#ode

La démocratie vit de mouvements, de changements, d’agencements contractuels, de temps fluides, de dynamiques permanentes, de jeux dialectiques. Elle se crée, vit, change, se métamorphose, se construit en regard d’un vouloir issu de forces vivantes. Elle recourt à l’usage de la raison, au dialogue des parties prenantes, à l’agir communicationnel, à la diplomatie autant qu’à la négociation. La théocratie fonctionne à l’inverse : elle nait, vit et jouit de l’immobilité, de la mort et de l’irrationnel. La théocratie est l’ennemie la plus à craindre de la démocratie, avant-hier à Paris avant 1789, hier à Téhéran en 1978, et aujourd’hui chaque fois qu’Al-Quaïda fait parler la poudre. ↗

— Michel Onfray

#immobilisme #irrationnel #modernité #mouvement #rationnel

Elizabeth scowled, feeling like a nobody, a nothing. She felt like her entire self had been made worthless. She could change her interests, but she couldn’t change her looks. She’d never be six feet tall. She’d never look like a supermodel. ↗

— Francine Pascal

#superficiality #supermodels #sweet-valley #worthless #change

I try about four or five looks during a shoot. A look can be defined by changes to hair, makeup, jewelry, props, furniture, background, partial clothing, fabric accents, accessories, lighting, etc. ↗

— A.K. Nicholas

#nude #photography #beauty

Now, 75 years [after To Kill a Mockingbird], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. [Open Letter, O Magazine, July 2006] ↗

— Harper Lee

#communication #computers #critical-thinking #modern-life #reading

We're the most aggressively inarticulate generation to come along since, you know, a long time ago! ↗

— Taylor Mali

#postmodernism #speech #communication

I've been saying it so long to you, you just wouldn't listen. Every time you said 'Farm Boy do this' you thought I was answering 'As you wish' but that's only because you were hearing wrong. 'I love you' was what it was, but you never heard. ↗

— William Goldman

#devotion #ignorance #love #love

Small wonder our national spirit is husk empty. We have more information but less knowledge. More communication but less community. More goods but less goodwill. More of virtually everything save that which the human spirit requires. So distracted have we become sating this new need or that material appetite, we hardly noticed the departure of happiness ↗

— Randall Robinson

#modernization #rationalization #communication

Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#community #competition #giftedness #modern #printing-press

But if a role model in her seventies isn't layered with contradictions - as we all come to be - then what good is she? Why bother to cut the silhouette of another's existence and place it against our own if it isn't as incongruous, ambiguous, inconsistent, and paradoxical as our own lives are? ↗

— Molly Peacock

#artist #paradoxes #role-model #women #age

What is to be gained if we are so intent in reaching out to the unchurched that we then unchurch the reached? ↗

— David F. Wells

#church #post-modernism #courage