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W Quotes

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All W Quotes

“We can construct, deconstruct and reconstruct our sexuality any way we want: it is our privilege as thinking creatures. However, human sexuality has a specific nature, regardless of what we believe or say about it. We are more likely to be satisfied with the outcome, if we work with our biology rather than against it. We will be happier if we face reality on its own terms.”

“We can contain these threats with the right regulatory frameworks. We always have.” Anatole responded, “These are not our grandfather’s threats. Even the nuclear threat remains uncontained. We cannot put that genie back into its bottle.” Braun pressed, “So, what is your solution?” Anatole began to sweat visibly as he started his big reveal. “The superorganism demands our servitude. It demands growth, innovation, and invention. It demands our sacrifice. We cannot resist its clarion call. Can anyone explain why we need social media? Or cryptocurrency? Of course, you can. But you’d have a hard time explaining what problem these technologies solved. If the goals of progress are freedom, safety, health, and happiness, shouldn’t we stop and ask ourselves if we actually feel safer, freer, healthier, and happier?”

“We can cooperate more easily with those who more easily intelligible to us, who are more familiar to us. But the advantages of specialization of labor often push us in the direction working with people who have different strengths and viewpoints than we do. I think that this is one major reason why moralities are always subject to change, because some of the people we cooperate with are going to be different from us in ways that often lead them to have different value orientations than we have; and interacting with them can change us.”

“We can create some information about Buffalo, milk and its nutritional values. We can exchange that information with each other for money, appreciation etc. A monk living alone in jungle doesn't know words such as Buffalo, milk or nutrition. He just wonders, "Green grass enters into this big black thing and a white liquid comes out of it. How!" He can't exchange this wonder with anyone but it transports him to eternity.”

“We can create the sensation of community through the accrual of actions, and that's often the clichéd way that storytelling is talked about, as someone taking a solo, and that's great for lots of reasons. But I don't really like to feel like I'm forced to listen to it in a certain way, or that there is one master reading of performance. I think what we want from performance is multiplicity, which is lots of ways in and through it, because it's for lots of people, and it was created by lots of people, often.”

“We can critically reflect on the influences that have shaped us. We can evaluate the quality and meaning of these various relationships and explore our dependency as well as our power and privilege in them. This reflection can be a kind of perceptual therapy that helps us develop our ethical skills. The goal, however, is not to transcend the relationships but to understand and improve them, in part by improving our self-conceptions. Our relationships with human and animal others co-constitute who we are and how we configure our identities and agency, even our thoughts and desires. We can't make sense of living without others, and that includes other animals. We are entangled in complex relationships and rather than trying to accomplish the impossible by pretending we can disentangle, we would do better to think about how to be more perceptive and more responsive to the deeply entangled relationships we are in.”

“We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread, but there are many more dying for a little love.”

“We can decide that the presence of cancer-causing substances in our air, water, and food is too expensive. A 2009 study, for example, has found that coal miners in Appalachia costs the region five times more in premature deaths, including from cancer, than it provides to the region in jobs, taxes, and economic benefits. In California, the production and use of hazardous chemicals cost the state $2.6 billion in 2004 alone in lost wages and health-care expenses to treat workers and children with pollution-linked diseases.”

“We can dedicate ourselves to staying connected to supportive people who will receive us without expectations or judgments. In that process, we will internalize them as they nurture our wounded ones. They will then join and foster those parts of ourselves who can be present with the ones who come to us in their suffering and recovery.”

“We can deeply love our poison. We can love the taste of it, the scent of it, the comforting weight of it in our belly and find ourselves woken in the night with stabbing cramps, arms around porcelain toilet bowls, hurling every last bit until collapsing on bathroom tile, limp from dehydration. Sometimes parting with love is essential for survival. I’ve found the most tragic aspect of losing loved ones wasn’t the big boom of the fallout, but realizing later how much healthier I was without them.”

“We can deny the destructive nature of our choices. And we can deny the consequences of those choices even when they litter the landscape of our lives and our culture with the burning wreckage of our foolishness. But are we ignorant enough to die by the hand of the ignorance that we’ve perpetually fed because it serves our agenda, or do we wish to live by letting it starve so that it’s no longer feeding on us?”