#context

It follows that the one thing we should not do to the men and women of past time, and particularly if they ghost through to us as larger than life, is to take them out of their historical contexts. To do so is to run the risk of turning them into monsters, whom we can denounce for our (frequently political) motives—an insidious game, because we are condemning in their make-up that which is likely to belong to a whole social world, the world that helped to fashion them and that is deviously reflected or distorted in them. Censure of this sort is the work of petty moralists and propagandists, not historians (p. 5). ↗

— Lauro Martines

#context #historians #history #memory #moralists

The Tyr had tried. It had really tried. It must have gone over every element of human psychology, tried desperately to understand the nature of human aesthetic sense … and then failed, miserably, in every regard. ↗

— C.S. Friedman

#irony #scifi #nature

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative — the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time. ↗

— Umberto Eco

#escape #escapism #fiction #interpretation #narrative

We share need, not-human. Yours is straightforward.” … “Mine is less so, but you will serve it. Come. ↗

— C.S. Friedman

#great-quote #scifi #understatements #scifi

You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission. ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#delusion #extremism #fanaticism #fanatics #guerrilla-decontextualism

In this context, I believe it is an imperative for the new President to select and install his team as quickly as possible, and this does not imply that he must or should appoint members of the 'other' party to his Cabinet, which could contribute to inaction and inefficiency. ↗

— Richard V. Allen

#believe #cabinet #context #contribute #could

I always dreamed of writing in an orchestral context. But when you finish a piece, you want to hear it. So we played everything with Phish. ↗

— Trey Anastasio

#context #dreamed #everything #finish #hear

Yeah, you know, within the context of TV families, these are pretty unsavory characters. ↗

— Will Arnett

#context #families #know #pretty #these

In a typical history book, black Americans are mentioned in the context of slavery or civil rights. There's so much more to the story. ↗

— Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

#black americans #book #civil #civil rights #context

Well, you cannot think of cinema now, and you cannot think of cinema in the UK and not place Chaplin in the most extraordinary elevated context, if there can be such a thing, in that he was a genius, he was unique. ↗

— Richard Attenborough

#chaplin #cinema #context #elevated #extraordinary