Condition Quotes - page 70
The computer's most profound aesthetic implication is that we are being forced to dismiss the classical view of art and reality which insists that man stand outside of reality in order to observe it, and, in art, requires the presence of the picture frame and the sculpture pedestal. The notion that art can be separated from its everyday environment is a cultural fixation [in other words, a mythic structure] as is the ideal of objectivity in science. It may be that the computer will negate the need for such an illusion by fusing both observer and observed, "inside" and "outside." It has already been observed that the everyday world is rapidly assuming identity with the condition of art.
Jack Burnham
There's a knock at the door, and Valentino and Dr. Emeterio enter. This is it. Suspense really isn't good for someone with my condition, and every second of silence is brutal. "What's up?" I ask, wanting to get this over with, one way or the other. "It's nice that something good will come out of this," Valentino says, pressing his hand to his chest. My heart skips a beat, two, ten, a hundred, a thousand, a million, and somehow, I don't die on the spot. In fact, I'm going to live. I'm going to live, live, liv, live, live, live, live, live, live, live, live, live.
But first, he has to die.
Adam Silvera
As no national interest would justify inflicting genocide on the victim and suicide on the aggressor, a prevalent misconception is that nuclear war will never be fought. But the realities of our age compel an opposite assessment. In no previous epoch were adversaries so continuously and totally mobilized for instant war. It is a statistical certainly that hair-trigger readiness cannot endure as a permanent condition. Furthermore, the unrelenting growth in nuclear arsenals, the increasing accuracy of missiles, and the continuing computerization of response systems all promote instabilities which court nuclear war by technical malfunction; by miscalculation, human aberration or criminal act.
Bernard Lown
It is competition between nations which has brought us to the very, very harmful condition of our present existence. Throughout the world... and of course more painful in the developing world than even than in the developed world... this is something we can take hold of we can change our minds... our way of thinking. We don't have to be absolutely at the mercy of these piscean ideas of division, of separation.
Benjamin Creme
Like Palestine for the Palestinians, Israel is a national fact, the response to an untenable condition and a collective desire, with its own imaginary, binding it, rightly or wrongly, to this earth. This is how the United Nations viewed the situation when it determined the constitutions of the two sovereign states.
Albert Memmi
Hardly a word about the condition of women is heard. Not a single statement about the fate of minorities, some of whose members have contributed to the independence of their country at the risk of their life; not a sign of recognition. On the contrary, they most often find themselves being gradually eliminated from the country's civil-service bureaucracy. In this way a great occasion is lost to build, at least in words, an open and multicultural nation, one that includes the Algerian Kabyles, the Egyptian Copts, Jews and Christians ... precisely what intellectuals living in the West demand for themselves in their host countries!
Albert Memmi
With all these arguments in favor of this type of violence, I still think there are good grounds to reject it. It seems to me, from the little we know about such matters, that a new society rises out of the actions that are taken to form it, and the institutions and the ideology it develops are not independent of those actions; in fact, they're heavily colored by them, they're shaped by them in many ways. And one can expect that actions that are cynical and vicious, whatever their intent, will inevitably condition and deface the quality of the ends that are achieved. Now, again, in part this is just a matter of faith. But I think there's at least some evidence that better results follow from better means.
Noam Chomsky
Neither of us cares a straw for popularity. A proof of this is for example, that, because of aversion to any personality cult, I have never permitted the numerous expressions of appreciation from various countries with which I was pestered during the existence of the International to reach the realm of publicity, and have never answered them, except occasionally by a rebuke. When Engels and I first joined the secret Communist Society we made it a condition that everything tending to encourage superstitious belief in authority was to be removed from the statutes.
Karl Marx
Descartes ... complained that Greek geometry was so much tied to figures "that is can exercise the understanding only on condition of greatly fatiguing the imagination." Descartes also deplored that the methods of Euclidean geometry were exceedingly diverse and specialized and did not allow for general applicability. Each theorem required a new kind of proof... What impressed Descartes especially was that algebra enables man to reason efficiently. It mechanizes thought, and hence produces almost automatically results that may otherwise be difficult to establish. ...historically it was Descartes who clearly perceived and called attention to this feature. Whereas geometry contained the truth about the universe, algebra offered the science of method. It is ... paradoxical that great thinkers should be enamored with ideas that mechanize thought. Of course, their goal is to get at more difficult problems, as indeed they do.
René Descartes
We must meet the responsibilities here if we are to be equal to the opportunities there. But the success of all we undertake--the fulfillment of all that we aspire to achieve--rests finally on one condition: the condition of peace among all people. Mr. Schary and Mr. Feinberg, in your citation tonight, the words expressed the essence of America in the thought that--"As a country, we try." I believe that it is the highest legacy of our democracy that we are always trying--trying, probing, failing, resting, and up trying again--but always trying and always gaining. And this is the pursuit and the approach that we must make to peace. Not in a day or a year or a decade in 120 nations or more-not, perhaps, in a lifetime--shall we finally grasp the goal of peace for which we reach tonight. But we shall always be reaching, always trying--and, hopefully, always gaining.
Lyndon B. Johnson
