Quotes by American Authors - Page 23

Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.
Joyce Carol Oates
Creative people are often found either disagreeable or intimidating by mediocrities.
Criss Jami
Human freedom brings with it the burden of choice and of its consequences. As humankind is akin to claim for its own special privilege a certain unique destiny not afforded with equal measure to other organisms, so must it further—if paradoxically so—entertain the assumption that, in spite of this glorious determinism, there persists nonetheless a thread of free will—or, at the very least, some vague delusion thereof—woven seamlessly into the tapestry of collective experience. Of course, this conception that destiny is to be forged by one’s own hands more often engenders greater restriction than it does greater extension to the potential of human happiness.
Ashim Shanker
I feel like a paper cut just waiting to bleed.
Jennifer Elisabeth
Time' is the most threatening four letter word.
Jennifer Elisabeth
We’ve been so busy with these things we let ourselves think actually mattered, but they don’t. There’s no such thing as the right career, or morality, or destiny, or fate. There’s only life. And whether you honor it or ignore it. It’s ironic, but in trying to find God we’ve been ignoring life.
Trevor D. Richardson
Together they spent their whole lives waiting for their luck to change, as though luck were some fabulous tide that would one day flood and consecrate the marshes of our island, christening us in the iridescent ointments of a charmed destiny.
Pat Conroy
Your own guilt is your own fault.
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
Sometimes I feel like one of those sliding tile puzzles. I just get so dang close to what I want to see in the mirror and who I want to be... but then I have to completely jumble up the pieces to try to get even closer.
Erica Goros
Confidence comes from crossing thresholds.
Kamal Ravikant
You gotta make it a priority to make your priorities a priority.
Richie Norton
What is it we are questing for? It is the fulfillment of that which is potential in each of us. Questing for it is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself. There is nothing you can do that's more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way you will find, live, become a realization of your own personal myth.
Joseph Campbell
Focus on making yourself better, not thinking you are better.
Bohdi Sanders
God, He didn't write the scripts for the puny little players downhere.We wrote them ourselves-with each day we lived, each word we spoke,each thought we etched on our brains. And Momma had written herscript, too.And a sorry one it was.
V.C. Andrews
When I was younger, I would cling to life because life was at the top of the turning wheel. But like the song of my gypsy girl, the great wheel turns over and lands on a minor key. It is then that you come of age and life means nothing to you. To live, to die, to overdose, to fall in a coma in the street... it is all the same. It is only in the peach innocence of youth that life is at its crest on top of the wheel. And there being only life, the young cling to it, they fear death… And they should! ...For they are 'in' life.
Roman Payne
Life and death are something everyone will experience. It is living that only few will have embraced
Ricky Maye
I no longer follow the voices of the sane. I follow the ill because they see farther, feel much more and change what the sane will not. This is the paradox of philosophers---trying to understand mass delusion among great people that have faith and knowledge, yet they can’t graduate from their institutions of religious theology to apply the knowledge they have gained for the shifting of Zion---- from words to action; from comfort to uncomfortable; from self serving to self giving; from competition to supporting; to tradition to unity; from bias to acceptance; from me to us.
Shannon L. Alder
Living things don't all requirelight in the same degree. Some of usmake our own light: a silver leaflike a path no one can use, a shallowlake of silver in the darkness under the great maples.But you know this already.You and the others who thinkyou live for truth and, by extension, loveall that is cold.
Louise Glück
THE SILENT PEOPLESome people are so rude,Living their lives with no concern for others,Or possibly just intent on pissing other people off-Annoying everyone around them.The silent people-Want to kill them-And drive forks into their skulls-Create weapons of extreme torture-And scream from the top of their lungs-"SHUT UP."But words are not spoken-And attention is not given.Though annoyance is apparent,The annoying keep on living.
Giorge Leedy
If you never been rabid, you ain't never lived.
Chuck Palahniuk
Environmental radiation research is the rent I pay for living on this planet.
Steven Magee
To ‘live’ is to realize that without the journey the destination is nothing more than a task rigorously completed rather than an experience riotously lived.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
If we’re missing life it’s probably because we’re expecting it to reveal itself to us, rather than realizing that life is revealed by us looking for it.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
It’s really a rather simple thing to bring balance to my anger. All I need to do is remember that the ‘hand of cards’ that have been dealt to me pale in comparison to the ‘deck of cards’ that I’ve thrown at others.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I don’t necessarily sit around inviting life to knock me down, but when it does I don’t wait around for an invitation to stand back up either.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
When you have lived your individual life in your own adventurous way and then look back upon its course, you will find that you have lived a model human life, after all.
Joseph Campbell
The power of the Will in a man, is favoured by the Heavens. The man who sets his Heart and Word onto something, and says "I will" no matter what obstacle is placed in his way— joins the ranks of the demi-gods. All else remain in mortality and are soon forgotten.
C. JoyBell C.
Summer is the time for squabbles. In winter, we must protect one another, keep each other warm, share our strengths.
George R.R. Martin
Doubt is like a current you have to swim against, one that saps your strength.
Victoria Schwab
Being alone is better than being your whore.
Lori Jenessa Nelson
That's the thing about rocks--they don't break easily. When I held them, I wanted to be like them-strong and steady, weathered but not broken.
Ellen Dreyer
To one degree or another we all fight against preconceptions nearly every day. The wisest people I know don't compare their fight to that of others. Everything is relative through the lens of personal struggle.Heroes come in all shapes and sizes... mine are often those who are fighting their fight in public. Unashamed. Proud. An example.Heroes aren't perfect. They have faults and flaws. They stumble from time to time. They are heroes, though, because they correct themselves... and set an example, intended or not, for the world observing them... even, and especially, to those who would love nothing more than to see them fail.Stay Strong!
Dennis Sharpe
Your strength doesn't come from winning. It comes from struggles and hardship. Everything that you go through prepares you for the next level.
Germany Kent
It is evident, therefore, that one of the most fundamental problems of psychology is that of investigating the laws of mental growth. When these laws are known, the door of the future will in a measure be opened; determination of the child's present status will enable us to forecast what manner of adult he will become.
Lewis Terman
Pride is born as a mountaintop on a valley, but dies as an abyss in which it is too deep and too dark to see the better.
Criss Jami
You're FAT - and don't try to sugarcoat it, because you'll just eat that, too.
Phillip C. McGraw
When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.
William Gibson
Don’t let society’s labelshold you back. If you have atrue passion for somethingwhether its sports, art,science, etc…don’t believeanyone who says you can’t doit because you’re a girl. If youwant to play baseball, hockey,or football, don’t let anyonetell you that you can’t. If youwant to play with Hot Wheelcars and Legos, then do it.Only you are the boss of you
Alison G. Bailey
The main difference is that the enlightened believe that the poor criminal should be rehabilitated while the righteous believe that the immoral criminal should be locked up in jail. Since almost the only available system of rehabilitation in America is to be locked up in jail, the difference remains highly abstract.
William Ryan
The rich eat life, the poor eat death; so what is the problem they ask?
Anthony Liccione
The new dumb, is now wisdom.
Anthony Liccione
A meritocracy is a system in which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment; luckiest in terms of family support, encouragement, and, probably, income; luckiest in their educational and career opportunities; and luckiest in so many other ways difficult to enumerate — these are the folks who reap the largest rewards. The only way for even a putative meritocracy to hope to pass ethical muster, to be considered fair, is if those who are the luckiest in all of those respects also have the greatest responsibility to work hard, to contribute to the betterment of the world, and to share their luck with others.
Ben S. Bernanke
The foundation of morality on the human sentiments of what is acceptable behavior versus repulsive behavior has always made morals susceptible to change. Much of what was repulsive 100 years ago is normal today, and - although it may be a slippery slope - what is repulsive today is possible to be normal 100 years into tomorrow; the human standard has always been but to push the envelope. In this way, all generations are linked, and one can only hope that every extremist, self-proclaimed progressive is considering this ultimate 'Utopia' to which his kindness will lead at the end of the chain.
Criss Jami
Public condemnation goes a long way in establishing what is and what is not acceptable in a society. The public good will prevail if the public demands it.
Laurence Overmire
Some skeptics believe religious people are religious because they fear Hell. It's about as fair as saying skeptics are skeptics because they fear the ridicule of modern society.
Criss Jami
Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.
James Madison
The problem with the ‘herd’ is that our voice is never ‘heard’.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
In our day and age, global society has been saturated with the wrong teaching of false positivity. The denial of darkness never equates the abundance of light. And the denial of your actual character never equates to the reality of your best character. People today are afraid to work on themselves and on their actual realities, they believe that outward appearances are enough. Outward appearances have become everything in our current day and age. People don't see what they are actually like, nor who they actually are, in reality. They live in a phantasmic version of reality. It has to stop. In the phantasmic version of reality, there is no chance to experience true love, true goodness, and true metamorphosis. The caterpillar does not become a butterfly by telling everybody it has wings. It actually buries itself in darkness and grows those wings.
C. JoyBell C.
Health makes good propaganda.
Naomi Wolf
Marketing is what you do when your product is no good.
Edwin H. Land
Carpe diem.Seize the day, boys.Make your lives extraordinary
Tom Schulman
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
Frederick Douglass
Teaching and learning _religious plurality often ends up privileging religious _texts_ over _practice_ and largely ignoring the social and historical contexts and the lived experience of people who shape, situate, and structure these religious texts. Furthermore, adopting the politics of recognition as a pedagogical principle in teaching can lead to an _uncritical silence_ about the various forms of oppression and domination of certain religious groups. Here people often use _religious difference_ as a _religious alibi_ for the oppression or violation of human rights of certain groups of people, such as women or LGBT people.
Namsoon Kang
Whenever one comes to the the table for interreligous dialogue, there is what I would call an _ecumenical taboo_ that one has to comply with. The ecumenical taboo_ does not exist in a written document, but people tend to practice it around the dialogue table. One should not raise, for instance, such questions as gender justice, sexual orientation issues, religious constructions of the other, multiple forms of violence in a religious community, or religious cooperation with neo/imperialism. each religion has its own _history of sin_ that has justified and perpetuated oppression and exclusion of certain groups of people through its own religious teaching, doctrine, and practice. In order to be _nice_ and _tolerant_ to one another, interreligious dialogue has not challenged the fundamental issues of injustice that a particular religion has practiced, justified, and perpetuated in various ways. I do not disregard that most ecumenists have based interreligious dialogue on a politics of tolerance, and this has played a significant role in easing the antagonism between religions, at least among the leaders of established religions. However, we should ground an authentic ecumenism and theology of religion in a _politics of affirmation and transformation, rather than a politics of tolerance_.
Namsoon Kang
Walter Mignolo terms and articulates _critical cosmopolitanism, juxtaposing it with globalization, which is a process of "the homogeneity of the planet from above––economically, politically and culturally." Although _globalization from below_ is to counter _globalization from above_ from the experience and perspective of those who suffer from the consequences of _globalization from above_, cosmopolitanism differs, according to Mignolo, form these two types of globalization. Mignolo defines globalization as 'a set of designs to manage the world,' and cosmopolitanism as 'a set of projects toward planetary conviviality
Namsoon Kang
Who are theologians? What kind of self-identity could or should a theologian claim? Should a theologian be a defender or transmitter of Christian _tradition_? What if the _tradition_ itself carries a dark side, implicitly or explicitly, bounded by religious or cultural superiorism, ethnocentrism, homophobism, exclusive nationalism, sexism, racism, and so forth? What kind of _identity_ would then justify my rule as theologian? This question has been lingering in my mind throughout the time I have been working on cosmopolitan theology. it may sound simple, but for me the identity issue has been fundamental.
Namsoon Kang
This is when the pill became widely known as The Pill, perhaps the only product in American history so powerful that it needed no name. Women went to their doctors and said they wanted it. They wanted The Pill. Some of them might still have been uncomfortable talking about birth control. Others might have been unsure of its brand name. But The Pill was The Pill because it was the only one that mattered, the one everyone was talking about, the one they needed.
Jonathan Eig
Most women are all too familiar with men like Calvin Smith. Men whose sense of prerogative renders them deaf when women say, "No thanks," "Not interested," or even "Fuck off, creep.
Jon Krakauer
Having had nothing, I will not settle for crumbs.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Often ignored by civil rights historians, a number of campaigns led to trials and even convictions throughout the South. These cases, many virtually unknown, broke with Southern tradition and fractured the philosophical and political foundations of white supremacy by challenging the relationship between sexual domination and racial equality.
Danielle L. McGuire