The virtues are lost in self-interest as rivers are lost in the sea.
Interpretation
Selfishness can overshadow our virtues, similar to how rivers disappear into the vastness of the sea.
Franklin D. Roosevelt highlights the idea that when individuals focus solely on their own interests, they neglect the virtues that guide moral behavior. Just as rivers eventually merge and lose their distinct identity in the vast sea, our noble traits can be overwhelmed by self-absorption, resulting in a diminished capacity for altruism and ethical conduct.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about the importance of community services over personal gain.
There has been one persistent theme through all Axis propaganda. This theme has been that Americans are admittedly rich, that Americans have considerable industrial power - but that Americans are soft and decadent, that they cannot and will not unite and work and fight. ... Let them tell that to the Marines!
The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.
A war of ideas can no more be won without books than a naval war can be won without ships. Books, like ships, have the toughest armor, the longest cruising range, and mount the most powerful guns.
Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
A world turned into a stereotype, a society converted into a regiment, a life translated into a routine, make it difficult for either art or artists to survive. Crush individuality in society and you crush art as well. Nourish the conditions of a free life and you nourish the arts, too.
"Faith" as an imperative is a veto against science-in praxi, it means lies at any price.
Renunciation - non-resistance - non-destructiveness - are the ideals to be attained through less and less worldliness, less and less resistance, less and less destructiveness. Keep the ideal in view and work towards it. None can live in the world without resistance, without destruction, without desire. The world has not come to that state yet when the ideal can be realised in society.
There has been an outpouring of anger and concern because of the actions of George Zimmerman, a private citizen who profiled a young boy and pursued him and tried to confront him, perhaps. But what George Zimmerman did is no different than what police officers do every day as a matter of standard operating procedure.
It is the basic, metaphysical fact of man's nature -- the connection between his survival and his use of reason -- that capitalism recognizes and protects.
OUR INSPIRATION: Billy Graham, July 2, 1962 βWorld events are moving very rapidly now. I pick up the Bible in one hand, and I pick up the newspaper in the other. And I read almost the same words in the newspaper as I read in the Bible. Itβs being fulfilled every day round about us.
Both individuals and societies tell themselves stories to simplify and make sense of the messy chaos of reality.
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