Quotes by Public Speakers - Page 6

Do not shout at me, Mr. Quill," said John [Adams]. "Justice may be blind, but she is not deaf.
Orson Scott Card
Skepticism is my nature. Free Thought is my methodology. Agnosticism is my conclusion. Atheism is my opinion. Humanitarianism is my motivation.
Jerry DeWitt
Emotion goes inside-out. Emotional contagion, though, suggests that the opposite is also true. If I can make you smile, I can make you happy. If I can make you frown, I can make you sad. Emotion, in this sense, goes outside-in.
Malcolm Gladwell
We cannot selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren't always comfortable, but they're never weakness.
Brené Brown
Our emotions can be either corrupted or elevated. Human love was not created to be without premeditated purpose.
Manis Friedman
Oh, people get used to so many things," said Vadesh, "if only they give them selves a chance.
Orson Scott Card
The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life... But they've learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong—for we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane.
Orson Scott Card
Bean could see the hunger in their eyes. Not the regular hunger, for food, but the real hunger, the deep hunger, for family, for love, for belonging.
Orson Scott Card
a lot of human behavior was really acting out our responses to dangers long past.
Orson Scott Card
Is it some law of human nature that you inevitably become whatever your first commander was?
Orson Scott Card
So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth.
Orson Scott Card
So why don’t Americans cheat? Because they think that their system is legitimate. People accept authority when they see that it treats everyone equally, when it is possible to speak up and be heard, and when there are rules in place that assure you that tomorrow you won’t be treated radically different from how you are treated today. Legitimacy is based on fairness, voice and predictability, and the U.S. government, as much as Americans like to grumble about it, does a pretty good job of meeting all three standards. Pg. 293
Malcolm Gladwell
Government is all show when it isn't murder in the dark ... or soldiers in the open.
Orson Scott Card
Every day people judge all other people. The question is whether they judge wisely.
Orson Scott Card
There is a set of advantages that have to do with material resources, and there is a set that have to do with the absence of material resources- and the reason underdogs win as often as they do is that the latter is sometimes every bit the equal of the former.
Malcolm Gladwell
Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be. She thought of that, worried about it for a few days, and then wrote a column using that as a premise, to show that politicians who toadied to the Russians in order to keep the peace would inevitably end up subservient to them in everything.
Orson Scott Card
Human beings *do* metamorphose. They change their identity constantly. However, each new identity thrives on the delusion that it was always in possession of the body it has just conquered.
Orson Scott Card
Valentine went back to class without answering. That night Demosthenes published a scathing denunciation of the population limitation laws. People should be allowed to have as many children as they like, and the surplus population should be sent to other worlds, to spread mankind so far across the galaxy that no danger, no invasion could ever threaten the human race with annihilation. "The most noble title any child can have," Demosthenes wrote, "is Third.
Orson Scott Card
With false names, on the right nets, they could be anybody. Old men, middle-aged women, anybody, as long as they were careful about the way they wrote. All that anyone would see were the words, their ideas. Every citizen started equal, on the nets.
Orson Scott Card
Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.
Orson Scott Card
You'd think God would come right out and tell us what to do in the Bible, but He doesn't. He mostly tells stories, and He rarely stops the story to say what the point is. He just lets the characters and conflict hang in the air like smoke.
Donald Miller
(The monks) approach was far less narcissistic and our tends to be. Their goal when reading Scripture was to see Christ in every verse, and not a mirror image of themselves.
Donald Miller
Because it is so scatterbrained and has absolutely no charts and graphs, I'm actually quite surprised the Bible sells.
Donald Miller
People have been cooking and eating for thousands of years, so if you are the very first to have thought of adding lime juice to scalloped potatoes try to understand there must be a reason for this.
Fran Lebowitz
Food is an important part of a balanced diet.
Fran Lebowitz
My favorite animal is steak.
Fran Lebowitz
Sometimes lies are more dependable than the truth.
Orson Scott Card
Ender nodded. It was a lie, of course, that it wouldn’t hurt a bit. But since adults always said it when it was going to hurt, he could count on that statement as an accurate prediction of the future. Sometimes lies were more dependable than the truth.
Orson Scott Card
I've found what makes children happy doesn't always prepare them to be courageous, engaged adults.
Brené Brown
One of the reasons we judge each other so harshly in this world of parenting is because... we perceive anyone else who's doing anything differently than what we're doing as criticizing our choices.
Brené Brown
[I] never talk about gratitude and joy separately, for this reason. In 12 years, I've never interviewed a single person who would describe their lives as joyful, who would describe themselves as joyous, who was not actively practicing gratitude.
Brené Brown
Caring about the welfare of children and shaming parents are mutually exclusive endeavors.
Brené Brown
Who we are and how we engage with the world are much stronger predictors of how our children will do than what we know about parenting.
Brené Brown
Fear of the Dark I’ve always been prone to worry and anxiety, but after I became a mother, negotiating joy, gratitude, and scarcity felt like a full-time job. For years, my fear of something terrible happening to my children actually prevented me from fully embracing joy and gratitude. Every time I came too close to softening into sheer joyfulness about my children and how much I love them, I’d picture something terrible happening; I’d picture losing everything in a flash. At first I thought I was crazy. Was I the only person in the world who did this? As my therapist and I started working on it, I realized that “my too good to be true” was totally related to fear, scarcity, and vulnerability. Knowing that those are pretty universal emotions, I gathered up the courage to talk about my experiences with a group of five hundred parents who had come to one of my parenting lectures. I gave an example of standing over my daughter watching her sleep, feeling totally engulfed in gratitude, then being ripped out of that joy and gratitude by images of something bad happening to her. You could have heard a pin drop. I thought, Oh, God. I’m crazy and now they’re all sitting there like, “She’s a nut. How do we get out of here?” Then all of the sudden I heard the sound of a woman toward the back starting to cry. Not sniffle cry, but sob cry. That sound was followed by someone from the front shouting out, “Oh my God! Why do we do that? What does it mean?” The auditorium erupted in some kind of crazy parent revival. As I had suspected, I was not alone.
Brené Brown
Dwight Eisenhower said that from the beginning, his mother and father operated on an assumption that set the course of his life - that the world could be fixed of its problems if every child understood the necessity of their existence. Eisenhower's parents assumed, and taught their children, that if their children weren't alive, their family couldn't function. (page 34)
Donald Miller
I never thought to ascribe my mother's emotional and physical exhaustion to the lack of a husband and father; rather, I ascribed it to my existence. In other words, I grew up learning the exact opposite of what Eisenhower was taught. I learned that if I didn't exist, the family would be better off. I grew up believing that if I had never been born, things would be easier for the people I loved. (page 35)
Donald Miller
There is no question that engagement requires sacrifice, but that's what we signed up for when we decided to become parents.
Brené Brown
He thought about the story his daughter was living and the role she was playing inside that story. He realized he hadn't provided a better role for his daughter. He hadn't mapped out a story for his family. And so his daughter had chosen another story, a story in which she was wanted, even if she was only being used. In the absence of a family story, she'd chosen a story in which there was risk and adventure, rebellion and independence.
Donald Miller
The real questions for parents should be: "Are you engaged? Are you paying attention?" If so, plan to make lots of mistakes and bad decisions. Imperfect parenting moments turn into gifts as our children watch us try to figure out what went wrong and how we can do better next time. The mandate is not to be perfect and raise happy children. Perfection doesn't exist, and I've found what makes children happy doesn't always prepare them to be courageous, engaged adults.
Brené Brown
What separates privilege from entitlement is gratitude.
Brené Brown
Either god exists or it doesn’t exist. If a god does exist, it either interacts with the universe in some detectable way or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, that god is indistinguishable from a non-existent god. That only leaves a god who interacts with the universe in some detectable way. But if science, which is the greatest realization of the use of our senses to, you know, detect things, hasn’t found this god, that doesn’t say much for individuals.In short, the god you’ve created is, in fact, undetectable by science. The limits of science are not the province of religious knowledge. Where science is ignorant, so is religion. The only difference is that religion lacks the integrity of science.
Matt Dillahunty
Poke had never shared out so many raisins, because she had never had so many to share. But the little kids wouldn't understand that. They'd think, Poke gave us garbage, and Achilles gave us raisins. That's because they were stupid.
Orson Scott Card
A wise man thus seeks not a straight path, but one that is the shortest or most convenient. The idea is to reach your goal comfortably and quickly rather than wasting your time in finding ‘Which is the straightest path?
Awdhesh Singh
I am old enough now to have all the memories of my people locked within my head. I remember things that happened long before I was born. I remember things that never happened at all. I live in memory. –Anton
Orson Scott Card
Suddenly, no one, including me, was in Guescheste anymore; they weren't in Miami or Cuba; they weren't in the present, or the future, but floating somewhre in the formless, timeless space of memory.
Richard Blanco
What good does it do to tell somebody to live morally so they can die 50 years later and apparently go to Hell?
Donald Miller
Religion is tied to the deepest feelings people have. The love that arises from that stewing pot is the sweetest and strongest, but the hate is the hottest, and the anger is the most violent.
Orson Scott Card
In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him...
Orson Scott Card
Being here alone with nothing to do, I've been thinking about myself too. Trying to understand why I hate myself so badly.
Orson Scott Card
People always have reason to hate, though they often may not find any reason for love.
Awdhesh Singh
That's why he hates you, because you didn't suffer when he tried to punish you.
Orson Scott Card
You made them hate me." Said Ender"So? What will you do about it? Crawl in a corner? Start kissing their little backsides so they'll love you again? There's only one thing that will make them stop hating you. And that's being so good at what you do that they can't ignore you. I told them you were the best. Now you damn well better be." -Graff
Orson Scott Card
When you really know somebody you can’t hate them. Or maybe it’s just that you can’t really know them until you stop hating them.
Orson Scott Card
The power of knowing, in that first two seconds, is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few. It is an ability that we can all cultivate for ourselves.
Malcolm Gladwell
Carn Carby left, and ender mentally added him to his private list of people who also qualified as human beings.
Orson Scott Card
For the first time, Ender had found a living mind he could admire.
Orson Scott Card
The rising strong reckoning has two deceptively simple parts: (1) engaging with our feelings, and (2) getting curious about the story behind the feelings--what emotions we're experiencing and how they are connected to our thoughts and behaviors.
Brené Brown
I didn't want to hurt him!" Ender cried. "Why didn't he just leave me alone!
Orson Scott Card
The emotion she could deal with best was anger.
Orson Scott Card
I see the cultural messaging everywhere that says an ordinary life is a meaningless life. . . . I know the yearning to believe that what I'm doing matters and how easy it is to confuse that with the drive to be extraordinary. I know how seductive it is to use the celebrity culture yardstick to measure the smallness of our lives. And I also understand how grandiosity, entitlement, and admiration-seeking feel like just the right balm to soothe the ache of being too ordinary and inadequate.
Brené Brown