#construct

Each of us is carving a stone, erecting a column, or cutting a piece of stained glass in the construction of something much bigger than ourselves. ↗

— Adrienne Clarkson

#carving #column #construction #cutting #each

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#advertising #brokerage #business #cannot #constructive

My icons do not raise up the blessed savior in elaborate cathedrals. They are constructed concentrations celebrating barren rooms. They bring a limited light. ↗

— Dan Flavin

#blessed #bring #cathedrals #celebrating #concentrations

The great sin was adopting the 21st Century's Socialism, something that not even its founder, Ditrich knows exactly what it is, though he says it is under construction. ↗

— Rafael Correa

#century #construction #even #exactly #founder

Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one. ↗

— Anatole France

#against #believers #certain #constructing #degree

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed. ↗

— Clifford Geertz

#historically #meaning #socially

If China wants to be a constructive, active player in the world economy, it's got to respect intellectual property rights or it makes it pretty impossible to do business with them. ↗

— Dan Glickman

#business #china #constructive #economy #got

There is a strange emptiness to life without myths. I am African American — by which I mean, a descendant of slaves, rather than a descendant of immigrants who came here willingly and with lives more or less intact. My ancestors were the unwilling, unintact ones: children torn from parents, parents torn from elders, people torn from roots, stories torn from language. Past a certain point, my family’s history just… stops. As if there was nothing there. I could do what others have done, and attempt to reconstruct this lost past. I could research genealogy and genetics, search for the traces of myself in moldering old sale documents and scanned images on microfiche. I could also do what members of other cultures lacking myths have done: steal. A little BS about Atlantis here, some appropriation of other cultures’ intellectual property there, and bam! Instant historically-justified superiority. Worked great for the Nazis, new and old. Even today, white people in my neck of the woods call themselves “Caucasian”, most of them little realizing that the term and its history are as constructed as anything sold in the fantasy section of a bookstore. These are proven strategies, but I have no interest in them. They’ll tell me where I came from, but not what I really want to know: where I’m going. To figure that out, I make shit up. ↗

— N.K. Jemisin

#constructs #making-stuff-up #myth #personal-history #family

I think that looking forward it's easy to imagine more constructive help for Haiti. ↗

— Paul Farmer

#easy #forward #haiti #help #i

The position the Government finds itself in is not one of constructing a law, but of carrying out a decision given by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. ↗

— Charles Tupper

#committee #constructing #council #decision #finds