continued, and whether a change ought not to be effected.
All the red tape in the country grew redder at the bare mention of this bold and original conception, and it took till 1826 to get these sticks abolished. In 1834 it was found that there was a considerable accumulation of them; and the question then arose, what was to be done with such worn-out, worm-eaten, rotten old bits of wood? I dare say there was a vast amount of minuting, memoranduming, and despatch-boxing on this mighty subject. The sticks were housed at Westminster, and it would naturally occur to any intelligent person that nothing could be easier than to allow them to be carried away for fire-wood by the miserable people who live in that neighbourhood. However, they never had been useful, and official routine required that they never should be, and so the order went forth that they were to be privately and confidentially burnt. It came to pass that they were burnt in a stove in the House of Lords. The stove, overgorged with these preposterous sticks, set fire to the panelling; the panelling set fire to the House of Lords; the House of Lords set fire to the House of Commons; the two houses were reduced to ashes; architects were called in to build others; we are now in the second million of the cost thereof, the national pig is not nearly over the stile yet; and the little old woman, Britannia, hasn't got home to-night…. The great, broad, and true cause that our public progress is far behind our private progress, and that we are not more remarkable for our private wisdom and success in matters of business than we are for our public folly and failure, I take to be as clearly established as the sun, moon, and stars.”

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) English writer and social critic and a Journalist

"Administrative Reform" (June 27, 1855) Theatre Royal, Drury Lane Speeches Literary and Social by Charles Dickens https://books.google.com/books?id=bT5WAAAAcAAJ (1870) pp. 133-134

Wisdom, People, Books, Age

“AND thus the Fourth Mode is a state of emptiness,
made one with God in bare love and in Divine Light,
free and empty of all the observances of love,
above actions, and enduring a pure and simple love,
which consumes and annihilates in itself the spirit of a man,
so that he forgets himself, and knows neither himself nor God,
nor any creature, nor aught else but Love alone,
which he tastes and feels and possesses in simple emptiness.
He feels himself one Breadth with Love, Which is measureless, comprehending all things,
and Itself for ever remaining incomprehensible.
He sees himself made one with the eternal Length,
which is immovable, without beginning or ending,
going before and following after all created things”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

The Twelve Beguines

Love, God, Feeling, Light

“The amazing part of the great Danish cartoon caper isn't that Muslims immediately engage in acts of mob violence when things don't go their way. That is de rigueur for the Religion of Peace. Their immediate response to all bad news is mass violence. That's a "dog bites man" story and belongs on page B-34, next to the grade school hot lunch menu and the birth notices. After an Egyptian ferry capsized recently, killing hundreds of passengers, a whole braying mob of passengers' relatives staged an organized attack on the company, throwing furniture out the window and burning the building to the ground. Witnesses say it was the most violent ocean liner-related incident since Carnival Cruise Lines fired Kathie Lee Gifford. The "offense to Islam" ruse is merely an excuse for Muslims to revert to their default mode: rioting and setting things on fire.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

"Muslim Bites Dog" (15 February 2006) http://www.anncoulter.com/cgi-local/printer_friendly.cgi?article=100. 2006

School, Peace, Religion, Dogs

“A woman capable of recollection in danger, of warding off groundless panics, of discerning the true mode of proceeding, and profiting by her best resources, is a prodigy.”

Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) American novelist, historian and editor

Wieland; or, the Transformation (1798)

“Acknowledging continuities between nineteenth century anti-slavery struggles, twentieth century civil rights struggles, twenty-first century abolitionist struggles—and when I say abolitionist struggles I’m referring to the abolition of imprisonment as the dominant mode of punishment, the abolition of the prison industrial complex—acknowledging these continuities requires a challenge to the closures that isolate the freedom movement of the twentieth century from the century preceding and the century following.”

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

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

Freedom

“The great Powers of the world today as they look at the armaments they have built up, find themselves hopelessly frustrated. If that be the case, what is the use of speaking about first-class, second-class and third-class Powers? That is surely the wrong language to use. It does not comply with contemporary reality. What we have to seek is new ways of being great, new modes of pioneering, new fashions of thought, new means of inspiring and igniting the minds of mankind. We can do so.”

Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960) Welsh politician

Hansard, House of Commons, 5th series, vol. 562, cols. 1404-5.
Speech in the House of Commons, 19 December 1956.
1950s

World, Way, Fashion, Reality

“The processes that may be employed, to give to portions of inert matter, precise movements resembling those of organized beings, are innumerable, as they consist of an indefinite number and variety of cords pulleys, toothed-wheels, nails, screws, levers, inclined-planes, as well as agencies of air, water, fire, light, &c., combined in endless modes to produce a desired effect Ingenuity has been long exercised on such combinations, chiefly for public amusement or mystification, without any object of utility.”

Andrew Ure (1778–1857) Scottish doctor and chemist

Source: The Philosophy of Manufactures, 1835, p. 9

Exercises, Light, Water

“Entertainment and learning are not opposites; entertainment may be the most effective mode of learning.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 66-67

Learning

“Rather than positing design and use as disconnected moments or stages in a technology's lifecycle, the structurational model of technology posits artifacts as potentially modifiable throughout their existence. In attempting to understand technology as continually socially and physically constructed, it is useful to discriminate analytically between human action which affects technology and that which is affected by technology. I suggest that we recognize human interaction with technology as having two iterative modes: the design mode and the use mode. I emphasize that this distinction is an analytical convenience only, and that in reality these modes of interaction are tightly coupled.”

Wanda Orlikowski American computer scientist

Source: "The duality of technology" 1992, p. 408

Understanding, Reality

“I began to reconcile myself to my forlorn condition, but still I was not what I wished to be: the worst of all was, I had no friend; not a human being that understood me. I wrote daily to my friend Leisewitz; he resided in Hanover, and was just as unhappy as myself, except that he had some friends, and plenty of money. In this respect I was differently situated, and although in want of money to buy books, I was determined not to be any expense to my father. Some watches, snuff-boxes, and rings, presents I had received in Gottingen, soon found their way to the hands of Jews at half price. I was even, against my will, driven to the necessity of accepting small fees from mechanics and peasants. This cut me to the heart; but I could not help myself. The following circumstance, however, overcame me more than all: My father was a man of great knowledge and experience, but, like all old men, he remained faithful to the old method of practice. I visited many of his patients, and without telling me exactly what mode of treatment I was to pursue, he only observed, "You will act so and sohowever, I saw the patients had confidence in my father only, and not in me; they wished me to be his tool, and I therefore followed his mode of practice, and thus lost several of his patients, who could have been saved had I followed my own method.”

Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828) German agronomist and an avid supporter of the humus theory for plant nutrition

My Life and Confessions, for Philippine, 1786

Men, Money, Books, Faith

“My soul, so far as I understand it, has very kindly taken colour and form from the many various modes of life that self-will and an impetuous temperament have forced me to indulge in. Therefore I may say that I am free from original qualities, defects, tastes, etc. What is mine I have acquired, or, to speak more exactly, chance bestowed, and still bestows, upon me. I came into the world apparently with a nature like a smooth sheet of wax, bearing no impress, but capable of receiving any; of being moulded into all shapes.”

George Moore (novelist) (1852–1933) Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist

Source: Confessions of a Young Man http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12278/12278-h/12278-h.htm (1886), Ch. 1.

Life, World, Soul, Understanding

“What is at issue here is not: What are the facts? but rather: How are the facts to be described in order to sanction one mode of explaining them rather than another? Some historians will insist that history cannot become a science until it finds the technical terminology adequate to the correct characterization of its objects of study, in the way that physics did in the calculus and chemistry did in the periodic tables. Such is the recommendation of Marxists, Positivists, Cliometricians, and so on. Others will continue to insist that the integrity of historiography depends on its use of ordinary language, its avoidance of jargon. These latter suppose that ordinary language is a safeguard against ideological deformations of the ‘facts.’ What they fail to recognize is that ordinary language itself has its own forms of terminological determinism, represented by the figures of speech without which discourse itself is impossible.”

Hayden White (1928–2018) American historian

"The fictions of factual representation"

Way, History, Study, Science

“Should the believers in special creations consider it unfair thus to call upon them to describe how special creations take place, I reply that this is far less than they demand from the supporters of the Development Hypothesis. They are merely asked to point out a conceivable mode. On the other hand, they ask, not simply for a conceivable mode, but for the actual mode.”

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist

The Development Hypothesis (1852)

Support

“If the States may tax one instrument, employed by the Government in the execution of its powers, they may tax any and every other instrument. They may tax the mail; they may tax the mint; they may tax patent rights; they may tax the papers of the custom house; they may tax judicial process; they may tax all the means employed by the Government to an excess which would defeat all the ends of Government. This was not intended by the American people. They did not design to make their Government dependent on the States. […] If the controlling power of the States be established, if their supremacy as to taxation be acknowledged, what is to restrain their exercising control in any shape they may please to give it? Their sovereignty is not confined to taxation; that is not the only mode in which it might be displayed. The question is, in truth, a question of supremacy, and if the right of the States to tax the means employed by the General Government be conceded, the declaration that the Constitution and the laws made in pursuance thereof shall be the supreme law of the land is empty and unmeaning declamation.”

John Marshall (1755–1835) fourth Chief Justice of the United States

17 U.S. (4 Wheaton) 316, 432-433
McCulloch v. Maryland (1819)

People, Truth, Law, Exercises

“There is but one mode by which man can possess in perpetuity all the happiness which his nature is capable of enjoying, — that is by the union and co-operation of all for the benefit of each.
Union and co-operation in war obviously increase the power of the individual a thousand fold. Is there the shadow of a reason why they should not produce equal effects in peace; why the principle of co-operation should not give to men the same superior powers, and advantages, (and much greater) in the creation, preservation, distribution and enjoyment of wealth?”

Robert Owen (1771–1858) Welsh social reformer

The Social System (1826)

Men, War, Peace, Nature

“It is in this way that all my books have been composed. They were always written at least twice over; a first draft of the entire work was completed to the very end of the subject, then the whole begun again de novo; but incorporating, in the second writing, all sentences and parts of sentences of the old draft, which appeared as suitable to my purpose as anything which I could write in lieu of them. I have found great advantages in this system of double redaction. It combines, better than any other mode of composition, the freshness and vigour of the first conception, with the superior precision and completeness resulting from prolonged thought. In my own case, moreover, I have found that the patience necessary for a careful elaboration of the details of composition and expression, costs much less effort after the entire subject has been once gone through, and the substance of all that I find to say has in some manner, however imperfect, been got upon paper.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/222/mode/1up p. 222

Effort, Parting, Books, Way

“[B]y Natura naturans we must understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, or such attributes of substance as express an eternal and infinite essence, that is … God, insofar as he is considered as a free cause.
But by Natura naturata I understand whatever follows from the necessity of God's nature, or from God's attributes, that is, all the modes of God's attributes insofar as they are considered as things which are in God, and can neither be nor be conceived without God.”

Baruch Spinoza book Ethics

Part I, Prop. XXIX, Scholium (trans: Edwin Curley, London: Penguin, 1996)
Ethics (1677)

God, Understanding, Nature

“When we seek a textbook case for the proper operation of science, the correction of certain error offers far more promise than the establishment of probable truth. Confirmed hunches, of course, are more upbeat than discredited hypotheses. Since the worst traditions of “popular” writing falsely equate instruction with sweetness and light, our promotional literature abounds with insipid tales in the heroic mode, although tough stories of disappointment and loss give deeper insight into a methodology that the celebrated philosopher Karl Popper once labeled as “conjecture and refutation.””

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

"An Essay on a Pig Roast", p. 437
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

Truth, Disappointment, Error, Literature

“Antoine Meillet also noted that imperatives in European languages are typically the morphological root of the verb, and hypothesised that the imperative was the primitive form of a verb: “walk!” precedes “to walk” or “he walks”. This opens up the possibility of an alternative ontology, or pre-ontology, based on commandment rather than assertion, on “be!” rather than “is”. While philosophical or scientific statements would fall under the ordinary “is”-based ontology, fields like law, religion or magic would operate in the imperative mode: “let there be…””

Giorgio Agamben (1942) Italian philosopher

Giorgio Agamben, "What is a commandment?" http://bat020.com/2011/03/30/giorgio-agamben-what-is-a-commandment/ March 28, 2011

Religion, Law

“I had now to select that mode of the primitive which is distinctive of your own species, a mode characterized by repressed sexuality, excessive self-regard, and an intelligence which is both rudimentary and in bondage to unruly cravings.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last Men in London

Last Men in London (1932)

Intelligence

“If dialectical logic understands contradiction as “necessity” belonging to the very “nature of thought,” … it does so because contradiction belongs to the very nature of the object of thought, to reality, where Reason is still Unreason, and the irrational still the rational. Conversely, all established reality militates against the logic of contradictions — it favors the modes of thought which sustain the established forms of life and the modes of behavior which reproduce and improve them. The given reality has its own logic and its own truth; the effort to comprehend them as such and to transcend them presupposes a different logic, a contradicting truth. They belong to modes of thought which are non-operational in their very structure; they are alien to scientific as well as common-sense operationalism. … These modes of thought appear to be a relic of the past, like all non-scientific and non-empirical philosophy. They recede before a more effective theory and practice of Reason.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 142

Life, Truth, Behavior, Understanding

“The Benthamic standard of "the greatest happiness" was that which I had always been taught to apply; I was even familiar with an abstract discussion of it, forming an episode in an unpublished dialogue on Government, written by my father on the Platonic model. Yet in the first pages of Bentham it burst upon me with all the force of novelty. What thus impressed me was the chapter in which Bentham passed judgment on the common modes of reasoning in morals and legislation, deduced from phrases like "the law of nature," "right reason," "the moral sense," "natural rectitude," and the like, and characterized them as dogmatism in disguise, imposing its sentiments upon others under cover of sounding expressions which convey no reason for the sentiment, but set up the sentiment as its own reason. It had not struck me before, that Bentham's principle put an end to all this. The feeling rushed upon me, that all previous moralists were superseded, and that here indeed was the commencement of a new era in thought.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873), Ch. 3: Last Stage of Education and First of Self-Education (pp. 45-46)

Law, Feeling, Nature, Sense

“Aristotle (De Anima, I. 1) makes in the first place the general remark that it appears as if the soul must, on the one hand, be regarded in its freedom as independent and as separable from the body, since in thinking it is independent; and, on the other hand, since in the emotions it appears to be united with the body and not separate, it must also be looked on as being inseparable from it; for the emotions show themselves as materialized Notions (λόγοι έννοια), as material modes of what is spiritual. With this a twofold method of considering the soul, also known to Aristotle, comes into play, namely the purely rational or logical view, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the physical or physiological; these we still see practiced side by side. According to the one view, anger, for instance, is looked on as an eager desire for retaliation or the like; according to the other view it is the surging upward of the heartblood and the warm element in man. The former is the rational, the latter the material view of anger; just as one man may define a house as a shelter against wind, rain, and other destructive agencies, while another defines it as consisting of wood and stone; that is to say, the former gives the determination and the form, or the purpose of the thing, while the latter specifies the material it is made of, and its necessary conditions.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History Vol 2 1837 translated by ES Haldane and Francis H. Simson first translated 1894 p. 181
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 2

Soul, Thinking, Freedom, Appearance

Quotes about mode page 2

Quotes about mode
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