Function Left Quotes & Sayings

In our modern world, this elemental quality of storytelling is denied. We live today in a world in which everything has its place and function and nothing is left out of place. Storytelling is thus at a discount and like everything else in a world ruled by the laws of exchange value, literature is required to submit itself to the requirements of the market and must learn, like any other commodity, to adapt and serve needs that lie outside of itself and its concrete value. It is forced to stand not for itself but for an ideological cause of one sort or another, whether it be political, social or literary. It cannot exist for itself: like everything else it has to be justified. And for this very reason the power of storytelling is automatically devalued. Literature is reduced to the status of complimentary utilitarian functions: as a pastime to provide distraction and entertainment, or as a heightened activity that would claim to explore 'great truths' about the human condition. — Michael Richardson

It goes beyond mere "acknowledgment" of religion because its sole purpose is to encourage all citizens to engage in prayer, an inherently religious exercise that serves no secular function in this context." she wrote. "In this instance, the government has taken sides on a matter that must be left to individual conscience. — Barbara Brandriff Crabb

We also notice that Paul was focused. He had a clear goal, and he would not veer to the right or to the left from it. We can't help but wonder how many emails Paul would have skipped over, or how current he would have been with the news of the day, or even how vigorously he would be rooting for his favorite sports teams or athletes. Our ability to have information quickly is both a blessing and a curse. Our ability to function in a fast-paced society sometimes encourages us to focus on nothing of lasting value, just running from one temporal thing to the next. Just — James MacDonald

The western world now obeys the percepts of commerce.A bloody demanding religion,if you ask me.The do's and don'ts change every season and your "everyone" doesn't want to be left out,so they rush headlong to comply.That continuous change has a function,a single aim.Maximum consumption.They want to go on milking you.From the cradle to the grave.Face it:You're a brain washed ,walking purse,a robot,the fuel multinationals run on. — Esther Verhoef

I really love working. It makes me feel like an even better person when I work. I function much better if I have a really rigid schedule. When I'm left to my own devices, I can just be all over the place. — Melanie Griffith

The reason the founders chafed at the idea of an American standing army and vested the power of war making in the cumbersome legislature was not to disadvantage us against future enemies, but to disincline us toward war as a general matter ... With citizen-soldiers, with the certainty of a vigorous political debate over the use of a military subject to politicians' control, the idea was for us to feel it- uncomfortably- every second we were at war. But after a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumbrances to war that they left us ... war making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state. It never stops. — Rachel Maddow

Music is the 'pure' art par excellence. It says nothing and has nothing to say. Never really having an expressive function, it is opposed to drama, which even in its most refined forms still bears a social message and can only be 'put over' on the basis of an immediate and profound affinity with the values and expectations of its audience. The theatre divides its public and divides itself. The Parisian opposition between right-bank and left-bank theatr, bourgeois theatre and avant-garde theatre, is inextricably aesthetic and political. — Pierre Bourdieu

Time and task were both disorienting, for if you were to remove everything from our lives that depends on electricity to function, homes and offices would become no more than the chambers and passages of limestone caves- simple shelter from wind and rain, far less useful than the first homes at Plymouth Plantation or a wigwam. No way to keep out cold, or heat, for long. No way to preserve food, or to cook it. The things that define us, quiet as rock outcrops - the dumb screens and dials, the senseless clicks of on/off switches- without their purpose, they lose the measure of their beauty and we are left alone in the dark with countless useless things. — Jane Brox

She decided to sleep with him and get it over with. It was the only way. He had become an annoying jingle, striking in the shower, or at work, or just as she was falling asleep. She had to at least kiss him deeply and completely, in a way that left nothing behind. So she could move on. So she could stop imagining it. She couldn't keep losing herself to the jingle. It was impairing her ability to function. — Max Barry

The human subject is a function of language and, from conception, is a subject of desire. Dolto believed that infants understand much more than is commonly understood, and that infants are in receipt of their family history, which is transmitted unconsciously from generation to generation. As a consequence, infant experience needs to be made sense of in language and communicated to babies so that they are not left alone with what might traumatize them in the womb during the process of birth or after birth. — Guy Hall

This is not just an abstract point. What I mean is that power has a social function. Its role is not just to enforce domination or to create winners and losers: it also organizes communities, societies, marketplaces, and the world. Hobbes explained this well. Because the urge for power is primal, he argued, it follows that humans are inherently conflictual and competitive. Left to express that nature without the presence of power to inhibit and direct them, they would fight until there was nothing left to fight for. But if they obeyed a "common power," they could put their efforts toward building society, not destroying it. "During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war," Hobbes wrote, "and such a war as is of every man against every man. — Moises Naim

The whole tendency of modern life is towards scientific planning and organisation, central control, standardisation, and specialisation. If this tendency was left to work itself out to its extreme conclusion, one might expect to see the state transformed into an immense social machine, all the individual components of which are strictly limited to the performance of a definite and specialised function, where there could be no freedom because the machine could only work smoothly as long as every wheel and cog performed its task with unvarying regularity. Now the nearer modern society comes to the state of total organisation, the more difficult it is to find any place for spiritual freedom and personal responsibility. Education itself becomes an essential part of the machine, for the mind has to be as completely measured and controlled by the techniques of the scientific expert as the task which it is being trained to perform. — Christopher Henry Dawson

My office has two buildings that function like the right and left sides of the brain. There's a room where everything is being edited for an upcoming project, but you can pull out of that into a tranquil space to work in a different, more solitary medium. It's an architectural unfolding of the process instead of just one chaotic structure. — Doug Aitken

The notion that Congress can change the meaning given a constitutional provision by the Court is subversive of the function of judicial review; and it is not the less so because the Court promises to allow it only when the Constitution is moved to the left. — Robert Bork

There is no doubt that right-hemisphere intuitive thinking may perceive patterns and connections too difficult for the left hemisphere; but it may also detect patterns where none exist. Skeptical and
critical thinking is not a hallmark of the right hemisphere. And unalloyed right-hemisphere doctrines, particularly when they are invented during new and trying circumstances, may be erroneous or paranoid. — Carl Sagan

Major scientific insights are characteristically intuitive, and equally characteristically described in scientific papers by linear analytical arguments. There is no anomaly in this: it is, rather, just as it should be. The creative act has major right-hemisphere components. But arguments on the
validity of the result are largely left-hemisphere functions. — Carl Sagan

The lesion is in the area of my brain that is responsible for motor function, so I have continual chronic pain in my left arm from elbow to fingertips and the right side of my body from my ear to my breast area. — Karen Duffy

Both capitalism and Marxism promised to point out the path for the creation of just structures, and they declared that these, once established, would function by themselves; they declared that not only would they have no need of any prior individual morality, but that they would promote a communal morality. And this ideological promise has been proved false. The facts have clearly demonstrated it. The Marxist system, where it found its way into government, not only left a sad heritage of economic and ecological destruction, but also a painful oppression of souls. And we can also see the same thing happening in the West, where the distance between rich and poor is growing constantly, and giving rise to a worrying degradation of personal dignity through drugs, alcohol and deceptive illusions of happiness. — Pope Benedict XVI

To me, the best, if not the only function of imaginative writing, is to lead the human imagination outward, to take it into the vast external cosmos, and away from all that introversion and introspection, that morbidly exaggerated prying into one's own vitals - and the vitals of others - which Robinson Jeffers has so aptly symbolized as "incest." What we need is less "human interest," in the narrow sense of the term - not more. Physiological - and even psychological analysis - can be largely left to the writers of scientific monographs on such themes. Fiction, as I see it, is not the place for that sort of grubbing. — Clark Ashton Smith

The health of a nation, a society, can be determined by the art it demands. We have insisted of television and our movies that they not have anything to do with anything, that they be our never-never land; and if we demand this same function of our live theatre, what will be left of the visual-auditory arts - save the dance (in which nobody talks) and music (to which nobody listens)? — Edward Albee

In a way, science might be described as paranoid thinking applied to Nature: we are looking for natural conspiracies, for connections among apparently disparate data. Our objective is to abstract patterns from Nature (right-hemisphere thinking), but many proposed patterns do not in fact correspond to the
data. Thus all proposed patterns must be subjected to the sieve of critical analysis (left-hemisphere thinking). — Carl Sagan

There is plenty of room left for exact experiment in art, and the gate has been opened for some time. What had been accomplished in music by the end of the eighteenth century has only begun in the fine arts. Mathematics and physics have given us a clue in the form of rules to be strictly observed or departed from, as the case may be. Here salutary discipline is come to grips first of all with the function of forms, and not with form as the final result ... in this way we learn how to look beyond the surface and get to the root of things. — Paul Klee

Simplicity matters. Especially when it comes to the muscle memory of boxing. That is perhaps rule number one. Simplicity works. Simplicity is repetition. Repetition is function. Boil function down to one action, maybe two. Left or right. Simplicity. Simplicity is really the hardest thing. — Brian D'Ambrosio

We conceive the function of Tribune to be the expression in popular form, and to as large a public as possible, of the views of the Left and Marxist wing of social democracy in this country. Its policy must be that of those who believe that the present leadership of the Labour Party is not sufficiently Socialist. — Anthony Crosland

"Spiritual teacher" of course is not an identity. "Spiritual teacher" is a function. Somebody comes, the teaching happens. Somebody leaves, there's no spiritual teacher left. — Eckhart Tolle

Reality isn't the most pleasant of atmospheres, Lieutenant. But we like to think we're engineered for it. It's a pretty fine piece of engineering, the kind an engineer can respect. Drag in an obsession and reality can't tolerate it. Something has to give; if reality goes, your fine piece of engineering is left with nothing to operate on. Nothing it was designed to operate on. So it operates badly. So kick the obsession out; start functioning the way you were designed to function. — Theodore Sturgeon

The left hemisphere seems to feel quite defensive-in a strange way insecure-about the right hemisphere; and, if this is so, verbal criticism of intuitive thinking becomes suspect on the ground of motive. Unfortunately, there is every reason to think that the right hemisphere has comparable misgivings -expressed nonverbally, of course- about the left. — Carl Sagan

crystals and low-grade inflammation can persist in the joint during this period.23 Once an initial acute gout attack has occurred, further attacks are likely to follow. Recurrent attacks of acute gout often lead to chronic tophaceous gout, in which monosodium urate deposits (tophi) form in the soft tissues, usually along the rim of the ear, over the elbow joint, and in the joints of the fingers and toes. Tophi reduce the growth and viability of bone cells (osteoblasts),24 and if left untreated, tophaceous gout can lead to significant joint erosion and loss of function.22 — Life Extension

Biodiversity can't be maintained by protecting a few species in a zoo, or by preserving greenbelts or national parks. To function properly, nature needs more room than that. It can maintain itself, however, without human expense, without zookeepers, park rangers, foresters or gene banks. All it needs is to be left alone. — Donella Meadows

Humans think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals. At the same time they never cease trying to escape from what they imagine themselves to be. Their religions are attempts to be rid of a freedom they have never possessed. In the twentieth century, the utopias of Right and Left served the same function. Today, when politics is unconvincing even as entertainment, science has taken on the role of mankind's deliverer. — John N. Gray

Reading is more of a left-brain process, and listening to music is a right-brain function. — Maynard James Keenan

A genuine Left doesn't consider anyone's suffering irrelevant or titillating; nor does it function as a microcosm of capitalist economy, with men competing for power and status at the top, and women doing all the work at the bottom ... Goodbye to all that. — Robin Morgan

Why? Why was it that in cases of real love the one who is left does not more often follow the beloved by suicide? Only because the living must bury the dead? Because of the measured rites that must be fulfilled after a death? Because it is as though the one who is left steps for a time upon a stage and each second swells to an unlimited amount of time and he id watched by many eyes? Because there is a function he must carry out? Or perhaps, when there is love, the widowed must stay for the resurrection of the beloved - so that the one who has gone is not really dead, but grows and is created for a second time in the soul of the living? Why? — Carson McCullers

Via our left hemisphere language centers, our mind speaks to us constantly, a phenomenon I refer to as "brain chatter." It is that voice reminding you to pick up bananas on your way home and that calculating intelligence that knows when you have to do your laundry. There is vast individual variation in the speed at which our minds function. For some, our dialogue of brain chatter runs so fast that we can barely keep up with what we are thinking. Others of us think in language so slowly that it takes a long time for us to comprehend. Still others of us have a problem retaining our focus and concentration long enough to act on our thoughts. These variations in normal processing stem back to our brain cells and how each brain is intrinsically wired. — Jill Bolte Taylor

Leaves no room of human legislation in an Islamic state, because herein all legislative functions vest in God and the only function left for Muslims lies in their observance of the God-made law. — Abul A'la Maududi

Why ... do the myths of America the Hateful take such powerful hold? Because anti-Americanism provides a useful emotional function which goes beyond logic and reaches deep into the darker recesses of the European soul. In centuries past those on the Left who wished to personalise their hatred of capitalism, who sought to make it emotionally resonant by fastening an envious political passion on to a blameless scapegoat people, embraced anti-Semitism. It was the socialism of fools. Which is what anti-Americanism is now. — Michael Gove

Technical knowledge, divorced from what it is supposed to be knowledge of, yields only the illusion of understanding. It's like being able to reel off the locations in a baseball field -- first base, second base, third base, home plate, left field, right field, center field, pitcher's mound -- without having the slightest clue as to how they function in a game. You can talk the talk, but you can't walk the walk. — Stanley Fish

If the decline of Christianity created the modern political zealot - and his crimes - so the evaporation of religious faith among the educated left a vacuum in the minds of Western intellectuals easily filled by secular superstition. There is no other explanation for the credulity with which scientists, accustomed to evaluating evidence, and writers, whose whole function was to study and criticize society, accepted the crudest Stalinist propaganda at its face value. They needed to believe; they wanted to be duped. — Paul Johnson

What we are left with is an overmanipulated economy that can't function normally. — Kenichi Ohmae

In other words, neither oppression nor exploitation as such is ever the main cause for resentment; wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated. Antisemitism reached its climax when Jews had similarly lost their public functions and their influence, and were left with nothing but their wealth. — Hannah Arendt

The thing I was beginning to figure out about Sam and Grace, the thing about Sam not being able to function without her, was that that sort of love only worked when you were sure both people would always be around for each other. If one half of the equation left, or died, or was slightly less perfect in their love, it became the most tragic, pathetic story invented, laughable in its absurdity. Without Grace, Sam was a joke without a punch line. — Maggie Stiefvater

You just push it down and function until the day you meet someone who sparks something stronger than what's left." ~ Mia — Ava Gray

Some evidence suggests the left-handers are more likely to have problems with such left-hemisphere functions as reading, writing, speaking and arithmetic; and to be more adept at such right -hemisphere functions as imagination, pattern recognition and general creativity. — Carl Sagan

The substance of what I have to say to the disadvantage of the theory and practice of universal suffrage is that it tends to invert what I should have regarded as the true and natural relation between wisdom and folly. I think that wise and good men ought to rule those who are foolish and bad. To say that the sole function of the wise and good is to preach to their neighbors, and that everyone indiscriminately should be left to do what he likes, should be provided with a ratable share of the sovereign power in the shape of the vote, and that the result of this will be the direction of power by wisdom, seems to me the wildest romance that ever got possession of any considerable number of minds. — James Fitzjames Stephen