Quotes About Context

The history of the world may be writ in your cells, all of it personal to your lineage and some of it part of the broader context, but though you have been shaped by history, you have only been shaped by some of it. Fundamentally,

Vonnegut exposes the assumption that if we do change biologically, we typically think we will end up smarter in the terms in which we consider ourselves smart today. But to survive means only that we'll be smart in the context of the environment we find ourselves in. If we continue to exist, we will by definition be smarter than the versions of us that did not survive, but that intelligence won't necessarily be comparable to what we have today.

Mddle Eastern history is filled with minefields, not because of what actually happened in the past, but because of how people read back the present into the past.

The strength of anarchism is its moral insistence on the primacy of human freedom over political expediency. But human freedom exists in a political context. It is not sufficient, however, to simply take the most uncompromising position in defense of freedom. It is necessary to actually win freedom.

People lose faith in their political institutions, which can't control the scale and rate of technological disruptions, blaming politicians for events that few fully understand and all have limited ability to influence. The role of thinkers and writers amid these whirlwind of disruptions is to provide context and meaning to these forces and reveal how they are shaping modern choices about life.

How do we understand prejudice, hatred, and violence in the context of modern societies, like our own, among people much like ourselves, among men and women who lived, not in dark times, but in an era when the balance of opinion was against the all-too-open expression of hatred?

Spoken in the context of the riots, the words did not kill but they enacted and performed, and what they performed was a murder: a ritual murder. Not the Jews but their Christian accusers performed the ritual murder.

History is not the past, but a map of the past drawn from a particular point of view to be useful to the modern traveler.

Even for a child, the major component of lipreading is guesswork. It's often said that only 30 to 40 percent of lipreading is actual "reading" of each word; the rest is "context guessing" to fill in the gaps between the words that are actually understood.

Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance, analysis, and interpretation—at least in the foreign policy world—depend on context and relevance.

stratification is developed and used throughout the book. This strategy has three elements: First, as often as possible, I place data in a historical and cross-national context. This information leads to important questions. For example, if the rate of poverty has fallen

The great British philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood maintained in The Idea of History that to write well about a historical figure, you need both empathy and imagination. By this he did not mean spinning tales out of thin air, but taking what is known and examining it in the full context of time and place, following the strands of the story until they begin to intertwine and establish a thick braid of reality.

If the relativist claims that, since all reasoning is embodied in a particular social context, no claim to know the truth can be sustained, one has to ask for the basis on which this claim is made. It is, after all, a claim to know something about reality — namely that reality is unknowable.

It is impossible to write history without some vision of its meaning from which judgments of significance can be made. And if there is no meaning, why be a historian? The

the history of Christian attempts to discern the signs of the times makes discouraging reading. At

A song playing comprises a very specific and vivid set of memory cues. Because the multiple-trace memory models assume that context is encoded along with memory traces, the music that you have listened to at various times of your life is cross-coded with the events of those times. That is, the music is linked to events of the time, and those events are linked to the music.

What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are.

History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.

The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

Personalization can be very useful in some contexts but very harmful in others. Searching for pizza online, it's probably OK to keep showing the same pizza shop as your No. 1 choice. I don't see any big political consequences out of that.

I like making art that's useful to people who have a harder road. Art is a tool to get through it; it's a tool to prepare for the worst. By envisioning it in an artistic context, you can make sense of it before and after it happens.

Economics taught in most of the elite universities are practically useless in my context. My country is dominated by drug economy and a mafia. Textbook economics does not work in my context, and I have very few recommendations from anybody as to how to put together a legal economy.

The meanings of words and the uses of words come from practice from the way people in a given culture use those words.