“They had supper and went away, and Ivan Ilyich was left alone with the consciousness
that his life was poisoned and was poisoning the lives of others, and that this poison did not
weaken but penetrated more and more deeply into his whole being.
“The Bible is to be our basis of authority. We must “by faith” accept [Jesus] as the Son of the living God. This sounds narrow and intolerant, and in a sense it is!”
“I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago’s South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder—alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware—is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all. And so what was a more interior, intimate effort on my part, to understand this struggle and to find my place in it, has converged with a broader public debate, a debate in which I am professionally engaged, one that will shape our lives and the lives of our children for many years to come.
“The hardest part of any important task is getting started on it in the first place. Once you actually begin work on a valuable task, you seem to be naturally motivated to continue.”
“One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ' an unjust law is no law at all.”
“Then as now much time was spent arguing about the rights of women, husband-and-wife
relationships and freedom and rights within marriage, but Natasha had no interest in any such
questions.
Questions like these, then as now, existed exclusively for people who see marriage only in
terms of satisfaction given and received by the married couple, though this is only one
principle of married life rather than its overall meaning, which lies in the family.”
“There are certain days that are forever locked in our memories. They represent special times, places, and people that we capture in the scrapbook of our minds. Just a fleeting thought of these memories can bring us back to that special time and place as well as the emotion we felt when we were there.”
“Anger is an agro-chemical that makes self-destruction to grow faster. Like a stone thrown upward, all angry people eventually fall down into the dirty ditch of sorrowful self-harm and a pathetic loss of real-self.”
“I never felt that I was good enough, strong enough, smart enough. He let me know that there was always room for improvement. A lot of sons would have been crippled by his demands, but instead the discipline rubbed off on me. I turned it into drive.”
“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated. But”
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