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We cannot stem linguistic change, but we can drag our feet. If each of us were to defy Alexander Pope and be the last to lay the old aside, it might not be a better world, but it would be a lovelier language.
--
Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary (1987), p. 231

 

Willard van Orman Quine

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Today, in the era of the complete triumph of the spectacle, what can be reaped from the heritage of Debord? It is clear that the spectacle is language, the very communicativity or linguistic being of humans. This means that a fuller Marxian analysis should deal with the fact that capitalism (or any other name one wants to give the process that today dominated world history) was directed not only toward the expropriation of productive activity, but also and principally toward the alienation of language itself, of the very linguistic and communicative nature of humans, of that logos which one of Heraclitus' fragments identified as the Common. The extreme form of this expropriation of the Common is the spectacle, that is, the politics we live in. But this also means that in the spectacle of our own linguistic nature comes back to us inverted. This is why (precisely because what is being expropriated is the very possibility of common good) the violence of the spectacle is so destructive; but for the same reason the spectacle remains something like a positive possibility that can be used against it.

 

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Why are all reflections lovelier than what we call the reality?—not so grand or so strong, it may be, but always lovelier?

 

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Hope springs eternal in the human breast. (Original to Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1734))

 

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I'm running for president because I think that, with a lot of help, I can stem the tide of this slide and restore America’s leadership in the world and change our priorities. I will argue that my experience and my track record — both on the foreign and domestic side — put me in a position to be able to do that.

 

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We use the word God. God hooks all the other words up. I'm the pope. I'm ten times the pope. I'm sixty times the pope. But I'm the pope in the hills and in the mountains.

 

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