#position

Don't kid yourself. President Obama's decision to withdraw 33,000 troops from Afghanistan before he stands for reelection is not driven by the United States' 'position of strength' in the war zone as much as it is by grim economic and political realities at home. ↗

— Ron Fournier

#before #decision #driven #economic #grim

The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture. ↗

— Sigmund Freud

#constitutes #culture #disposition #independent #innate

When the whole world has their eyes on you, if you say something that doesn't truly come from your spirit and your soul, or if you wear something that doesn't come from your spirit and your soul, it's an injustice to your position. And so, I'm really myself every single day and I do it because I know my fans would want me to. ↗

— Lady Gaga

#come #day #every #every single day #eyes

I would be surprised to see the White House scaling back on anything. That would be an admission they are operating from a position of weakness. ↗

— Rich Galen

#anything #back #house #i #operating

Woman is the opposite, the ‘other’ of man: she is non-man, defective man, assigned a chiefly negative value in relation to the male first principle. But equally man is what he is only by virtue of ceaselessly shutting out this other or opposite, defining himself in antithesis to it, and his whole identity is therefore caught up and put at risk in the very gesture by which he seeks to assert his unique, autonomous existence. Woman is not just an other in the sense of something beyond his ken, but an other intimately related to him as the image of what he is not, and therefore as an essential reminder of what he is. Man therefore needs this other even as he spurns it, is constrained to give a positive identity to what he regards as no-thing. Not only is his own being parasitically dependent upon the woman, and upon the act of excluding and subordinating her, but one reason why such exclusion is necessary is because she may not be quite so other after all. Perhaps she stands as a sign of something in man himself which he needs to repress, expel beyond his own being, relegate to a securely alien region beyond his own definitive limits. Perhaps what is outside is also somehow inside, what is alien also intimate — so that man needs to police the absolute frontier between the two realms as vigilantly as he does just because it may always be transgressed, has always been transgressed already, and is much less absolute than it appears. ↗

— Terry Eagleton

#derrida #feminism #gender #equality

One can tell or do whatever one wants when one is in the Opposition but once one is running a state, one cannot do that. ↗

— Sunil Gangopadhyay

#once #opposition #running #state #tell

Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide. ↗

— Henry Louis Gates

#american #bridge #child #divide #finally

But definitely, when a decision is taken, or when you are trying to oppose a decision, you are in a weaker position than the member states, because they know more about the situation than you. We gave information, but they never gave us any information. ↗

— Boutros Boutros-Ghali

#any #because #decision #definitely #gave

I am a realist as well as an idealist, and I think that it is incumbent upon those of us in opposition to try to work within what are always arduous circumstances to stretch the limits of the possible. ↗

— Todd Gitlin

#am #arduous #circumstances #i #i am

I've always felt that there's a point where a piece seems to be alive, that is, living. And that's the point where I know the composition is finished. ↗

— David Tudor

#always #composition #felt #finished #i