William James Quotes

Words can have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbit and enter a wider magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to dictate how they will be used.

Context is worth 80 IQ points.

I can see that you are a true historian because you really always ought to ask that question about anybody at a different place or a different time: What's the same and what's different?

No one ever really 'learns' from history, because choices never present themselves in exactly the same way, and because you can always choose similarities and differences to fit current needs.

We know they are doing their job in committee, that they are brilliant men, smart men, and that they are on the job all the time. We're just human beings down here-all different. We take all these things into consideration. You can't help it.

Random forays into the history of political language with undue regard for the detail of historical context all too often end up as exercises in self confirmation.

The difference between the first time I read something and the tenth time I read something is generally pretty profound. Even if the script is the same, just the way that I read it is different.

Another part of the challenge was to bring back things that you've forgotten about and maybe some things you haven't forgotten about, recontextualize them and have the series make sense.

Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.

Do remember that one line does nothing; it is only in relation to another that it creates a volume.

The ability to manage well doesn't make much difference if you're not even in the right jungle.

I think it's really useful to create parameters. The term you use can be forwarded into something more like a grid, a rubric, a system that you apply to all environments, and in so doing you create a situation in which you can locate local color, local differences within new environments.

When I say it doesn't make much difference, I mean in terms of the importance of the piece of literature.

The Bible is not interested in precisionism unless the context indicates that precision is particularly important.

Information consists of differences that make a difference.

Today, getting people to hear your story on social media, and then act on it, requires using a platform’s native language, paying attention to context, understanding the nuances and subtle differences that make each platform unique, and adapting your content to match.

It's important to understand differences in scale and environment.

We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.

It is not easy to tear any event out of the context of the universe in which it occurred without detaching from it some factor that influenced it.

1) Différance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other. This spacing is the simultaneously active and passive (the a of différance indicates this indecision as concerns activity and passivity, that which cannot be governed by or distributed between the terms of this opposition) production of the intervals without which the "full" terms would not signify, would not function.

Let us repeat the two crucial negative premises as established firmly by all human experience: (1) Words are not the things we are speaking about; and (2) There is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.

Biological determinism is, in its essence, a theory of limits. It takes the current status of groups as a measure of where they should and must be ... We inhabit a world of human differences and predilections, but the extrapolation of these facts to theories of rigid limits is ideology.

We don't want to give the controls to someone else; we want those reins ourselves. We want to get our way. And we get upset when things don't work out. . . . When we try to control someone else or events beyond the scope of our power, we lose. When we learn to discern the difference between what we can change and what we can't, we usually have an easier time expressing our power in our lives. Because we're not wasting all our energy using our power to change things we can't, we have a lot of energy left over to live our lives.

I am wearing a vest. If I had no arms, it would be a jacket.

Now, having seen the differences between where you are and where you want to be, begin to change-consciously change-your thoughts, words, and actions to match your grandest vision.