Pursuing Quotes - page 13
The patient endurance of the saints exhausts the evil power that attacks them, since it makes them glory in sufferings undergone for the sake of the truth. It teaches those too much concerned with a life in the flesh to deepen themselves through such sufferings instead of pursuing ease and comfort; and it makes the flesh's natural weakness in the endurance of suffering a foundation for overwhelming spiritual power. For the natural weakness of the saints is precisely such a foundation, since the Lord has made their weakness stronger than the proud devil.
Maximus the Confessor
I am overwhelmed by your letter yesterday, and I hope with all my heart and for you and for the patriotic work that we are pursuing that you do not persevere in your desire to leave the administration of the Congo. Please come and see me in Brussels on Saturday at a quarter past one.
Leopold II of Belgium
Altruism is an instinct we've inherited from the small society where we knew for whom we work, whom we serve. When you pass from this, as I like to call it, 'concrete society', where we are guided by what we see, to the abstract society which far transcends our range of vision, it becomes necessary that we are guided not by the knowledge of the effect of what we do, but by some abstract symbols. Now, the only symbol which tells us where we can make the best contribution is profit. And in fact by pursuing profit, we are as altruistic as we can possibly be, because we extend our concern to people who are beyond our range of personal conception. This is a condition which makes it possible to produce what I call an extended order, an order which is not determined by our aim, by our knowing what are the most urgent needs, but by an impersonal mechanism which by a system of communication puts a label on certain things which is fully impersonal.
Friedrich Hayek
I was 25 years old and pursuing my doctorate in economics when I was allowed to spend six months of post-graduate studies in Naples, Italy. I read the Western economic textbooks and also the more general work of people like Hayek. By the time I returned to Czechoslovakia, I had an understanding of the principles of the market. In 1968, I was glad at the political liberalism of the Dubcek Prague Spring, but was very critical of the Third Way they pursued in economics.
Friedrich Hayek
As a senator, as the de facto leader of liberal Democrats for decades, even as a failed presidential candidate, Ted Kennedy was always the same, pursuing his goals no matter the odds. Where brother Bob cautiously waited until Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the presidential race to begin his anti-Vietnam War campaign in 1968, Ted Kennedy in 1980 challenged the incumbent, Jimmy Carter, simply in the belief that Carter had abandoned the principles of the Democratic Party. Kennedy suffered a humiliating defeat but returned to the Senate unbowed and fashioned a career unique in both its legislative accomplishments and the range of his personal friendships. His mourners range from conservative Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah to liberal neighbor Chris Dodd of Connecticut -- and scores in between.
Ted Kennedy
Today we hear much discussion about "overkill." The people who are talking "overkill" knowingly or unknowingly support the adoption of a minimum-deterrence strategy. In advocating that strategy, they are addressing the wrong problem. Instead of belaboring our ability to destroy the population of an aggressor nation, they should consider what we require to save American lives and property by preventing war, or by gaining a decision as quickly as possible if war occurs. That is the proper and traditional task of the United States armed forces. The counterforce strategy which we are pursuing and analyzing today provides our best prospect for success in that task.
Curtis LeMay
I felt strongly that in the U.S.-Soviet competition the appeal of America as a free society could become an important asset, and I saw in human rights an opportunity to put the Soviet Union ideologically on the defensive....by actively pursuing this' commitment we could mobilize far greater global support and focus global attention on the glaring internal weaknesses of the Soviet system.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Conduct, practice, is the proof of doctrine, theory. "If any man will do His will - the will of Him that sent me," said Jesus, "he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself" (John vii. 17); and there is a well known saying of Pascal: "Begin by taking holy water and you will end by becoming a believer." And pursuing a similar train of thought, Johann Jakob Moser, the pietist, was of the opinion that no atheist or naturalist had the right to regard the Christian religion as void of truth so long as he had not put it to the proof by keeping its precepts and commandments (Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus, book viii., 43).
Miguel de Unamuno
Ageing brings a lot of happiness. You get fatter and more wrinkles, and that's not so good, but there is a freedom that comes with it. The freedom is: I better do what I want to do now, because I'll be dead soon. So this is my last chance. Also, there's a serenity that comes – I had the career I had, good or bad, I did the best I could, and now I continue pursuing what is interesting to me.
Isabella Rossellini
There is always something for it to think, always something for it to solve, so whenever I first start to meditate, the mantra is a tiny clear droplet lost in a deluge of sludge. I'm not a person who finds meditation a doddle or to whom yoga comes naturally. To tell you the truth, I find the whole business a bit poncey and contrary to the way I used to see myself. It's only the fact that I decimated my life by aggressively pursuing the models of living that were most immediately available-eating, wanking, drinking, consuming, getting famous-that I was forced to look at alternatives.
Russell Brand
Stick to the plan. Not just obey orders. If you were being asked to do something according to a plan, then the way the Culture saw it, you should have had at least some say in what that plan actually was. And if circumstances changed during the course of trying to follow that plan then you were expected to have the initiative and the judgment to alter the plan and act accordingly. You didn't keep on blindly obeying orders when, due to an alteration in context, the orders were in obvious contradiction to the attainment of whatever goal it was you were pursuing, or when they violated either common sense or common decency. You were still responsible, in other words.
Iain Banks
However controversial his views, he was one of the great figures of 20th-century British politics, gifted with a brilliant mind. However much we disagreed with many of his views, there was no doubting the strength of his convictions or their sincerity, or his tenacity in pursuing them, regardless of his own political self-interest.
Enoch Powell
[Luigi Ferrarese] is an enlightened and philanthropic physician of Naples, who has for several years been zealously pursuing the study of Phrenology, and endeavouring to promote its application to those branches of science, morals and legislation, which he perceives it so well calculated to benefit. He has met with much persecution, but he has persevered, and it is with pleasure we perceive that there is one mind at least, in Naples, imbued with the importance of his views.
Luigi Ferrarese
And then she said and I have Rebecca, you know? Sort of the idea is I was delightful, and she said I was delightful, but in the context you could see I was a calamity nonetheless. I mean I think there was a real ambivalence about the role of children in lives of independent, thinking women. And what was transmitted to me was not that being a mom was the worst possible choice, but that it could definitely be a serious hindrance. And that there were other things worth pursuing more.
Rebecca Walker
So the question we have to ask ourselves in 2017 is: Why does North Korea risk its long-enjoyed security by developing long-range nukes? Why is it doing the one thing that might force America to attack, to accept even the likelihood of South Korean civilian casualties? And the only goal, the only plausible goal big enough to warrant the growing risk and expense is the goal North Korea has been pursuing from day one of its existence? And I can ask you Matthew what that goal is; I'm sure you know. It's the unification of the peninsula. More concretely, North Korea wants to force Washington into a grand bargain linking de-nuclearization to the withdrawal of U.S. troops. South Korea would then be pressured into a North-South confederation, which is a concept the South Korean left has flirted with for years, and which the North has always seen as a transition to unification under its own control.
Brian Reynolds Myers
After years of encirclement and repeated rebuffs from Washington, years of threat, isolation, and demonization, the Pyongyang leaders are convinced that the best way to resist superpower attack and domination is by developing a nuclear arsenal. It does not really sound so crazy. As already mentioned, the United States does not invade countries that are armed with long-range nuclear missiles (at least not thus far). Having been pushed to the brink for so long, the North Koreans are now taking a gamble, upping the ante, pursuing an arguably "sane” deterrence policy in the otherwise insane world configured by an overweening and voracious empire.
Michael Parenti
[A] global culture is without time. Forever pursuing an elusive present, an artificial and standardised universal culture has no historical background, no developmental rhythm, no sense of time and sequence. Contextless and timeless, this artificial global culture may quarry the past for illustrative purposes or cynically use motifs from particular pasts with eclectic caprice, but it refuses to locate itself in history. Stripped of any sense of development beyond the performative present, and alien to all ideas of "roots", the genuine global culture is fluid, ubiquitous, formless and historically shallow.
Anthony D. Smith
Herbert Marcuse made a lengthy, impassioned response. What good was the Voting Rights Act accomplishing, he said, since the blacks were pursuing the tawdry values as their white fellow citizens? They were accepting the same capitalist values and aping the life-restricting respectability of the middle class. At a prolonged pause in his reply, just as he was getting his second wind, I rose and asked him a simple question: 'Which do you prefer, a situation in which the blacks had no freedom to vote or one in which they had the freedom to vote but chose wrongly?' Marcuse's response surprised the audience--and subsequently perhaps Marcuse himself: 'Since I have gone so far out on a limb, I may as well go all the way. I would prefer that they did not have the freedom to vote if they are going to make the wrong use of their freedom.' For this and other reasons, I suspect, Marcuse never became the darling of the black American students.
Sidney Hook
The core study of geography is the study of places, that is the analysis of the significant differences that distinguish the various areas of the world from each other. Among the differences that are significant to this areal differentiation, one of the more obvious are differences in landforms; one of the least obvious to the eye, but nonetheless important in molding the character of areas, are the differences in their political organization. In pursuing these and other separate topics, geographers "radiate out in diverse directions" "and for various distances, toward the cores of other disciplines." As long as they realise where they are in reference to the central core, they may hope to understand each other purposes.
Richard Hartshorne
