#paradox

Eroding solidarity paradoxically makes a society more susceptible to the construction of substitute collectives and fascisms of all kinds. ↗

— Elfriede Jelinek

#eroding #kinds #makes #more #paradoxically

Failures of perspective in decision-making can be due to aspects of the social utility paradox, but more often result from simple mistakes caused by inadequate thought. ↗

— Herman Kahn

#caused #decision-making #due #failures #inadequate

But, I think that the reason I responded to this book, sort of paradoxically, is that it starts out like The Big Chill, sort of. Four friends, who are not quite happy with their life, and every year they get together for a week and look for some comfort from each other. ↗

— Lawrence Kasdan

#book #chill #comfort #each #every

This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything. One of the first measures taken by the new Bolshevik government in 1918 was to make public the entire corpus of tsarist secret diplomacy, all the secret agreements, the secret clauses of public agreements etc. There too the target was the entire functioning of the state apparatuses of power. ↗

— Slavoj Žižek

#philosophy #political-science #wikileaks #change

The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo. ↗

— Soren Kierkegaard

#else #embryo #exposed #grandiose #great

The words of truth are always paradoxical. ↗

— Lao Tzu

#paradoxical #truth #words

First she would try to kill him, but failing this give him food and her body, breast-feed him back to a state of childishness and even, perhaps, feel affection for him. Then, the moment he was asleep, cut his throat. The synopsis of the ideal marriage. ↗

— J.G. Ballard

#husband #j-g-ballard #james-graham-ballard #jg-ballard #marriage

It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it. ↗

— Arnold J. Toynbee

#ambitious #beyond #goal #important #itself

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly. ↗

— Alan Watts

#appear #find #paradoxes #particularly #study

There is a strange duality in the human which makes for an ethical paradox. We have definitions of good qualities and of bad; not changing things, but generally considered good and bad throughout the ages and throughout the species. Of the good, we think always of wisdom, tolerance, kindliness, generosity, humility; and the qualities of cruelty, greed, self-interest, graspingness, and rapacity are universally considered undesirable. And yet in our structure of society, the so-called and considered good qualities are invariable concomitants of failure, while the bad ones are the cornerstones of success…Perhaps no other animal is so torn between alternatives. Man might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox. ↗

— John Steinbeck

#paradox #age