#abstract

We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat. ↗

— Terence McKenna

#across #barely #earth #flames #look

The type of contract between players and producers is, I feel, antiquated in form and abstract in concept. We have no privacies which producers cannot invade, they trade us like cattle, boss us like children. ↗

— Teresa Wright

#antiquated #between #boss #cannot #cattle

None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace. ↗

— Theodor Adorno

#closer #comes #concepts #eternal #eternal peace

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

— Theodor Adorno

#conception #concrete #responsibility #universal #vanishes

Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict. ↗

— Saul Alinsky

#change #conflict #friction #means #movement

O reason, reason, abstract phantom of the waking state, I had already expelled you from my dreams, now I have reached a point where those dreams are about to become fused with apparent realities: now there is only room here for myself. ↗

— Louis Aragon

#abstract #already #apparent #become #dreams

We invoke the sacrifices of our fallen heroes in the abstract, but we seldom take time to thank them individually. ↗

— Rahm Emanuel

#fallen #heroes #individually #invoke #our

There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men. ↗

— Epicurus

#abstract #between #compact #justice #merely

The economy is not an abstraction. The economy consists of people, and it will only grow if people feel secure and are reasonably free. ↗

— John Bruton

#consists #economy #feel #free #grow

It must be this overarching commitment to what is really an abstraction, to one's children right or wrong, that can be even more fierce than the commitment to them as explicit, difficult people, and that can consequently keep you devoted to them when as individuals they disappoint. On my part it was this broad covenant with children-in-theory that I may have failed to make and to which I was unable to resort when Kevin finally tested my maternal ties to a perfect mathematical limit on Thursday. I didn't vote for parties, but for candidates. My opinions were as ecumenical as my larder, then still chock full of salsa verde from Mexico City, anchovies from Barcelona, lime leaves from Bangkok. I had no problem with abortion but abhorred capital punishment, which I suppose meant that I embraced the sanctity of life only in grown-ups. My environmental habits were capricious; I'd place a brick in our toilet tank, but after submitting to dozens of spit-in-the-air showers with derisory European water pressure, I would bask under a deluge of scalding water for half an hour. My closet wafter with Indian saris, Ghanaian wraparounds, and Vietnamese au dais. My vocabulary was peppered with imports -- gemutlich, scusa, hugge, mzungu. I so mixed and matched the planet that you sometimes worried I had no commitments to anything or anywhere, though you were wrong; my commitments were simply far-flung and obscenely specific. By the same token, I could not love a child; I would have to love this one. I was connected to the world by a multitude of threads, you by a few sturdy guide ropes. It was the same with patriotism: You loved the idea of the United States so much more powerfully than the country itself, and it was thanks to your embrace of the American aspiration that you could overlook the fact that your fellow Yankee parents were lining up overnight outside FAO Schwartz with thermoses of chowder to buy a limited release of Nintendo. In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant little boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons triumph for eternity. Although neither of us ever went to church, I came to conclude that you were a naturally religious person. ↗

— Lionel Shriver

#parenting #patriotism #religion #life