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Function Quotes

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“... we are obliged to produce the truth by the power that demands truth and needs it in order to function: we are constrained, we are condemned to admit the truth or to discover it. Power constantly asks questions and questions us; it constantly investigates and records; it institutionalizes the search for the truth, professionalizes it, and rewards it. ... In a different sense, we are also subject to the truth in the sense that truth lays down the law: it is the discourse of truth that decides, at least in part; it conveys and propels effects of power.”

“Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. it is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely toleration, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within the interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters”

“Orchids manufacture their intricate devices from the common components of ordinary flowers, parts usually fitted for very different functions. If God had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power, surely he would not have used a collection of parts generally fashioned for other purposes. Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components. Thus, they must have evolved from ordinary flowers.”

“Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.”

“You love the person for who they are, flaws and all. You can't help who you love, either. It comes from a different side of your brain than the logic part that tells you that this person is horrible for you - "You should walk away!" While you're walking away, the other part of your brain is trying to gain control of your bodily functions. "Turn around! She's the one!"”

“If the universe is a non-spatial computer, a 'time machine' is a program that allows a user to have the same (ontologically non-spatial) feelings or experiences that occurred or s/he merely feels to have occurred in the past, with an in-built function to have different feelings or experiences than those of the past, and thus creating a possibility to change the past or to rewrite history in a pseudo sense.”

“And other people get the opportunity to leave prison, and then they do something to get put back in there because they can't actually function in society. It's really cool because you get to see all these different women, their backstories, where they come from, their upbringing and why they get to where they get to, and they're all completely different. It's really cool that you get to see all those storylines.”

“A real Master is not a teacher: a real Master is an awakener. His function is totally different from a teacher; his function is far more difficult. And only very few people can stay with a Master because to wake up after millions of lives is not an ordinary feat; it is a miracle. And to allow somebody to wake you up needs great trust, great surrender.”

“The intellectual and moral failures common to America's general officer corps in Vietnam and Iraq constitute a crisis in American generalship. Any explanation that fixes culpability on individuals is insufficient. No one leader, civilian or military, caused failure in Vietnam or Iraq. Different military and civilian leaders in the two conflicts produced similar results. In both conflicts, the general officer corps designed to advise policymakers, prepare forces and conduct operations failed to perform its intended functions.”

“From watching my own mind deteriorate circuit by circuit, I learned that every ability I have, from wiggling my finger to creating language, is dependent on a group of cells inside of my brain functioning in a healthy, happy way. I realized in order to get well I had to make the cells that performed those functions well again. It gave me an entirely different way to look at myself as an individual and at all of us as people.”

“There are certain ways, narrative forms, that do not function as a continuation, for example, of 3D movies. You see, what is obvious to me is virtual reality or immersive 360 degrees virtual reality is not somehow a part of 3D movies, and it is not a new form of video games, it's neither, it is something completely new, something different, and nobody has come up yet with real convincing content.”

“David Foster Wallace was a brilliant experimentalist who I deeply admire. His ability to do formalism helped me understand how to tackle stories like "Dictionary" and "Failed Revolution." "Dictionary," in particular, functions against narrative in many ways - each of the definitions are their own mini-story or prose poem, and the collection of them adds up to create a different effect than the traditional Freytagian Pyramid story.”

“If you don't uphold your legal responsibility to enforce the First Amendment, to provide speakers with platforms and audiences with safe, the ability to listen to speakers of all different kinds, agnostic ideology, if you don't do that as a university, you are not performing your essential function.”

“In Pakistan, many of the young people read novels because in the novels, not just my novels but the novels of many other Pakistani writers, they encounter ideas, notions, ways of thinking about the world, thinking about their society that are different. And fiction functions in a countercultural way as it does in America and certainly as it did in the, you know, '60s.”

“There is a huge body of evidence to support the notion that me and the police were put on this earth to do extremely different things and never to mingle professionally with each other, except at official functions, when we all wear ties and drink heavily and whoop it up like the natural, good-humored wild boys that we know in our hearts that we are..These occasions are rare, but they happen - despite the forked tongue of fate that has put us forever on different paths.”

“At first glance, the key and the lock it fits may seem very different," Sazed said. "Different in shape, different in function, different in design. The man who looks at them without knowledge of their true nature might think them opposites, for one is meant to open, and the other to keep closed. Yet, upon closer examination he might see that without one, the other becomes useless. The wise man then sees that both lock and key were created for the same purpose.”

“You must purge yourself before finding faults in others. When you see a mistake in somebody else, try to find if you are making the same mistake. This is the way to take judgment and to turn it into improvement. Do not look at others' bodies with envy or with superiority. All people are born with different constitutions. Never compare with others. Each one's capacities are a function of his or her internal strength. Know your capacities and continually improve upon them.”

“The chemical differences among various species and genera of animals and plants are certainly as significant for the history of their origins as the differences in form. If we could define clearly the differences in molecular constitution and functions of different kinds of organisms, there would be possible a more illuminating and deeper understanding of question of the evolutionary reactions of organisms than could ever be expected from morphological considerations.”

“The melting pot failed to function in one crucial area. Religions and nationalities, however different, generally learned to live together, even to grow together, in America. But color was something else. Reds were murdered like wild animals. Yellows were characterized as a peril and incarcerated en masse during World War ii for no really good reason by our most liberal president. Browns have been abused as the new slave labor on farms. The blacks, who did not come here willingly, are now, more than a century after emancipation by Lincoln, still suffering a host of slave like inequalities.”

“Childhood is a complex dialectical process characterized by periodicity, unevenness in the development of different functions, metamorphosis or qualitative transformation of one form into another, intertwining of external and internal factors, and adaptive processes which overcome impediments that the child encounters.”

“No physiologist who calmly considers the question in connection with the general truths of his science, can long resist the conviction that different parts of the cerebrum subserve different kinds of mental action. Localization of function is the law of all organization whatever: separateness of duty is universally accompanied with separateness of structure: and it would be marvellous were an exception to exist in the cerebral hemispheres.”

“All living organisms are but leaves on the same tree of life. The various functions of plants and animals and their specialized organs are manifestations of the same living matter. This adapts itself to different jobs and circumstances, but operates on the same basic principles. Muscle contraction is only one of these adaptations. In principle it would not matter whether we studied nerve, kidney or muscle to understand the basic principles of life. In practice, however, it matters a great deal.”