Top 100 Quotes About Discourse
#1. Words themselves - the very material of our discourse increasingly take on masks or disguises
Dennis Potter
#2. There is nothing in discourse that is not to be found in a sentence.
Roland Barthes
#3. Universal design systems can no longer be dismissed as the irrelevant musings of a small, localized design community. A second modernism has emerged, reinvigorating the utopian search for universal forms that marked the birth of design as a discourse and a discipline nearly a century earlier.
Ellen Lupton
#4. One who "knows," knows there is no need to discourse; knowing is enough
Osho
#5. As a filmmaker, it's not my intent to trigger or shape national discourse. My task is to make as powerful and understandable a film as I can. What happens next is what happens next.
Peter Landesman
#6. 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
#7. The mention of one apartment in a building naturally introduces an enquiry or discourse concerning the others: and if we think ofa wound, we can scarcely forbear reflecting on the pain which follows it.
David Hume
#8. Remember Bacon's recommendation to the reader: Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.
Mortimer J. Adler
#9. The discourse of work as pure emancipation depends on blocking out class and age constantly.
Nina Power
#10. But, he feigned not to notice the two strangers, and fell into discourse with the triumvirate of customers who were drinking at the counter.
Charles Dickens
#11. There is no such thing as a straight line, the sun does not go down, and it is time we updated our language. A more mesmerizing discourse I have never heard.
Amy C. Edmondson
#12. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were both justified by an appeal to the emancipation of women, and the discourse of feminism was specifically invoked.
Nina Power
#13. Just as you and I speak by forming words, the natural, private discourse of the Sanza twins appears to consist entirely of farts and savage beatings. What
Scott Lynch
#14. 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
Moliere
#15. We can no more tolerate neutrality and benevolence toward every conceivable form of discourse, including that of magical thinking, than we can lump together executioner and victim, good and evil.
Michel Onfray
#16. Ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe.
Herbert Marcuse
#17. There was absolutely zero discourse between me or anybody at the studio with the NFL. None. The only exchange was one-sentence e-mails trying to arrange a meeting, before deciding to cancel the meeting. Period. End of story.
Peter Landesman
#18. The reduction of political discourse to sound bites is one of the worst things that's happened in American political life.
John Silber
#19. It was a gentle love, a tactile love. It was all hands and lips and hearts in tandem. There was motion in our bodies and emotion in our discourse. We were a symphony of melody and melancholy. When you find peace in another's presence, there is no mistaken.
Lang Leav
#20. The real achievement in discoveries ... is seeing an analogy where no one saw one before.. The essence of discovery is that unlikely marriage of ... previously unrelated forms of reference or universes of discourse, whose union will solve the previously insoluble problem.
Arthur Koestler
#21. Informed opponents of Obama's healthcare initiative have expressed dismay at the low level of discourse.
Carl Hiaasen
#23. Our religion was the religion of a Book. Man must be educated on Earth for Heaven. John Quincy Adams
Paul C. Nagel
#24. We can talk about God's justice and love from now to the end of time. But until our theological discourse engages white supremacy in a way that empowers poor people to fight the monster, then our theology is not worth the paper it is written on. In
Frederick W. Schmidt Jr.
#25. Of all Discourse , governed by desire of Knowledge, there is at last an End , either by attaining, or by giving over.
Thomas Hobbes
#26. We can't handle violence in women characters but we CAN handle what's done to women in our present tense every second of the day worldwide? Or next door? Or in political or medical discourse? Please. That idea just makes me want to crap on a table at a very fancy restaurant.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#27. We're just learning that a lot of planets are small planets, and we didn't know that before, fact is, in planetary science, objects such as Pluto and the other dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt are considered planets and called planets in everyday discourse in scientific meetings.
Alan Stern
#28. Fruitful discourse in science or theology requires us to believe that within the contexts of normal discourse there are some true statements.
Kenneth L. Pike
#29. The process of driving a wedge between sacred and secular history is called secularization...the eventual result of this process is that belief in God is relegated to nothing more than a "personal belief" that has no standing in public discourse.
Stephen Leston
#30. The poet's spoken discourse often depends on a mystique, on the spiritual freedom that finds itself enslaved on earth.
Salvatore Quasimodo
#31. Bad faith likes discourse on friendship and loyalty.
Mason Cooley
#32. Fred!" the nurse said, though they had never met. "How are we today?" Reading the nurse's name tag, Mr. Bennet replied with fake enthusiasm, "Bernard! We're mourning the death of manners and the rise of overly familiar discourse. How are you?
Curtis Sittenfeld
#33. Thinking and spoken discourse are the same thing, except that what we call thinking is, precisely, the inward dialogue carried on by the mind with itself without spoken sound.
Plato
#34. The very use of the term "mental illness" (rather than, say, "neurosis", "insanity", "nervous breakdown", or other euphemisms) can be seen as an effort to move certain kinds of psychological distress into the biomedical realm.
Carl Elliott
#35. The manifest discourse, therefore, is really no more than the repressive presence of what it does not say; and this 'not-said' is a hollow that undermines from within all that is said.
Michel Foucault
#36. It's fun talking to you ... like walking on the edge of a precipice. At first one's nervous but then courage takes over from somewhere.
Ivan Turgenev
#37. Because he thinks Facebook is the lowest common denominator of social discourse. Though he does like to talk about social media as a vehicle for constructing and performing identity. Whatever the hell that means.
Becky Albertalli
#38. Be not too hasty," said Imlac, "to trust or to admire the teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men.
Samuel Johnson
#39. It is still possible to have friendly discourse in America, as long as you don't bring up any subject.
Robert Breault
#40. Where two discourse, if the anger of one rises, he is the wise man who lets the contest fall.
Plutarch
#41. TV serves us most usefully when presenting junk-entertainment; it serves us most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse - news, politics, science, education, commerce, religion.
Neil Postman
#42. Discourse has ended in America. It's all just shouting and ranting and demonization. Do you know how the rest of the world laughs at you guys? Have you got any idea? They're just rocking with laughter night and day.
Felix Dennis
#43. Theological discourse can be, in and of itself, a form of identity and solidarity.
Namsoon Kang
#44. I shall therefore discourse equally of both, convinced that human happiness never continues long in one stay.
Herodotus
#45. Not everything written on Kafka is Kafkology. How then to define Kafkology? By a tautology: Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka.
Milan Kundera
#46. For the sake of public discourse, for the demands of the free market, and for the value we place in citizen advocacy, Rush Limbaugh must go.
Christine Pelosi
#47. We will convert the entire world to Islam with our logic. We are confident that the Islamic logic, culture, and discourse can prove their superiority in all fields over all schools of thought and theories.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
#48. Any woman who has moved from the playing fields of male discourse into the realm where women are developing our own descriptions of the world knows the extraordinary sense of shedding, as it were, the encumbrance of someone else's baggage, of ceasing to translate.
Adrienne Rich
#49. My dominant (no pun intended) discourse seems to be needy as fuck.
Alexis Hall
#50. [T]he content of the discourse should be about loving the un-lovable object ... The beloved and the friend are the immediate and direct objects of immediate love, the choice of passion and of inclination. And what is the ugly? It is the neighbor, whom one shall love (373).
Soren Kierkegaard
#51. That man is guilty of impertinence who considers not the circumstances of time, or engrosses the conversation, or makes himself the subject of his discourse, or pays no regard to the company he is in.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#52. What we won't do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of "true scientific discourse." It isn't.
Jimmy Wales
#53. In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worst. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation.
Marshall McLuhan
#54. Literature is my Utopia ... No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends
Helen Keller
#55. But as Cicero had long tried to convince him, a speech is a performance, not a philosophical discourse: it must appeal to the emotions more than to the intellect
Robert Harris
#56. Sermons remain one of the last forms of public discourse where it is culturally forbidden to talk back.
Harvey Cox
#57. If only I had it in me to be all fierce, fearless and forthright instead of forever sprinkling my discourse with pitiful retractions, apologies and prevarications.
Anonymous
#58. What we call fiction is the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies ... Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority of the single mind to make and remake the world.
E.L. Doctorow
#59. The French equate intelligence with rational discourse, the Russians with intense soul-searching. For the Mexican, intelligence is inseparable from maliciousness.
Carlos Fuentes
#60. Our debates, for the most part, are examples unworthy of a playground: name-calling, verbal slaps, gossip, giggles, all while the swings and slides of governance remain empty.
Toni Morrison
#61. There are reasons why Religious Right Evangelicals will continue to dominate religious discourse, not only in their own sector of the Christian community, but also in what transpires in mainline denominations.
Tony Campolo
#62. I think it's always good when you're able to, as an actor, allow your work to be some kind of a conduit for social discourse, and an examination of where we are, as a society.
Zachary Quinto
#63. Political discourse has been reduced to "Where's the beef?" "Read my lips," and "Make my day." Where are the assassins when we really need them?
George Carlin
#64. Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden and name her "Health": if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.
Naomi Wolf
#65. A man's behavior is the index of the man, and his discourse is the index of his understanding.
Ali Ibn Abi Talib
#66. On the other side, I do believe that the rhetoric we are seeing from the Democrats today is unprecedented, is a new low in presidential politics and goes beyond political discourse and amounts to political hate speech.
Ed Gillespie
#67. That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.
William Shakespeare
#68. the most basic rule of human discourse: when someone says they're going to be honest with you, they are in most cases preparing to lie faster
Stephen King
#69. So much of western self-perception and intellectual worldview has been shaped by the moral rhetoric of the Cold War, the discourse in which communism featured as a clear enemy, determined to rule the world.
Pankaj Mishra
#70. If bloggers are to improve our public discourse - helping busy and usually uninformed people make sense of the world - it is necessary to use some sort of standard with which to judge their reliability. Perhaps the answer (strictly advisory) is a body of their peers. Perhaps not.
Eric Alterman
#71. Two truths are all too often overshadowed in today's political discourse: Public service is a most honorable pursuit, and so is bipartisanship.
Olympia Snowe
#72. Unlike the past decades, the present moment is lacking in architectural discourse.
Lebbeus Woods
#73. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which boils down in popular discourse to saying that the very act of observing things changes the things you observe, works just as well, worryingly, when you look in the mirror.
N. T. Wright
#74. This is the greatest good to man, to discourse daily on virtue, and other things which you have heard me discussing, examining both myself and others,
Plato
#75. Political discourse has become so rotten that it's no longer possible to tell the stench of one presidential candidate from the stink of another.
P. J. O'Rourke
#76. The ruler who is good for anything ought not to beg his subjects to be ruled by him, although the present governors of mankind are of a different stamp.
Plato
#77. As I say, I'm a discourse advocate. What form it comes is less important to me than the fact that there is discourse.
Jim Lehrer
#78. I would suggest that what the translator has to give up is the temptation to translate history by making sense of it, that is, by using an apologetic or apocalyptic discourse. What the translator fails to do is to erase the body, to erase the murder of the original.
Shoshana Felman
#79. Expose every belief to the light of reason, discourse, facts, scientific observations; question everything, be sceptical because this is the only chance at life you will ever get.
James Randi
#80. While the intelligence profession oftentimes demands secrecy, it is critically important that there be a full and open discourse on intelligence matters with the appropriate elected representatives of the American people.
John O. Brennan
#81. De Quincey compared the two arts of rhetoric, logos and pathos, to rudder and sail. The first guides discourse and the second powers it (Thonssen and Baird, 1948, p. 358). Even
Haddon Robinson
#82. In our democracy and our civic discourse, it seems as if folks who take religion the most seriously are sometimes also those who are suspicious of those not like them.
Barack Obama
#83. A lot of people who voted for Barack Obama expected and were led to expect something new in politics: a new tone of political discourse in Washington. And I think - I think they're disappointed, because Barack Obama is not a new kind of politician. In fact, he's an old Chicago politician.
Bernard Goldberg
#84. Now if you have proofs to bring forward, bring them forward, and your moral discourse as well; if you have no enthymemes, then fall back upon moral discourse: after all, it is more fitting for a good man to display himself as an honest fellow than as a subtle reasoner.
Aristotle.
#85. During depression the world disappears. Language itself. One has nothing to say. Nothing. No small talk, no anecdotes. Nothing can be risked on the board of talk. Because the inner voice is so urgent in its own discourse: How shall I live? How shall I manage the future? Why should I go on?
Kate Millett
#86. The effort to identify the enemy as singular in form is a reverse-discourse that uncritically mimics the strategy of the oppressor instead of offering a different set of terms.
Judith Butler
#87. It was the first and most striking characteristic of Socrates never to become heated in discourse, never to utter an injurious or insulting word
on the contrary, he persistently bore insult from others and thus put an end to the fray.
Epictetus
#88. My mother was Irish; she had this great sense of humor, and both my parents loved films. There was a very vibrant discourse about politics and everything that was going on in the world where I grew up. So I was genetically predisposed to go into the performing arts.
Martin Donovan
#89. The skilful class of flatterers praise the discourse of an ignorant friend and the face of a deformed one.
Juvenal
#90. Let your Discourse with Men of Business be Short and Comprehensive.
George Washington
#91. The failures of the press have contributed immensely to the emergence of a talk-show nation, in which public discourse is reduced to ranting and raving and posturing. We now have a mainstream press whose news agenda is increasingly influenced by this netherworld.
Carl Bernstein
#93. If someone's really busy listening to other CDs, and worried about what's new and what's truly relevant for discourse now, maybe it isn't that interesting. To me it is, because I'm tuned into that and that's what I like, so it's interesting to me. It's all I can do.
Stephen Malkmus
#94. Almost one half of our time is spent in telling and hearing evil of one another ... and every hour brings forth something strange and terrible to fill up our discourse and our astonishment.
Laurence Sterne
#95. I am comfortable with my level of public discourse.
Neil Armstrong
#96. Actual human discourse happens within a number of contexts, not in some sort of unified public forum.
Rowan Williams
#97. To endeavor to move by the same discourse hearers who differ in age, sex, position and education is to attempt to open all locks with the same key.
Jean Antoine Petit-Senn
#98. science feeds our perpetual curiousity and claims that nothing exists until 'proven'. Science cannot prove the existence or non-existence of the human soul any more than a thermometer can prove the colour red or King Henry the eight could discourse on electronics.
Bryan Islip
#99. Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse.
John Lewis
#100. They have a notion, that when people are met together, a short silence does much improve conversation: this I found to be true; for during those little intermissions of talk, new ideas would arise in their minds, which very much enlivened the discourse.
Jonathan Swift
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