Quotes About Plurality

Never think you speak for all of yourself.

The plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real. Vedantic philosophy... has sought to clarify it by a number of analogies, one of the most attractive being the many-faceted crystal which, while showing hundreds of little pictures of what is in reality a single existent object, does not really multiply that object.

Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown; … there is only one thing and that, what seems to be a plurality, is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception (the Indian MAYA); the same illusion is produced in a gallery of mirrors …

Do not ever expect that anything applies completely to one person.

We are a country where people of all backgrounds, all nations of origin, all languages, all religions, all races, can make a home. America was built by immigrants.

I think it's important to be reminded that that's what this country is comprised of - people from other countries.

The United States is historically a nation of immigrants.

America has long been the land of immigrants.

That's what this country is. It's made up of immigrants.

it's easy to forget that England is made up of many Englands

people are taken much too seriously. one equals no one. anything less than two hundred at a time is not worth mentioning. of course, anybody can be of a different opinion. an opinion is of no consequence whatever. any level-headed man can level headedly adopt two or three different opinions.

To become self-aware, people must be allowed to hear a plurality of opinions and then make up their own minds. They must be allowed to say, write and publish whatever they want. Freedom of expression is the most basic, but fundamental, right. Without it, human beings are reduced to automatons.

The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility??of being unable to undo what one has done??is the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. Both faculties depend upon plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no man can forgive himself and no one can be bound by a promise made only to himself.

Exasperation with the threefold frustration of action -- the unpredictability of its outcome, the irreversibility of the process, and the anonymity of its authors -- is almost as old as recorded history. It has always been a great temptation, for men of action no less than for men of thought, to find a substitute for action in the hope that the realm of human affairs may escape the haphazardness and moral irresponsibility inherent in a plurality of agents.

The curious sterility of utopias comes from the absence within them of any scope for initiative, any room for plurality.

Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.

Trust me, there are as many ways of living as there are men, and one is no more fit to lead another, than a bird to lead a fish, or a fish a quadruped.

Y cuanto más vivo más convencido estoy de que cuando digo yo en realidad estoy diciendo nosotros.

Writing novels means being plural, being divided among your creatures and suffering with them.

In diversity there is beauty and there is strength.

Sadly, at a time when so much sophisticated cultural criticism by hip intellectuals from diverse locations extols a vision of cultural hybridity, border crossing, subjectivity constructed out of plurality, the vast majority of folks in this society still believe in a notion of identity that is rooted in a sense of essential traits and characteristics that are fixed and static.

Funny is funny, and it can come in 8 billion different shades and flavors, so I think it's silly to kind of limit it.

Treating 'life' as an object to which we are more or less adequate excises crucial elements from life just at the very time that we are living it: such elements as sleep, rest, laziness, and the absence of labour, energy, and work. To say that these kinds of stasis are not living is not only to limit the plurality of life but to make it lopsided, tipping it towards the stresses that we find in modernity's cult of perpetual activity.

It brings us to a confrontation with that important perception of Finnegans Wake, that its apparent sense of affirmation, plurality, and multiplicity shades into or hides a stronger idea of nullity. From the infinitely meaningful, universally affirming, it is a short step to the opposite, to indifference, to voids of meaning and value.