Prevailing Quotes - Page 8

• The first thing to recognize is how fortunate Ireland is to be an island off the west coast of Europe, and therefore helped by the prevailing winds to escape the effects of acid rain and other problems. We were also lucky not to have had the same kind of industrial revolution and industry as some other countries. Our problem now is to create employment, but to do it in ways that value our environment.

  Mary Robinson

  Country, Rain, Islands

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.

  George Orwell

  Fear, Effectiveness, Challenges

  George Orwell (1987). “Animal farm: a fairy story”, Harvill Secker

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• So far as this has gone, I am satisfied to see a spirit prevailing that promises to send the system out free from those vexations and abuses that might be warranted by the terms of the Constitution. It must never be forgotten, however, that the liberties of the people are not so safe under the gracious manner of government, as by the limitation of power.

  Richard Henry Lee

  Government, People, Promise

  Richard Henry Lee (1825). “Memoir of the Life of Richard H. Lee, and His Correspondence with the Most Distinguished Men in America and Europe”

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• A work of art can be called revolutionary if, by virtue of the aesthetic transformation, it represents, in the exemplary fate of individuals, the prevailing unfreedom and the rebelling forces, thus breaking through the mystified (and petrified) social reality, and opening the horizon of change (liberation).

  Herbert Marcuse

  Art, Fate, Reality

  Herbert Marcuse (2007). “Art and Liberation: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse”, p.62, Routledge

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• Despotism has forever had a powerful hold upon the world. Autocratic government, not self-government, has been the prevailing state of mankind. The record of past history is the record, not of the success of republics, but of their failure.

  Calvin Coolidge

  Powerful, Past, Government

  Calvin Coolidge (2001). “The Price of Freedom: Speeches and Addresses”, p.343, The Minerva Group, Inc.

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• A revolution without a prior reformation would collapse or become a totalitarian tyranny. A reformation means that masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don't know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won't act for change but won't strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution

  Saul Alinsky

  Mean, Past, Self

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• Theres another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution.

  Saul Alinsky

  Letting Go, Attitude, Acceptance

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• Prevailing prayer is that which secures an answer. Saying prayers is not offering prevailing prayer. The prevalence of prayer does not depend so much on quantity as on quality.

  Charles Grandison Finney

  Prayer, Offering, Quality

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• It reflects a prevailing myth that production technology is no more amenable to human judgment or social interests than the laws of thermodynamics, atomic structure or biological inheritance.

  Barry Commoner

  Technology, Law, Inheritance

  Interview With Alan Hall, www.scientificamerican.com. June 23, 1997.

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• There may be in every government a few choice spirits, who may act from more worthy motives. One great error is that we suppose mankind more honest than they are. Our prevailing passions are ambition and interest.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Passion, Ambition, Errors

  Alexander Hamilton (1904). “The Works of Alexander Hamilton”

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• The prevailing idea seems to be, that I come to God and ask Him for something that I want, and that I expect Him to give me that which I have asked. But this is a most dishonouring and degrading conception. The popular belief reduces God to a servant, our servant: doing our bidding, performing our pleasure, granting our desires. No, prayer is a coming to God, telling Him my need, committing my way unto the Lord, and leaving Him to deal with it as seemeth Him best.

  Arthur W. Pink

  Prayer, Ideas, Giving

  Arthur W. Pink (2007). “The Sovereignty of God”, p.107, Lulu.com

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• It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion that they were created rather to feel than reason, and that all the power they obtain must be obtained by their charms and weaknesses.

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Justice, Diversity, Sorrow

  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman ch. 4 (1792)

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• It occurred to me that there have always been selkie women: women who did not seem to belong to this world, because they did not fit into prevailing notions of what women were supposed to be. And if you did not fit into those notions, in some sense you weren't a woman. Weren't even quite human. The magical animal woman is, or can be, a metaphor for those sorts of women.

  Theodora

  Animal, World, Fit

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• and while faith based on theological reasoning is today universally engaged in a bitter struggle with doubt and resistance from the prevailing brand of rationalism, it does seem that the naked fundamental experience itself, that primal seizure of mystic insight, stripped of religious concepts, perhaps no longer to be regarded as a religious experience at all, has undergone an immense expansion and now forms the soul of that complex irrationalism that haunts our era like a night bird lost in the dawn.

  Robert Musil

  Religious, Struggle, Night

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• Quite often I have been faced with people who were praised and admired for their talents and their achievements... According to prevailing attitudes, these people-the pride and joy of their parents-should have had a strong and stable sense of self-assurance. But the case is exactly the opposite... Whenever they suddenly get the feeling they have failed to live up to some ideal image or have not measured up to some standard, then they are plagued by anxiety or deep feelings of guilt and shame. What are the reasons for such disturbances in these competent, accomplished people?

  Alice Miller

  Strong, Attitude, Pride

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• The proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives. Today sometimes it seems that the opposite order is prevailing.

  Pope Francis

  Religious, Order, Opposites

  Pope Francis (2015). “Encountering Truth: Meeting God in the Everyday”, p.18, Image

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• Pragmatism ... reflects with almost disarming candor the spirit of the prevailing business culture, the very same attitude of 'being practical' as counter to which philosophical meditation as such was conceived.

  Max Horkheimer

  Attitude, Philosophical, Meditation

  Max Horkheimer (2013). “Eclipse of Reason”, p.35, A&C Black

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• This is what happens: somebody—girl usually—got a free spirit, doesn't get on too good with her parents. These kids, they're like tied-down helium balloons. They strain against the string and strain against it, and then something happens, and that string gets cut, and they just float away. And maybe you never see the balloon again . . . Or maybe three or four years from now, or three or four days from now, the prevailing winds take the balloon back home . . . But listen, kid, that string gets cut all the time.

  John Green

  Girl, Kids, Home

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• At present, when the prevailing forms of society have become hindrances to the free expression of human powers, it is precisely the abstract branches of science, mathematics and theoretical physics, which ... offer a less distorted form of knowledge than other branches of science which are interwoven with the pattern of daily life, and the practicality of which seemingly testifies to their realistic character.

  Max Horkheimer

  Character, Expression, Theoretical Physics

  Max Horkheimer (1972). “Critical Theory: Selected Essays”, p.133, A&C Black

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• My father instilled in me the attitude of prevailing. If there's a challenge, go for it. If there's a wall to break down, break it down.

  Donny Osmond

  Wall, Attitude, Father

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• We are here among you as seekers of refuge from our present-your future-a time of worldwide famine, exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty-the end of the capitalistic experiment. Once we came to understand the simpl...truth that earth's resources were limited, in fact soon to run out, the whole capitalistic illusion fell to pieces. Those of us who spoke this truth were denounced as heretics, as enemies of the prevailing economic faith. Like religious Dissenters of an earlier day.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Running, Religious, Enemy

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• Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.

  George Orwell

  War, Party, Intelligent

  George Orwell (1983). “1984”, p.416, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Of Nature itself upon the soul; the sunrise, the haze of autumn, the winter starlight seem interlocutors; the prevailing sense is that of an exposition in poetry; a high discourse, the voice of the speaker seems to breathe as much from the landscape as from his own breast; it is Nature communing with the seer.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Winter, Autumn, Voice

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• The evolution of cultures appears to follow the pattern of the evolution of species. The many different forms of culture which arise correspond to the "mutations" of genetic theory. Some forms prove to be effective under prevailing circumstances and others not, and the perpetuation of the culture is determined accordingly.

  B. F. Skinner

  Different, Mutation, Culture

  B.F Skinner (2012). “Science And Human Behavior”, p.434, Simon and Schuster

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• Dickens didn't have access to any other epistemologies other than those prevailing in Britain. But a novelist today cannot plausibly claim ignorance of his society's manifold connections with the wider world, the fact that prosperity and security at home, for instance, often depend on extensive violence and exploitation abroad.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Home, Ignorance, Novelists

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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