Tuesday 25 October 2016

Quotes

President Eisenhower on the military-industrial complex: “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government … we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.” 

Pope Francis, US Congress, 24 September, 2015: “A nation can be considered great when it defends liberty as Lincoln did; when it fosters a culture which enables people to ‘dream’ of full rights for all their brothers and sisters, as Martin Luther King sought to do; when it strives for justice and the cause of the oppressed, as Dorothy Day did by her tireless work; the fruit of a faith which becomes dialogue and sows peace in the contemplative style of Thomas Merton.” [This quote and the quote that follows are from The Common Good, a newspaper of the Christchurch Catholic Worker.]

Thomas Merton : “Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy.” 

Leigh Hunt
Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,
Jenny kissed me. 

E.M. Farrelly “Civilisation demands both the freedom to let the village idiot speak, and the universal discernment to know, it is the village idiot speaking.” Sidney Morning Herald
Martin Luther King “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” Spoken at the time of “Bloody Sunday” in Selma 1965

Erich Fromm
: “A spectre is stalking in our midst… It is not the old ghost of communism or fascism. It is a new spectre: a completely mechanized society, devoted to maximum material output and consumption, directed by computers; and in this social process, man himself is being transformed into a part of the total machine, well fed and entertained, yet passive, unalive, and with little feeling.” Page 1 “The Revolution of Hope”. 

Ecclesiastes 9:4: “For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope”. Quoted by Erich Fromm at the beginning of his book The Revolution of Hope

Paul Oestreicher: “If the aerial bombing of cities that kills thousands is now taken for granted as a normal way of waging war, or if at least five so-called civilised nations are prepared, in certain circumstances, to wage nuclear war, then to be outraged at the explosion of a car bomb, is strangely selective.” P 62 The Double Cross 

Winston Churchill: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

Dame Anne Salmond: “If life is understood as a struggle among cost benefit individuals, the idea of a fair and harmonious society retreats, even vanishes. As Margaret Thatcher famously said, “There is no such thing as society”. If one studies human history, however, driven as it is by collective achievement, it is clear she was wrong… Human beings are social animals, through and through. However if the aim of life is personal success, those who have failed are at fault and must bear the consequences, those who lose their jobs for instance, or the homeless… Much of life in the Anglo-American world looks like that at present.” NZ Herald 15/07/2016, “Ravages of neo-liberalism.”

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