#ma

Nie można zrozumieć ani życia jednostki, ani życia społeczeństwa, nie odnosząc jednego do drugiego. ↗

— Charles Wright Mills

#society #sociology #imagination

Like casinos, large corporate entities have studied the numbers and the ways in which people respond to them. These are not con tricks - they're not even necessarily against our direct interests, although sometimes they can be - but they are hacks for the human mind, ways of manipulating us into particular decisions we otherwise might not make. They are also, in a way, deliberate underminings of the core principle of the free market, which derives its legitimacy from the idea that informed self-interest on aggregate sets appropriate prices for items. The key word is 'informed'; the point of behavioural economics - or rather, of its somewhat buccaneering corporate applications - is to skew our perception of the purchase to the advantage of the company. The overall consequence of that is to tilt the construction of our society away from what it should be if we were making the rational decisions classical economics imagines we would, and towards something else. ↗

— Nick Harkaway

#choice #corporations #economics #information #power

They spell-caught the sounds of cat paws, the breath of fish, the spittle of birds, the hairs of a woman's beard, and the roots of a mountain, and spun them around the sinews of a bear. That made a bond that looked as fine as a ribbon of silk, but, since it was made of things not in this world, it was so strong nothing in the world could break it. ↗

— Ingri d'Aulaire

#imagery #imagination #myth #imagination

Then she'd stared at him with those radiant blue eyes and asked him to let her go. And bugger, bugger, bigger, he'd suddenly imagined he was sodding Sir Galahad. ↗

— Anna Campbell

#imagination

…growing a little tiresome on account of some mysterious internal discomfort that the local practitioner diagnosed as imagination ↗

— H.G. Wells

#imagination

There is no such thing as self-awareness. Imagine thought retreating into itself to think about itself. It would be easier to imagine a revolver bullet extracting itself from its victim's wound and re-entering the barrel. Yes, it would be easier to imagine the universe's explosion suddenly halting its outflow of energy, so that the galaxies congeal once more, and the millions of light-years of their flight through space are immediately annulled. ↗

— J.M.G. Le Clézio

#thought #imagination

So maybe now I might be imagining what it would be like to kiss him again, but that didn’t mean anything. ↗

— Monica Alexander

#imagination

Taking a couple short backup swigs, Flint’s crippling headache started to release its grip, sort of the way he imagined an octopus would release an inedible bowling ball. ↗

— Cole Alpaugh

#bowling #circus #drinking #headache #imagination

There are plenty of good reason for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive. "It's that part of an imbecile," I said, "that punishes and vilifies and makes war. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#make-war #imagination

Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying. ↗

— Theodor W. Adorno

#imagination