"Josh Billings said, 'It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too.' Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems."
John W. Gardner
» John W. Gardner - all quotes »
Absolutist statements about Islam being "fundamentally violent" are deceptive, because Muslims can and do choose to ignore or renounce the more violent aspects of their dogma -- just as Christians do. [...] in the modern world, there are many, many Muslims who do not follow this version of Islam, who are decent human beings who want the same things other human beings want - peace, security, and a chance to succeed.
Charles Foster Johnson
"Thinking is easy," said Goethe, "acting is difficult, and to put one's thought into action is the most difficult thing in the world." And Tolstoy: "It is easier to produce ten volumes of philosophical writing than to put one principle into practice."
Andre Maurois
To my mind, the expression of divinity is in variety, and the more variable the creation, the more variable the creatures that surround us, botanical and zoological, the more chance we have to learn and to see into life itself, nature itself. If we were just human beings, living in a spaceship, with an algae farm to give us food, we would not be moved to learn nearly as many things as we are moved by living on a world, surrounded by all kinds of variety. And when I see that variety being first decimated, and then halved — and I imagine in another hundred years it may be down by 90% and there'll be only 10% of what we had when I was a child — that makes me very sad, and very despairing, because we need variety. We came from that, we were born from that, it's our world, the world in which we became what we have become.
Sheri S. Tepper
Havel ... invokes ... "higher law" when he claims that "human rights, human freedoms . . . and human dignity have their deepest roots somewhere outside the perceptible world …while the state is a human creation, human beings are the creation of God." He seems to be saying that NATO forces were allowed to violate international law because they acted as direct instruments of the "higher law" of God — a clear-cut case of religious fundamentalism.
Vaclav Havel
"I have to work hard to not look like a nerd all the time. My friends are the only people I know that don't care about my image. I need to have people who treat me just as Josh, not as Josh the singer. "
Josh Groban
Gardner, John W.
Gardner, Martin
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