Artificial Constructs Quotes

Maybe we are all prospective migrants. The lines of national borders on maps are artificial constructs, as unnatural to us as they are to birds flying overhead. Our first impulse is to ignore them.

It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which give us such worlds of salutary illusion. That is - since nothing means anything in itself, we must preserve the proximate and arbitrary background which makes things around us seem as if they did mean something.

Here is one optimists reason for believing unity will prevail ... within the next hundred years ... nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. A phrase briefly fashionable in the mid-20th century -- citizen of the world -- will have assumed real meaning by the end of the 21st. All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary.

Role is something people play, model is something people make, both of those things are fake.

All divisions are man-made.

Simulations directly relate to the process of and complications in photography. They also overtly create layers of fantasies, myths and interventions... The simulation confuses the idea of a truth. I've always been interested in this kind of theater and illusion at the foundation of belief.

You don't see any borders between countries from space. That's man-made, and one experiences it only when you return to Earth.

Those who make antitheses by forcing the sense are like men who make false windows for the sake of symmetry. Their rule is not to speak justly, but to make accurate figures.

We have lost all sense of other considerations, because they are artificial. Only the facts are real and important to us. And good boots are hard to come by." - All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 2

Our body is part of nature. Our creations, they're not natural. We build things that aren't natural, but our bodies, they're part of that system.

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.

Our intellect has created a new world that dominates nature, and has populated it with monstrous machines.

Boundary lines, of any type, are never found in the real world itself, but only in the imagination of the mapmakers.