Essential Quotes - page 73
This unjust and unexampled proceeding of the Court of Spain, by inforcing her demands on England through the channel and by the compulsion of a hostile power, denouncing eventually future war in conjunction, while Spain was still professing amity and friendship with Great Britain; and the full declaration and avowal at last made by the Spanish Ministry of a total union of councils and interests between the two monarchies of the House of Bourbon, are matters of so high and urgent a nature as call indispensably on His Majesty to take forthwith such necessary and timely measures as God has put into his hands, for the defence of the honour of his Crown, and of the just and essential interests of His Majesty's people.
William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham
A free and independent press is essential to the health of a functioning democracy. It serves to inform the voting public on matters relevant to its well-being. Why they've stopped doing that is a mystery. I mean, 300 camera crews outside a courthouse to see what Kobe Bryant is wearing when the judge sets his hearing date, while false information used to send our country to war goes unchecked? What the fuck happened?
Jon Stewart
A favourable climate for peaceful negotiation must be created and can only be created by painstaking, unremitting effort. Conflicting parties must be led to realize that the road to peace can never be traversed by threatening to fight at every bend, by merely being armed to the teeth, or by flushing every bush to find an enemy. An essential first step in a civilized approach to peace in these times would call for a moratorium on recrimination and reproach.
Ralph Bunche
Government was instituted for the purposes of common defence ... In short, it is the greatest absurdity to suppose it in the power of one, or any number of men ... to renounce their essential natural rights, or the means of preserving those rights; when the grand end of civil government, from the very nature of its institution, is for the support, protection, and defence of those very rights; the principal of which, as is before observed, are Life, Liberty, and Property. If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation. The right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave.
Samuel Adams
You start to know, on stage, when to get off. There's just this feeling that you develop from years and years of doing it; you just feel that "We're getting-- Everyone's really having a good time... and I think, in another few minutes, this is going to start to get old... 'Good night, everybody!'" And everyone's happy! [...] It's just... proportions. Y'know? I guess it's a function of art and economy: that economy is essential to all good art. And I thought "Let's-- " Even though we had done a lot [of Seinfeld]: nine years, 180 episodes, I thought "We can't do one too many, or it's gonna taint the whole thing."
Jerry Seinfeld
Authentic existence involves exaltation, sensitivity to the holy, awareness of indebtedness.
Existence without transcendence is a way of living where things become idols and idols become monsters.
Denial of transcendence contradicts the essential truth of being human. Its roots can be traced either to stolidity of self-contentment or to superciliousness of contempt, to moods rather than to comprehensive awareness of the totality and mystery of being.
Denial of transcendence which claims to unveil the truth of being is an inner contradiction, since the truth of being is not within being or within our consciousness of being but rather a truth that transcends our being.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
In conclusion, then, no satisfactory interpretation of quantum mechanics exists today. The questions posed by the confrontation between the Copenhagen interpretation and the hidden variable theorists go to the very foundations of microphysics, but the answers given by hidden variable theorists and Copenhagenists are alike unsatisfactory. Human curiosity will not rest until those questions are answered, but whether they will be answered by conceptual innovations within the framework of the present theory or only within the framework of an as yet unforeseen theory is unknown. The first step toward answering them has been attempted here. It is the modest but essential step of becoming clear on the nature and magnitude of the difficulties.
Hilary Putnam
Sei Shonagon feels modern, almost a proto-feminist in such a paternalistic age that women at court stayed, for the most part, silent and still and available indoors all their lives. She said much, and she said two electrifying things from the still darkness of her domestic prisons. She said them of course very much in her own way, but she said there were two things in life that were absolutely essential, and life would be unbearable without them: the sensuous body and literature. My crude summation would be sex and text. Both have the X factor. She said them with longing and her longing stayed with me.
Sei Shōnagon
I am not discouraged. I really am not. I do not despair for our country. I never do. I believe tonight, as I always have, that the essential decency and compassion and common sense of the American people will prevail.
And so I say to you and to others around the world, whether they wish us well or ill: Do not underestimate us Americans.
Jimmy Carter
«Nevertheless it is about themes endowed with depth, rather uncomfortable in a culture that often seeks from poetry almost a consolation or at least a reconciliation with the world. Davinio's poetry is instead problematic, not at all conciliatory or reconciled. Caterina develops her themes in a vibrant language, dry and almost essential, taut and antirhetorical» (Gianmario Lucini)
Caterina Davinio
Nuclear weapons are an expression of one side of our human character. But there is another side. The same rocket technology that delivers nuclear warheads has also taken us peacefully into space. From that perspective, we see our Earth as it really is - a small and fragile and beautiful blue globe, the only home we have. We see no barriers of race or religion or country. We see the essential unity of our species and our planet; and with faith and common sense, that bright vision will ultimately prevail.
Another major challenge, therefore, is to protect the quality of this world within which we live. The shadows that fail across the future are cast not only by the kinds of weapons we have built, but by the kind of world we will either nourish or neglect.
Jimmy Carter
We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation, we belong, no matter how normal, moral, or mature we take ourselves to be.
Humanity is estranged from its authentic possibilities. This basic vision prevents us from taking any unequivocal view of the sanity of common sense, or of the madness of the so-called madman. ... Our alientation goes to the roots. The realisation of this is the essential springboard for any serious reflection on any aspect of present inter-human life.
Ronald David Laing
But the hatred of women is a source of sexual pleasure for men in its own right. Intercourse appears to be the expression of that contempt in pure form, in the form of a sexed hierarchy; it requires no passion or heart because it is power without invention articulating the arrogance of those who do the fucking. Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men's contempt for women; but that contempt can turn gothic and express itself in many sexual and sadistic practices that eschew intercourse per se. Any violation of a woman's body can become sex for men; this is the essential truth of pornography.
Andrea Dworkin
For you the group meditation is essential; it will serve to aid your soul in its life task and to integrate you into the second ray sphere of influence, which will be of real use. My brother, we travel not alone. For you, again, group love, group understanding, group happiness and group work are essential to progress, real happiness and good physical health. In group work and contact comes relief from inner tension, through the sharing of force. You...carry much force. Disperse it among your brothers.
Alice Bailey
Family hurts us, it is like a trap, it shortens our life, it bothers us psychically and socioculturally, it forces us into a limited level of consciousness, it robs us of our essential self, it inculcates ideas in us that are not our own, and at the moment when we find ourselves in the world, all of this collapses and we have to build a life from scratch. We forgive ourselves because no one is guilty. Generation after generation, each one is victim to the one before. We end up with many centuries of being victims, but in the end you understand that there is no reason for resentment.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
At the core of the notion of a superhuman intelligence - particularly the view that this intelligence will keep improving itself - is the essential belief that intelligence has an infinite scale. I find no evidence for this. Again, mistaking intelligence as a single dimension helps this belief, but we should understand it as a belief. There is no other physical dimension in the universe that is infinite, as far as science knows so far. Temperature is not infinite - there is finite cold and finite heat. There is finite space and time. Finite speed. Perhaps the mathematical number line is infinite, but all other physical attributes are finite.It stands to reason that reason itself is finite, and not infinite.
Kevin Kelly (editor)
As far as the economic content of the common European home is concerned, we regard as a realistic prospect - though not a close one - the emergence of a vast economic space from the Atlantic to the Urals where Eastern and Western parts would be strongly interlocked. In this sense, the Soviet Union's transition to a more open economy is essential; and not only for ourselves, for a higher economic effectiveness and for meeting consumer demands. Such a transition will increase East-West economic interdependence and, thus, will tell favorably on the entire spectrum of European relations.
Mikhail Gorbachev
An acknowledgment of the full spectrum of consciousness would profoundly alter the course of every one of the modern disciplines it touches-and that, of course, is an essential aspect of integral studies... A full-spectrum approach to human consciousness and behavior means that men and women have available to them a spectrum of knowing-a spectrum that includes, at the very least, the eye of flesh, the eye of mind, and the eye of spirit.
Ken Wilber
We have, for the first time in history, easy access to all of the world's great religions. Examine the many great traditions-from Christianity to Buddhism, Islam to Taoism, Paganism to Neoplatonism-and you are struck by two items: there are an enormous number of differences between them, and a handful of striking similarities.
When you find a few essential items that all, or virtually all, of the world's great religions agree on, you have probably found something incredibly important about the human condition, at least as important as, say, a few things that physicists can manage to agree on (which nowadays, by the way, ain't all that impressive).
Ken Wilber
