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Berkeley Quotes

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Berkeley Quotes

“Scientists are extremely keen on “common sense”, yet their hero Albert Einstein dismissively said, “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by the age of eighteen.” Your senses and your common sense are both insufficient to the task that scientism assigns to them. They don’t tell you shit. As Bishop Berkeley pointed out, you have no experience of any objective thing called “matter”. Instead, you have a subjective experience of a subjective idea of what you label “matter”. You always encounter the idea of matter in your mind. You have no non-mental encounter with anything called matter, so where is your evidence that matter even exists? As Berkeley demonstrated, “matter” is a redundant hypothesis.”

MindMatterPhilosophyScienceCommon SenseEmpiricismBerkeleyPhenomenaScientific MaterialismNaive Realism
Book:Extra Scientiam Nulla Salus: How Science Undermines Reason
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“At first she felt overwhelmed by the house, its airy symmetry its silence. Now she was accustomed to the place, but she caught herself wondering, Is this still Berkeley? George's neighborhood felt as far from Telegraph as the hanging gardens of Babylon. You could get a good kebab in Jess's neighborhood, and a Cal T-shirt, and a reproduction NO HIPPIES ALLOWED sign. Where George lived, you could not get anything unless you drove down from the hills. Then you could buy art glass, and temple bells, and burled-wood jewelry boxes, and dresses of hand-painted silk, and you could eat at Chez Panisse, or sip coffee at the authentically grubby French Hotel where your barista took a bent paper clip and drew cats or four-leaf clovers or nudes in your espresso foam. You returned home with organic, free-range groceries, and bouquets of ivory roses and pale green hydrangeas, and you held dinner parties where some guests got lost and arrived late, and others gave up searching for you in the fog. That was George's Berkeley, and even in these environs, his home stood apart, hidden, grand, and rambling; windows set like jewels in their carved frames, gables twined with wisteria of periwinkle and ghostly white.”

FlowersColorsBerkeleyNeighborhoodsJess And George
Book:The Cookbook Collector
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“Questions and debates related to the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, starting with Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Boyle, and culminating with Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, although we can go back to Democritus and his conventions, arise not only from these qualities per se but also from the lack of clear and precise definitions of these terms, including the terms “sensibles” (“sensible qualities”) and “proper and common sensibles.” For the philosophers of old, since Aristotle, proper sensibles were the same as secondary qualities for the philosophers since Locke. Common sensibles would be primary qualities based on Locke’s classification. The main distinction shall be sought between the essence of the Being as a singularity, in its ultimate mode, and its manifestation, appearance, in and through plurality. We can further postulate that there is a distinction between the essence of singularity and its appearance or manifestation in (through) plurality. The next question is whether Plurality saves the essence of singularity. Although singularity is saved even in plurality, this essence hides beyond appearance, and the senses cannot experience it. The senses experience only the appearance of plurality, not its essence as a singularity.”

Dejan StojanovicAbsoluteNewtonBerkeleyHumeDescartesGalileoJohn LockeBoyle
Book:ABSOLUTE
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“If you really want this acceptance, then you need to display that now. Acceptance into the college of your choice may happen, but it likely won’t happen from mediocrity or luck. Put in the time and effort, do the research, and constantly strive for excellence on a daily basis. This needs to be a fundamental aspect of your mindset as a student.”

CollegeHarvardStanfordBerkeleyUclaUndergraduateMitCollege AdmissionsCollege ApplicationCollege Applications
Book:The College Admissions Blueprint: 9 Proven Steps from Application to Acceptance
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“Robert Oppenheimer used to tell of the pioneer mysteries of building reliable Geiger counters that had low background noise. Among his friends, he said, there were two schools of thought. One school firmly held that the final step before one sealed off the Geiger tube was to peel a banana and wave the skin three times, sharply to the left. The other school was equally confident that success would follow if one waved the banana peel twice to the left and then, once, smartly to the right. (My counters were unbelievably bad because I didn't use either of these techniques.)”

SciencePhysicsBerkeleyBananaOppenheimerGeiger CounterGeiger
Book:Alvarez
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“Cecile was teaching in Berkeley and I was [at Livermore]. He probably had, could have had, some influence on Teller, [for] Teller was quite generous in allowing me one whole semester off to be at Berkeley to work on something and also a semester off at the Institute for Advanced Study. Then I won the Gravity Research Foundation first prize.”

SciencePhysicsBerkeleyTheoretical PhysicsInstitute For Advanced StudyEdward TellerCal Berkeley
Author:Bryce S. DeWitt
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“It was in the nature of those who had long dreamt of Pacific empire to stress the optimism with which George Berkeley opened his quatrain. Few pondered the line with which he closed it: Westward the course of empire takes its way; The first four acts already past. A fifth shall close the drama with the day: Time's noblest offspring is its last.”

TimeHistoryBerkeleyGeorge BerkeleyPacific EmpireUrban Studies
Book:Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin
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“One more item for the delusional Miss Grundys still obtusely citing Reagan as their model of “niceness”: As governor of California, Reagan gave student protesters at Berkeley the finger. Remember that next time you ask yourself: “What would Reagan do?” People who are afraid of ideas whitewash Reagan like they whitewash Jesus. Sorry to break it to you, but the Reagan era did not consist of eight years of Reagan joking about his naps.”

PeopleYearsStillsIdeasRememberNextAsksJesusBreakMissingStudentsModelsFingersSorryEightErasCaliforniaGovernorsNext TimeItemsNapsDelusionalCitingBerkeleyNiceness
Author:Ann Coulter
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“Even when alternative views are clearly wrong, being exposed to them still expands our creative potential. In a way, the power of dissent is the power of surprise. After hearing someone shout out an errant answer, we work to understand it, which causes us to reassess our initial assumptions and try out new perspectives. “Authentic dissent can be difficult, but it’s always invigorating,” Nemeth says. “It wakes us right up.””

WayTryingStillsCausesDifficultAnswersViewsCreativePsychologyPerspectiveSurpriseUniversityHearingAlternativesCaliforniaAssumptionProfessorsExposedInitialsDissentNew PerspectiveBerkeleyInvigoratingShout Out
Author:Jonah Lehrer
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“Esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived, said good old Berkeley; but, according to most philosophers, he was wrong. Yet, obviously, there are things for which the adage holds. Perception, trivially, to begin with. If elements of conscious awareness--pains, tickles, feelings of heat and cold, sensory qualia of colors, sounds, and the like--have any existence, it must consist in their being perceived by a subject.... This shows, of course, that such experiences are epiphenomenal, at least with respect to the physical world.”

IfsWorldSaidShowsFeelingsPainCoursesSoundExistenceSubjectsAwarenessColorColdElementsPerceptionConsciousPhilosopherHeatAdagesSensoryConscious AwarenessBerkeleyHeat And Cold
Author:Zeno Vendler
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“Language is virtually always pathological; hence the solution is to move as fast and far as possible from language to experience, from linguistic to experimental or psychological philosophy. In order to know that we are not in the linguistic maze, we need to determine, according to Berkeley, whether the things we are talking about exist; hence we need to look for the relevant perceptions. For him, this usually means retiring into himself and trying to imagine whether x exists, having formed the best definition possible of x.”

KnowsNeedsTryingLooksMeanPhilosophyMovingOrderLanguageTalkingImaginePerceptionSolutionsDefinitionsDeterminePsychologicalRetiringRelevantMazesBerkeley
Author:David Berman
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“It would be wrong of me to suppose that just because I can form private mental images, that everyone can. As Francis Galton and William James long ago showed, a small proportion of adults-and some of these extremely intelligent-are unable to form such visual images. Berkeley's point is that it would be equally arrogant for these non-thinkers or non-image formers to claim that everyone is like them in the relevant respect. The temptation to pontificate in that way reveals a narrowness and unwillingness to see the world from another perspective.”

WorldWayMindLongI CanWould BeFormPerspectiveAdultsClaimsIntelligentTemptationVisualsProportionThinkerRelevantArrogantLong AgoBecause I CanBerkeleyVisual Images
Author:David Berman
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“It isn't that information is exploding, but accessibility is. There's just about as much information this year as there was last year; it's been growing at a steady rate. It's just that now it's so much more accessible because of information technology. The consensus is that a Web crawler could get to a terabyte of publicly accesible HTML. A terabyte is about a million books. the UC Berkeley library has about 8 million books, and the Library of Congress has 20 million books.”

YearsBookLastsMillionsTechnologyGrowingInformationRateLibraryCongressSteadyLast YearConsensusInformation TechnologyExplodingAccessibilityBerkeleyHtmlUc Berkeley
Author:Hal Varian
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“In San Francisco, most of the older activists, especially at Berkeley, were very hostile towards punks. The music, certainly, wasn't nice and mellow for them, and neither was our look or our attitude. While in Vancouver, the two most important early punk bands, D.O.A. and the Subhumans, were both managed by former yippie activists, who saw this as a logical extension of what they were already doing.”

LooksTwoImportantAttitudeSawsNiceBandFormerLogicalActivistPunkExtensionsHostileSan FranciscoMellowVancouverBerkeley
Author:Jello Biafra
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“I studied music for my first two years in college. When I went to UC Berkeley, I failed the admission requirements to get into the music school there, so I studied communications and public policy, which actually were a greater engine for my career than a musical education would have been. If I had gotten into the music department at Berkeley, I'd probably be a timpanist in an orchestra right now.”

IfsYearsFirstsHas BeensTwoSchoolCareersGreaterPolicyCollegeCommunicationRight NowMusicalDepartmentTwo YearsEnginesRequirementsOrchestraAdmissionPublic PolicyBerkeleyMusical EducationUc Berkeley
Author:Stewart Copeland
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“I started making movies in my late 20s, that time in an artist's career that often sees artists just imitating things that he or she loves. I just wanted to be great like L'Age d'Or vintage Buñuel. I wanted to be Busby Berkeley, for crying out loud! I wanted to have chorus girls stomping their heels in my casting office. I wanted to be Erich Von Stroheim monogramming underwear for extras. So I started off my career doing that, and that was fun, but I realised I wasn't very good at it.”

AgeWantedArtistGirlFunCareersCryOfficeLateVery GoodLoudExtrasHeelsCastingRealisedUnderwearChorusVintageImitatingBerkeleyStomping
Author:Guy Maddin
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“Oh my research. Well, I got an English Degree. And I got that degree in a certain time/at a certain place. If you add UC Berkeley + 1984 the other side of the = is "new historian" meaning that I studied with and was influenced by those who were interested in how the personal shaped the political (and literary), how science and literature might interact, and what the body got to do with it.”

IfsWellsBodyMightPoliticalCertainLiteratureSidesDegreesResearchAddHistorianBerkeleyUc Berkeley
Author:Laura Mullen
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“My filmmaking style of remixing came out of necessity. When I was a film theory student at UC Berkeley in the early 1990s, there were no film production facilities. The only way I learned to tell stories on film was by re-cutting and splicing together celluloid of old movies, early animated films, home films, sound slug - anything I could get my hands on.”

WayStoriesHomeHandsTogetherFilmSoundCuttingStyleStudentsTheoryProductionsFilmmakingFacilityAnimatedBerkeleySlugsOld MovieAnimated FilmsCelluloidUc BerkeleyFilm Production
Author:Elisa Kreisinger
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“I talk about folding it in often with Althea, my girlfriend. She's getting her doctoral degree at Berkeley and she talks about how even when writing these very academic, and, for the most part, serious papers there's just so much going on in her head and heart, and it's a reminder that there's a reason that she's studying these things.”

WritingHeartReasonStudySeriousDegreesPaperGirlfriendAcademicPapersRemindersMy GirlfriendBerkeleyHead And HeartFolding
Author:Paul Beatty
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“My students used to say, one such as Mary O'Neal, that I identified the students by their boyfriend/girlfriend relationship. That was the way I knew them and keep up with them. Mary was the girlfriend of Stokely Carmichael. She later became a fine painter of distinction and taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, and later became chairman of the Department of Art at Berkeley.”

WayArtUsedStudentsTaughtFinePainterGirlfriendDepartmentDistinctionMarySan FranciscoChairmanInstituteBerkeley
Author:David C. Driskell
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