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Kinship Quotes

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Kinship Quotes

“No daylight to separate us. Only kinship. Inching ourselves closer to creating a community of kinship such that God might recognize it. Soon we imagine, with God, this circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied. We locate ourselves with the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join the easily despised and the readily left out. We stand with the demonized so that the demonizing will stop. We situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.”

GodChristianCompassionSolidarityMarginsKinship
Book:Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion
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“Through innumerable kinships, natures are knit together this way and that, until the world hangs in a web of frith. So man draws souls into his circle. For the present age, the war-cry is: rule. Be master of the earth, subdue creation is the watch-word running through our time, and it looks as if this commandment sympathetically strikes the heart-note of our culture and ever sets the pace not only for its actions but also for its speculations. All hypotheses anent past ages in the history of our race hinge on the assumption that man has made his way through an everlasting battle, and that civilization is the outcome of man's struggle for existence. But modern civilization with its cry for mastery and its view of life as a continuous strife is too narrow a base for hypotheses to make history intelligible. The evolutionary theory of an all-embracing struggle for food and survival is only an ætiological myth, as the ethnologists have it, a simple contrivance to explain modern European civilization by throwing our history, its competition and its exclusive interest in material progress back on the screen of the past. When ancient and primitive cultures are presented in the light of modern economical problems, all the proportions and perspectives are disturbed; some aspects are thrown into relief, other aspects are pushed into the shade, without regard to the harmony inherent in the moral and intellectual life of other peoples; and the view as a whole is far more falsified by such capricious playing of searchlights than by any wilful distorting of facts.”

SoulNatureKinshipHeathenryFrith
Book:The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2
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“The key-note of ancient culture is not conflict, neither is it mastery, but conciliation and friendship. Man strives to make peace with the animals, the trees and the powers that be, or deeper still, he wants to draw them into himself and make them kin of his kin, till he is unable to draw a fast line between his own life and that of the surrounding nature. Culture is too complex — and we may add too unprofitable — a thing to be explained by man's toil for the exigencies and sweets of life, and the play of his intellect and imagination has never —until recent times perhaps — been dominated by the quest of food or clothing. The struggle for daily bread and for the maintenance of life until the morrow is generally a very keen one in early society, and it seems that the exertion calls for the exercise of all faculties and powers. But as a creature struggling for food, man is a poor economist; at any rate he is a bad hand at limiting his expenditure of energy to the needs of the day. There is more than exertion in his work; there is an overshooting force, evidence that the energy which drives him is something more complex than the mere instinct of existence. He is urged on by an irresistible impulse to take up the whole of nature in himself, to make it, by his active sympathy, something human, to make it heore.”

SoulSpiritCultureNatureConflictKinshipHeathen
Book:The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2
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“The animal does not rebel against its own kind. Consider animals: how just they are, how well-behaved, how they keep to the time-honored, how loyal they are to the land that bears them, how they hold to their accustomed routes, how they care for their young, how they go together to pasture, and how they draw one another to the spring. There is not one that conceals its overabundance of prey and lets its brother starve as a result. There is not one that tries to enforce its will on those of its own kind. Not a one mistakenly imagines that it is an elephant when it is a mosquito. The animal lives fittingly and true to the life of its species, neither exceeding nor falling short of it. He who never lives his animal must treat his brother like an animal. Abase yourself and live your animal so that you will be able to treat your brother correctly. You will thus redeem all those roaming dead who strive to feed on the living. And do not turn anything you do into a law, since that is the hubris of power.”

HumanityAnimalPowerHumanAnimalsConsumptionEcologyKinshipResource
Book:The Red Book: Liber Novus
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“Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

InspirationalHumanityFreedomCompassionInequalityKinshipRadicalismSubversion
Book:Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches
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“We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separation." (Defy the Space That Separates, The Nation, October 7, 1996)”

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Author:Adrienne Rich
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“Maternal love is an instinctive and natural impulse, and animals possess it in a degree as high as that of human beings. This alone is enough to show that it is not true love, that it is not of moral origin ; for all morality proceeds from the intelligible character which animals, having no free will, do not possess. The ethical imperative can be heard only by a rational creature ; there is no such thing as natural morality, for all morality must be self-conscious.”

FamilyBloodMothersKinshipMaternal LoveHigher LovePlatonism
Book:Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles
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“I wasn’t asking to be admitted to the family. Or was I? I wasn’t kin and he didn’t owe me anything. Or did he? The questions were not just about myself but about all people who are, to a greater or lesser extent, shaky arrivals, showing up unannounced, trying to migrate into a kind of safety or homecoming. Some of us stood outside the door campaigning for admittance, and some of us were thinking It’s a minuscule country, for God’s sake, how many more can we fit? And every one of us was related.”

FamilyKinshipDna TestingDna Testing Memoir
Book:Unearthing
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“[They] may have for instance taken the view of Edmund Burke, who in the 18th century made the central conservative insight; that a culture and a society are not things run for the convenience of the people who happen to be here right now, but is a deep pact between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born.”

SocietyCivilizationEuropeConservatismKinshipEdmund Burke
Book:The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam
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“When sovereignty first expands to become the general organizing principle of a society, it is by turning violence into kinship. The early, spectacular phase of mass killing in both China and Egypt, whatever else it may be doing, appears to be intended to lay the foundations of what Max Weber referred to as a ‘patrimonial system’: that is, one in which all the kings’ subjects are imagined as members of the royal household, at least to the degree that they are all working to care for the king. Turning erstwhile strangers into part of the royal household, or denying them their own ancestors, are thereby ultimately two sides of the same coin. Or to put things another way, a ritual designed to produce kinship becomes a method of producing kingship.”

PatriarchySovereigntyAnthropologyKinshipArcheologyKingship
Book:The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
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“When she notices my silence she goes quiet and sighs. I guess she, too, gets fed up with the weight of incomprehension. I guess that on top of seeming like a sister who is detached, dejected and discourteous, I also come off as an arrogant person. Kinship isn't enough for her, either, of course it isn't. In cases like ours, getting along isn't a question of magic or chemistry or affinity, but of tenacity, toughness and torturous toiling.”

Family RelationshipsSisterhoodSiblingsKinshipPersonalitiesFamily DynamicsHuman Complexity
Book:La encomienda
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“In the outworks of our lives, we were almost strangers, but we shared a certain outlook on human life and human destiny, which, from the very first, made a bond of extreme strength . . . . At our very first meeting, we talked with continually increasing intimacy. We seemed to sink through layer after layer of what was superficial, till gradually both reached the central fire. It was an experience unlike any other that I have known. We looked into each other's eyes, half appalled and half intoxicated to find ourselves together in such a region. The emotion was as intense as passionate love, and at the same time all-embracing. I came away bewildered, and hardly able to find my way among ordinary affairs.”

PassionFriendshipAffinityKinshipJoseph Conrad
Book:Portraits From Memory and Other Essays
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“It may be well here to sum up, in the fewest possible words, the conclusions reached in this book: (I) That our present so called "Civilisation" is only a "manner of speaking," and is in fact quite a rude state as compared with what may already be foreseen. (2) That the basis of any real morality must be the sense of Kinship between all living beings. (3) That there can be no abiding national welfare until the extremes of Wealth and Poverty are abolished. (4) That Warfare will not be discontinued until we have ceased to honour soldiering as heroic. (5) That the Rights of Animals have henceforth to be considered; and that such practices as cruel sports, vivisection, and flesh eating are not compatible with civilised life. (6) That Free Thought is essential to progress, and that the religion of the future will be a belief in a Creed of Kinship, a charter of human and sub-human relationships.”

PhilosophyEthicsAnimalsKinshipPacifismConscientious ObjectionAnthropozentrism
Book:The Creed of Kinship
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“The psychical condition of men's minds may be compared with a set of bells close together, and so arranged that in the ordinary man a bell rings only when one beside it sounds, and the vibration lasts only a moment. In the genius, when a bell sounds it vibrates so strongly that it sets in action the whole series, and remains in action throughout life. The latter kind of movement often gives rise to extraordinary conditions and absurd impulses, that may last for weeks together and that form the basis of the supposed kinship of genius with insanity.”

MenGivingMindKindMayWholeMomentsActionTogetherLastsFormSoundWeekConditionsMovementGeniusOrdinaryBasesRemainsSeriesExtraordinaryRingsAbsurdImpulseInsanityLatterBellsVibrationsKinshipOrdinary ManVibrate
Author:Otto Weininger
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“I am only about half alive - a large part of my strength is consumed in sitting up or walking. My nervous system is a shattered wreck, and I am absolutely bored & listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me. However - so many things do interest me, & interest me intensely, in science, history, philosophy, & literature; that I have never actually desired to die, or entertained any suicidal designs, as might be expected of one with so little kinship to the ordinary features of life.”

LittlesPhilosophyMightDiesLiteratureInterestHalfAliveDesignWalkingOrdinarySittingExpectedNervousBoredFeaturesSuicidalConsumedWrecksShatteredNervous SystemKinshipSitting Up
Author:H. P. Lovecraft
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“Acceptance is approval, a word with a bad name in some psychologies. Yet it is perfectly normal to seek approval in childhood and throughout life. We require approval from those we respect. The kinship it creates lifts us to their level, a process referred to in self-psychology as transmuting internalization. Approval is a necessary component of self-esteem. It becomes a problem only when we give up our true self to find it. Then approval-seeking works against us.”

GivingSelfProblemNamesProcessLevelsPsychologyChildhoodSelf EsteemAcceptanceGiving UpNormalSeekingEsteemLiftsApprovalTrue SelfComponentsKinshipPerfectly Normal
Author:David Richo
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“Couldn't we end this interview with what I really want to say? That what the world really needs is a real feeling of kinship -- everybody: stars, laborers, Negroes, Jews, Arabs. We are all brothers. If we could end this article saying just that, we'd get down to what we should all be talking about. Please don't make me a joke. End the interview with what I believe.”

IfsWorldWantNeedsShouldBelieveRealEndsFeelingsI BelieveStarsTalkingBrotherPleaseJokesJewInterviewsArticlesKinshipLaborersReal Feelings
Author:Marilyn Monroe
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“Like the Pentagon, our social science often reduces all phenomena to dollars and body counts. Sexuality, family unity, kinship, masculine solidarity, maternity, motivation, nurturing, all the rituals of personal identity and development, all the bonds of community, seem "sexist," "superstitious," "mystical," "inefficient," "discriminatory." And, of course, they are -- and they are also indispensable to a civilized society.”

BodySeemsMotivationCoursesSocialCommunityIdentityDevelopmentDollarsUnitySexualityCivilizedRitualSolidarityMysticalIndispensableMasculineNurturingSuperstitiousSexistKinshipPentagonSocial ScienceCivilized SocietyMaternityPersonal Identity
Book:Sexual suicide
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“I grew up in a time when people believed in duty, honor and country. My grandfathers were both officers. My father was a General in the Air Force. My brother and I were both in the Army. I've always felt a kinship with soldiers; I think it's possible to support the warrior and be against the war.”

PeopleThinkingWarCountryFatherForceFeltSupportAirBrotherDutyGrewHonorGrew UpArmySoldierWarriorMy BrotherOfficersGrandfatherMy GrandfatherAir ForceKinship
Author:Kris Kristofferson
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