Quotes About Blank slate

You've got the second-system problem where people who've had some success are given a blank slate and allowed to do whatever they want. Generally, they will fail because they'll be too ambitious, they won't understand the limits. And you get nothing out of that. You have to have extreme discipline to say, "It's not a blank slate; it's reimplementing what we had here; it's doing what we knew.

Sometimes the best experiences are when I know nothing about this movie: I've never met the director, and I come and see something and I'm blank, because then it's coming at you in a way it would never come at you if you'd read the script, with an expectation.

A clean slate, did he say? As if the initial word of each our destiny were not graven in imperishable characters upon the face of a rock.

I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing, absolutely nothing about Europe.

I try and reduce myself to an almost blank slate and hope to God that I am creative.

Nothing can come of nothing.

It's only at first sight,when the mind's a blank slate,that you get the purest look. So I fold the flap back,and write: Tumbleweeds.

'Trolls' was a blank slate - there was no world, no mythology. We talked a lot about the Grinch and we liked how they showed his heart growing, but how do you show a photographable device like that for the Bergens? We ended up using color for a lot of that: desaturating and then pulling the saturation up.

Set aside a half hour or an hour to rethink the way you make decisions, the habits you have, the biases you may have. And if you think of things, if you come with a little bit of a blank slate and be willing to acknowledge what you don't know, and you'd be willing to think like a child, I think it'll help not only individuals but society at large.

Where there is nothing, there is the possibility of everything.

While Money's theory of human newborns as total psychosexual blank slates may strike a contemporary reader as science fiction, such was not the case in the mid-1950s, when it was met with almost universal acceptance by clinicians and scientists

A man without a past, he thought, can write any future.

There is a character that you're born with, and there are tendencies that are prior to what your parents have socialized you into. There are definitely tendencies among girls to do certain things in certain ways, and there are tendencies in boys to do certain things, prior to socialization. Then socialization can enforce certain things or play down certain things. But you're not dealing with a totally blank slate.

Start with a blank surface. It doesn't have to be paper or canvas, but I feel it should be white. We call it white because we need a word, but its true name is nothing. Black is the absence of light, but white is the absence of memory, the color of can't remember.

The Blank Slate is today's Great Chain of Being: a doctrine that is widely embraced as a rationale for meaning and morality and that is under assault from the sciences of the day. As in the century following Galilee, our moral sensibilities will adjust to the biological facts, not only because facts are facts but because the moral credentials of the Blank Slate are just as spurious.

Bertrand Russell wrote, "Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day." For intellectuals today, many of those convictions are about psychology and social relations. I will refer to those convictions as the Blank Slate: the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves.

In this way the theory of human nature coming out of the cognitive revolution has more in common with the Judeo-Christian theory of human nature, and with the psychoanalytic theory proposed by Sigmund Freud, than with behaviorism, social constructionism, and other versions of the Blank Slate. Behavior is not just emitted or elicited, nor does it come directly out of culture or society. It comes from an internal struggle among mental modules with differing agendas and goals.

In The Blank Slate I argued that two extreme visions of human nature—a Tragic vision that is resigned to its flaws, and a Utopian vision that denies it exists—define the great divide between right-wing and left-wing political ideologies.154

the Blank Slate had, and has, a dark side. The vacuum that it posited in human nature was eagerly filled by totalitarian regimes, and it did nothing to prevent their genocides. It perverts education, childrearing, and the arts into forms of social engineering. It torments mothers who work outside the home and parents whose children did not turn out as they would have liked. It threatens to outlaw biomedical research that could alleviate human suffering.

The idea that man is a tabula rasa, or Mao's sheet of blank paper upon which the most beautiful characters can be written, is an old one with disastrous implications. I do not think though that the cults you mention could survive honest thought about human nature.

this cryptic game of hide-and-seek is what makes it one of the greatest historical mysteries. So many of the symbols can be interpreted in so many different ways, there's always the possibility that all we're really looking at is a blank slate onto which anything can be read.

To love shoes is to love problems. Every season, starting a new collection is my greatest challenge. The blank slate in front of me, starting the process all over again, there is no greater challenge.

For me, actresses are constantly chameleons, and so they are taking a backseat to their own personality. I don't feel like we're trying to show off their personality as much as let them be a blank slate. It's precisely the reason why I dress more musicians than I do actresses.

I brought my personality to HQ. I injected my DNA into this thing. They gave me a blank slate to work with.