Ideology - what determines how you think when you don't know you're thinkin

--- John Naughton, in Reformation Then and Now, Talking Politics podcast, 10 January 2018, at timecode 11:59

"You could define ideology as what determines how you think when you don't know you're thinking. And some things become unthinkable in any ideological climate."

See also Naughton's "95 theses about Technology"

Each of you is perfect the way you are ... and you can use a little improvement

― Shunryu Suzuki, quoted everywhere, but I haven't found a source

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who are very strange and those whom you don't know well

--- John Allen Paulos, afterword to Edwin Abbott's "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions" (Signet, new edition, 2013), p. 153

Quote in context

I myself have sketched an attempt along these lines that utilizes the rich notion of dimension, and there is probably no better place than here to sketch it. Specifically, I've developed a mathematical metaphor for the old chestnut "There are two kinds of people in the world: those who are very strange and those whom you don't know well." In other words, I'm suggesting that each of us is actually very strange and not a completely integrated personality, and there is a way in which higher dimensions can illustrate this.

[He goes on to calculate the percentage of an N-square that is more than 5% from both edges, e.g. for a line of length 10 inches "Consider the part within a half inch of aside of this square and call this border the extreme part of the square." The normal part is (10 - 2*0.5)^2 = 9^2 = 81 square inches. Taken as a percentage, one has for an N-dimensional square 0.9^N, and evidently this shrinks as N increases. Line: 90%; square: 81%; cube: 72.9%; hypercube: 65.61%; etc. "For one hundred dimensions, the interior or normal part shrinks to only 0.0027 percent of the total volum"

Poverty is not a lack of character. Poverty is a lack of cash.

--- Rutger Bregman at TED 2017

From the transcript, at 14:33 (the final words of the presentation):

Now, more than 500 years after Thomas More first wrote about a basic income, and 100 years after George Orwell discovered the true nature of poverty, we all need to change our worldview, because poverty is not a lack of character. Poverty is a lack of cash.

religion has generally been an activity, not a set of true-or-false propositions, and above all a collective activity in which the tribe or nation finds meaning

--- from The Economist, "Transcendental meditation: Neil MacGregor on living with gods," 4 Nov 2017, a review of Neil MacGregor's show at the British Museum "Living with Gods" and associated podcast

Quote in context:

Mr MacGregor is a social anthropologist on a vast plane, whereas Ms Cook leans more to the neuroscience of religion. By including sounds, such as softly heard bells and flutes, she draws attention to the aural stimuli that can arouse people’s spiritual antennae.

However, they have a common purpose: to bring home the ubiquity, and the social character, of religion to a mainly secular public. To the modern mind, speculating about moral and philosophical questions is something people engage in individually. In most eras of history, and in many parts of the world today, such freedom would be inconceivable.

As the exhibition and the radio series both proclaim, religion has generally been an activity, not a set of true-or-false propositions, and above all a collective activity in which the tribe or nation finds meaning.