#lex

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

-Nice concept. -What is? -Retreating. Getting away from the grind. -Oh, you never do. You just change gears. ↗

— Jonathan Kellerman

#escaping-from-reality #nova #retreating #change

No critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language's capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility. For English is a language that simply cannot be fixed, not can its use ever be absolutely laid down. It changes constantly; it grows with an almost exponential joy. It evolves eternally; its words alter their senses and their meanings subtly, slowly, or speedily according to fashion and need. ↗

— Simon Winchester

#lexicology #words #change

It is always easier to destroy a complex system than to selectively alter it. ↗

— Roby James

#complex #systems #change

So I’m just learning more and more that circumstances can be very different from place to place but culture is universal. you know, humans do things the way humans do things, and that doesn’t change whether those humans are in Zambia or they’re in England or they’re in America. ↗

— Alex Day

#change

It would change everything, gentlemen. It would shift the entire balance of power in Europe-maybe the world. Alexander conquered half of it. Think what he would have done with arrows dipped in monster snot! ↗

— Rick Yancey

#history #humor #monster-snot #monstrumology #change

Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans. ↗

— Daniel J. Levitin

#connection #flexibility #music #people #communication

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction. ↗

— E.F. Schumacher

#elegance #genius #inspirational #simplicity #violence

Alex grinned and then walked past him, murmuring, "I applaud you for your courage." "Courage?" he asked with confusion. "Hmm." She headed for the door to the hall, swinging her purse gaily as she went. "Many men find it difficult to come out of the closet. ↗

— Lynsay Sands

#cale #courage

I have never known courage to be judged by the length of a man's hair. Or, for the matter of that, whether he has any hair at all. ↗

— Lloyd Alexander

#courage