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Alas, being a New Zealander is such an exquisite dilemma.
--
Fulbright New Zealand Keynote speech, November 2005

 

Witi Ihimaera

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I have described the human dilemma as the capacity of man to view himself as object and as subject. My point is that both are necessary — necessary for psychological science, for effective therapy, and for meaningful living. I am also proposing that in the dialectical process between these two poles lies the development, and the deepening and widening, of human consciousness. The error on both sides — for which I have used Skinner and the pre-paradox Rogers as examples — is the assumption that one can avoid the dilemma by taking one of its poles. It is not simply that man must learn to live with the paradox — the human being has always lived in this paradox or dilemma, from the time that he first became aware of the fact that he was the one who would die and coined a word for his own death. Illness, limitations of all sorts, and every aspect of our biological state we have indicated are aspects of the deterministic side of the dilemma — man is like the grass of the field, it withereth. The awareness of this, and the acting on this awareness, is the genius of man the subject. But we must also take the implications of this dilemma into our psychological theory. Between the two horns of this dilemma, man has developed symbols, art, language, and the kind of science which is always expanding in its own presuppositions. The courageous living within this dilemma, I believe, is the source of human creativity.

 

Rollo May

 

Alas, despite wing implants, feathers and wax, and carnal associations with swans, we will never grow wings. Alas, any true flight we make will always be externally assisted. Alas, the best we can do is fall and believe ourselves flying.

 

Peter Greenaway

 

In some ways I believe I epitomise the average New Zealander: I have modest abilities, I combine these with a good deal of determination, and I rather like to succeed.

 

Edmund Hillary

 

Joys too exquisite to last,
And yet more exquisite when past.

 

James Montgomery

 

The spread, both in and width and depth, of the multifarious branches of knowledge by during the last hundred odd years has confronted us with a queer dilemma. We feel clearly that we are only now beginning to acquire reliable material for welding together the sum total of all that is known into a whole; but, on the other hand, it has become next to impossible for a single mind fully to command more than a small specialized portion of it. I can see no other escape from this dilemma (lest our true who aim be lost for ever) than that some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them -and at the risk of making fools of ourselves.

 

Erwin Schrodinger