“We are all architects of ruin in our own way, building monuments to our pain while claiming we're chasing justice.”
Source: The Despondent
“Choose the right path, not the easy route.”
Source: Values to Live By: Know What Matters Most and Let It Be Your Guide
“The revolutionary Terror, which is attacked for its revolutionary tribunal, its law of suspects and its guillotine, was a process welded to a regime of popular sovereignty in which the object was to conquer tyranny or die for liberty. This Terror was willed by those who, having won sovereign power by dint of insurrection, refused to let this be destroyed by counter-revolutionary enemies”
Source: In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution
“To evoke another great phrase of the American revolutionary heritage — widely though inconclusively attributed to Thomas Jefferson — the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Such a phrase is merely trite, however, unless we consider its deeper implications. For the French revolutionaries, as for so many regimes that have succeeded them across the world up to the present day, the call for vigilance against enemies, both external and internal, was the first step on the road to the loss of liberty, and lives.
Of far more significance, and the true and tragic lesson of the epic descent into The Terror, is the summons to vigilance against ourselves — that we should not assume that we are righteous, and our enemies evil; that we can see clearly, and to others are blinded by malice or folly; that we can abrogate the fragile rights of others in the name of our own certainty and all will be well regardless.
If we do not honor the message of human rights born in the revolutions of 1776 and 1786, as the French in their case most certainly failed to do, we too are on the road to The Terror.”
Source: The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France
“Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war is of every man against every man . . . In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Source: Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
“One doesn't need to be a scientist, a philosopher or a politician to solve human problems - being human is enough.”
Source: Build Bridges not Walls: In the name of Americana
“Congregations are not immune to adultery, personality conflicts, egos, and other human problems. But they are bound together by persons of faith with a like goal in mind.”
Source: Finding the Clouds and a Life
“The old errors are fantastical and fantastic, and revealing of human hopes and anxieties; our terrors, our desires for greater digestive health and sexual prowess, our quest for magical solutions to relentlessly human problems. And every scientist you meet will tell you: there is no reason to believe that we haven't got just as much wrong today as we have done in every generation up till now. It would be worth our holding that knowledge, tight and urgent, as we go; our learning, though vast, is an infinitesimally small fraction of what exists.”
Source: Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures
“Some people come into our lives and leave footprints on our hearts and we are never ever the same.”
“In this century, we are about to enter interplanetary civilization.
In order to survive, we need to go beyond neoclassical economics definition.
We define it as interplanomics.”
Source: My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut