Mark Kingwell Quotes

• Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. . . . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.

  Mark Kingwell

  Procrastination, Too Much, Action

  "Later" by James Surowiecki, www.newyorker.com. October 11, 2010.

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• If anyone is tweeting right now, I'm not pulling a knife on David Cronenberg!

  Mark Kingwell

  Knives, Pulling, Ifs

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• How doe we create the world we want, rather than a world that just happens to us?

  Mark Kingwell

  Doe, World, Want

  Mark Kingwell (2000). “The World We Want: Restoring Citizenship in a Fractured Age”, p.207, Rowman & Littlefield

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• Never before, I suspect, have so many people been so rich to so little purpose.

  Mark Kingwell

  People, Purpose, Littles

  Mark Kingwell (2000). “The World We Want: Restoring Citizenship in a Fractured Age”, p.209, Rowman & Littlefield

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• Our desires are never wholly transparent, even to ourselves.

  Mark Kingwell

  Desire, Transparent

  Mark Kingwell (2000). “The World We Want: Restoring Citizenship in a Fractured Age”, p.42, Rowman & Littlefield

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• If you have ever been accused of being rude when you were merely stating the truth, or called a gossip because you like to dwell on other people's actions, Westacott is for you. His linked studies of everyday vices offer elegant analysis of the goods that lurk in behavior that is usually condemned. This wise book is practical philosophy in the best sense.

  Mark Kingwell

  Wise, Philosophy, Book

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• Dreams are evidence that we are creatures who produce more meaning than we can ourselves understand.

  Mark Kingwell

  Dream, Produce, Evidence

  Mark Kingwell (2000). “The World We Want: Restoring Citizenship in a Fractured Age”, p.146, Rowman & Littlefield

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• Neiman's book is written with considerable flair, as many critics have already noted, but it possesses a far rarer and more valuable quality: moral seriousness. Her argument builds a powerful emotional force, a sense of deep inevitability. . . . It is not often that a work of such dark conclusions has felt so hopeful and brave.

  Mark Kingwell

  Powerful, Book, Dark

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• Politics is rather the creation of the best possible polity out of the deep inner needs of its citizenry - who are only some of its members.

  Mark Kingwell

  Needs, Creation, Members

  Mark Kingwell (2000). “The World We Want: Restoring Citizenship in a Fractured Age”, p.38, Rowman & Littlefield

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• We don't know what the future will bring, but that's because we are ever in the process of creating it, not because it is an alien force to which we have to submit.

  Mark Kingwell

  Creating, Aliens, Process

  Mark Kingwell (2000). “The World We Want: Restoring Citizenship in a Fractured Age”, p.222, Rowman & Littlefield

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• Concrete is momentarily unformed matter seeking its natural completion, filling in the last corners of its allowed space, finding a form. It is possibility rendered material, hope in an industrial-strength mixer.

  Mark Kingwell

  Space, Filling In, Matter

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• Books, like lives, are always unfinished even when they end, for to write is to struggle with contingency, to impose a certain false order upon the endless, and endlessly frustrating, nature of thought.

  Mark Kingwell

  Struggle, Book, Writing

  Mark Kingwell (2000). “The World We Want: Restoring Citizenship in a Fractured Age”, p.22, Rowman & Littlefield

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• We are capitalism made flesh.

  Mark Kingwell

  Flesh, Made, Capitalism

  "The World We Want: Restoring Citizenship in a Fractured Age". Book by Mark Kingwell, 2000.

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• All social space is suffused with political meanings and agendas, the very stones and walls a kind of testament to the ongoing struggles for liberation and justices.

  Mark Kingwell

  Wall, Struggle, Space

  Mark Kingwell (2000). “The World We Want: Restoring Citizenship in a Fractured Age”, p.174, Rowman & Littlefield

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• Paradoxically, the problems of politics often arise not in the form of a problem of scarcity, but as one of abundance.

  Mark Kingwell

  Scarcity, Problem, Abundance

  Mark Kingwell (2000). “The world we want: restoring citizenship in a fractured age”

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• For every apparent gain, in short, we now observe a balancing danger. This is the world we have created.

  Mark Kingwell

  World, Gains, Danger

  Mark Kingwell (2000). “The World We Want: Restoring Citizenship in a Fractured Age”, p.165, Rowman & Littlefield

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• Socrates was likewise right that pissing people off is how we first, and maybe best, go about the business of provoking thought.

  Mark Kingwell

  People, Firsts, Provoking

  Mark Kingwell (2000). “The World We Want: Restoring Citizenship in a Fractured Age”, p.159, Rowman & Littlefield

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• I hold to the idea that civility, understood as the willingness to engage in public discourse, is the first virtue of citizens.

  Mark Kingwell

  Ideas, Citizens, Firsts

  "The World We Want: Virtue, Vice, and the Good Citizen". Book by Mark Kingwell, 2000.

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• Tyranny is abhorrent, freedom benefits all, whereas violence benefits no one for long.

  Mark Kingwell

  Long, Abhorrent, Benefits

  Mark Kingwell (2000). “The World We Want: Restoring Citizenship in a Fractured Age”, p.90, Rowman & Littlefield

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• War is smaller in scale than in recent memory, but it is far more ambiguous, intractable, and nasty. Money flows more quickly than ever, but it is still somehow manages to gather and puddle in certain places, for certain people rather then others.

  Mark Kingwell

  Memories, War, People

  "The World We Want: Restoring Citizenship in a Fractured Age". Book by Mark Kingwell, 2000.

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• Ambition is ever tempered by experience. Otherwise, fortune makes fools of us all.

  Mark Kingwell

  Ambition, Fool, Fortune

  Mark Kingwell (2000). “The World We Want: Restoring Citizenship in a Fractured Age”, p.77, Rowman & Littlefield

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• We tend to think of the problems of globalization and cultural identity as peculiar to our times. In fact they are rooted in ancient problems of civic belonging.

  Mark Kingwell

  Thinking, Identity, Facts

  Mark Kingwell (2000). “The World We Want: Restoring Citizenship in a Fractured Age”, p.3, Rowman & Littlefield

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• Friendship requires a leap, not of faith but of regard.

  Mark Kingwell

  Leap, Regard

  Mark Kingwell (2000). “The World We Want: Restoring Citizenship in a Fractured Age”, p.85, Rowman & Littlefield

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