Quotes About Context

You keep using that word!" the Spaniard snapped. "I don't think it means what you think it does.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. [ Inigo Montoya ]

You keep using that word!" the Spaniard snapped. "I don't think it means what you think it does." "How

But, to judge the action fairly, we must transport ourselves to the age when it happened.

Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations. On the other hand, the same thing recurring on different days, in different contexts, read, recited on, referred to again and again, related to other things and reviewed, gets well wrought into the mental structure.

Well, sometimes," Dane said, "Just because someone uses something wrong doesn't mean it's useless.

In the right context you can make words do all kinds of things.

Is it dangerous? Hmm. Well, define 'dangerous.' Is a knife 'dangerous'? Is Russian roulette 'dangerous'? Is arsenic 'dangerous'? ...It really depends on your perspective.

If I program 'ware with an Anglo-Ubiq word and play it, you understand it," Scile said. "If I do the same with a word in Language, and play it to an Ariekes, I understand it, but to them it means nothing, because it's only sound, and that's not where the meaning lives. It needs a mind behind it.

Statistics are rarely meaningful in and of themselves. Statistics will, and should, almost always be used to illustrate a relationship. It's more important for people to remember the relationship than the number.

In this chapter, we've seen that what looks like a "character problem" is often correctible when you change the environment. The

contexts. To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from "What information do I need to convey?" to "What questions do I want my audience to ask?

we are quick to jump to conclusions because we give too much weight to the information that's right in front of us, while failing to consider the information that's just offstage. He called this tendency "what you see is all there is.

We are frequently blind to the power of situations.

To change someone's behavior, you've got to change that person's situation.

In this chapter, we've seen that what looks like a "character problem" is often correctible when you change the environment.

Putting a number in a day-to-day context is critical. For instance, years ago, Cisco Systems was contemplating whether to install a wireless network for its employees (a no-brainer today, but not at the time). The company had calculated that it would cost roughly $500 per year, per employee, to maintain the network. Was that worth it? Hard to say, since we don't have much intuition about $500 yearly expenses.

The error lies in our inclination to attribute people's behavior to the way they are rather than to the situation they are in.

Statistics aren't inherently helpful; it's the scale and context that make them so.

In a world of infinite choice, not context content is king.

In a world of infinite choice, context—not content—is king.

If humans are ever to understand one another, they will have to come to terms with the concept, and the reality, of relativity. In essence, that's what the Earthgame is about. They will have to see how things look compared to other things. Once you understand that nothing exists without its opposite, you understand nothing is good and nothing is evil, that opposites actually hold each other up.

This was the context, a moderately optimistic one except in the 810s and 820s, for one of the most interesting Christian conflicts of the middle ages, over the power of religious images.

Before judging a person you have to know the story of his life.