#reaction

Every once in a while, however, the subordinates of this world contest their fates. They protest their conditions, write letters and petitions, join movements, and make demands. Their goals may be minimal and discrete — better safety guards on factory machines, an end to marital rape—but in voicing them, they raise the specter of a more fundamental change in power. They cease to be servants or supplicants and become agents, speaking and acting on their own behalf. More than the reforms themselves, it is this assertion of agency by the subject class—the appearance of an insistent and independent voice of demand — that vexes their superiors. Guatemala’s Agrarian Reform of 1952 redistributed a million and a half acres of land to 100,000 peasant families. That was nothing, in the minds of the country’s ruling classes, compared to the riot of political talk the bill seemed to unleash. Progressive reformers, Guatemala’s arch-bishop complained, sent local peasants “gifted with facility with words” to the capital, where they were given opportunities “to speak in public.” That was the great evil of the Agrarian Reform. ↗

— Corey Robin

#reactionary-politics #change

As soon as I had proved this and, of course, also the normal pointing action and reactions in all other extremities and joints, I stopped the experiment. ↗

— Robert Barany

#also #course #experiment #had #i

Every chemical reaction has a transition state. ↗

— Derek Harold Richard Barton

#every #reaction #state #transition

Successfully functioning in a society with diverse values, traditions and lifestyles requires us to have a relationship to our own reactions rather than be captive of them. To resist our tendencies to make right or true, that which is nearly familiar, and wrong or false, that which is only strange. ↗

— Robert Kegan

#lifestyles #reactions #society #tendencies #traditions

I am sure that in Canada the people appreciate this principle, and the general intelligence which prevails over that country is such that I am sure there is no danger of a reactionary policy ever finding a response in the hearts of any considerable number of our people. ↗

— Alexander Mackenzie

#any #appreciate #canada #considerable #considerable number

I try not to get too rattled about things that aren't that important - there's a different outburst for when the kids are reaching for a knife in the kitchen versus the reaction I have when they just won't stop talking. And my wife and I have mellowed out as we've gone along. ↗

— Chris O'Donnell

#along #different #get #gone #i

It is not important for me as a writer that you leave a piece of writing of mine with either an agreement or even a resonance with what I have said. What is important is that you leave with the resonance of what you have felt and what you thought in reaction to that. ↗

— Ben Okri

#either #even #felt #i #important

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever. ↗

— George Orwell

#books #constantly #exceptionally #exhausting #feeling

Now that virtually every career is an option for ambitious girls, it can no longer be considered regressive or reactionary to reintroduce discussion of marriage and motherhood to primary education. We certainly do not want to return to the simplistic duality of home economics classes for girls and wood shop for boys. ↗

— Camille Paglia

#career #certainly #classes #considered #discussion

There is something very basic to the sense of listening. The sense of hearing is the only one that operates totally from vibrations, without other physical or chemical reactions to receive the sensations. ↗

— Henry Reed

#chemical #chemical reactions #hearing #listening #only