Realization Quotes - page 18
While I too may be wrong about North Korea's intentions, I'm neither lying nor guessing. Granted, it's not easy figuring out what any country wants. America? Damned if I know anymore. The beginning of political wisdom is the recognition that no government's discourse can be trusted. That goes also for the regime our softliners consider uniquely guileless. And the beginning of I.R. wisdom is the realization that foreign-service officials lie especially often. I had to laugh when I first heard of a news magazine called The Diplomat; it's like calling a porn magazine The Prude.
Brian Reynolds Myers
What grew from from that discussion was the realization that in order for him to create an authentic alliance with me, he must deal with the primary source of his own sense of oppression. He must, first, emotionally come to terms with what it feels like to be a victim. If he-or anyone-were to truly do this, it would be impossible to discount the oppression of others, except by again forgetting how we have been hurt. And yet, oppressed groups are forgetting all the time. There are instances of this in the rising Black middle class, and certainly an obvious trend of such "unconsciousness" among white gay men. Because to remember may mean giving up whatever privileges we have managed to squeeze out of this society by virtue of our gender, race, class, or sexuality.
Cherríe Moraga
More and more, men are beginning to understand the severity of the problems which face them today. On all fronts - political, economic and social - these problems multiply and cause much heartache and sad shaking of heads. Add to these the environmental problems which man's cavalier attitude to nature and its resources has engendered, and the future for mankind looks bleaker still. The realization is dawning that mankind's life is in crisis and that something radical must be done before it is too late.
Benjamin Creme
The world is divided into two groups: those who are holding on to the old greedy and selfish nationalistic systems and who thus represent the reactionary forces of the world, and those who are opening to the new incoming energies of Aquarius, and who are looking for a way of brotherhood and co-operation, a realization of the interdependence that results from the fact that we are one humanity.
Benjamin Creme
Our experience hitherto justifies us in trusting that nature is the realization of the simplest that is mathematically conceivable. I am convinced that purely mathematical construction enables us to find those concepts and those lawlike connections between them that provide the key to the understanding of natural phenomena. Useful mathematical concepts may well be suggested by experience, but in no way can they be derived from it. Experience naturally remains the sole criterion of the usefulness of a mathematical construction for physics. But the actual creative principle lies in mathematics. Thus, in a certain sense, I take it to be true that pure thought can grasp the real, as the ancients had dreamed.
Albert Einstein
There was a later time when sincere men tried to build an organization as wide as the world to secure the peace of the world. It had been tried before and it had failed before. Perhaps if it failed this time it would not be tried again for a very long while. The idea of the thing was attacked by good and bad men, in good faith and bad. The final realization of it was so close that it could be touched with the fingertips. A gambler wouldn't have given odds on it either way. It teetered, and it almost seemed as though it would succeed. Then members of that group interfered."
"And it failed, O'Claire?"
"No. It succeeded, Foley, as in the other case. It succeeded in so twisted a fashion that the Devil himself was puzzled as to whether he had gained or lost ground by it. And he isn't easily puzzled.
R. A. Lafferty
