Quotes about representation

A collection of quotes on the topic of representation, use, other, form.

Quotes about representation

“Mary is the great mother. She is the mother. That's what Mary is. Whether she existed or not, is not the point. She exists at least as a hyper-reality. She exists as the mother. What's the sacrifice of the mother? That's easy: if you're a mother who's worth her salt, you offer your son to be destroyed by the world. That's what you do. And that's what's going to happen. He's going to be born, he's going to suffer, he's going to have his trouble in life, he's going to have his illnesses, he's going to face his failures and catastrophes, and he's going to die. That's what's going to happen, and if you're awake you know that, and then you say, 'well, perhaps he will live in a way that will justify that.' And then you try to have that happen. And that's what makes you worthy of a statue like [The Pieta]. 'Is it right to bring a baby into this terrible world?' Well, every woman asks herself that question. Some say no, and they have their reasons. Mary answers 'yes' voluntarily. Mary is the archetype of the woman who answers yes to life voluntarily. Not because she is blind. She knows what's going to happen. So, she's the archetypal representation of the woman who says yes to life knowing full well what life is. She's not naive. She's not someone who got pregnant in the backseat of a 1957 Chevy during one night of half-drunk idiocy. Not that. She does so consciously. Consciously, knowing what's to come. And then she allows it to happen, which is a testament to mothers.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Bible Series V: Cain and Abel: The Hostile Brothers
Concepts

Life, World, Way, Failure

“It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”

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

"On the Method of Theoretical Physics" The Herbert Spencer Lecture, delivered at Oxford (10 June 1933); also published in Philosophy of Science, Vol. 1, No. 2 (April 1934), pp. 163-169., p. 165. [thanks to Dr. Techie @ www.wordorigins.org and JSTOR] There is a quote attributed to Einstein that may have arisen as a paraphrase of the above quote, commonly given as “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler,” "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler", or “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.” See this article from the Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/05/13/einstein-simple/ for a discussion of where these later variants may have arisen. The original quote is very similar to Occam's razor, which advocates that among all hypotheses compatible with all available observations, the simplest hypothesis is the most plausible one. The aphorism "everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler" is normally taken to be a warning against too much simplicity and emphasizes that one cannot simplify things to a point where the hypothesis is no more compatible with all observations. The aphorism does not contradict or extend Occam's razor, but rather stresses that both elements of the razor, simplicity and compatibility with the observations, are essential. The earliest known appearance of Einstein's razor is an essay by Roger Sessions in the New York Times (8 January 1950) http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30615FE3559137A93CAA9178AD85F448585F9, where Sessions appears to be paraphrasing Einstein: “I also remember a remark of Albert Einstein, which certainly applies to music. He said, in effect, that everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler.” Another early appearance, from Time magazine (14 December 1962) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,872923,00.html: “We try to keep in mind a saying attributed to Einstein—that everything must be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.” 1930s

“I don't care for 'Abstract expressionism'.... and it is certainly not 'non-objective', and not 'non-representational' either. I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your consciousness, figures are bound to emerge. We're all of us influenced by Freud, I guess. I've been a Jungian for a long time... Painting is a state of being... Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

In an interview (1956); published in Conversations with Artists, by Seldon Rodman, New York, Capricorn Books, 1961, pp. 84-85
1950's

Time, Painting

“When a soul has advanced so far on the spiritual road as to be lost to all the natural methods of communing with God; when it seeks Him no longer by meditation, images, impressions, nor by any other created ways, or representations of sense, but only by rising above them all, in the joyful communion with Him by faith and love, then it may be said to have found God of a truth, because it has truly lost itself as to all that is not God, and also as to its own self.”

John of the Cross (1542–1591) Spanish mystic and Roman Catholic saint

Note to Stanza 29 part 8
Spiritual Canticle of The Soul and The Bridegroom, Notes to the Stanzas

Love, God, Truth, Faith

“Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.”

Simone de Beauvoir book The Second Sex

Source: The Second Sex

Men, Truth, World

“If, there is a tendency in all Western democracies no longer to respect the professional politician or even the party member as such, it is no longer only because of some personal insufficiency, some fault, or some incompetence, or because of some scandal that can now be more widely known, amplified, and in fact often produced, if not premeditated by the power of the media. Rather, it is because politicians become more and more, or even solely characters in the media's representation at the very moment when the transformation of the public space, precisely by the media, causes them to lose the essential part of the power and even of the competence they were granted before by the structures of parliamentary representation, by the party apparatuses that were linked to it, and so forth. However competent they may personally be, professional politicians who conform to the old model tend today to become structurally incompetent. The same media power accuses, produces, and amplifies at the same time this incompetence of traditional politicians: on the one hand, it takes aways from them the legitimate power they held in the former political space (party, parliament, and so forth), but, on the other hand, it obliges them to become mere silhouettes, if not marionettes, on the stage of televisual rhetoric. They were thought to be actors of politics, they now often risk, as everyone knows, being no more than TV actors.”

Jacques Derrida book Specters of Marx

Wear and Tears (tableu of a ageless world)
Specters of Marx (1993)

Democracy, Time, Parting, Personality

“The refusal to allow a multiply-disadvantaged class to represent others who may be singularly-disadvantaged defeats efforts to restructure the distribution of opportunity and limits remedial relief to minor adjustments within an established hierarchy. Consequently, “bottom-up” approaches, those which combine all discriminatees in order to challenge an entire employment system, are foreclosed by the limited view of the wrong and the narrow scope of the available remedy. If such “bottom-up” intersectional representation were routinely permitted, employees might accept the possibility that there is more to gain by collectively challenging the hierarchy rather than by each discriminatee individually seeking to protect her source of privilege within the hierarchy. But as long as antidiscrimination doctrine proceeds from the premise that employment systems need only minor adjustments, opportunities for advancement by disadvantaged employees will be limited. Relatively privileged employ- ees probably are better off guarding their advantage while jockeying against others to gain more. As a result, Black women — the class of employees which, because of its intersectionality, is best able to challenge all forms of discrimination — are essentially isolated and often required to fend for themselves.”

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw book Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex

Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex (1989)

Women, Effort

“What is meant by "the representation of space"? What distinguishes one representation from another? Does this mean "how does one see that one thing is not another thing?" What constitutes a change of focus?… What about "another way of establishing (?) "thingness"? "Something" can be either one thing or another (without turning the rabbit on its side)..”

Jasper Johns (1930) American artist

Book B (sketchbook), c 1967: as quoted in Jasper Johns, Writings, sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. Kirk Varnedoe, Moma New York, 1996, p. 62
1960s

Way, Change

“Fortunate indeed is the man who has found wisdom and who is full of that discretion which is better than all the acquiring, trafficking, and possession of gold and silver. … I dwell (so says Wisdom) in good and salutary counsel, and am present at learned and wise cogitations. Therefore must a man seek this Wisdom and, having found it, take care to hold it well, that in its time and place it may be of help to him. The ensuing representation will set before your eyes the treatise which I have propounded.”

Philibert de l'Orme (1514–1570) French architect of the Renaissance.

Livre d'architecture as quoted by Edward Fenton, "Messer Philibert Delorme" The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin Vol. 13, No. 4, Dec., 1954

Wisdom, Learning, Time, Help

“The anxiety of fate is conquered by the self-affirmation of the individual as an infinitely significant microcosmic representation of the universe.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p. 120

Fate, Universe

“Man of science seeks to resolve the links between art, aesthetics, and the science. The man of science …seeks to resolve [nature’s] infinite complexities in to a few simple principles or elements of action which he calls the laws of nature. In doing this, like the exponents of other forms of art, subjects himself to a rigorous discipline, the rules of which he had laid down for himself and which he calls logic …. Science… Is a fusion of man’s aesthetic and intellectual functions devoted to the representations of nature. It is therefore the highest form of creative art.”

C. V. Raman (1888–1970) Indian physicist

[Parameswaran, Uma, C.V. Raman: A Biography, http://books.google.com/books?id=RbgXRdnHkiAC, 2011, Penguin Books India, 978-0-14-306689-7] page=xiv

Law, Art, Nature, Science

“Utopia is a spatial matter that might be thought to know potential change in fortunes in so spatialized a culture as the postmodern; but if this last is a dehistoricized and dehistorizing as I some times claim here, the synaptic chain that might lead the Utopian impulse to expression becomes harder to localize. Utopian representations knew an extraordinarily revival in the 1960's; if postmodernism is the substitute for the sixties and the compensation for their political failure, the question of Utopia would seem to be a crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change at all.”

Fredric Jameson (1934) American academic

Introduction
Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)

Imagination, Failure, Question, Change

“What looks like a man is only a representation of a man who does what the organization requires. He (or it) does not run the machine; he tends it.”

Charles A. Reich book The Greening of America

Source: The Greening of America (1970), Chapter V : Anatomy Of The Corporate State, p. 107

“Graphic representation constitutes one of the basic sign-systems conceived by the human mind for the purposes of storing, understanding, and communicating essential information. As a "language" for the eye, graphics benefits from the ubiquitous properties of visual perception. As a monosemic system, it forms the rational part of the world of images.”

Jacques Bertin (1918–2010) French geographer and cartographer

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

World, Communication, Understanding, Parting

“[According to Habermas, the genesis of the bourgeois public sphere resulted from a combination of early capitalist commercial development and the organization of territorial … Representative publicness involved a re-presenting or staging for the purposes of display and acclamation, hence] this publicness (or publicity) of representation was not constituted as a social realm, that is, as a public sphere; rather, it was something like a status attribute, if this term may be permitted.”

Jürgen Habermas book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Source: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 1963/1991, p. 7 as cited in: Benedetto Fontana, Cary J. Nederman, Gary Remer (2004) Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy. p. 222

“The most distinguishing feature, or, at least, one of the most distinguishing features, of the great change effected in 1832 was that those who effected it at once abolished all the franchises as ancient as those of the Baronage of England; and, while they abolished them, they offered and proposed no substitute. The discontent upon the subject of representation which afterwards more or less pervaded our society dates from that period, and that discontent, all will admit, has ceased. It was terminated by the Act of Parliamentary Reform of 1867-8. That act was founded on a confidence that the great body of the people of this country were "Conservative". I use the word in its purest and loftiest sense. I mean that the people of England, and especially the working classes of England, are proud of belonging to a great country, and wish to maintain its greatness— that they are proud of belonging to an Imperial country, and are resolved to maintain, if they can, the empire of England— that they believe, on the whole, that the greatness and the empire of England are to be attributed to the ancient institutions of this country… There are people who may be, or who at least affect to be, working men, and who, no doubt, have a certain influence with a certain portion of the metropolitan working class, who talk Jacobinism… I say with confidence that the great body of the working class of England utterly repudiate such sentiments. They have no sympathy with them. They are English to the core. They repudiate cosmopolitan principles. They adhere to national principles. They are for maintaining the greatness of the kingdom and the empire, and they are proud of being subjects of our Sovereign and members of such an Empire. Well, then, as regards the political institutions of this country, the maintenance of which is one of the chief tenets of the Tory party, so far as I can read public opinion, the feeling of the nation is in accordance with the Tory party.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Speech at banquet of the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations, Crystal Palace, London (24 June 1872), cited in "Mr. Disraeli at Sydenham," The Times (25 June 1872), p. 8.
1870s

Men, People, Feeling, Confidence

“Dragon is the category of primate predator. Predator is a weird category, right? Because there's crocodiles in it, and then there's lions. And they don't have much in common except that they eat you. So it's a functional category. So the dragon is the imagistic representation of the functional category of predator. It's like this: If you're a monkey, then a bird will pick you off, like an eagle. That's the wings. If it wasn't an eagle, then it was a cat (dragon claws), because they climb trees and give you a good chomping. And if it wasn't a cat, then you go down to the ground and a snake would get you, or maybe the snake would climb up the tree. So a dragon is a cat-snake-bird. And that's the thing that you really want to avoid. An the other thing is that it breathes fire, which is interesting because fire was both greatest friend and greatest enemy of humanity.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

Cats, Bird, Tree

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, that we've enjoyed some good times this evening, and enjoyed some laughter together, I feel it is my obligation to remind you of some of the negative, depressing, dangerous, life-threatening things that life is really all about; things you have not been thinking about tonight, but which will be waiting for you as soon as you leave the theater or as soon as you turn off your television sets. Anal rape, quicksand, body lice, evil spirits, gridlock, acid rain, continental drift, labor violence, flash floods, rabies, torture, bad luck, calcium deficiency, falling rocks, cattle stampedes, bank failure, evil neighbors, killer bees, organ rejection, lynching, toxic waste, unstable dynamite, religious fanatics, prickly heat, price fixing, moral decay, hotel fires, loss of face, stink bombs, bubonic plague, neo-Nazis, friction, cereal weevils, failure of will, chain reaction, soil erosion, mail fraud, dry rot, voodoo curse, broken glass, snake bite, parasites, white slavery, public ridicule, faithless friends, random violence, breach of contract, family scandals, charlatans, transverse myelitis, structural defects, race riots, sunspots, rogue elephants, wax buildup, killer frost, jealous coworkers, root canals, metal fatigue, corporal punishment, sneak attacks, peer pressure, vigilantes, birth defects, false advertising, ungrateful children, financial ruin, mildew, loss of privileges, bad drugs, ill-fitting shoes, widespread chaos, Lou Gehrig's disease, stray bullets, runaway trains, chemical spills, locusts, airline food, shipwrecks, prowlers, bathtub accidents, faulty merchandise, terrorism, discrimination, wrongful cremation, carbon deposits, beef tapeworm, taxation without representation, escaped maniacs, sunburn, abandonment, threatening letters, entropy, nine-mile fever, poor workmanship, absentee landlords, solitary confinement, depletion of the ozone layer, unworthiness, intestinal bleeding, defrocked priests, loss of equilibrium, disgruntled employees, global warming, card sharks, poisoned meat, nuclear accidents, broken promises, contamination of the water supply, obscene phone calls, nuclear winter, wayward girls, mutual assured destruction, rampaging moose, the greenhouse effect, cluster headaches, social isolation, Dutch elm disease, the contraction of the universe, paper cuts, eternal damnation, the wrath of God, and PARANOIAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Playing With Your Head (1986)

Life, God, Bad luck, Children

“Known, culture, order, explored territory, or the dominance hierarchy, are all interchangeable from a representational perspective.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Other

“All that is said by any of us can only be imitation and representation.”

Plato (-427–-347 BC) Classical Greek philosopher

107b
Critias

“The concept-systems of antithesis are concepts that are indeed thoroughly determined by negative predicates but are not positively representable.
Just because a precise and complete representation of these concept-systems is impossible, they are inaccessible to direct investigation and elaboration by our reflection. They may, however, be regarded as lying at the limit of the representable, i. e., we can form a concept-system lying within the representable, which passes over into the given system by simple change of magnitude ratio. By abstracting from the ratios of the quantities, the concept-system remains unchanged in case of transition to the limit. At the limit itself, however, some of the correlative concepts of the system lose their susceptibility of being represented, and those, indeed, that mediate the relation between other concepts.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

General Relation of the Concept System of Thesis and Antithesis
Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

Lying, Change

“When this country here was first being founded there were 13 colonies. The whites were colonized. They were fed up with this taxation without representation, so some of them stood up and said “Liberty or death.” Though I went to a white school over here in Mason, Michigan, the white man made the mistake of letting me read his history books. He made the mistake of teaching me that Patrick Henry was a patriot, and George Washington -- wasn’t nothing nonviolent about old Pat or George Washington. “Liberty or death” was what brought about the freedom of whites in this country from the English. They didn’t care about the odds. Why they faced the wrath of the entire British Empire. And in those days they used to say that the British Empire was so vast and so powerful when the sun would never set on them. This is how big it was, yet these 13 little, scrawny states, tired of taxation without representation, tired of being exploited and oppressed and degraded, told that big British Empire “Liberty or death.” And here you have 22 million Afro-American black people today catching more hell than Patrick Henry ever saw. And I’m here to tell you, in case you don’t know it, that you got a new generation of black people in this country who don’t care anything whatsoever about odds. They don’t want to hear you old Uncle Tom handkerchief heads talking about the odds. No. This is a new generation. If they’re gonna draft these young black men and send them over to Korea or South Vietnam to face 800 million Chinese — if you’re not afraid of those odds, you shouldn’t be afraid of these odds.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

The Ballot or the Bullet (1964), Speech in Detroit, Michigan (12 April 1964)

Death, Men, People, Books

“We act out our encounter with the unknown world. We act it out in a way that is analogous to the manner that's presented as a description of what it is that God does at the beginning of time to extract habitable order out of chaos. So you act it out first. Then the second thing is, you watch people who act it out, and you start to make representations of that. That's stories, right? And maybe you admire them. And then maybe after a long time you collect a bunch of those stories, and you can say what that is. You can articulate it as a pattern.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Other

God, People, World, Way

“What happens in the story of Adam and Eve is that when people become self-conscious, they get thrown out of Paradise and then they're in history. And history is a place where there's pain in child birth, and where you're dominated by your mate, and where you have to toil like mad like no other animal because you're aware of your future. You have to work, and sacrifice the joys of the present for the future, constantly, and you know that you're going to die. And you have all that weight on you. How could anything be more true than that? Unless you're naive beyond comprehension. There's something that's echoed about your life in that representation. We're such strange creatures, because we don't really fit into being in some sense, and that's what's expressed in the notion of The Fall.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdrLQ7DpiWs "Biblical Series II: Genesis 1: Chaos & Order"

Life, Pain, People, History

“It was inevitable that artists should turn around and question the validity of the fundamental assumption that art aimed at representation; and the moment the question was fairly posed it became clear the pseudo scientific assumption that fidelity to appearance was the measure of art had no logical foundation.”

Roger Fry (1866–1934) English artist and art critic

Lecture to Fabian Soiety 1917 Art and Life from Vision and design by Roger Fry , Forgotten Books , 2012
Art Quotes

Art, Question, Appearance

“Just to paint a representation or design is not hard, but to express a thought in painting is. Thought is fluid. What you put on canvas is concrete, and it tends to direct the thought. The more you punt on canvas the more you lose control of the thought. I’ve never been able to paint what I set out to paint.”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

1941 - 1967
Source: Three Hundred Years of American Painting, Alexander Eliot; New York: Time Inc., 1957, p. 298

Painting

“What now is the answer to the question as to the bridge between the perception of the senses and the concepts, which is now reduced to the question as to the bridge between the outer perceptions and those inner image-like representations.”

Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) Austrian physicist, Nobel prize winner

Letter to Markus Fierz (1948)
Context: What now is the answer to the question as to the bridge between the perception of the senses and the concepts, which is now reduced to the question as to the bridge between the outer perceptions and those inner image-like representations. It seems to me one has to postulate a cosmic order of nature — outside of our arbitrariness— to which the outer material objects are subjected as are the inner images... The organizing and regulating has to be posited beyond the differentiation of physical and psychical... I am all for it to call this "organizing and regulating" "archetypes." It would then be inadmissible to define these as psychic contents. Rather, the above-mentioned inner pictures (dominants of the collective unconscious, see Jung) are the psychic manifestations of the archetypes, but which would have to produce and condition all nature laws belonging to the world of matter. The nature laws of matter would then be the physical manifestation of the archetypes.

Question, Sense

“A picture or representation of human figures, ought to be done in such a way as that the spectator may easily recognise, by means of their attitudes, the purpose in their minds.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), IX The Practice of Painting
Context: A picture or representation of human figures, ought to be done in such a way as that the spectator may easily recognise, by means of their attitudes, the purpose in their minds. Thus, if you have to represent a man of noble character in the act of speaking, let his gestures be such as naturally accompany good words; and, in the same way, if you wish to depict a man of a brutal nature, give him fierce movements; as with his arms flung out towards the listener, and his head and breast thrust forward beyond his feet, as if following the speaker's hands. Thus it is with a deaf and dumb person who, when he sees two men in conversation — although he is deprived of hearing — can nevertheless understand, from the attitudes and gestures of the speakers, the nature of their discussion.

Way

“We both are, and know that we are, and delight in our being, and our knowledge of it. Moreover, in these three things no true-seeming illusion disturbs us; for we do not come into contact with these by some bodily sense, as we perceive the things outside of us of all which sensible objects it is the images resembling them, but not themselves which we perceive in the mind and hold in the memory, and which excite us to desire the objects. But, without any delusive representation of images or phantasms, I am most certain that I am, and that I know and delight in this.”

Aurelius Augustinus book The City of God

XI, 26, Parts of this passage has been heavily compared with later statements of René Descartes; in Latin and with a variant translations:
The City of God (early 400s)
Context: We both are, and know that we are, and delight in our being, and our knowledge of it. Moreover, in these three things no true-seeming illusion disturbs us; for we do not come into contact with these by some bodily sense, as we perceive the things outside of us of all which sensible objects it is the images resembling them, but not themselves which we perceive in the mind and hold in the memory, and which excite us to desire the objects. But, without any delusive representation of images or phantasms, I am most certain that I am, and that I know and delight in this. In respect of these truths, I am not at all afraid of the arguments of the Academicians, who say, What if you are deceived? For if I am deceived, I am. For he who is not, cannot be deceived; and if I am deceived, by this same token I am. And since I am if I am deceived, how am I deceived in believing that I am? for it is certain that I am if I am deceived. Since, therefore, I, the person deceived, should be, even if I were deceived, certainly I am not deceived in this knowledge that I am. And, consequently, neither am I deceived in knowing that I know. For, as I know that I am, so I know this also, that I know. And when I love these two things, I add to them a certain third thing, namely, my love, which is of equal moment. For neither am I deceived in this, that I love, since in those things which I love I am not deceived; though even if these were false, it would still be true that I loved false things. For how could I justly be blamed and prohibited from loving false things, if it were false that I loved them? But, since they are true and real, who doubts that when they are loved, the love of them is itself true and real? Further, as there is no one who does not wish to be happy, so there is no one who does not wish [themself] to be [into being]. For how can he be happy, if he is nothing?

Knowledge, Sense, Memory

Karl Marx book The German Ideology

Vol. I, Part 1, [The Materialist Conception of History].
The German Ideology (1845/46)
Context: Where speculation ends — in real life — there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of activity loses its medium of existence. At the best its place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general results, abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical development of men. Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history. On the contrary, our difficulties begin only when we set about the observation and the arrangement — the real depiction — of our historical material, whether of a past epoch or of the present.

Life, Men, Knowledge, Science

“Young people are openly talking about democracy, representation and freedom. They want to see constitutions that are by the people for the people. Children are challenging the adult world as they respond to the energies of the New Age. They want to see friendship, humanity and goodwill manifesting throughout the world.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

The Art of Living: Living within the Laws of Life (2006)

Democracy, Friendship, Freedom, Children

“This is very scary for a country’s future and a great challenge to the world’s development of peace. Xi Jinping’s madness and stupidity is a representation of this country. China will have to pay a heavy price for it in the future.”

Zhou Fengsuo (1967) Chinese human rights activist

Source: May 12, 2019 The Tiananmen Massacre, 30 years on – Survivor Q&A: Zhou Fengsuo https://hongkongfp.com/2019/05/12/tiananmen-massacre-30-years-survivor-qa-zhou-fengsuo/

Peace, Country, Future, Stupidity

“I haven't calculated why white signifies completeness, and it's not an impeccable colour, but a colour that lacks itself. Black is comprehensive and black is full of obliviousness. It is a true completion. This world is a downside. It's just a tiny point in the gloaming twilight. Denial is inclusive and it's about the idealised assertives and defensives, furthermore protecting the aspects of the destructive, senseless actualities of current counterinsurgencies. The representation of one fulfillment is more pleasant than all the blemishes and the settlement of this one imperfection. There are defects in this world, and on the other hand, hegemony. "Why don't you erase the perception, only negritude?" “How can I take this cobblestone and consolidate it?” You will be fully embossed with this extraordinary world. You will see such translucent melancholy. You will feel as if you can use adhesive in the last memoir of this one humankind and you will only experience the last time before, you will see the emptiness for one instant and then the bright glistening light way ahead of you. - Rok Seo.”

RokSeo

Time, Light, Way, World

“Where speculation ends — in real life — there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of activity loses its medium of existence. At the best its place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general results, abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical development of men. Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history. On the contrary, our difficulties begin only when we set about the observation and the arrangement — the real depiction — of our historical material, whether of a past epoch or of the present.”

Karl Marx book The German Ideology

Source: The German Ideology (1845-1846), Vol. I, Part 1, [The Materialist Conception of History].

History, Past, Knowledge, Reality

“All our ideas are representations of the objects that affect our senses; then what can be represented by the idea of God, which is obviously an idea without an object? Isn't such an idea, or will add, as impossible as effects without causes? Isn't an idea without a prototype anything but a chimera? Some Doctors of the Church, you will continue, assure us that the notion of God is innate, and that a man already has this notion in his mother's womb. But that is wrong, you will add; every principle is a judgement, every judgement is the result of experience, and experience can be gained only through the exercise of the senses. And it thereby follows that religious principles are obviously based on nothing and are not innate at all. How, you will go on, could anyone persuade rational beings that the hardest thing to grasp was the most essential thing for them? They were terrified; and when you are terrified, you are no longer rational. Above all, they were told to distrust their reasoning; and when the brains are muddled, you believe everything and examine nothing. Fear and ignorance, you will continue, are two mainstays of any and all religions.”

Marquis de Sade Philosophy in the Bedroom

Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans
Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795)

God, Religion, Sense, Idea

“We women have presented larger petitions in support of our enfranchisement than were ever presented for any other reform; we have succeeded in holding greater public meetings than men have ever held for any reform, in spite of the difficulty which women have in throwing off their natural diffidence, that desire to escape publicity which we have inherited from generations of our foremothers. We have broken through that. We have faced hostile mobs at street corners, because we were told that we could not have that representation for our taxes that men have won unless we converted the whole of the country to our side. Because we have done this, we have been misrepresented, we have been ridiculed, we have had contempt poured upon us, and the ignorant mob have been incited to offer us violence, which we have faced unarmed and unprotected by the safeguards which Cabinet Ministers enjoy. We have been driven to do this; we are determined to go on with this agitation because we feel in honour bound. Just as it was the duty of your forefathers, it is our duty to make the world a better place for women than it is to-day.”

Emmeline Pankhurst book My Own Story

My Own Story (1914), Book II, Ch. 3

Country, Support, Nature, Men

“We have always sought explanations when it was only representations that we could seek to invent.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Original: (fr) On a toujours cherché des explications quand c’était des représentations qu’on pouvait seulement essayé d’inventer.
Source: Unsourced

“If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”

Abigail Adams (1744–1818) 2nd First Lady of the United States (1797–1801)

Source: The Letters of John and Abigail Adams

Law

“I tell you to thinkthoughts and you come up with that?!" the lieutenant had screamed. "Is a guinea pigDo you consider a guinea pig the representation of all that is evil?"

Maybe… if it's an evil guinea pig.”

Frank Beddor book The Looking Glass Wars

Source: The Looking Glass Wars

Evil

“Next you will cry about taxation without representation, and throw a basket of tea into the harbor. You are indeed a very Jacobin at heart, and I think I must give up trying to cure you of it; I can but wash my hands and deny responsibility”

Naomi Novik book His Majesty's Dragon

Source: His Majesty's Dragon

Thinking, Heart, Tea, Cry

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”

Guy Debord (1931–1994) French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker and founding member of the Situationist International (SI)

Source: Society of the Spectacle (1967), Ch. 1, sct. 1.

Life

“There are a lot of idiots in this country, and they deserve representation as much as the next man.”

Jasper Fforde book First Among Sequels

Source: First Among Sequels

Country

“[The information available within a system constitutes what Boulding (1978) calls the noosphere. It is constituted by the collection of plans, of representations, of procedures, of ideas for the construction of objects or of instructions to realize certain interaction patterns, including] the totality of the cognitive content, including values, of all human nervous systems, plus the prostatic devices by which the system is extended and integrated in the form of libraries, computers, telephones, post offices, and so on.”

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

Source: 1970s, Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution, 1978, p. 122, cited in: Jorge Reina Schement, Brent D. Ruben (1993) Information and Behavior - Volume 4. p. 517 Robert A. Solo (1994) " Kenneth Ewart Boulding: 1910-1993. An Appreciation http://www.jstor.org/stable/4226892" commented: "The image appears as crucial in Boulding's treatment of societal evolution. Here the record is in human artifacts, not only in material structures such as buildings and machines, telephones and radios, but also in organizations including the extended family, the tribe, the nation, and the corporation. All such artifacts originate in and are sustained by images in the human mind. Civilization and civilized man, in the language that he knows, the skills he acquires, the whole heritage of tradition and manners he has learned, are human artifacts."

Idea

“In these facts we discover the cause of the popular discontent and outbreaks which have so frequently threatened the stability of the British throne and the peace of the English people. As early as 1770 Lord Chatham said, 'By the end of this century, either the Parliament must be reformed from within, or it will be reformed with a vengeance from without.' The disastrous failure of Republicanism in France delayed the fulfillment of his prophecy; but when, in 1832, the people were on the verge of revolt, the government was reluctantly compelled to pass the celebrated Reform Bill, which has taken its place in English history beside Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights. It equalized the basis of representation, and extended the suffrage to the middle class; and though the property qualification practically excluded the workingman, a great step upward had been taken, a concession had been made which must be followed by others. The struggle is again going on. Its omens are not doubtful. The great storm through which American liberty has just passed gave a temporary triumph to the enemies of popular right in England. But our recent glorious triumph is the signal of disaster to tyranny, and victory for the people. The liberal party in England are jubilant, and will never rest until the ballot, that 'silent vindicator of liberty', is in the hand of the workingman, and the temple of English liberty rests on the broad foundation of popular suffrage. Let us learn from this, that suffrage and safety, like liberty and union, are one and inseparable.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1860s, Oration at Ravenna, Ohio (1865)

People, Peace, History, Failure

“The individual representation of the object, treated sympathetically or anti-pathetically, is highly necessary and is an enrichment to the world in form. The elimination of the human relationship causes the vacuum which makes all of us suffer in various degrees – an individual alteration of the details of the object represented is necessary in order to display on the canvas the whole physicals reality.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

Source: 1930s, On my Painting (1938), pp. 17-18

World, Reality, Suffering

“Taxation and representation are inseparable… whatever is a man's own, is absolutely his own; no man has a right to take it from him without his consent, either expressed by himself or representative; whoever attempts to do it, attempts an injury; whoever does it, commits a robbery; he throws down and destroys the distinction between liberty and slavery.”

Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden (1714–1794) English lawyer, judge and Whig politician

Speech in the House of Lords, on the taxation of Americans by the British parliament, 7 March 1766; as reported in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1990), 2nd edn., p. 60.

“The period during the First World War was a very exciting time in Paris, with artists, philosophers, and poets continually discussing and arguing about the work with which they were involved. Although I myself am little concerned with abstract theory, I certainly do think of cubism as a form of emancipation essentially different from artistic movements that had preceded it. Thus, impressionism, while it was a revolutionary technique, was still an essentially naturalistic movement concerned with a precise examination of the nature of light and the effect of changing lights on representational scenes and objects. Cubism did add a new dimension to painting and sculpture, a dimension that changed our way of looking at nature and the work of art.”

Jacques Lipchitz (1891–1973) American and French sculptor

Source: Jacques Lipchitz: My life in sculpture, 1972, p. 40

War, World, Art, Way

“In his references to my own work, Gould includes at least nine citations that involve more than just an expression of Gould's opinion; in these citations Gould purportedly paraphrases my views. Yet in eight of the nine cases, Gould's representation of these views is false, misleading, or grossly caricatured. Nonspecialists could have no way of knowing any of this without reading the cited sources. While an author can occasionally make an inadvertent mistake in paraphrasing another, it appears Gould's paraphrases are consistently slanted to serve his own message…
Of all the book's references, a full 27 percent precede 1900. Another 44 percent fall between 1900 and 1950 (60 percent of those are before 1925); and only 29 percent are more recent than 1950. From the total literature spanning more than a century, the few "bad apples" have been hand-picked most aptly to serve Gould's purpose.”

Arthur Jensen (1923–2012) professor of educational psychology

Arthur Jensen, "The Debunking of Scientific Fossils and Straw Persons" http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/jensen-gould-fossils Contemporary Education Review 1:2, 1982

Books, Way, Literature, Appearance

“Acting is the physical representation of a mental picture and the projection of an emotional concept.”

Laurette Taylor (1884–1946) American stage and silent film actress

The Quality You Need Most, from Green Book Magazine (April 1914)

“Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing.”

George Meredith (1828–1909) British novelist and poet of the Victorian era

Prelude. The Egoist http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext99/egost11.txt (1879)

Life, Women, Men, World

“I want so much for my work to grow forth out of the material, just as in nature the plants grow forth out of the earth, which corresponds to their character. In the print 'Lebensfreude' [Joy of living] I worked for the most part with my finger, and the effect I hoped for was achieved. There is hidden in the print a bit of wantonness, in the representation as well as in the boldness of the technique. If I were to make the "ragged and moving" contours "correctly" in the academic sense, this effect would not nearly be achieved.”

Emil Nolde (1867–1956) German artist

in a letter to his friend Gustav Schiefler, 1906, in 'Gustav Schiefler and Christel Mosel', Emil Nolde: Das graphische Werk, vol. 2.; M. DuMont Schauberg, Cologne, 1966-67, p. 8; as quoted in 'The Revival of Printmaking in Germany', I. K. Rigby; in German Expressionist Prints and Drawings - Essays Vol 1.; published by Museum Associates, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California & Prestel-Verlag, Germany, 1986, p.50
Nolde described how the exhilarating new sense of collaboration with the medium had freed him from the constraints of traditional etching techniques and encouraged a bolder, freer expression
1900 - 1920

Hope, Nature, Sense, Joy

“In this country political agitation is not likely to be soon lulled. We shall have no violence, I think, except in Ireland, and even there I hope appearances are rather less threatening than were supposed a short time ago. But we shall have, and ought to have, a powerful agitation in favour of a real Parliamentary Reform, and to gain this would be worth some time longer of commercial depression. We have deluded ourselves with the notion that we are a free people, and have a good government and a representative system, whilst in fact our representative system is for the most part a sham, and the forms of representation are used to consolidate the supremacy of the titled and proprietary class. All this will break down by and by. From all parts of the country we hear of preliminary meetings and new organisations, Associations and Leagues, etc. The middle and working classes are beginning to see that united they may win all they require; divided they are a prey to their insatiable enemies.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Letter to Mrs. Priestman (23 April 1848), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), p. 183.
1840s

People, Hope, Thinking, Appearance

“[Zachman reasons that] an analogous set of architectural representations is likely to be produced in building any complex product.”

John Zachman (1934) American computer scientist

Source: A Framework for Information Systems Architecture, 1987, p. 281 as cited in: San Murugesan, Yogesh Deshpande (2001) Web Engineering: Managing Diversity and Complexity of Web. p, 126

“[T]he last 15 years have witnessed the ascent of an alternative view, that of embodied or enactive cognition. This new wave arose because the computationalist doctrine failed to account even for the most elementary coping with the world: walking, perceiving object in a natural setting, imagination. Slowly the cards turned into considering that the basis of mind is the body in coupled action, that is, the sensory-motor circuits establish the organism as viable in situated contexts. From this perspective the brain appears as a dynamical process (and not a syntactic one) of real time variables with a rich self-organizing capacity (and not a representational machinery). So in this sense the mind is not in the head since it is roots in the body as a whole and also in the extended environment where the organism finds itself.”

Francisco Varela (1946–2001) Chilean biologist

Varela (1998) " The Cosmos Letter http://www.expo-cosmos.or.jp/letter/letter12e.html", Expo'90 Foundation, Japan

World, Imagination, Nature, Sense

“We are going to have perhaps a thousand years of non-representational painting.”

Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) American artist

1950s, Conversations With Artists, 1957

Painting

“If you push it, it feels good; I don’t know what it is. It must have something to do with kinesthesia. I feel now that I am painting I'm not drawing anything, or even representing non-objective art. You know, you can represent abstract art, too, as well as heads figures, nudes. A lot of abstract artists are just representational painters, you know that. And a lot of figurative artists are very abstract. I don't feel as if I'm doing that. I feel more as if I'm shaping something with my hands. I feel as if I've always wanted to get to that state. Like a blind man in a dark room had some clay, what would he make? I end up with 2 or 3 forms on a canvas, but it gets very physical for me. I always thought I am a very spiritual man, not interested in paint, and now I discover myself to be very physical and very involved with matter. I want to be involved with how heavy things are, a balloon, how light things are, things levitating, pushing forms, make me feel as if my hand is pushing in a head, bulges out here and pushes there.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1961 - 1980, transcript of a public forum at Boston university', conducted by Joseph Ablow 1966, pp. 73-75

Art, Feeling, Light, Drawing

“In the shift from direct democracy to representational democracy, the printed book became an embodiment of thought for the physically absent author; and so the popular art form of the popular book and the pamphlet re-presented ideas and contributed to the public space of political philosophies of the Enlightenment. Television, however, now brings forth this new kind of public space, and it calls into being this new world, not of the educated citizenry in a republic, but of the electropeasantry in the state of Entertainment. Recall how people stopped singing in pubs when they brought in the TV set, and you will appreciate the new passivity in which people stop voting for their representatives as TV takes over the electoral campaigns.”

William Irwin Thompson (1938) American writer

Thompson (1991) Play, from The American Replacement of Nature.

People, Books, World, Education

“Gordon Tullock, on the other hand, might be characterized as the somewhat cynical pragmatist, who set out to understand the world, not to change it. This side of Tullock is visible in his early paper on simple majority rule, and is perhaps most apparent in his work on rent seeking. These differences should not be pushed too far, however. Buchanan (1980) also contributed to the rent-seeking literature, and often has described public choice as “politics without romance.” One of the most dispiriting contributions to the public choice literature has to be Kenneth Arrow’s (1951) famous impossibility theorem. In a too little appreciated article, Tullock (1967b) demonstrated with the help of a somewhat torturous geometrical analysis, that the cycling that underlies the impossibility theorem is likely to be constrained to a rather small subset of Pareto-optimal outcomes, and thus Arrow’s theorem was “irrelevant,” a rather happy result, and one which anticipated work appearing more than a decade later on the uncovered set. In Chap. 10 of Toward a Mathematics of Politics, Tullock (1967a) engages in a bit of wishful thinking about constitutional design by describing how one could achieve an ideal form of proportional representation in a legislative body. He also was an early enthusiast of the potential for using a demand-revelation process to reveal individual preferences for public goods”

Dennis Mueller (1940) American economist

Tideman and Tullock 1976
James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and The Calculus (2012)

World, Literature, Mathematics, Optimism

“The new plastic idea cannot, therefore, take the form of a natural or concrete representation, although the latter does always indicate the universal to a degree, or at least conceals it within.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

1910's, Natural Reality and Abstract Reality', 1919

Idea, Nature, Universe

“I have always directed my attempts at the figurative representation of objects by way of summary and not very descriptive brushstrokes, diverging greatly from the real objective measurements of things, and this has led many people to talk about childish drawing.... this position of seeing them [the objects] without looking at them too much, without focusing more attention on them than any ordinary man would in normal everyday life..”

Jean Dubuffet book Prospectus et tous écrits suivants

Source: 1960-70's, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, 1967, p. 105

Life, People, Way, Drawing

“During the late 1970s and early 1980s there was vigorous debate about the nature of visual mental imagery. One position (championed primarily by Pylyshyn, 1973, 1981) held that representations that underlie the experience of mental imagery are the same type as those used in language; the other position (which my colleagues and I supported, e. g., Kosslyn, 1980, 1994) held that these representations serve to depict, not describe, objects. The debate evolved over time… but always centred on the nature of the internal representations that underlie the experience of visualisation.”

Stephen Kosslyn (1948) American psychologist

Stephen M. Kosslyn, "Mental images and the brain." Cognitive Neuropsychology 22.3-4 (2005): p. 333

Support, Nature, Time

“And now, at the end of the twentieth century, with the pressure of modern information and the advances of data processing, graphics is passing through a new and fundamental stage. The great difference between the graphic representation of yesterday, which was poorly dissociated from the figurative image, and the graphics of tomorrow, is the disappearance of the congential fixity of the image.
When one can superimpose, juxtapose, transpose, and permute graphic images in ways that lead to groupings and classings, the graphic image passes from the dead image, the 'illustration,' to the living image, the widely accessible research instrument it is now becoming. The graphic is no longer only the 'representation' of a final simplification, it is a point of departure for the discovery of these simplifications and the means for their justification. The graphic has become, by its manageability, an instrument for information processing.”

Jacques Bertin (1918–2010) French geographer and cartographer

Source: Semiology of graphics (1967/83), p. 4

Way, Departure, Dead

“The mythology of the New Testament, also, is not to be questioned with respect to the content of its objectifying representations but with respect to the understanding of existence that expresses itself in them.”

Rudolf Karl Bultmann (1884–1976) German theologian

Source: New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (1941), p. 10

Understanding, Question

“Long-term potentiation helps stabalize the internal representation of space, and… attention, a defining feature of explicit memory storage, modulates the representation of space.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

In Search of Memory (2006)

Memory, Help

“Mercifully, we stay our hand. Earth’s cities will not be bombed. The free citizens of Venus Republic have no wish to slaughter their cousins still on Terra. Our only purpose is to establish our own independence, to manage our own affairs, to throw off the crushing yoke of absentee ownership and taxation without representation which has bleed us poor.
In doing so, in so taking our stand as free men, we call on all oppressed and impoverished nations everywhere to follow our lead, accept our help. Look up into the sky! Swimming there above you is the very station from which I now address you. The fat and stupid rulers of the Federation have made of Circum-Terra an overseer’s whip. The threat of this military base in the sky has protected their empire from the just wrath of their victims for more then five score years.
We now crush it.
In a matter of minutes this scandal in the clean skies, this pistol pointed at the heads of men everywhere on your planet, will cease to exist. Step out of doors, watch the sky. Watch a new sun blaze briefly, and know that its light is the light of Liberty inviting all of Earth to free itself.
Subject peoples of Earth, we free men of the free Republic of Venus salute you with that sign!”

Robert A. Heinlein book Between Planets

Source: Between Planets (1951), Chapter 6, “The Sign in the Sky” (p. 74) - Speech given before the destruction of the nuclear-armed satellite Circum-Terra.

Men, People, Stupidity, Light

“There are prisoners in Guantanamo Bay that have not been tried, have no legal representation, their families cannot see them and are obviously kept in a strange land outside their own country. There is no international monitoring of their conditions and fate. No one knows whether they are prisoners, POWs, accused or criminals. European investigators have confirmed the existence of secret prisons in Europe too.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Paragraphs 6-7
2006, Letter to George W. Bush, 2006

Fate, Secret, Family, Country

“The role of the 'representational arts' - painting, sculpture, and even architecture…. has ended, as it is no longer necessary for the consciousness of our age, and everything art has to offer can simply be classified as a throwback.”

Lyubov Popova (1889–1924) Russian artist

Quote, c. 1921; from Lyubov' Popova, in 'Commentary on Drawings', trans. ed. James West, in Art Into Life: Russian Constructivism, 1914-1932; catalogue for exhibition Rizzoli, New York: 1990, p. 69 (Popova's original text, in the Manuscript Division, State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow, f. 148, ed. khr. 17, 1. 4.)

Age, Art, Painting

“I just want to explain what I mean when I say that we should try to hold on to physical reality.
We are … all aware of the situation regarding what will turn out to be the basic foundational concepts in physics: the point-mass or the particle is surely not among them; the field, in the Faraday-Maxwell sense, might be, but not with certainty. But that which we conceive as existing ("real") should somehow be localized in time and space. That is, the real in one part of space, A, should (in theory) somehow "exist" independently of that which is thought of as real in another part of space, B. If a physical system stretches over A and B, then what is present in B should somehow have an existence independent of what is present in A. What is actually present in B should thus not depend the type of measurement carried out in the part of space A; it should also be independent of whether or not a measurement is made in A.
If one adheres to this program, then one can hardly view the quantum-theoretical description as a complete representation of the physically real. If one attempts, nevertheless, so to view it, then one must assume that the physically real in B undergoes a sudden change because of a measurement in A. My physical instincts bristle at that suggestion.
However, if one renounces the assumption that what is present in different parts of space has an independent, real existence, then I don't see at all what physics is supposed to be describing. For what is thought to be a "system" is after all, just conventional, and I do not see how one is supposed to divide up the world objectively so that one can make statements about parts.”

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

"What must be an essential feature of any future fundamental physics?" Letter to Max Born (March 1948); published in Albert Einstein-Hedwig und Max Born (1969) "Briefwechsel 1916-55", and in Potentiality, Entanglement and Passion-at-a-Distance: Quantum Mechanical Studies for Abner Shimony, Volume Two edited by Robert Cohen, Michael Horn, and John Stachel (1997), p. 121 http://books.google.com/books?id=DsNoIcQemTsC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA121#v=onepage&q&f=false 1940s

World, Reality, Sense, Change

“Mathematics, like music and poetry, is a creation of the mind; … the primary task of the mathematician, like that of any other artist, is to extend man's mental horizon by representation and interpretation.”

Graham Sutton (1903–1977) Welsh scientist

Mathematics in Action (1954) page 1

Music, Mathematics

“I had but very little prospect, from my own application, of obtaining the necessary supplies of cash. What additional influence your Excellency's letter will give to my reasons and representation, time only can manifest.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (24 April 1779)

Time

“Scientific models have all these connotations. They are representations of states, objects, and events. They are idealized in the sense that they are less complicated than reality and hence easier to use for research purposes. These models are easier to manipulate and "carry" than the real thing. The simplicity of models, compared with reality, lies in the fact that only the relevant properties of reality are represented.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1960s, Scientific method: optimizing applied research decisions, 1962, p. 108 as cited in: Joe H. Ward, Earl Jennings (1973) Introduction to linear models. p. 4.

Reality, Sense

“Even amidst the violent attacks launched against us for months past, we call upon the sons of the Arab people dwelling in Israel to keep the peace and to play their part in building the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its institutions, provisional and permanent.”

David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973) Israeli politician, Zionist leader, prime minister of Israel

Israel's Proclamation of Independence, read on (14 May 1948)

People, Peace, Past, Parting

“The pace of life has increased in the last few decades just as the speed of the motor bicycle has been exceeded many times over by the aeroplane. After art passed through a whole series of intermediate stages it reached cubism where for the first time the creative urge to construct instinctively overcame conscious resolve.... from this point the picture started to gain stature as a new world of reality and in this way the foundation stone for a new representation of the shapes and forms of the material world was laid.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

1915 - 1925, Suprematism' in World Reconstruction (1920)

Life, World, Art, Way

“Towards the end of 1958, I greatly increased.... the works done with what is called poor material. I felt the need to persist and go deeper with the entire message of what is insignificant, worn or dramatised by time... In fact, it was the most conscious resumption of subjects that had often attracted me. In my research, I had discovered this material, one I find loaded with strange suggestions, which is cardboard. A grey, anonymous material that won't be easily manipulated, for which very reason the slightest mark of the hand torments it and destroys it. But the piece of cardboard, the box, the lid, the tray.... dirty clothes (socks, T-shirt, underpants…), old furniture, everyday objects; not used as a representation or theme in the picture but as real bodies, objects.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

as quoted in 'Tàpies: From Within', June/November 2013 - Presse Release text, Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC), pp. 7-8
1971 - 1980, Memòria Personal', 1977

Time, Clothes, Box

“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

“[Ackoff also developed the circular organization concept. This structure is a democratic hierarchy with three essential characteristics:]
(1) the absence of an ultimate authority, the circularity of power;
(2) the ability of each member to participate directly or through representation in all decisions that affect him or her directly; and
(3) the ability of members, individually or collectively, to make and implement decisions that affect no one other than the decision maker or decision-makers.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Ackoff’s (1994) The Democratic Corporation: A Radical Prescription for Recreating Corporate America and Rediscovering Success. p. 117 cited in: Stuart A. Umpleby and Eric B. Dent. (1999) "The Origins and Purposes of Several Traditions. in Systems Theory and Cybernetics". in Cybernetics and Systems: An International Journal, Vol 30. pp. 79-103.
1990s

Decision

“Now, it is unquestionable that language, and consequently the system of concepts which it translates, is the product of a collective elaboration. What it expresses is the manner in which society as a whole represents the facts of experience. The ideas which correspond to the diverse elements of language are thus collective representations. Even their contents bear witness to the same fact. In fact, there are scarcely any words among those which we usually employ whose meaning does not pass, to a greater or less extent, the limits of our personal experience. Very frequently a term expresses things which we have never perceived or experiences which we have never had or of which we have never been the witness. Even when we know some of the objects which it concerns, it is only as particular examples that serve to illustrate the idea which they would never have been able to form by themselves. Thus there is a great deal of knowledge condensed in the word which I never collected, and which is not individual; it even surpasses me to such an extent that I cannot even completely appropriate all its results. Which of us knows all the words of the language he speaks and the entire signification of each?”

Émile Durkheim book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

Source: The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1912, p. 434

Idea, Knowledge, Personality

“I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing, and stretching one's arms again transcendental experiences became possible.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

in The Romantics were prompted, essay by Mark Rothko, 1947/48; as quoted in Possibilities, vol 1, no. 1, winter 1947-48, Kate Rothko Prizel and Christophor Rothko.
1940's

Question, Solitude, Silence

“A certain theory of representation implies a certain theory of meaning - and meaning is what we live by.”

Paul Cilliers (1956–2011) South African philosopher

Source: Complexity and Postmodernism (1998), p. 88; as cited by David Byrne (1999)

“I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue and yellow. I affirmed: it's all over. Basic colors. Every plane is a plane and there is to be no representation.”

Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956) Russian artist and photographer

Quote in: 'The Death of Painting'; from the MoMA-website: Interactives: texts https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/1998/rodchenko/texts/death_of_painting.html Rodchenko is looking back: in 1921 he executed what were arguably some of the first true monochromes (artworks of one color; source, Wikipedia:Rodchenko)

Color, Painting

“Calculation establishes that a quantum positive energy theorem may be possible using a representation based on the Ashtekar connection. Left open is a key question of whether this use of the Ashtekar connection is necessary or whether a positive quantum energy result can be achieved for representations based on other connections, i. e., for [other] values of the Immirzi parameter.”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

"Positive energy in quantum gravity" arXiv (Jun 10, 2014)

Question

“It is my intention to represent the world of Shakespeare as far as possible as it really is and not merely to tell the story. It is my effort to retain the names used by him, the atmosphere he created, his descriptions…on the whole. His representation of the world as it is. I believe that this is necessary for the enhancement of Kannada literature and the sensibilities of the Kannada people and for the broadening of their vision of the world. If human civilization and peace are to last, it is of foremost importance that the different races of the earth attain a world vision. In order to achieve this the people of the West should read our epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata sympathetically as we must acquaint ourselves with their poetic tradition.”

D. V. Gundappa (1887–1975) Indian writer

India's Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation, and Performance

People, World, Peace, Literature

“As you can see this is a composition of vertical and horizontal lines which will (in an abstract manner) have to express the idea of rising upwards, of magnitude. This is the same idea which used, for example, to be the guiding principle in the construction of cathedrals. Since only the manner of expression and not the representation has to express this general idea, I have not given any title. An abstract human mind will, of itself, receive the intended impression. I always confine myself to expressing the general.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote in Mondrian's letter to Theo van Doesburg, Amsterdam, 1915; as cited in Letters of the great artists, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 234 (transl. Daphne Woodward)
1910's

Idea

“The problem of directing a user to stored information, some of which may be unknown to him, is the problem of "information retrieval"… In information retrieval, the addressee or receiver rather than the sender is the active party. Other differences are that communication is temporal from one epoch to a later epoch in time, though possibly at the same point in space; communication is in all cases unidirectional; the sender cannot know the particular message that will be of later use to the receiver and must send all possible messages; the message is digitally representable; a "channel" is the physical document left in storage which contains the message; and there is no channel noise because all messages are presumed to be completely accessible to the receiver. The technical goal is finding in minimum time those messages of interest to the receiver, where the receiver has available a selective device with a finite digital scanning rate.”

Calvin Mooers (1919–1994) American computer scientist

Calvin Mooers (1950). " Information retrieval viewed as temporal signaling http://www.mathunion.org/ICM/ICM1950.1/Main/icm1950.1.0565.0576.ocr.pdf#page=8". Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians. Vol. 1, S.572-573

Communication, Problem, Time

“I myself in my work tend to humanize everything, to relate mountains to people, tree trunks to the human body, pebbles to heads & figures, etc… To cut out & make a taboo any organic representational element or human reference & then say the artist has gained freedom, seems as silly as locking yourself up in a small cell & saying 'now I know where I am – this is freedom – freedom from the outside world”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

critic on the idea of pure Abstract art by Moore
1940 - 1955
Source: 'Unpublished notes' for 'Art and Life', 1941, HMR Archive; as quoted in Henry Moore writings and Conversations, edited by Alan Wilkinson, University of California Press, California 2002, p. 114

People, World, Art, Mountain

“There is no pure visualization in the sense of a priori philosophies; every visualization is determined by previous sense perceptions, and any separation into perceptual space and space of visualization is not permissible, since the specifically visual elements of the imagination are derived from perceptual space. What led to the mistaken conception of pure visualization was rather an improper interpretation of the normative function… an essential element of all visual representations. Indeed, all arguments which have been introduced for the distinction of perceptual space and space of visualization are base on this normative component of the imagination.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

Imagination, Sense

“III. We think you are unduly influenced by the counsels, the representations, the menaces, of certain fossil politicians hailing from the Border Slave States. Knowing well that the heartily, unconditionally loyal portion of the White citizens of those States do not expect nor desire chat Slavery shall be upheld to the prejudice of the Union--(for the truth of which we appeal not only to every Republican residing in those States, but to such eminent loyalists as H. Winter Davis, Parson Brownlow, the Union Central Committee of Baltimore, and to The Nashville Union)--we ask you to consider that Slavery is everywhere the inciting cause and sustaining base of treason: the most slaveholding sections of Maryland and Delaware being this day, though under the Union flag, in full sympathy with the Rebellion, while the Free-Labor portions of Tennessee and of Texas, though writhing under the bloody heel of Treason, are unconquerably loyal to the Union. So emphatically is this the case, that a most intelligent Union banker of Baltimore recently avowed his confident belief that a majority of the present Legislature of Maryland, though elected as and still professing to be Unionists, are at heart desirous of the triumph of the Jeff. Davis conspiracy; and when asked how they could be won back to loyalty, replied "only by the complete Abolition of Slavery." It seems to us the most obvious truth, that whatever strengthens or fortifies Slavery in the Border States strengthens also Treason, and drives home the wedge intended to divide the Union. Had you from the first refused to recognize in those States, as here, any other than unconditional loyalty--that which stands for the Union, whatever may become of Slavery, those States would have been, and would be, far more helpful and less troublesome to the defenders of the Union than they have been, or now are.”

Horace Greeley (1811–1872) American politician and publisher

1860s, The Prayer of the Twenty Millions (1862)

Truth, Home, Confidence, Intelligence

“(Systems science) does not aim to ﬁnd the one true representation for a given type of systems (e. g. physical, chemical or biological systems), but to formulate general principles about how different representations of different systems can be constructed so as to be effective in problem-solving.”

Francis Heylighen (1960) Belgian cyberneticist

Francis Heylighen, 1990, "Classical and non-classical representations in physics I." Cybernetics and Systems 21. p. 423; As cited by: Hieronymi, A. (2013), Understanding Systems Science: A Visual and Integrative Approach. Syst. Res.. doi: 10.1002/sres.2215

Problem, Science

“The kind of painting which I find exciting is not necessarily representational or non-representational, but it is musical and architectural… Whether this visual relationship is slightly more or slightly less abstract is, for me, beside the point.”

Ben Nicholson (1894–1982) British painter

"Notes on Abstract Art" in Herbert Read's Ben Nicholson: Paintings, Reliefs, Drawings (London, 1948)

Music, Painting

“Science does not speak of the world in the language of words alone, and in many cases it simply cannot do so. The natural language of science is a synergistic integration of words, diagrams, pictures, graphs, maps, equations, tables, charts, and other forms of visual and mathematical expression… [Science thus consists of] the languages of visual representation, the languages of mathematical symbolism, and the languages of experimental operations.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Jay Lemke (2003), "Teaching all the languages of science: Words , symbols, images and actions," p. 3; as cited in: Scott, Phil, Hilary Asoko, and John Leach. "Student conceptions and conceptual learning in science." Handbook of research on science education (2007): 31-56.

World, Mathematics, Nature, Science

“We're adapted to the meta-reality, which means that we're adapted to that which remains constant across the longest spans of time. And that's not the same things that you see around you day to day. They're just like clouds, they're just evaporating, you know? There are things underneath that that are more fundamental realities, like the dominance hierarchy, like the tribe, like the danger outside of society, like the threat that other people pose to you, and the threat that you pose to yourself. Those are eternal realities, and we're adapted to those. That's our world, and that's why we express all those things in stories. Then you might say, well how do you adapt yourself to that world? The answer, and I believe this is a neurological answer, is that your brain can tell you when you're optimally situated between chaos and order. The way it tells you that is by producing the sense of engagement and meaning. Let's say that there's a place in the environment that you should be. So what should that place be? Well, you don't want to be terrified out of your skull. What good is that? And you don't want to be so comfortable that you might as well sleep. You want to be somewhere where you are kind of on firm ground with both of your feet, but you can take a step with one leg and test out new territory. Some of you who are exploratory and emotionally stable are going to go pretty far out there into the unexplored territory without destabilizing yourself. And some people are just going to put a toe in the chaos, and that's neuroticism basically - your sensitivity to threat that is calibrated differently in different people. And some people are more exploratory than others. That's extroversion and openness, and intelligence working together. Some people are going to tolerate more chaos in their mixture of chaos and order. Those are often liberals, by the way. They're more interested in novel chaos, and conservatives are more interested in the stabilization of the structures that already exist. Who's right? It depends on the situation. That's why liberals and conservatives have to talk to each other, because one of them isn't right and the other is wrong. Sometimes the liberals are right and sometimes the liberals are right, because the environment is unpredictable and constantly changing, so that's why you have to communicate. That's what a democracy does. It allows people of different temperamental types to communicate and to calibrate their societies. So let's say you're optimally balanced between chaos and order. What does that mean? Well, you're stable enough, but you're interested. A little novelty heightens your anxiety. It wakes you up a bit. That's the adventure part of it. But it also focuses the part of your brain that does exploratory activity, and that's associated with pleasure. That's the dopamine circuit. So if you're optimally balanced - and you know you're there if you're listening to an interesting conversation or you're engaged in one…you're saying some things that you know, and the other person is saying some things that they know - and what both of you know is changing. Music can model that. It provides you with multi-level predictable forms that can transform just the right amount. So music is a very representational art form. It says, 'this is what the universe is like.' There's a dancing element to it, repetitive, and then little variations that surprise you and produce excitement in you. In doesn't matter how nihilistic you are, music still infuses you with a sense of meaning because it models meaning. That's what it does. That's why we love it. And you can dance to it, which represents you putting yourself in harmony with these multiple layers of reality, and positioning yourself properly.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

"The selection pressure that women placed on men developed the entire species. There's two things that happened. The men competed for competence, since the male hierarchy is a mechanism that pushes the best men to the top. The effect of that is multiplied by the fact that women who are hypergamous peel from the top. And so the males who are the most competent are much more likely to leave offspring, which seems to have driven cortical expansion."
Concepts

Love, Women, Men, People

“Archimedes is said to have requested his friends and relatives to place upon his tomb a representation of a cylinder circumscribing a sphere within it, together with the inscription giving the ratio (3/2) which the cylinder bears to the sphere; from which we may infer that he himself regarded the discovery of this ration as his greatest achievement.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

p, 125
Achimedes (1920)

“Andrew Jackson then is a sturdy obstacle to the Democrats' ongoing and increasingly frenzied campaign to erase from America's history all the unsavory things their party has championed for most of its existence, namely, slavery, secession, civil war, segregation, socialism, and, most recently the slaughter of infants. And so their longtime hero Andrew Jackson has been, as Sam Spade once said, chosen to take the fall alongside the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia to help erase the Democrats' consistently reprehensible behavior and policies from the history books. But there is a rub. None of the women the Democrats have so far raised as General Jackson's replacement in any way merit representation in the pantheon of patriots, nation-builders, and military leaders that grace the few denominations of our paper currency.”

Michael Scheuer (1952) American counterterrorism analyst

As quoted in Michael Scheuer's Non-Intervention http://non-intervention.com/1689/democrats-scourge-the-south-after-the-battle-flag-it%e2%80%99s-on-to-old-hickory/ (9 July 2015), by M. Scheuer. 2010s

Women, War, Books, Way

“I have always been strong for a large increase of labour representation in the House of Commons…Now, I dare say the day may come—it may come sooner than some think—when the Liberal party will be transformed or superseded by some new party; but before the working population of this country have their destinies in their own hands, as they will assuredly do within a measurable distance of time, there is enough ground to be cleared which only the Liberal party is capable of clearing. The ideal of the Liberal party is that view of things which believes that the welfare of all is bound up with injustice being done to none. Above all, according to the ideal of the Liberal party—that party from which I beseech you, not for my sake, but for your own, not to sever yourselves—the ideal of the Liberal party is this—that in the mass of the toilers on land all the fountains of national life abide and the strongest and most irresistible currents flow.”

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor

Speech in Newcastle (21 May 1894), quoted in 'Mr. Morley At Newcastle', The Times (22 May 1894), p. 11.

Life, Thinking, Strong, Time

“The subject detects the presence and interrelationships of the basic components of one of the two-dimensional drawings - particularly, the variously oriented straight lines, the several types of vertices by which they are connected and, presumably, something of the structural relationships among these components within the two-dimensional pattern. Then, on the basis of some higher-level processing of these extracted features and their interrelationships, an internal representation, code, or verbal description is generated for each picture separately that captures the intrinsic structure of the three-dimensional object in a form that is independent of the particular orientation in which that object happens to be displayed.”

Roger Shepard (1929) American psychologist

Source: Mental images and their transformations. 1982, p. 64; as cited in: Keith K. Niall, "‘Mental rotation’, pictured rotation, and tandem rotation in depth." Acta psychologica 95.1 (1997): 31-83.

Drawing

“When all this is eliminated, what really remains? In place of the representative bodies created by general, popular elections, Lenin and Trotsky have laid down the soviets as the only true representation of political life in the land as a whole, life in the soviets must also become more and more crippled. Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously – at bottom, then, a clique affair – a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, in the sense of the rule of the Jacobins”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

the postponement of the Soviet Congress from three-month periods to six-month periods!

Chapter Six, "The Problem of Dictatorship"
The Russian Revolution (1918)

Life, Reality, Sense, Freedom

“Maps have been a successful form of representation for centuries by making the world understandable through systematic abstraction that retains the iconicity of space depicting space. Advances in methods and technologies are blurring the lines among maps and other forms of visual representation and pushing the bounds of “map” as a concept toward both more realistic and more abstract depiction. As a result, there are a variety of unanswered questions about the attributes and implications of “maps.””

Alan MacEachren (1952) American geographer

Source: Research challenges in geovisualization (2001), p. 6-7

World, Understanding, Question, Success

“You see, some mathematicians have clear and far-ranging. "programs". For instance, Grothendieck had such a program for algebraic geometry; now Langlands has one for representation theory, in relation to modular forms and arithmetic. I never had such a program, not even a small size one.”

Jean-Pierre Serre (1926) French mathematician

An Interview with Jean-Pierre Serre - Singapore Mathematical Society https://sms.math.nus.edu.sg/smsmedley/Vol-13-1/An%20interview%20with%20Jean-Pierre%20Serre(CT%20Chong%20&%20YK%20Leong).pdf

“Measure-relations can only be studied in abstract notions of quantity, and their dependence on one another can only be represented by formulæ. On certain assumptions, however, they are decomposable into relations which, taken separately, are capable of geometric representation; and thus it becomes possible to express geometrically the calculated results. In this way, to come to solid ground, we cannot, it is true, avoid abstract considerations in our formulæ, but at least the results of calculation may subsequently be presented in a geometric form. The foundations of these two parts of the question are established in the celebrated memoir of Gauss, Disqusitiones generales circa superficies curvas.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

On the Hypotheses which lie at the Bases of Geometry (1873)

Way, Question, Study, Parting

“Mr. Soame Jenyns, a writer of verse and member of the Board of Trade… In twenty three very small pages he had disposed of the "Objections to the Taxation of Our American Colonies" in a manner highly satisfactory to himself and doubtless also to the average reading Briton, who understood constitutional questions best when they were "briefly considered," and when they were humorously expounded in pamphlets that could be had for sixpence…. The heart of the question was the proposition that there should be no taxation without representation; upon which principle it was necessary to observe only that many individuals in England, such as copyholders and leaseholders, and many communities, such as Manchester and Birmingham, were taxed in Parliament without being represented there. "… are they only Englishmen when they solicit protection, but not Englishmen when taxes are required to enable this country to protect them?" As for "liberty," the word had so many meanings, "having within a few years been used as a synonymous term for Blasphemy, Bawdy, Treason, Libels, Strong Beer, and Cyder," that Mr. Jenyns could not presume to say what it meant.”

Carl L. Becker (1873–1945) American historian

The Eve of the Revolution (1918)

Communication, Beer, Question, Strong