#cult

If you are faced with a mountain, you have several options. You can climb it and cross to the other side. You can go around it. You can dig under it. You can fly over it. You can blow it up. You can ignore it and pretend it’s not there. You can turn around and go back the way you came. Or you can stay on the mountain and make it your home. ↗

— Vera Nazarian

#coping #difficulties #mountain #mountains #obstacle

Organizations like the UN do a lot of good, but there are certain basic realities they never seem to grasp ...Maybe the most important truth that eludes these organizations is that it's insulting when outsiders come in and tell a traumatized people what it will take for them to heal. You cannot go to another country and make a plan for it. The cultural context is so different from what you know that you will not understand much of what you see. I would never come to the US and claim to understand what's going on, even in the African American culture. People who have lived through a terrible conflict may be hungry and desperate, but they are not stupid. They often have very good ideas about how peace can evolve, and they need to be asked. That includes women. Most especially women ... To outsiders like the UN, these soldiers were a problem to be managed. But they were our children. ↗

— Leymah Gbowee

#culture #liberia #outsiders #war #women

Olivia had changed so much since then. She had changed in ways she would never have been able to anticipate. She had become the kind of person who was barely able to get out of bed in the morning without buckling beneath the tidal pull of the planets. ↗

— Kevin Brockmeier

#difficulty #change

I grew up in a culture in which it was a sin for a woman to speak out. ↗

— Terry Tempest Williams

#grew #i #out #sin #speak

Society historically has a difficult time with the concept of something new and foreign that shakes up our comfortable views, especially if it involves the very volatile question of sexual identity. ↗

— Mercedes Ruehl

#concept #difficult #difficult time #especially #foreign

Tax reform and expanded trade are going to be so important to the economy of Illinois, particularly the 11th Congressional District, which is a major manufacturing and a major agricultural district. ↗

— Jerry Weller

#congressional #congressional district #district #economy #expanded

Intuition makes much of it; I mean by this the faculty of seeing a connection between things that in appearance are completely different; it does not fail to lead us astray quite often. ↗

— Andre Weil

#astray #between #completely #connection #different

I should point out, however, that at first some difficulty was experienced in observing the phenomena predicted by the theory, owing to the extreme smallness of the variations in the period of oscillation. ↗

— Pieter Zeeman

#experienced #extreme #first #however #i

It is commonly said that men are forward to believe whatever is connected with their own interest. This in common cases is true; but it is also true, that when some very great and unexpected good news is brought to us, we find it very difficult to credit it. ↗

— Archibald Alexander

#believe #brought #cases #common #commonly

It would be difficult, in this day and age, to fund art that made racial slurs. ↗

— Jane Alexander

#art #day #difficult #fund #made