Our esteem of great powers, or amiable qualities newly discovered, may embroider a day or a week, but a friendship of twenty years is interwoven with the texture of life.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. [Speech, “Where Do We Go From Here?” by Martin Luther King, Jr. made to the Tenth Anniversary Convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (S.C.L.C) in Atlanta on August 16, 1967. Dr. King projected in it the issues which led to Poor People’s March on Washington. From Foner, Philip S., The Voice of Black America: New York, 1972.] A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will “thingify” them and make them things. And therefore, they will exploit them and poor people generally economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and it will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. What I’m saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, “America, you must be born again! . . .[ Ibid .] What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. . . . [ Ibid .] Another basic challenge is to discover how to organize our strength in terms of economic and political power. [Ibid.] Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change. Walter Reuther defined power one day. He said, “Power is the ability of a labor union like the U.A.W. to make the most powerful corporation in the world, General Motors, say ‘Yes’ when it wants to say ‘No.’ That’s power.” [Ibid.] Now a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often have problems with power. There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly. [Ibid.] [A] host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts among husbands, wives and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on the scale of dollars is eliminated. [Ibid.] [T]he Movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s market place. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question, “Who owns the oil?” You begin to ask the question, “Who owns the iron ore?” [Ibid.] One night, a juror came to Jesus and he wanted to know what he could do to be saved. Jesus didn’t get bogged down in the kind of isolated approach of what he shouldn’t do. Jesus didn’t say, “Now Nicodemus, you must stop lying.” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, you must stop cheating if you are doing that.” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, you must not commit adultery.” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, now you must stop drinking liquor if you are doing that excessively.” He said something altogether different, because Jesus realized something basic – that if a man will lie, he will steal. And if a man will steal, he will kill. So instead of just getting bogged down in one thing, Jesus looked at him and said, “Nicodemus, you must be born again.” He said, in other words, “Your whole structure must be changed.” A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will “thingify” them — make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. What I am saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, “America, you must be born again!” [Ibid.] [L]et us go out with a “divine dissatisfaction.” Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice. Let us be dissatisfied until those that live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security. Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history, and every family is living in a decent sanitary home. Let us be dissatisfied until the dark yesterdays of segregated schools will be transformed into bright tomorrows of quality, integrated education. Let us be dissatisfied until integration is not seen as a problem but as an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity. Let us be dissatisfied until men and women, however black they may be, will be judged on the basis of the content of their character and not on the basis of the color of their skin. Let us be dissatisfied. Let us be dissatisfied until every state capitol houses a governor who will do justly, who will love mercy and who will walk humbly with his God. Let us be dissatisfied until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. Let us be dissatisfied until that day when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together. and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid. Let us be dissatisfied. And men will recognize that out of one blood God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth. Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout “White Power!” — when nobody will shout “Black Power!” — but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power. [Ibid.]
A cultural inheritance may be acquired between dusk and dawn, and many have been so acquired. But the new "culture" was an inheritance of darkness, wherein "simpleton" meant the same thing as "citizen" meant the same thing as "slave." The monks waited. It mattered not at all to them that the knowledge they saved was useless, that much of it was not really knowledge now empty of content, its subject matter long since gone. Still, such knowledge had a symbolic structure that was peculiar to itself, and at least the symbol-interplay could be observed. To observe the way a knowledge-system is knit together is to learn at least a minimum knowledge-of-knowledge, until someday someday, or some century an Integrator would come, and things would be fitted together again. So time mattered not at all. The Memorabilia was there, and it was given to them by duty to preserve, and preserve it they would if the darkness in the world lasted ten more centuries, or even ten thousand years...
One world, one mankind cannot exist in the face of six, four or even two scales of values: We shall be torn apart by this disparity of rhythm, this disparity of vibrations.… Our 20th Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors; our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, radical conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes. The primeval refusal to accept a compromise has been turned into a theoretical principle and is considered the virtue of orthodoxy. It demands millions of sacrifices in ceaseless civil wars, it drums into our souls that there is no such thing as unchanging, universal concepts of goodness and justice, that they are all fluctuating and inconstant.… Violence, less and less embarrassed by the limits imposed by centuries of lawfulness, is brazenly and victoriously striding across the whole world, unconcerned that its infertility has been demonstrated and proved many times in history. What is more, it is not simply crude power that triumphs abroad, but its exultant justification. The world is being inundated by the brazen conviction that power can do anything, justice nothing.… The young, at an age when they have not yet any experience other than sexual, when they do not yet have years of personal suffering and personal understanding behind them, are jubilantly repeating our depraved Russian blunders of the 19th Century, under the impression that they are discovering something new. They acclaim the latest wretched degradation on the part of the Chinese Red Guards as a joyous example. In shallow lack of understanding of the age-old essence of mankind, in the naive confidence of inexperienced hearts they cry: Let us drive away those cruel, greedy oppressors, governments, and the new ones (we), having just laid aside grenades and rifles, will be just and understanding. Far from it.… But of those who have lived more and understand, those who could oppose these young—many do not dare oppose, they even suck up, anything not to appear conservative. Another Russian phenomenon of the 19th Century which Dostoyevsky called slavery to progressive quirks.… The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles.… The price of cowardice will only be evil. We shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices. [ The Wall Street Journal , September 6, 1972, p. 14.]
Grant that the old Adam in these persons may be so buried, that the new man may be raised up in them.
If adapted to the unique requirements of various regions and peoples of the world, such economic pluralism could have a greater global impact over the next fifty years than the collectivist economics of Marxism and neo-Marxism have had during the half century just past. [“New Directions for American Foreign Policy,”, Orbis , Summer 1969, Published by Foreign Policy Research Institute, University of Pennsylvania.]
In spiritual as in earthly things there is great strength in hope, and, therefore, God's people are carefully to cultivate that grace. A well-grounded hope that, having been made new creatures in Jesus Christ, we are His; that with our names, though unknown to fame, written in the Book of Life, we have grace in possession and heaven in prospect; that after a few more brief years, pure as the angels that sing before the throne, we shall be brought with gladness into the palace of the King, to be like Christ and with Christ, seeing Him eye to eye and face to face--such hopes are powerful springs of action.--_Guthrie._
When I consider life, 't is all a cheat. Yet fool'd with hope, men favour the deceit; Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay. To-morrow 's falser than the former day; Lies worse, and while it says we shall be blest With some new joys, cuts off what we possest. Strange cozenage! none would live past years again, Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain; And from the dregs of life think to receive What the first sprightly running could not give.
But we have the advantage over our shovel-headed predecessor--or possibly ancestor--and can perceive that a certain vein of thrift runs through this apparent prodigality. Nature is never in a hurry, and seems to have had always before her eyes the adage, "Keep a thing long enough, and you will find a use for it." She has kept her beds of coal many millions of years without being able to find much use for them; she has sent them down beneath the sea, and the sea-beasts could make nothing of them; she has raised them up into dry land, and laid the black veins bare, and still, for ages and ages, there was no living thing on the face of the earth that could see any sort of value in them; and it was only the other day, so to speak, that she turned a new creature out of her workshop, who by degrees acquired sufficient wits to make a fire, and then to discover that the black rock would burn.
~Illusion.~--In youth we feel richer for every new illusion; in maturer years, for every one we lose.--_Madame Swetchine._
Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.
I am on the Federal Reserve Board in Richmond and…have felt for many years that we must discover a more effective way of combating the cancer of inflation…. We in business had better get smart enough to come up with a plan that will strengthen free enterprise…. I am more convinced than ever that the only way to resolve some of the basic ills that have brought about two digit inflation is for business to devise new means of rewarding employees with compensation over and above regular rates of pay…. It seems to me that the concept of profit sharing as a means of extra compensation has been grossly overlooked and under publicized as an important plan of attack to bring inflation under control.
Venient annis / S?cula seris, quibus Oceanus / Vincula rerum laxet, et ingens / Pateat tellus, Tiphysque novos / Detegat orbes; nec sit terris / Ultima thule=--In later years a time will come when Ocean shall relax his bars, and a vast territory shall appear, and Tiphys shall discover new worlds, and Thule shall be no longer the remotest spot on earth. _Sen. predicting the discovery of America._
Let byganes be byganes, / Wha's huffed at anither, / Dinna cloot the auld days / And the new anes thegither; / Wi' the fauts and the failings / O' past years be dune, / Wi a grip o' fresh freen'ship / A New->Year begin.
And space, what it is like? Is it mechanical, Newtonian? A frozen prison? Or the lofty space of Einstein, the relation Between movement and movement? No reason to pretend I know. I don't know, and if I did, Still my imagination is a thousand years old.
We are come too late, by several thousand years, to say anything new in morality. The finest and most beautiful thoughts concerning manners have been carried away before our times, and nothing is left for us but to glean after the ancients and the more ingenious of the moderns.
Men of great genius and large heart sow the seeds of a new degree of progress in the world, but they bear fruit only after many years.--_Mazzini._
Two hundred years ago the first liberal economist, Adam Smith, warned businessmen that they could absorb only a certain amount of rigidity. In the easy days after World War II…wage rises could be financed out of inflationary price increases. But now that foreign steel, and foreign cars, are moving into the United States in increased quantities at relatively low prices, the United States can no longer keep its business system fluid by inflation. Thus a new way of finding fluidity will inevitably be imposed on management and labor alike. The profit-sharing, or “progress” sharing union contract is the only possible way of satisfying labor and the consumer without saddling industry with fixed costs that in depression periods can kill off marginal companies like flies.
I think you should be a child for as long as you can. I have been successful for 74 years being able to do that.
For three thousand years it had been the concent’s policy to accept any and all folding chairs and collapsible tables made available to it, and never throw one away. On one and only one occasion, this had turned out to be a wise policy: the millennial Apert of 3000, when 27,500 pilgrims had swarmed in through the gates to enjoy a square meal and see the End of the World. We had folding chairs made of bamboo, machined aluminum, aerospace composites, injection-molded poly, salvaged rebar, hand-carved wood, bent twigs, advanced newmatter, tree stumps, lashed sticks, brazed scrap metal, and plaited grass. Tabletops could be made of old-growth lumber, particle board, extruded titanium, recycled paper, plate glass, rattan, or substances on whose true nature I did not wish to speculate. Their lengths ranged from two to twenty-four feet and their weights from that of a dried flower to that of a buffalo.
I suppose that nineteen hundred years ago, when Julius Cæsar was good enough to deal with Britain as we have dealt with New Zealand, the primæval Briton, blue with cold and woad, may have known that the strange black stone, of which he found lumps here and there in his wanderings, would burn, and so help to warm his body and cook his food. Saxon, Dane, and Norman swarmed into the land. The English people grew into a powerful nation, and Nature still waited for a full return of the capital she had invested in the ancient club-mosses. The eighteenth century arrived, and with it James Watt. The brain of that man was the spore out of which was developed the modern steam-engine, and all the prodigious trees and branches of modern industry which have grown out of this. But coal is as much an essential condition of this growth and development as carbonic acid is for that of a club-moss. Wanting coal, we could not have smelted the iron needed to make our engines, nor have worked our engines when we had got them. But take away the engines, and the great towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire vanish like a dream. Manufactures give place to agriculture and pasture, and not ten men can live where now ten thousand are amply supported.
Lieut Brooke, of the American Navy, some years ago invented a most ingenious machine, by which a considerable portion of the superficial layer of the sea-bottom can be scooped out and brought up from any depth to which the lead descends. In 1853, Lieut. Brooke obtained mud from the bottom of the North Atlantic, between Newfoundland and the Azores, at a depth of more than 10,000 feet, or two miles, by the help of this sounding apparatus. The specimens were sent for examination to Ehrenberg of Berlin, and to Bailey of West Point, and those able microscopists found that this deep-sea mud was almost entirety composed of the skeletons of living organisms--the greater proportion of these being just like the _Globigerinæ_ already known to occur in the chalk.
Our own self-interest surely would seem to suggest as severe a trial of our own religion as of other religions, nay, even a more severe trial. Our religion has sometimes been compared to a good ship that is to carry us through the waves and tempests of this life to a safe haven. Would it not be wise, therefore, to have it tested, and submitted to the severest trials, before we entrust ourselves and those dear to us to such a vessel. And remember, all men, except those who take part in the foundation of a new religion, or have been converted from an old to a new faith, have to accept their religious belief on trust, long before they are able to judge for themselves. And while in all other matters an independent judgment in riper years is encouraged, every kind of influence is used to discourage a free examination of religious dogmas, once engrafted on our intellect in its tenderest stage. We condemn an examination of our own religion, even though it arises from an honest desire to see with our own eyes the truth which we mean to hold fast; and yet we do not hesitate to send missionaries into all the world, asking the faithful to re-examine their own time-honoured religions. We attack their most sacred convictions, we wound their tenderest feelings, we undermine the belief in which they have been brought up, and we break up the peace and happiness of their homes. Yet if some learned Jew, or subtle Brahman, or outspoken Zulu asks us to re-examine the date and authorship of the Old or New Testament, or challenges us to produce the evidence on which we also are quite ready to accept certain miracles, we are offended, forgetting that with regard to these questions we can claim no privilege, no immunity.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
(on Paradigm shifts): 1. It’s crazy! 2. It may be possible — so what? 3. I said it was a good idea all along. 4. I thought of it first. The Aharonov-Bohm effect, predicted in 1959, required nearly 30 years after its 1960 demonstration by Chambers until it was begrudgingly accepted. Mayer, who discovered the modern thermodynamic notion of conservation of energy related to work, was hounded and chastised so severely that he suffered a breakdown. Years later, he was lionized for the same effort Wegener, a German meteorologist, was made a laughing stock and his name became a pseudonym for “utter fool,” because he advanced the concept of continental drift in 1912. In the 1960s the evidence for continental drift became overwhelming, and today it is widely taught and part of the standard science curriculum. Gauss, the great mathematician, worked out nonlinear geometry but kept it firmly hidden for 30 years, because he knew that if he published it, his peers would destroy him. In the 1930s Goddard was ridiculed and called “moon-mad Goddard” because he predicted his rocketry would carry men to the moon. Years later when the Nazi fired V-1 and V-2 rockets against London, those rockets used the gyroscopic stabilization and many other features discovered and pioneered by Goddard. And as everyone knows, rocketry did indeed carry men to the moon. Science has a long and unsavory history of severely punishing innovation and new thinking. In the modern world such scientific suppression of innovation is uncalled-for, but it is still very much the rule rather than the exception. [In “Space Drive: A Fantasy That Could Become Reality,” Nov./Dec. 1994, p. 38.]
Two thousand five hundred years ago the value of civilization was as apparent as it is now; then, as now, it was obvious that only in the garden of an orderly polity can the finest fruits humanity is capable of bearing be produced. But it had also become evident that the blessings of culture were not unmixed. The garden was apt to turn into a hothouse. The stimulation of the senses, the pampering of the emotions, endlessly multiplied the sources of pleasure. The constant widening of the intellectual field indefinitely extended the range of that especially human faculty of looking before and after, which adds to the fleeting present those old and new worlds of the past and the future, wherein men dwell the more the higher their culture. But that very sharpening of the sense and that subtle refinement of emotion, which brought such a wealth of pleasures, were fatally attended by a proportional enlargement of the capacity for suffering; and the divine faculty of imagination, while it created new heavens and new earths, provided them with the corresponding hells of futile regret for the past and morbid anxiety for the future.