Other Quotes

“It is critical to note that our biases against the other are empowered less by our assumptions of their otherness and more by our assumptions about our own normality.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“It is in the shelter of each other that the people live. -Irish proverb”
― Louisa Thomsen Brits, The Book of Hygge: The Danish Art of Living Well

“I'm sorry it took me so long to see you, Alina. But I see you now.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Shadow and Bone

“It is not only temporality that is concealed although something like time always announces itself; even more well-known phenomena, like that of transcendence, the phenomena of world and being-in-the-world, are covered over. Nevertheless, they are not completely hidden, for the Dasein knows about something like ego and other. The concealment of transcendence is not a total unawareness but, what is much more fateful, a misunderstanding, a faulty interpretation. Faulty interpretations, misunderstandings, put much more stubborn obstacles in the way of authentic cognition than a total ignorance. However, these faulty interpretations of transcendence, of the basic relationship of Dasein to beings and to itself, are no mere defects of thought or acumen. They have their reason and their necessity in the Dasein's own historical existence. In the end, these faulty interpretations must be made, so that the Dasein may reach the path to the true phenomena by correcting them.”
― Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology

“When I was a kid, growing up during the 1970s, I used to read a lot of horror and science fiction. I graduated from comic books to paperbacks around the time I first entered my teens. And I want to say that what 99% of that stuff tells you about supposed encounters with the unknown is a formulaic convention. No one faints like a chicken-shit or else reaches for their weapon like Arnie Schwarzenegger in the face of something so utterly terrifying there isn’t even a name for it. What those writers don’t know is what happens in an encounter with the outside is this: that the moment slows down to such an extent that time itself simply stands still in your head. I suppose that fact doesn’t make for good characterisation. It’s incommunicable. I think they call it the numinous.

I once did a semester in creative writing back after graduating, around the decade King was outselling every other author on the planet, but could never make the grade. Still, I read a lot of the best attempts. Maybe that’s why someone like Lovecraft, or Machen, or one of the old-school writers of that stuff I used to read had almost pulled it off. They were no good at characterisation and tended to use ciphers, presenting the phenomenon itself as the main protagonist, because it was the way things are when you encounter it. The thing empties you, draining out any semblance of normalcy, no matter what your history is, or what you think you’re all about. Real horror consists not of the worst thing in the world you can imagine happening, but in encountering some abomination you cannot possibly imagine, something even worse than fear: a shard of absolute outsideness. Human characters become shadows, just shadows.”
― Mark Samuels, The Prozess Manifestations

“Feminists have often highlighted the “otherness” of nonhuman animals while highlighting similarities between women and the men who hold power. Biologically speaking, any two humans will be
more similar than a human and any other species. But the position of most women in patriarchal societies is closer to that of chickens and cows than it is to that of the men who hold power.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices

“We must do all we can to imagine the Other before we presume to solve the problems work and life demand of us.”
― Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

“Arab-ness is like Negro-ness, which only exists in the white man’s eyes.”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“Self and other is less of a dichotomy than a continuum.”
― James Hamblin, Clean: The New Science of Skin

“Although we may have different views, let us continue to forgive, love and respect each other”
― Charmaine J. Forde

“Wavelength calibration lamps containing mercury and other elements were in use in astronomy.”
― Steven Magee

“Because they don't know [the anger is] there inside them. [...] They think they are sweet reasonableness, and it's you that's in the wrong, just by being, and not being like them, or looking like them, or wanting their kind of life.”
― Margaret Laurence, The Diviners

“Perhaps his demons were quite other.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“The representation of spirit in the element of essential being has, however, the same defect as regards form which essential being as such has. Essential being is abstraction, and therefore, the negative of its simplicity is an other: in the same way, spirit in the element of essential being is the form of simple unity, which, on that account, is just as essentially a process of becoming something else. Or, what is the same thing, the relation of the eternal essential Being to its self-existence is that of pure thought, an immediately simple relation. In this simple beholding of itself in the Other, otherness therefore is not as such set up independently; it is distinction in the way of distinction, in pure thought, is immediately no distinction - a recognition of Love, where lover and beloved are by their very nature not opposed to each other at all. Spirit, which is expressed in the element of pure thought is essentially just this: not to be merely in that element, but to be concrete, actual existence; for otherness itself, cancelling and supersceding its own pure thought-constituted notion, lies in the very notion of spirit.”
― Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedric 1770-1831

“Why should he carry the burden of representation when it will only hold him back? white people are only required to represent themselves, not an entire race”
― Bernadine Evaristo

“Consequently the other is all of a sudden no longer there to be exterminated, hated, rejected or seduced, but instead to be understood, liberated, coddled, recognized. In addition to the Rights of Man, we now also need the Rights of the Other. In a way we already have these, in the shape of a universal Right to be Different. For the orgy is also an orgy of political and psychological comprehension of the other - even to the point of resurrecting the other in places where the other is no longer to be found. Where the Other was, there has the Same come to be.
And where there is no longer anything, there the Other must come to be. We are no longer living the drama of otherness. We are living the psychodrama of otherness, just as we are living the psychodrama of 'sociality', the psychodrama of sexuality, the psychodrama of the body - and the melodrama of all the above, courtesy of analytic metadiscourses. Otherness has become sociodramatic, semiodramatic, melodramatic.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“There is an ugly, unmentioned truth behind a feminist’s tendency to associate women with men, rather than with similarly exploited pigs or cattle:
Those who purposefully distance women from other female animals hope to liberate female humans while leaving nonhuman animals in the category of exploitable “other." But it is
reprehensible for individuals who are seeking release from oppression to purposefully leave others in the dungeons of exploitation—even to condemn others to such exploitation—in the process of working to extricate themselves.

In any event, this selfish approach has not worked, and the reason for this seems somewhat obvious: As long as we foster power-over—whether over pigs or turkeys or women—most human females will remain under the control of men, along with pigs and cows and chickens (who will generally remain yet lower on the rungs of power). In seeking to stand above
nonhuman females, women help to maintain a hierarchy through which they are held below men. As long as we support a hierarchy, as long as we support a system which grants some individuals power over other individuals, men will dominate over women. Hierarchies entail power-over, and the power of one individual over another inevitably supports oppression.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Speaking Up for Animals: An Anthology of Women's Voices

“The Other should be a glorious, not a pitiful Other, an object of admiration not of commiseration, the object of a challenge, not that interactive, democratic Other which is not even really your equal.
The Other exists more intensely in the dual relation, in rivalry and challenge, than in interaction, conviviality and cosy multiculturalism.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“Nationalism plays on my need to label and compare so that I feel superior to other people and promotes an "us verses them" mentality.”
― Karl Forehand

“The truly haunting Other is not what lies outside the text but what lies outside the picturesque garden of the Western world.”
― Robin Evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries

“Perhaps the desire to take photographs arises from the observation that on the broadest view, from the standpoint of reason, the world is a great disappointment. In its details, however, and caught by surprise, the world always has a stunning clarity.
The secret form of the Other is what has to be reconstituted, as in anamorphosis, starting with the fragments and tracing its broken lines, its lines of fracture.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“Each of us lives by setting traps for the other. The one and the other live in an endless affinity, an affinity which endures until prostration decides the issue.
Everyone wants their other. Everyone has an imperious need to put the other at their mercy, along with a heady urge to make the other last as long as possible so as to savour him. The opposing logics of the lie and the truth unite in a dance of death which is nothing but pure delight at the other's demise. For desire for the other is always also the desire to put an end to the other (albeit, perhaps, at the latest possible moment?). The only question is which one will hold out the longest, occupying the space, the speech, the silence, the very inner world of the other - who is dispossessed of himself at the very moment when he becomes one in his difference. Not that one kills the other: the adversary is simply harassed into desiring, into willingly acceding to his own symbolic death ... The world is a perfectly functioning trap.
An otherness, a foreignness, that is ultimately unintelligible - such is the secret of the form, and the singularity, of the emergence of the other.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“If the Epic of Gilgamesh carries a teaching, it is that the other makes our existence possible.”
― Alberto Manguel, La cité des mots: CBC Massey Lectures

“What the poet tells us is that, after the ordeals and adventures, after the revelation and the loss, the king must do two things: preserve the splendor of his city and tell his own story. Both tasks are complementary: both speak of the intimate connection between building a city of walls and building a story of words, and both require, in order to be accomplished, the existence of the other.”
― Alberto Manguel, La cité des mots: CBC Massey Lectures

“The identity of the city, because of the laws that define it, depends on some sort of banning or exclusion. The individual identity required the reverse: a constant effort of inclusion, a story reminding Gilgamesh that, in order to know who one is, we need two.”
― Alberto Manguel, La cité des mots: CBC Massey Lectures

“The character of traitor is to destroy surrounding in sake of others.”
― Kamaran Ihsan Salih

“I was fortunate when I worked at the DeSoto Solar Farm that I had already seen some of the dangerous problems at other solar power systems I had worked at.”
― Steven Magee

“Too much rain and too little rain will be as bad as each other during climate change.”
― Steven Magee

“I view OSHA and the police the same way: Only interact with them when you have exhausted all other options available to you.”
― Steven Magee

“The two supplements needed to treat Altitude Hypersensitivity do not work independently of each other, they have to be taken together.”
― Steven Magee