Discourse Quotes

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

Neil Postman

Author describes one monarch's impressive table but conveys a contemporary's observation, "the weightiest thing at dinner was the conversation".

Peter Heather

The point is that television does not reveal who the best man is. In fact, television makes impossible the determination of who is better than whom, if we mean by 'better' such things as more capable in negotiation, more imaginative in executive skill, more knowledgeable about international affairs, more understanding of the interrelations of economic systems, and so on. The reason has, almost entirely, to do with 'image.' But not because politicians are preoccupied with presenting themselves in the best possible light. After all, who isn't? It is a rare and deeply disturbed person who does not wish to project a favorable image. But television gives image a bad name. For on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of himself, as offer himself as an image of the audience. And therein lies one of the most powerful influences of the television commercial on political discourse.

Neil Postman

He was telling an interesting anecdote full of exciting words like "encyclopedia" and "rhododendron".

A.A. Milne

Of course, in television's presentation of the "news of the day," we may see the Now...this" mode of discourse in it's boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure entertainment.

Neil Postman

Talk lives in a man’s head, but sometimes it is very lonely because in the heads of many men there is nothing to keep it company - and so talk goes out through the lips.

Beryl Markham

The meetings and marches and vigils are cool, but if the enemy isn't present, you're just talking slick to a can of oil.

Darnell Lamont Walker

Liberty is like those solid and tasty foods or those full-bodied wines which are appropriate for nourishing and strengthening robust constitutions that are used to them, but which overpower, ruin and intoxicate the weak and delicate who are not suited for them.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Where wise actions are the fruit of life, wise discourse is the pollination.

Bryant McGill

Marx understood well that the press was not merely a machine but a structure for discourse, which both rules out and insists upon certain kinds of content and, inevitably, a certain kind of audience.

Neil Postman

It is up to the individual to 'choose' their repertoire of the self. If they do not have access to the range of narratives and discourses for the production of the ethical self they may be held responsible for choosing badly, an irresponsible production of themselves

Bev Skeggs

In America, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different roder from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this world almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information--misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information--information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?

Neil Postman

The beautiful is powerless but always exceeds what frames it, and what always frames it is discourse.

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe

Teddy White lamented that TV might spell the death of serious politics: to give a thoughtful response to serious questions, politician needed a good thirty seconds to ponder, but television allowed only five seconds of silence at best. DDB (ad men) found nothing to lament and the fact. They were convinced you could learn everything you needed to KNOW about a product, which in this case happens to be a human being, in half a minute – the speed not of thought but of emotion.

Rick Perlstein

A great deal of the global stimuli that we view comes to us without major effort. Daily a person scans and screens a wide barrage of solicited and unsolicited material. What information a society pays attention to creates the standards and principles governing citizens’ life. A nation’s discourse translates its economic, social, and cultural values to impressionable children.

Kilroy J. Oldster

What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one's own language as it is perceived in someone else's language, coming to know one's own belief system in someone else's system.

Mikhail Bakhtin

We are all full of discourses that we only half understand and half mean.

Rae Armantrout

I can do everything with my language but not with my body. What I hide by my language, my body utters. I can deliberately mold my message, not my voice. By my voice, whatever it says, the other will recognize "that something is wrong with me". I am a liar (by preterition), not an actor. My body is a stubborn child, my language is a very civilized adult...

Roland Barthes

If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to speak coherently at all. If the whole of language were present to me when I spoke, then I would not be able to articulate anything at all. The ego, or consciousness, can therefore only work by repressing this turbulent activity, provisionally nailing down words on to meanings. Every now and then a word from the unconscious which I do not want insinuates itself into my discourse, and this is the famous Freudian slip of the tongue or parapraxis. But for Lacan all our discourse is in a sense a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery and ambiguous as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say and never say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense an approximation, a near-miss, a part-failure, mixing non-sense and non-communication into sense and dialogue.

Terry Eagleton

Volatility in the up direction is not a problem-it's only downward volatility that offers discourse.

Coreen T. Sol

In many a case, the phrase ‘I’d like to get to know you better’ is a euphemism for ‘I want us to fuck.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

We ought to punish pitilessly that shameful pretence of friendly intercourse. I like a man to be a man, and to show on all occasions the bottom of his heart in his discourse. Let that be the thing to speak, and never let our feelings be beneath vain compliments

Molière

It is not uncommon for textbooks on language to have sections on the relationship 'between' language and society, as if these were two independent entities which just happen to come into contact occasionally. My view is that there is not an external relationship 'between' language and society, but an internal and dialectical relationship.

Norman Fairclough

It may well be that we talk about sex more than anything else; we set our minds to the task; we convince ourselves that were have never said enough on the subject...where sex is concerned the most long-winded, the most impatient of societies is our own.

Michel Foucault

[W]e would do better to treat terrorists as common criminals, people who have broken the laws recognized by all civil societies. To treat them as soldiers is to increase their power, respectability, and commitment.

Nel Noddings

Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

Philip K Dick

When it comes to moral dilemmas and matters of discerning right justice, my natural sympathy so often happens to land on the opposite end of that of most of my peers. I sometimes wonder if this is nothing more than the misguidedness and the wickedness of my own heart. I wonder other times if God wires some of us in such a way so that fair discourse might then be provided, so that honest and unbiased, due process is ultimately more likely to be carried out. Perhaps it is all necessary for variance of perception, for mindful debate: that the heart is meant to create a bit of bias on certain issues; as between one another, they weigh and balance. For not all hearts are the same.

Criss Jami

The altitude of any relation is possible through discourse.

Unarine Ramaru

...civility doesn't require consensus or the suspension of criticism. It is simply the ability to disagree productively with others while respecting their sincerity and decency.

Ravi Iyer and Jonathan Haidt

The real purpose of the opposition is to minimize the amount of money the ruling party will have stolen from the people at the end of its term.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

We usually learn from debates that we seldom learn from debates.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Demetrius the grammarian finding in the temple of Delphos a knot of philosophers set chatting together, said to them, “Either I am much deceived,or by your cheerful and pleasant countenances, you are engaged in no very deep discourse.” To which one of them, Heracleon the Megarean, replied: “ ’Tis for such as are puzzled about inquiring whether the future tense of the verb Ballo be spelt with adouble L, or that hunt after the derivation of the comparatives Cheirou and Beltiou, and the superlatives Cheiriotou and Beliotou, to knit their brows whilst discoursing of their science; but as to philosophical discourses, they always divert and cheer up those that entertain them, and never deject them or make them sad.

Michel de Montaigne

How can we satisfy ourselves without going on in infinitum? And, after all, what satisfaction is there in that infinite progression? Let us remember the story of the Indian philosopher and his elephant. It was never more applicable than to the present subject. If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world.

David Hume

Belief is a wonderful way to pass the time until the facts come in.

Carl R White

Discourse is not life; its time is not your time; in it, you will not be reconciled to death; you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying you will make a man that will live longer than he.

Michel Foucault

A philosopher's main task is to compulsively filibuster

Mohadesa Najumi

One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.

Marcel Proust

as soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency.

Slavoj Žižek

Discourse Quotes

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