#possibility

Something must be radically wrong with a culture and a civilisation when its youth begins to desert it. Youth is the natural time for revolt, for experiment, for a generous idealism that is eager for action. Any civilisation which has the wisdom of self-preservation will allow a certain margin of freedom for the expression of this youthful mood. But the plain, unpalatable fact is that in America today that margin of freedom has been reduced to the vanishing point. Rebellious youth is not wanted here. In our environment there is nothing to challenge our young men; there is no flexibility, no colour, no possibility for adventure, no chance to shape events more generously than is permitted under the rules of highly organised looting. All our institutional life combines for the common purpose of blackjacking our youth into the acceptance of the status quo; and not acceptance of it merely, but rather its glorification. ↗

— Harold Edmund Stearns

#adventure #america #civilization #desertion #emigration

Verse comedy is interesting to me because of the challenge of writing in rhymed couplets, which is not a form that's usually amenable to English, yet to me it gives great possibility for comedy. ↗

— David Ives

#because #challenge #comedy #english #form

There is one consolation in being sick; and that is the possibility that you may recover to a better state than you were ever in before. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#being #better #consolation #ever #may

When people make judgments they close all the possibility around them. ↗

— Jeff Koons

#close #judgments #make #people #possibility

The very impossibility in which I find myself to prove that God is not, discovers to me his existence. ↗

— Voltaire

#existence #find #god #his #i

The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy. ↗

— Sun Tzu

#defeat #defeating #enemy #fighters #first

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. ↗

— John Updike

#dreams #incite #nature #possibility #them

The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of liberty - of the indefinite expansion of possibility. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#expansion #ideology #indefinite #into #liberty

Es perfectamente imaginable que el esplendor de la vida está dispuesto, siempre en toda plenitud, alrededor de cada uno, pero cubierto de un velo, en las profundidades, invisible muy lejos. Sin embargo está ahí, no hostil, no a disgusto, no sordo, viene si uno lo llama con la palabra correcta, por su nombre correcto, Es la esencia de la magia, que no crea, sino llama. ↗

— Franz Kafka

#magic #possibility #imagination

Our society strives to avoid any possibility of offending anyone - except God. ↗

— Billy Graham

#anyone #avoid #except #god #offending