| | | The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful. |
| | I do not look on a human being as a machine, made to be kept in action by a foreign force, to accomplish an unvarying succession of motions, to do a fixed amount of work, and then to fall to pieces at death, but as a being of free spiritual powers; and I place little value on any culture but that which aims to bring out these, and to give them perpetual impulse and expansion. |
| | I know of no more encouraging fact than the ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor. It is something to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so make a few objects beautiful. It is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look. This morally we can do. |
| | Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being. |
| | You can not, without guilt and disgrace, stop where you are. The past and the present call on you to advance. Let what you have gained be an impulse to something higher. Your nature is too great to be crushed. You were not created what you are, merely to toil, eat, drink, and sleep, like the inferior animals. If you will, you can rise. |
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| So radiant in certain mornings' light
With its roses and its trees
Is Earth, or with its grain and olives
So suddenly it is radiant on the soul,
Which stands then alone and forgetful
Though just a moment earlier the soul
Wept bloody tears or dwelt in bitterness;
So radiant in certain mornings' light
Is Earth, and in its silence so expressive
This wondrous lump rolling in its skies;
Beautiful, tragic in solitude, yet smiling
That the soul, unasked, replies,
"Yes" replies, "Yes" to the Earth
To the indifferent earth, "Yes!"
Even though next instant skies
Should darken, roses too,
Or the effort of life grow heavier still,
The act of breathing even more heroic,
"Yes" replies the battered soul to Earth,
So radiant in the light of certain mornings,
Beautiful above all things, and human hope. |
| Author | Chris Hedges |
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| Keywords | comrades, comradeship, death, friends, friendship, human, life, love, sacrifice, self-awareness, war |
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| Source | "War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning" |
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| Friends are predetermined; friendship takes place between men and women who possess an intellectual and emotional affinity for each other. But comradeship — that ecstatic bliss that comes with belonging to the crowd in wartime — is within our reach. We can all have comrades. The danger of the external threat that comes when we have an enemy does not create friendship; it creates comradeship. And those in wartime are deceived about what they are undergoing. And this is why once the threat is over, once war ends, comrades again become strangers to us. This is why after war we fall into despair. In friendship there is a deepening of our sense of self. We become, through the friend, more aware of who we are and what we are about; we find ourselves in the eyes of the friend. Friends probe and question and challenge each other to make each of us more complete; with comradeship, the kind that comes to us in patriotic fervor, there is a suppression of self-awareness, self-knowledge, and self-possession. Comrades lose their identities in wartime for the collective rush of a common cause — a common purpose.
In comradeship there are no demands on the self. This is part of its appeal and one of the reasons we miss it and seek to recreate it. Comradeship allows us to escape the demands on the self that is part of friendship. In wartime when we feel threatened, we no longer face death alone but as a group, and this makes death easier to bear. We ennoble self-sacrifice for the other, for the comrade; in short we begin to worship death. And this is what the god of war demands of us.
Think finally of what it means to die for a friend. It is deliberate and painful; there is no ecstasy. For friends, dying is hard and bitter. The dialogue they have and cherish will perhaps never be recreated. Friends do not, the way comrades do, love death and sacrifice. To friends, the prospect of death is frightening. And this is why friendship or, let me say love, is the most potent enemy of war. |
| | The only way to live on this planet with any human dignity at the moment is to struggle. |
| See, capitalism is not fundamentally racist - it can exploit racism for its purposes, but racism isn't built into it. Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and differences among them, such as on the basis of race, usually are not functional. I mean, they may be functional for a period, like if you want a super exploited workforce or something, but those situations are kind of anomalous.
Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist - just because it's anti-human. And race is in fact a human characteristic - there's no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic. So therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangeable cogs who will purchase all the junk that's produced - that's their ultimate function, and any other properties they might have are kind of irrelevant, and usually a nuisance. |
| | The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. |
| | Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men. |
| | A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. |
| | The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated. |
| | I saw a human pyramid once. It was totally unnecessary. |
| | A person in a rented apartment must be able to lean out of his window and scrape off the masonry within arm's reach. And he must be allowed to take a long brush and paint everything outside within arm's reach. So that it will be visible from afar to everyone in the street that someone lives there who is different from the imprisoned, enslaved, standardised man who lives next door. |
| | Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men. |
| | To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. |
| | I have expressed my strong interest in the mass of the people; and this is founded, not on their usefulness to the community, so much as on what they are in themselves. Indeed every man (sic), in every condition, is great. It is only our own diseased sight which makes him little. A man is great as a man, be he where or what he may. The grandeur of his nature turns to insignificance all outward distinctions. |
| | Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality... the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else. |
| Keywords60 tags, 368 hidden human: Authors19 items by 15 authors |