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O Quotes

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All O Quotes

“Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us.”

“Our ultimate weapon is not our guns but our beliefs ... Ours are not Western values. They are the universal values of the human spirit and anywhere, any time, ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same. Freedom not tyranny. Democracy not dictatorship. The rule of law not the rule of the secret police. The spread of freedom is the best security for the free. It is our last line of defence and our first line of attack.”

“Our unclaimed Shunemite, however, can only look on. No kiss for her. Being the most beautiful woman in Israel isn't enough for Solomon. Solomon is seeking partners to help him grow a very special nation. Abishag is relegated to wishing Solomon's new wives well, but in the mean time, her life as an outsider is bitter. 'Take me away,' she will later lament.”

“Our understanding of early Christian beginnings is usually monolithic. It is much determined by the Acts of the Apostles, which pictures a straightforward development from the primitive community in Jerusalem founded on Pentecost to the world-wide mission of Paul climaxing with his arrival in Rome, the political centre of the Greco-Roman world. The Pauline epistles are understood not so much as historical sources reflecting a much more multifaceted early Christian situation fraught with tensions but as theological treatises expounding and defending the doctrine of justification by faith.”

“Our understanding of Shakespeare already depends largely on the vitality of Renaissance elements in our education. Each man must live in his own generation, as the saying is; but the generations are bound together by the golden links of the great tradition of civilization.”

“Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.”

“Our understanding of the universe is completely dependent upon the sensory apparatus available to us. Different animals have different sensory apparatus and so will have different but equally valid views of the universe. It is only by going outside our sensory apparatus, and studying how other sensory apparatus work, that we are able to get a better understanding of our own sensory apparatus.”

“Our understanding of what constitutes intelligence is utterly relative. If an aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, for example, all of Western civilization would probably flunk. We have a very convenient and self-serving way of defining intelligence. If an animal does something, we call it instinct. If we do the same thing for the same reason, we call it intelligence.”

“Our understanding of who we are, where we came from, how the world works, and what matters in life depends on partaking of the vast and ever-expanding store of knowledge. Though unlettered hunters, herders, and peasants are fully human, anthropologists often comment on their orientation to the present, the local, the physical. To be aware of one's country and its history, of the diversity of customs and beliefs across the globe and through the ages, of the blunders and triumphs of past civilizations, of the microcosms of cells and atoms and the macrocosms of planets and galaxies, of the ethereal reality of number and logic and pattern—such awareness truly lifts us to a higher plane of consciousness. It is a gift of belonging to a brainy species with a long history.”

“Our uniqueness implies unique responsibility that we as individuals have in the world. It also implies an unavoidable loneliness. Here Ghandi’s words come to mind: “Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.” We are all minorities of one in the sense of our uniqueness and loneliness. But in searching for the truth and the meaning of our lives, we “intercept” with others who are doing the same and our loneliness at least will not have to be experienced as isolation. And in chess too, we “intercept” with others in this common interest that is much like life, where everything we do matters, where we have to participate responsibly, and the more responsible our participation is, the more we feel at home. As such it can have a highly affirmative effect on the person, a sense that the individual gets: “Yes, I belong to this world, I am part of how things get decided, of how things get achieved. I share this with others.”

“Our universe cannot even be stated symbolically. And this touches us all more directly than one might suppose. For example, artists, who have been very little influenced by social systems, have always responded instinctively to latent assumptions about the shape of the universe. The incomprehensibility of our new cosmos seems to me, ultimately, to be the reason for the chaos of modern art.”

“Our Universe is a multidimensional one; every individual life unit consciously functions in a particular vibratory level (dimension or density) but unconsciously/ subconsciously functions in and through all the other levels, and as the awareness increases it moves to the conscious existence of the next immediate level.”