Quotes About Context

I think that intelligent people to a great extent are captives of their time or place.

On Saint Paul, he's probably one of the best theologians of all time, but I don't believe that some of his teachings are appropriate today.

I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.

If you take my sayings and explode them in the air, they remain only sayings. But if you fit them together in their correct places, you will have the whole story.

You mean like a small silicone breast implant?" I wasn't actually thinking that, but sure.

A journalist who assumes that Trump's intention is unknowable, that repeated false statements—when the truth is indeed knowable—do not, factually, constitute lying, is abdicating the responsibility to tell the story, to provide the context of what happened a year ago, yesterday, or even in parallel with the lying. The journalist becomes complicit in creating the bizarre sense of ahistoricism of the Trump era, which seems to exist only, ever, in the current moment.

Viewed in the context of epidemic nostalgia for the Soviet past, these results made sense: they represented yet another way of returning to the paternalistic state.20

It is important to remember that body language, like the written and spoken word, relies on context. You must observe the person carefully. Is he crossing his arms because he does not enjoy my company or is he just feeling cold?

The thing I like most about political cartooning is the relevance of the work to the real world. And if you do this long enough you get to look back and see yourself in historical context, sometimes on the right side and sometimes on the wrong. But I'm proud of the work I was doing in the runup that bamboozled us into the Iraq War and that horrible chapter where Cheney and Bush drove the country into the ditch, the one we're still in. (2010 interview with Washington City Paper)

Because Lambda executes in a custom environment managed by AWS, it can be difficult to work through this cycle. Fortunately, a number of open source third-party libraries have sprung up to fill the need for testing. Ultimately, these tools mimic the "event" and "context" objects, along with their properties and method to simulate the environment in which Lambda functions launch once uploaded.

Of course, I didn't say all that. Maybe I should have.

For in the end laws are just words on a page - words that are sometimes malleable, opaque, as dependent on context and trust as they are in a story or poem or promise to someone, words whose meanings are subject to erosion, sometimes collapsing in the blink of an eye.

Context had reinforced familiarity, and familiarity had blinded them to new possibilities.

Traveling encourages the revision of received wisdoms and the shedding of prejudices. It turns the mind toward a consideration of context and releases it from the dictatorship of absolute truths about humanity.

In oral societies it is recognized that the telling of a story to a different audience or in a different context or for a different reason calls for a different version of the story. Stories are molded to the time and circumstance in which they are told.

Our Bibles today have chapter and verse divisions. These are extremely helpful, of course, since without them it is very hard indeed to tell someone where to find a passage. But the authors did not write in chapters and verses. One problem with our having them is that they make us think that the next chapter (or even verse) is changing the subject.

what the book of Revelation actually does say and how it says it, matters surprisingly overlooked by many so-called experts on biblical prophecy.

But the reality is that most of these symbols would have been quite simple for anyone at the time to discern, whether a devoted Christian or a Roman pagan.

That's not how authors, ancient or modern, work. Authors write for readers in their own time and place.

each author of the Bible lived in his own time and place—and not in ours.

The reason we need books like these is that the Gospels cannot simply be taken at face value as giving us historically reliable accounts of the things Jesus said and did.

When the verses on women are removed, the passage flows neatly without a break. This too suggests that these verses were inserted into the passage later.

I can't give a full analysis here

the criterion of contextual credibility. This final criterion insists that we understand Jesus's historical context if we want to understand what he said and did during his life.