Fear hems us in, stops us from thinking clearly, and prevents us from either challenging oppression or engaging calmly with the impersonal fates.
Interpretation
Fear limits our ability to think and act effectively.
This quote by George Monbiot expresses how fear can be a significant barrier to clear thinking and decisive action. It suggests that fear can imprison us, preventing us from confronting injustices and responding to lifeβs challenges with calmness and clarity.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming personal challenges.
The notions that nature exists to serve us; that its value consists of the instrumental benefits we can extract; that this value can be measured in cash terms; and that what can't be measured does not matter, have proved lethal to the rest of life on Earth.
I believe that anyone who wants to stand in a national election should receive a course of psychotherapy. Completing the course should be a qualification for office. This wouldn't change the behaviour of psychopaths, but it might prevent some people who exercise power from imposing their own deep wounds on others.
I became an environmentalist because I love the living world, but I spend much of my life thinking about electricity, industrial processes and civil engineering.
Places that have become agricultural deserts, trashed by giant corporations, could be reforested, drawing carbon dioxide from the air on a vast scale. The ecosystems of land and sea could recover, not just in pockets but across great tracts of the planet.
Never underestimate the power of intrinsic values. They inspire every struggle for a better world.
Why is it so easy to save the banks - but so hard to save the biosphere?
I feel no disgust when I hear the confessions of those near their end, whose wounds are full of maggots...This may give you some idea of my daily work. Picture to yourself a collection of huts with 800 Lepers. No doctor; in fact, as there is no cure, there seems no place for a doctor's skill.
Tonight, savagery in the streets of Iraq. Ten Americans die in a single day, four of them civilians murdered, mutilated and dragged through the streets....What drives American civilians to risk death in Iraq? In this economy it may be, for some, the only job they can find.
If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it, let us fight against destiny, even without hope of victory.
Whether trauma will be a cruel and punishing Gorgon or a vehicle for soaring to the heights of transformation and mastery depends upon how we approach it.
The higher man is distinguished from the lower by his fearlessness and his readiness to challenge misfortune.
The six of us gathered at my house, and we walked to the polls. I'll never forget it. Not a Negro was on the streets, and when we got to the courthouse, the clerk said he wanted to talk with us. When we got into his office, some 15 or 20 armed white men surged in behind us - men I had grown up with, had played with.
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