A Quote by Anatole Broyard
The tension between 'yes' and no', between 'I can' and 'I cannot,' makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.
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The tension between 'yes' and 'no', between 'I can' and 'I cannot', makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.
Before the thunderous clamor of political debate or war set loose in the world, love insisted on its promise for the possibility of human unity: between men and women, between blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, haves and have-have-nots, self and self.
Literature gives us models of living human beings who may not agree with us and even be our enemies. D. H. Lawrence said that the purpose of literature was to expand our sympathies. To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man. And this conflict cannot be easily reconciled. The tension is always there as a kind of a pain in the human condition.
The tension between the governed and the governing is what makes the world go 'round. It's not love, it's that tension, because that tension exists in love affairs. The whole idea of control is at the heart of human relationships. Control and resistance to control.
There's always a tension between those who would like to garner wealth, and they contribute a lot to society. There's also those who say, 'I believe in the common good. I want that to be enlarged.' They contribute a lot to society. The tension, the debate, between these two views is extremely important to our progress.
Somehow, in many of those near-miss instances, I've managed to fight through and continue. But in all these situations, even when they're apparently going well, I feel I am living on the razor's edge between success and failure, adulation and humiliation - between justifying my existence and revealing my unworthiness to be alive.
There are times when only America can make the difference between war and peace, between freedom and repression, between life death. We cannot save all the world's children but we can save many of them.
As I like to say to the people in Montgomery: "The tension in this city is not between white people and Negro people. The tension is, at bottom, between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.
Without fear I can acknowledge that the authentic Christian tension is not between life and death, but between life and life.
In Britten or Berg, there's a tension between the sweet and the sour, between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the tonal and the atonal, the happy and the sad. That, to me, is what all western art is about - that tension. It's why we want to say anything at all.
What you have in the Middle East is tension not between Jews and Arabs, not between Israelis and Palestinians, but between the radical wing and the moderate people.
From the viewpoint of economic democracy, the capitalism-socialism debate was a debate between private and state capitalism (i.e., the private or public employment system), and the debate was as misframed as would be a debate between the private or public ownership of slaves.
Silence has many dimensions. It can be a regression and an escape, a loss of self, or it can be presence, awareness, unification, self-discovery. Negative silence blurs and confuses our identity, and we lapse into daydreams or diffuse anxieties. Positive silence pulls us together and makes us realize who we are, who we might be, and the distance between these two.
In the presence of God, nothing stands between Him and us - we are forgiven. But we cannot feel His presence if anything is allowed to stand between ourselves and others.
Self-awareness is a trait that not only makes us human but also paradoxically makes us want to be more than merely human. As I said in my BBC Reith Lectures, “Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don’t feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence
The decision must be made between Judaism and Christianity, between business and culture, between male and female, between the race and the individual, between unworhtiness and worth, between the earthly and the higher life, between negation and God-like. Mankind has the choice to make. There are only two poles, and there is no middle way.
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