Opposites Quotes - Page 38

• Demand and supply are the opposite extremes of the beam, whence depend the scales of dearness and cheapness; the price is the point of equilibrium, where the momentum of the one ceases, and that of the other begins.

  Jean-Baptiste Say

  Momentum, Demand, Beam

  Jean Baptiste Say, Clement Cornell Biddle (1851). “A treatise on political economy”, p.290

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• The novice-friendly software is more like a misbehaving dog: it shits on the floor, it destroys things, and stinks - the novice-friendly software embodies the opposite of what computer people have dreamed of for decades: artificial stupidity. It's more human.

  Erik Naggum

  Dog, People, Stupidity

  "Read the fine manual, please". Usenet discussion groups, groups.google.com. November 14, 1997.

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• Barcelona is a very old city in which you can feel the weight of history; it is haunted by history. You cannot walk around it without perceiving it. In Los Angeles, it is quite the opposite: it is an older city than it might seem to be, but you don't perceive this -- every day you get out of your home, you are driving somewhere and sometimes you get this impression that everything was put there the night before.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Home, Night, Cities

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• You know who your true friends are when things go wrong for you, but the opposite is also true. When things go well, the people who really love you are happy.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  True Friend, Love You, People

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• I believe that one of the most important properties of a work of art is an attempt to reconcile opposites, and in their fusion to achieve a 'wholeness' or 'oneness,' the experiencing of which should be revelatory - both for the artist and the spectator - something akin to the experience of enlightenment in terms of religion.

  Douglas Portway

  Art, Believe, Oneness

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• Perhaps the deterioration of American education is illustrated by the high correlation between the number of years a person has attended school and his inability to understand the words "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." It is more likely, though, that those who interpret the Second Amendment to preclude an individual right to own guns are driven by their political agenda. Whichever the case, they do themselves no credit when they tell us that a simple, elegant sentence means the opposite of what it clearly says.

  Sheldon Richman

  Education, School, Mean

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• Rather than incorporating study into life, I've done the opposite. I've turned life into study. Where events take me? That's what I dive in to learn.

  Silver RavenWolf

  Events, Done, Study

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• I don't have a favorite cooking tool. In the kitchen, I always have my pencil and notebook in my hand. I cook more theoretically than I do practically. My job is creative, and in the kitchen, the biggest part of my creativity is theoretical. The pencil has a symbolic meaning for me. The type of person who carries a pencil around is the type of person who's open to change. Someone who walks around with a pen isn't; he's the opposite.

  Ferran Adria

  Notebook, Jobs, Creativity

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• As happy as I am off the floor, on the floor I am the opposite. I don't take any crap.

  Gilbert Arenas

  Crap

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• Now the code of life of the High Middle Ages said something entirely opposite to this: that it was precisely lack of leisure, an inability to be at leisure, that went together with idleness; that the restlessness of work-for-work's sake arose from nothing other than idleness. There is a curious connection in the fact that the restlessness of a self-destructive work-fanatacism should take its rise from the absence of a will to accomplish something.

  Josef Pieper

  Self, Age, Together

  "Leisure, the Basis of Culture" by Josef Pieper, translated by Gerald Malsbary, South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine's Press, (p. 27), 1998.

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• Why does a dad matter so much to a daughter, in particular? A dad is the one who teaches a daughter what a male is all about. It's the first man in her life--the first man she loves, the first male she tries to please, the first man who says no to her, the first man to discipline her. In effect, he sets her up for success or failure with the opposite sex. Not only that, but she takes cues from how Dad treats Mom as she grows up about what to expect as a woman who is in a relationship with a man. So Dad sets up his daughter's marriage relationship too.

  Kevin Leman

  Mom, Daughter, Sex

  Kevin Leman (2014). “Be the Dad She Needs You to Be: The Indelible Imprint a Father Leaves on His Daughter's Life”, p.2, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• The phrase "work-life balance" tells us that people think that work is the opposite of life. We should be talking about life-life balance.

  Patrick Dixon

  Work, Thinking, Talking

  "Building a Better Business". Book by Patrick Dixon, 2005.

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• It is a commonplace observation that liberals believe in the perfectibility of man while conservatives believe in the endurance of original sin. Superficially, that would suggest that conservatives take a more understanding and indulgent view of individual lapses, while liberals take a more harshly judgmental one. In fact, we know, quite the opposite is the case.

  William A. Henry III

  Believe, Men, Views

  William A. Henry, III (2015). “In Defense of Elitism”, p.157, Anchor

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• Individuals bearing witness do not change history; only movements that understand their social world can do that. Movements encourage solidarity; the moral individual is likely, all unwittingly, to do the opposite, for bearing witness is lonely: it breeds feelings of superiority and moralistic anger against those who are not doing the same.

  Ellen Willis

  Lonely, Feelings, Movement

  "Three Elegies for Susan Sontag". "New Politics", Vol. X, No. 3, Summer 2005.

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• Someone from the Internet Writing Workshop sent me a link to the Gender Genie, where you paste in a section of text and it uses an algorithm to detect whether the author is male or female. Or, if you're an author, you can tell whether you're really nailing your opposite-sex characters. I mean, nailing their dialog.

  Max Barry

  Sex, Writing, Character

  "Hand Me My Y-Chromosome". Personal blog, maxbarry.com. August 08, 2005.

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• Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear. . .

  e. e. cummings

  Love, Voice, Silence

  E. E. Cummings (1994). “Selected Poems”, p.71, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Some god or Weltgeist has been making a movie out of us for the past six thousand years, and now we have turned a corner on the movie set of reality and have discovered the boards propping up the two-dimensional monuments of human history. The movement of humanism has reached its limit, and now at that limit it is breaking apart into the opposites of mechanism and mysticism and moving along the circumference of a vast new sphere of posthuman thought.

  William Irwin Thompson

  Moving, Past, Reality

  William Irwin Thompson (1980). “Passages about Earth: An Exploration of the New Planetary Culture”, HarperCollins

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• ...in this way the structure of the universe- I mean, of the heavens and the earth and the whole world- was arranged by one harmony through the blending of the most opposite principles.

  Aristotle

  Mean, Heaven, Principles

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• You can think of my films as cautionary tales, but you might even think of them as despairing tales, because at least in a cautionary tale, you have this idea that by listening to the story you can assure a better outcome. Whereas I'm not at all convinced that's the case. In fact, if anything, I'm convinced that it's the opposite.

  Errol Morris

  Thinking, Ideas, Listening

  "The Eleven-Minute Psychiatrist". Interview with James Hughes, Stop Smiling Magazine, www.errolmorris.com. March 2006.

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• A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a "permission culture" -- a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.

  Lawrence Lessig

  Powerful, Past, Rights

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• A city like London was always going to be a paradox, the best of it so very riddled with the opposite, so Swiss-cheesed with moral holes.

  China Mieville

  Cities, London, Moral

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• A politician will always tip off his true belief by stating the opposite at the beginning of the sentence. For maximum comprehension, do not start listening until the first clause is concluded. Begin instead at the word 'BUT' which begins the second, or active, clause. This is the way to tell a liberal from a conservative - before they tell you. Thus: 'I have always believed in a strong national defense, second to none, but...(a liberal, about to propose a $20 billion defense cut).

  Frank Mankiewicz

  Strong, Cutting, Listening

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• Men are constantly attracted and deluded by two opposite charms: the charm of competence which is engendered by mathematics and everything akin to mathematics, and the charm of humble awe, which is engendered by meditation on the human soul and its experiences. Philosophy is characterized by the gentle, if firm, refusal to succumb to either charm.

  Leo Strauss

  Philosophy, Humble, Men

  Leo Strauss, Hilail Gildin (1989). “An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays”, p.39, Wayne State University Press

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• Any story worth telling relates to real life in some meaningful way. Scifi allows you to tell meaningful stories without seeming too preachy - it adds a metaphorical layer between the story and the real world. Scifi is dismissed as ungrounded fluff, but it's actually the opposite.

  Jane Espenson

  Meaningful, Real, Layers

  "Caprica Producer Jane Espenson Redefines Racism in the BSG Universe". AMC interview, www.amc.com.

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• Once the philosophical foundation of democracy has collapsed, the statement that dictatorship is bad is rationally valid only for those who are not its beneficiaries, and there is no theoretical obstacle to the transformation of this statement into its opposite.

  Max Horkheimer

  Philosophical, Democracies Have, Democracy

  Max Horkheimer (2013). “Eclipse of Reason”, p.19, A&C Black

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