Quotes About Definition

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

If blood alone is what defines us, no child born is born in freedom.

Not according to your definition. It appears Andromeda has taken a vow of celibacy." Naasir groaned. "I think I should jump off into traffic. It'd be less painful than such torture.

An especially damaging form of contradiction is self-referential absurdity—which means a theory sets up a definition of truth that it itself fails to meet. Therefore it refutes itself.

To protect women's rights, we must be able to say what a woman is. If postmodernism is correct—that the body itself is a social construct—then it becomes impossible to argue for rights based on the sheer fact of being female. We cannot legally protect a category of people if we cannot identify that category.

Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn't. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not. Tap on it and it's hollow. Look under the shells: it's not there.

In the beginning, therefore, the most important work is of separation. It is of pulling apart the tangled threads. It is of saying "This shall be separate from that. This shall be water, this shall be sky, and this shall be the line between them, the horizon." It is of setting a line between them.

There is no shape to anything except the shape it has. Every name we give ourselves is wrong.

But there's no denying that it's Iris Keller who walks out. Emerald eyes, obsidian hair, legs for days. Beautiful. The definition of the word. The only definition.

By the classic definition, a hormone is a substance secreted by one tissue that travels through blood or another body fluid to another tissue, whereupon the hormone arouses the encountered tissue to a new state of activity.

Our missiology has always been clearly defined for us and our ecclesiology has been inherited, healthy or not.

To name a thing was to own, control and understand it.

A drawn line can be many things," he says, whereas a digitized line has to be just one thing.27

Everybody has a notion of what a desert should look like. Effective definitions of deserts vary according to the background of those doing the defining and the purpose of their enquiry. An artist's approach to deserts may be different from the stance taken by a scientist although, broadly, the two usually overlap geographically. It may, or may not, be surprising to learn that no universally accepted definition of the term 'desert' exists.

Gnosticism and Christianity start from the same point, but go in different directions. From the same definition of the human condition, Christianity infers that man is a creature, while the Gnostic infers he is a god.

What is "rational" consists in prolonging life, avoiding pain, satisfying the appetite for hunger and sex. Only some such definition sheds any light on the discourse of the last centuries.

I can call nothing by name if that is not his name. I call a cat a cat, and Rollet a rogue.

When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything?

When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything?

The power of recursion evidently lies in the possibility of defining an infinite set of objects by a finite statement. In the same manner, an infinite number of computations can be described by a finite recursive program, even if this program contains no explicit repetitions.

To discover the history of women and art is in part to account for the way art history is written. To expose its underlying values, its assumptions, its silences and its prejudices is also to understand that the way women artists are recorded is crucial to the definition of art and artists in our society.

For a word to be a word, it has to refer to something that is not a word.

We then discover that we have no word, corresponding to "poem" in poetry or "play" in drama, to describe a work of literary art. It is all very well for Blake to say that to generalize is to be an idiot, but when we find ourselves in the cultural situation of savages who have words for ash and willow and no word for tree, we wonder if there is not such a thing as being too deficient in the capacity to generalize.

i done forgot all abt words aint got no definitions