A Quote by Mary McCarthy

To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

Mary McCarthy

Quote Topics

Achieved Again Against America American Became Birth Care Cause Children Civics Ending Experience Had Happy Happy Ending History Identify Kind Live Losing Modern Modern World Nonconformity Oneself Passionately Past Politically Quarrels Rare Reality Rebellious Speaking System Though Virtues World

Quote Author

Mary McCarthy
American - Novelist
June 21, 1912 - October 25, 1989

... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

Mary McCarthy

There is a power that can be created out of pent-up indignation, courage, and the inspiration of a common cause, and that if enough people put their minds and bodies into that cause, they can win. It is a phenomenon recorded again and against in the history of popular movements against injustice all over the world.

Howard Zinn

I have heard it said that families with many children and high birth rates are among the cause of poverty. It seems to me a simplistic opinion. I can say that the main cause of poverty is an economic system that has removed the person from the center.

Pope Francis

Every nervous system creates its own "reality," minute by minute - we live inside a "bubble" of neural abstractions which we identify with reality. You can make this neurological fact into conscious experience, and you will never be bored or depressed again.

Robert Anton Wilson

Definitely we see throughout history that American teachers are asked to be very self-abnegating. They're not supposed to be concerned with the conditions of their labor, they're not supposed to care about pay. This is the kind of vision of the ideal teacher, which is again and again brought to the fore by reformers, the ideal teacher as someone who is passionately driven to serve children. Almost to the exclusion of a more pragmatic view of what the job actually entails.

Dana Goldstein

Lagos was a city that had been turned against itself. There was a bridge that became the perfect trap for crimes, which began with nails being scattered to cause flat tyres. If the driver stopped, the car would be dismantled in 20 minutes and the parts thrown overboard [to people waiting below]. The system had turned into a kind of destructive device that could be used against people. That was the narrative.

Rem Koolhaas

This perversion of the truth, familiar to the artist though it was, always unnerved him afresh and proved too much for him. What was a consequence of the premature ending of his fast was here presented as the cause of it! To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of nonunderstanding, was impossible.

Franz Kafka

I have great love and respect for Russian history and culture. But the world is changing and Russia is too. Russia is part of the modern world, not the world of the past but the modern world. And I believe it has an even greater future than some other countries that can't take care of their young people, of the new generations, of their children, and believe that they can just let things slide.

Vladimir Putin

Since 1994, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have considered it politically risky to offer a plan to fix America's broken health care system. The American public, though, has paid the price for this silence as health care costs skyrocketed, millions went uninsured, and millions more grappled with financial insecurity and hardship.

Ron Wyden

Against the suffering which may come upon one from human relationships the readiest safeguard is voluntary isolation, keeping oneself aloof from other people. The happiness which can be achieved along this path is, as we see, the happiness of quietness. Against the dreaded external world one can only defend oneself by some kind of turning away from it, if one intends to solve the task by oneself.

Sigmund Freud

I think that America is in danger of losing its adventurous spirit in the cause of some kind of illusion of safety, or substitute of law and order there.

Jerry Garcia

General Systems Theory, a related modern concept [to holism], says that each variable in any system interacts with the other variables so thoroughly that cause and effect cannot be separated. A simple variable can be both cause and effect. Reality will not be still. And it cannot be taken apart! You cannot understand a cell, a rat, a brain structure, a family, a culture if you isolate it from its context. Relationship is everything.

Marilyn Ferguson

Life is worthy of the name only when it reflects Reality in action. No university will teach you how to live so that when the time of dying comes, you can say: I lived well I do not need to live again. Most of us die wishing we could live again. So many mistakes committed, so much left undone. Most of the people vegetate, but do not live. They merely gather experience and enrich their memory. But experience is the denial of Reality, which is neither sensory nor conceptual, neither of the body, nor of the mind, though it includes and transcends both.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Winning slowly is another way of losing. Americans are screwing up our health care system again right now. That's going to cause grave trouble for people over the next five, 10 years. There are going to be lots of people who die, lots of people who are sick. It's going to be horrible. But 10 years from now it will not be harder to solve the problem because you ignored it for those 10 years. With climate change, that's not true. As each year passes, we move past certain physical tipping points that make it impossible to recover large parts of the world that we have known.

Bill McKibben

Talk passionately and act compassionately. The only thing you can do in your life to win the world is to be a kind speaker and a kind listener. That's what makes the humankind. Kind listening and kind speaking. Passionately talk and compassionately act.