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W Quotes

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All W Quotes

“When a scientist works in his laboratory, he does not smoke, he does not eat sweets, and does not listen to the radio. He abstains not because he thinks that these things are sins, but because he knows that they impede the perfect concentration of his mind on the object of his study. It is much the same in Zen Discipline: the observance of this discipline must help the practitioner to live in Awareness of Being; it does not lead to moral objectives.”

“When a sculptor creates a sculpture, a writer writes a novel, or a painter paints a motif on a canvas, he needs talent and expertise. But to be successful in his endeavor, he also needs to have the passionate feeling that he wants, at all costs, to create a work of art which, in his head, constantly demands to be accomplished. The same also applies to developing board games or card games.”

“When a sense of emptiness and hopelessness grips you, try being useful. Don’t ask what’s in it for you. Just be useful. In any context in Life, no matter what you are going through and how challenged you are, you can always be useful. So, try being useful to someone, in whatever small way. Then see how your Life transforms magically. Your self-worth is always a function of how useful you are to the world, to your world. It is not about what you have for yourself, it is all about how much of yourself that you are giving to others.”

“When a serious felony case went to trial in a county like Monroe County, which was 40 percent black, it was not uncommon for prosecutors to exclude all African Americans from jury service. In fact, twenty years after the civil rights revolution, the jury remained an institution largely unchanged by the legal requirements of racial integration and diversity. As far back as the 1880s, the Supreme Court ruled in Strauder v. West Virginia that excluding black people from jury service was unconstitutional, but juries remained all-white for decades afterward. In 1945, the Supreme Court upheld a Texas statute that limited the number of black jurors to exactly one per case. In Deep South states, jury rolls were pulled from voting rolls, which excluded African Americans. After the Voting Rights Act passed, court clerks and judges still kept the jury rolls mostly white through various tactics designed to undermine the law. Local jury commissions used statutory requirements that jurors be "intelligent and upright" to exclude African Americans and women. In the 1970s, the Supreme Court ruled that underrepresentation of racial minorities and women in jury pools was unconstitutional, which in some communities at least led to black people being summoned to the courthouse for possible selection as jurors (if not selected). The Court had repeatedly made clear, though, that the Constitution does not require that racial minorities and women actually serve on juries—it only forbids excluding jurors on the basis of race or gender.”

“When a silverback gorilla dies of Ebola, he does it beyond the eyes of science and medicine. No one is there in the forest to observe the course of his agony, with the possible exception of other gorillas. No one takes his temperature or peers down his throat. When a female gorilla succumbs to Ebola, no one measures the rate of her breathing or checks for a telltale rash. Thousands of gorillas may have been killed by the virus but no human has ever attended one of those deaths - not even Billy Karesh, not even Alain Ondzie. A small number of carcasses have been found, some of which have tested positive for Ebola antibodies. A large number of carcasses have been seen and reported by casual witnesses, in Ebola territory at Ebola times, but because the forest is a hungry place, most of those carcasses could never be inspected and sampled by scientific researchers.”

“When a slave rebels, it is nothing much to the people who read about it later. Just thin words on thinner paper, worn finer by the friction of history. "So you were slaves? So what?" They whisper, like it's nothing. But to the people who live through a slave rebellion, both those who take their dominance for granted, until it comes for them in the dark, and those who would see the world burn before enduring one moment longer in their place. That is not a metaphor, Essun. Not hyperbole. I did watch the world burn. Say nothing to me of innocent bystanders, unearned suffering, heartless vengeance. When a comm builds atop a fault line, do you blame its walls when they inevitably crush the people inside? No; you blame whoever was stupid enough to think they could defy the laws of nature forever. Well, some worlds are built on a fault line of pain, held up by nightmares. Don’t lament when those worlds fall. Rage that they were built doomed in the first place.”

“When a small child calls out, "I want bread! I am hungry," does his mother not...prepare him something to eat? Likewise, if all day we call out, "We want to be saved!...Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us." will Christ not send us His mercy?”

“When a social movement adopts the compromises of legislators, it has forgotten its role, which is to push and challenge the politicians, not fall in meekly behind them. We who protest...are not politicians. We are citizens. Whatever politicians may do, let them first feel the full force of citizens who speak for what is right, not for what is winnable, in a shamefully timorous Congress.”