Monolithic Quotes & Sayings

Peer pressure is not a monolithic force that presses adolescents into the same mold ... Adolescents generally choose friend whose values, attitudes, tastes, and families are similar to their own. In short, good kids rarely go bad because of their friends. — Laurence Steinberg

Even the state TV channels are not monolithic in their pro-government line, and the views they express are quite pluralistic. — Sergei Lavrov

They passed a succession of granite monuments to the conquering magicians of the late Victorian age and the fallen heroes of the Great War, then a few monolithic sculptures representing Ideal Virtues (Patriotism, Respect for Authority, the Dutiful Wife). — Jonathan Stroud

At some point, you realize you can't provide a perfectly monolithic description of a foreign culture's future any more than you can provide a monolithic description of your own hometown's future. Your choices about what to emphasize and what to leave out make all the difference, and ultimately, your fingerprints and biases and viewpoints are going to be all over the story. — Paolo Bacigalupi

The private realm of the household was the sphere where the necessities of life, of individual survival as well as of continuity of the species, were taken care of and guaranteed. One of the characteristics of privacy, prior to the discovery of the intimate, was that man existed in this sphere not as a truly human being but only as a specimen of the animal species man-kind. This, precisely, was the ultimate reason for the tremendous contempt held for it by antiquity. The emergence of society has changed the estimate of this whole sphere but has hardly transformed its nature. The monolithic character of every type of society, its conformism which allows for only one interest and one opinion, is ultimately rooted in the one-ness of man-kind. — Hannah Arendt

The epithet "monolithic" is often used as a term of praise in this country; but a monolith is a mass of stone. Human beings are far more complex. — Ilya Ehrenburg

The recognition that modern societies are no longer monolithic, that the
imaginary social space has mushroomed into a multitude of identities has
propelled us into a realization that we are in an era where interculturality,
transculturalism and the eventual prospect of identifying a cosmopolitan
citizenship can become a reality. However we still remain circumscribed by
our Little Italies, our China Towns etc., which beyond the pleasures of
experiencing culinary delights, nevertheless create a self illusion that we
have attained a level of cultural awareness of the other. — Donald Cuccioletta

[The Founding Fathers] were not advocates for a monolithic notion of "God and Country," as promoters of a Christian America would now have us believe. They were precisely the opposite: the very prototypes, in fact, of the East Coast intellectuals we are always being warned against by today's religious right. — Brooke Allen

Artists and celebrities are citizens, and as such you have a responsibility to keep fighting for justice because there are monolithic power structures and systemic oppression out there. — Emily Saliers

I've been asked to explain why I don't worry much about the topics of privacy threat ... One reason is that these scenarios seem to assume that there will be large, monolithic bureaucracies ... that are capable of harnessing computers for one-way surveillance of an unsuspecting populace. I've come to feel that computation just doesn't work that way. Being afraid of monolithic organizations especially when they have computers, is like being afraid of really big gorillas especially when they are on fire. — Bruce Sterling

There is a tendency to want to treat blacks as a monolithic socioeconomic group. — William Julius Wilson

A strange coldness had settled upon Achamian, the monolithic selfishness of which only children and madmen are sometimes capable. — R. Scott Bakker

Globalization is not a monolithic force but an evolving set of consequences - some good, some bad and some unintended. It is the new reality. — John B. Larson

How women view religion's role in society is shaped more by their own country's culture and context than one monolithic view that religion is simply bad for women. — Dalia Mogahed

It is probably true that business corrupts everything it touches. It corrupts politics, sports, literature, art, labor unions and so on. But business also corrupts and undermines monolithic totalitarianism. Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment. — Eric Hoffer

Black people, we are not this monolithic group, you know? — Joy Bryant

The beauty of the system, however, is that such dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows that the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda. — Noam Chomsky

Those who come to Islam because they wish to draw closer to God have no problem with a multiform Islam radiating from a single revealed paradigmatic core. But those who come to Islam seeking an identity will find the multiplicity of traditional Muslim cultures intolerable. People with confused identities are attracted to totalitarian solutions. And today, many young Muslims feel so threatened by the diversity of calls on their allegiance, and by the sheer complexity of modernity, that the only form of Islam they can regard as legitimate is a totalitarian, monolithic one. That there should be four schools of Islamic law is to them unbearable. That Muslim cultures should legitimately differ is a species of blasphemy. — Abdal Hakim Murad

It is an interesting observation on today's religious climate that many people now get every bit as steamed up about insisting that 'all religions are just the same' as the older dogmaticians did about insisting on particular formulations and interpretations. The dogma that all dogmas are wrong, the monolithic insistence that all monolithic systems are to be rejected, has taken hold of the popular imagination at a level far beyond rational or logical discourse. — N. T. Wright

The hi-tech industry is not a monolithic thing. If you look on a timeline of a company, you see that in the beginning, you have to come up with an idea and to be willing to take risk. You have to grow fast, you have to think fast, and you have to do this usually in small teams. — Yossi Vardi

Cosmopolitanism seeks a _we_ that does not rely on the exclusion of _others_ but, instead, recognizes and confirms each other as part of the planetary _we_. The cosmopolitan _we_ is not grounded in a monolithic sameness but in a constant alterity and _ethical singularity_ of each individual human person regardless of one's national origin and belonging, religious affiliation, gender, race and ethnicity, class ability, or sexuality. — Namsoon Kang

With a monolithic project, late in the game, we can't even do much to cut costs. We have already written requirements for things we'll never get. We've designed, and even written code for things that we'll never complete. All that work is wasted. If only we had known the truth. We could have deferred some of that work. We laid out this project with an all-or-nothing mentality. We analyzed it all. We designed it all. We tried to code it all. We discovered, too late, that we can't have it all. — Anonymous

African-Americans are not a monolithic group. So, we tend to talk about the black community, the black culture, the African-American television viewing audience, but there are just as many facets of us as there are other cultures. — Malcolm-Jamal Warner

I think being born in America and growing up exclusively within the American boundaries of race and race oppression is a very different experience for those of us who grew up under the boundaries of race and race experience in the Caribbean, or for those who grew up in Africa. Our experience has not made us monolithic. We're not all of the same stripe, coming from the same place with the same sense of what the tactics have to be to survive. — Harry Belafonte

I'm always thinking about young people first when I'm writing music. Whenever I can reach that young person and inspire them to go after their own dreams, start their own movement just like I did with Wondaland. Starting their own tribe and showing people that we are not all the same, we're not all monolithic. I think that's what it's all about for me. — Janelle Monae

The basic theme of a hostile environment that seeks to destroy the ideology has many variations. Hitler fought his life-and-death struggle against a coalition (constructed by him alone) of 'Jewish, plutocratic and Bolshevik powers supported by the Vatican'; Ulrike Meinhof's indignation was directed against 'the German parliamentary coalition, the American government, the police, the state and university authorities, the bourgeois, the Shah of Iran, the multinational corporations, the capitalist system'; the opponents of nuclear energy imagine themselves up against a powerful, monolithic alliance of irresponsible corporations, the powers of high finance, and all the institutions that are slave to it: courts, authorities, universities, as well as other research institutions, and political parties. — Paul Watzlawick

Prose is like this big block - you write big paragraphs. I feel that when I'm reading and writing, that a prose book is kind of monolithic. But a song is more like a feather or something. — Bill Callahan

..culture is not monolithic either and is not the exclusive property of the East or West nor of the small groups of men and women. — Edward Said

To all you sensitive sallys out there who spend your time scribing angry letters, I have great news: Scientific models show that in the not-too-distant future, all the races will become so completely interbred that humanity will have a monolithic caramelish color and common facial features. There won't be blonds or hairy Jews anymore.Words like "Chink" will cease to have meaning. They will be relics, along with those who use them for comedy. Which is exactly why I am past that meta-racist shit and onto poop and pee. Onward and downward! — Sarah Silverman

There is no poststructuralist person - no completely decentered subject for whom all meaning is arbitrary, totally relative, and purely historically contingent, unconstrained by body and brain. The mind is not merely embodied, but embodied in such a way that our conceptual systems draw largely upon the commonalities of our bodies and of the environments we live in. The result is that much of a person's conceptual system is either universal or widespread across languages and cultures. Our conceptual systems are not totally relative and not merely a matter of historical contingency, even though a degree of conceptual relativity does exist and even though historical contingency does matter a great deal. The grounding of our conceptual systems in shared embodiment and bodily experience creates a largely centered self, but not a monolithic self. — George Lakoff And Mark Johnson

The history written, taught, and sworn to as 'the unvarnished truth' by the establishment - any establishment, left or right, conservative or liberal, capitalist or socialist or fascist - is generally revisionist, narrow in perspective, monolithic, and agenda-driven. In the worst case, it consists of one part denial and one part propaganda - in other words, a self-serving pack of lies. — Thomas W. Knowles

Vietnam should have taught us that mindless anti-Communism is not a cause worth killing or dying for in a world in which Communism is hardly a monolithic force. — Pete Hamill

The net is more than an organizing tool - it has become an organizing model, a blueprint for decentralized but cooperative decision-making. It facilitates the process of information sharing to such an extent that many groups can work in concert with one another without the need to achieve monolithic consensus. — Naomi Klein

What is clear is that the Gospel of Judas has joined the other spectacular discoveries that are exploding the myth of a monolithic Christianity and showing how diverse and fascinating the early Christian movement really was. — Elaine Pagels

The demise of the monolithic record industry has been, for a lot of people, really liberating and emancipating. — Moby

After a while you learn what you once considered monolithic is infinitely intricate. — Greg Baxter

Katniss should have the most reasons to hate, having been sent into the arena not once, but twice. But despite everything she's been through, she's still capable of seeing the so-called "enemy" as individuals rather than as a monolithic entity. She remembers that Octavia snuck her a roll rather than see her hungry and that Flavius had to quit during the Quarter Quell because he couldn't stop crying. — Leah Wilson

I want to strip my work of 'effects' until it stands monolithic, based on reality and yet transcending it. It must flow naturally from my materials, from the way of the chisel and the way of the block ... It is the ultimate ideal. — Shiko Munakata

We are not a monolithic group of individuals, not every single person believes the exact same thing. — Joseph Crowley

The basic idea of a portfolio life is that instead of thinking of your work as a monolithic activity, what if you chose to see it as the complex group of interests, passions, and activities it is? — Jeff Goins

There is no such thing as one Islam. The Koran is ambiguous and Islam is not a monolithic entity. — Walter Kasper

It is often hard to secure unanimity about the borders of legislative power, but that is much easier than to decide how far a particular adjustment diverges from what the judges deem tolerable. On such issues experience has over and over again shown the difficulty of securing unanimity. This is disastrous because disunity cancels the impact of monolithic solidarity on which the authority of a bench of judges so largely depends. — Learned Hand

The Communists , following Hegel , speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion. — Simone De Beauvoir

For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence
on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match. — John F. Kennedy

My historical reading of the situation is that these great monolithic empires developed, Rome, Turkey, and so forth, and they always break down when enough people, and it's always the young, the creative, and minority groups drop out and go back to a tribal form. — Timothy Leary

Structures are never monolithic. — James S.A. Corey

I discovered even before I went to jail that apartheid was not run by people who were monolithic in their approach. Some of them didn't even believe in apartheid. — Nelson Mandela

People have accepted the media's idea of what feminism is, but that doesn't mean that it's right or true or real. Feminism is not monolithic. Within feminism, there is an array of opinions. — Judy Chicago

There's really no such thing as just Sharia, it's not one monolithic Continuum - Sharia is understood in thousands of different ways over the 1,500 years in which multiple and competing schools of law have tried to construct some kind of civic penal and family law code that would abide by Islamic values and principles, it's understood in many different ways. — Mark Durie

The only real argument for monolithic systems was performance, and there is now enough evidence showing that microkernel systems can be just as fast as monolithic systems. — Andrew S. Tanenbaum

Environmentalists believe that monolithic solutions - be they in the auto, nuclear, or genetics field - are doomed to fail and lead only along the path to dependence. They feel rather that it is far more sensible to approach the future by opening up more possibilities. Likewise, polyamorists believe that monogamy sterilizes love and fosters unhealthy codependence, whereas multiple relationships feed off of each other's differences and ultimately lead to an enriching fulfillment. — Francoise Simpere

Hollywood is really weird to talk about in this monolithic sense because it's this microcosm of anywhere. It's full of a lot of people who have different intentions and different points of view. — Karina Longworth

So many people seem to spend their lives trying to appear normal, predictable and consistent to themselves and those that surround them. They just end up bored with themselves, bereft of any depth of inner resources, suffocated by the inhibitions that defend their own monolithic identities. — Peter J. Carroll

Gay and lesbian couples simply do not fit the Strict Father model of the family. Homosexuality challenges the monolithic authority of the father. And above all, it challenges the natural order, which presupposes that sex is heterosexual sex in which men are dominant over women and that, in a family, this natural order carries over to the moral order. But — George Lakoff

Our people, our history, our struggle is more than a war, more than a fall, more than a favorite dish, more than one monolithic political opinion, more than one dialect, one gender, one nation, one flag. Respect and love to the diaspora - as imperfect as I am, I am one of you and I am yours. — Bao Phi

I get asked this question a lot. My first piece of advice would be that the less well you understand a domain, the harder it will be for you to find proper bounded contexts for your services. As we discussed previously, getting service boundaries wrong can result in having to make lots of changes in service-to-service collaboration - an expensive operation. So if you're coming to a monolithic system for which you don't understand the domain, spend some time learning what the system does first, and then look to identify clean module boundaries prior to splitting out services. — Sam Newman

The point is that instead of a monolithic brick of printed content - delivered more or less unchanged to all subscribers - social media offers news that is personalized and nimble. — Ryan Holmes

Churches, by the very reason of their structures, are monolithic and do not adapt easily. But in many cases, they, too, have allowed themselves to become allied or even part of an unjust establishment or system. — Sean MacBride

Rather than assume that the wealthy are a monolithic, selfish and unfeeling lot who must be subjugated by the force of the state, set a tone that encourages people of good will to meet in the middle. — Leon G. Cooperman

We need to reverse three centuries of walling the for-profit and non-profit sectors off from one another. When you think for-profit and non-profit, you most often think of entities with either zero social return or zero return on capital and zero social return. Clearly, there's some opportunity in the spectrum between those extremes. What's missing is the for-profit finance industry coming in to that area. Look at the enormous diversity of the for-profit financial industry as opposed to monolithic nature of the non-profit world; it's quite astonishing. — Bill Drayton

["Manning Up"'s] essays definitely nuance the idea of transitioning into a "shared manhood" (much like feminists of color have complicated the idea of "shared womanhood"). Trans men don't all transition to just become "men," which was one of the projects' cornerstone concepts. They become black men, white men, queer men, straight men, working class men, affluent men, fatherly men, single men, spiritual men, etc. etc. All of these mean different things when filtered through social and intimate, familial lenses.

One major boon of the growth in transgender literature ... is that we get to tease out these complexities in lives that will be popularly portrayed as monolithic unless we provide counter-scripts."

- from a National Book Critics Circle interview with writer Rigoberto Gonzalez — Mitch Kellaway

There's no longer a monolithic evil empire somewhere, spreading a different philosophy of life. That doesn't exist. — Seth Gordon

You witness the artists acting as witnesses, but they provide a point of view that's less monolithic. It's less official in a certain way. Many artists are speaking in the first person singular, as a reaction to dubbed-over media commentary. The thought is: "Enough with how we're represented by the media. Let me tell the story." — Massimiliano Gioni

The central problem of our age is not liberalism or modernism, nor the old Roman Catholicism or the new Roman Catholicism, nor the threat of communism, nor even the threat of rationalism and the monolithic consensus which surrounds us. All these are dangerous but not the primary threat. The real problem is this: the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, individually corporately, tending to do the Lord's work in the power of the flesh rather than of the Spirit. The central problem is always in the midst of the people of God, not in the circumstances surrounding them. — Francis A. Schaeffer

Left and Right are monolithic ideas - colossal, abstract, and, as their religious origins suggest, cosmic. They are part of the darker side of humanity that replaces the specific with the general, the personal with the impersonal. If you wanted to find a way of making certain that people would have as little as possible in common, there would be no better way than to divide them, not into ten or three or four, but into two. Dual division turns the largest possible sections of humanity against one another, often causing neighbors and compatriots to have nothing to say to one another. No regeneration of community can begin without a careful demolition of Left and Right; nor can this tearing down be relinquished to academic abstraction, technical philosophy, government, corporations, or ideology. Nothing can be built without a new politics - least of all with a politics that refers outward to ideas of Heaven and Hell rather than inward to the experience of daily life. — Hugh Graham

On the existence and threat of modern-day secret societies: We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence . . . building a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. - JOHN F. KENNEDY, FROM A SPEECH GIVEN AT THE WALDORF-ASTORIA HOTEL ON APRIL 27, 1961 — James Rollins

On a national level there is a tendency to portray Latino culture as a monolithic entity, which is a really inaccurate way of seeing ourselves. There is as much diversity and uniqueness within the Latino culture as there is in any other kind of American culture. — Benjamin Bratt

It hadn't occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden. This image was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine. She would be old and beautiful like the black-and-white photo of Georgia O'Keeffe I'd once sent her. I held fast to this image for the first couple of weeks after we left the Mayo Clinic, and then, once she was admitted to the hospice wing of the hospital in Duluth, that image unfurled, gave way to the others, more modest and true. I imagined my mother in October; I wrote the scene in my mind. And then the one of my mother in August and another in May. Each day that passed, another month peeled away. — Cheryl Strayed

We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence - on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day — John F. Kennedy

I don't think that writing, real writing, has much to do with affirming belief
if anything it causes rifts and gaps in belief which make belief more complex and more textured, more real. Good writing unsettles, destroys both the author and the reader. From my perspective, there always has to be a tension between the writer and the monolithic elements of the culture, such as religion. — Brian Evenson

Of the two powers, the two categories that take possession of us when we enter the world, space is by far the less mysterious ... Space is, after all, solid, monolithic ... Time, on the other hand, is a hostile element, truly treacherous, I would say even against human nature. — Stanislaw Lem

Technological evolution is leading to something new: a worldwide, interlocked, monolithic, technical-political web of unprecedented negative proportions — Jerry Mander

The Golden Arches of McDonald's rise, glorious across the landscape, contempo-monolithic, simple in concept as Stonehenge if we could but see it. — Maureen Howard

I don't advocate Stalinist monolithic state structures any more than I advocate capitalistic monoliths. Unfortunately, human society tends to the monolithic, whether you go to the left or right, everybody in leathers, or everybody holding Chairman Mao's book, and if everybody goes to one end of the pitch, I always go to the other. — Robyn Hitchcock

In the wrong hands," Leto said, "monolithic centralized power is a dangerous and volatile instrument." - "And your hands are the right ones? — Frank Herbert

Emperor held court from his Iron Throne, made from the personal weapons of all those monarchs the Emperors of the past had conquered and deposed, each glazed and guarded against rust. The throne itself was over six feet tall and four feet in width; a monolithic piece of furniture, it was so heavy that it had not been moved so much as a finger-length in centuries. Anyone looking at it could only be struck by its sheer mass - and must begin calculating just how many sword blades, axes, and lance points must have gone into the making of it ... None — Mercedes Lackey

[Perl] combines all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript. — Jamie Zawinski

When I first drove my car down Sunset Strip, I nearly crashed my car gazing at the monolithic ads of various celebrities. They are bigger than King Kong, and more frightening. — Rebecca Pidgeon

I began to research the concept of dimensionality from the point of view of quality, and not just quantity, as a mathematician might do. Taking my clues from the theosophical use made of the Vedantic levels of reality, I identified the western notion of Energy (as someting which is effecatious by means of motion), with the idea of Time. The more comprehensive dimension 'eternity' I defined as a form of energy which is efficacious without motion. In this manner I began to establish the qualities of dimensions and open out the seemingly monolithic concept of energy. — Paul Laffoley

Beyond the cultural differences that must be bridged in any international effort, combined with factors of national politics, priorities, and values, we continue to grapple with the essential paradox of public health that began our discussion: when the system is working effectively, it is a silent venture and there are relatively few outbreaks of disease. These very successes lead most of us down a complacent path of false confidence, apathy, and assumptions that the endless dance is over. To complicate matters further, microbes themselves are hardly monolithic or permanently settled beings. For every attempt we make to destroy or weaken them, they respond with an equal and opposite force. The goal of both sides is to assume leadership of the evolutionary waltz ever in progress. — Howard Markel

Encircled and provoked, Russia is once again turning into a mighty monolithic defense wall. Its people are ready! They want peace, above anything else. But if they'd have to fight for their own survival, and for the survival of the world, they will. — Andre Vltchek