My signature block used to include a few extra quotations to show what was important to me. That grew to such an extent that it became unmanageable some while ago, so I split it, with a full list on my “pages”, and a shorter list on (shorter) posts on my main, or “home” page. Well, that also got to the stage where it was unmanageable, so I decided to create a page solely for quotations - and here ‘tis :)
Definitions anchor us in principles.
Dr Ibram X. Kendi, “How to be an Antiracist”
The real dividing line is not between Christianity and Islam, Sunni and Shia, East and West. It is between people who believe in coexistence, and those who don’t.
Tom Fletcher, Former UK Ambassador to Lebanon
Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
often attributed, without evidence, to Albert Einstein
The very powerful and the very [amathiac] have one thing in common - they don't change their views to fit the facts. They change the facts to fit their views, which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs changing.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
David Bohm (cited here)
The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.
Bryan Stevenson, ECI, TED Talk
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
We are not going to turn the United States into a right-wing totalitarian country in order to deal with a left-wing totalitarian threat.
We can have vast wealth in the hands of a few, or we can have a democracy. But we cannot have both.
US Justice Louis Brandeis, 1924 (cited here)
Perfect
is the enemy of the good.
(more literally “the best is
the enemy of the good”)
Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.
Voltaire
Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.
attributed to “Valery Legasov“, supposedly said during the USSR Chernobyl trial
“History is by no means a perfect guide to what is likely to happen, but it is one of the best we’ve got”
When the wrong person uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way.
an “old Chinese saying” cited in “Sitting with Lao-Tzu“ by Andrew Beaulac
A problem: aspirational leadership without commensurate resource base.
I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.
“We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”
“One cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own.” (from here)
“It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.” (from here)
“I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.” (from here)
“The oppressor would not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed”.
Simone de Beauvoir, “The Ethics of Ambiguity”
“Our pen is our spear / Let us have the courage to use it / For resistance is the refusal to yield to silence.”
***
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral. Returning violence with violence only multiplies violence, add deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
(the saying dates back to Theodore Parker, in the 1850s)
It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless.
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity.
True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
No work is insignificant. All labour that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Let us turn to a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself. This is difference made legal. On the other hand, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow, and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. . . . There are some instances when a law is just on its face and unjust in its application.
This ‘wait’ has almost always meant ‘never.’ It has been a tranquillizing thalidomide, relieving the emotional stress for a moment, only to give birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration.
Over the last few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. So I have tried to make it clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or even more, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.
Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., in various sources including “Letter from a Birmingham Jail“
***
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.
(speaking in Response to the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.)
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different [centres] of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product ... if we should judge America by that -- counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. ... Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
Robert F. Kennedy
The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by sceptics or cynics, whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need [people] who can dream of things that never were, and ask why not.
The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichĂ©s of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.
There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.
John F. Kennedy
Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger [people].
(quoting 19th Century Episcopal Bishop Phillips Brooks)
John F. Kennedy
***
If cowardice is the only alternative to violence, it is better to fight.
Gandhi, as cited by Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.
Civilisation is the encouragement of differences.
It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there’ll be any fruit. But that doesn’t mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.
“Do you fight to change things, or to punish?”
Mahatma Gandhi
***
The worst illiterate is the political illiterate. He hears nothing, sees nothing, takes no part in political life. He doesn’t seem to know that the cost of living, the price of beans, of flour, of rent, of medicines, all depend on political decisions. He even prides himself on his political ignorance, sticks out his chest and says he hates politics. He doesn’t know . . . that, from his political non-participation comes . . . the abandoned child, the robber and, worst of all, corrupt officials, the lackeys of exploitative multinational corporations.
Bertolt Brecht (cited here)
These are the disadvantages of a commercial spirit. The minds of men are contracted, and rendered incapable of elevation. Education is despised, or at least neglected, and the heroic spirit is almost utterly extinguished.
Adam Smith (cited here)
It doesn't matter if most voters don’t benefit. They all believe that someday they will. That’s the problem with the American dream. It makes everyone concerned for the day they're gonna be rich
fictional character US President Josiah Bartlet
from the TV series “The West Wing”,
Season 3, Ep 43, “Ways and Means”
at 40 min 29 sec
The fastest way to change society is to mobilize the women of the world.
“He was a ... man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms - one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the thought police, the stability of the party depended.”
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
Justice Louis D. Brandeis
Lifted on tiptoes, one cannot stand firm.
Chapter 24
However, with compassion, you remain victorious when attacked and when defending you are invincible.
Chapter 67,
The Dao De Ching,from “Sitting with Lao-Tzu“ by Andrew Beaulac
One’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
Prison does not silence ideas whose time has come, a fact that generally escapes despots, who by nature are rulers of little wisdom.
Barbara Tuchman
“The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam“
When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
There is no way to peace - peace is the way.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
Albert Einstein
When you press the pause button on a machine, it stops. But when you press the pause button on a human beings they start.
Dov Seidman , cited by Tom L Friedman in “Thank You
for Being late”
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2016, ISBN 978-0-374-27353-8)
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good [people] to do nothing.
(based on writing by) Edmund Burke
Those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.
Be the change you want to see happen instead of trying to change anyone else.
Females, get over ‘cute’. Get competent. Get trained. Get capable. Get over ‘cute’. And those of you who are called Patty and Debby and Suzy, get over that. Because we use those names to infantalise females – we keep females in their ‘little girl’ state by the names we use for them. Get over it. If you want to be taken seriously, get serious.
Jane Elliott
We have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen more than we say.
Zeno of Citium
Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.
Stephen R. Covey
Mankind’s greatest achievements have come about by talking and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn’t have to be like this.
Stephen Hawking
(in a 1993 British Telecom advertisement)
Jesus loves you. Odin wants you to grow up.
Facebook meme, according to John Beckett)
We make our decisions. And then our decisions turn around and make us.
F.W. Boreham
Your children are not your children. ... They come through you but ... they belong not to you ... for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow
Kahlil Gibran
We didn’t inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we only borrowed it from our children
Antoine De Saint-Exupéry
In times like the present, men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and eternity.
You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.
Abraham Lincoln
One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes... and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.
Eleanor Roosevelt
The price of greatness is responsibility.
Winston Churchill
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Oscar Wilde
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Aldous Huxley
Where globalisation means, as it so often does, that the rich and powerful now have new means to further enrich and empower themselves at the cost of the poorer and weaker, we have a responsibility to protest in the name of universal freedom.
No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.
If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions.
Arguing that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
Sometimes the scandal is not what law was broken, but what the law allows.
The immoral cannot be made moral through the use of secret law.
Edward Snowdon
The UN was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.
2nd United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, May 1954
Wherever you go, go with all your heart.
There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
H L Mencken (in “Prejudices”, 1920)
There is no person who is worthless,
There is no word without magical powers,
There is no root that is devoid of medicinal value,
It’s only the knower who is difficult to find!
Unknown
(described as “an old Sanskrit quatrain”)
May the echoes in the chamber of fear, hate, and revenge be damped down and then overwhelmed, absorbed, and transmuted by love, acceptance, and forbearance.
Transnational humaneness for a transnational humanity on a single world is my political philosophy.
Our greatest struggle with, to borrow from pop culture, the Jedi-Sith scale, is not with the Sith, whether they are hiding or not: it is with the annoying, snotty-nosed, heroine/hero-worshipping little kid who keeps intruding, stopping us from being cool enough to be with our heroines/heroes, the big kids ...
Love for those close to us emotionally does NOT preclude caring according to need - as will be understood by all who are spiritually and emotionally mature.
Beware the enforcers of conformity - those small people who, sharing the banality of evil, cannot abide that others may demonstrate that doing the same as everyone else is not compulsory.
Just because you can comprehend, carry out, and are comfortable with an idea does not mean it is correct.
The evil - and, whether it is there out of malice or ignorance, it is evil - that is in the hearts of those who are harming and diminishing gays, lesbians and trans people, is, at its core, the same as the evil that harms and diminishes humans of other races, ethnicities or cultures, or sexes or genders, or religions, or those humans seeking safety. Furthermore, as with the evil that is slavery, one of its worst aspects is that those people indulging in it get used to being cruel and try to justify it. The struggle for Equal Marriage is a struggle to abolish the slavery-like control that one group of people exerts over the hearts of another group of people.
US Justice Harlan‘s comment “This ‘liberty’ is not a series of isolated points ... It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints” speaks to a more universal principle: specific “–isms” of discrimination are not the problem, the underlying bigotry, and whatever fear, ignorance or hate it is founded on, is the problem.
Human dignity is the inherently cumulative holistic combination of human rights, wellbeing and potential, and all actions or interaction which promote, realise or facilitate same. The converse also applies: whatever degrades, diminishes or robs humans of dignity, is inherently undignified.
Abuses of power such as silencing victims are one of the causes of conflating revenge and justice - which is wrong.
The “purpose” of spiritual evolution is not the attainment of “spiritual perfection” - not in the sense of not having to evolve further, at any rate, since there is no such thing. We need to evolve in order to grow - but we can take rest breaks (hopefully well earned :) ) along the way. No, the “purpose” of evolution is, rather, to perfect our ability to learn, and thus grow.
The reason for diversity / variety in life is not to allow choice, it is to enable the meeting of the diversity / variety of spiritual needs in life.
As you are right now, here, living on this world, it is IMPOSSIBLE for you to know everything or understand everyone. The only thing to do then, is accept people as they are - unless they are genuinely harming others - and learn to co-exist.
Spiritual love is NOT about emotional highs.
Having an “equal say”, or a “right to respond”, MUST be assessed in the context of what is happening overall in society – it is NOT solely what is happening in one limited and specific incident or even one discussion.
One of the major flaws in this world is
mistaking awareness of convenience for thinking;
Thinking social status/personal significance is “importance” / “right to do stuff”
rather than accepting the equality of human rights is a mistake.
Hierarchical obedience is not “respect”:
it is the imposition of power, domination, and control. Reinforcing social/business hierarchy is not building cohesion. Promoting human rights is not divisive - it is the resistance that is divisive, not the rights nor their promotion.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about rents and housing prices, of late, and my conclusion is that the only way they will start coming down to realistic levels is for some ethical builder/owner to decide they are rich enough/don’t want that part of their income to be blood money, and start charging lower rents (rather than “commercial rent”) and sell houses by direct negotiation at a price with a modest aka reasonable level of profit (which I personally would interpret as 10%). Who will be first cab up to the decency-and-save-their-moral-soul rank?
Families are often where people are spiritually sentenced to learn to co-exist; they can be controlling and abusive, and, perhaps even more importantly, the focus on family first cuts down our empathy and compassion for people who are genuinely in far more extreme suffering – thus diminishing the family-focused people and making them less as human beings: it is mistaking an apprentice application of love for a mature application of love.
Consider: how many Einsteins, Marie Curies, Steve Jobs, Jane Elliotts, Nicola Teslas, Helen Kellers, Gandhis, Eleanor Roosevelts, and Mandelas never got a chance because of their crushing poverty?
Gnwmythr
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Remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, to mind our MÓ•gan, and to acknowledge that all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering” (just as binary gendered [men’s and women’s] sporting teams are either both given the gender descriptor, or neither).For my original writing ONLY: Copyright © Kayleen White 2007-2024 NO AI
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