Insufficiency Quotes - page 2
The insufficiency of defining goodness as not hurting others is clearly demonstrated by the general assessment of the behavior of most Germans under the Nazis. According to this definition, most Germans during the Holocaust were good people, since they did not hurt anyone. Yet most of us do not consider such Germans good people, clearly indicating that we recognize the impossibility of defining a good person as one who does not hurt anyone.
You do not have to do something bad in order to do bad; you only have to do nothing.
Dennis Prager
But Ted Kennedy wanted both power and publicity, not because, like Lyndon Johnson, they could inflate him and make him unassailable, or because, like Richard Nixon, they could level the playing field Nixon had found so unfair, though Ted did have an ego and he did have his sense of insufficiency to address, but because he understood that they were the means to achieving his legislative goals, which were themselves a means to expiating his sins while making him worthy of his brothers. And Ted Kennedy knew how to get both power and publicity.
Ted Kennedy
Being is either open to, or dependent on, what is more than being, namely, the care for being, or it is a cul-de-sac, to be explained in terms of self-sufficiency. The weakness of the first possibility is in its reference to a mystery; the weakness of the second possibility is in its pretension to offer a rational explanation.
Nature, the sum of its laws, may be sufficient to explain in its own terms how facts behave within nature; it does not explain why they behave at all. Some tacit assumptions of the theory of insufficiency remain problematic.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
"But what about church attendance figures?" ventured Harriet. "Aren't modern people supposed to be feeling a lack in their lives that they need religion to fill?" Martha shrugged. "An advertising gambit," she said. "First you convince people that they lack something and then you send them a product to remedy it. People 'need' religion to 'deepen their awareness' or give them 'tragic irony' - the way I 'need' a facial cream to make my life more glamorous." [...] "But if there is a lack, Martha?" said Dolly. "Then it ought not to be filled," said Martha. "If it's a real lack, it's a necessary hollow in life that can't be stuffed up, like a chicken. Insufficiency. Shortcoming. I don't need God as a measure to feel that. Do you, Dolly?" "God, no!" said Dolly.
Mary McCarthy
Esotericism, which is legal, but not too much fun, prescribes to our condition. But when one tries to follow a spiritual path, nothing much happens for most of us. Faced with this lack of results, the esoteric schools put the blame squarely on us rather than on any insufficiency in their doctrines or methods. Finally, they explain our failure by taking refuge in paradoxes. They tell us, for example, that we can attain only by not wanting to attain-a neat double bind.
Some esoteric schools caution the disciple not to practise the extraordinary powers which we will acquire in the course of our work. This is surely an extraordinary statement. Most of us can't muster the power to give up smoking, much less to levitate.
Robert Sheckley
