Pseudo Quotes
Since fresh examples and proofs could always be found of the alleged relation between guilt and punishment: if you behave in such and such a way, it will go badly with you. Now, as it generally does go badly, the allegation was constantly confirmed; and thus popular morality, a pseudo- science on a level with popular medicine, continually gained ground.
Georg Brandes
Showing poverty is such a large part of my work because another thing that I am finding is that for me personally, doing this work helps me in trying to come to grips with my own upbringing and all that occurred during that time. Basically, this work to me is a sort of time for reflection, a pseudo inventory of "this is your life," a way to try to accept the concept of what was so inevitable.
Manuel Rivera-Ortiz
My book expresses, I rather say, contempt and hostility to this constant religious intimidation and clerical bullying to which we're being subjected. My book is part of an attempt to arrange and organize a push back against this...whether it's the parties of god destroying Iraqi civil society or bigots in America trying to have pseudo science taught in our schools or a pope who says that AIDS may be bad...and limbo by the way may have been a mistake, but let's talk about hell in any way... AIDS isn't as bad as condoms.
Christopher Hitchens
I propose to create an heroic, monumental style of composition simple enough to inspire all people, completely free from fads, artificial mannerisms and false sophistications, direct, forceful, sincere, always original but never unnatural. Music must be freed from decadence and stagnation. There has been too much emphasis on small things while the great truths have been overlooked. The superficial must be dispensed with. Music must become virile to express big things. It is not my purpose to supply a few pseudo intellectual musicians and critics with more food for brilliant argumentation, but rather to inspire all mankind with new heroism and spiritual nobility. This may appear to be sentimental and impossible to some, but it must be remembered that Palestrina, Handel, and Beethoven would not consider it either sentimental or impossible. In fact, the worthiest creative art has been motivated consciously or unconsciously by the desire for the regeneration of mankind.
Alan Hovhaness
IN THE last half century a larger and larger proportion of our experience, of what we read and see and hear, has come to consist of pseudo‑events. We expect more of them and we are given more of them. They flood our consciousness. Their multiplication has gone on in the United States at a faster rate than elsewhere. Even the rate of increase is increasing every day. This is true of the world of education, of consumption, and of personal relations.
Daniel J. Boorstin
These pseudo‑events which flood our consciousness must be distinguished from propaganda. The two do have some characteristics in common. But our peculiar problems come from the fact that pseudo‑events are in some respects the opposite of the propaganda which rules totalitarian countries. Propaganda - as prescribed, say, by Hitler in Mein Kampf - is information intentionally biased. Its effect depends primarily on its emotional appeal. While a pseudo‑event is an ambiguous truth, propaganda is an appealing falsehood. Pseudo‑events thrive on our honest desire to be informed, to have "all the facts,” and even to have more facts than there really are.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Pseudo‑events do, of course, increase our illusion of grasp on the world, what some have called the American illusion of omnipotence. Perhaps, we come to think, the world's problems can really be settled by "statements,” by "Summit” meetings, by a competition of "prestige,” by overshadowing images, and by political quiz shows.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Pseudo‑events spawn other pseudo‑events in geometric progression. This is partly because every kind of pseudo-event (being planned) tends to become ritualized, with a protocol and a rigidity all its own. As each type of pseudo-event acquires this rigidity, pressures arise to produce other, derivative, forms of pseudo‑event which are more fluid, more tantalizing, and more interestingly ambiguous.
Daniel J. Boorstin
The reason for the astonishing fact that a majority of working people submit to a handful of idlers who control their labour and their very lives is always and everywhere the same - whether the oppressors and oppressed are of one race or whether, as in India and elsewhere, the oppressors are of a different nation. This phenomenon seems particularly strange in India, for there more than two hundred million people, highly gifted both physically and mentally, find themselves in the power of a small group of people quite alien to them in thought, and immeasurably inferior to them in religious morality. ... the reason lies in the lack of a reasonable religious teaching which, by explaining the meaning of life would supply a supreme law for the guidance of conduct, and would replace the more than dubious precepts of pseudoreligion and pseudoscience and the immoral conclusions deduced from them, commonly called "civilization."
Leo Tolstoy
The case of methodology is analogous though less clear. Nobody would object to the subject of methodology being science, or some pseudo science. On closer inspection, however, this agreement is no more than a verbal coincidence. It rests on what is meant by science, as reported as a subject of methodology. In fact the subject methodologists call science is more often than not different from what scientists call science. Methodologists are inclined to consider a science as a linguistic system whereas the scientist would only admit that his science has a language, not that it is a language.
Hans Freudenthal
We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, 'What is real?' Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.
Philip K. Dick
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
Head of Christ by Morales, exactly as in the description in the pseudo letter of the Roman Proconsul. Morales well entitled to his surname of Divino... [T]he auburn locks seem only prevented from growing over the countenance by the moiety of the star which forms the glory: everything which can even be conceived as necessary to the formation of a face of perfect beauty, but nothing earthly in the appearance. You could not mistake the head for an Apollo or an Adonis. The eyes, beaming with human beauty, are nevertheless bright with the effulgence of celestial light, and fixed upon no particular object. They seem looking on the world. The nose is exquisitely formed, and the flesh tints seem immortal.
Benjamin Disraeli
