The best politics is right action.
It is never the “right” time to confront the truth about things. We always want to put it off until later. When you recognize the lies you live, your inauthenticity, feeling bad about what you did doesn’t make any difference. It’s what you do about it that makes a difference in the world. If you don’t live by your word, you are a windbag. You’ve got a choice: to be your word or be your feelings. It’s that simple. Choose.
It is only the religious mind that is a truly revolutionary mind.
The penalty that good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by men worse than themselves.
Yes, I felt closer to my fellow men too, even in my solitude. For it is not physical solitude that actually separates one from other men, not physical isolation, but spiritual isolation. It is not the desert island nor the stony wilderness that cuts you from the people you love. It is the wilderness in the mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost and a stranger. When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others. How often in a large city, shaking hands with my friends, I have felt the wilderness stretching between us. Both of us were wandering in arid wastes, having lost the springs that nourished us — or having found them dry. Only when one is connected to one’s own core is one connected to others, I am beginning to discover. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be refound through solitude.
The world will be saved by beauty.
But how shall we educate men to goodness, to a sense of one another, to a love of truth? And more urgently, how shall we do this in a bad time?
Revolutionary consciousness is to be found Among the most ruthlessly exploited masses: Animals, trees, water, air, grasses.
Jesus Christ was the first communist.
It is simply untrue that all our institutions are evil, that all adults are unsympathetic, that all politicians are mere opportunists, that all aspects of university life are corrupt. Having discovered an illness, it’s not terribly useful to prescribe death as a cure.
The rich will do everything for the poor but get off their backs.
Political life neither provides our final end nor contains the happiness we seek for ourselves or others. . . . The purpose of temporal tranquility, which well-ordered policies establish and maintain, is to give opportunities for contemplating truth.
Knowledge is what we take in with our senses.
Understanding is the action verb of knowledge, what we use of it, what we actually do with our knowledge.
Wisdom is what we pass on of the knowledge we really understand.
Bullshit is passing on knowledge without understanding.
“The things we see,” Pistorius said softly, “are the same things that are within us. There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such unreal lives. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.”
When we first experience true ordinariness, it is something very extraordinarily ordinary, so much so that we would say that mountains are not mountains anymore or streams streams anymore, because we see them as so ordinary, so precise, so “as they are.” This extraordinariness derives from the experience of discovery. But eventually this super-ordinariness, this precision, becomes an everyday event, something we live with all the time, truly ordinary, and we are back where we started: the mountains are mountains and streams are streams. Then we can relax.
The whole earth is in jail and we’re plotting this incredible jailbreak.
We turn to God for help when our foundations are shaking, only to learn it is God who is shaking them.
