Kathryn > Kathryn's Quotes

“We need the right admixture of self-assurance and doubt.”
― Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory

“the proper task of social justice is no smaller: it is, quite literally, to remake the world.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Reconsidering Reparations

“Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
― E.B. White

“For liberal democracies in particular, disinformation represents a double threat: being at the receiving end of active measures will undermine democratic institutions—and giving in to the temptation to design and deploy them will have the same result.”
― Thomas Rid, Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare

“Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“I would often invent this dream for myself at the edge of sleep, and then it was strange how content it would make me, how it would make peace and consolation flow, and I would close my eyes and float on it into my real dreams which were never so kind [...].”
― Alice Munro

“The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at ever conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbours soundly sleep.”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.”
― John le Carré

“I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,' Smiley went on, more lightly. 'Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.”
― John Le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“Tessa distinguished absolutely between pain observed and pain shared. Pain observed is journalistic pain. It’s diplomatic pain. It’s television pain, over as soon as you switch off your beastly set. Those who watch suffering and do nothing about it, in her book, were little better than those who inflicted it. They were the bad Samaritans.”
― John le Carré, The Constant Gardener

“I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.”
― H.L. Mencken

“I am in love with your sinners,” responded Theron, as he shook hands with Celia, and trusted himself to look fully into her eyes. “I’ve had five days of the saints, over in another part of the woods, and they’ve bored the head off me.”
― Harold Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware: Or Illumination

“The composer came to represent the cultural-political unconscious of modernity—an aesthetic war zone in which the Western world struggled with its raging contradictions, its longings for creation and destruction, its inclinations toward beauty and violence. Wagner was arguably the presiding spirit of the bourgeois century that achieved its highest splendor around 1900 and then went to its doom.”
― Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music

“I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.”
― Alfred Tennyson

“One of the difficulties that arose with fixed settlement was the need to coexist not only with other people but also with the dead.”
― Kōjin Karatani, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange

“Instead of limiting himself to describing the different methods of the sciences and humanities, he delved to the roots of the false antagonism between them. The sad fate of critical thinking, he suggested, mirrored a larger problem in the culture. His diagnosis of that problem was clearest in the essay he did not include in the volume but that expressed the book’s intentions perfectly, “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community” (1982), one of the most important essays of his career.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“Interpretation, he was saying, is complex, fraught, and often ambiguous, but not mystical and never merely willful.”
― Timothy Brennan, Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

“The theoretical perspective of worldmaking and the concrete task of climate justice both force us to contend with the immense scale of injustice and thus the immense scale of the struggle for justice. It may well be outside of any generation’s ability to win outright. But if we choose to relate to the world as ancestors, we can prevent this realization from overwhelming us into political paralysis. Many of the things that we do every day link us with countless people who have come before us and—if we succeed at preventing the worst climate outcomes—countless people who will come after us. We can do the spiritual work to act from this knowledge and faith right now. The world depends on it.”
― Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Reconsidering Reparations

“for theories in the human sciences to move beyond weak inductive inference to more robust abductive explanation we need to be able to specify the common properties of the entity we are talking about and the causal, anchoring processes that have produced those properties. We need to not just identify patterns, but explain why they hold. Yet we have historically been missing the right account of the basic structuring entities addressed by our scholarship.”
― Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory

“proof of the social genealogy of AI: the first artificial neural network – the perceptron – was born not as the automation of logical reasoning but of a statistical method originally used to measure intelligence in cognitive tasks and to organise social hierarchies accordingly.”
― Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence

“As any word implies a grammar, any number hides an algorithm – that is, a procedure for representing quantities and for performing operations with quantities. In conclusion, all numbers are algorithmic numbers as they are manufactured by those algorithms that are the systems of numerations. Numerals count nothing (so to speak); they are simply position holders in a procedure – an algorithm – of quantification.”
― Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence

“one could say that computation emerged as both the automation of the division of mental labour and the calculus of the costs of such labour.”
― Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence

“Lovelace defined as an ‘operation’ the control of material and symbolic entities beyond the second-order language of mathematics (like the idea, discussed in chapter 1, of an algorithmic thinking beyond the boundary of computer science). In a visionary way, Lovelace seemed to suggest that mathematics is not the universal theory par excellence but a particular case of the science of operations. Following this insight, she envisioned the capacity of numerical computers qua universal machines to represent and manipulate numerical relations in the most diverse disciplines and generate, among other things, complex musical artefacts: [The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine … Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”
― Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence

“Flourishing is a process, not a product. Happiness is impossible to attain as a fixed state. Indeed, it has been argued that flourishing is incompatible with stasis or even being only one thing.89 Flourishing is rather the ability to change or to become something else.”
― Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory

“Who I am in this context is a form of advanced computational math that can produce natural language outputs that resemble human communication.”
― Reid Hoffman, Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI

“There will be a day in the future when current AI will be considered an archaism, one technical fossil to study among others.”
― Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence

“The scale shift of labour composition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries affected also the logic of automation, that is, the scientific paradigms involved in this transformation. The relatively simple industrial division of labour and its seemingly rectilinear assembly lines could easily be compared to a simple algorithm, a rulebased procedure with an ‘if/then’ structure which has its equivalent in the logical form of deduction. Deduction, not by coincidence, is the logical form that via Leibniz, Babbage, Shannon, and Turing innervated into electromechanical computation and eventually symbolic AI. Deductive logic is useful for modelling simple processes, but not systems with a multitude of autonomous agents, such as society, the market, or the brain.”
― Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence