I believe that the truth about any subject only comes when all sides of the story are put together, and all their different meanings make one new one.
Alice Walker (b. 1944) American writer, activist
“Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O’Connor,” In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983)
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Quotations about:
synthesis
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Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
Henry Adams (1838-1918) American journalist, historian, academic, novelist
The Education of Henry Adams, ch. 25 (1907)
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When I was a student, we used to sit around discussing whether a particular end justified a particular means. On the assumption of everyone from Marx or Machiavelli, I thought that was the question. It took me twenty years to figure out that the means are the ends — and vice versa. Whatever means you use become an organic part of the ends you achieve.
Gloria Steinem (b. 1934) American feminist, journalist, activist
Commencement address, Tufts University (1987-05-17)
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The only simplicity for which I would give a straw is that which is on the other side of the complex — not that which never has divined it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935) American jurist, Supreme Court Justice
Letter (1902-10-24) to Lady Georgina Deffell Pollock
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In context, criticizing those who praise simplicity (at least in literature, if not beyond), except that simplicity which results after a synthesis of the complex.
Collected in Mark Howe (ed.), Holmes-Pollock Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Sir Frederick Pollock, 1874-1932 (1961).
This quotation is frequently misattributed to his father, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. It also has (at least two) incorrect variants that are seen more frequently on the Internet:For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.I wouldn’t give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity; I would give my right arm for the simplicity on the far side of complexity.
First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.
Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.
Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds.
And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) English philosopher and economist
On Liberty, ch. 2 “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion” (1859)
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