Tag Archives: quote

Who said it?

A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.

This does not describe our current president, who seems abnormally focused on not just winning. He wants others to feel like losers.

I’m not a liberal. Well, I don’t think of myself as being a liberal: though I do admit to liberal views on some topics. One thing I believe is:

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).

and:

Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

And I believe our current president has made a mockery of individual rights.

I also think he is the latest in a line of presidents taking us down a dark road:

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

All these quotes are from the same person. A person in my opinion who would oppose Trump. This person values rational discussion:

“When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.”

Our president does not.

At the end of the day I believe:

Government ‘help’ to business is just as disastrous as government persecution… the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.

And finally a note to many who have “demonstrated” against our president since his election:

Rights are not a matter of numbers – and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.

 

I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of all things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction. Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a sacrifice on their alters.

Life is about…

And it’s about the simple pleasures that keep getting you out of bed every morning. Toast with butter or jam or cream cheese and cucumbers. Simple little things that you know will be there when you wake up. Blankets. Sunlight on Puget Sound. Dew on cedars. Daisies. Somewhere, mountains. Somewhere, the ocean. The consistent things, the old things, like evergreen trees at dusk. – Rachel Corrie: Let Me Stand Alone.

The part of me I can love…

As I walk out the door, my reflection flutters up again on its glass surface. Now it wavers. What I mistook for a pear an hour before is only a faltering wraith. The gleaming eyes and jutting cheekbones are all that is left. I want to observe this shadowy parody of me longer: it fascinates me. Drenched in darkness, my face has taken on an enigmatic quality. It is almost beautiful. This reflected ghost does not surprise me; I have seen her before. She gazes down at me from the car window late at night, broken by the harsh glow of an occasional street light. This part of me, a half-hidden, mysterious fairy, is the part I can love. She is completely mine. She is mature and wise and feminine. – Rachel Corrie: Let Me Stand Alone

Safe

In the second grade there were classroom rules hanging from the ceiling. The only one I can remember now seems like it would be a good rule for life. “Everyone must feel safe.” Safe to be themselves, physically safe, safe to say what they think, just safe. That’s the best rule I can think of. – Rachel Corrie: Let Me Stand Alone

Maybe it is loneliness

When I ride in the dark on stark roads through dry, bald hills, I ache with desperate longing. I don’t know what I am longing for, maybe for some place of my own within these images, some place where I fit, instead of being the one human being still awake, the only thing moving across the hills in arid darkness. Maybe that ache is loneliness. I haven’t found a name for the feeling yet, nor do I know exactly what awakens it in me. But instinct warns me that it is too potent for me, that my soul is on the verge of cracking when I feel it that way. I cannot handle the sheer power of those wild emotions by myself. I have to find some way to share them. That is why I write. It’s instinctive. I just have to – because it is awake like lava in my blood, and sustains me.

Rachel Corrie; Let Me Stand Alone – The Journals of Rachel Corrie