Quotes About Texts

I despise the religions we have, nothing but flummery and manipulation based on texts and materials so reworked over time they're all meaningless. I despise the division religions religions bring; humans have enough problems without that. I despise con men like Father Melly. And yet, and yet …

The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the 'American civil religion.' The president must invoke the name of God (though not Jesus), glorify America's heroes and history,quote its sacred texts (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), and perform the transubstantiation of pluribus unum.

What is new today is the premise that students are fragile. Even those who are not fragile themselves often believe that others are in danger and therefore need protection. There is no expectation that students will grow stronger from their encounters with speech or texts they label "triggering." (This is the Untruth of Fragility: What doesn't kill you makes you weaker.)

Or might that framework itself alter a student's reactions to ancient texts, creating a feeling of threat and a stress response to what otherwise would have been experienced merely as discomfort or dislike?

Though I thought there weren't any words any more, only fucking signifiers. And since texts have no objective univocal meaning, I feel sure that when I call you a bunch of moronic cunts you will be able to decode that sequence of sequential signifiers with the appropriate emancipated subjectivity.

at Heliopolis, where the Pyramid Texts were compiled, and announced ahead of time to all the other major temples up and down the Nile.53 I remembered that Sirius was referred to directly in the Pyramid Texts by 'her name of the New Year'.54 Together with other relevant utterances (e.g., 66955), this confirmed that the Sothic calendar

There are points in life when everything changes, and changes in a big way. The old sophistic texts refer to these points as synchrons. Synchrons supposedly tie great forces and personalities together. You can't predict them and you can't avoid them.

I think that writing texts, publishing texts, selling texts in a physical book store is one of the important tools for breeding this new generation.

The bibliographer in the digital age returns to the revelatory practice of her medieval forebears. Librarians, like those scribes of the Middle Ages, do not merely keep and classify texts; they create them, in the form of online finding aids, CD-ROM concordances, and other electronic texts, not to mention paper study guides and published bibliographies.

even though the orthodox claimed that this kind of manipulation of texts was a heretical activity, in the manuscripts of the New Testament that survive today almost all the evidence points in the other direction, showing that it was precisely orthodox scribes who modified their texts in order to make them conform more closely with orthodox theological interests.

So Jewish texts speak of the great angels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. These are divine powers far above humans, though far below God as well.

We knew about Gnostic forgeries for a long time before we actually had any of them.

One of the problems with ancient Greek texts (which would include all the earliest Christian writings, including those of the New Testament) is that when they were copied, no marks of punctuation were used, no distinction made between lowercase and uppercase letters, and, even more bizarre to modern readers, no spaces used to separate words. This kind of continuous writing is called scriptuo continua, and it obviously could make it difficult at times to read, let alone understand, a text.

we have no writings from them, or writings of any kind, in fact, from the first two decades of the Christian movement.

Religion thrives on woolly allegory, emotional commitments to texts that no one reads, and other forms of benign hypocrisy.

If there's anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common, it was an insistence that we energetically apply the standard of reason to understanding our world, and not fall back on generators of delusion like faith, dogma, revelation, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings, or the hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts.

I was astonished to learn in one of these best-selling books (on church life) that the size of my church parking lot had far more to do with how things fared in my congregation than my choice of texts in preaching. I was being lied to and I knew it.

Some of the poetic writers who insert passages of realism in their texts have no underlying philosophy to uphold them, and revert to realism.

As to texts, look at history; it, is known that all the texts have been falsified by the Jesuits.

There was a formula—a sort of list of things to say and do—which I recognised as something black and forbidden; something which I had read of before in furtive paragraphs of mixed abhorrence and fascination penned by those strange ancient delvers into the universe's guarded secrets whose decaying texts I loved to absorb.

If philosophy is practice, a demand to know the manner in which its history is to be studied is entailed: a theoretical attitude toward it becomes real only in the living appropriation of its contents from the texts.

Not only are magical texts among the oldest surviving pieces of literature, but many scholars and anthropologists suggest that it was the need to record spells and divination results that stimulated the very birth of writing.

The Bible is a profoundly liberating document, but there is no denying that it also contains deeply problematic texts—indeed, "texts of terror"2 that have adversely impacted the lives of women, slaves, Jews, Palestinians, Native Americans, and gays (to mention but a few). Such texts and prevalent interpretations of them may be described as "tyrannical" in the sense that they have legitimated the right of some to exercise unjust power or control over others. They

For me archaeology is not a source of illustrations for written texts, but an independent source of historical information, with no less value and importance, sometimes more importance, that the written sources.