A Quote by John Kenneth Galbraith
The threat to men of great dignity, privilege and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth. Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great -- a little understood thing.
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America was founded by men who understood that the threat of domestic tyranny is as great as any threat from abroad. If we want to be worthy of their legacy, we must resist the rush toward ever-increasing state control of our society. Otherwise, our own government will become a greater threat to our freedoms than any foreign terrorist.
While I generally find that great myths are great precisely because they represent and embody great universal truths, the myth of romantic love is a dreadful lie. Perhaps it is a necessary lie in that it ensures the survival of the falling-in-love experience that traps us into marriage. But as a psychiatrist I weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and suffering that this myth fosters. Millions of people waste vast amounts of energy desperately and futilely attempting to make the reality of their lives conform to the unreality of the myth.
Metallica lives in a little bubble. We just do our own thing. We're not part of any trends or waves or fads. We can just do our own thing, all the time. It's a great luxury. I don't think we were really appreciative of it until recently, and really understood that it is what keeps us alive. It's great to be able to have the freedom to run around and do all this crazy stuff, and at all cost, avoid making another record, just to piss our managers off.
Own it. Just take it and say, 'Yes I will be great, I am going to be great.' Great doesn't mean being a movie star, great doesn't mean having millions of dollars. Great means being able to be confident, strong, and a solid human being that has dignity and integrity. That is great.
It has been said that the myth is a public dream, dreams are private myths. Unfortunately we give our mythic side scant attention these days. As a result, a great deal escapes us and we no longer understand our own actions. So it remains important and salutary to speak not only of the rational and easily understood, but also of enigmatic things: the irrational and the ambiguous. To speak both privately and publicly.
You are different from the really great man in only one thing: The great man, at one time, also was a very little man, but he developed one important ability: he learned to see where he was small in his thinking, and actions. Under the pressure of some task which was dear to him he learned better and better to sense the threat that comes from his smallness and pettiness. The great man, then, knows when and in what he is a little man.
For the company of the great is good company as Shakespeare understood it, as Plutarch understood it. The past remains the source from which example and precept can still be drawn.
That's the great thing about rock n' roll: the myth is ultimately more important than the reality. And that's what you learn - you just learn to go with the mythology.
The Greeks invented the idea of nemesis to show how any single virtue, stubbornly maintained gradually changes into a destructive vice. Our success, our industry, our habit of work have produced our economic nemesis. Work made modern men great, but now threatens to usurp our souls, to inundate the earth in things and trash, to destroy our capacity to love and wonder.
There have been great men with little of what we call education. There have been many small men with a great deal of learning. There has never been a great people who did not possess great learning.
Great passions may either bring great victories or great sorrows! In both cases, it is always a great privilege to have great passions!
The privilege of holding the priesthood, which is the power and authority to act in God's name, is a great blessing and privilege and one that carries with it equally great obligations and responsibilities.
For me white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great, for in facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is not such a free country; one's life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own.
Little movements of communities of ordinary radicals are committed to doing small things with great love.
When I meet a historian who cannot think that there have been great men, great men moreover in politics, I feel myself in the presence of a bad historian, and there are times when I incline to judge all historians by their opinion of Winston Churchill -- whether they can see that, no matter how much better the details, often damaging, of man and career become known, he still remains quite simply, a great man.
Generally young men are regarded as radicals. This is a popular misconception. The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates. The radicals are the men past middle life.
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