Birth Quotes - page 56
Lincoln sees American democracy as a last stand, what he calls the last, best hope. And if this goes down, we may so discredit the whole notion of democracy that no one will ever want to go this way again, and so this is the test. It's a test of whether or not we'll have this new birth of freedom, if we'll finally shuck off these last husks of aristocracy and move forward in the direction of democracy. That for him is the vital issue.
Allen C. Guelzo
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, vesting every individual with equal rights, was directly opposed to the hierarchical social structure of indigenous Fijian society. Chiefs were at the apex by virtue of their birth and rank. The rest of the people had a communal functional role in this hierarchy.
Laisenia Qarase
[O]ne reason there is no socialism in America is because of Lincoln. In the American context Lincoln imparted to liberal democracy a sense of nobility and purpose that it has not always had in other contexts. He makes democracy something transcendent, and especially at Gettysburg where he talks about the nation having this new birth of freedom. He ratchets the horizons of liberal democracy right up past the spires of Cologne Cathedral and he makes it this glowing attractive ideal that people are willing to make these tremendous sacrifices to protect. Because at the end of the day this is what the Civil War is about-it's about the preservation of liberal democracy. In the 1860s the United States was the last Enlightenment experiment that was still standing. What you had in the climate of mid-19th century Europe was the renaissance of romantic aristocracy.
Allen C. Guelzo
IT is good to love God for hope of reward, but it is better to love God for loves sake and the prayer goes O Lord, I do not want wealth nor children nor learning. If it be Thy will, I shall go from birth to birth. But grant me this, that I may love thee without the hope of reward - love unselfishly for loves sake.
Swami Vivekananda
There are four ways through which a nation's population can vanish: 1. Through obliteration in war; 2. Through their lands being swamped by labor-driven immigration; 3. Through physical mixing with newcomers; and 4. The second and third factors above combined with a decreasing birth rate amongst the original population. Ancient Rome vanished because of the last three factors: now exactly the same scenario is being played out in Western Europe, North America and Australia. Unless checked, the demographic trends show conclusively that Whites will be a minority in all three of these continents by the year 2100. After that, it is only then a question of time and Whites as a racial group will vanish completely.
Arthur Kemp
The primary challenge of this cosmological transformation of consciousness is the awareness that each being in the universe is an origin of the universe. "The center of the cosmos" refers to that place where the great birth of the universe happened at the beginning of time, but it also refers to the upwelling of the universe as river, as star, as raven, as you, the universe surging into existence anew. The consciousness that learns it is at the origin point of the universe is itself an origin of the universe. The awareness that bubbles up each moment that we identify as ourselves is rooted in the originating activity of the universe. We are all of us arising together at the center of the cosmos.
Brian Swimme
What's evil for the hawk is the mouse because, you know, the mouse is quick and gets away but I did this one realization every scientist goes through at one point... if you gave the hawk power, the power of God, the first thing the hawk might do is to slow down the mouse. But then the hawk would lose it's speed. And then if you slow the mouse all the way down, so it can just barely move, the hawk would lose its flight. So that in a weird way the tension between those two say natural enemies is what gives birth to their beauty. So I definitely feel that the tension we have right now within the human community in particular - that those are ultimately going to be resolved with a deeper harmony and a deeper appreciation for one another.
Brian Swimme
The more I learn about light the more I realize, man, we don't know anything about light... It's just bizarre... a particle has it's own proper time which slows down as you speed up. But at the speed of light... there's no time. That's bizarre ... that we can, right now, as you know, see - interact with the light that has come from the birth of the universe. So ... from our point of view, that light traveled for 14 billion years but from the point of view of the light it's the moment of creation.
Brian Swimme
No longer enslaved or made dependent by force of law, the great majority are so by force of poverty; they are still chained to a place, to an occupation, and to conformity with the will of an employer, and debarred, by the accident of birth both from the enjoyments, and from the mental and moral advantages, which others inherit without exertion and independently of desert. That this is an evil equal to almost any of those against which mankind have hitherto struggled, the poor are not wrong in believing.
John Stuart Mill
One student told us that she knew birth control wasn't covered, and she assumed that's how Georgetown's insurance handled all of women's sexual healthcare, so when she was raped, she didn't go to the doctor even to be examined or tested for sexually transmitted infections because she thought insurance wasn't going to cover something like that, something that was related to a woman's reproductive health.
Sandra Fluke
Her claim was denied repeatedly on the assumption that she really wanted the birth control to prevent pregnancy. She's gay, so clearly polycystic ovarian syndrome was a much more urgent concern than accidental pregnancy. After months of paying over $100 out of pocket, she just couldn't afford her medication anymore and had to stop taking it. I learned about all of this when I walked out of a test and got a message from her that in the middle of her final exam period she'd been in the emergency room all night in excruciating pain. ... Without her taking the birth control, a massive cyst the size of a tennis ball had grown on her ovary. She had to have surgery to remove her entire ovary.
Sandra Fluke
All my life I have been attracted by Catholicism. But what attracted me was not its Christianity, but its paganism. The Scholastic Philosophers entertained me not because they were apologists for Jesus but because they were refinements of Aristotle. The liturgical life of the Church moved me because it echoes the most ancient responses to the turning of the year and the changing seasons, and the rhythms of animal and human life. For me the Sacraments transfigured the rites of passage, the physical facts of the human condition - birth, adolescence, sexual intercourse, vocation, sickness and death, communion, penance. Catholicism still provides a structure of acts, individual and at the same time communal, physical responses to life.
Kenneth Rexroth
I did not want my son remembered by uncontrolled howls of pain. My wife and I suffered more than I can express, but to make poems merely out of the agony would have been self-pitying and dishonest. My son had been my greatest joy. His birth had left me awe-struck and humble before life. He turned me from a son into a father - and allowed me to understand my own father clearly for the first time. If I mourned him, I also wanted to preserve the joyful mystery of his existence. The sorrow could not be adequately appreciated without also expressing the joy and wonder.
Dana Gioia
There is not, in the Constitution, a syllable that implies that persons, born within the territorial limits of the United States, have allegiance imposed upon them on account of their birth in the country, or that they will be judged by any different rule, on the subject of treason, than persons of foreign birth.
Lysander Spooner
