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Quote by Bessel A. van der Kolk

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The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

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Bessel A. van der Kolk

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“People say that a person needs six feet of earth. But in fact it's a corpse that needs six feet of earth, not a person. People don’t need six feet of earth, or even a house in the country, but the whole globe, the whole of nature in its entirety, so they can have the space to express all the capacities and particularities of their free spirit.”

InspirationalHumanityLibertyHuman NaturePersonal DevelopmentTranslated By Rosamund Bartlett
Book:Gooseberries and other stories
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“But to think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call 'human nature,' the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival - so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be' is the question 'to think or not to think”

ReasonConsciousnessHuman NatureTo BeTo Think
Book:Atlas Shrugged
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“Ever since the rise of fear in the hominid psyche, one way or another, the grounds for an ever-active anti-fear mechanism was being prepared in the soft soil of consciousness by the process of natural selection. It is a process that deems survival potential as the only measure for existence. And by this measure, the anti-fear, anti-anxiety, anti-depressant mechanism, which later humans named "God", proved to be extremely effective. It delivered solace to the scared psyche of the early humans in their times of utter distress. In the midst of darkness, this one imaginative idea gave them light and hope.”

FaithHuman NatureNeuroscienceEvolutionary PsychologyNeuropsychologyNeurotheologyScience Of MindPsychology Of Religion
Book:7 Billion Gods: Humans Above All
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“We must nurture the lotus of knowledge, not play in the pond with it, and rip it apart like children. We must mature and discuss correctly what we mean by faith, by its definition and by its scientific and poetic effect on the human heart and psychology and the total nature of our humanity.”

PoetryFaithKnowledgeHuman Nature
Book:The Bifrost and The Ark: Examining the Cult and Religion of New Atheism
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“Perhaps it is time to question goals that run counter to near-universal behavior. There may be lessons for us in the failure of Soviet-style Communism. It is our era's foremost example of a system that made mesmerizing promises of an earthly paradise but betrayed those promises. Millions of people were inspired by an ideology that would do away with capitalist exploitation. Marxists believed that the working class would seize the means of production, the state would wither away, selfishness would disappear, and man would live 'from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.' In the name of this ideology millions gave their lives and took the lives of millions of others. Communism failed. It failed for many reasons, not least because it was a misreading of human nature. Selfishness cannot be abolished. People do not work just as hard on collective farms as they do on their own land. The almost universal rejection of Communism today marks the acceptance of people as they are, not as Communism wished them to be. Is it possible that our racial ideals assume that people should become something they cannot? If most people prefer the company of people like themselves, what do we achieve by insisting that they deny that preference? If diversity is a weakness rather than a strength, why work to increase diversity?”

RaceHuman NatureFailureLessonsDiversityCommunismMarxismStateUtopias
Book:White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century
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