Some of the homes that have been built in the last 10 years just appall me. Why do humans need huge homes? I was born poor and I didn’t know you bought clothes at anything but the Goodwill until I went to college. Some of our mentality about what it means to have a good life is, I think, not going to help us in the next 50 years. We have to think through how to choose a meaningful life where we’re helping one another in ways that really help the Earth.
Interpretation
This quote critiques materialism and emphasizes the importance of a meaningful life focused on helping others and the Earth.
Elinor Ostrom highlights the disparity between material wealth and the essence of a fulfilling life. She argues that the recent trend towards building excessively large homes symbolizes a misguided understanding of what constitutes a good life. Instead of accumulating material possessions, she suggests that true fulfillment comes from making choices that foster community support and environmental sustainability, particularly as society faces future challenges.
In practice
During a speech about sustainable living, one might quote this to emphasize the need for a shift in mindset.
What is missing from the policy analyst's tool kit -- and from the set of accepted, well-developed theories of human organization -- is an adequately specified theory of collective action whereby a group of principals can organize themselves voluntarily to retain the residuals of their own efforts.
What we have ignored is what citizens can do and the importance of real involvement of the people involved - versus just having somebody in Washington make a rule.
The power of a theory is exactly proportional to the diversity of situations it can explain.
To me, reason is as spiritual as anything else, the beauty of reason seems to me indelible and ineffable and numinous... the spirit is after all the same word we use to describe... essence
I can tell you that solitude Is not all exaltation, inner space Where the soul breathes and work can be done. Solitude exposes the nerve, Raises up ghosts. The past, never at rest, flows through it.
Most of us are shrinking in the face of psycho-social and physical poisons, of the toxins of our world. But compassion, the generation of compassion, actually mobilizes our immunity.
Dead girl walking” the boys say in the halls. “Tell us your secrets” the girls whisper, one toilet to another. "I am that girl. I am the spaces between my thighs, daylight shinning through. I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame.
If you suffocate my blackness, you've got to realize that's supremacy.
We have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary. This now moment, in which I'm talking and you're listening, is eternity.
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