Ending poverty calls for humility, honesty, freedom from ideology and refusal to accept cruel simplicities about anyone's human potential. It requires listening to the wisdom and cutting the nonsense from both the Right and the Left.
Interpretation
Addressing poverty requires humility and an open mind, free from extremes of thought and ideology.
This quote emphasizes that effectively tackling poverty involves recognizing our own limitations and biases, advocating for honest dialogue, and being willing to learn from diverse perspectives. It suggests that simplistic views that pigeonhole individuals or groups ignore the complexity of human potential and the systemic issues surrounding poverty, and calls for a balanced and compassionate approach rooted in understanding rather than ideology.
In practice
In a debate on social policy, this quote can be referenced to advocate for a more nuanced approach to poverty alleviation.
Both the United States and the world economy have already reached - and surpassed - their sustainable physical limits. Ground water is being drawn down, soils eroded, forests cut faster than they grow, fish caught faster than they reproduce, non-renewable fossil fuels burnt without developing substitutes.
There is hardly a place on Earth where people do not log, pave, spray, drain, flood, graze, fish, plow, burn, drill, spill or dump. There is no life zone, with the possible exception of the deep ocean, that we are not degrading.
Speak the truth._x000D_ Speak it loud and often, calmly but insistently,_x000D_ and speak it, as the Quakers say, to power._x000D_ Material accumulation is not the purpose of human existence._x000D_ All growth is not good._x000D_ The environment is a necessity, not a luxury._x000D_ There is such a thing as enough.
No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.
Like the other great revolutions, an environmental revolution will require sacrifices and lead to enormous gains. It, too, will change the face of the land and human institutions, hierarchies, self-definitions, cultures. It will take centuries. If it happens. There is no guarantee, of course.
There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.
The masses do not see the Sirens. They do not hear songs in the air. Blind, deaf, stooping, they pull at their oars in the hold of the earth. But the more select, the captains, harken to a Siren within them... and royally squander their lives with her.
The doctrine of foods is of great ethical and political significance. Food becomes blood, blood becomes heart and brain, thoughts and mind stuff. Human fare is the foundation of human culture and thought. Would you improve a nation? Give it, instead of declamations against sin, better food. Man is what he eats [Der Mensch ist, was er isst].
Religion teaches us that our lives here on earth are to be used for transformation.
The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. The God's name is Abraxas.
In regard to the past, where contemplation is not obscured by desire and the need for action, we see, more clearly than in the lives about us, the value for good and evil, of the aims men have pursued and the means they have adopted. It is good, from time to time, to view the present as already past, and to examine what elements it contains that will add to the world's store of permanent possessions, that will live and give life when we and all our generation have perished.
I should like to save the Shire, if I could - though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. But I don't feel like that now. I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.