A Quote by Kenneth Keniston

In the early nineteenth century, the doctrine of self-sufficiency came to apply to families as well as individuals.... The familybecame a special protected place, the repository of tender, pure, and generous feelings (embodied by the mother) and a bulwark and bastion against the raw, competitive, aggressive, and selfish world of commerce (embodied by the father).... In performing this protective task, the good family was to be as self-sufficient as the good man.

Kenneth Keniston

Quote Topics

Against Aggressive Apply Came Century Commerce Competitive Doctrine Early Embodied Families Family Father Feelings Generous Good Good Family Good Man Individuals Man Mother Nineteenth Century Performing Place Protected Protective Pure Raw Repository Self Self-Sufficient Selfish Selfish World Special Sufficiency Sufficient Task Tender Well World

Quote Author

Kenneth Keniston
Born: January 6, 1930

The myth of the self-sufficient individual and of the self-sufficient, protected, and protective familytells us that those who need help are ultimately inadequate. And it tells us that for a family to need help--or at least to admit it publicly--is to confess failure. Similarly, to give help, however generously, is to acknowledge the inadequacy of the recipients and indirectly to condemn them, to stigmatize them, and even to weaken what impulse they have toward self-sufficiency.

Kenneth Keniston

Individuals motivated by self-interest, self-indulgence, and a false sense of self-sufficiency pursue selfish ambition for the purpose of self-glorification.

C. J. Mahaney

The myth of self-sufficiency blinds us to the workings of other forces in family life. For families are not now, nor were they ever, the self-sufficient building blocks of society, exclusively responsible, praiseworthy, and blamable for their own destiny. They are deeply influenced by broad social and economic forces over which they have little control.

Kenneth Keniston

By happy fraternity amongst themselves, the embodied beings get the supreme peace. Then all this earth shines like one house. When the men, the embodied beings treat each other with equal respect and have good brotherly feelings amongst themselves, great peace and harmony abound. Then all this earth shines like one house. The whole world shines like the one dwelling house of the entire human family.

Ramana Maharshi

The idea of dependence is an explanation, whereas self-sufficiency is an unprecedented, nonanalogous concept in terms of what we know about life within nature. Is not self-sufficiency itself insufficient to explain self-sufficiency?

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Let your intentions be good - embodied in good thoughts, cheerful words, and unselfish deeds - and the world will be to you a bright and happy place in which to work and play and serve

Grenville Kleiser

The raw fact is that every successful example of economic development this past century ? every case of a poor nation that worked its way up to a more or less decent, or at least dramatically better, standard of living ? has taken place via globalization, that is, by producing for the world market rather than trying for self-sufficiency.

Paul Krugman

India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.

Will Durant

The free market promotes self-worth, self-sufficiency, shared values, and honest dealings, which enhance the individual, the family, and the community. It discriminates against no race, religion, or gender.

Mark Levin

I'm especially honored that The Black Gents will debut Off-Broadway and pay tribute to The Tuskegee Airmen and other ancestors of that time who have embodied excellence, self-determination, and self-discipline.

Lamman Rucker

My mother's family came from the British West Indies. And my father's family came from, well, my father's father came from the Montana/South Dakota area. They were Blackfoot Indian.

Richie Havens

There is some pretty powerful self-interest in wanting a future that is not just running storm-to-storm. The argument that I make is not that we aren't competitive and selfish and greedy. We are. We're all of these things. We're complicated, competitive, greedy and nasty, and kind and generous and compassionate.

Naomi Klein

Good girls don't hurt other people's feelings. Good girls are not overly aggressive, competitive, or boastful. Good girls please others. But what good girls are good for is another question.

Susan Jane Gilman

That which of all things unfits man for the reception of Christ as a Savior, is not gross profligacy and outward, vehement transgression, but it is self-complacency, fatal self-righteousness and self-sufficiency.

Alexander MacLaren

The embodied self is the same person who woke to the world in a burst of visonary immediacy, who soon found that he was not the center of that world but on the contrary, a dependent and even hapless creature, and who then discovered that he was doomed to die