Enacting Quotes & Sayings

[T]he price you've paid is not the price of becoming human. It's not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It's the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world. — Daniel Quinn

A speech with magical force. Nowadays, people don't believe in these kinds of things. Except in the Metaverse, that is, where magic is possible. The Metaverse is a fictional structure made out of code. And code is just a form of speech - the form that computers understand. The Metaverse in its entirety could be considered a single vast nam-shub, enacting itself on L. Bob Rife's fiber-optic network. — Neal Stephenson

First, with regard to managing relationships within an oikos, both parables point to exemplary managers as independent moral agents, enacting values that challenge conventional oikos relationships. The parable of the shrewd manager affirms the manager who acts as a countercultural moral agent by unilaterally redistributing his master's wealth, and the parable of the ten pounds affirms the manager who counters his master's wishes by refusing to exploitatively use money to make more money. — Bruno Dyck

What is most difficult to face, but increasingly obvious as gay visibility provokes containment, but not equality, is that homophobes enjoy feeling superior, rely on the pleasure of enacting their superiority, and go out of their way to resist change that would deflate their sense of supremacy. Homophobia makes heterosexuals feel better about themselves. It's not fear - it's fun.
We know from photographs of happy picnicking white families laughing underneath the swinging body of a tortured, lynched black man, or giggly white U.S. soldiers leading naked Iraqis on leashes, or terrified humiliated Jews surrounded by laughing smiling Nazis that human beings love being cruel. They enjoy the power, and go far beyond social expectation to carry out the kind of cruelty that makes them feel bigger. In short, homophobia is not a phobia at all. It is a pleasure system. — Sarah Schulman

A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up the state's segregation laws was democratically elected? — Martin Luther King Jr.

However, as our brave men and women continue to return from the battlefields of the War on Terror, Congress must respond by enacting policies that meet the evolving needs of the veterans community. — Randy Neugebauer

Commanded by God dozens of times in the Hebrew Bible to remember their past, Jews historically obeyed not by recording events but by ritually re-enacting them: by understanding the present through the lens of the past. — Dara Horn

The methods that will most effectively minimize the ability of intruders to compromise information security are comprehensive user training and education. Enacting policies and procedures simply won't suffice. Even with oversight the policies and procedures may not be effective: my access to Motorola, Nokia, ATT, Sun depended upon the willingness of people to bypass policies and procedures that were in place for years before I compromised them successfully. — Kevin Mitnick

Culture. A culture is a people enacting a story." "A people enacting a story. And a story again is ... ?" "A scenario interrelating man, the world, and the gods." "Okay. So you're saying that the people of my culture are enacting their own story about man, the world, and the gods." "That's right. — Daniel Quinn

Being a dominatrix, sticking my foot up people's asses for money, necessitated that I divorce myself from any sort of objective perspective on what I was doing. In order to think about things as a writer you have to objectify your experience. I couldn't have been enacting that experience if I was objectifying it. — Melissa Febos

Ideas come easily to me, enacting them comes harder. I usually let things go. Perhaps it's an escape hatch, my way of allowing myself to double back and ease out the side door on a lot of my schemes. Irresolute about my social life, obsessive in my work. — Kathy Reichs

There is enormous pressure on you to take a place in the story your culture is enacting in the world - any place at all. — Daniel Quinn

Ending feudalism, ending slavery, enacting labor laws, winning universal suffrage, ending Jim Crow laws, overcoming much of the mindset and practice of patriarchy as it was entrenched in the '50s and '60s, bringing gay rights and liberation into the light of social policy and practice. Putting ecology on the political map. The left has a long lineage. — Michael Albert

Why can't a democrat get fired up about protecting the environment and enacting gun control legislation just as right wing republicans get fired up about making sure that children have access to assault weapons and banning 'the catcher in the rye' and 'harry potter'? — Moby

Politicians responsible for enacting civil same-sex marriage legislation are morally complicit as co-operators in facilitating this grave sin. — Thomas J. Paprocki

We must reign in overspending by ridding government of outmoded programs, making Big Oil pay their fair share, repealing massive tax breaks for corporations that ship jobs overseas, and enacting a tax code that no longer favors millionaires and billionaires. — Paul Tonko

Before that night, I'd had no idea my father was so well suited for wreaking havoc or equipped to make that lightning-quick transformation from sanity to lunacy that is indispensable in enacting the unbridled urge to destroy. — Philip Roth

Smoking is, as far as I am concerned, the entire point of being an adult. Many people find smoking objectionable. I myself find many - even more - things objectionable. I do not like aftershave lotion, adults who roller-skate, children who speak French, or anyone who is unduly tan. I do not, however, go around enacting legislation and putting up signs. — Fran Lebowitz

Do you think to make man good by enacting more laws? — Hock G. Tjoa

Enacting love was a critical aspect of experiencing love. Devotion and ethics intertwined. — Diana Butler Bass

As popular culture becomes more presentist, we move away from entertainment as the vicarious experience of a narrative - as watching someone else's story - and much more toward enacting one's own story. Moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames. — Douglas Rushkoff

Within your culture as a whole, there is in fact no significant thrust toward global population control. The point to see is that there never will be such a thrust so long as you're enacting a story that says the gods made the world for man. For as long as you enact that story, Mother Culture will demand increased food production today- and promise population control tomorrow. — Daniel Quinn

* Compassion (Res/App):A term with several meanings including "feeling with" another person, sensing another's pain, and even the enacting of behaviors to help reduce the suffering of others (as in an act of compassion). There is also a universal (nondirected) compassion, or a sense of care and concern toward the world of living beings. Compassion can also be toward the self, "self-compassion," and includes qualities of kindness, acceptance, feeling a part of a larger human journey, and letting go of judgments about the self. — Daniel J. Siegel

A Halloween-haired, Sachsgate-enacting, estuary-whining, glitter-lacquered, priapic berk How dare I, from my velvet chaise longue, in my Hollywood home like Kubla Khan, drag my limbs from my harem to moan about the system? A system that has posited me on a lilo made of thighs in an ocean filled with honey and foie gras'd my Essex arse with undue praise and money. — Russell Brand

To glorify God is not just to do so in religious worship, singing praise and enacting the traditional rites of the church. To glorify God is to reveal his character by being who we were created to be-the embodiment of the image of God in human form. — James W. Sire

It's nice to not feel like you're just re-enacting a preconceived moment, but there's room for an organic feeling to develop while the camera is rolling. Even amidst these enormous technical productions, Chris [ Nolan] always prioritized making sure that sort of spontaneous and organic feeling could happen at the moment. — Joseph Gordon-Levitt

It privileges certain forms of religion at the expense of the rest of the world's religious and spiritual practices, enacting a series of "mini-establishments" in the process. It — Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

Enacting elements of the Affordable Care Act isn't backtracking on core principles, but rather understanding that new ways to help make health care affordable builds stronger businesses and saves struggling hospitals. And that is a very attractive offer. — Ronnie Musgrove

Before Katrina, you didn't see criticism of the Bush administration in the media. Here they are, stealing elections, enacting illegal wars, huge crimes against humanity and democracy, and you didn't even see criticism. It wasn't until Katrina that people started to come down on them. — Ani DiFranco

Everything depends on what is being enacted. Enactment itself, since it is almost synonymous with ceremony, is, as we have seen, part of the very fabric of our human life. We do enact things. We will enact things. No on can stop us from enacting things. The most gaunt anti-ceremonialist may refuse to take off his hat in a shrine, whereupon he has given the whole game away. He agrees with the priests at the shrine that hats on or hats off are significant, and to register his dissociation from their cult, he keeps his on. It is a ceremonial enactment of what he believes. A church wishes to stress the table aspect of the Eucharist, so it instructs its people to remain seated as they eat the bread and drink the cup. This is a ceremonial enactment of something important to them. They agree with the Christians who kneel that posture is immensely significant. The external act matters; stay seated. — Thomas Howard

So too, in forming a constitution, or in enacting rules of procedure, or making canons, the people do not merely passively assent, but actively cooperate. They have, in all these matters, the same authority as the clergy. — Charles Hodge

Both the fragmentation of power and the conflicting government policies are rooted in the political realities of a democratic system that operates by enacting detailed and specific legislation. Such a system tends to give undue political power to small groups that have highly concentrated interests, to give greater weight to obvious, direct, and immediate effects of government action than to possibly more important but concealed, indirect, and delayed effects, to set in motion a process that sacrifices the general interest to serve special interests, rather than the other way around. There is, as it were, an invisible hand in politics that operates in precisely the opposite direction to Adam Smith's invisible hand. Individuals who intend only to promote the general interest are led by the invisible political hand to promote a special interest that they had no intention to promote. — Milton Friedman

If princes are indeed superior to the people in enacting laws, in organizing civil governments, in setting up new statues and ordinances, then doubtless the people are so superior in maintaining what has been instituted that they increase the glory of those who instituted them. — Niccolo Machiavelli

If you haven't guessed yet, my family is made up of ultra-nerds. This is not necessarily a bad thing. We play games like Scrabble and watch documentaries together. I have always known that I am going to college. Yet, there are times when it can get a little embarrassing. As Mom admits, "Re-enacting is the final step before Star Trek conventions." In a couple of years, my family will probably be doing that, too. — Maya Van Wagenen

Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight. — Thomas Hardy

Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day's end. They were manifesting as the earth's bright-colored nerve endings, the sun's descent urging them into activity, filling them individually with life nectar, the life nectar then being passed into the world, out of each beak, in the form of that bird's distinctive song, which was, in turn, an accident of beak shape, throat shape, breast configuration, brain chemistry: some birds blessed in voice, others cursed; some squeaking, others rapturous. — George Saunders

...I tried to pretend that what we were enacting was nothing more than an intricate kind of handshake." ~Malcolm — Kathleen Maher

You don't have to be young. You don't have to be thin. You don't have to be "hot" in a way that some dumbfuckedly narrow mindset has construed that word. You don't have to have taut flesh or a tight ass or an eternally upright set of tits. You have to find a way to inhabit your body while enacting your deepest desires. You have to be brave enough to build the intimacy you deserve. You have to take off all of your clothes and say, "I'm right here." There are so many tiny revolutions in a life, a million ways we have to circle around ourselves to grow and change and be okay. And perhaps the body is our final frontier. It's the one place we can't leave. We're there till it goes. Most women and some men spend their lives trying to alter it, hide it, prettify it, make it what it isn't, or conceal it for what it is. But what if we didn't do that? That's the question you need to answer, — Cheryl Strayed

Redefining marriage will have huge implications for what is taught in our schools, and for wider society. It will redefine society since the institution of marriage is one of the fundamental building blocks of society. The repercussions of enacting same-sex marriage into law will be immense. — Keith O'Brien

In the purer ages of the commonwealth, the use of arms was reserved for those ranks of citizens who had a country to love, a property to defend, and some share in enacting those laws which it was their interest, as well as duty, to maintain. But in proportion as the public freedom was lost in extent of conquest, war was gradually improved into an art, and degraded into a trade. — Edward Gibbon

Solidarity is something much more than mercy: usually when you appease your conscience (donate money to starving children in Africa, to use the usual Starbucks example), you can go on with your daily life as if nothing really happened. However, once you are enacting solidarity you can even abstain from charity or mercy: even if you don't give a dollar to every beggar, you can't go on with your daily life as if nothing really happened. Why? Because you carry him in your life; you live with him not like with some "integrated reject" (as we live with immigrants or refugees today), but he is a part and even a presupposition for your very action: he can never be fully integrated, because injustice can't be integrated in acts of love. This is why solidarity already contains love. — Srecko Horvat

The Old Man at the Wheel
Measured against the immeasurable
universe, no word you have spoken
brought light. Brought
light to what, as a child, you thought
too dark to be survived. By exorcism
you survived. By submission, then making.
You let all the parts of that thing you would
cut out of you enter your poem because
enacting there all its parts allowed you
the illusion you could cut it from your soul.
Dilemmas of choice given what cannot
change alone roused you to words.
As you grip the things that were young when
you were young, they crumble in your hand.
Now you must drive west, which in November
means driving directly into the sun. — Frank Bidart

When we begin enacting the new world, the nations will follow. Nations will not lead us to peace; it is people who will lead the nation to peace as they begin to humanize the nations. — Shane Claiborne

I used to do Civil War re-enacting between the ages of 15 and 19. I was part of a unit that was considered very authentic. We would source the right wools, the right buttons for the costumes. We had the right look. — Cary Fukunaga

Little towns are like little children in this respect, that they interest most when they are enacting native peculiarities unconscious of beholders. Discovering themselves to be watched they attempt to be entertaining by putting on an antic, and produce disagreeable caricatures which spoil them. The — Thomas Hardy

They had a nice,if not private, reunion before Rupert joined them. He didn't exactly ruin it, but if he insisted on enacting their pretense tonight, even for her mother,it surely would. Unfortunately, he entered the room wearing a horribly bright lime-green dinner jacket that had his mother immediately scowling at him. So even after that kiss upstairs, he'd decided on an evening of humorously baiting his mother again. Bad timing, with her own mother there, or maybe not.At least it kept Rebecca's own mood light for the moment, since she knew why he did it.
Nor did Julie hold her tongue, remarking in disgust, "I see your taste is still beyond flamboyant. You're a bloody peacock, Rue."
He actually looked behind him as he replied, "I thought I had my feathers tucked away nicely. — Johanna Lindsey

The key to containing this unbalanced gigantism is not establishing ownership limits or enacting state regulations. The key lies in addressing those fundamental disorders within the souls of men that have taken us so far off course. — John Horvat

To become - in Jung's terms - individuated, to live as a released individual, one has to know how and when to put on and to put off the masks of one's various life roles. 'When in Rome, do as the Romans do,' and when at home, do not keep on the mask of the role you play in the Senate chamber. But this, finally, is not easy, since some of the masks cut deep. They include judgment and moral values. They include one's pride, ambition, and achievement. They include one's infatuations. It is a common thing to be overly impressed by and attached to masks, either some mask of one's own or the mana-masks of others. The work of individuation, however, demands that one should not be compulsively affected in this way. The aim of individuation requires that one should find and then learn to live out of one's own center, in control of one's for and against. And this cannot be achieved by enacting and responding to any general masquerade of fixed roles. — Joseph Campbell

Minus the adverts of TV, the special effects of movies, and the trash of the Internet, live theatre is a personal means to connect with viewers. Lining up eye candy, using graphic words, and teasing or enacting bedroom antics is a lowbrow way to go about it. — Tom Jalio

The point of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony unleashes one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music ... The point is not to hold up Beethoven as exceptionally monstrous. The Ninth Symphony is probably our most compelling articulation in music of the contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal culture since the Enlightenment. Moreover, within the parameters of his own musical compositions, he may be heard as enacting a critique of narrative obligations that is ... devestating. — Susan McClary

This was one of the secret jokes about marriage. People turned out to be exactly the opposite of how they'd seemed at first; they then went on changing randomly, as though enacting a hypothesis of unceasing chaos. — Anjali Joseph

Enacting same-sex civil marriage would therefore not be an expansion of the institution of marriage, but a redefinition. Finishing what policies like "no-fault" divorce began, and thus entrenching them, it would finally replace the conjugal view with the revisionist view, elevating the latter to the dignity of legal principle. In so doing, it would multiply the marriage revolution's moral and cultural spoils, and make them harder than ever to recover. Or so we shall argue. — Sherif Girgis

agreements were documents of inequality codified under American law, which had always favored property rights over liberties of the individual. This made any landlord the most important person in his or her tenants' lives, capable of enacting terrible vengeance on the slightest whim. — Jarett Kobek

Among the many important provisions in the energy bill are the creation of an estimated half million new jobs, increased oil production, blackout protection, controlling fertilizer costs by stabilizing natural gas prices and enacting new efficiency benchmarks. — Paul Gillmor