Quotes About Ambiguity

in between. It's like the whole thing is winking at us.

With Johnson, you never quite knew if he was out to lift your heart or your wallet. Roy Wilkins

And, in fact, had Johnson's plan succeeded, in many ways it would indeed have been "just the way it was.

He never took strong positions, positions where you knew where Lyndon stood," one student had said. "He was only interested in himself and what could help himself." The feeling in Washington was the same.

Matt, you are suffering from a disease of youth—you expect moral problems to have nice, neat, black-and-white answers.

It does not pay a prophet to be too specific." —L. Sprague de Camp

But the underlying biblical conception of character is often unpredictable, in some ways impenetrable, constantly emerging from and slipping back into a penumbra of ambiguity, in fact has greater affinity with dominant modern notions than do the habits of conceiving character typical of the Greek epics.

There is no complete theory of anything.

You asked me what linguistics I find most pernicious. I started with is. The either/or habit is very pernicious. It seems very pernicious to me, I mean. Two-valued situations are relatively rare, actually.

Between choices, we evidently return to the maybe state until we make another choice. Existence precedes essence, remember?

Sigismundo Celine, in the woods of Ohio, meditated. To him all phenomena were real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense.

It seems to me that existence — at this point I have doubts about the universe — is a lot like a Rorschach ink-blot. Everybody looks at it and sees their own favorite reality-tunnel.

If you think about it from the perspective of E-Prime, the world consists mostly of UFOs and UNFOs. Very few things (space-time events) in the air or on the ground give us the opportunity to identify them with certainty.

Whether we like it or not, many of our pop artists today play post-modernist games with their audiences.

It was mass hallucination. It was not mass hallucination. It was both mass hallucination and not mass hallucination. It was neither mass hallucination nor not mass hallucination.

Yes, it was mass hallucination. No, it was not mass hallucination. Maybe it was mass hallucination.

We never find out how many of the people "framed" by Quinlan actually committed the crimes for which he framed them — just as we never find out the definite position of a quantum particle, or how many Picassos we should really call Elmyrs. Post-modernism does not result from whim, but from growing evidence that we simply do not live in an Aristotelian true/false universe. As UMMO says, we live with a middle (or muddle) excluded by Aristotle.

Keep her origins a mystery.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who do not.

Do shadows cast shadows of their own?

There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing.

The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

Life does not provide answers, only questions.

Stephanie was still holding his hand, and Scott was wondering what she meant by it when an enormous Bentley sedan appeared at the end of the street, as out of place in this neighborhood as a flying carpet, windows up, smoked glass, not a speck of dust on its gleaming skin. Stephanie