Lack Quotes - page 76
The lack of objectivity, as far as foreign nations are concerned, is notorious. From one day to another, another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while one's own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standard - every action of oneself by another. Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals which they serve.
Erich Fromm
In the final analysis alienation is, among other things a response to the frustration created by the lack of meaning in modern society. It has been pointed out often enough that politics takes on religious overtones when religion proper withers, at any rate among intellectuals. Along these lines Doris Lessing observed: "There are certain types of people who are political out of a kind of religious reason...I think it's fairly common among socialists: They are in fact God-seekers, looking for the kingdom of God on earth...trying to abolish the present in favor of some better future -- always taking it for granted that there is a better future. If you don't believe in heaven you believe in socialism."
Paul Hollander
We are already used to the fact that the United States and other Western countries simply announce in the media yet another set of accusations against Russia, be it hackers, or some kind of a sensation about the double or even triple poisoning of Navalny. All this news is funny to read, but it says only one thing -- or rather the manner in which this news is presented says only one thing -- that our Western partners do not have any ethical standards and lack skill in normal diplomatic work, and [have] unwillingness to comply with the international legal norms when it comes to finding the facts.
Sergey Lavrov
To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.
Marilynne Robinson
There was an enormous amount of dissent in Romania, but it was passive, not active. There were far fewer workers and intellectuals who confronted brute power head on in Romania than in, say, Czechoslovakia or Poland. That has partly to be explained by the savagery of the Securitate compared to, for example, the Czech secret police, the StB, and partly the Romanians' lack of a democratic transition and the historic culture of submission.
John Sweeney (journalist)
Everything about the loss of the Kursk in 2000 prefigures the 2022 invasion of Ukraine: the Kremlin's lack of interest in its own people; their shoddy and obsolete kit; the contempt for proper scrutiny; the silencing of honest criticism. The lesson Putin learnt from the sinking of the Kursk was entirely fascistic. He had suffered a lot of heat from Russia's free and independent media for his slow and heartless response. The solution was to switch it off.
John Sweeney (journalist)
Roberto really should not have played that second game. He was so tired from the previous night's game and lack of sleep that he passed up batting practice. But he played all twenty-five innings within a twenty-hour period... Man, when I was playing, it would take me three or four weeks to get that many hits.
Roberto Clemente
There was a time in South Africa that people would put flaming tires around people's necks if they dissented. And in some ways the fear is that you will be ‘necklaced' here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions...I do not except myself from this criticism...What we are talking about here-whether one wants to recognize it or not, or call it by its proper name or not-is a form of self-censorship. I worry that patriotism run amok will trample the very values that the country seeks to defend.
Dan Rather
The left blames white nationalism. The right blames mental illness. Neither explains that it happens often here and nowhere else. But mass shootings account for a very small number of gun deaths: Many more women are killed in their home by guns. Men used to just knock women around, but rarely did death result. But with a gun on hand, there's a death. Half of the gun deaths are suicide. The proliferation of guns is a huge problem, but its cause is not lack of regulations. There were lots of regulations in the '70s when this started; going postal and school shootings started in the '70s.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
[T]he left, whose existence is threatened by the diminishment of racial oppression. The left's unspoken terror is that racism is no longer menacing enough to support its own power. The great crisis for the left today-the source of its angst and hatefulness-is its own encroaching obsolescence. Today the left looks to be slowly dying from lack of racial menace.
Shelby Steele
Like so many other male writers, Singer sees the world as essentially male-centered and clearly views women as "other"-separate, subsidiary, apart, alien. He betrays a deep mistrust, revulsion and hostility toward women, especially those who stray in any way from their prescribed roles or cease to organize their lives around men. Singer portrays women almost entirely as the sum total of their biological functions and in terms of their relationships (or lack of them) with men. He uses physical details of women's bodies as signposts of their personalities.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
It's an amazing thing to think that ours is the first generation in history that really can end extreme poverty, the kind that means a child dies for lack of food in its belly. That should be seen as the most incredible, historic opportunity but instead it's become a millstone around our necks. We let our own pathetic excuses about how it's "difficult" justify our own inaction. Be honest. We have the science, the technology, and the wealth. What we don't have is the will, and that's not a reason that history will accept.
Bono
This is the straight truth, the righteous truth. It's not a theory, it's a fact. The fact is that this generation - yours, my generation - that can look at the poverty, we're the first generation that can look at poverty and disease, look across the ocean to Africa and say with a straight face, we can be the first to end this sort of stupid extreme poverty, where in the world of plenty, a child can die for lack of food in it's belly. We can be the first generation. It might take a while, but we can be that generation that says no to stupid poverty. It's a fact, the economists confirm it. It's an expensive fact but, cheaper than say the Marshall Plan that saved Europe from communism and fascism. And cheaper I would argue than fighting wave after wave of terrorism's new recruits.
Bono
The characters of self-restrained officials are exceedingly careful and just and conservative, but they lack keenness and a certain quick and active boldness. The courageous natures, on the other hand, are deficient in justice and caution in comparison with the former, but excel in boldness of action; and unless both these qualities are present it is impossible for a state to be entirely prosperous in public and private matters.
Plato
He has been called an atheist, but atheist he was not. Paine believed in a supreme intelligence, as representing the idea which other men often express by the name of deity.
His Bible was the open face of nature, the broad skies, the green hills. He disbelieved the ancient myths and miracles taught by established creeds. But the attacks on those creeds - or on persons devoted to them - have served to darken his memory, casting a shadow across the closing years of his life.
When Theodore Roosevelt termed Tom Paine a "dirty little atheist" he surely spoke from lack of understanding. It was a stricture, an inaccurate charge of the sort that has dimmed the greatness of this eminent American. But the true measure of his stature will yet be appreciated. The torch which he handed on will not be extinguished.
Thomas Edison
From a comparative perspective, the United States is unusual if not unique in the lack of restraints on freedom of expression. It is also unusual in the range and effectiveness of methods employed to restrain freedom of thought... Where the voice of the people is heard, elite groups must insure their voice says the right things... The less the state is able to employ violence in the defense of the interest of the elite groups that effectively dominate it, the more it becomes necessary to devise techniques of ‘manufacture of consent'... Where obedience is guaranteed by violence, rulers may tend towards a ‘behaviourist' conception; it is enough that people obey; what they think does not matter too much. Where the state lacks means of coercion, it is important to control what people think.
Noam Chomsky
The great invention... Descartes gave to the world, the analytical diagram, ...gives at a glance a graphical picture of the law governing a phenomenon, or of the correlation which exists between dependent events, or of the changes which a situation undergoes in the course of time. ...the invention of Descartes not only created the important discipline of analytic geometry, but it gave Newton, Leibnitz, Euler, and the Bernoullis that weapon for the lack of which Archimedes and later Fermat had to leave inarticulate their profound and far-reaching thoughts.
René Descartes
But perhaps I lack the gift. I see I've described her as being like a sword. That's true as far as it goes. But utterly inadequate by itself, and misleading. I ought to have said 'But also like a garden. Like a nest of gardens, wall within wall, hedge within hedge, more secret, more full of fragrant and fertile life, the further you explore.'
And then, of her, and every created thing I praise, I should say 'in some way, in its unique way, like Him who made it.'
Thus up from the garden to the Gardener, from the sword to the Smith. to the life-giving Life and the Beauty that makes beautiful.
C. S. Lewis
The standard bearers have grown weak in the defense of their priceless heritage, and the powers of darkness have been strengthened thereby. Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character; it becomes lack of power to act with courage proportionate to danger. All this must lead to the destruction of our intellectual life unless the danger summons up strong personalities able to fill the lukewarm and discouraged with new strength and resolution.
Albert Einstein
The characteristics the modern mind prides itself on are precisely those of madness. There is no one more logical than the lunatic, more concerned with the minutiae of cause and effect. Madmen are the greatest reasoners we know, and that trait is one of the accompaniments of their undoing. All their vital processes are shrunken into the mind. What is the one thing they lack that sane men possess? The ability to be careless, to disregard appearances, to relax and laugh at the world. They can't unbend, can't gamble their whole existence, as did Pascal, on a fanciful wager. They can't do what religion has always asked: to believe in a justification of their lives that seems absurd.
Ernest Becker
