#eol

Our country, like every modern state, needs profound democratic reforms. It needs political and ideological pluralism, a mixed economy and protection of human rights and the opening up of society. ↗

— Andrei Sakharov

#democratic #economy #every #human #human rights

And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#ideology #people #political-revolutionary #revolution #revolutionary-movement

Wonder—the enthusiastic ardor for the sublimity of being, for its worthiness to be an object of knowledge—promises to become the point of departure for genuine insight only where it has reached the stage in which the subject, overwhelmed by the object, has, as it were, fused into a single point or into nothing… like the movement of hope and love toward God, which is genuine and selfless only where it has assumed the attitude of pure worship of God for his own sake. ↗

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

#philosophy #theology #wonder #worship #attitude

I do not think either virginity or old age contemptible, and some of the shrewdest minds I have met inhabited the bodies of old maids. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#marriage #mind #mindfulness #philosophy #theology

My body kills me, so I kill it. ↗

— Dorotheus the Theban

#death #desert-father #dying #holy-father #monastic

Love gives you eyes. ↗

— Peter Kreeft

#christianity #eyes #inspirational #jesus-shock #love

It even has the same phraseology as the English orders of knighthood, companions and this sort of thing. ↗

— George Woodcock

#english #even #knighthood #orders #phraseology

So the major obstacle to the development of new supplies is not geology but what happens above ground: international affairs, politics, investment and technology. ↗

— Daniel Yergin

#affairs #development #geology #ground #happens

Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely that man was created in God's image. Either/or: either man was created in God's image - and has intestines! - or God lacks intestines and man is not like him. The ancient Gnostics felt as I did at the age of five. In the second century, the Great Gnostic master Valentinus resolved the damnable dilemma by claiming that Jesus "ate and drank, but did not defecate." Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man's crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the creator of man. ↗

— Milan Kundera

#shit #theology #age

It is well known that stone can think, because the whole of electronics is based on that fact, but in some universes men spend ages looking for other intelligences in the sky without once looking under their feet. That is because they've got the time-span all wrong. From stone's point of view the universe is hardly created and mountain ranges are bouncing up and down like organ-stops while continents zip backward and forward in general high spirits, crashing into each other from the sheer joy of momentum and getting their rocks off. It is going to be quite some time before stone notices its disfiguring skin disease and starts to scratch, which is just as well. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#humor #perspective #time #age