The average "educated" American has been made to believe that, somehow, the United States must lead the world even though hardly anyone has any information at all about those countries we are meant to lead. Worse, we have very little information about our own country and its past.
Everything abstract is ultimately part of the concrete. Everything inanimate finally serves the living. That is why every activity dealing in abstraction stands in ultimate service to a living whole.
[T]hat the inhabitants of the English colonies in North America, by the immutable laws of nature, the principles of the English constitution, and the several charters or compacts, have the following RIGHTS: Resolved… That they are entitled to life, liberty and property: and they have never ceded to any foreign power whatever, a right to dispose of either without their consent. [ Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress , October 14, 1774.]
Imagine all the people Sharing all the world... You may say I'm a dreamer But I'm not the only one I hope someday you'll join us And the world will live as one.
Personally I do not resort to force — not even the force of law — to advance moral reforms. I prefer education, argument, persuasion, and above all the influence of example — of fashion.
Jackie Biskupski is running for a seat in the Utah Legislature, and she's attracting a lot of attention because she's a lesbian. Her Republican opponent, Dan Alderson, is a staunch Mormon, and is running a negative ad campaign calling her lifestyle abnormal and deviant. His six wives agree.
And he that will to bed go sober Falls with the leaf still in October.
Bring on those tired, labor-plagued, competition-weary companies and ESOP will breathe new life into them. They will find ESOP better than Geritol. It will revitalize what is wrong with capitalism. It will increase productivity. It will improve labor relations. It will promote economic justice. It will save the economic system. It will make our form of government and our concept of freedom prevail over those who don’t agree with us. [October 20, 1975.]
I think for it to be unhip to be idealistic is weird, you know? I mean, even all the best rebels to me had some sense of hope in them.
The practical reason for freedom is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fiber can be developed — we have tried law, compulsion and authoritarianism of various kinds, and the result is nothing to be proud of.
I'm an optimist. In order to be libertarian, you have to be an optimist. You have to have a benign view of human nature, to believe that human beings left to their own devices are basically good. But I'm not so sure about human institutions, and I think the real point of argument here is whether or not large corporations are human institutions or some other entity we need to be thinking about curtailing. Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government.
He who has provoked the lash of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.
Ownership of productive property — long a basic principle of Catholic social doctrine — is more important today than ever before. Productive property (capital) and productive human effort (labor) are the sources of all goods and services. New technology is greatly increasing the contribution of capital to production and causing a decrease in the relative contribution of labor. Many, many tasks which were once done by human hands and minds are now done rapidly and unerringly by machines. Many economists predict that the day will soon come when labor will account for a tiny fraction of production and capital will account for almost all of it. The implications of these trends are inescapable. Unless ownership of productive property becomes more widespread, a growing number of our people will be unable to support themselves or to buy the products of our industry and agriculture. This will result in much hardship among individuals and a check upon the growth of our economy. [Editorial, Catholic Rural Life , vol. XVI, October, 1967.]
There is surely a piece of divinity within us, something that was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun.
There is but one means to extenuate the effects of enemy fire: it is to develop a more violent fire oneself.
The ideally non-violent state will be an ordered anarchy. That State is the best governed which is governed the least.
War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.
Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. [Letter to James Madison, Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Virginia, and President of William and Mary College, October 28, 1785.]
A comedian does funny things. A good comedian does things funny.
It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.
Politicians at international forums may reiterate a thousand times that the basis of the new world order must be universal respect for human rights, but it will mean nothing as long as this imperative does not derive from the respect of the miracle of Being, the miracle of the universe, the miracle of nature, the miracle of our own existence.
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
I know that it will hurt, I know that it will break your heart, the way things are, and the way they've been. Don't spread the discontent, don't spread the lies, don't make the same mistakes with your own life.
Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude of hostility toward life. True religion must teach that life is filled with joys pleasing to the eye of God, that knowledge without action is empty. All men must see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. The proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you've always known.
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.
You always fall when you're training, that's sort of part of the process. If you're not falling, you're not training hard enough.
I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable, but the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property… . [Letter to James Madison, Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Virginia, and President of William and Mary College, October 28, 1785.]
I would like to make the point that we cannot undo the past but we can learn from it, and we cannot predict the future but we can shape and build it.
"Probably the best operating system in the world is the [operating system]
THE OCTOBER COUNTRY … that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coalbins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain…
When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead, And the White Knight is talking backwards And the Red Queen's "off with her head!" Remember what the dormouse said — Feed your head! Feed your head!
Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams? So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life.
Our Founding Fathers well understood that concentrated power is the enemy of liberty and the rights of man. They knew that the American experiment in individual liberty, free enterprise and republican self-government could succeed only if power were widely distributed. And since in any society social and political power flow from economic power, they saw that wealth and property would have to be widely distributed among the people of the country. The truth of this insight is immediately apparent. Could there be anything resembling a free enterprise economy, if wealth and property were concentrated in the hands of a few, while the great majority owned little more than the shirts on their backs? Could there be anything but widespread misery, where a privileged few controlled a nation’s wealth, while millions labored for a pittance, and millions more were desperate for want of employment? It should be clear to everyone that the nation’s steadfast policy should afford every American of working age a realistic opportunity to acquire the ownership and control of some meaningful form of property in a growing national economy. This is not to say that the government should confiscate from the “haves” and bestow upon the “have-nots”, beyond the requirements of a compassionate welfare program to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves. Far from it. But it is to say that our duty is to foster a strong, vibrant wealth-producing economy which operates in such a way that new additions to wealth accrue to those who presently have little or no ownership stake in their country. [From unpublished Reagan letter sent to New Orleans Times Picayune , based on note from John McClaughry, SeniorPolicy Advisor, Reagan Bush Committee, October 31, 1980.]
Tragedy blows through your life like a tornado, uprooting everything, creating chaos. You wait for the dust to settle, and then you choose. You can live in the wreckage and pretend it's still the mansion you remember. Or you can crawl from the rubble and slowly rebuild.
We sometimes talk as if "original research" were a peculiar prerogative of scientists or at least of advanced students. But all thinking is research, and all research is native, original, with him who carries it on, even if everybody else in the world already is sure of what he is still looking for.
At all times, day by day, we have to continue fighting for freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom from want — for these are things that must be gained in peace as well as in war.
In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.
A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
If you ever get trial by television or guilt by accusation, that day freedom dies because you have not had it done with all of the careful rules that have developed in a court of law. Press and television rely on freedom. Those who rely on freedom must uphold the rule of law and have a duty and a responsibility to do so and not try to substitute their own system for it.
We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few — but we can’t have both. [ Labor, October 17, 1941.]
Only now are increasing numbers of political and social scientists beginning to realize that [Kelso’s] theories provide a private-property-based alternative to the imminent passage of a government-distributed “guaranteed income” or “negative income tax.” [ Harvard Business Review , September-October 1969.]
It is a very fashionable and prevalent opinion today that the institution of private ownership and the thing we call capitalism not only go hand in hand but are also inseparable. Only recently a prominent writer in the American Review (October, 1935) said in effect that we should not speak of abolishing capitalism because for the average American capitalism means private ownership of the means of production. If that is true, then the strategy of former socialists and of all communists has been very successful. They have always tried to tell us that the two, capitalism and private property, are identical—not merely because they want to abolish capitalism but more especially because they want to abolish also private property. They know that they will have a better chance to succeed in this if they can make private property identical with capitalism in the minds of men. For the present, then, we must keep in mind that capitalism and the institution of private ownership as such are not at all identical. [ Christian Social Reconstruction , p. 16.]
The quicker humanity advances, the more important it is to be the one who deals the first blow.
Poems present their testimony as circumstantial evidences, not as closing argument. Where Wallace Stevens says, “God and the imagination are one,” I would say that the imagination, which synergizes intellect, emotion and instinct, is the perceptive organ through which it is possible, though not inevitable, to experience God.
Builders and warriors, strengthen the steps. Reader, if you have not grasped — read again, after a while. The predestined is not accidental, The leaves fall in their time. And winter is but the harbinger of spring. All is revealed; all is attainable.
We take the position that there is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.
Behold the believers of all beliefs! Whom do they hate most? Him who breaketh up their tables of values, the breaker, the law-breaker — he, however, is the creator. Companions, the creator seeketh, not corpses — and not herds or believers either. Fellow-creators the creator seeketh — those who grave new values on new tables.
Your true home is in the here and the now. It is not limited by time, space, nationality, or race. Your true home is not an abstract idea. It is something you can touch and live in every moment. With mindfulness and concentration, the energies of the Buddha, you can find your true home in the full relaxation of your mind and body in the present moment. No one can take it away from you. Other people can occupy your country, they can even put you in prison, but they cannot take away your true home and your freedom.
I am 100 percent in favor of the intelligent use of drugs, and 1,000 percent against the thoughtless use of them, whether caffeine or LSD. And drugs are not central to my life.
All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
Reality is always greater — much greater — than what we know, than whatever we can say about it.
We hold that the ownership of private property is the right and privilege of every American citizen and is one of the foundation stones upon which this nation and its free enterprise system has been built and has prospered. We feel that private property rights and human rights are inseparable and indivisible. Only in those nations that guarantee the right of ownership of private property as basic and sacred under their law is there any recognition of human rights. [ Congressional Record , October 15, 1968, p. E9212.]
No moral system can rest solely on authority.
The essence of capitalism is expressed in two of its basic features: a) profit maximization and b) market competition. In their abstract formulations none of them was supposed to have anything conspiratorial against the poor. But in real life they turn out to be the “killers” of the poor — by making rich the richer and poor the poorer. [“Does the Capitalist System have to be the Handmaiden of the Rich?”, Grameen Dialogue , October, 1994.]
Everyone seems to be playing well within the boundaries of his usual rule set. I have yet to hear anyone say something that seemed likely to mitigate the idiocy of this age.
Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.
I have no objection to any person’s religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person don’t believe it also. But when a man’s religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.
There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil. Death closes all; but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with gods.
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.
[T]hose who urge increasing redistribution of wealth are not doing so because they reject freedom. They are sincerely seeking ways to eliminate poverty, and because they are sincere I expect them to give serious consideration to the freedom route to prosperity…. I am satisfied that Kelso’s theories are correct, and that this is the solution that we shall have to adopt if we are to avoid the unthinkable alternative [the elimination of freedom]. [Speech before the 39th Annual Meeting of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Calgary, Alberta, October 1968.]
The truth is that there is only one terminal dignity — love. And the story of a love is not important — what is important is that one is capable of love. It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted of eternity.
If we are looking for one single action which will enable the poor to overcome their poverty, I would go for credit. Money is power. I have been arguing that credit should be accepted as a human right. If we can come up with a system which allows everybody access to credit while ensuring excellent repayment — I can give you a guarantee that poverty will not last long. If the helplessness and isolation of labour, who have nothing to sell but their labour, can be totally removed by connecting labour with capital through a universal credit system, we’ll then have other kinds of actors on the economic scene different from what the existing capitalist world would allow us to bring out. [“Does the Capitalist System have to be the Handmaiden of the Rich?” , Grameen Dialogue , October, 1994.]
Today it is difficult to find leaders who are independent of the forces that have brought us our problems: The Congress, the bureaucracy, the lobbyists, big business, and big labor. [Quoted by Jack Kemp in The New Conservative Digest , October 1982, p. 23.]
Date not the life which thou hast run by the mean of reckoning of the hours and days, which though hast breathed: a life spent worthily should be measured by a nobler line, — by deeds, not years...
That [slavery] is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.” No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle. [Lincoln-Douglas Debate, October 15, 1858, Alton, Illinois.]
love is the every only god
I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time.
I am not the rose, but I have lived near the rose. I know nothing about it; I am my own ancestor.[806-2] (When asked as to his ancestry.) Take, O boatman, thrice thy fee,-- Take, I give it willingly; For, invisible to thee, Spirits twain have crossed with me.
All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness. October 25, 1780.
Liberalism is a force truly of the spirit proceeding from the deep realization that economic freedom cannot be sacrificed if political freedom is to be preserved. [Address, New York City, October 31, 1932.]
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
After bread, education is the first need of the people.
Few men during their lifetime come anywhere near exhausting the resources dwelling within them. There are deep wells of strength that are never used.
Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration.
If there must be a god in the house, must be, Saying things in the room and on the stair, Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor, Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost Or Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.
Let the world know you as you are, not as you think you should be, because sooner or later, if you are posing, you will forget the pose, and then where are you?
Life is an error-making and an error-correcting process, and nature in marking man's papers will grade him for wisdom as measured both by survival and by the quality of life of those who survive.
The search for the truth is the most important work in the whole world — and the most dangerous.
It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death
There has been a little distress selling on the stock exchange.
[I]t is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state. [Letter to James Madison, Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Virginia, and President of William and Mary College, October 28, 1785.]
Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.