#icon

Classifying depression as an illness serves the psychiatric community and pharmaceutical corporations well; it also soothes the frightened, guilty, indifferent, busy, sadistic, and unschooled. To understand depression as a call for life-changes is not profitable. Stagnation is not a medical term. The 17.5 million Americans diagnosed as suffering a major depression in 1997 were mostly damned. (Psychobiological examinations confuse cause and symptom.) Deficient serotonergic functioning, ventral prefrontal cerebral cortex, dis-inhibition of impulsive-aggressive behavior, blah blah blah: the medical lexicon boils emotion from human being. Go take a drug, the doctor says. Pain is a biochemical phenomenon. Erase all memory. ↗

— Antonella Gambotto-Burke

#biochemical-phenomenon #cause-and-symptom #disinhibition #doctors #drugs

There was something about Marilyn. She couldn't act her way out of a bag, but she became an icon because something happened between her and the lens, and no one knows what it is. ↗

— Richard Widmark

#act #bag #became #because #between

A hive mind is a social organization of RISTs that are capable of processing semantic memes ("thinking"). These could be either carbon-based or silicon-based. RISTs who enter a hive mind surrender their independent identities (which are mere illusions anyway). For purposes of convenience, the constituents of the hive mind are assigned bit-pattern designators. ↗

— Neil Stephenson

#design

Chase the dream, not the competition. ↗

— Lisa J. Ellwood

#dreams

Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that's their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#religions #sky #small #statues #up

Want me to flex my magic for you, baby? ↗

— Sarah Rees Brennan

#humor #magic #nick-rvyves #the-demon-s-covenant #humor

Natalie's estate is handled by Global Icons, and they police the world so her picture isn't on a T-shirt or coffee cup unless we approve of it. ↗

— Robert Wagner

#coffee #cup #estate #global #handled

Artists are agents of chaos. It is the artists job to encourage entropy, to promote chaos. Idols must be killed, icons crushed, beliefs shattered. It is the artists job to encourage legitimate, unadulterated, raw thought and emotion. Art that does nothing new, that simply fills an established role, is not art. It is a product. A stale, stagnant product of a disgustingly mundane process that has been done so much it is assumed mandatory. Little different than feces. The last thing the world needs is to get shittier. ↗

— Jonathan Culver

#art #artists #chaos #entropy #feces

... Blake is a ready-made patron saint for those wanting to elevate their marginality, dissent, and queerness into strength. The relative futility of Blake's battle during his lifetime make him all the more attractive. In the intertextual heritage of queer art, Blake has become an honorary icon. ↗

— Andrew Elfenbein

#queer-icon #art

I'm just myself, so I don't know that I think of myself as a nerd icon. ↗

— Aisha Tyler

#i think #icon #just #know #myself