Quotations V
Without the inner beauty of a free and harmonious life, (fine food) and eau de cologne can become merely forms of barbarism. Without tolerance and broad spiritual understanding, hygiene will only make for clean animals, very clean and very healthy, but also very animal. External riches will merely smother us, if we do not cultivate inner riches. Miguel de Unamuno
The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up. Dorothy Day
Poverty is not the problem. Wealth is the problem. Poverty is the solution. Kumar Satish, Editor Resurgence Magazine www.resurgence.org
In Spain, erudition tends to mask the fetid sore of moral cowardice that has poisoned our collective soul. In many, it serves as a kind of opium to appease or extinguish longing and anguish; others use it to shirk the necessity of thinking for themselves, limiting themselves to expounding what other men have thought. They pick out a book here and there, extracting sentences and doctrines which they put together and stew, or they spend a year or two or twenty rummaging through files and stacks of papers in some archive or other so that they may announce this or that discovery. The object is to avoid looking into one's own heart and plumbing it, to avoid thinking and, even more, feeling. Unamuno
And he again rejoined: "I have no desire to find myself in the middle of the ocean, like a victim of a shipwreck, drowning and without a plank to cling to." I countered once again: "A plank? I myself am a plank. I don't need any other because the ocean you mention and in which I float is God. Man floats in God without needing any sort of plank... Have you so little confidence in God that though you are in Him, in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28), you still need a plant to hang on to? He will keep you afloat without any spar or plank." Unamuno
Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God idea, not God Himself. Unamuno
More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones. St. Theresa of Avila
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. Gertrude Stein
I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions . . . Kurt Vonnegut
People are as you see them on the streets. The other thing is a lie. Albert Camus
The best index to a person's character is how he treats people who can't do him any good.
When I have something to say that is too difficult for adults, I write for children. They have not closed the shutters. They like it when you rock the boat. Madeline L'Engle
Adults are obsolete children. Dr. Seuss
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold. Helen Keller
There are two kinds of people in the world; those who say to God, 'Thy will be done', and those to whom God says, 'Go ahead, then, have it your way'. C. S. Lewis
"Football combines the worst elements of America: mass violence punctuated by committee meetings." Eisenhower
The tactic of nonviolence is a tactic of love that seeks the salvation and redemption of the opponent, not his castigation, humiliation, and defeat. A pretended nonviolence that seeks to defeat and humiliate the adversary by spiritual instead of physical attack is little more than a confession of weakness. Thomas Merton
We who claim to love peace and justice must always be careful that we do not use our righteousness to provoke the violent, and in this way bring about the conflict for which we, too, like other men, are hungering in secret, and with suppressed barbarity. Thomas Merton
It is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not "what he ought to be." If we do not first respect what he "is" we will never suffer him to become what he ought to be: in our impatience we do away with him altogether. Thomas Merton
A demonic existence is one which insistently diagnoses what it cannot cure, what it has no desire to cure, what it seeks to bring to full potency, in order that it may cause the death of its victim. Thomas Merton
I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death. Anne Frank
It's just so uninteresting to live without love. Life has not risk. Love just seems to make life not just livable, but a gallant, gallant event. Toni Morrison
There are no emergencies. Toni Morrison
There seems no plan because it's all plan. There seems no center because it's all center. C. S. Lewis
The more you complain the longer God lets you live.
You will not die until you embody the vices of those you disdain.
You are permitted in time of great danger to walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge. Bulgarian proverb
A full belly does not believe in hunger. Italian proverb
When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. Jonathan Swift
All music jars when the soul's out of tune. Miguel de Cervantes
The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of trolls. Father Robert F. Capon
"....Walter Lippman - the American journalist and commentator - once noted the special importance of propaganda in a situation in which the national narrative is relentlessly at odds with the facts. What he called 'manufacture of consent' becomes terribly important in this situation. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, in 'Manufacturing Consent' (1988) - the title echoing Lippman - offer a systematic analysis of the propaganda system in the United States. They outline rather starkly how bias is created and maintained by the media:
'Institutional critiques such as we present in this book are commonly dismissed by establishment commentators as 'conspiracy theories,' but this is an evasion. We do not use any kind of 'conspiracy' hypothesis to explain mass media performance. In fact, our treatment is much closer to a 'free market' analysis, with the results largely an outcome of the workings of market forces. Most biased choices in the media arise from the pre-selection of right-thinking people, internalized preconceptions, and the adaptation of personnel to the constraints of ownership, organization, market and political power. Censorship is largely self-censorship, by reporters and commentators who adjust to the realities of source and media organizational requirements, and by people at higher levels within media organizations who are chosen to implement, and have usually internalized, the constraints imposed by proprietary and other market and governmental centers of power.'
To be sure, within the system there will always be disagreements. One gets used to seeing dignified men in suits (and a few women) sitting around a table before TV cameras to discuss which of several options might be chosen to promote a certain end. But do they ever challenge real premises? Or even note them? Does the language of debate move outside the most prescribed and narrow circles? When, for instance, the subject of a debate is terrorism, what would happen if one debater simply assumed that the United States, in its activities - past and present - in Central America or the Middle East, might be guilty of state terrorism? The case can be made; indeed, it is often made in marginal journals and books, but how often is it argued in the mass, or mainstream, media?
...For the most part, the people who are chosen to conduct public discourse are carefully self-selected; they know what - in a free market society - will upset a sponsor. They realize that certain kinds of arguments will not even be heard by the audience, which has been subtly educated to screen out certain kinds of analysis. Cultural power devolves on those, it seems, who are willing and able to reinforce the assumptions already shared by those in power. These men and women are intellectuals, of course; they are people trained in discourse of a particular kind, and many of them are experts in some field, such as economics or sociology or international politics. But we cannot safely look in their direction for a discourse that is free of cant, that is fully imagined, and where the grain of a unique voice is heard. Here is where the artist - the imaginative writer - comes in
After World War II, the US was in a unique position of power relative to other nations. George Kennan perhaps the leading architect of the cold war, understood our situation and expressed it with icy plainness in Policy Planning Study #23, released to other members of the State Department in February, 1948:
'We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and out attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and benefaction.... The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.'" Jay Parini
Forgive and forget - Washington did once.
Reclaiming the remaining debts must be justified.
By Noam Chomsky
The Guardian -- Tuesday May 12, 1998
The call for debt cancellation is welcome, but debt does not just go away. Someone pays, and history generally confirms what a rational look at the structure of power would suggest: risks tend to be socialized, just as costs commonly are, in the system mislabeled 'free enterprise capitalism'.The old-fashioned idea is that responsibility falls upon those who borrow and lend. Money was not borrowed by campesinos, assembly plant workers, or slum-dwellers. The mass of the population gained little from borrowing, indeed often suffered grievously from its effects. But they are the ones who bear the burdens of repayment, along with taxpayers in the West - not the banks who made bad loans or the economic and military elites who enriched themselves while transferring wealth abroad and taking over the resources of their own countries.
The Latin American debt that reached crisis levels from 1982 would have been sharply reduced by return of flight capital - in some cases,
overcome, though all figures are dubious for these secret and often illegal operations. The World Bank estimated that Venezuela's flight capital exceeded its foreign debt by 40 per cent in 1987. In 1980-82, capital flight reached 70 per cent of borrowing for eight leading debtors, according to Business Week estimates. That is a regular pre- collapse phenomenon, which we saw again in Mexico in 1994.
The current IMF 'rescue package' for Indonesia approximates the estimated wealth of the Suharto family. One Indonesian economist estimates that 95 per cent of the country's foreign debt of some $80 billion is owed by 50 individuals, not the 200 million who end up suffering the costs.
Debt can be and has in the past been canceled. When Britain, France and Italy defaulted on US debts in the 1930s, Washington "forgave (or forgot)" as the Wall Street Journal reported. There are other relevant precedents. When the US took over Cuba 100 years ago it canceled Cuba's debt to Spain on the grounds that the burden was "imposed upon the people of Cuba without their consent and by force of arms". Such debts were later called "odious debt" by legal scholarship, "not an obligation for the nation" but the "debt of the power that has incurred it", while the creditors who "have committed a hostile act with regard to the people" can expect no payment from the victims.
When Britain challenged Costa Rica's attempts to cancel the debt of the former dictator to the Royal Bank of Canada, the arbitrator - US SupremeCourt Chief Justice William Howard Taft - concluded that the bank lent the money for no "legitimate use", so its claim for payment "must fail". The logic extends readily to much of today's debt: 'odious debt' with no legal or moral standing, imposed upon people without their consent, often serving to repress them and enrich their masters.
These capitalists generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people. Abraham Lincoln
All knowledge, we feel, must be built up upon our instinctive beliefs; and if these are rejected, nothing is left. Bertrand Russell, 1912
In so far as people think they can see the "limits of human understanding", they think of course that they can see beyond these. Ludwig Wittgenstein
Private opinion creates public opinion.... That is why private opinion, and private behavior, and private conversation are so terrifyingly important. Jan Struther (Joyce Anstruther), English poet (1901-1953)
When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us. Helen Keller
This passage was written by a London reporter on the eve of the England-West Germany Soccer World Cup final of 1966... "If, on the morrow, the Germans defeat us at our national sport, be not dismayed. For twice in this century, we've defeated them at theirs. San Jose Mercury News, 7 July 1990
It was the mystical dogma of Bentham and Adam Smith and the rest, that some of the worst of human passions would turn out to be all for the best. It was the mysterious doctrine that selfishness would do the work of unselfishness.
Nor do I agree with the viewpoint of the Libertarians, who seem to think that citizenship carries with it an inalienable right to selfishness. Heidi Wolf
Self-interest remains the very religion of the corporate world. Paul Wachtel
A lady came up to me on the street and pointed at my suede jacket. "You know a cow was murdered for that jacket?" she sneered. I replied in a psychotic tone, "I didn't know there were any witnesses. Now I'll have to kill you too." Jake Johansen
No human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself toward which his thought turns in a movement of desire, supplication, and hope... Consequently, the only choice is between worshipping the true God or an idol. Every atheist is an idolater --- unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters." Simone Weil
The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. Simone Weil
"She sees a way to come to terms with idolatry. 'A power comes to reside in any object which has been approached with intense feeling by large numbers of men. To adore this power is idolatry. True adoration consists in contemplating such an object with the thought that it has become divine through a convention ratified by God.'" Coles/Weil
Only one thing can be taken as an end, for in relation to the human person it possesses a kind of transcendence: this is the collective. The collective is the object of all idolatry, this it is which chains us to the earth. Simone Weil
Religion insofar as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith.... Love is not consolation, it is light. Simone Weil
The great mistake of the Marxists and of the whole of the 19th century was to think that by walking straight on one mounted upward into the air. Simone Weil
The constant illusion of Revolution consists in believing that the victims of force, being innocent of the outrages that are committed, will use force justly if it is put into their hands. But except for souls which are fairly near to saintliness, the victims are defiled by force, just as their tormentors are. The evil which is in the handle of the sword is transmitted to its point. So the victims thus put in power and intoxicated by the change, do as much harm or more, and soon sink back again to where they were before. Simone Weil
Scientists believe in science in the same way that the majority of Catholics believe in the Church, namely as Truth crystallized in an infallible collective opinion; they contrive to believe this in spite of the continual changes in theory. In both cases it is through lack of faith in God. Simone Weil
'One has only the choice between God and idolatry. There is no other possibility. For the faculty of worship is in us, and it is either directed somewhere into this world, or into another. If one affirms God one is either worshipping God or else some things of this world labeled with his name. If one denies God, either one is worshiping him unknown to oneself or else one is worshipping some things of this world in the belief that one sees them only as such, but in fact, though unknown to oneself, imagining the attributes of Divinity in them.Idolatry is due to the fact that, while athirst for absolute good, one is not in possession of supernatural attention, and one has not the patience to let it grow.
Idolatry is in our very nature, she is declaring, and when disguised (as scientific pursuit, as politics, as a deep affection for nature, as a religious ritual and practice) is no less what it is, though perhaps more dangerous, potentially, because not even acknowledged. If only some of us who have been psychoanalyzed, and who look deeply into the psychological life of others, were able to be so forcefully analytic about ourselves! I remember an aphorism I used to hear from William Carlos Williams as he went from home to home, making his rounds (of the NJ working class poor), still recovering he'd say from some disappointment or serious impasse in his 'other life,' that of the writer. "It's gold or glory or God --- what people worship.' Once when I added the worship intellectuals accord their own ideas and theories, he replied curtly, annoyed with my lack of imagination, "I think that comes under glory, or maybe God!'" Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage by Robert Coles M.D.
Life is god's novel. Let him write it. Isaac Bashevis Singer
If you're able to be yourself, then you have no competition. All you have to do is get closer and closer to that essence. Barbara Cook
The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise. Alden Nowlan
If you are afraid of being lonely, don't try to be right. Jules Renard
There is a strange relationship between the system of a country and its people. In England, the people are hostile to a man but the system is compassionate. The very old, the very young, and the ill-equipped-to-live will always be looked after. In America everyone is friendly --- almost doggie-like --- but the system is ruthless. Once you can be pronounced unproductive, you've had it. Quentin Crisp
"I have more or less equated limits with losses. The losses of aging are so numerous that they could fill books and so huge that they are incomprehensible to the young. We need every skill at our command to cope with them. One such skill is gallows humor. A particularly male variant of it goes: "At forty I would have settled for a beautiful woman. At fifty five I would have settled for a great meal. Now that I'm seventy I'd settle for a good bowel movement."
Again without whitewashing, let me note that some of these losses may eventually come, for at least a few, to be experienced as liberation. Take the "beautiful woman" bit. In my fifty fifth year I experienced a relatively sudden and dramatic loss of libido. It was not total, but along with it my capacity to attain and sustain erections became distinctly iffy. Such a loss of sexual potency would have sent many men, despite their embarrassment, running to their physicians in panic. Not me. Since I was a traveling man at the time, not infrequently subject to the attentions of beautiful women, this dimunution of testosterone coursing through my veins felt as if I'd gotten a monkey off my back. It did take a while to accept, but when the while was done it seemed to me more like a healing than a disease.
I focus on this matter of sexual potency because potency --- power, whether for women or for men --- is what's most at stake. By power I do not mean just political power, as we ordinarily think of it. The loss of such power may be one of the great losses of aging."
"Denial of the Soul: Spiritual and medical Perspectives on Euthanasia and Mortality" by M. Scott Peck M.D.
"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral." Paulo Friere
"We gotta throw our televisions away. It's all trash. It's like talking about how cocaine might have some vitamins." David Mamet
The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of
extremists will we be? Will we be extremists for hate or extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice--or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?' Martin Luther King Jr.
"In spite of this prevailing tendency to conform, we as Christian
have a mandate to be nonconformist. There are some things in our world to which [people] of goodwill must be maladjusted. I confess that I never intend to become adjusted to the evils of segregation and the crippling effects of discrimination, to the moral degeneracy of religious bigotry and the corroding effects of narrow sectarianism, to economic conditions that deprive [people] of work and food, and to the insanities of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence. Human solution lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted." Martin Luther King Jr.
"The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be guide and critic of the state and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority." Martin Luther King Jr.
In part it was watching music videos and seeing the images of scantily clad female "bootays" shaking and jiggling to the beats of some man's song that strengthened my reserve. As did observing the faceless women being pimped across the screen according to some brother's understanding of their sexuality. It was also attempting to ease the late-night, teary-eyed phone sessions of sisters wondering why their man wasn't acting right and how they were going to fix that slut he was cheating with. But ultimately, I think, it was listening to the sweet-talking lips of brothers themselves that did it for me.
Their refusal to uphold visions of female sexuality that were about more than just "getting some" made me decide early on that I wanted to be in control of and empowered by my sexuality.
Thus I chose, and still am choosing, virginity.
"Am I the Last Virgin? Ten African American Reflections on Sex and Love," Tara Roberts
There is no greater illusion than fear,
no greater wrong than preparing to defend yourself,
no greater misfortune than having an enemy.
Whoever can see through all fear
will always be safe. Lao-Tsu, "Tao Te Ching"
We who claim to love peace and justice must always be careful that we do not use our righteousness to provoke the violent, and in this way bring about the conflict for which we, too, like other men, are hungering in secret, and with suppressed barbarity. Thomas Merton, "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander"
"What you do with your own Communists is your own business. They are Trotskyists anyway. If you must, shoot them, and if you can't handle them, I'll help." Josef Stalin, as reported by NY Times correspondent Otto Tolischus, when asked during the Baltic negotiations what to do with Communists imprisoned in those countries.
Really that little dealybob is too far away from the hole. It should be built right in. Loretta Lynn
Love... is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Iris Murdoch
In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love, you want the other person. Margaret Anderson
Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth. Lillian Hellman
I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist when I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute. Dame Rebecca West
The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots. Rebecca West
The poor wish to be rich, the rich wish to be happy, the single wish to be married, and the married wish to be dead. Ann Landers
If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks' vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days. Dorothy Canfield Fisher, American author and essayist (1879-1958).
We don't tell people what to think. We make the pain of decision-making so intense that the only escape is to think." Sign on Fred Friday's office wall. Friday was a journalist who headed CBS briefly in the mid-50s until he quit in a dispute over the direction network television was to take.
In June of 1987, men will begin talking about their feelings; women all over America will be sorry within minutes. Nicole Hollander
When I encounter individuals in total despair, crushed by misfortune, by the lack of a future, by injustice or loneliness, I must transmit to them the reason I myself have found to hope and to live. In other words, the message is no longer, "Be converted or I will kill you," but rather, "You want to kill yourself; be converted to escape from killing yourself." Jacques Ellul
Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic. Anais Nin
What urge will save us now that sex won't? Jenny Holzer
Instant gratification is not fast enough. Suzanne Vega
I think you should know I worry a lot. Like the Nobel sperm bank. Something bothers me about the world's greatest geniuses sitting around reading pornography and jerking off. Jane Wagner
To me, the term 'sexual freedom' meant freedom from having to have sex. Jane Wagner
The apes were all homosexuals, eager to wrap their paws around Johnny's thighs. They were jealous of me, and I loathed them." Maureen O'Sullivan
I refuse to believe that trading recipes is silly. Tuna-fish casserole is at least as real as corporate stock. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself. Annie Dillard
"The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false. Saint Thomas Aquinas
