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Quote by Michael Austin

“Most of us don't really fear political disagreements with our close friends. We fear not being liked and respected by people we like and respect. Challenging someone's political beliefs can signal (correctly or not) a lack of respect or affection. One way to prevent this from happening is to say something like 'I think you are a great person, and I value our friendship, so when I disagree with you it's because I value your opinion and want to learn more about how you see things.' If someone manages to communicate this idea to me, then I'm probably not going to hesitate to express my real opinions about controversial issues. It also helps if we don't call each other 'stupid,' 'evil,' or 'crazy' when 'I don't quite see it that way; help me understand what you mean' will do just fine.”

Quote by Michael Austin

Book:We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America's Civic Tradition
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We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America's Civic Tradition

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Michael Austin

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“I am frequently surprised by how much resistance I encounter when I say that we should try to be friends with people we disagree with. Some people see it as a betrayal of their ideals. More than one of my good friends has told me something like 'You are just wrong about this. We need to call out evil when we see it, even when it hurts someone's feelings. One should always try to be civil, but there is no way that I could ever friends with someone who thinks "x." There are moral principles at stake.' It is precisely because of the moral principles at stake that I believe we must try to be better friends with people who disagree with us. Those who have strong opinions about what should happen in a society have a moral obligation to advocate effectively for their beliefs. If I sincerely believe that something is immoral, then this belief should compel me to find the most effective way possible to keep that thing from happening.”

PoliticsFriendshipKindnessArgumentDebateDialogueCivilityPolarization
Book:We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America's Civic Tradition
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“Civic charity is easy to talk about but tremendously difficult to practice - mainly because a lot of people don't reciprocate. Some people will be rude and obnoxious and will laugh at us when we try to engage with them charitably. They will see our generosity as a sign of weakness and take advantage of our good nature to abuse us further. We will forgive them the requisite seventy times seven times, and they will keep on offending us. Charity always works this way, both the civic kind and the 'love-other-people-like-God-loves-you' kind. We need not think, however, that we are shirking our duties or abandoning our causes when we decline to angrily denounce those on the other side or to treat them like subhuman imbeciles. Charitable engagement does not always change people's hearts and minds, but the number of times it has done so is not zero - which gives charity a better track record than anger, contempt, and derision. Ultimately, though, mature and thoughtful people do not allow the way other people treat them to determine how they treat other people; when we do this, we surrender an enormous amount of power to people who do not wish us well.”

LoveKindnessCharityCivilityReciprocityCivic Virtues
Book:We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America's Civic Tradition
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“Just like a seed that needs intensive care to grow into a magnificent tree, a child needs the same amount of love, effort, care, and kindness to grow into a healthy, aware, responsible adult. A sapling doesn't grow with neglect, thirst, or underfeeding, and neither do children. Fulfilling their various needs will help them grow into fine grown-ups who repay kindness with kindness, and return love with love.”

ChildrenCareResponsibilityKindnessGrowing UpTeachingChildhoodParentingRaising ChildrenUpbringing
Author:Noora Ahmed Alsuwaidi
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“The will to insist upon a definite, unimpeachable reading of an incident - which might well have been read in other, more generous ways - was a mark of a bewildering denial: a denial of the imagination that, liberated to do its proper work, can lead us in alternative directions.”

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Book:The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies
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“Because we are co-creators, because we feel each other’s energy, because we are linked—what matters most when you teach is not the flawlessness of your delivery. Not your poise or whether you remembered every line you planned to say or every pose in your yoga sequence. No, it’s not your perfection, it’s your kindness.”

KindnessYogaBe KindYoga PhilosophyTeaching QuotesYoga TeachersYoga Teacher Training
Book:A Yoga Teacher's Guide to Creative Living
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“Anybody who spends any time at all talking about things like civility, civic friendship, and the quality of our political discourse had better be prepared to talk about Nazis. Call it the 'argumentum ad nazium,' or the 'dicto simplicihitler,' but people seem compelled to let it be known that they have no intention of trying to make friends with Nazis. This is often asserted as a decisive blow. 'Don't talk to me about civility. I don't talk nicely to Nazis; I punch them in the face.' ... Most people who want to carve out a 'Nazi exemption' to the requirements of basic human decency - or any exemption based on a proposition-testing outlier instead of lived experience - are not really trying to to decide what to do in the unlikely event that they run into someone doing 'sieg heil' salutes in the checkout line. They want to create an exempt category and populate it with anybody they can force into the definition. This phenomenon happens across the political spectrum.”

PoliticsFriendshipKindnessDebateCivilityPolarizationCivic Friendship
Book:We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America's Civic Tradition
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