#ali

What are Christians known for? Outsiders think our moralizing, our condemnations, and our attempts to draw boundaries around everything. Even if these standards are accurate and biblical, they seem to be all we have to offer. And our lives are a poor advertisement for the standards. We have set the gameboard to register lifestyle points; then we are surprised to be trapped by our mistakes. The truth is we have invited the hypocrite image. ↗

— David Kinnaman

#legalism #lifestyle

In much of the rest of the world, rich people live in gated communities and drink bottled water. That's increasingly the case in Los Angeles where I come from. So that wealthy people in much of the world are insulated from the consequences of their actions. ↗

— Jared Diamond

#civilization #consequences #environment #foresight #insight

Just like children, emotions heal when they are heard and validated. ↗

— Jill Bolte Taylor

#validation #insight

In order to share one's true brilliance one initially has to risk looking like a fool: genius is like a wheel that spins so fast, it at first glance appears to be sitting still. ↗

— Criss Jami

#determination #first-impression #fool #foolish #genius

If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population. ↗

— Herbert Marcuse

#philosophy #political-science #social-science #science

Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind's fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#rationality #values #satisfaction

A man of character finds a special attractiveness in difficulty, since it is only by coming to grips with difficulty that he can realize his potentialities. ↗

— Charles de Gaulle

#difficulty #perseverance #potentiality #trial #perseverance

In America sex is an obsession, in other parts of the world it is a fact. ↗

— Marlene Dietrich

#morality #obsession #prudishness #puritanism #sexuality

The power of human thought grows exponentially with the number of minds that share that thought. ↗

— Dan Brown

#spirituality #knowledge

[T]hose who are in a position of strength have a responsibility to protect the weak. ↗

— Thomas Cushman

#intervention #iraq #iraq-war #liberalism #iraq