#though

For years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country. ↗

— Charles Erwin Wilson

#company #country #did #difference #exist

Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God? ↗

— E. O. Wilson

#could #evolution #god #had #important

I thought perhaps it should be recognized that religious people, including fundamentalists, are quite intelligent, many of them are highly educated, and they should be treated with complete respect. ↗

— E. O. Wilson

#educated #fundamentalists #highly #i #including

I had been brought up to be something of an intellectual, but there seemed at the time no connection between my newly formed ideas and the world to which I had returned. Indeed, I did not even recognize my ideas as ideas at all: they seemed to be culled from somewhere else and did not belong to me. I did not know then what I am just beginning to know now: that my ideas were indeed mine, that I had reacted and changed and moved, that I had already analyzed and synthesized, rejecting some thoughts, adopting others, putting yet others away for a while to be thought on. I did not recognize how mentally active an individual I had become, already divorced from the world through my own thoughts, my own perceptions of right and wrong, of honour and justice, of what mattered and what did not. (2007: 117) ↗

— Jean Said Makdisi

#thoughts #change

What is in the pencil is greater than what is around it. The talents in you are greater than the environment surrounding you. Your potentials will change your environment. ↗

— Israelmore Ayivor

#believe #believe-and-achieve #change #christ-in-you #environment

If we thought it would improve our relationship, we would get married tomorrow, but as it is, nearly 7 years after we got engaged, we are content to wait. ↗

— Benny Anderson

#content #engaged #get #get married #got

I never thought about being an actor. ↗

— Danny Glover

#actor #being #i #never #thought

We Japanese, on the other hand, know our egos are nothing. We bend our egos, all of the time, and that is where we differ. That is the fundamental difference, Hatsue. We bend our heads, we bow and are silent, because we understand that by ourselves alone, we are nothing at all, dust in a strong wind, while the 'hakujin' believes his aloneness is everything, his separateness is the foundation of his existence. He seeks and grasps, seeks and grasps for his separateness, while we seek union with the Greater Life--you must see that these are distinct paths we are travelling, Hatsue, the 'hakujin' and we Japanese" (p. 176). ↗

— David Guterson

#inspirational #provocative #thoughtful #inspirational

Of course, I am interested, but I would not dare to talk about them. In talking about the impact of ideas in one field on ideas in another field, one is always apt to make a fool of oneself. In these days of specialization there are too few people who have such a deep understanding of two departments of our knowledge that they do not make fools of themselves in one or the other. ↗

— Richard P. Feynman

#learning #self-awareness #specialization #thought-provoking #inspirational

Given the obstacles to merging these fragile and diverse forms of storytelling into a single tale, it is, paradoxically, by venturing in the opposite direction -- by listening for the silences between accounts; by discovering what each genre of recordkeeping cannot tell us -- that we can capture most fully the human struggle to understand our elusive past. What this past asks of us in return is a willingness to recount all our stories -- our darkest tales as well as our most inspiring ones -- and to ponder those stories that violence has silenced forever. For until we recognize our shared capacity for inhumanity, how can we ever hope to tell stories of our mutual humanity? ↗

— Karl Jacoby

#inspirational