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W Quotes

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All W Quotes

“We teach them to take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter -- exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been taught. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place -- the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else's keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan.”

“We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master. We then become witnesses to the development of the human soul; the emergence of the New Man who will no longer be the victim of events but, thanks to his clarity of vision, will become able to direct and to mold the future of mankind.”

“We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger.”

“We tell our children they're trapped like rats on a doomed, bankrupt, gangster-haunted planet with dwindling resources, with nothing to look forward to but rising sea levels and imminent mass extinctions, then raise a disapproving eyebrow when, in response, they dress in black, cut themselves with razors, starve themselves, gorge themselves, or kill one another.”

“We tell ourselves a story about what just happened, and our feelings most often follow the story we've constructed. Belinda is being nice. Belinda is being sarcastic. Living beyond individualism requires each of us to take responsibility for our own constructions. "What I make up" is a phrase I ask my clients to use. What I make up is that you're being sarcastic. What I make up is that under your anger, there's hurt. We are not clairvoyant, and neither are we the authoritative voice of objective reality. Keep it subjective; keep it humble. "This was my experience, right or wrong. This is how I recollect it. This is the story I tell myself about it." Here's the trick. For the most part, you cannot violate someone when you speak from the I.”

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

“We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited ... the highest rung of what's possible is far beyond the world you can see ... She found her way through sheer force of will.”