#paradox

The modern West has been deeply split about freedom and responsibility. On the one hand, it has championed human freedom in many forms - human rights, sexual freedom, political liberty, freedom to choose in many spheres. On the other hand, many of its most intelligent members have not believed that people are free at all, and have devoted great efforts to show that really we are the product of our genes, our unconscious drives, our education, economic pressures, or other forms of conditioning. ↗

— David F. Ford

#freedom #modernity #paradox #education

Where consumption is both conspicuous and competitive, humanity will never run out of new wishes. All the while, industry creates new desires that are marketed, in the great fashion paradox, as both novelty and need. ↗

— James Buchan

#competitive #conspicuous #consumption #creates #desires

As an actor, there's a bit of you that's decided you want to be looked at and watched, but there's a paradoxical bit that wants to run away. ↗

— Ralph Fiennes

#away #bit #decided #looked #paradoxical

Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want. ↗

— John Fowles

#end #marriages #most #paradox #passion

The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent. ↗

— Erich Fromm

#away #become #child #fully #grow

In its quest to discover how the patterns of reality are organised, the story of modern science hints at a picture of a set of Chinese puzzle boxes, each one more intricately structured and wondrous than the last. Every time the final box appears to have been reached, a key has been found which has opened up another, revealing a new universe even more breathtakingly improbable in its conception. We are now forced to suspect that, for human reason, there is no last box, that in some deeply mysterious, virtually unfathomable, self-reflective way, every time we open a still smaller box, we are actually being brought closer to the box with which we started, the box which contains our own conscious experience of the world. This is why no theory of knowledge, no epistemology, can ever escape being consumed by its own self-generated paradoxes. And this is why we must consider the universe to be irredeemably mystical. ↗

— Bob Hamilton

#paradox #science #experience

It is a paradox that every dictator has climbed to power on the ladder of free speech. Immediately on attaining power each dictator has suppressed all free speech except his own. ↗

— Herbert Hoover

#climbed #dictator #each #every #except

By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox. ↗

— Galileo Galilei

#denying #maintain #may #paradox #principles

Paradoxically Americans are becoming both more obese and more nutrient deficient at the same time. Obese children eating processed foods are nutrient depleted and increasingly get scurvy and rickets, diseases we thought were left behind in the 19th and 20th centuries. ↗

— Mark E. Hyman

#behind #both #centuries #children #deficient

Men have two greatest fears: the first fear is the fear of being needed, and the second fear is the fear of not being needed. ↗

— C. JoyBell C.

#fears #life-and-living #men #men-s-fears #paradox