“It is often the parishioners, the men and women in the pews, who set the tone.”
Source: Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation
“Libertarian communists shun any particularist atomization into small units, communes, and workers' councils, and aspire to a federalist coordination, one which is both close-knit and freely consented to. Rejecting bureaucratic and authoritarian planning, they believe in the need for coherent and democratic planning, inspired from the bottom up.”
Source: For a Libertarian Communism
“In any analysis of any part of the world, it is mandatory to institute a general reasoning in which the whole – the Absolute – is also included. This is what science scrupulously avoids. Science is all about the parts, and ignoring the whole. Science is non-holistic, which is why it cannot arrive at a grand unified, final theory of everything. From the whole you can get to every part, because the whole defines the parts. If you start with the parts, as science does, you can never get to the whole because the parts are necessarily defined piecemeal, heuristically and with no regard to the whole, since the whole is unknown. A bottom-up approach can never work. Only top-down approaches have any chance of working. Empiricists are always parts people and bottom-up people. Rationalists are holistic and top-down. These are opposite worldviews. The PSR is an explanatory, top-down principle. Randomness is a non-explanatory, bottom-up speculation.”
Source: God Is Mathematics: The Proofs of the Eternal Existence of Mathematics
“...international peacebuilders usually arrive in new theaters of deployment with a clear sense of belonging to a specific group – a group markedly different from local populations.”
Source: Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention
“These are all good things, I said. But no one knows where your country is or who you are. You don't have a familiar ethnic cuisine; your diaspora , from what I understand, is mostly in Southern California, three time zones removed from the national media in New York; and you don't have a recognizable, long-simmering conflict like the one between the Israelis and the Palestinians, where people in the richer nations can take sides and argue over at the dinner table. The best you can do is get the United Nations involved, as in East Timor. Maybe they'll send troops."
"We don't want the United Nations" Mr. Nanabragov said. "We don't want Sri Lankan troops patrolling our streets. We're better tan that. We want America.”
Source: Absurdistan
“The pain of today can never offset the inevitability of tomorrow.”
“Not all good things come together, and we can't have it all tomorrow. Remarkable interveners understand that building peace sometimes requires baby steps, and they look to local people as a guide for which foot to start on.”
Source: The Frontlines of Peace: An Insider's Guide to Changing the World
“What I've discovered is that by keeping peace with those who hurt me, I had no peace. Rather, I was in turmoil. I suffered the aftermath of sexual violence. I am the one who has battled for my life.”
Source: Soul Cry: Releasing & Healing the Wounds of Trauma
“As we have a right to be silent when arrested by police, so do we ought to be silent when arrested by SOME situations in life until we find a responsibility to break free from the borders.”
“He's a wallflower.”
Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower