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"There is another way to think about conversation, one that is less about information and more about creating a space to be explored. You are interested in hearing about how another person approaches things-her or her opinions and associations. In this kind of conversation-I think of it as 'whole person conversation'-if things go quiet for a while you look deeper, you don't look away or text a friend. You try to read your friends in a different way. Perhaps you look into their faces or attend to their body language. Or you allow for silence. Perhaps when we talk about 'conversations' being boring, such a frequent complaint, we are saying how uncomfortable we are with stillness."
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"All I'm arguing for really is that we should have a conversation where the best ideas really thrive, where there's no taboo against criticizing bad ideas, and where everyone who shows up, in order to get their ideas entertained, has to meet some obvious burdens of intellectual rigor and self-criticism and honesty-and when people fail to do that, we are free to stop listening to them. What religion has had up until this moment is a different set of rules that apply only to it, which is you have to respect my religious certainty even though I'm telling you I arrived at it irrationally."
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Personal Development
"In every argument there is a discovery of truth and a bed of success."
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Personal Development
"You wanted to see me, Professor?"
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Personal Development
"Confront somebody with an issue before it becomes a conflict. Confrontation is not all bad."
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Personal Development
"If you hope for any sort of dialogue and unity with all factions on the vaguely leftist or radical side of politics, you must cease from silly verbal abuse. If you don't want it, then we go on as we are, fractious and impotent."
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Personal Development
"Hey, Carlos,' the Professor says when he walks in. 'How was REACH?''It sucked.''Can you be more specific?' my guardian asks.'It really sucked,' I elaborate, sarcasm dripping from every word."
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Personal Development
"Dialogue doesn't take place in a vacuum. Dialogue is contradictory, in that it can either speed up or slow down a passage."
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Personal Development
"Armus: 'No need for interogation if you'd tell me this earlier.'Samarga: 'You wouldn't buy it if I gave it away without squeal."
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Personal Development
"The Art of Communication shares insights to help you communicate with a higher awareness and focused intention and meet people on their level to increase clarity and understanding."
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Personal Development
"But I don't think we shall quarrel about a word - the subject of our inquiry is too important for that."
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Personal Development
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"It is painful to watch children trying to show off for parents who are engrossed in their cell phones. Children are nostalgic for the 'good old days' when parents used to read to them without the cell phone by their side or watch football games or Disney movies without having the BlackBerry handy."
Family
"This is what technology wants, it wants to be a symptom. Like all psychological symptoms, it obscures a problem by 'solving' it without addressing it."
Technology
"You end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. When this happens, we're not able to appreciate who they are. It's as though we're using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self. We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we're at risk, because actually it's the opposite that's true."
Solitude
"Sometimes a citizenry should not simply 'be good'. You have to leave space for dissent, real dissent."
Freedom
"Increasingly, people feel as though they must have a reason for taking time alone, a reason not to be available."
Solitude
"Human relationships are rich and they're messy and they're demanding. And we clean them up with technology. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be. We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch, the face, the voice, the flesh, the body - not too little, not too much, just right."
Communication
"The journal is written to everyone and thus to no one."
Writing
"Who says that we always have to be ready to communicate?"
Silence
"One of the emotional affordances of digital communication is that one can always hide behind deliberated nonchalance."
Communication
"To understand desire, one needs language and flesh."
Desire
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