Ambiguous Quotes - Page 3

• Even if that statement was ambiguous, we kind of wanted to cause a stir. We thought that by having the name "Cabaret Voltaire", that with it came a certain responsibility. It wasn't meant to be purely entertainment; it was meant to be something a little bit more serious - and to provoke people - wrapped within an outer wrapping of entertainment.

  Stephen Mallinder

  Responsibility, Names, People

  Source: www.artdesigncafe.com

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• I didn't have a perfect model, but I wanted to try to blend my own personal reflections and experiences with this broader canvas to see how a lot of the narratives we have about economy and foreign policy got stuck. Because we have these categories of liberal, conservative, free marketer, open government - all these stereotypes about our politics and the categories we try to put things in are inadequate to this sort of complex, ambiguous, sometimes contradictory experience we have as ordinary people and that I have as an elected official.

  Barack Obama

  Reflection, Government, Perfect

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• DJ Spooky was meant to be a kind of ironic take on that. It was always meant to be kind of a criticism and critique of how downtown culture would separate genres and styles because it was ambiguous.

  DJ Spooky

  Ironic, Style, Criticism

  Source: bigthink.com

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• What one commonly takes as 'the reality,' including the reality of one's own individual person, by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous - that there is not only one, but that there are many realities, each comprising also a different consciousness of the ego.

  Albert Hofmann

  Mean, Reality, Ego

  "LSD: My Problem Child". Book by Albert Hofmann. Chaoter 11: "LSD Experience and Reality", www.psychedelic-library.org. 1980.

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• I want the music to be ambiguous. Its tone gives you a context in which to start visualizing what you're feeling with the music.

  Glenn Branca

  Giving, Feelings, Want

  Interview with Simon Dasher, pitchfork.com. April 30, 2006.

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• Words are such gross machinery, so primitive and ambiguous.

  Frank Herbert

  Machinery, Gross, Primitive

  Frank Herbert (2008). “Dune Messiah”, p.175, Penguin

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• Documentary photography is becoming more illustrative as people become more familiar with photography’s limitations and vulnerabilities. Reality has always been interpreted through layers of manipulation, abstraction, and intervention. But now, it is very much on the surface. I like this honesty about its dishonesty. Every photograph has many truths and none. Photographs are ambiguous, no matter how seemingly scientific they appear to be. They are always subject to an uncontrollable context. This is a tired statement, but worth repeating.

  Taryn Simon

  Photography, Honesty, Tired

  Interview with Geoffrey Batchen, Nell McClister, www.museomagazine.com.

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• What happens when an art form becomes ambiguous, I think, is that the standards are lowered. You can say anything is jazz. So I think it's important to reflect on what made jazz so special.

  Stefon Harris

  Art, Thinking, Special

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• Zen is to religion what a Japanese "rock garden" is to a garden. Zen knows no god, no afterlife, no good and no evil, as the rock-garden knows no flowers, herbs or shrubs. It has no doctrine or holy writ: its teaching is transmitted mainly in the form of parables as ambiguous as the pebbles in the rock-garden which symbolise now a mountain, now a fleeting tiger. When a disciple asks "What is Zen?", the master's traditional answer is "Three pounds of flax" or "A decaying noodle" or "A toilet stick" or a whack on the pupil's head.

  Arthur Koestler

  Flower, Teaching, Garden

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• The reinvention of American culture as purely the self catapulted Las Vegas to prominence. The city took sin and made it choice -- a sometimes ambiguous choice, but choice nonetheless. Combined with a visionary approach to experience that melded Hollywood and Americans' taste for comfort and self-deception, Las Vegas grew into the last American frontier city, as foreign at times as Prague but as quintessential as Peoria. In Las Vegas, you can choose your fantasy; in the rest of America, you don't always get to pick.

  Hal Rothman

  Las Vegas, Self, Cities

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• Oral myths are closer to the genetic conclusions than the often ambiguous scientific evidence of archaeology.

  Bryan Sykes

  Evidence, Myth, Archaeology

  Bryan Sykes (2007). “Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland”, p.21, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Sin² φ is odious to me, even though Laplace made use of it; should it be feared that sin² φ might become ambiguous, which would perhaps never occur, or at most very rarely when speaking of sin(φ²), well then, let us write (sin φ)², but not sin² φ, which by analogy should signify sin (sin φ)

  Carl Friedrich Gauss

  Writing, Use, Analogies

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• The material which a scientist actually has at his disposal, his laws, his experimental results, his mathematical techniques, his epistemological prejudices, his attitude towards the absurd consequences of the theories which he accepts, is indeterminate in many ways, ambiguous, and never fully separated from the historical background . This material is always contaminated by principles which he does not know and which, if known, would be extremely hard to test.

  Paul Feyerabend

  Attitude, Law, Historical

  Paul Feyerabend (1993). “Against Method”, p.51, Verso

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• All men are naturally included to obscure the morally ambiguous element in their political cause by investing it with religious sanctity.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Religious, Men, Political

  Reinhold Niebuhr (1957). “Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr”, p.59, Westminster John Knox Press

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• The ambiguous, gray areas of authority and responsibility between parents and teachers exacerbate the distrust between them. The distrust is further complicated by the fact that it is rarely articulated, but usually remains smoldering and silent.

  Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

  Teacher, Responsibility, Parent

  Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot (1978). “Worlds apart: relationships between families and schools”, Basic Books (AZ)

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• The language of commerce has been engineered to describe the overt purpose of a thing, but cannot encompass fringe benefits or peripheral pleasures. It weighs the obvious against what in its terms are incomprehensible. When I drive from here to there, speed, privacy, control, and safety are easy to claim. When I walk, what happens is more vague, more ambiguous-and in many circumstances much richer. I am out in the world. It's exercise, though not so quantifiably as on a treadmill in a gym with a digital readout.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Exercise, Safety, Environmental

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• Wave particle duality is a core feature of our world. Or rather, we should say, it is a core feature of our mathematical descriptions of our world. But what is critical to note here is that, however ambiguous our images, the universe itself remains whole and is manifestly not fracturing into schizophrenic shards. It is this tantalizing wholeness and the thing itself that drives physicists onward like an eternally beckoning light that seems so teasingly near. It is always out of reach.

  Margaret Wertheim

  Our World, Light, Wave

  "The Grandeur and Limits of Science". Interview with Krista Tippett, onbeing.org. February 16, 2017.

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• The American citizen lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly irridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.

  Daniel J. Boorstin

  Real, Play, Age

  "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America" by Daniel J. Boorstin, Vintage edition (p. 37), 1992.

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• Life is unresolved, confusing, bewildering, puzzling, ambiguous. You don't really know what's going to happen. The future is uncertain for everybody.

  Woody Allen

  Confusing, Life Is, Uncertain

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• At the end of the day, the end of the movie is sort of ambiguous - it's whatever you want it to be.

  Jonathan Groff

  The End Of The Day, Want, Ends

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• If you've got more ambiguous characters or stock stereotypes, the plastic comes through and they don't work as well.

  Bill Watterson

  Character, Stereotype, Plastic

  Source: bob.bigw.org

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• The whole of natural theologyresolves itself into one simple, though somewhat ambiguous proposition, That the cause or causesof order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence.

  David Hume

  Simple, Order, Religion

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• Every ambiguous, false, tearful, emotional exaggeration brings about that typically kitsch attitude which could be defined as "sentimentality."

  Gillo Dorfles

  Attitude, Emotional, Kitsch

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• William James once said: "Progress is a terrible thing." It is more than that: it is also a highly ambiguous notion. For who knowsbut that a little further on the way a bridge may not have collapsed or a crevice split the earth?

  Johan Huizinga

  Bridges, Progress, Earth

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• Because of the confusion surrounding the term "agnosticism," it would seem better to use the very similar term "rationalism" in its place when referring to the original Huxleyan meaning of the term. The use of "rationalist" for "agnostic" would also seem to be less ambiguous.

  Gordon Stein

  Confusion, Atheism, Use

  Gordon Stein (1980). “An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism”

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