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Chris Lavergne

4,407 Quotes
President of Thought.is
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4,407 quotes curated by Chris Lavergne:

“John Pilger: Does that right of free expression, in your view, extent to everybody?  

Noam Chomsky: I mean, if we don’t believe in free expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all. 

John Pilger: Would you support the right of terrorists calling for murder of Salman Rushdie to speak in that way? 

Noam Chomsky: To speak yes, but I think that Bentham’s standard is the one that should be observed… Suppose you and I walk into a store and you have a gun and I tell you to shoot the store owner. Well, that’s speech but it’s not protected because that’s speech which is part of a violent act. 

John Pilger: But shouldn’t that be, as in the case of the racist being allowed to speak, shouldn’t that be simply, and indeed it is in this country, illegal. I mean it’s incitement to murder. 

Noam Chomsky: You have to ask whether it is incitement to imminent violent action. Now you know there’s no precise litmus test that tells you where to draw the line. But freedom of speech is an important enough to value so that you need an extraordinary argument to overcome it. I think there are such cases. I gave one. For example, somebody who says ‘shoot' when someone else has a gun. OK. That’s crossing the line. But I don’t think there are many cases that cross the line.”
— Noam Chomsky, Freedom of Speech: Words are Not Deeds
Tagged: Freedom of Speech, Crossing The Line
“Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his blood. Write with blood, and you will find that blood is spirit… He that writes with blood and proverbs does not want to be read, but learned by heart. In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak, but for that route you must have long legs. Proverbs should be peaks, and those spoken to should be big and tall.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Tagged: Aphorisms, Writing, Write with Blood
“It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things, or the Nothingness, behind it. Grammar and Style— to me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it (be it something or nothing) begins to seep through: I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today.”
— David Shields, Reality Hunger
Tagged: Writing
“There was a reason the church was the main cultural unifier in Western Europe: it had the best distribution network and the most mass-produced item— the Bible.”
— David Shields, Reality Hunger
Tagged: Communications, Medium, The Bible, The Printing Press
“Here everything is admissible— philosophy, ethics, divinity, criticism, poetry, humor, fun, mimicry, anecdote, jokes, ventriloquism— all the breadth and versatility of the most liberal conversation, highest and lowest personal topics: all are permitted, and all may be combined into one speech.”
— David Shields, Reality Hunger
Tagged: Communication, Speech, Thought Catalog
“We are all so afraid. We are all so alone. We all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.”
— David Shields, How Literature Saved My Life
Tagged: Alone, Love, Sad
“When strongly disagreeing with another, most of us have a tendency to see things solely through our own world view.… In these circumstances, it can be constructive to take a minute to understand why the other person has reached the conclusion that they have. For instance, what in their background has led them to take that position? … Are they fearful of a particular outcome that may not be obvious at surface level? Asking yourself these questions, and more importantly, asking the other person these questions, can take what would otherwise be a challenging situation and transform it into a coachable moment and truly collaborative experience. ”
— Jeff Weiner, Linkedin.com
Tagged: Empathy, strategy
“We think of ourselves as breathing, but, in reality, we are being breathed.”
— Arianna Huffington, Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder
Tagged: Inside Outside
“The simplest reply was given by Tolstoy with his statement, 'Science is meaningless because it has no answer to the only questions that matter to us: What should we do? How shall we live?’ The fact that science cannot give us this answer is absolutely indisputable. The question is only in what sense does it give 'no' answer, and whether or not it might after all prove useful for somebody who is able to ask the right question.”
— Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures
Tagged: Epistemology, Knowledge, Liberal Arts, Science
“And anyone who lacks the ability to don blinkers for once and to convince himself that the destiny of his soul depends upon whether he is right to make precisely this conjecture and no other at this point in his manuscript should keep well away from science. He will never be able to submit to what we may call the 'experience' of science. In the absence of this strange intoxication that outsiders greet with a pitying smile, without this passion, this conviction that 'millennia had to pass before you were born, and millennia more must wait in silence' to see if your conjecture will be confirmed— without this you do not possess this vocation for science and should turn your hand to something else. For nothing has any value for a human being as a human being unless he can pursue it with passion.”
— Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures
Tagged: Intellectualism, Passion, Vocation