Quotes About Context

Moral judgments are linguistic survivals from the practices of classical theism which have lost the context provided by these practices.

unless there is a telos which transcends the limited goods of practices by constituting the good of a whole human life, the good of a human life conceived as a unity, it will both be the case that a certain subversive arbitrariness will invade the moral life and that we shall be unable to specify the context of certain virtues adequately.

The environment is everything that isn't me.

As any reader knows, a printed page creates its own reading space, its own physical landscape in which the texture of the paper, the colour of the ink, the view of the whole ensemble acquire in the reader's hands specific meanings that lend tone and context to the words.

All reading is interpretation, every reading reveals and is dependent on the circumstances of its reader.

The past is not something fixed and unalterable. Its facts are re-discoverable by every succeeding generation, its values re-assessed, its meaning re-defined in the context of present tastes and preoccupations. Out of the same documents and monuments and works of art, every epoch invents its own Middle Ages, its private China, its patented and copyrighted Hellas.

The past is not something fixed and unalterable. Its facts are re-discovered by every succeeding generation, its values re-assessed, its meanings re-defined in the context of present tastes and preoccupations.

There was far too much interest in the past, she thought. People were forever digging up events that had taken place a long time ago. And what was the point in doing this if the effect was merely to poison the present?

It was always disconcerting to meet those who had become so obsessed with a single topic that they could not see their concerns in context.

French philosophers had been able to admire Mao and his works because they did not have to live in China at the time.

It had always struck her as wrong that we should judge ourselves-or, more usually, others-by single acts, as if a single snapshot said anything about what a person had been like over the whole course of his life. It could say something, of course, but only if it was typical of how that person behaved; otherwise, no, all it said that at that moment, in those particular circumstances, temptation won a local victory.

Does it matter? Think of our petty concerns and then look up at the night sky, at the stars in the firmament, and think: do any of our petty little concerns really make one jot of difference? Do they mean anything in the context of this great spinning universe—if universes spin, which I am not at all sure they do…

Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of.

There is a gigantic modern fallacy at work here. For of course people only think that they would have acted better in history because they know how history ended up. People in history didn't – and don't – have that luxury. They made good or bad choices in the times and places they were in, given the situations and shibboleths that they found themselves with.

In recent years, the critics of the West have marked themselves out through a set of extraordinary claims. Their technique now has a pattern. It is to zoom in on Western behavior, remove it from the context of the time, set aside any non-Western parallels, and then exaggerate what the West actually did.

fascism'. 1 Yet however abused, anybody offering

There is a vast difference between the dutiful Christian citizen and the craven Christian who cites passages out of context in order to justify a continuation of his cowardice.

Isaiah Berlin argued, the kinds of descriptions that historians give of historical events wouldn't have made much sense to the people who actually participated in them.

The Lord can accomplish much more through prayer than any teacher can through teaching, and many times He will also bring great insight within that context.

I understand that life is not black and white, everything has a different hand, lots of them, I act according to the situation.

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.

Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

The word 'Terror' is so generally and universally used in connection with everyday trivial matters that it is apt to fail to convey, when intended to do so, its real meaning.

I believe we always should consider the context of the art, and we can't ignore or forgive significant moral wrongs at its core—racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, or worse.