Quotes Tagged "society"
Our lives are mere flashes of light in an infinitely empty universe. In 12 years of education the most important lesson I have learned is that what we see as “normal” living is truly a travesty of our potential. In a society so governed by superficiality, appearances, and petty economics, dreams are more real than anything anything in the “real world”. Refuse normalcy. Beauty is everywhere, love is endless, and joy bleeds from our everyday existence. Embrace it. I love all of you, all my friends, family, and community. I am ceaselessly grateful from the bottom of my heart for everyone. The only thing I can ask of you is to stay free of materialism. Remember that every day contains a universe of potential; exhaust it. Live and love so immensely that when death comes there is nothing left for him to take. Wealth is love, music, sports, learning, family and freedom. Above all, stay gold.
Your god, sir, is the World. In my eyes, you, too, if not an infidel, are an idolater. I conceive that you ignorantly worship: in all things you appear to me too superstitious. Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon. You, and such as you, have raised him to a throne, put on him a crown, given him a sceptre. Behold how hideously he governs! See him busied at the work he likes best -- making marriages. He binds the young to the old, the strong to the imbecile. He stretches out the arm of Mezentius and fetters the dead to the living. In his realm there is hatred -- secret hatred: there is disgust -- unspoken disgust: there is treachery -- family treachery: there is vice -- deep, deadly, domestic vice. In his dominions, children grow unloving between parents who have never loved: infants are nursed on deception from their very birth: they are reared in an atmosphere corrupt with lies ... All that surrounds him hastens to decay: all declines and degenerates under his sceptre. Your god is a masked Death.
Some historians subsequently said that the twentieth century actually started in 1914, when war broke out, because it was first war in history in which so many countries took part, in which so many people died and in which airships and airplanes flew and bombarded the rear and towns and civilians, and submarines sunk ships and artillery could lob shells ten or twelve kilometers. And the Germans invented gas and the English invented tanks and scientists discovered isotopes and general theory of relativity, according to which nothing was metaphysical, but relative.And when Senegalese fusiliers first saw an airplane they thought it was a tame bird and one of the Senegalese soldiers cut a lump of flesh from a dead horse and threw it as far as he could in order to lure it away. And airships and airplanes flew through the sky and the horses were terribly frightened. And writers and poets endeavored to find new ways of expressing it best and in 1916 they invented Dadaism because everything seemed crazy to them. And in Russia they invented a revolution. And the soldiers wore around their neck or wrist a tag with their name and the number of their regiment to indicate who was who, and where to send a telegram of condolences, but if the explosion tore off their head or arm and the tag was lost, the military command would announce that they were unknown soldiers, and in most capital cities they instituted an eternal flame lest they be forgotten, because fire preserves the memory of something long past. And the fallen French measured 2,681 kilometers, the fallen English 1,547 kilometers, and the fallen Germans, 3,010 kilometers, taking the average legth of a corpse as 172 centimeters. And a total of 15, 508 kilometers of soldiers fell worldwide. And in 1918 an influenza known as Spanish Flu spread throughout the world killing over twenty million people. Pacifists and anti-militarists subsequently said that these had also been victims of the war because the soldiers and civilian populations lived in poor conditions of hygiene, but epidemiologists said that the disease killed more people in countries where there was no war, such as Oceania, India or the United States, and the Anarchists said that it was a good thing because the world was corrupt and heading for destruction.
If this past election and our present political, social, and environmental upheavals have done nothing else, they have inspired a new generation of thinkers. From poets to activists to journalists to scholars, the raw and gritty realities we face as a nation and as global citizens are being exposed, dissected, and examined. Freedom of the press, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, and the right to peacefully protest are not the luxuries of a free society, they are the defenders,supporters, and protectors of a free society. They are what make a free society possible. The solutions to our problems will no doubt be lengthy, complex, and difficult, but a generation awakened from the lethal sleep of apathy is a beginning. And that offers true hope for our future.
In the final analysis, the relation of the individual to society must not be conceived after the atomistic and mechanistic pattern of bourgeois individualism which destroys the organic social totality, or after the biological and animal pattern of the statist or racist totalitarian conception which swallows up the person, here reduced to a mere histological element of Behemoth or Leviathan, in the body of the state, or after the biological and industrial pattern of the Communistic conception which ordains the entire person, like a worker in the great human hive, to the proper work of the social whole. The relation of the individual to society must be conceived after an irreducibly human and specifically ethicosocial pattern, that is, personalist and communalist at the same time; the organization to be accomplished is one of liberties. But an organization of liberty is is unthinkable apart from the amoral realities of justice and civil amity, which, on the natural and temporal plane, correspond to what the Gospel calls brotherly love on the spiritual and supernatural plane. This brings us back to our considerations of the manner in which the paradox of social life is resolved in a progressive movement that will never be terminated here-below. There is a common work to be accomplished by the social whole as such. This whole, of which human person are the parts, is not ‘neutral’ but is itself committed and bound by a temporal vocation. Thus the persons are subordinated to this common work. Nevertheless, not only in the political order, is it essential to the common good to flow back upon the persons, but also in another order where that which is most profound in the person, its supra-temporal vocation and the goods connected with it, is a transcendent end, it is essential that society itself and its common work are indirectly subordinated. This follows from the fact that the principal value of the common work of society is the freedom of expansion of the person together with all the guarantees which this freedom implies and the diffusion of good that flows from it. In short, the political common good is a common good of human persons. And thus it turns out that, in subordinating oneself to this common work, by the grace of justice and amity, each one of us is trill subordinated to the good of persons, to the accomplishment of the personal life of others an, at the same time, to the interior dignity of ones own person. But for this solution to be practical, there must be full recognition in the city of the true nature of the common work and, at the same time, recognition also of the importance and political worth--so nicely perceived by Aristotle--of the virtue of amity.
আমার উপরে, তোমার উপরে, আর ঐ কাপুচিন মঠবাসীদের ’পরে চিকিৎসা-বিদ্যার কিছু জানা সূত্রের নির্ভরে, ঘড়ির মতন নাগাড়ে, বিরতিহীন সোল্লাসে বাড়ে নাসাতরু দিনদিন। রাতারাতি তারা বেড়ে চলে অনুখন প্রতি নাগরিকে, বিশেষ বা সাধারণ, সান্ত্রির তথা মন্ত্রীর ’পরে, ধনী তথা গরিবের, প্যাঁচার মতন নিশি-ডাক ছেড়ে ছেড়ে, ঠাণ্ডা এবং প্রায়-নিষ্ক্রিয়, মেরে ফাটিয়ে দিয়েছে মুষ্টিযোদ্ধা যাকে, অথবা থেঁৎলে গিয়েছে যা দরোজায়, আর আমাদের স্ত্রী-জাতি পড়োশিদের সেগুলি যে, আহা, তুরপুন হয়ে ঢোকে কত দুয়ারের চাবির ছিদ্রে, হায়! গোগল-মরমি, ঝঞ্ঝেটে আত্মাটি ধ্যানে জেনেছিল ইহাদের খুঁটিনাটি। আমার ইয়ার বুগিন্্স্, মদের ঘোরে স্বপ্ন দেখল, যেন গির্জার চূড়ার মতন চোখা হয়ে, ঝাড়বাতি-বালতি-গামলা টুটে, জাগিয়ে এবং বিঁধে ফেলে যত অবাক্ সিলিং, পরে গেঁথে মেঝেগুলি-খোঁটে রিসিট যেমন গেঁথে রাখা হয়-তারপর একরোখা উঠে গেল নির্বাক্ উপরে, আরও উপরে তার আপনার নাক। ‘এর মানেটা কী?’ পরদিন প্রাতে আমাকেই শুধাল সে। ‘হুশিয়ারি কেয়ামতের: হয়তো,’ আমি বলি, ‘তোর বই- পত্রের হ’তে পারে পরীক্ষা-নিরীক্ষা শীঘ্রই।’ তিরিশ তারিখে বন্ধু-বেচারা ঢুকে গেল কারাগারে। কেন, হে প্রধান নাক-বিধায়ক, কেন বাড়ে আমাদের নাকগুলি, আর কমে আয়ু আমাদের? কেন এই ছোট মাংসপিণ্ড রাতের অন্ধকারে আমাদের শুষে ভ্যাম্পায়ার বা সাক্শন-পাম্প্-হেন খালি করে একেবারে? এস্কিমো জাতি, এরকম শোনা যায়, মুখের বদলে নাক দিয়ে চুমু খায়। আমাদের মাঝে এখন অবধি চলন হয় নি এর।