Altering Quotes - page 2
Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person's thoughts.
Sam Harris
It would be different if there were some great widespread public indignation and demand: "Away with the prescriptive upper house of Parliament". There is not. There was recently carried out by Mr. McKenzie and a colleague of his a survey of working-class political attitudes called Angels in Marble. They found that "only one-third of the entire working class sample, and only a slightly higher proportion of Labour voters, favoured abolishing the Lords or altering it in any way...About a third of the whole sample" of working-class voters in the country "see the Lords as an intrinsic part of the national tradition or of the government of the country." As so often, the ordinary rank and file of the electorate have seen a truth, an important fact, which has escaped so many more clever people-the underlying value of that which is traditional, of that which is prescriptive.
Enoch Powell
Your experience in the world of physical matter flows outward from the center of your psyche. Then you perceive this experience. exterior events, circumstances and conditions are meant as a kind of living feedback. Altering the state of the psyche automatically alters the physical circumstances. There is no other valid way of changing physical events. It might help if you imagine an inner living dimension within yourself in which you create, in miniature psychic form, all the exterior conditions that you know. Simply put, you do exactly this. Your thoughts, feelings and mental pictures can be called incipient exterior events, for in one way or another, each of these is materialized into physical reality.
Robert Butts
The psyche is awareized energy, in a state of constant creativity; a psychic pattern of multidimensionally expressed; each point within it changing in relationship to all other points, and thus altering the entire pattern or model. Each self is immersed in the psyche, yet immersed in its own individuality simultaneously, experiencing reality in time and out of it at once.
Robert Butts
Refactoring is a disciplined technique for restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its external behavior. Its heart is a series of small behavior preserving transformations. Each transformation (called a 'refactoring') does little, but a sequence of transformations can produce a significant restructuring. Since each refactoring is small, it's less likely to go wrong. The system is also kept fully working after each small refactoring, reducing the chances that a system can get seriously broken during the restructuring.
Martin Fowler
Science is the only news. When you scan a news portal or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same cyclical dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness; even the technology is predictable if you know the science behind it. Human nature doesn't change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.
Stewart Brand
We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, or invention, or insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least.
Joshua Foer
To anyone growing up in any large city, the immediate neighborhood becomes the world. The street on which one lives provides a kid with local identification somewhat similar to being branded by national origin. Streets have a status. They grow, get old and change in character. In large coastal cities, immigration has an effect on the profile of a street altering it as each new group enters, stays a while, assimilates and then moves away. Streets seem to have a discernible life. Some start out ostentatiously and gradually descend into slums while others begin as poor the disreputable neighborhoods and rise to ostentation through what city planners call gentrification.
Will Eisner