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Friday March 12, 2010
Quotations
Those who prize freedom only for the material benefits it offers have never kept it for long.
- Alexis de Tocqueville
If you assume that there's no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, there's a chance you may contribute to making a better world. That's your choice
- Noam Chomsky
Hear one another out. Draw each other out. And when it's your turn to be speaking, pay far more attention to what you are actually perceiving than to what you know. And don't repeat yourself much. The universe is infinite: by attending your own perceptions, you are infinite. And so also is that person you are drawing out. Even the least of us is a window on God, whatever your definition.
- Win Wenger, Ph.D.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
- Buckminster Fuller
Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love
- Reinhold Niebuhr
We put our truths together in pieces, but you use nails, and I use glue. You mend with staples. I mend with screws. You stitch what I would bandage. Your truth may not look like mine, but that is not what matters. What matters is this: you can look at a scar and see hurt or you can look at a scar and see healing. Try to understand.
- Sheri Reynolds
LATE FRAGMENT
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
- Raymond Carver
No one is wise by birth, for wisdom results from one own's efforts.
- Krishnamacharya
All birth is unwilling.
- Pearl S. Buck
If the World is to be saved, it won't be by programs, policies,
laws or agendas.
If the World is to be saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds.
- Daniel Quinn
Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Panic is not an effective, long-term organizing strategy.
- Starhawk
Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.
- Mother Teresa
Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.
- Katherine Mansfield
Forgiveness takes away what stands between your brother and yourself.
- A Course In Miracles
Try saying this silently to everyone and everything you see for thirty days:
'I wish you happiness now and whatever will bring happiness to you in the future.'
If we said it to the sky, we would have to stop polluting; if we said it when we see ponds and lakes and streams, we would have to stop using them as garbage dumps and sewers; if we said it to small children, we would have to stop abusing them, even in the name of training; if we said it to people, we would have to stop stoking the fires of enmity around us. Beauty and human warmth would take root in us like a clear, hot June day.
We would change.
- Sister Joan Chittister
In the midst of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
- Albert Camus
We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.
- Louis Brandeis
One doesn’t become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable, and therefore not popular.
- Carl Jung
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
- Gandhi
Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
- Chief Seattle
When one experiences truth, the madness of finding fault with others disappears.
- Goenka
We are all Imaginary...
- RBWeeks
I think often of the Roman poet Juvenal's line about "bread and circuses." All these distractions that now fill our lives are an unprecedented mechanism of social control, because they occupy so much of our time that we don't reason, we don't imagine, and we don't use our senses. We walk though our day mesmerized, never questioning, never thinking, never appreciating. From this process we emerge a synthetic vessel without moral purpose, with no notion in our head or our heart of what is good for people, of what builds a healthier, happier, more loving society.
- Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark
Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them -- never become even conscious of them all. -- How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?
- C.S. Lewis
The richer a society, the more impossible it becomes to do worthwhile things without immediate payoff.
- E.F. Schumacher in SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL
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