Quotes on Action

The great social justice changes in our country have happened when people came together, organized, and took direct action. It is this right that sustains and nurtures our democracy today. The civil rights movement, the labor movement, the women's movement, and the equality movement for our LGBT brothers and sisters are all manifestations of these rights.

The mid-day sun is too much for most eyes; one is dazzled even with its reflection. Be careful that too broad and high an aim does not paralyze your effort and clog your springs of action.

The problem in my life and other people's lives is not the absence of knowing what to do but the absence of doing it.

I have observed over the years that the unanticipated consequences of social action are always more important, and usually less agreeable, than the intended consequences.

If you go on working with the light available, you will meet your Master, as he himself will be seeking you.

Once you envision something and the Universal forces come into play to help you in the creation of it, there's never again going to be enough action for you to keep up with it. You can't use the Energy that creates worlds to create a situation and then find the action to keep up with it. You have to keep envisioning. You have to keep imagining it better.

By becoming a conscious choice-maker, you begin to generate actions that are evolutionary for you.

If you find yourself saying 'I can't do something', but you know it in your heart of hearts that if you do it, you're going to grow, you're going to be a better person, it's going to contribute to your family or to your kids or to something that matters, and you keep saying 'I can't do it,' there is no question—you must do it. You don't discuss it anymore. You just take immediate action... You do what's necessary.

Most of us become so rigidly fixed in the ruts carved out by genetic programming and social conditioning that we ignore the options of choosing any other course of action. Living exclusively by genetic and social instructions is fine as long as everything goes well. But the moment bioloical or social goals are frustrated- which in the long run is inevitable - a person must formulate new goals, and create a new flow activity for himself, or else he will always waste his energies in inner turmoil.

For every crime that comes before him, a judge is required to complete a perfect syllogism in which the major premise must be the general law; the minor, the action that conforms or does not conform to the law; and the conclusion, acquittal or punishment. If the judge were constrained, or if he desired to frame even a single additional syllogism, the door would thereby be opened to uncertainty.

The human being is a self-propelled automaton entirely under the control of external influences. Willful and predetermined though they appear, his actions are governed not from within, but from without. He is like a float tossed about by the waves of a turbulent sea.

Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance.

All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.

Radicals must be resilient, adaptable to shifting political circumstances, and sensitive enough to the process of action and reaction to avoid being trapped by their own tactics and forced to travel a road not of their choosing.

Elegance is usually confused with superficiality, fashion, lack of depth. This is a serious mistake: human beings need to have elegance in their actions and in their posture because this word is synonymous with good taste, amiability, equilibrium and harmony.

For they had learned that true safety was to be found in long previous training, and not in eloquent exhortations uttered when they were going into action.

One of the biggest lessons I've learned recently is that when you don't know what to do, you should do nothing until you figure out what to do because a lot of times you feel like you are pressed against the wall, and you've got to make a decision. You never have to do anything. Don't know what to do? Do nothing.

Air power can either paralyze the enemy's military action or compel him to devote to the defense of his bases and communications a share of his straitened resources far greater that what we need in the attack.

I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

And as long as America must choose, that long will there be a need and a place for the Democratic Party. We Democrats can run on our record but we cannot rest on it. We will win if we continue to take the initiative and if we carry the message of hope and action throughout the country. Alexander Smith once said, 'A man doesn't plant a tree for himself. He plants it for posterity.' Let us continue to plant, and our children shall reap the harvest. That is our destiny as Democrats.

It cannot be said too often that actions are good or bad in the light of consequences, and that a clear perception of consequences would control actions. That which increases the sum of human happiness is moral; and that which diminishes the sum of human happiness is immoral. . . . Blind, unreasoning obedience is the enemy of morality.