May each of you live lives of immersion. They won't necessarily be easy lives. But in the end, it is all that will sustain us.
Jacqueline NovogratzRead
I've been working on issues of poverty for more than 20 years, and so it's ironic that the problem that and question that I most grapple with is how you actually define poverty. What does it mean?
Interpretation
Defining poverty is complex and requires deep reflection.
Jacqueline Novogratz highlights the irony in her extensive experience with poverty that despite two decades of work, she still grapples with what poverty truly means. This suggests that poverty is not merely a lack of resources, but a nuanced concept that involves various social, economic, and emotional dimensions.
In practice
In a discussion about social justice, I would reference Novogratz's quote to emphasize the complexities of poverty.
May each of you live lives of immersion. They won't necessarily be easy lives. But in the end, it is all that will sustain us.
When people gain income, they gain choice, and that is fundamental to dignity.
The poor don't live in functional market economies as the rest of us do, but in political economies where corruption and broken systems extend from local government to moneylenders.
Each of us can work to change a small portion of events. And it's in the total of all those acts that the history of this generation will be written.
Don't let people tell you to do it this way. You are on the verge of figuring out hybrid models -- with companies and nonprofits, markets, government, crowd-sourced philanthropy. The capitalist system as we know it is not working.
Traditional charity and aid are never going to solve the problems of poverty.
Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me - the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love - He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us - nature did it all - not the gods of the religions.
Collectivism answers: The power of society is unlimited. Society may make any laws it wishes, and force them upon anyone in any manner it wishes.
The English language started out as a distortion in my life, but nothing remains the same, and so the distortion is now just normal. That is one of the things that will happen to all distortions: They become normal and turn into something else.
I think there is a serious corruption in the idea sold through advertising that you can attain spiritual peace through lifestyle and the notion of building your happiness from the outside-in by acquiring things . . . which if you think about it, is the essence of advertising
I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife.
What I have against religion is that they start you when you are so defenseless. I mean, I was three when they started pumping this bullshit into my head. I believed in Santa Claus and the Fairy Godmother, of course I believed in a virgin birth, and a guy lived in a whale, and a woman came from a rib. But then something happened that made me doubt all of it: I graduated sixth grade!
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