Quotessence
Home / Quotes / O Quotes

O Quotes

Browse famous quotes beginning with O. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.

All O Quotes

“Ours is a society of denial that conditions us to protect ourselves from any direct difficulty and discomfort. We expend enormous energy denying our insecurity, fighting pain, death and loss and hiding from the basic truths of the natural world and of our own nature.”

“Ours is a society that has falsely assumed that contribution must mean giving to some specific cause rather than simply giving our best selves. Thus, too many people don't recognize the fact that simply being who they are is contributing significantly to the world. What if simply living your truth, being your best, and fully expressing your strengths, talents, and abilities at whatever you do were sufficient to contribute to the world? I say it is, and we must not overlook the fact that being our best ultimately inspires others and can and does indeed make an impact.”

“Ours is a time of uneasiness and indifference—not yet formulated in such ways as to permit the work of reason and the play of sensibility. Instead of troubles—defined in terms of values and threats—there is often the misery of vague uneasiness; instead of explicit issues there is often merely the beat feeling that all is somehow not right. Neither the values threatened nor whatever threatens them has been stated; in short, they have not been carried to the point of decision. Much less have they been formulated as problems of social science.”

“Ours is an age in which thousands are driven daily from their homelands by the unforgiving brutalities of war, terrorism, political oppression, starvation, disease, economic piracy, and the relentless suffocation of that singular breath which makes human beings individuals.”

“Ours is an age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected. The sacredness of religion, and the authority of legislation, are by many regarded as grounds for exemption from the examination by this tribunal, But, if they are exempted, and cannot lay claim to sincere respect, which reason accords only to that which has stood the test of a free and public examination.”

“Ours is an age of reckoning - savages call it wokeness, I call it correctiveness. And it is only through correction that this savage species might, just might, one day become human. It is only through correction we apes might one day usher into the dawn of humanity. As usual, those who are fixed in the ways of the forefathers would instantly react to this as woke propaganda. So be it. Propaganda is everywhere - bigoted apes give in to their primitive ancestry and propagate hate and division - I, a civilized ape, refuse my innate primitiveness and choose to propagate love and inclusion. Savages choose tradition, I am human, so I choose transformation.”

“Ours is certainly not an old culture. Yet in recent decades we've used more energy, destroyed more soil, created more pathogenicity (temporarily stopped some too, for sure), mutated more bacteria, and dumped more toxicity on the planet than all the cultures before us-combined. I love the United States, but I am not blind to the wrongs. I have no desire to live anywhere else, but that doesn't mean I think everything we're doing should be done or can be maintained.”

“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”

“Ours is not a culture that respects the sick, the old or the vulnerable. We strive for independence, competence, and mastery. In embracing such 'frontier' values, we may become intolerant of human wholeness, contemptuous of anything in ourselves, and in others, that has needs or is capable of suffering. The denial of a vulnerability is the ultimate barrier to compassion.”

“Ours is not a dumb species. We have put a man on the moon. We have unlocked the secrets of the human genome. We have discovered how to take stem cells and coax them into becoming brain cells, heart muscle, liver tissue - any organ of the human body that needs repair. These are our miracles, and there are more. Yet we have not yet found a way to do the simplest things: To live in peace. To stop killing each other when we disagree. To distribute that which is good in life freely and fairly.”

“Ours is not an age that wants heroes. Ours is an age of envy, in which laziness and self-involvement are the rule. Anyone who tries to shine, who dares to stand above the crowd, is dragged down by his lackluster and self-appointed “peers”.”

“Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.”