#tract

In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes. ↗

— Theodor Adorno

#conception #concrete #responsibility #universal #vanishes

Beauty: the adjustment of all parts proportionately so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole. ↗

— Leon Battista Alberti

#adjustment #beauty #cannot #change #harmony

Make no mistake about it: once a band has signed a letter of intent, they will either eventually sign a contract that suits the label or they will be destroyed. ↗

— Steve Albini

#band #contract #destroyed #either #eventually

To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching. To attain it we must be able to guess what will interest; we must learn to read the childish soul as we might a piece of music. Then, by simply changing the key, we keep up the attraction and vary the song. ↗

— Henri Frederic Amiel

#art #attain #attraction #changing #childish

When you accept a role in a pilot, you automatically sign up for five years. You think it's scary to walk down the aisle? Try signing a five-year contract for a show you may not want to be part of down the road. ↗

— Jennifer Aniston

#aisle #automatically #contract #down #down the road

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda. ↗

— Hannah Arendt

#elite #itself #masses #mob #momentum

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation. ↗

— Jean Arp

#after #back #contemplation #day #devices

Solomon's temple also was designed to increase the attractiveness of the city of his residence. ↗

— Julius Wellhausen

#attractiveness #city #designed #his #increase

You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string. ↗

— Julian Barnes

#language #design

Fire, ice, asteroids and pole shifts are bogeymen with which we distract ourselves from the real threat of our time. In an age when everyone invents his own truth, there is no community, only factions. Without community, there can be no consensus to resist the greedy, the envious, the power-mad narcissists who seize control and turn the institutions of civilization into a series of doom machines. ↗

— Dean Koontz

#distractions #age