#discourse

The level of discourse in this country is falling to a depth that cannot be sustained. ↗

— Martin Frost

#country #depth #discourse #falling #level

But ultimately what I was impressed by during my years in government was how much the intellectual climate and the prevailing intellectual notions constrained and represented the universe within which the discourse took place. ↗

— Lawrence Summers

#constrained #discourse #during #government #how

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing. ↗

— Neil Postman

#elections #irrelevance #media #nate-silver #news

Discourse is not life; its time is not your time; in it, you will not be reconciled to death; you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying you will make a man that will live longer than he. ↗

— Michel Foucault

#god #language #writing #death

Liberty is like those solid and tasty foods or those full-bodied wines which are appropriate for nourishing and strengthening robust constitutions that are used to them, but which overpower, ruin and intoxicate the weak and delicate who are not suited for them. ↗

— Rousseau Jean-Jacques

#freedom #liberty #weak #food

as soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency. ↗

— Slavoj Žižek

#fiction #ideology #imaginary #philosophy #real

On the other side, I do believe that the rhetoric we are seeing from the Democrats today is unprecedented, is a new low in presidential politics and goes beyond political discourse and amounts to political hate speech. ↗

— Ed Gillespie

#beyond #democrats #discourse #goes #hate

Every discourse, even a poetic or oracular sentence, carries with it a system of rules for producing analogous things and thus an outline of methodology. ↗

— Jacques Derrida

#carries #discourse #even #every #methodology

Good company and good discourse are the very sinews of virtue. ↗

— Izaak Walton

#discourse #good #good company #sinews #very

With Barack Obama as president and the super-happening Michelle Obama as First Lady, you would think a new tone, a new tune, a kicky new jazzitude, would have entered Washington discourse, but it remains a landlocked island unto itself, held captive by its tribal fevers. ↗

— James Wolcott

#barack obama #captive #discourse #entered #fevers