A Quote by Neil MacGregor
The collapse of the Tower of Babel is perhaps the central urban myth. It is certainly the most disquieting. In Babylon, the great city that fascinated and horrified the Biblical writers, people of different races and languages, drawn together in pursuit of wealth, tried for the first time to live together - and failed.
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The city Babel is the Ham-like man, who builds this city upon the earth; the tower is his self-chosen god, and divine worship. All reason-taught, from the school of this world, are the master-builders of this tower.
We've never slammed people over the head or made 'The Flash' an after-school special. With us, it's always been presenting the world in which we live. The world in which we live, men and women work together; different races work together, and you have gay friends, and people have relationships. We just try to show that.
Music shouldn't be based around money or politics. Music should be a bunch of people that really do great songs together doing them together for the pursuit of having a good time.
In sports, a team is surrounded with people with different backgrounds, with different races, and with different religions. In order to win, everybody comes together. I feels like that's what the U.S.A. represents. Everyone just has to come together in order to win.
Great rewards will come to those who can live together, learn together, work together, forge new ties that bind together.
So these are the kind of things that now when people are trying to move towards multiracial congregations that they're stressing. They're talking about these scriptures that say we ought to come together, and that at Pentecost, when that the Holy Spirit is said to have come upon the first Christians, they were given the ability to speak in different languages, and so that no matter who the people were, they could all worship together.
We seem to be in a really interesting time, a time of weird change and values and choices, and "Who are you really? Where's the revolution, and what does it mean to you? What are your choices?" To me, America is built on immigrants - everybody coming here and making America "Great," as Donald Trump would say. And that's what New York is, a melting pot for all these different races and religions. We all live on this little island together and somehow get on, some days. But most of the time it's proven to have worked, right? So I don't know what the f - k he's talking about.
I am tired of people using 'diverse' to mean 'of color.' That's not what that word means. 'Diversity' means people of all different races, all together - like a New York City subway.
Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.
Nothing has done more to bring people of different races and different backgrounds together than athletics, certainly more than politicians have done. It's why the Greeks invented the Olympics.
By 2050, seven out of ten people will live in cities, which will account for six billion people living in urban areas. That phenomenon is central to all the challenges humanity faces. If there is an issue to be addressed, then it is certainly happening in cities and therefore must be considered on an urban scale.
America is a collection of people from different races, religions, and backgrounds - that is part of what makes us great. But a common language is what brings all of those people together to form a community.
I love working together with Dean McDermott. We love - we actually are a couple that do everything together even when we're not working. So for us, this is the best venue for our relationship because we get to spend all our time together. And I think for other couples, you know, perhaps they didn't spend all their time together and then all of a sudden they were stuck together all the time, and they couldn't make it work. But for us it works.
Well, T Bone's had a remarkable career as a producer since the time that we first worked together. He was dividing his time between recording and producing when we first met, and touring. We toured together and we were great friends.
When all men were of one language, some of them built a high tower, as if they would thereby ascend up to heaven, but the gods sent storms of wind and overthrew the tower, and gave every one his peculiar language; and for this reason it was that the city was called Babylon.
The late British-born philosopher Alan Watts, in one of his wonderful lectures on eastern philosophy, used this analogy: "If I draw a circle, most people, when asked what I have drawn, will say I have drawn a circle or a disc, or a ball. Very few people will say I've drawn a hole in the wall, because most people think of the inside first, rather than thinking of the outside. But actually these two sides go together--you cannot have what is 'in here' unless you have what is out there.' " In other words, where we are is vital to who we are.
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