A Quote by Ben Brantley

The eternal ambiguity of human motives and memory.

Ben Brantley

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Ambiguity Eternal Human Memory Motives

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Ben Brantley
American - Journalist
Born: October 26, 1954

When comparing human memory and computer memory it is clear that the human version has two distinct disadvantages. Firstly, as indeed I have experienced myself, due to ageing, human memory can exhibit very poor short term recall.

Kevin Warwick

Screw ambiguity. Perversion and corruption masquerade as ambiguity. I don`t trust ambiguity. John Wayne

John Wayne

As a novelist, your impulse is toward multiplicity: multiple voices, multiple perceptions, multiple nuances, the ambiguity in human communication. Fiction really is the ultimate home for that sense of ambiguity.

Pankaj Mishra

The ambiguity of poetic language answers to the ambiguity of human life as a whole, and therein lies its unique value. All interpretations of poetic language only interpret what the poetry has already interpreted.

Hans-Georg Gadamer

We must never forget that human motives are generally far more complicated than we are apt to suppose, and that we can very rarely accurately describe the motives of another.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

There are novels that end well, but in between there are human beings acting like human beings. And human beings are not perfect. All of the motives a human being may have, which are mixed, that's the novelists' materials. That's where they have to go. And a lot of that just isn't pretty. We like to think of ourselves as really, really good people. But look in the mirror. Really look. Look at your own mixed motives. And then multiply that.

Margaret Atwood

Capitalism justified itself and was adopted as an economic principle on the express ground that it provides selfish motives for doing good, and that human beings will do nothing except for selfish motives

George Bernard Shaw

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing.

Ralph Ellison

What is obnoxious about the motives of politicians - whatever those motives may be - is that politicians must announce their motives as visionary and grand.

P. J. O'Rourke

We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being. -stage manager, in the play OUR TOWN

Thornton Wilder

Unlike the ambiguity of life, the ambiguity of language does reach a limit.

Mason Cooley

Reagan's genius as a communicator lies in his use of ambiguity. ... Ambiguity is the mother of Teflon.

Robin Lakoff

I don't have a distaste for ambiguity, in fact, ambiguity is what I think life is all about.

Robert Rubin

We have a memory cut in pieces. And I write trying to recover our real memory, the memory of humankind, what I call the human rainbow, which is much more colorful and beautiful than the other one, the other rainbow.

Eduardo Galeano

We want to live in ambiguity. This is the human condition.

Frank Moore Cross

The nations, and the sects, of the Roman world, admitted with equal credulity, and similar abhorrence, the reality of that infernal art [witchcraft], which was able to control the eternal order of the planets, and the voluntary operations of the human mind. . . . They believed, with the wildest inconsistency, that this preternatural dominion of the air, of earth, and of hell, was exercised, from the vilest motives of malice or gain, by some wrinkled hags and itinerant sorcerers, who passed their obscure lives in penury and contempt.

Edward Gibbon

A Quote by Ben Brantley

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