Lower Quotes - page 34
What are the ingredients of the most creatively meaningful image of human existence that the mind can conceive? Remove human frailty--as grass, as a sigh, as dust, as moth-crushed--and the estimate becomes romantic. Remove grandeur--a little lower than God--and aspiration recedes. Remove sin-the tendency to miss the mark--and sentimentality threatens. Remove freedom--choose ye this day!--and responsibility goes by the board. Remove, finally, divine parentage and life becomes estranged, cut loose and adrift on a cold, indifferent sea. With all that has been discovered about human life in the intervening 2,500 years, it is difficult to find a flaw in this assessment.
Huston Smith
The revelation we've come to is that we can trust our memories of a past with lower, not higher, entropy only if the big bang - the process, event, or happening that brought the universe into existence - started off the universe in an extraordinarily special, highly ordered state of low entropy.
Brian Greene
With a few exceptions, lower population [density] means fewer problems [for survivalist retreats]. When the Schumer Hits the Fan, there will be a mass exodus from the cities. Think of it as an army that is spreading out across a battlefield: The wider they are spread, the less effective they are. The inverse-square law hasn't been repealed.
James Wesley Rawles
We must recognize that in our generation there might come a day with no remaining avenue of escape. State laws can be avoiding simply by moving, but what of unconstitutional Federal laws? At that point we will have no choice but to rebel against tyranny. (Since the alternative would be to live as little better than bleating sheep.) When we reach that juncture I doubt that I will advocate expatriation. Most foreign lands have less freedom than we enjoy here in these United States. I don't think that I will find some ideal "bolt hole" nation with more firearms freedom, better banking privacy, a more positive business climate, lower taxes, full religious freedom, unimpeded personal property rights, fair courts, and assured freedom of speech. If I must die, then I will do so here in America, fully armed and facing my oppressors. I won't die in some ditch, begging for mercy.
James Wesley Rawles
Enough is known today about natural ventilation for summer cooling to warrant the entire replacement of artificial air-conditioning devices. ...prevailing breezes enter small, louvered openings at the lower section... circulate across the "living zone," rise and then exit through larger, higher openings in the opposite wall.
Ken Kern
In course sand it may be better to drive a well. Driven wells are usually 2 inches in diameter and less than 30 feet deep. If driving conditions are good, you can drive a 4-inch casing as deep as 50 feet. A driving tool consists of a drive point connected to the lower end of sections or pipe.
Ken Kern
He turned his head, reacted in a microsecond, and hit the deck just before a hundred-mile-an-hour fastball zipped past his ear and clanged into the wire backstop. Had the pitch been another inch lower or a few miles an hour faster, he would have been beaned and, at that speed, possibly killed.
Lis Wiehl
As far as country houses were concerned, the functions of the lower ranks within the hierarchy were now only those of respectful service to their superiors. They lived in the basement, or in subordinate wings to either side of the house. The main rooms were designed as the orderly setting for meetings between gentlemen, lords, and princes, who seldom forgot their rank. But behind the rigid etiquette which regulated their intercourse, continual jockeying for power, position and favours went on. The central government was a rich source of jobs and perquisites, which were distributed either by the king himself, or by his ministers and favourites. The main power of the court aristocracy now lay in its power of patronage; it was constantly being solicited for favours.
Mark Girouard
It makes sense to describe a core competence as a complex adaptive system, located in the lower regions of the I-Space between an ordered regime in which knowledge assets get frozen into technologies and a chaotic regime in which the stability necessary for effective organizational coordination and integration remains absent. Core competences, then, have their being in a region of the I-Space sandwiched between an excess of usable structure and a total lack of it. We hypothesize that the possession of a core competence is one measure of a firm's ability to deal with complexity.
Max Boisot
In the slow accretion of self-images that is the mortar between periods in the history of our civilization, a third character ideal emerged, in part from the failure of the previous two [political man and religious man]: economic man, one who would cultivate rationally his very own garden, meanwhile solacing himself with the assumption that by thus attending to his own lower needs a general satisfaction of the higher needs would occur. A moral revolution was the result: what had been lower in the established hierarchy of human interests was asserted to be higher.
Philip Rieff
Here is another example of violating one's nature in the name of nobility, an example that shows the larger dangers of false love. Years ago, I heard Dorothy Day speak. Founder of the Catholic Worker movement, her long-term commitment to living among the poor on New York's Lower East Side-not just serving them but sharing their condition-had made her one of my heroes. So it came as a great shock. when in the middle of her talk, I heard her start to ruminate about the "ungrateful poor."
I did not understand how such a dismissive phrase could come from the lips of a saint-until it hit me with the force of a Zen koan. Dorothy Day was saying, "Do not give to the poor expecting to get their gratitude so that you can feel good about yourself. If you do, your giving will be thin and short-lived, and that is not what the poor need; it will only impoverish them further. Give only if you have something you must give; give only if you are someone for whom giving is its own reward."
Parker Palmer
Both Socrates and Christ taught economic man to be at least slightly ashamed of himself when he failed to sacrifice the lower capacity to the higher. Freud is America's great teacher, despite his ardent wish to avoid that fate. For it was precisely the official and parental shams of high ideals that Freud questioned. In their stead, Freud taught lessons which Americans, prepared by their own national experience, learn easily: survive, resign yourself to living within your moral means, suffer no gratuitous failures in a futile search for ethical heights that no longer exist-if they ever did.
Philip Rieff
