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Quotations to Consider by corey anton

greatdane — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 08:59:42 GMT

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Quotations to Consider
compiled by corey anton

St. Thomas Aquinas said: "Each receives according to his capacity."

St. Augustine: "To understand, you must first believe."

Francis Bacon: "All perceptions, as well of the senses as of the mind, accord to the measure of the individual, not to the measure of the universe." (as cited in Lee Thayer's On Communication, New Jersey: Ablex, 1987, p. 7).

Ernest Becker: "…Communication is largely self-deception, a disguise of power-rooting…people get together not by communicating with one another, but by sharing appetites and power allegiances" (as cited in Lee Thayer's On Communication, New Jersey: Ablex, 1987, p. 40).

Henri Bergson: "In fact, there is no perception which is not full of memories…In most cases the memories supplant our actual perception, of which we then retain only a few hints, thus using them merely as 'signs' that recall to us former images" (In Memory and Matter. New York: Zone Books, 1991, p. 33).

William Blake from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd." (In Kenneth Burke's Towards a Better Life. London: University of California Press, 1983, p. 177-8).

Jacob Bohme: "Whatever the self describes, describes the self."

Kenneth Burke writes, "Spontaneous speech is not a naming at all, but a system of attitudes, of implicit exhortations. To call a man a friend or enemy is per se to suggest a program of action with regard to him" (In Permanence and Change. Second edition, Bobbs-Merrill Co, 1954, p. 177).

"Words communicate to things the spirit that the society imposes upon the words which have come to be the 'names' for them. The things are in effect the visible tangible material embodiments of the spirit that infuses them through the medium of words. And in this sense, things become the signs of the genius that resides in words." (In Language as Symbolic Action, London: University of California Press, 1966. p. 362).

And through Burke The Lord spoke to Satan: "And in any case, you will agree that, even if their ideas of divine perfection were reducible to little more than a language-using animals' ultimate perception of its own linguistic forms, this could be a true inkling of the divine insofar as language itself happened to be made in the image of divinity." (In The Rhetoric of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970, p. 289-299).

"One talks about a thing by talking about something else." (In Counter-Statement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968, p. 141).

Ernst Cassirer: "Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with things themselves man is in a sense of constantly conversing with himself. He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial medium." (In An Essay on Man. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944, p. 25).

Collingwood: "Understanding what someone says to you is thus attributing to him the idea which his words arouse in yourself." (In The Principles of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938, p. 250).

Condillac once said, "Though we should soar to the heavens, though we should sink into the abyss, we never go out of ourselves; it is always our own thought we perceive." (In Lee Thayer's Communication and Communication Systems. University Press of America, 1986, p. 112).

John Dewey writes: "For the feature which characterizes symbolism is precisely that the thing which later reflection calls a symbol is not a symbol, but a direct vehicle, a concrete embodiment, a vital incarnation." (In Experience and Nature, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988 {1925} p. 72).

"When the introspectionist thinks he has withdrawn into a wholly private realm of events disparate in kind from other events, made out of mental stuff, he is only turning his attention to his own soliloquy. And soliloquy is the product and reflex of converse with others; social communication not an effect of soliloquy." (ibid., pp. 134-35).

From T. S. Eliot's dissertation: "Our only way of showing that we are attending to an object is to show that it and ourselves are independent entities, and to do this we must have names…{thus} We have no objects without language." (In Kenneth Burke's Language as Symbolic Action, Berkeley: University of California press, 1968, p. 61).

Ralph W. Emerson: "Your actions shout so loudly at me that I cannot hear what you are saying."

Richard Feynman said that his father said: "If you know the names of the things you may know a little something about people, but you don't necessarily know anything about those things."(as cited in Lee Thayer On Communication. New Jersey: Ablex, pp. 8-9).

E. M. Forester: "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" (as cited in Richard Lederer's The Miracle of Language. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991, p. 220).

Paul Fussell: "'One's speech is an unceasingly repeated public announcement about background and social standing,' says John Brooks, translating into modern American Ben Johnson's observation 'Language most shows a man. Speak, that I may see thee.'"(In Class. New York: Ballatine books, 1983, p. 175).

Hans-Georg Gadamer: "Every understanding of the intelligible that helps others to understanding has the character of language. To that extent, the entire experience of the world is linguistically mediated." (In Philosophical Hermeneutics. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1976, p. 99).

"A question is behind each statement that first gives it its meaning…For the 'meaning' of such a text is not motivated by an occasion, but on the contrary, claims to be understandable 'anytime,' that is, to be an answer always, and that means inevitably also to raise the question to which the text is an answer." (ibid. pp. 89-90).

William H. Gass: "We fall upon cliché as if it were a sofa and not a sword…it is true that prefab conversation frees the mind, yet rarely does the mind have a mind left after these interconnected clichés have conquered it." (In Habitations of the Word. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1985, p. 211).

Theodor Geiger: "Being confirmed by others frees me from being responsible for the absurdity of my belief."(as cited in Lee Thayer On Communication. New Jersey: Ablex, 1987, p. 9).

Kahlil Gibran--The Prophet--tells us,
"And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.
For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings, but cannot fly." (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923, p. 60).

Gibran again: "It takes only two to create a truth, one to utter it, and one to believe it."

"The true use of speech," according to O. Goldsmith, "is not so much to express our wants, as to conceal them." (as cited in Lee Thayer On Communication. New Jersey: Ablex, 1987, p. 8).

Georges Gusdorf: "In fact, the life of the mind ordinarily begins not with the acquisition of language, but with the revolt against language once it is acquired." In Speaking (La Parole), {Trans. P. T. Brockelman}, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965, p. 40).

Abraham Heschel: "The truth of a theory of man is either creative or irrelevant, but never merely descriptive" (In Who is man? Palo Alto, CA:Stanford University Press, 1965, p. 8).

"The image of man affects the nature of man. We become what we think of ourselves." (ibid., p. 10)

Martin Heiddegger: "It is the custom to put speaking and listening in opposition: one man speaks, the other listens…Speaking is of itself a listening. Speaking is listening to the language we speak. Thus, it is a listening not while but before we are speaking…We do not merely speak the language--we speak by way of it. We can do so solely because we always have already listened to the language. What do we hear? We hear language speaking" (In On the Way to Language, Harper and Row, 1971, p. 123-4).

Werner Heisenberg: "What we see in nature is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." (In The Physicists Conception of Nature. {trans. A.J. Pomerans} New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958).

Douglas Hofsteader puzzles with/on/over/from self-reflection: "If this sentence were in Chinese, it would say something else." (In Metamagical Themas, New York: Bantam Books, 1985, p13).

William James: "Why may not thought's mission be to increase and elevate, rather than simply to imitate and reduplicate, existence?... thought itself {is} a most momentous part of fact, and the whole mission of the pre-existing and insufficient world of matter may simply be to provoke thought to produce its far more precious supplement." (In Pragmatism and other essays. New York: Washington Square Press, 1963, p. 175).

Alfred Korzypski's Law of Non-Identification:
"Whatever I say a thing is, it is not." (In Science and Sanity, Lakeville, CONN: The international Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing company, 1958).

Weldhelm Lewis said, "To believe in a thing's existence is to experience its reality."(as cited in Lee Thayer's On Communication. New Jersey: Ablex, 1987).

Walter Lippmann: "For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see." (In Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1922, p. 81).

Malinowski, Bronislaw: "A word is used when it can produce an action and not to describe one, still less to translate thoughts… it is a handle to acts and objects and not a definition of them." (as cited in Ogden & Richards The Meaning of Meaning. Harcourt, Brace & World: New York. Eighth Edition. 1932, p. 322).

Pierre Martineau: "The great enemy of communication is the illusion of it." (as cited in Lee Thayer On Communication. New Jersey: Ablex, 1987, p. 5).

George Herbert Mead: "A person who is saying something is saying to himself what he says to others; otherwise he does not know what he is talking about." (In Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1934, p. 147).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: "The word, far from being the mere sign of objects and meanings, inhabits things and is the vehicle of meanings. Thus, speech, in the speaker, does not translate ready-made thought, but accomplishes it" (Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. 1962, p. 178).

"The wonderful thing about language is that it promotes its own oblivion: my eyes follow the lines on the paper, and from the moment I am caught up in their meaning, I lose sight of them."(ibid., p. 401).

"Speaking to others (or to myself), I do not speak of my thoughts, I speak them." (In Signs, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964, p. 19).

"One of the effects of language is to efface itself to the extent that its expression comes across…As I become engrossed in a book, I no longer see the letters on the page…all that remains is meaning. The perfection of language lies in its capacity to pass unnoticed" (In The Prose of the World, Trans. John O'Neil. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973, pp. 9-10).

"If we were to make completely explicit the architectonics of the human body, its ontological framework, and how it sees itself and hears itself, we would see that the structure of its mute world is such that all the possibilities of language are already given in it."(In The Visible and the Invisible, Trans. A. Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). p. 155.)

Lewis Mumford: "The physical universe is unable to behold itself, except through the eyes of man, unable to speak for itself, except through the human voice…"(In The Myth of the Machine. Vol.1: Technics and Human Development. New York: Harcourt Brace and Jovanich, publ., 1967, p. 31).

Friedrich Nietzsche: "Values did man only assign to things in order to maintain himself-he created only the significance of things, a human significance! Therefore, calleth he himself "man," that is, the valuator." (In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Modern Library. p. 60).

"He is a thinker; that means, he knows how to make things simpler than they are." (In The Gay Science. Trans. Kauffmann. Random House. Section 189, 1974, p. 205).

Octavio Paz tells us: "Man is a being who has created himself in creating a language. By means of the word, man is a metaphor of himself." (as cited in Lee Thayer's On Communication, New Jersey: Ablex, 1987, p. 12).

Michael Polanyi said that "Truth is something that can be thought of only by believing it."

"What anthing is, depends upon how who looks at what…We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are." (In Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Dell Publishing Co., 1969).

"Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned. It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged, which is a way of saying that the "truth" is a kind of cultural prejudice…"(In Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death. New York: Penguin Books, 1985, p. 23).

Plato: "When the mind is thinking; it is talking to itself." (as cited in Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner's Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Dell Publishing Co., 1969, p. 126).

Jurgen Reusch: "We are not interested in the way nature is constructed but in how the observer perceives it, and his method of perceiving." In "The Observer and the Observed: Human Communication Theory." from R.R Grinker (eds.) Toward a Unified Theory of Human Behavior, New York: Basic Books, 1956, p. 36.

George Santayana: "I would agree with Spinoza where he says that other people's idea of man is apt to be a better expression of their nature than of his." (In Character and Opinion in the United States, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1956. p. v).

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: "Whether you wish it or not, your meaning is made of others' meanings, and your taste of others' tastes...For you live not by the things, but by the meaning of the things." (In The Wisdom of the Sands. {Citadelle trans. S. Gilbert} New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948, p. 263).

"You give birth to that on which you fix your mind. For, by defining a thing, you cause it to be born, and then it seeks to nourish, perpetuate and augment itself." (Ibid. p. 269).

"If you were to understand men, begin by never listening to them" (ibid., p. 219).

Jean-Paul Sartre: "Whether our language is overt or 'internal' our thoughts become more and better defined by means of it than we ourselves were able to make them; it teaches us something." (In The Psychology of Imagination, New York: Citadel Press, 1991, p. 121).

Alfred Schutz: "the so-called 'Thomas theorem' well known to sociologists: 'If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences'" (In Collected Papers, Vol. I The Problem of Social Reality, Martinus Nijhoff publ. 1962, p. 348).

George Sefler: "Language and the world are two sides of one and the same reality. The world I know is known inseparably from the language I use." (In Language and the world: a methodological synthesis of the writings of Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, New Jersey, Humanities Press, 1974. p. 188).

Liu Shao: "You cannot recognize in another a quality you do not have yourself."

George Steiner: "Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is…Ours is the ability, the need, to gainsay or 'un-say' the world, to image and speak it otherwise….'"(In After Babel, New York: Oxford University Press, 1975, pp. 217-18).

"Language is not a description of 'reality,' but an answer to it, an evasion from it." (In Psychology Today, February, 1973, p. 66).

Laurence Sterne: "Writers of my stamp have one principle in common with painters. Where an exact copying makes our pictures less striking, we choose the less evil; deeming it ever more pardonable to trespass against truth, than beauty." (In The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, gentleman. {ed. Ian watt}. Houghton Mifflin Co. 1965, pp. 69-70)

Lee Thayer: "Is a theory of communication to be a theory of ideas, or of living?
Or a theory of the difference?
Or the difference itself?" (Ibid., p. 15).

Eric Voegelin: "Human society is not merely a fact, or an event, in the external world to be studied by an observer like a natural phenomenon. Though it has externality as one of its important components, it is as a whole little world, a cosmion, illuminated with meaning from within by the human beings who continuously create and bear it as the mode and condition of their self-realization." (In The New Science of Politics, An Introduction. Chicago, 1952, p. 27).

Alan Watts: "There is not something or someone experiencing experience! You do not feel your feelings, think your thoughts, or sense your sensations any more than you hear hearing, see sight, or smell smelling." (In The Wisdom of Insecurity. Vintage Books, 1951, p. 85).

Paul Watzlawick: "If as he {Vico} says, the world that we experience and get to know is necessarily constructed by ourselves, it should not surprise us that it keeps relatively stable." (In The Invented Reality, New York: Norton & Company, 1984, p. 29).

"Man's consciousness is as man standing before a mirror, asking the man he sees in the mirror what the man in the mirror is asking." (In The End of the Modern Age)

Ludwig Wittgenstein: "To speak is to philosophize."

posted in Communication Theory - 0 replies

McLuhan media appearances?

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 07:45:37 GMT

Hey Com Kids-

I'm working on a McLuhan workshop for class and we want to address not only his theories and methodologies, but also the impact of celebrity on scholarship.

Any suggestions on good examples of MM-as-celebrity? Right now we're thinking of the cameo in Annie Hall, the Playboy interview, and the character he inspired in Videodrome.

All sugestions - and weblinks! - much appreciated...

posted in Communication Theory - 3 replies

virtualdissection.tribe.net

mel-o-nee — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 15:58:38 GMT

please feel free to join this new tribe that I have created [*dissecting the net*]. it's just an experiment...I am working on a project at the moment that explored how we metaphorize the internet and why, and also the effects of our perception of "cyberspace". very much related to communication theory: my project is for a communication studies programme.

drop by and add your 0.02!

--M.

posted in Communication Theory - 4 replies

Areas of study?

jeremiahnelson23 — Sat, 13 Dec 2003 16:55:37 GMT

My interests lie in technology's influence on communication in all formats and the social / personal change that's drived through new forms of communication technology. Additionally, I'm interested in how religion and communication are intertwined... yes it's taboo, but i like it.

posted in Communication Theory - 25 replies

performativity....

gabrieltodd — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 15:48:45 GMT

i wonder if anyone here could direct me to sources concerning, illuminating... "performativity" in language, literature, writing, etc. I am mostly familiar with performativity as used by Judith Butler, refering to the body and gender performativity.
I am sure this word is used in so many ways by different disciplines. If you have any ideas or just want to say what you understand, go for it.

posted in Communication Theory - 1 reply

Anyone know where I can find

kyooverse — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 20:11:53 GMT

information about queer/trans/poc communication theory?

posted in Communication Theory - 0 replies

total control

splace — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 17:42:53 GMT

www.snabbstart.com/film/geo...bush-spindoctor.aspx

posted in Communication Theory - 0 replies

researching masters programs

sugarlime — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 22:35:25 GMT

i am researching different options in education at the moment. i have a BFA in integrated media and a lot of work experience in new york and shanghai. i am giving up a fantastic position in advertising to pursue further education because i dont have passion for the industry. i am interested in the following fields communications, writing, creative writing, social sciences, integrated media, design, photography, multimedia. MFA or MA is fine. if you know of anyway i can talk to in these fields or if you have advise on schools and programs, please let me know. thank you

posted in Communication Theory - 3 replies

80%

orangeboxman — Mon, 16 Feb 2004 06:49:19 GMT

Everyone keeps telline me that '80% of communication is nonverbal'.

Or maybe they're saying it wrong or maybe I'm hearing it wrong.

Do they really mean that '80% of noncommunication is verbal'?

Now, THAT I would believe!

posted in Communication Theory - 5 replies

Technologies of Communication

gravity7 — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 23:33:42 GMT

Anybody here into bringing communication theory to bear on technologies? Asynchronous mostly--email, social software, etc?

I have several ideas in the works that have come out of questions about the impact networks have on our relationships and communication, micro and macro. As in, do networks, mediation, and increasingly non f2f interactions weaken the ties that bind us? Do technologies create ambiguities (of intended meaning, or etiquette for example)? And more.

I've got a lot posted at my site, http://www.gravity7.com/articles_investigations.html

Discussion, anyone?

adrian

posted in Communication Theory - 2 replies

our tribe needs a graphic

jeremiahnelson23 — Sat, 24 Apr 2004 16:25:47 GMT

any thoughts?

posted in Communication Theory - 2 replies

Modes of communication

zby — Fri, 23 Apr 2004 08:37:04 GMT

On my wiki I've started a list of distinct modes of communication. It is currently composed of pairs of (partially)oposite communication patterns:

asynchronous communication <-> synchronous communication (mail versus Instant Messaging) see SynVersusAsyn
push <-> pull (mail versus blogs) see PushVersusPull
mass media <-> private communication (see ScaleFreeGranularity)
topic centric <-> user centric (a comment by Lucas on Corante).
document based <-> message based (WikiIsDocumentBased)

Explanatios of those modes you'll find in the linked documents.

I think this list, when completed, can be used for analyzis of communication tools (I've even started that in the table at the bottom of the page), it might be particulary usefull to describe new communication tools (like the Groove communicator included in the table).

The link that page:
http://zby.aster.net.pl/kwiki/kwiki.cgi?UseTheWholeSpectrum

posted in Communication Theory - 6 replies

No-one's posted yet?

mel-o-nee — Tue, 09 Dec 2003 14:56:23 GMT

I'm a Communication Studies Student at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. Just thought I would drop in on this tribe, but discovered that there aren't any messages! Ah well. I'm particularly interested in communications and education. If anyone would like to have the inevitable discussion on McLuhan, I'll be glad to join in. Cheers

Melonie

posted in Communication Theory - 6 replies