A Quote by David Brooks
We are a democratic, egalitarian people who spend our days desperately trying to climb over each other.
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Where people are trying to split Americans from each other I want there desperately to be bipartisanship.
How do we get utopian thinking in a dystopian world? These days we aren't talking to each other - we're screaming and trying to hit each other over the head with rocks and sticks. A primitive fury has been unleashed by a president who has no culture, who cannot read, and who wants to determine power and aggression.
I don't think much new ever happens. Most of us spend our days the same way people spent their days in the year 1000: walking around smiling, trying to earn enough to eat, while neurotically doing these little self-proofs in our head about how much better we are than these other slobs, while simultaneously, in another part of our brain, secretly feeling woefully inadequate to these smarter, more beautiful people.
I used to like people more, but now I have children and that changes your life in a lot of ways. Like you spend time with people you never would have chosen to spend time with, not in a million years. I spend whole days with people, I'm like, "I never would have hung out with you. I didn't choose you. Our children chose each other based on no criteria by the way. They're the same size. They don't care who they make me hang out with."
In reality the world is made of thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or propriety.
Do we spend most of our days trying to remember or to forget? Do we spend most of our time running towards or away from our lives?
When people have light in themselves, it will shine out from them. Then we get to know each other as we walk together in the darkness, without needing to pass our hands over each other's faces, or to intrude into each other's hearts.
I know some good marriages-marriages where both people are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other.
We spend our time sending messages to each other, talking and trying to listen at the same time, exchanging information. This seems to be our most urgent biological function; it is what we do with our lives.
Whoever tries to climb over our fence, we will try to climb over his house.
We spend a good part of our lives trying desperately to convince ourselves as well as everybody else that we know more than we really do.
Can it really be love if we don't talk that much, don't see each other? Isn't love something that happens between people who spend time together and know each other's faults and take care of each other?...In the end, I decide that the mark we've left on each other is the color and shape of love.
The Democratic Party is always going to be a diverse group of people who are yelling at each other and fighting over what's the best way to do something.
You have two choices: You can come down from the mountain and spend the rest of your days thinking it was so beautiful there, or you can create a vision, look upward, see the next mountain, and start the climb all over again.
Soundgarden was incredibly democratic, and I was really proud of that. I felt like we got along better than most bands we toured with and most people we knew. And at the same time, when you're that democratic and concerned with each other's opinions, you're always concerned with what the other people think.
People need each other to help each other up. But we can't stand near each other because we fear each other. When you get over fear, nothing matters anymore but love.
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