Idealizations Quotes & Sayings

Free will is an idealization of human beings that makes the ethics game playable. Euclidean geometry requires idealizations like infinite straight lines and perfect circles, and its deductions are sound and useful even though the world does not really have infinite straight lines or perfect circles. The world is close enough to the idealization that the theorems can usefully be applied. Similarly, ethical theory requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational, equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused, and its conclusions can be sound and useful even though the world, as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events. As long as there is no outright coercion or gross malfunction of reasoning, the world is close enough to the idealization of free will that moral theory can meaningfully be applied to it. — Steven Pinker

It's your job as an actor to fill out the blanks. I love doing that. To fill in the bones. — Jeremy Piven

I am happy to make money. I want to make more money, make more music, eat Big Macs and drink Budweisers. — Kid Rock

Tell you what." I closed the blade with a satisfying snick. "Remember that time you tried to kill me because I wouldn't open a gate to hell?"
"The memory's a bit fuzzy ... "
I opened the knife again.
"Yes, now that you mention it, I do recall something like that happening, although my motivation was certainly never to kill you. Can't you view it as me inspiring you to figure out how to use the Paths? I didn't actually want you to die. — Kiersten White

First, it is a commitment to particularism, to giving priority to the specificity of particulars, not to abstractions and generalities that divert our attention away from concrete realities. Idealizations tend to be partial and distorting, obscuring the heterogeneity and complexity of actual experiences and concrete practices, which is why they do not provide an adequate standpoint for the diagnosis of social problems and injustices. — Jose Medina

Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character. We extend this into all our thinking. Between us and the realities of social life we build up a mass of generalizations, abstract ideas, ancient glories, and personal wishes. They simplify and soften experience. It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves. We worry about their fate and forget their original content. — Walter Lippmann

The theoretical fruits of deliberate oversimplification through idealization are not to be denied ... Reality in all its messy particularity is too complicated to theorize about, taken straight. The issue is, rather (since every idealization is a strategic choice), which idealizations might really shed some light ... which will just land us ... diverting fairy tales. — Daniel Dennett

I am alone so I dream of the being who has cured my solitude, who would be cured by solitudes. With its life, it brought me the idealizations of life, all the idealizations which give life a double, which lead life toward it summits, which make the dreamer too live by splitting ... — Gaston Bachelard

People who drain others have a certain world they want to get to when they die, and you're their ticket! — Frederick Lenz

In rational inquiry, we idealize to selected domains in such a way (we hope) as to permit us to discover crucial features of the world. Data and observations, in the sciences, have an instrumental character. They are of no particular interest in themselves, but only insofar as they constitute evidence that permits one to determine fundamental features of the real world, within a course of inquiry that is invariably undertaken under sharp idealizations, often implicit and simply common understanding, but always present. — Noam Chomsky

[...] Within the religious realm, the same can be said about that type of'apologetics' that claims to agree with the results of modern science-an utterly illusory undertaking and one that constantly requires revision; one that also runs the risk of linking religion with changing and ephemeral conceptions, from which it must remain completely independent. — Rene Guenon

Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal. — Robert Smithson

Contrary to everything you've heard, the only options are not: Amnesty or deporting 11 million people. There's also the option of letting them stay in the shadows - or the same thing we've been doing for the last thirty years. Americans are under no moral obligation to grant amnesty to people who have broken our laws. "The moral thing to do" is usually defined as "following the law." The fact that Democrats want 30 million new voters is not a good enough reason to ignore the law and screw over American workers, as well as legal immigrants already here. How about Republicans try this: We're not giving you anything - not even half - because there's no reason to do so. — Ann Coulter

Knowing that another path might have been easier for him to travel, but that it couldn't possibly have offered a more satisfying conclusion. — Garth Stein

Innovators are at their very heart visionaries who also have determination, dedication, passion and motivation. — Pearl Zhu

Theres a lot of muscles in your eyes even that you dont ever work, but little human traits like showing signs of exertion while running, you couldnt do that. Blinking when youre shooting a gun, you know. Things that you take for granted every day that had to be eliminated, so it was always interesting. — Kristanna Loken

UNREALITY IS THE HALLMARK of narcissism. Whether it's idealizations, expectations of perfection, manufactured images, illusions, distortions of fact, catastrophizing or other kinds of exaggerations, denial, or outright lying, Narcissists will go to great lengths to avoid any reality that evokes shame and to promote fanatasies that sustain their grandiosity and omnipotence. They require accomplices for this, people to admire them and do their bidding, — Sandy Hotchkiss

By speech first, but far more by writing, man has been able to put something of himself beyond death. In tradition and in books an integral part of the individual persists, for it can influence the minds and actions of other people in different places and at different times: a row of black marks on a page can move a man to tears, though the bones of him that wrote it are long ago crumbled to dust. In truth, the whole progress of civilization is based upon this power. — Julian Huxley

To ensnare an elusive answer, camouflage the question. — Khang Kijarro Nguyen

If our friends' idealizations of us need the corrective of our own experience, it may be true also that our own sordid view of our lives needs the corrective of our friends' idealizations. — Oscar W. Firkins

There's a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her. — Gillian Flynn

I propose going up the Delaware, In order to be nearer this place than I should be by taking The course of the Chesapeake which I once intended."1 - William Howe, July 16, 1777 — Michael Harris