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W Quotes

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All W Quotes

“We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos.... We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. (1970 English translation)”

“We take off our shoes, or we turn on our ears. We press our hands together in a gesture of prayer, or we remember the full extent of our lungs. Perhaps we even arrange ourselves cross-legged on the ground, or perhaps we dance or walk or swim instead. When we want to escape the surface, we activate our bodies, and they show us a different intelligence, pointing to a mind that resides not just in the head. Our knowing is diffused throughout all of us, distributed through muscle and bone, pulsing through organs and conveyed in the blood. We put our feet to the ground to listen with all of it. Not all that we know is verbal. Much of it--sometimes I think the vast majority--is somatic, the concern of the body. I learned this most keenly when Bert was a baby, and I used to reach towards him in the back seat on long car journeys and feel his foot press into my palm in reply. There was communication there far beyond words, and far more soothing to both of us. When I used to sit him on my lap and kiss his soft head, I was aware that information was being exchanged between us, transmitted through my lips and received through my nose. I could not even tell you what it said. Our bodies have answers to questions that we don't know how to ask.”

“We take pictures because we can't accept that everything passes, we can't accept that the repetition of a moment is an impossibility. We wage a monotonous war against our own impending deaths, against time that turns children into that other, lesser species: adults. We take pictures because we know we will forget. We will forget the week, the day, the hour. We will forget when we were happiest. We take pictures out of pride, a desire to have the best of ourselve preserved. We fear that we will die and others will not know we lived.”

“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism... We cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

“We take the size of sin too low, and short, and wrong, when we measure it by the wrong it doth to ourselves, or our families, or our neighbours, or the nation wherein we live; indeed, herein somewhat of its evil and mischief doth appear; but to take its full length and proportion, we must consider the wrong it doth to this great, this glorious, this incomparable God. Sin is incomparably malignant, because the God principally injured by it is incomparably excellent.”

“We take these animals and completely violate who they are. We use them, abuse them, and deprive them all their lives…then we cut their throats, shred them and eat them! Morally, I’m against it, ethically, I can’t justify it, and ecologically, it’s just insane. The thought of meat-eating makes me shudder. As far as wearing fur is concerned, it is the rudest, most inconsiderate, selfish and sick façade I can imagine.”

“We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization. We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about a particular degree of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimatized.”