Home > Topic > the argument
41 " The writer, indeed every real artist, was the devil, rivalling God in creativity, trying even to surpass him. God was surely man’s most fatal creation, the devil’s kitsch bitch. It was God, with his insistence on being worshipped and admired, who made the argument of art necessary, keeping the fire of dissent alive in men and women. This dissident was the artist, who spanned with his imagination reason and unreason, the under and the over, the dream and the world, men and women. "
― Hanif Kureishi , The Last Word
42 " Allah says in Surah Ar-Rahman that every thing in the Heavens and the Earth begs Allah for its needs. The argument can be made that an atheist doesn't ask Allah for anything at all. The answer to that is simple: his throat begs to Allah when it is thirsty, his heart seeks permission from Allah before beating each and every single time, and every blood cell asks Allah's permission before traveling through his veins. There is only one small part of his heart, his free will, that is in disobedience to Allah. And even that part will beg to Allah on Judgment Day. "
― Nouman Ali Khan
43 " Kant is sometimes considered to be an advocate of reason. Kant was in favor of science, it is argued. He emphasized the importance of rational consistency in ethics. He posited regulative principles of reason to guide our thinking, even our thinking about religion. And he resisted the ravings of Johann Hamann and the relativism of Johann Herder. Thus, the argument runs, Kant should be placed in the pantheon of Enlightenment greats. That is a mistake. The fundamental question of reason is its relationship to reality. Is reason capable of knowing reality - or is it not? Is our rational faculty a cognitive function, taking its material form reality, understanding the significance of that material, and using that understanding to guide our actions in reality - or is it not? This is the question that divides philosophers into pro- and anti-reason camps, this is the question that divides the rational gnostics and the skeptics, and this was Kant’s question in his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant was crystal clear about his answer. Reality - real, noumenal reality - is forever closed off to reason, and reason is limited to awareness and understanding of its own subjective products… Kant was the decisive break with the Enlightenment and the first major step toward postmodernism. Contrary to the Enlightenment account of reason, Kant held that the mind is not a response mechanism but a constitute mechanism. He held that the mind - and not reality - sets the terms for knowledge. And he held that reality conforms to reason, not vice versa. In the history of philosphy, Kant marks a fundamental shift from objectivity as the standard to subjectivity as the standard. What a minute, a defender of Kant may reply. Kant was hardly opposed to reason. After all, he favored rational consistency and he believed in universal principles. So what is anti-reason about it? The answer is that more fundamental to reason than consistency and universality is a connection to reality. Any thinker who concludes that in principle reason cannot know reality is not fundamentally an advocate of reason… Suppose a thinker argued the following: “I am an advocate of freedom for women. Options and the power to choose among them are crucial to our human dignity. And I am wholeheartedly an advocate of women’s human dignity. But we must understand that a scope of a women’s choice is confined to the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen’s door she must not attempt to exercise choice. Within the kitchen, however, she has a whole feast of choices[…]”. No one would mistake such a thinker for an advocate of women’s freedom. Anyone would point out that there is a whole world beyond the kitchen and that freedom is essentially about exercising choice about defining and creating one’s place in the world as a whole. The key point about Kant, to draw the analogy crudely, is that he prohibits knowledge of anything outside our skulls. The gives reasons lots to do withing the skull, and he does advocate a well-organized and tidy mind, but this hardly makes him a champion of reason… Kant did not take all of the steps down to postmodernism, but he did take the decisive one. Of the five major features of Enlightenment reason - objectivity, competence, autonomy, universality, and being an individual faculty - Kant rejected objectivity. "
― Stephen R.C. Hicks , Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault
44 " The greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of Custom is complete. This is the case over the whole East. Custom is there, in all things, the final appeal; justice and right mean conformity to custom; the argument of custom no one, unless some tyrant intoxicated with power, thinks of resisting. And we see the result. Those nations must once have had originality; they did not start out of the ground populous, lettered, and versed in many of the arts of life; they made themselves all this, and were then the greatest and most powerful nations in the world. What are they now? The subjects or dependants of tribes whose forefathers wandered in the forests when theirs had magnificent palaces and gorgeous temples, but over whom custom exercised only a divided rule with liberty and progress. "
― John Stuart Mill , On Liberty
45 " All liberty required was that the space for discourse itself be protected. Liberty lay in the argument itself, not the resolution of that argument, in the ability to quarrel, even with the most cherished beliefs of others; a free society was not placid but turbulent. The bazaar of conflicting was the place where freedom rang. "
― Salman Rushdie , Joseph Anton: A Memoir
46 " There is indeed something deeply wrong with a person who lacks principles, who has no moral core. There are, likewise, certainly values that brook no compromise, and I would count among them integrity, fairness, and the avoidance of cruelty. But I have never accepted the argument that principle is compromised by judging each situation on its own merits, with due appreciation of the idiosyncrasy of human motivation and fallibility. "
― Sonia Sotomayor , My Beloved World
47 " I was Juliet and Quinn was Romeo, and the lines weren't dead black-and-white words on a page but somehow alive, as natural and real as the argument we'd had about the spider and the fly. The rows of empty seats were gone, and we were in a candlelit ballrooom, wrapped in our own cocoon of words. But the playful banter of our words couldn't mask what we both knew--that after this, nothing would be the same .And then we got to the kissing part, which we'd only read through together and had never really rehearsed. But it didn't matter, because I was still Juliet and Quinn was still Romeo, his gray-green eyes fixed on mine. And when he bent to kiss me, it was Romeo's lips on Juliet's. Even so, Juliet was just as stunned as I would've been. When I said the last line, I was speaking for both of us. You kiss by the book. "
― Jennifer Sturman
48 " It is a fundamental principle of American democracy that laws should not be public only when it is convenient for government officials to make them public. They should be public all the time, open to review by adversarial courts, and subject to change by an accountable legislature guided by an informed public. If Americans are not able to learn how their government is interpreting and executing the law then we have effectively eliminated the most important bulwark of our democracy. That’s why, even at the height of the Cold War, when the argument for absolute secrecy was at its zenith, Congress chose to make US surveillance laws public. Without public laws, and public court rulings interpreting those laws, it is impossible to have informed public debate. And when the American people are in the dark, they can’t make fully informed decisions about who should represent them, or protest policies that they disagree with. These are fundamentals. It’s Civics 101. And secret law violates those basic principles. It has no place in America. "
49 " It is hard to understand how a compassionate world order can include so many people afflicted by acute misery, persistent hunger and deprived and desperate lives, and why millions of innocent children have to die each year from lack of food or medical attention or social care. This issue, of course, is not new, and it has been a subject of some discussion among theologians. The argument that God has reasons to want us to deal with these matters ourselves has had considerable intellectual support. As a nonreligious person, I am not in a position to assess the theological merits of this argument. But I can appreciate the force of the claim that people themselves must have responsibility for the development and change of the world in which they live. One does not have to be either devout or non devout to accept this basic connection. As people who live-in a broad sense-together, we cannot escape the thought that the terrible occurrences that we see around us are quintessentially our problems. They are our responsibility-whether or not they are also anyone else's. As competent human beings, we cannot shirk the task of judging how things are and what needs to be done. As reflective creatures, we have the ability to contemplate the lives of others. Our sense of behavior may have caused (though that can be very important as well), but can also relate more generally to the miseries that we see around us and that lie within our power to help remedy. That responsibility is not, of course, the only consideration that can claim our attention, but to deny the relevance of that general claim would be to miss something central about our social existence. It is not so much a matter of having the exact rules about how precisely we ought to behave, as of recognizing the relevance of our shared humanity in making the choices we face. "
― Amartya Sen , Development as Freedom
50 " Your people understand the forest: how the animals behave, where to find them, and so on. I want something similar—but instead of the forest as a whole, I want to understand dragons. They are not only here, you know; there are dragons in the savannah—” Mekeesawa nodded. “Well, there are more than that, all over the world. They live in the mountains and on the plains and maybe even in the ocean. I want to know them as you know the creatures of this forest.”“But why?” Mekeesawa asked. His eyes were still merry with laughter, but his question was serious. “You don’t live in all those places.”With the amount of time I have spent traveling in my life, one might make the argument that I do live in all those places, if only temporarily. But Mekeesawa’s point was a good one, and not easily dismissed. The Moulish understood the creatures of the Green Hell because their survival depended on it; my survival did not depend on my traveling the globe to find dragons. (Indeed, it has on more than one occasion nearly been detrimental to my life expectancy.) How could I answer him?Thinking back on the matter now, it is possible my only true answer to that question is now in its second volume, with more to come. These memoirs are not only an accounting of my life; they are an accounting *for* it. "
― Marie Brennan , The Tropic of Serpents (The Memoirs of Lady Trent, #2)
51 " The mistake in the argument of those who suppose that a variation in the quantity of money results in an inversely proportionate variation in its purchasing power lies in its starting-point. If we wish to arrive at a correct conclusion, we must start with the valuations of separate individuals; we must examine the way in which an increase or decrease in the quantity of money affects the value-scales of individuals, for it is from these alone that variations in the exchange-ratios of goods proceed. "
― Ludwig von Mises , The Theory of Money and Credit
52 " Case by case, we find that conformity is the easy way, and the path to privilege and prestige; dissidence carries personal costs that may be severe, even in a society that lacks such means of control as deathsquads, psychiatric prisons, or extermination camps. The very structure of the media is designed to induce conformity to established doctrine. In a three-minute stretch between commercials, or in seven hundred words, it is impossible to present unfamiliar thoughts or surprising conclusions with the argument and evidence required to afford them some credibility. Regurgitation of welcome pieties faces no such problem. "
― Noam Chomsky , Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies
53 " As with our earlier worship of saints and facts, there is something silly about grown men and women striving to reduce their vision of themselves and of civilization to bean counting. The message of the competition/efficiency/marketplace Trinity seems to be that we should drop the idea of ourselves developed over two and a half millennia. We are no longer beings distinguished by our ability to think and to act consciously in order to affect our circumstances. Instead we should passively submit ourselves and our whole civilization -- our public structures, social forms and cultural creativity -- to the abstract forces of unregulated commerce. It may be that most citizens have difficulty with the argument and would prefer to continue working on the idea of dignified human intelligence. If they must drop something, they would probably prefer to drop the economists. "
54 " ...'undertow'. It describes (...) how underneath our own everyday lives - the shopping and squabbles and weeding and trips to the vet - there's a sense of being dragged slowly off, not against our will but regardless of it. And fighting the undertow, as children are quick to learn, is not usually the best way of getting back to the beach. Floating along with it, on the other hand, can be fatal. It's really the struggle, the argument with oneself, that interests... "
55 " Once an opportunist like Mickey, who took the argument when she jumped on some devastated wretch's machine and jackpotted that it was the " cash-ino's money" she was winning, Moon returned after her six month break with the view that the separation had somehow sweetened the honeypot. The sad reality, she quickly learned, was that she was not irreplaceable; as such, the Casino felt no compunction to welcome her back with multi-jackpots. Instead, it took her money everyday and did not once give her a jackpot so that she could say, " Ah. They missed me." Instead, all she could keep saying was, " Verr-y bed. Verr-y bed. Suck-ah all my money! "
56 " It's difficult to make the argument that one female fist inserted into one male ass--or, for that matter, dozens or even hundreds of fists inserted into as many asses--can really make a difference for, say, lesbian mothers fighting for custody of their children. -Katherine Raymond "
― Carol Queen , PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality
57 " The argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument. The argument for individualism is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument. And the emotional faculties are more highly developed in most men than the rational, paradoxically or especially even in those who regard themselves as intellectuals "
― Milton Friedman
58 " I never knew I never knew that everything was falling through That everyone I knew was waiting on a cue To turn and run when all I needed was the truth But that's how it's got to be It's coming down to nothing more than apathy I'd rather run the other way than stay and see The smoke and who's still standing when it clears Everyone knows I'm in Over my headOver my head With eight seconds left in overtime She's on your mindShe's on your mind Let's rearrange I wish you were a stranger I could disengage Just say that we agree and then never change Soften a bit until we all just get along But that's disregard Find another friend and you discard As you lose the argument in a cable car Hanging above as the canyon comes between Everyone knows I'm in Over my headOver my head With eight seconds left in overtime She's on your mindShe's on your mind Everyone knows I'm in Over my headOver my head With eight seconds left in overtime She's on your mind She's on your ... And suddenly I become a part of your past I'm becoming the part that don't last I'm losing you and its effortless Without a sound we lose sight of the ground In the throw around Never thought that you wanted to bring it down I won't let it go down till we torch it ourselves And everyone knows I'm in Over my headOver my head With eight seconds left in overtime She's on your mindShe's on your mind Everyone knows She's on your mind Everyone knows I'm in over my head I'm in over my head I'm over my... Everyone knows I'm in Over my headOver my head With eight seconds left in overtime She's on your mindShe's on your mind. "
59 " How I win over you is “with modulation of words that i use, winning is not the argument but peace of mind. You may call it diplomatic, guess what? I don't care ! "
― Praveen Chenna
60 " Granting that there is some truth to the theory that defects in society give rise to the emergence of criminals, I still maintain that those who use this theory as a defense of criminality are overlooking the fact that there are many people in this defective society who survive without resorting to crime. The argument to the contrary is pure sophistry. "
― Akira Kurosawa , Something Like an Autobiography