Concrete Quotes - Page 22

• Finding Mecca in America weaves social theory and concrete ethnography into a significant contribution on Muslims in the United States, illuminating broader questions about the integration of minority and immigrant groups along the way. This is an important work and a joy to read.

  Eboo Patel

  America, Joy, Important

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• I want to smash this concrete world into oblivion. I want to be bigger, better, stronger. I want to be the bird that flies away.

  Tahereh Mafi

  Bird, Stronger, World

  Tahereh Mafi (2011). “Shatter Me”, p.13, Harper Collins

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• Concrete, Steel & Paint portrays the core values of restorative justice-respect, responsibility and relationships-expressed through art. it is art that involves victims, offenders and communities in a dialogue that is sometimes difficult and painful, sometimes reconciling, but always engaging. As one prisoner says in the film, 'We have come together collectively through art.' It will be a great discussion tool for college classes, community groups and others interested in issues of justice, community-building, conflict resolution and socially-engaged art.

  Howard Zehr

  Art, Responsibility, College

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• Listen to the women. Women say exactly what they want. Who has concrete plans - not macroeconomics but kitchen table economics. Who will change the situation for their families, and help restore the middle class. Women are also sick to death of having their bodies and their lives treated as a political football.

  Celinda Lake

  Football, Class, Sick

  "Women Are the Deciders, But for Which Candidate? An Interview With Pollster Celinda Lake". Interview with Martha Burk, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 15, 2012.

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• Don't feel guilty if you don't immediately love your stepchildren as you do your own, or as much as you think you should. Everyoneneeds time to adjust to the new family, adults included. There is no such thing as an "instant parent."
  Actually, no concrete object lies outside of the poetic sphere as long as the poet knows how to use the object properly.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Lying, Love You, Thinking

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• Listening to music and driving - that's the best way to listen to music. You just kind of zone out. Driving's so futuristic - you're barely putting in any effort, and this huge machine is pummeling down a strip of concrete.

  Galcher Lustwerk

  Effort, Listening, Machines

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• American government is not dominated by engineers, it is dominated by lawyers. Engineers are interested in substance and building things; lawyers are interested in process and rights and getting the ideology correctly blended. And so there is sort of no really concrete plan for the future.

  Peter Thiel

  Rights, Government, Building Things

  Source: bigthink.com

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• When needs and means become abstract in quality, abstraction is also a character of the reciprocal relation of individuals to oneanother. This abstract character, universality, is the character of being recognized and is the moment which makes concrete, i.e. social, the isolated and abstract needs and their ways and means of satisfaction.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Character, Mean, Quality

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1945). “Hegel's Philosophy of right”

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• Compared with men, it is probable that brutes neither attend to abstract characters, nor have associations by similarity. Their thoughts probably pass from one concrete object to its habitual concrete successor far more uniformly than is the case with us. In other words, their associations of ideas are almost exclusively by contiguity. So far, however, as any brute might think by abstract characters instead of by association of con cretes, he would have to be admitted to be a reasoner in the true human sense. How far this may take place is quite uncertain.

  William James

  Character, Men, Thinking

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• The comparison between Coleridge and Johnson is obvious in so far as each held sway chiefly by the power of his tongue. The difference between their methods is so marked that it is tempting, but also unnecessary, to judge one to be inferior to the other. Johnson was robust, combative, and concrete; Coleridge was the opposite. The contrast was perhaps in his mind when he said of Johnson: "his bow-wow manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced.

  Virginia Woolf

  Opposites, Differences, Judging

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.3815, Delphi Classics

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• A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wiresto the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Home, America, Exhibitions

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• French rhetorical models are too narrow for the English tradition. Most pernicious of French imports is the notion that there is no person behind a text. Is there anything more affected, aggressive, and relentlessly concrete than a Parisan intellectual behind his/her turgid text? The Parisian is a provincial when he pretends to speak for the universe.

  Camille Paglia

  Intellectual, Speak, Tradition

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson”, Vintage

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• Every concrete object
  has abstract value, is timeless
  in the dream parallel.

  Hilda Doolittle

  Dream, Timeless, Abstract

  Hilda Doolittle, Louis L. Martz (1986). “Collected Poems 1912-1944”, p.523, New Directions Publishing

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• Love wants to be confirmed with concrete symbols, but recklessness loves instability.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Love, Symbolism, Want

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• You can keep counting forever. The answer is infinity. But, quite frankly, I don't think I ever liked it. I always found something repulsive about it. I prefer finite mathematics much more than infinite mathematics. I think that it is much more natural, much more appealing and the theory is much more beautiful. It is very concrete. It is something that you can touch and something you can feel and something to relate to. Infinity mathematics, to me, is something that is meaningless, because it is abstract nonsense.

  Doron Zeilberger

  Beautiful, Science, Thinking

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• The computer takes up where psychoanalysis left off. It takes the ideas of a decentered self and makes it more concrete by modeling mind as a multiprocessing machine.

  Sherry Turkle

  Self, Ideas, Psychology

  Sherry Turkle (2005). “The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit”, p.282, MIT Press

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• I was inspired by the androgyny of Yohji Yamanoto's designs to translate the clothing's dualities onto screen and image. I was playing with a multitude of influences for the S/S 2012 campaign, inspired by the modernist literature and architecture that is in itself a fusion of political and architectural mantras, both dreamy and concrete.

  Collier Schorr

  Design, Political, Fusion

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• The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.

  Alan Watts

  Past, Reality, Abstraction

  Alan Watts (1989). “The way of Zen”, Vintage

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• I remember, as a young architect, people always talked about I. M. Pei's concrete. He had a particular specification no one else knew.

  Annabelle Selldorf

  People, Remember, Architect

  "Interview with Architect Annabelle Selldorf". Interview with Philip Nobel, www.architecturaldigest.com. March 31, 2013.

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• In mathematics ... we find two tendencies present. On the one hand, the tendency towards abstraction seeks to crystallise the logical relations inherent in the maze of materials ... being studied, and to correlate the material in a systematic and orderly manner. On the other hand, the tendency towards intuitive understanding fosters a more immediate grasp of the objects one studies, a live rapport with them, so to speak, which stresses the concrete meaning of their relations.

  David Hilbert

  Stress, Hands, Two

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• Practice being kind to yourself in small, concrete ways. Look at your refrigerator. Are you feeding yourself nicely? Do you have socdks? An extra set of sheets? What about a new house plant? A thermos for the long drive to work? Allow yourself to pitch out some of your ragged clothes. You don't have to keep everything.

  Julia Cameron

  Practice, Clothes, Long

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• On the lawn next to the sidewalk a fire ant colony is swarming. The ants are pouring out of a mound nest, here no more than an irregular pile of dirt partly flattened by the last pass of a lawnmower. Winged queens and males are taking off on their nuptial flight, protected by angry-looking workers that run up and down the grass blades and out onto the blistering-hot concrete of the sidewalk. The species is unmistakably Solenopsis geminata, the native fire ant.

  E. O. Wilson

  Running, Queens, Fire

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• Our beliefs are rooted deep in our earth, no matter what you have done to it and how much of it you have paved over. And if you leave all that concrete unwatched for a year or two, our plants, the native Indian plants, will pierce that concrete and push up through it.

  John Fire Lame Deer

  Years, Two, Done

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• Sometimes among our more sophisticated, self-styled intellectuals--and I say self-styled advisedly; the real intellectual I am notsure would ever feel this way--some of them are more concerned with appearance than they are with achievement. They are more concerned with style then they are with mortar, brick and concrete. They are more concerned with trivia and the superficial than they are with the things that have really built America.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Real, Self, America

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• All the same, the fundamental truths which govern that art are still unchangeable; just as the principles of mechanics must always govern architecture, whether the building be made of wood, stone, iron or concrete; just as the principles of harmony govern music of whatever kind. It is still necessary, then, to establish the principles of war.

  Ferdinand Foch

  Art, War, Iron

  "The Principles of War". Book by Ferdinand Foch, 1918.

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