REFLECTIONS

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take us or spare us.
Marcel Proust

"Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he or she sends a tiny ripple of hope. Crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, these simple ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." Robert Kennedy

To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it. - Bertrand Russell

And, what is more, let us have that religion for the world we live in. Right here! Let us have that religion until it cannot be said that they who do the most work have the least to eat. Let us have that religion here until hundreds and thousands of women are not compelled to make a living with the needle that has been called"the asp for the breast of the poor," and to live in tenements, in filth, where modesty is impossible. I say, let us preach that religion here until men will be ashamed to have forty or fifty millions, or any more than they need, while their brethren lack bread -- while their sisters die from want. Let us preach that religion here until man will have more ambition to become wise and good than to become rich and powerful. Let us preach that religion here among ourselves until there are no abused and beaten wives. Let us preach that religion until children are no longer afraid of their own parents and until there is no back of a child bearing the scars of a father's lash.Let us preach it, I say, until we understand and know that every man does as he must, and that, if we want better men and women, we must have better conditions. Let us preach this grand religion until everywhere, the world over, men are just and kind to each other. And then, if there be another world, we shall be prepared for it. And if I come into the presence of an infinite, good, and wise being, he will say, "Well,you did the best you could. You did very well, indeed. There is plenty of work for you to do here. Try and get a little higher than you were before." Let us preach that one drop of restitution is worth an ocean of repentance. And if there is a life of eternal progress before us, I shall be as glad as any other angel to find that out. But I will not sacrifice the world I have for one I know not of. I will not live here in fear, when I do not know that that which I fear lives.


Robert Ingersoll - to the Unitarians

We have just enough religion to hate, but not enough to love one another. -- Jonathan Swift

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.-Friedrich Nietzsche

If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look similar to this: 57 Asians; 21 Europeans; 14 from the Western Hemisphere; 8 Africans; 52 would be female; 48 would be male; 70 would be non-white; 30 would be white; 70 would be non-Christian; 30 would be Christian; 89 would be heterosexual; 11 would be homosexual; 6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth and all 6 would be from the United States.; 80 would live in substandard housing; 70 would be unable to read; 50 would suffer from malnutrition; 1 would be near death; 1 would be near birth; 1 would have a college education; 1 would own a computer: When one considers our world from such an incredibly compressed perspective, the need for both tolerance and understanding becomes glaringly apparent. - Unknown

"Great Doubt: great awakening. Little Doubt: little awakening. No Doubt: no awakening."
Zen maxim

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.-- Albert Camus

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.
-- Carl Gustav Jung

"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster." - Friedrich Nietzshce

"What is tolerance? -- it is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly -- that is the first law of nature." -- Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet; 1694 - 1778) Author and Philosopher