Quotes About Imagination

About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.

If something did go terribly wrong in human history – and given the current state of the world, it's hard to deny something did – then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part of human history.

Bureaucracies, I've suggested, are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity--of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence.

Freedom is our ability to make things up just for the sake of being able to do so.

The war against the imagination is the only one the capitalists have actually managed to win.

All of this would explain why revolutionary moments always seem to be followed by an outpouring of social, artistic, and intellectual creativity. Normally unequal structures of imaginative identification are disrupted; everyone is experimenting with trying to see the world from unfamiliar points of view; everyone feels not only the right, but usually the immediate practical need to re-create and reimagine everything around them.

As the events of 2011 reveal, the age of revolutions is by no means over. The human imagination stubbornly refuses to die. And the moment any significant number of people simultaneously shake off the shackles that have been placed on that collective imagination, even our most deeply inculcated assumptions about what is and is not politically possible have been known to crumble overnight.

What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves? SOME

Pure greed and pure generosity are complementary concepts; neither could really be imagined without the other;

What if the sort of people we like to imagine as simple and innocent are free of rulers, governments, bureaucracies, ruling classes and the like, not because they are lacking in imagination, but because they're actually more imaginative than we are?

We are projects of self-creation. What f we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling. story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?

The fact that we find it hard to imagine how such an alternative life could be endlessly engaging and interesting is perhaps more a reflection on the limits of our imaginations than on the life itself.

If artistic avant-gardes and social revolutionaries have felt a peculiar affinity for one another ever since, borrowing each other's languages and ideas, it appears to have been insofar as both have remained committed to the idea that the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently. In this sense, a phrase like "all power to the imagination" expresses the very quintessence of the Left.

All such authors are really saying is that they themselves cannot personally imagine any other way that precious objects might move about. But lack of imagination is not itself an argument.

To be fair, they don't deny that human beings are quirky and imaginative creatures - they just seem to reason that, in the long run, this fact makes very little difference. Those who don't follow an optimal pathway for the use of resources are destined for the ash heap of history.

lack of imagination is not itself an argument.

One gets the sense that indigenous life was, to put it very crudely, just a lot more interesting than life in a 'Western' town or city, especially insofar as the latter involved long hours of monotonous, repetitive, conceptually empty activity. The fact that we find it hard to imagine how such an alternative life could be endlessly engaging and interesting is perhaps more a reflection on the limits of our imagination than on the life itself.

We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), a reclusive, near-deaf, self-taught rural schoolteacher who, working alone and having almost no contact with the wider scientific community, invented ingenious engineering designs for multistage rockets, orbiting space colonies, and interplanetary craft. Though

for the first time ever the majority of children being born today will never in their lives directly see the Milky Way galaxy. The cosmic connection has never been closer or more remote. Age

She had not yet sensed the pea beneath the pile of mattresses, the pea that belonged to the little brown-skinned girl who used to make up stories to keep her soul pinned down inside her or, at times, to let it fly—stories whose most exciting element was the word "suddenly" at the beginning of every sentence and before each description: Suddenly, suddenly, her heart would leap when she whispered to herself, suddenly .

Cuando escribimos, sentimos que el mundo se mueve, es flexible y está lleno de posibilidades. Ciertamente no está congelado

The primary urge that motivates and engenders writing...is the writer's desire to invent and tell a story, and to know himself. But the more I write, the more I feel the force of the other urge, which collaborates with and completes the first one: the desire to know the Other from within him. To feel what it means to be another person. To be able to touch, if only for a moment, the blaze that burns within another human being.

We write. How fortunate we are: The world does not close in on us. The world does not grow smaller.