#discourse

I think it is very difficult today to have a reasoned public discourse on any controversial subject. Certainly, election years present a complicating factor. ↗

— John Poindexter

#certainly #controversial #difficult #discourse #election

Proposition 19 already is a winner no matter what happens on election day. The mere fact of its being on the ballot has elevated and legitimized public discourse about marijuana and marijuana policy in ways I could not have imagined a year ago. ↗

— George Soros

#ago #already #ballot #being #could

The level of discourse in this country is falling to a depth that cannot be sustained. ↗

— Martin Frost

#country #depth #discourse #falling #level

But ultimately what I was impressed by during my years in government was how much the intellectual climate and the prevailing intellectual notions constrained and represented the universe within which the discourse took place. ↗

— Lawrence Summers

#constrained #discourse #during #government #how

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing. ↗

— Neil Postman

#elections #irrelevance #media #nate-silver #news

The beautiful is powerless but always exceeds what frames it, and what always frames it is discourse. ↗

— Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe

#beauty #discourse #the-beautiful #beauty

One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone. ↗

— Marcel Proust

#discourse #interpersonal-communication #love #philosophy #wisdom

Where wise actions are the fruit of life, wise discourse is the pollination. ↗

— Bryant H. McGill

#discourse #fruit #life #where #wise

If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to speak coherently at all. If the whole of language were present to me when I spoke, then I would not be able to articulate anything at all. The ego, or consciousness, can therefore only work by repressing this turbulent activity, provisionally nailing down words on to meanings. Every now and then a word from the unconscious which I do not want insinuates itself into my discourse, and this is the famous Freudian slip of the tongue or parapraxis. But for Lacan all our discourse is in a sense a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery and ambiguous as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say and never say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense an approximation, a near-miss, a part-failure, mixing non-sense and non-communication into sense and dialogue. ↗

— Terry Eagleton

#consciousness #discourse #failure #freudian-slips #lacan

Discourse is not life; its time is not your time; in it, you will not be reconciled to death; you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying you will make a man that will live longer than he. ↗

— Michel Foucault

#god #language #writing #death