Critical Quotes - page 38
It is difficult to see the great dance effects as they happen, to see them accurately, catch them fast in memory. It is even more difficult to verbalize them for critical discussion. The particular essence of a performance, its human sweep of articulate rhythm in space and in time has no specific terminology to describe it by.
Martha Graham
In addition to promoting awareness of nonviolence, it's just possible – indeed it is absolutely critical – that we work with undaunted determination to create a sane firearms policy that makes it harder for disturbed individuals to secure weapons of mass murder. We can no longer afford to shirk this urgent responsibility.
Bernice King
If you think being dysfuncted and damaged, strapped to your baggage, dirty, ruined and hurt like critical, cynical, scathing, if you're lost or have come up missing, scarred and scared (or pretending you aren't), when you think that's all you've got, it's not. The sadness you wear around like a trophy is intriguing at most, but it's miserable, and about as original as a frat boy with a visor cap. So step up.
Buddy Wakefield
The forces going on in the society are not things the media can prevent or change. But we can and should help understand this crisis and warn against false solutions. If feelings are trumping arguments - the pun is fully intended - it doesn't mean that arguments don't still have to be made. It may not win the news cycle. It may not even win this election cycle. But it's a critical task.
Andrew Sullivan
The desire to criticise becomes less and less as the character is developed. It is the mark of a fine character never to be critical and to mention but rarely the faults of others. A strong character does not resist evil, but uses their strength in building the good. They know that when the light is made strong, the darkness will disappear of itself.
Christian D. Larson
Francisco Varela is amazingly inventive, freewheeling, and creative. There's a lot of depth in what he and Humberto Maturana have said. Conversely, from the point of view of a tied-down molecular biologist, this is all airy-fairy, flaky stuff. Thus there's the mixed response. That part of me that's tough-minded and critical is questioning, but the other part of me has cottoned on to the recent stuff he's doing on self- representation in immune networks. I love it.
Stuart Kauffman
At home, the public has come to accept torture as a legitimate instrument of government, something that the Founding Fathers would have been aghast at. We have come to accept that the president is not bound by habeas corpus, if he decides he isn't. He can sign laws and say they don't apply to him. We know that an American citizen can be detained for years without charges and tortured and abused - and then critical evidence of his torture will be "lost." We have come to accept our phones being tapped without a warrant and without our even knowing about it. These huge surrenders of liberty have occurred without much public outcry. When the next major terrorist attack comes, the question will simply be how much liberty Americans have left. That is a victory al Qaeda could not have achieved by force of arms. It is something they have achieved with our witting and conscious help.
Andrew Sullivan
I personally regret the shift in literary study from reading primary texts to reading critical and theoretical texts. The major problem today among students is that they simply have not read enough literature. Consequently they do not have the necessary background to take a critical attitude towards literary theory. One needs to test every abstraction against experience.
Dana Gioia
"Life is experienced holistically with sensations pouring in through every physical and mental organ of perception. Art exists embodied in physical elements-especially meticulously calibrated aspects of sight and sound-which scholarly explication can illuminate but never fully replace. However conceptually incoherent and subjectively emotional, the amateur response to poetry comes closer to the larger human purposes of the art-which is to awaken, amplify, and refine the sense of being alive-than does critical commentary" (19).
Dana Gioia
I think there certainly was a milestone in the '90s with regards to the Internet achieving critical mass. There were several magical factors that came together the creation of HTML by Tim Berners-Lee, the drop in the price of communications, and all the PCs out there that you could put this software into.
Bill Gates
Our work is not so much to treat or to cure feelings, as to accept and celebrate them. This is a critical difference.
Fundamentalists figure things out and anticipate change. Trend followers join the trend of the moment. Fundamentalists try to solve their feelings. Trend followers join their feelings and observe them evolve and dis-solve.
The feelings we accept and enjoy rarely interfere with trading.
Trying to treat or cure feelings adds mass.
Ed Seykota
