Reduction Quotes

“A photograph of a disposable diaper floating in the arctic miles away from human habitat fueled my daily determination to save at least one disposable diaper from being used and created. One cloth diaper after another, days accumulated into years and now our next child is using the cloth diapers we bought for our firstborn.”
― Gloria Ng, Cloth Diapering Made Easy

“What emerges from these separate strands of (modern) history is an image of man himself that bears a new, stark, more nearly naked, and more questionable aspect. The contraction of man's horizons amounts to a denudation, a stripping down, of this being who has now to confront himself at the center of all his horizons. The labor of modern culture, whenever it has been authentic, has been a labor of denudation. A return to the sources; "to the things themselves," as Husserl puts it; toward a new truthfulness, the casting away of ready-made presuppositions and empty forms - these are some of the slogans under which this phase in history has presented itself. Naturally enough, much of this stripping down must appear as the work of destruction, as revolutionary or even "negative": a being who has become thoroughly questionable to himself must also find questionable his relation to the total past which in a sense he represents.”
― William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy

“To label myself is similar to thinking that I can come up with a single phrase to explain the universe.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“I approach this project in the spirit of a fast: an intentional reduction, a deliberate abstinence to summon God's movement in my life. A fast creates margin for God to move.”
― Jen Hatmaker, 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess

“Reduction is the least observed of the three R’s of environmentalism (‘reduce, reuse, recycle’) but it’s probably the most important. Reuse and recycling are sensible measures in an over-productive society, but why not neutralise the problem of overproduction at the source? Instead of choosing to act efficiently at the end of a product’s life cycle by reusing or recycling it, we should stop said product from being made in the first place by eliminating consumer demand for it. If the rainforests must be burned and the oceans poisoned to cater for the essentials of human life, then so be it and we’ll call it an inevitable pity; but for that to happen in the name of games consoles, cell phones and chocolate fountains is a wanton and avoidable shame.”
― Robert Wringham, Escape Everything!

“The face that stares back at you from the mirror later in life is so different than when you're young. There's a winnowing away and a shutting down. A sense of something having been taken from you and you don't know exactly what it is, just that it isn't there anymore.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Hummingbird Salamander

“At the same time that a massive deployment of biologically harmful radio frequency (RF) radiation devices across the mass population has occurred, we see the reduction of health care for the poor, sick and elderly.”
― Steven Magee

“If i bought something that didn't warrant more than three wearings, I did not need it.”
― Jen Hatmaker, 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess

“To treat an object primarily as part of a network is to assume it can be reduced to that set of qualities and relations that it manifests in this particular network.”
― Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures

“The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.”
― Don DeLillo, Point Omega

“ The cream sauce has a rich, full-bodied bitterness to it that makes the tongue tingle...
Its spicy freshness lightens up the thick, heavy flavor of the roast beef to exactly the right degree! The wallop the meat's juice packs is no joke, but I feel I could keep eating this forever!
Sure, he shoved a mountain of artichokes into this dish...
... but how did he manage to make their uniquely fresh, vibrant and astringent flavor stand out this much?!
"This, too, is the result of Mr. Eizan's highly skilled use of cynarine. Any unnecessary source of sweetness has been removed, which makes the taste of the cream sauce stand out even more starkly."
"Whoa, Whoa! Slow down. I'm totally lost here!"
"I get that cynarine's supposed to make stuff taste sweet, but how does that even work?"
"Is it so bitter that anything tasted afterwards seems sweet by comparison?"
"No, it isn't anything as simple as that. Cynarine directly affects the taste buds."
Yep! When you eat food that contains cynarine, the compound spreads across your tongue as you chew, covering up and thereby blocking the taste buds for sweetness.
That's what's happening with Yukihira and the judges right now. Their tongues can't taste sweet, so bitter flavors really stand out. As they eat other food, the act of chewing gradually wipes the cynarine off the tongue. Slowly, their taste buds resume their normal functions. But here's where the important bit happens...
Since the tongue has been blocked from tasting sweet flavors for a time...
... even a tiny bit of sweetness will now stick out like a sore thumb!
"When there's a ton of cynarine smeared on the tongue, even a cup of water will taste supersweet.”
― Yūto Tsukuda, 食戟のソーマ 27 [Shokugeki no Souma 27]

“English: "Cognition is the delimitation of imagination by experience."

Česky: „Poznávání je okrajování fantazie pomocí zkušenosti.”
― Sebastián Wortys