Capacity Quotes - Page 32

• The systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society. They are an ordered more or less consistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves. They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted. In that world, people and things have their well-known places, and do certain expected things. We feel at home there. We fit in. We are members.

  Walter Lippmann

  Home, People, May

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• The only justifiable stopping place for for the expansion of altruism is the point at which all whose welfare can be affected by our actions are included within the circle of altruism. This means that all beings with the capacity to feel pleasure or pain should be included; we can improve their welfare by increasing their pleasures and diminishing their pains.

  Peter Singer

  Pain, Mean, Circles

  Peter Singer (1982). “The expanding circle: ethics and sociobiology”, Plume

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• It is now generally accepted that the roots of our ethics lie in patterns of behavior that evolved among our pre-human ancestors, the social mammals and that we retain within our biological nature elements of these evolved responses. We have learned considerably more about this responses, and we are beginning to to understand how they interact with our capacity to reason.

  Peter Singer

  Lying, Roots, Mammals

  Peter Singer (2011). “The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress”, p.11, Princeton University Press

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• The capacity to reason is a special sort of capacity because it can lead us to places that we did not expect to go.

  Peter Singer

  Special, Reason

  Peter Singer (2011). “The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress”, p.88, Princeton University Press

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• But progress in knowledge has made us aware of the superficiality of Plato's lumping of individuals and their original powers into a few sharply marked-off classes; it has taught us that original capacities are indefinitely numerous and variable. It is but the other side of this fact to say that in the degree in which society has become democratic, social organization means utilization of the specific and variable qualities of individuals, not stratification by classes.

  John Dewey

  Plato, Mean, Taught Us

  John Dewey (2012). “Democracy and Education”, p.87, Courier Corporation

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• As Western nations became more prosperous, leisure, which had been put off for several centuries in favor of the pursuit of property, the means to leisure, finally began to be of primary concern. But, in the meantime, any notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, had disappeared.

  Allan Bloom

  Mean, Men, Favors

  "The Closing of the American Mind: How higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today's students". Book by Allan Bloom, 1987.

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• In situations of sparse resources along with degraded self-images and depoliticized sensibilities, one avenue for poor people is in existential rebellion and anarchic expression. The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people.

  Cornel West

  Expression, Self, People

  Cornel West (1999). “The Cornel West Reader”, p.272, Basic Books

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• Trust in thine own untried capacity As thou wouldst trust in God himself. Thy soul Is but an emanation from the whole. Thou dost not dream what forces lie in thee, Vast and unfathomed as the grandest sea.

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox

  Confidence, Dream, Lying

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox (2016). “Complete Poetical Works of Ella Wheeler Wilcox (Delphi Classics)”, p.567, Delphi Classics

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• Incapacity to appreciate certain types of beauty may be the condition sine qua non for the appreciation of another kind; the greatest capacity both for enjoyment and creation is highly specialized and exclusive, and hence the greatest ages of art have often been strangely intolerant. The invectives of one school against another, perverse as they are philosophically, are artistically often signs of health, because they indicate a vital appreciation of certain kinds of beauty, a love of them that has grown into a jealous passion.

  George Santayana

  Appreciation, Art, Passion

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• Life is sacred. Life is art. Life is sacred art. The art of sacred living means being a holy actor, acting from the soul rather than the ego. The soul is out of space and time and hence always available, an ever-present potential of our being. It is up to each of us to celebrate and to actualize our being and to turn each meal, conversation, outfit, letter, and so on, into art. Every mundane activity is an opportunity for full authentic self-expression. The soul is our artistic self, our capacity for transforming every dimension of our lives into art and theater.

  Gabrielle Roth

  Art, Mean, Opportunity

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• Facilitative attitudes (and skills) can help a therapist gain entry into the group Freedom from a desire to control the outcome, and respect for the capacity of the group, and skills in releasing individual expression Openness to all attitudes no matter how extreme or unrealistic they may seem Acceptance of the problems experienced by the group where they are clearly defined as issues Allowance of the freedom of choices in direction, either for the group or individuals particularly in the near future

  Carl Rogers

  Attitude, Acceptance, Expression

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• Neither federal nor state government acts compatibly with equal protection when a law or official policy denies to women, simply because they are women, full citizenship stature - equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities.

  Ruth Bader Ginsburg

  Opportunity, Government, Law

  Ruth Bader Ginsburg (2016). “My Own Words”, p.348, Simon and Schuster

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• Globalization makes our economy, our health, and our security all captive to events on the other side of the world. And no other nation on earth has a greater capacity to shape that global system, or to build consensus around a new set of international rules that expand the zones of freedom, personal safety, and economic well-being. Like it or not, if we want to make America more secure, we are going to have to help make the world more secure.

  Barack Obama

  America, Safety, World

  Barack Obama (2007). “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream”, p.304, Canongate Books

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• The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Rap, Imagination, Feelings

  H.P. Lovecraft, Digital Papyrus (2016). “H.P. Lovecraft: The Ultimate Collection (160 Works Including Early Writings, Fiction, Collaborations, Poetry, Essays & Bonus Audiobook Links)”, p.1681, eBookIt.com

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• In my youth and comparative inexperience I had always regarded the yearning and pangs of love as the worst torture that could afflict the human heart. At this moment, however, I began to realize that there was another and perhaps grimmer torture than that of longing and desiring: that of being loved against one's will and of being unable to defend oneself against the urgency of another's passion; of seeing another human being seared by the flame of her desire and of having to look impotently, lacking the power, the capacity, the strength to pluck her from the flames.

  Stefan Zweig

  Love, Passion, Heart

  "Beware of Pity". Book by Stefan Zweig, 1939.

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• That way of life against which my generation rebelled had given us grim courage, fortitude, self-discipline, a sense of individual responsibility, and a capacity for relentless hard work.

  Rose Wilder Lane

  Hard Work, Responsibility, Self

  Rose Wilder Lane (1985). “Old Home Town”, p.24, U of Nebraska Press

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• A point of great importance would be first to know: what is the capacity of the earth? And what charge does it contain if electrified? Though we have no positive evidence of a charged body existing in space without other oppositely electrified bodies being near, there is a fair probability that the earth is such a body, for by whatever process it was separated from other bodies - and this is the accepted view of its origin - it must have retained a charge, as occurs in all processes of mechanical separation.

  Nikola Tesla

  Views, Space, Doe

  Nikola Tesla (2013). “The Nikola Tesla Treasury”, p.283, Simon and Schuster

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• No man of common sense will value a woman the less, for not giving herself up at the first attack, or for not accepting his proposal without enquiring into his person or character; on the contrary, he must think her the weakest of all creatures in the world, as the rate of men now goes; in short, he must have a very contemptible opinion of her capacities, nay, even of her understanding, that having but one cast for her life, shall cast that life away at once, and make matrimony like death, be a leap in the dark.

  Daniel Defoe

  Character, Dark, Men

  Daniel Defoe (2011). “Moll Flanders”, p.94, OUP Oxford

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• Americans have no capacity for abstract thought, and make bad coffee.

  Georges Clemenceau

  Coffee, Abstract

  "The Europeans". Book by Luigi Barzini, p. 225, 1984.

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• The time has come, I think, when we must recognize bisexuality as a normal form of human behavior... we shall not really succeed in discarding the straitjacket of our cultural beliefs about sexual choice if we fail to come to terms with the well-documented, normal human capacity to love members of both sexes.

  Margaret Mead

  Sex, Thinking, Capacity To Love

  Redbook Magazine, 1975.

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• Laughter is man's most distinctive emotional expression. Man shares the capacity for love and hate, anger and fear, loyalty and grief, with other living creatures. But humour, which has an intellectual as well as an emotional element belongs to man

  Margaret Mead

  Loyalty, Laughter, Hate

  Margaret Mead, Rhoda Bubendey Métraux (1979). “Margaret Mead, some personal views”, Angus & Robertson

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• Leadership is evoking in others the capacity to dream.

  John C. Maxwell

  Leadership, Dream

  John C. Maxwell (2007). “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You”, p.297, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• A teacher who can show good, or indeed astounding results while he is teaching, is still not on that account a good teacher, for it may be that, while his pupils are under his immediate influence, he raises them to a level which is not natural to them, without developing their own capacities for work at this level, so that they immediately decline again once the teacher leaves the schoolroom.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Teacher, Teaching, Levels

  "Culture and Value" by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Peter Winch, (p. 43e), 1980.

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• Meditation develops the capacity to question your mind. Without it, you are at the mercy of every thought, every desire, every wave of emotion.

  Geneen Roth

  Meditation, Mind, Desire

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• Considering mankind's indifference to freedom, their easy gullibility and their facile response to conditioning, one might very plausibly argue that collectivism is the political mode best suited to their disposition and their capacities. Under its regime, the citizen, like the soldier, is relieved of the burden of initiative and is divested of all responsibility, save for doing as he is told.

  Albert J. Nock

  Responsibility, Political, Soldier

  "Memoirs of a Superfluous Man" by Albert J. Nock, (p. 319), 1943.

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