tim | Entries tagged with quotations

"I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is."

-- Ursula K. Le Guin, commencement speech at Mills College, 1983.

(Her comment about "separatism" strikes me as dancing at the edge of trans erasure... but then, it's their world. As with many things, good if you ignore that.

And you know, I hope she wasn't talking about the need to dominate and/or be dominated in an overarchingly affectionate context of consent, but one just never knows that either.)

"In the descriptive tradition of the social sciences, past participles are used as simple adjectives and their dynamic nature as verb forms is overlooked. The poor are often described as 'deprived' or 'impoverished,' as if these words connoted inherent characteristics like 'tall' or 'redheaded.' In reality, to say that a group of persons is 'deprived' or 'impoverished' is to say that they have been deprived. Then, changing voice, we can say that someone has deprived them, someone has impoverished them. Only after that dynamic process has occurred does anyone benefit from a declaration, with a scientific imprimatur, that the resulting state of affairs is permanent and unchangeable. It is not the lack of elegant models that leads to policy decisions that further deprive the deprived. Such consequences are usually quite obvious---at least to those about to be deprived. A policy choice is an act of will and intention. We must once in a while admit that the poor have been impoverished intentionally."

-- William Ryan, Equality

Phrases I should use more often: "It's a personal choice, and also a wrong one."

"And I know that lots of advice on doing well at things (any things, really) is phrased as 'here are the values and outlooks and skills of the successful people; be like them', but so much of that is bullshit. If any of said advice actually helps or inspires you, by all means go for it, but it isn't worth it to angst about not fitting a model someone else constructed after the fact to explain their own or others' success in a way that minimizes signs of luck and maximizes the appearance of various good qualities." --

safiiru

"I couldn't accept what I'd been told, and all you're ever told in this country about being black is that it's a terrible, terrible thing to be. Now in order to survive this, you have to really dig down into yourself and recreate yourself... according to no image which yet exists in America... You have to impose in fact---this may sound strange---you have to decide who you are. And force the world to deal with who you are and not with its idea of you."

-- James Baldwin (in an interview with Studs Terkel, 1961)

I've been reading (or re-reading) various examples of the genre of Grad Student Self-Help Books. (You'd think such books would be very short and consist of "don't be a grad student".)

"Tattoo this list somewhere you won't forget to look. (1) Publish academic papers. (2) Go to conferences. (3) Get on committees. If you dive into the administrative pool, you can swim around with your professors and get to know them on a collegial level (a cynical colleague refers to this as 'amplexus,' which is the mating embrace of frogs."

-- Robert L. Peters, _Getting What You Came For_

"And that argument, for example, as to whether or not homosexuality is natural seems to me completely pointless---pointless because I really do not see what difference the answer makes. It seems clear, in any case, at least in the world we know, that no matter what encyclopedias of physiological and scientific knowledge are brought to bear the answer never can be Yes. And one of the reasons for this is that it would rob the normal---who are simply the many---of their very necessary sense of security and order, of their sense, perhaps, that the race is and should be devoted to outwitting oblivion--and will surely manage to do so." -- James Baldwin

"One of the things we are forced to re-examine is relationships. Unlike straight people we do not have church weddings, we are not often enrolled in the PTA, we are not clear on who is the breadwinner and who is the homemaker. We don't have relatives clucking over us, urging us to be faithful and fertile and upstanding. Our relationships have little social or legal reality. As a result, we must invent love all over again. Gay lovers must work out contracts or agreements that suit them. Household chores, money matters, social obligations -- these things must be decided and assigned. Sex roles in bed, gender-linked behavior out of bed (who cooks, who mows the lawn, who pays the bills) -- these things must be arbitrated. And fidelity, the thorniest question of all, must be arranged.... The variations are endless. My point is that convention does not govern us; we create new conventions for ourselves.... Today more and more straight couples are deciding that traditional marriage doesn't work.... Straight people might well learn something from us, since we have already sorted out the issues, even if we haven't arrived at solutions that will suit everyone." -- Edmund White, "The Joys of Gay Life" (1977)

Two quotations from _The Honest Politician's Guide to Crime Control_ by Norval Morris and Gordon Hawkins (which, based on what I've read of it so far, everyone should be forced to read, or at least, everyone who is a political leader or votes for them):

And, particularly from these "sportsmen," we must never tolerate the argument that if the murderer lacked a gun he would kill in some other way. If they believe that, they should, on grounds of sportsmanship, throw away their guns and club the deer to death, knife the bears, and poison the ducks.

The sanctity of life is often also taken to refer to the life of "the unborn child." Yet the use of this expression is as if we referred to the reader as "an adult fetus." To say that a fertilized ovum or an embryo is a human being and therefore entitled to the full protection of the law is a prejudicial abuse of language. Nor do those who take this position ever maintain it consistently, for they never embrace the logical corollary which is that all abortive operations are murders and should be so treated in law.

For our part, in view of the fact that human reproduction is a continuum, such questions as "When does life begin?" are unanswerable, except perhaps in metaphysical or theological terms. Nevertheless it is quite practicable to draw objective distinctions between abortion, infanticide, and homicide; and in terms of these well-recognized distinctions we say that abortion should not be regarded as criminal as long as the woman desires its performance. We see no reason to regard some other arbitrarily selected point prior to parturition, in what is a continuous process, as having any particular significance.

I think I may have posted part of the second quotation before. But it's worth re-posting, among other reasons because I came across this Cat and Girl comic that

pinkhairedcyn linked to that says the same thing, only with pictures.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30

Tim's journal

"Success is somebody else's failure."

Words matter.

(no subject)

QOTD

QOTD

well, at least I've got one of these down pat

I'm not sure he meant this the way I understand it, but

It's quotation-offloading time

Much-needed breaths of rationality

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June 2013

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