#quality

People enjoy inventing slogans which violate basic arithmetic but which illustrate “deeper” truths, such as “1 and 1 make 1” (for lovers), or “1 plus 1 plus 1 equals 1” (the Trinity). You can easily pick holes in those slogans, showing why, for instance, using the plus-sign is inappropriate in both cases. But such cases proliferate. Two raindrops running down a window-pane merge; does one plus one make one? A cloud breaks up into two clouds -more evidence of the same? It is not at all easy to draw a sharp line between cases where what is happening could be called “addition”, and where some other word is wanted. If you think about the question, you will probably come up with some criterion involving separation of the objects in space, and making sure each one is clearly distinguishable from all the others. But then how could one count ideas? Or the number of gases comprising the atmosphere? Somewhere, if you try to look it up, you can probably fin a statement such as, “There are 17 languages in India, and 462 dialects.” There is something strange about the precise statements like that, when the concepts “language” and “dialect” are themselves fuzzy. ↗

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

#mathematics #truth #equality

Assumptions equal a loss of pride and the sting of defeat. ↗

— Donna Lynn Hope

#assumptions #defeat #equality

I oppose same-sex marriage but I would advance equal rights in employment for gay and lesbian people. I appointed a few judges who were gay and I had few people in my cabinet that I found out were gay. I never asked peoples sexual orientation. ↗

— Mitt Romney

#gay-and-lesbian #lgbt-rights #same-sex-marriage #equality

Women! They madly love Casanovas for their traits and equally hate them for being disloyal. ↗

— Himmilicious

#playboy #women #equality

He did not believe in having a sock drawer or a T-shirt drawer. He believed that all drawers were created equal and filled each with whatever fit. My mother would have died. ↗

— John Green

#equality

Justice in a fallen world is not equality of outcome but equal treatment under a fair law. ↗

— Kevin DeYoung

#justice #equality

Have you noticed how Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen look nothing alike, and yet they both manage to look exactly like their father, Martin? ↗

— Ken O'Neill

#equality #fiction #humor #equality

Whether one showed you and execution or a little finger, you would extract an equally edifying thought from both of them, and would still be content. That's the way to get on in life. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#equality

Revealingly, the central function of the Constitution as law--the supreme law--was to impose limitations not on the behavior of ordinary citizens but on the federal government. The government, and those who ran it, were not placed outside the law, but expressly targeted by it. Indeed, the Bill of Rights is little more than a description of the lines that the most powerful political officials are barred from crossing, even if they have the power to do so and even when the majority of citizens might wish them to do so. ↗

— Glenn Greenwald

#constitution #law #politics #equality

It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have. ↗

— Ian Mcewan

#equality