Disorder Quotes - Page 21

• I've never regretted saying no to anything, or finishing something. When I'm in the middle of doing something I love, I can have a better idea, and I'll go, "Oh God, I can't finish this." Maybe I've got some sort of disorder.

  Ricky Gervais

  Ideas, Finishing, Saying No

  Interview with Scott Gordon, www.avclub.com. January 10, 2007.

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• Every region should retain representative samples of its original or wilderness condition, to serve science as a sample of normality. Just as doctors must study healthy people to understand disease, so must the land sciences study the wilderness to understand disorders of the land-mechanism.

  Aldo Leopold

  Land, Doctors, People

  Aldo Leopold (2012). “For the Health of the Land: Previously Unpublished Essays And Other Writings”, p.197, Island Press

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• The ills and disorders of the 14th century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years until at some imperceptible moment, by the some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.

  Barbara Tuchman

  Years, Ideas, Humanity

  "A Distant Mirror". Book by Barbara Tuchman, p. 581, 1978.

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• Anarchy is a word that comes from the Greek, and signifies, strictly speaking, "without government": the state of a people without any constituted authority. Before such an organization had begun to be considered possible and desirable by a whole class of thinkers, so as to be taken as the aim of a movement (which has now become one of the most important factors in modern social warfare), the word "anarchy" was used universally in the sense of disorder and confusion, and it is still adopted in that sense by the ignorant and by adversaries interested in distorting the truth.

  Errico Malatesta

  Taken, Class, Organization

  "Anarchy". Pamphlet by Errico Malatesta, www.marxists.org. 1891.

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• No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you're not superior to sex. It's a very risky game.... It's sex that disorders our normally ordered lives.

  Philip Roth

  Sex, Thinking, Games

  Philip Roth (2001). “The Dying Animal”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The elegant study... is consistent with the themes of modern cognitive neuroscience . Every aspect of thought and emotion is rooted in brain structure and function, including many psychological disorders and, presumably, genius. The study confirms that the brain is a modular system comprising multiple intelligences, mostly nonverbal.

  Steven Pinker

  Psychological Disorders, Brain, Genius

  "On Einstein's brain". The New York Times, June 24, 1999.

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• It's hard with ballet because your aesthetic really is important. It's different from acting and from film. Nobody wants to watch somebody who is sickly thin. And it's interesting because I have danced with people who are ill, have eating disorders, and a light goes off within them.

  Amanda Schull

  Light, Interesting, People

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• You are the cutting edge of a thirteen billion year old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose? To add to the complexity. Your enemy? Disorder, entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness.

  Terence McKenna

  Cutting, Years, Stupidity

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• Proportion ... You can't help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn't exist ... It's like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way ... We need no barbarians from outside; they're on the premises, all the time.

  Aldous Huxley

  Cat, Thinking, Symphony

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• A society which makes provision for participation in its good of all its members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of its institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated life is in so far democratic. Such a society must have a type of education which gives individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control, and the habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder.

  John Dewey

  Giving, Mind, Different

  John Dewey (2015). “Democracy and Education”, p.102, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• There is a nationwide shortage of drugs for Attention Deficit Disorder. The FDA says they're not sure how it happened. I guess somebody wasn't paying attention.

  Jay Leno

  Fda, Drug, Attention

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• Let pessimism once take hold of the mind, and life is all topsy-turvy, all vanity and vexation of spirit. There is no cure for individual or social disorder, except in forgetfulness and annihilation.

  Helen Keller

  Vanity, Mind, Vexation

  Helen Keller (2010). “The World I Live In and Optimism: A Collection of Essays”, p.102, Courier Corporation

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• Since it is Reason which shapes and regulates all other things, it ought not itself to be left in disorder.

  Epictetus

  Shapes, Reason, Ought

  Epictetus (1866). “The Works of Epictetus: Consisting of His Discourses, in Four Books, the Enchiridion, and Fragments”, p.51

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• Their [those with eating disorders'] task is to rescue themselves from a drive that is destroying them. Food embodies the false values that their own bodies refuse to assimilate, by which I mean that their bodies become edemic, bloated, allergic, or resort to vomiting the poison out. The unconscious body, and certainly the conscious body, will not tolerate the negative mother.

  Marion Woodman

  Mother, Mean, Eating Disorder

  "Addiction to Perfection". Book by Marion Woodman, 1982.

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• In Paris on a chilling evening late in October of 1985 I first became fully aware that the struggle with the disorder in my mind - a struggle which had engaged me for several months - might have a fatal outcome.

  William Styron

  Struggle, Paris, Mind

  "Darkness Visible". Book by William Styron, 1990.

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• I do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortal men can attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible and unimprovable truth about such matters of fact as those with which religions deal. But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight in intellectual instability. I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly.

  William James

  Men, Intellectual, Doubt

  William James (2015). “The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature”, p.116, Xist Publishing

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• The advanced members of the medical profession know that the health of society is not to be obtained or maintained by medicines; - that it is far better, far more easy and far wiser, to adopt substantive measures to prevent disease of body or mind, than to allow substantive measure to remain continually to generate causes to produce physical and mental disorders.

  Robert Owen

  Medicine, Mind, Body

  "The Book of the New Moral World". Book by Robert Owen, Part 3, 1845.

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• Anarchism means voluntary co-operation instead of forced participation. It means harmony and order in place of interference and disorder.

  Alexander Berkman

  Mean, Order, Harmony

  Alexander Berkman (2003). “What is Anarchism?”, p.151, AK Press

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• The more you look back into English history, the more you are forced to the conclusion that alongside civility and the deeply held convictions about individual rights, the English have a natural taste for disorder.

  Anna Pavlova

  Rights, English History, Looks

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• Just keep playing, mastering as you do the step Into disorder this one meant. Don't you see It's all we can do? Meanwhile, great fires Arise, as of haystacks aflame. The dial has been set And that's ominous, but all your graciousness in living Conspires with it, now that this is our home: A place to be from, and have people ask about.

  John Ashbery

  Home, Fire, People

  John Ashbery (1985). “A Wave: Poems”, p.2, Ardent Media

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• Everybody's a bit screwed up, you know. You can take it as symptoms of a disorder, or you can take it as personality. Me, I'd rather think it as parts of personality.

  Jarvis Cocker

  Thinking, Personality, Symptoms

  "The South Bank Show", 2007.

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• The night ... it is filled with bestial watchmen, trammeling the extremities and the interstices of the timeless city, portents fallen, constellated deities plummeting in ash and smoke, roaming the apocryphal cities, the cities of speculation and reconstituted disorder, of insemination and incipience, swept round with the dark.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Dark, Night, Cities

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• It began with one act of madness, and it ended with another. John Brown heard history's clock strike in the night and tried to hurry dawn along with gunfire; now John Wilkes Booth heard the clock strike, and he tried with gunfire to restore the darkness. Each man stood outside the human community, directed by voices the sane do not hear, and each kept history from going logically... The line from Harper's Ferry to Ford's Theater is a red thread binding the immense disorder of the Civil War into an irrational sort of coherence.

  Bruce Catton

  War, Night, Men

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• Along with supernature and science, there is one other major source of horror movies disorder: the human psyche, most commonly homicidal psychosis. Unlike 'mad' scientists, horror-movies madmen are not visionary obsessives, glorifying in scientific reason as they single-mindedly purse their researches. They are, rather, victims of overpowering impulses that well up from within; monsters brought forth by the sleep of reason, not by its attractions.

  Andrew Tudor

  Sleep, Psychosis, Mad

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• The primary cause of disorder and lawlessness today, as throughout history, is the poverty of the many in contrast to the affluence of the few. But a new element of unrest has been added: a growing awareness that mass poverty is caused by defective institutions that prevent our harnessing the physical capabilities of science, engineering, management and labor to create general affluence; in other words, a growing awareness that poverty in any country that is or can be industrialized, is man's not nature's fault.

  Louis O. Kelso

  Wisdom, Country, Men

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