Quotes About Contingent

As we shall see, the hardcore anticorset contingent included many (but by no means all) doctors and many (but by no means all) feminists. Medical ambivalence about corsetry may well have been related, at least, in part, to the profession's general opposition to feminist claims. But feminists and female doctors were themselves ambivalent about corsetry

History does not repeat itself. Nor does it unfold in cycles. The real future is contingent, rich beyond imagining, a perennial gobsmack, tragic and glorious in equal measure; the pundits' future, spun of 'conventional wisdom,' is only a sucker punch to that common-sense fact.

Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.

Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.

Commerce flourishes by circumstances, precarious, transitory, contingent, almost as the winds and waves that bring it to our shores.

Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit, a refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings.

The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.

Her prettiness was factual and obvious, the way a flag was patriotic or a puppy was cute—not an interesting prettiness, but also not contingent on taste.

There are two kinds of truths: those of reasoning and those of fact. The truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; the truths of fact are contingent and their opposites are possible.

So many truths have been kept from me. This violent, pointless voyage has been sopping with blood. I feel thick and sick with it. And that is all: contingent and brutal without meaning. There is nothing to be learnt here. No ecstatic forgetting. There is no redemption in the sea.

How can you expect my character to be solidly real, to be anything other than obviously imaginary, when everything is contingent anyway? My Character has been deformed out of reality by his own nihilism, his own metaphysical nothingness.

To expect a fact, is by definition to expect the isolated, it is for positivism, to prefer the 'accident' to the essential, the contingent to the necessary, disorder to order; it is in principle to reject the essential in the future:

Those who conceal from themselves this total freedom, under the guise of solemnity, or by making deterministic excuses, I will call cowards. Others, who try to prove their existence is necessary, when man's appearance on earth is merely contingent, I will call bastards.

Revolutionary man must be a contingent being, unjustifiable but free, entirely immersed in the society that oppresses him, but capable of transcending this society by his effort to change it. Idealism mystifies him in that it binds him by rights and values that are already given; it conceals from him his power to devise roads of his own. But materialism also mystifies him, by depriving him of his freedom. The revolutionary philosophy must be a philosophy of transcendence.

If the law is a bad law, there is always the contingent right to take action that you would not otherwise take.

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

Sales are contingent upon the attitude of the salesman - not the attitude of the prospect.

The outcome of political conflict is never certain, and even if in hindsight we see many historical events as inevitable, the path of history is contingent. Nevertheless, once in place, inclusive economic and political institutions tend to create a virtuous circle, a process of positive feedback, making it more likely that these institutions will persist and even expand.

Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection.

To say it another way, thinking, however abstract, originates in an embodied subjectivity, at once overdetermined and permeable to contingent events.

Is it possible that a contingent genesis can lead to necessary knowledge?

This is the satisfaction of a successful work of fiction--the internal coherence that reality does not have. Life as lived is disordered, undirected, and at the mercy of contingent events.

But I did know that opportunities were unlimited. For sale are contingent upon the attitude of the salesman-not the attitude of the prospect.

Sales are contingent upon the attitude of the salesman - not the attitude of the prospect.