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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d9fe246 | Overconfidence will negate our technological advantage faster than anything the other guy could do. | Larry Bond | ||
| 96473f5 | Churchill made a point about the power of government: A National or Municipal Beef Trust, with the United States Treasury at its back, might indeed give more regular employment at higher wages to its servants, and might sell cleaner food to its customers--at a price. But if evil systems corrupt good men, it is no less true that base men will dishonor any system, and while no bond of duty more exacting than that of material recompense regula.. | Larry P Arnn | ||
| 5fc3b96 | If you want to change the story that justifies current structures of power and privilege, you must have such a combination of bold goals and specific steps. | Eric Liu | ||
| d58df4b | In our country, there is so much that's wrong with the way we deliver care to the aging, the very young, and the infirm. But you can't beat something with nothing. It is not enough to decry what's broken. You have to describe the alternative and make it possible for people to believe in it. To care. | Eric Liu | ||
| aa0f7b7 | uses a method for organizing that centers on three nested narratives: the story of self, the story of us, and the story of now. He teaches organizers entering into any setting to start not with policy proposals or high concepts like justice but with biographies--their own, and those of the people they hope to mobilize. What are the stories you tell about yourself? Why do you tell them that way? How can we find connections across our stories.. | Eric Liu | ||
| 5f5c3a0 | Power justifies itself, in countless small ways. But one of the big ways it does so is by creating an ideological narrative about how things got to be this way--and what must now change. These narratives are more than technical explanations. They are epic morality tales, and they typically follow this sequence: Paradise Paradise Lost Paradise Redeemed | Eric Liu | ||
| 8e333c2 | Every person and institution with power in our society today has it because we give it to them. | Eric Liu | ||
| 2553575 | First, power concentrates. That is, it feeds on itself and compounds (as does powerlessness). * Second, power justifies itself. People invent stories to legitimize the power they have (or lack). * Third, power is infinite. There is no inherent limit on the amount of power people can create. | Eric Liu | ||
| 6912cbd | In American politics, power is presumptively illegitimate. It's important to remember this. Our founding is premised on the notion that power is inherently hostile to freedom. The pamphlets of the Revolution are heavy with warnings that citizens must "jealously" guard their liberties against tyrannies of the state. The Constitution, even as it created a stronger national government, hobbled that government with checks and balances, separati.. | Eric Liu | ||
| adf37ea | To me, this passage is essentially the Chinese equivalent of the Socratic claim that the unexamined life is not worth living. It has exactly the same rhetorical assertiveness and moral severity: the unexamined life is not just less good; it's useless. | Eric Liu | ||
| 55de0bb | Meaning, though, changes with time; text with context. What am I to do? There was a time, as in the minutes after we learned of my father's death, when those words or words roughly like them, uttered in panic, escaped my mother's lips. Today, after so many years of lonely meditation, and so many conversations with me that describe but a fraction of those meditations, and so many outings and travels with her Bon Sisters and other friends to .. | Eric Liu | ||
| af69ad5 | In civically flourishing societies, the people remember that the system is healthiest and most robust when power emerges from the bottom up and the middle out, not the top down. In such societies, the people recognize that it is not only fair that power be circulated widely; it is also wise. | Eric Liu | ||
| a18909d | Which is why, from the Inca Empire to the Soviet Union, extractive societies have been prone to collapse. Power naturally flows to the top. We've established that. But where power flows to the top and stays there, without correction or recirculation, a society is likely to die a catastrophic death. | Eric Liu | ||
| 69c6a21 | They share a vision of a society where more people are able to claim and create more power--for themselves, by themselves--against the encroachments of others. And they now share an experience that teaches them that it is both possible and necessary to create power: to activate people who very reasonably could believe that the deck is so stacked against them that there's no point in getting involved. | Eric Liu | ||
| 5dac93a | By deliberately withholding power, you generate more. By choosing to redirect it, you remember that the choice is yours. Such acts remind us how much dormant civic power we actually have--and how infrequently we ever activate that potential in full. | Eric Liu | ||
| 48d3be4 | We haven't truly enabled all the people of this society to participate in self-government to the fullest extent of their potential. We haven't come close, not in an age when our elected officials and their staffs are overwhelmingly white, male, and affluent. Nor have we truly enabled all the people of this society to participate fully in economic life as creators and contributors. Not when 48 percent of the new jobs in the country are low-w.. | Eric Liu | ||
| 0c14573 | It was there, during the 1960s, that his evolution into a firebrand revolutionary began. He became a vocal leader in the emerging Chicano movement. He joined black student activist Larry Gossett, Native American leader Bernie Whitebear, and Asian American leader Bob Santos to create multiracial coalitions for justice in education, policing, immigration, and other issues. Together they became masters of organizing and direct action. The so-c.. | Eric Liu | ||
| bac859b | The story of El Centro's creation and flourishing reminds us that civic power may not require a plan--but it does require a purpose. | Eric Liu | ||
| 22b9d00 | Change the game: 1. Adjust the arena. 2. Re-rig the rules. 3. Attack the plan. Change the story: 1. Describe the alternative. 2. Organize in narratives. 3. Make your fight a fable. Change the equation: 1. Act exponentially. 2. Act reciprocally. 3. Perform your power. | Eric Liu | ||
| 725f59a | Until I die again, perhaps. Until the next replay. Then it all vanishes." Jeff shook his head, his arm tightly around her shoulders. "Only the products of your work will disappear. The struggle, the devotion you put into your endeavors ... That's where the value truly lies, and will remain: within you." | life philosophy-of-life | Ken Grimwood | |
| 5b97ccb | You and I...have lived many lives. | Ken Grimwood | ||
| b6f3dc2 | The water was calm and blue today, and as they walked along the dunes they could see the hump of Poplar Island off the Eastern Shore. | Ken Grimwood | ||
| 053311e | The only thing that mattered was the quarter century or so he had remaining would be HIS life, to live out as he chose and in his own best interests. Nothing took precedence over that...The possibilities...were endless. | Ken Grimwood | ||
| 98fc871 | The cure for the pain is the pain. Unprocessed pain almost always leads to something much worse than pain. Opening ourselves up to our emotional reactions to that world and allowing ourselves to feel the gamut of emotions that opening inevitably produces is the beginning of a movement toward wholeness and healing. This can produce energy, focus, and a sense of urgency. To quote Bob Dylan, "Behind every beautiful thing is some kind of pain." | Mary Pipher | ||
| eb15e7b | In the Western consciousness, emotion has had a bad rap as the opposite of reason and good judgment. But psychological and neurological research reveal that emotion is the primary organizing force for human beings. | Mary Pipher | ||
| f30613d | Peace is a matter of education more largely than of legislation; although the latter is necessary. | Belva Ann Lockwood | ||
| e8ad92e | blacks who had been dragging the city down for the past twenty years. Rusk and a few trusted friends referred to them as "untouchables." | Greg Iles | ||
| d1bfcb8 | One of our most effective coping skills is simply sticking together. In a 2011 New Yorker article called "Social Animal," David Brooks writes, "Research over the past thirty years makes it clear that what the inner mind really wants is connection . . . Joining a group that meets just once a month produces the same increase in happiness as doubling your income." | Mary Pipher | ||
| 14790f4 | diffident voice. "You're not going to believe this." | Greg Iles | ||
| 01d7626 | Alf caught the child and gave him to Father. She was gripping Coral, thrusting her out. Willing, anxious hands were holding a blanket. She was trying to make the boy Walter jump too. But the children were terrified, and dazed by the smoke. They would not jump. They would not obey. Hannah lifted them, then dropped them on to the blanket. 'Hannah, come down. Jump yerself. Quick! Quick!' Alf was struggling to fight his way in through the flame.. | Radclyffe Hall | ||
| 11ab383 | Inside the Mousery the smell was overpowering, but it is doubtful if any of the three noticed it. Down the center of the single long room ran a brick path on either side of which were shelves three deep, divided into roomy sections. The admiral stopped before one of them, 'Golden Agouti', he remarked. He took hold of a rectangular box, the front of which was wired; very slyly he lifted a lid set into the top panel, and lowered the cage so t.. | Radclyffe Hall | ||
| ed24575 | But do try to remember this: even the world's not so black as it's painted. | Radclyffe Hall | ||
| f3e2113 | Oh, Stephen, Stephen, get used to the world -- it's a horrible place full of horrible people, but it's all there is, and we live in it, don't we? So we've just got to do as the world does, my Stephen. | Radclyffe Hall | ||
| 96f33ed | The sorrows of childhood are mercifully passing, for it is only when maturity has rendered soil mellow that grief will root very deeply. Stephen's | Radclyffe Hall | ||
| 4268ff1 | Oh, yes -- very easy to talk about death, but not so easy to manage the dying. | Radclyffe Hall | ||
| 8d7bfcf | Pat's been deserted -- have you heard that, darling? Do you think she'll take the veil or cocaine or something? | Radclyffe Hall | ||
| e7bab80 | Nothing appears to succeed like success in a world that is principally made up of failure. | Radclyffe Hall | ||
| a1d3a17 | Yes, it was trying to get her under, this world with its mighty self-satisfaction, with its smug rules of conduct, all made to be broken by those who strutted and preened themselves on being what they considered normal. They trod on the necks of those thousands of others who, for God knew what reason, were not made as they were; they prided | Radclyffe Hall | ||
| b100e3e | No one is useless who can pray, my sister. | Radclyffe Hall | ||
| 0695b9a | The world would condemn but they would rejoice; glorious outcasts, unashamed, triumphant! | Radclyffe Hall | ||
| 7c6e589 | I cannot protect you, Mary, the world has deprived me of my right to protect; I am utterly helpless, I can only love you. | Radclyffe Hall | ||
| adc8acd | For at moments such is the blindness and folly, yet withal the redeeming glory of love. | Radclyffe Hall | ||
| 1f0baa3 | For other women that kind of intimacy--the physical, mental and emotional closeness to a man, a lover--was something they took for granted. But she would never travel through life with a man she loved and who loved her in return. Out of nowhere, a yearning ache of loss welled up inside her. A sense of barren hopelessness that panicked and angered her. | man-woman-relationship relationship | Penny Jordan | |
| 0f5fd6b | From the Bullens' cottage came Father and Alf. They were carrying Granny on her old straw pallet. Hannah followed with the rest of the family. Showers of sparks were blowing on to the roof and against the side wall that was weather-boarded. Mother was clutching her case of stuffed birds and the family Bible. Granny was singing. Hannah said: 'Yer'd best take 'er up near the church and put 'er somewheres out of the wind. Ermie and Doris, you .. | Radclyffe Hall |