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Obfuscation Quotes

Browse 22 quotes about Obfuscation.

Obfuscation Quotes

“- I do have some faith in democracy, but I don't think that this vote can be regarded as a matter of course as democratic. The voters knew too little about the alternatives. - They are always Ill-informed. - You are possibly right, but democracy does depend on certain principles of freedom and these are often more essential than demonstrations of freedom. That vote was a demonstration of freedom, but it went against the principles of freedom.”

“But no. That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies were mostly meaningless — a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). Most, of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not? If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches’ tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality? It was absurd.”

“Little hypocrisies are easy enough to find, and where sex is involved, one finds little else. During a debate in 1970 over whether to introduce coed dorms at the University of Kansas, one male student said that such living arrangements would leave students “free to engage one another as human beings.” “I believe that the segregation of the sexes is unnatural,” another said. “This tradition of segregation is discriminatory and promotes inequality of mankind.” The same high-flown statements were heard at every school where coeducation was introduced, and they all carried the same tacit addendum: any benefit to our sex lives will be purely coincidental. From the moment the Pill became widely available, the effect of the sexual revolution has mainly been to make women more sexually available to men. This hardly even qualifies as an unintended consequence, just an unannounced one.”

“Some of those watching believed answers like this (eg. "I don't recall", "I don't think so.") - which dominated Pell's evidence as well as [former Auxiliary Bishop of Brisbane Brian] Finnigan's and many of the other priests - to be a form of 'mental reservation' or mentalis restrictio in the Latin. It's a theological strategy dating back centuries, which involves the idea of truths 'expressed partly in speech and partly in the mind'. As the theory goes, lying is considered a sin. But a Christian's ethical duty is to tell truth to God - reserving or restricting part of that truth from human ears is ethically sound if it serves the greater good. (p.185)”

“[Is it] Lying when a person uses his considerable reputation and his mastery of public communications to thrash his opponents by redirecting the attention of the general populace, thus infecting the people with the tiniest sliver of doubt, which, widely propagated, becomes a sizable wedge of doubt? said G. Doesn't every idea, said R., even those judged by some standards to be fallacious or those which have been disproven outright, deserve to be honored with the public's attention? Doesn't the public have the right to know? said G. And decide for itself? said R. Are you calling the public stupid? said G. Do you not believe in democracy? said R. R. turned to me. We were, in life, eminent scientists, he said.”

“Advertizing, television and film all wield mighty powers to visually seduce us, while much fine art leaves us indifferent, confused or, at worst, repulsed. There is a desperate need for creative Christians to redeem the visual arena from both forms of excess, cutting through all the false glamour, tawdry baseness and dense obfuscation.”

“The zest for life of those unusual men and women who make a great zealous success of living is due more often in good part to the craftiness and pertinacity with which they manage to overlook the misery of others. You can watch them watch life beat the stuffing out of the faces of their friends and acquaintances, although they themselves seem to outwit the dense delays of social custom, the tedious tick-tock of bureaucratic obfuscation, accepting loss and age and change and disappointment without suffering punctures in their stomach lining.”

“My mother, whom I love dearly, has continually revised my life story within the context of a complicated family history that includes more than the usual share of divorce, step-children, dysfunction, and obfuscation. I've spent most of my adult life attempting to deconstruct that history and separate fact from fiction.”

“An ideology is a complex of ideas or notions which represents itself to the thinker as an absolute truth for the interpretation of the world and his situation within it; it leads the thinker to accomplish an act of self-deception for the purpose of justification, obfuscation and evasion in some sense or other to his advantage.”

“To cover politics in Washington allows you to live in the very, very wide gap between what the actual truth is, and how people are trying to manipulate the truth. They speak in the language of spin, obsequiousness, obfuscation. The meta of politics is just this endless source of material that can shed light on the psychology of the process.”

“I'll tell you what, [Hillary Clinton] is not making America safer by her actions and because as it relates to Benghazi, as it relates the e-mail scandal, as to the number of lies and obfuscation that she has engaged in throughout the course of this investigation and lack of transparency. And specifically, she's making America weaker by telegraphing and telling our enemies that we won't even put troops or boots over there. You don't know what's going to happen down the road”

“His gaze was a lot steadier than her heartbeat. “She’s the reason for those whispered phone calls I used to overhear, isn’t she?” “Don’t be silly. I was talking to my lover.” “She told me she lives at a place called Brookdale. After I hung up, I did a little research on the Web. Your talent for obfuscation continues to amaze me.” “Hey, I haven’t obfuscated in weeks. Makes you go blind.”