A Quote by Michela Wrong
When a society is criticised by outsiders, its members wince but shrug their shoulders. 'What you can expect from strangers?' is the feeling. When the attack comes from within, no such indulgence is shown. 'He was one of us,' runs the refrain.
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A society is a group whose members have more relationships with one another then they do with outsiders.
You can't win with some people. If you're not in government, you're criticised for being not serious. If you are in government, you're criticised for wanting power. That's the Labour party's line of attack, and it's a bit ridiculous.
When you expect to get into a negotiation, you expect to be faced by a guy that's going to attack you, a guy or gal that's going to attack or that they're going to try to get the best of you. Two-thirds of us, that makes us very defensive.
There is an innate fear that runs within Israeli society of all that we see and hear around us, and you know what? It's a natural reaction of human beings.
I've even said to other countries - I've said, "Listen, you're charging us a lot. We're going to charge you the same thing." They shrug their shoulders. They can't fight it.
Most people, I've noticed, are instinctively harsh to strangers. They expect every approach to be an attack, every question to be an interruption.
What makes us Christians shrug our shoulders when we ought to be flexing our muscles? What makes us apathetic in a day when there are loads to lift, a world to be won and captives to be set free? Why are so many bored when the times demand action?
We have an incredible capacity for the worst possible evil, all of us, it was that we also have this incredible capacity for good. And that is why we are all of us appalled when something bad happens. Because if the bad was the norm, we would just shrug our shoulders and say "well tough luck, this is how the cookie crumbles" kind of thing but none of us does that.
GUILLOTINE, n. A machine which makes a Frenchman shrug his shoulders with good reason.
The radicals who perpetrated the Charlie Hebdo attack were not motivated by Western imperialism but by members of a free society violating Islamic law.
People always ask me, 'Lech, aren't you afraid of being killed?' And as an answer I shrug my shoulders.
It’s a strange sort of attack, to be sure: a wonderfully pacific attack, a supportive attack, an attack without the slightest intention or capacity to cause harm, consisting, as it does, of the earnest wish of certain loving couples to join themselves to that very institution and thus to feel themselves, and be accepted as, full members of the American (and human) family.
It is as absurd to expect members of philosophy departments to be philosophers as it is to expect members of art departments to be artists.
We must honor our dragons, encourage them to be worthy destroyers, expect they'll strive to cut us down. It is their duty to ridicule us, it is their job to demean us, to force us if they can to stop being different! And when we walk our way no matter their fire and their fury, our dragons shrug when we're out of sight, return to their card-games philosophical: 'Ah well, we can't toast 'em all...'
If it were (Is it not) outrageous that society should treat with such rigid precision those of its members who were most poorly endowed in the distribution or wealth that chance had made, and who were, therefore, most worthy of indulgence.
Of course in Turkey I'm seen as being on the 'Western' side, criticised by the nationalists, criticised by the communitarians as not belonging. Even, sometimes, criticised for looking at my country through Western eyes. And in the Western media I'm portrayed as belonging to the East.
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