Becoming Quotes - page 78
Our task is to prevent the present generation, torn asunder by its conflicts, from becoming perverted and from perverting new generations. We must not bring into being either docile servants of official thought or scholarship students who live at the expense of the state - practising "freedom." Already there are revolutionaries coming who will sing the song of the new man in the true voice of the people. This is a process, which takes time.
Che Guevara
Who is to blame but her and the third factor, from whence no one knows, which moved me with its stimulus and transformed me? After all, what I have done is praised in others.-Or is becoming a poet my compensation? I reject all compensation, I demand my rights-that is, my honor. I did not ask to become one, I will not buy it at this price. – Or if I am guilty, then I certainly should be able to repent of my guilt and make it good again. Tell me how. On top of that, must I perhaps repent that the world plays with me as a child plays with a beetle?-Or is it perhaps best to forget the whole thing? Forget-indeed, I shall have ceased to be if I forget it. Or what kind of life would it be if along with my beloved I have lost honor and pride and lost them in such a way that no one knows how it happened, for which reason I can never retrieve them again? Shall I allow myself to be shoved out in this manner? Why, then, was I shoved in?
Søren Kierkegaard
The purpose of our evolutionary existence, then, is to manifest the soul's qualities on the physical plane, and so to spiritualize matter. Meditation provides a more-or-less scientific means, depending on the meditation, of contacting the soul and gradually becoming at one with the soul, so that it can manifest clearly and potently on the physical plane. When we see such individuals, we perceive them as radiating meaning and purpose – for example, exceptionally creative artists, scientists, politicians or educators. Such persons are quite obviously governed by a force altogether different from the norm. It is the energy of the soul which is pouring through them, making them the creative beings who enrich our culture and civilization.
Benjamin Creme
One incident that is becoming more and more common was related to me in almost every colony I visited between 2008 and 2010: the random abduction of young Hindu women and girls. With a numbing consistency, their testimonies would tell of a young female walking by the side of the road. In some cases, she was going to draw water; in others she was on her way to school; and in some, she was just walking o her way to see a relative or friend. out of the blue, a gang of Muslims would drive up and snatch the woman and then take her to a vacant building or field and rape her repeatedly. (85)
Richard Benkin
The needs of man, if life is to survive, are usually said to be four -- air, water, food, and in the severe climates, protection. But it is becoming clear today that the human organism has another absolute necessity... This fifth need is the need for novelty -- the need, throughout our waking life, for continuous variety in the external stimulation of our eyes, ears, sense organs, and all our nervous network.
William D. Tammeus
That's what I believe, in part because that's what a child like Christina Taylor Green believed. Imagine: here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy; just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship; just starting to glimpse the fact that someday she too might play a part in shaping her nation's future. She had been elected to her student council; she saw public service as something exciting, something hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted. I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us - we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations.
Barack Obama
I cannot claim to have had any direct personal divine inspiration. Yet coping with multitudinous problem-solving efforts and observing the world in which I live evokes an openness to a mystery of being that I cannot deny. Critical reflection leads me to believe than an awareness of such mysteries is a necessity in the constitution of order in democratic societies. If religion is a necessity in the conceptualization of paradigmatically diverse formulations, religion might be viewed as a necessary element in a system of knowledge pertaining to the consitution of order. We do, however, face the problem of those system of order that were constituted under circumstances of explicitly rejecting religion as a necessary feature in their constitution. We have the potential, then, of those who reject religion becoming the prophets of new secular religions. What we call "ideologies" may be the source of that most profound pathologies in human personal and social disorders.
Vincent Ostrom
When he discovered the polyhedral hypothesis soon after being sent to teach mathematics in Graz, he changed his mind [about becoming a Lutheran minister], indicating... that he now saw his work in astronomy as an exercise of a priestly vocation. ...he claimed that, in the Harmonice mundi, he offered to the world nothing less than the plan of creation, which God himself had waited six thousand years for someone to comprehend.
Johannes Kepler
Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet preserve the constitution? By general law life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the constitution, through the preservation of the nation. Right or wrong, I assumed this ground, and now avow it. I could not feel that, to the best of my ability, I had even tried to preserve the constitution, if, to save slavery, or any minor matter, I should permit the wreck of government, country, and Constitution all together.
Abraham Lincoln
Globalism was operated by oligarchical corporations on the gigantic scale, made possible by cheap oil. By "oligarchical” I mean that power was vested in small numbers of people running large organizations who were not accountable for their actions to many of the people who were subject to those actions. By "corporation,” I mean a group enterprise given the legal status of a "person,” with "rights,” but in fact devoid of any human qualities of ethics, humility, mercy, duty, or loyalty that would constrain those rights. As Wendell Berry put it, "a corporation... is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance... It can experience no personal hope or remorse. No change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.
James Howard Kunstler
