Quotes About Discourse

One reason that the church has become so bitterly divided over moral issues is that the community of faith has uncritically accepted the categories of popular U.S. discourse about these topics, without subjecting them to sustained critical scrutiny in light of a close reading of the Bible.

have found by experience that an ignorant man who has been an unprofitable hearer has received more knowledge and remorse of conscience in half an hour's close discourse than he did in ten years of public preaching. I know that the public preaching of the gospel is the most excellent means of conversion because we speak to many at once, but it is usually far more effectual to preach it privately to an individual sinner.

Power is the ability to take one's place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one's part matter.

Knowledge is not made for understanding it is made for cutting.

Prayer is not a discourse. It is a form of life, the life with God. That is why it is not confined to the moment of verbal statement.

A beast, that wants discourse of reason.

Although he was less successful in turning back the New Deal than he had been in promoting the progressive agenda that preceded and prepared the nation for it, he set the terms for the counter-progressive ideological assault that would enter—and, at times, dominate—the nation's political discourse from the mid-1930s onward.

The metaphor can be considered in some sense and under some circumstances to be a kind of sleight of hand by means of which meanings can be surreptitiously smuggled into an apparently innocent discourse.

A metaphor then, we might reasonably surmise, is not necessarily a matter of simple one-to-one equivalences ('this stands for that'), but neither is it a process of ornamentation of something that could have been more clearly said in another, simpler way; rather, in this case at least […] it is the very substance of the discourse.

Many of my colleagues operate from a mistaken notion that rational thought can come from only objective discourse, devoid of emotions. To me, speaking from the heart and with passion is not antagonistic to reason.

Which is why I stayed long enough to buy every man a pint and winnow out at least a little kernel of wheaty truth from the chaff of gossip.

The French equate intelligence with rational discourse, the Russians with intense soul-searching. For the Mexican, intelligence is inseparable from maliciousness.

Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.

Contention is inseparable from creating knowledge. It is not contention we should try to avoid, but discourses that attempt to suppress contention.

Reading makes a full man, meditation a profound man, discourse a clear man.

The fury to unveil the truth, to get at the naked truth, the one which haunts all discourses of interpretation, the obscene rage to uncover the secret, is proportionate to the impossibility of ever achieving this.

Few anglophones realize that by keeping French words in the "upper stratum" of their discourse, they are granting French a lofty position in their language and culture. As they export English all around the world, French and its high status have become part of the package. It's one of the least-known explanations for the resilience of French today.

Dites-en du bien, dites-en du mal, mais dites-en quelque chose.

To transform the unconscious into discourse is to bypass the dynamics, to become complicit with the whole of Western ratio, which kills art at the same time as the dream. One does not in the least break with metaphysics by placing language everywhere.

Scientific knowledge is a kind of discourse.

Indeed, theological discourse offers its strange jubilation only to the strict extent that it permits and, dangerously, demands of it wokman that he speak beyond his means, precisely because he does not speak of himself. Hence the danger of a speech that, in a sense, speaks against the one who lends himself to it. One must obtain forgiveness for every essay in theology. In all senses.

criticisms of the actions of the state of Israel and antisemitism are conflated in many statements and in actions taken against the state of Israel.

To be clear, I worry as much about the impact of the Internet as anyone else. I worry about shortening attention spans, the physical cost of sedentary 'surfing' and the potential for coarsening discourse as millions of web pages compete for attention by appealing to our base instincts.

The artificial separation of politics and culture is nowhere more pronounced than in the discourse of foreign policy and international affairs.