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Mutual Aid Quotes

Browse 25 quotes about Mutual Aid.

Mutual Aid Quotes

“Jullian crossed his arms, almost defensively, but there was no heat behind it. “Animals have morality? That still sounds… primitive. Like pack survival instinct. What does that have to do with our laws? With people who give up their lives for strangers? That’s not instinct. That’s… irrational. It’s like a failure in the cost-benefit logic.” Mira bent down and plucked a weed growing through the cracked cement, fingers patient. “That’s where something beautiful begins. Reason refines instinct. It doesn't erase it. When we act against our social nature, our mind remembers what our body once knew. A pull toward others. An ache when we ignore it.”

LovePhilosophyHumanityMutual Aid
Book:Her Name is Anarchy: a novella
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“I think that's quite true. and in fact the people who understand this the best are those who are carrying out the control and domination in the more free societies. like the U.S. and England, where popular struggles have have won a lot of freedoms over the years and the state has limited capacity to coerce. It is very striking that it's precisely in those societies that elite groups—the business world, state managers and so on—recognized early on that they are going to have to develop massive methods of control of attitude and opinion, because you cannot control people by force anymore and therefore you have to modify their consciousness so that they don't perceive that they are living under conditions of alienation, oppression, subordination and so on. In fact, that's what probably a couple trillion dollars are spent on each year in the U.S., very self-consciously, from the framing of television advertisements for two-year olds to what you are taught in graduate school economics programs. It's designed to create a consciousness of subordination and it's also intended specifically and pretty consciously to suppress normal human emotions. Normal human emotions are sympathy and solidarity, not just for people but for stranded dolphins. It's just a normal reaction for people. If you go back to the classical political economists, people like Adam Smith, this was just taken for granted as the core of human nature and society. One of the main concentrations of advertising and education is to drive that out of your mind. And it's very conscious. In fact, it's conscious in social policy right in front of our eyes today. Take the effort to destroy Social Security. Well, what's the point of that? There's a lot of scam about financial problems, which is all total nonsense. And, of course, they want Wall Street to make a killing. Underlying it all is something much deeper. Social Security is based on a human emotion and it's a natural human emotion which has to be driven out of people minds, namely the emotion that you care about other people. You care. It's a social and community responsibility to care whether a disabled widow across town has enough food to eat, or whether a kid across the street can go to school. You have to get that out of people's heads. You have to make them say, "Look, you are a personal, rational wealth maximizer. If that disabled widow didn't prepare for her own future, it's her problem not your problem. It's not your fault she doesn't have enough to eat so why should you care?”

CareSocietyEmpathyCaringWelfareSympathySolidarityMutual Aid
Book:Chomsky On Anarchism
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“My short-term goals are to defend and even strengthen elements of state authority which, though illegitimate in fundamental ways, are critically necessary right now to impede the dedicated efforts to "roll back" the progress that has been achieved in extending democracy and human rights. State authority is now under severe attack in the more democratic societies, but not because it conflicts with the libertarian vision. Rather the opposite: because it offers (weak) protection to some aspects of that vision. Governments have a fatal flaw: unlike the private tyrannies, the institutions of state power and authority offer to the despised public an opportunity to play some role, however limited, in managing their own affairs. That defect is intolerable to the masters, who now feel, with some justification, that changes in the international economic and political order offer the prospects of creating a kind of "utopia for the masters," with dismal prospects for most of the rest. It should be unnecessary to spell out here what I mean. The effects are all too obvious even in the rich societies, from the corridors of power to the streets, countryside, and prisons. For reasons that merit attention but that lie beyond the scope of these remarks, the rollback campaign is currently spearheaded by dominant sectors of societies in which the values under attack have been realized in some of their most advanced forms, the English-speaking world; no small irony, but no contradiction either.”

EmpathyHealth CareWelfareSolidarityWelfare StateMutual Aid
Book:Chomsky On Anarchism
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“Their relationship echoed, in many ways, the binds of trust and mutual protection that kept prisoners alive and sane in Nazi concentration camps. In those camps, researchers found, the "basic unit of survival" was the pair, not the individual.”

SurvivalCooperationEvolutionary PsychologyInterdependenceMutual AidSymbiotic RelationshipSpecies Longevity
Book:Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West
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“What is a great man who has made his mark upon history? Every time, if we think far enough, he is a man who has looked through the confusion of the moment and has seen the moral issue involved; he is a man who has refused to have his sense of justice distorted; he has listened to his conscience until conscience becomes a trumpet call to like-minded men, so that they gather about him, and together, with mutual purpose and mutual aid, they make a new period in history.”

IfsThinkingMenMadeEnoughMomentsTogetherPurposeJusticeMoralHistoryIssuesInvolvedPeriodsConscienceMarkAidsConfusionGreat MenMutualTrumpetsMoral IssuesMutual Aid
Author:Jane Addams
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“The Occupy movement did create spontaneously communities that taught people something: you can be in a supportive community of mutual aid and cooperation and develop your own health system and library and have open space for democratic discussion and participation. Communities like that are really important.”

PeopleImportantCommunitySpaceMovementTaughtDemocraticLibraryAidsDiscussionMutualCooperationParticipationSupportiveOpen SpacesHealth SystemOccupy MovementMutual Aid
Author:Noam Chomsky
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“Ethically they had arrived at the conclusion that man's supremacy over lower animals meant not that the former should prey upon the latter, but that the higher should protect the lower, and that there should be mutual aid between the two as between man and man. They had also brought out the truth that man eats not for enjoyment but to live.”

MenShouldTwoSpiritualAnimalHigherProtectAidsConclusionFormerEnjoymentLatterMutualVegetarianPreyVegetarianismSupremacyMutual Aid
Book:Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth
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“Man is appealed to be guided in his acts, not merely by love, which is always personal, or at best tribal, but by his perception of his oneness with each human being. In the practice of mutual aid, which we can re-trace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support- not mutual struggle- has had the leading part.”

MenHumansHuman BeingsPracticeSupportStruggleProgressEvolutionPerceptionEthicsAidsOnenessMutualEthicalConceptionMutual AidMutual Support
Book:Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
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“Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with, not the social-Darwinist economic 'libertarianism' of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism's principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principle moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.”

TryingStatesPoliticalNamesSocialStuffInterestingMoralPrinciplesEconomicTheoryTerrorismAidsPracticalsThemeBombsPocketsMutualTargetCooperationCapitalistLibertarianismPrincipalSocialistSolidarityAnarchismMost InterestingIdealisticGoodmanPolitical TheoryShelleyMutual Aid
Author:Ursula K. Le Guin
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“Physical separateness can never be overcome by electronics, but only by 'conviviality,' by 'living together' in the most literal physical sense. The physically divided are also the conquered and the controlled. 'True desires' - erotic, gustatory, olfactory, musical, aesthetic, psychic, & spiritual - are best attained in a context of freedom of self and other in physical proximity & mutual aid. Everything else is at best a sort of representation.”

SelfTogetherSpiritualDesireOvercomingMusicalAidsMutualControlledDividedAestheticRepresentationPsychicsEroticLiteralProximityElectronicsLiving TogetherSeparatenessMutual Aid
Author:Hakim Bey
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