“But the most lasting rivalry between American landmasses is the one between the northern United States (really the northeastern United States) and the southern United States (really Texas, Alabama, South Carolina, all of Louisiana except New Orleans, and the whitest, most strip-mally regions of Florida). Although the north and south fought a war 150 years ago in order to determine which region's values were going to wind up guiding this nation forward, north vs. south has subsequently played out largely in our elections and pop culture.”
Source: Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me: What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About the Meaning of Life
“When the mind is without borders, the world will be without borders.”
Source: When Humans Unite: Making A World Without Borders
“A lot of time has been wasted by the nations of planet earth on strategies of war, it's time we start organizing peace instead.”
“When the people don't give a damn about reason, they can be manipulated quite easily - and in such cases the perception of the people are manufactured by those controlling the narratives. As a result, ask an Azerbaijani, "who do you think is at fault for the conflict at Nagorno-Karabakh" and they'll say, "Armenia of course" - or ask an Indian, "who do you think is at fault for the conflict at Jammu-Kashmir", they'll say, "Pakistan of course". Hard as it may sound, whoever controls the narrative, controls the people. And the only way to break that spell is to practice reason, but without losing your warmth.”
Source: I Vicdansaadet Speaking: No Rest Till The World is Lifted
“States cannot bring peace,
for state and peace are antithesis of each other.
Move past the state, look into culture -
the world won't have peace
till there is integration amongst cultures.”
Source: Aşk Mafia: Armor of The World
“When faced by an international conflict, forget diplomacy, forget statecraft, forget strategies and policies and ask yourself, what would a human do in this situation, not a politician, not a bureaucrat, not a law enforcement official, but a human? The tree of diplomacy only grows thorns of war, not fruits of peace.”
Source: Hurricane Humans: Give me accountability, I'll give you peace
“We don’t need to build a world with one superpower,
We gotta build a world where the world is superpower.
We don’t need a world rotting in diplomatic gutter,
Let’s build a world that has no geopolitical clutter.”
Source: Iman Insaniyat, Mazhab Muhabbat: Pani, Agua, Water, It's All One
“The outcomes of the decision making process should be weighed against the risk that it will take to implement it”
“...Turn our thoughts, in the next place, to the characters of learned men. The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning. Read over again all the accounts we have of Hindoos, Chaldeans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Teutons, we shall find that priests had all the knowledge, and really governed all mankind. Examine Mahometanism, trace Christianity from its first promulgation; knowledge has been almost exclusively confined to the clergy. And, even since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate a free inquiry? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your legs and hands, and fly into your face and eyes.
[Letters to John Taylor, 1814, XVIII, p. 484]”
Source: The Letters of John and Abigail Adams
“We are repelled by the Teutons, because their thoughts will not minister to our
private needs; but this instinctive recoil at the same time explains a furtive
attraction which was not exhausted by the romantic revival of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. The concentration of the Teutons exposes a
narrowness of another kind in ourselves; every time we are confronted with a
people of another type, a stone in the foundation of our complacency is
loosened. We are surprised by an uneasy feeling that our civilization does not
exhaust the possibilities of life; we are led to suspect that our problems derive
their poignancy from the fact that, at times, we mistake our own reasonings
about reality for reality itself. We become dimly aware that the world stretches
beyond our horizon, and as this apprehension takes shape, there grows upon
us a suspicion that some of the problems which baffle us are problems of our
own contrivance; our questionings often lead us into barren fastnesses instead
of releasing us into the length and breadth of eternity, and the reason may be
that we are trying to make a whole of fragments and not, as we thought,
attempting to grasp what is a living whole in itself. And at last, when we learn to
gaze at the world from a new point of view, revealing prospects which have
been concealed from our eyes, we may perhaps find that Hellas also contains
more things, riches as well as mysteries than are dreamt of in our philosophy;
after all, we have perhaps been no less romantic in our understanding of Greece than in our misunderstanding of the Teutons and other primitive peoples.”
Source: The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2