Quotations

The following quotations which link to the themes of the web site are meaningful to me. I hope they may be meaningful to you. They will be added to from time to time.

Josef Stalin: Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.

Gregory Bateson: Mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dreams, and the like, is necessarily pathologic and destructive of life.

Martin Luther King: This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those who it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

Mahatma Gandhi: The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice.

Thomas Merton: What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous.

Adrienne Rich: The mother's battle for her child - with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life - needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.

Benjamin Franklin: Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.

Albert Einstein: The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead.

Meister Eckhart: There is no such thing as 'my' bread. All bread is ours and is given to me, to others through me and to me through others. For not only bread but all things necessary for sustenance in this life are given on loan to us with others, and because of others and for others and to others through us.

William Allen White: Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others.

Benjamin Franklin: They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.

Friedrich Schelling: The theoretical intelligence merely contemplates the world and the practical intelligence merely orders it, but the aesthetic intelligence creates the world.

Thomas Jefferson: I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive.

Walter Brueggemann: Every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing alternative futures to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.

Thomas Merton: The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another and all involved with each other.

Tacitus: The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.

Frederick Buechner: Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody eles's skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.

Edmund Burke: The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts.

Voltaire: It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

Mother Teresa: Do not wait for leaders, do it alone, person to person.

Martin Luther King Jr: A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Lyndon Johnson: You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.

Thomas Jefferson: The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all.

Mahatma Gandhi: An eye for an eye and soon the whole world is blind.

Krishnamurti: Freedom is a state of mind - not freedom from something

Krishnamurti: Fear is one of the greatest problems in life. A mind that is caught in fear lives in confusion, in conflict, and therefore must be violent, distorted and aggressive

Mahatma Gandhi: We do not have the right to force others to see the truth in our way.

Arab Proverb: We own only what cannot be lost in a shipwreck. (Quoted from In the Heart of the Temple. Joan Chittister)

Edmund Burke::Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.