A Quote by Robert A. Agresta
It is often said that our modern world is incapable of self-government.
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
We Americans think we enjoy self-government. We have all the trappings of self-government, like elections. But in reality, we have gradually lost many of our rights to govern ourselves. We have the form of self-government, but only some of the substance. We are, in a sense, a nation run by a handful of judges who often enforce, not the law, but their personal opinions.
I now proceed to demonstrate that the Mexicans are wholly incapable of self-government, and that our liberties, our fortunes and our lives are insecure so long as we are connected with them.
The idea of self-government is foreign to Americans. ... Self-government is a form of self-control, self-limitation. It goes against our whole grain. We're supposed to go after what we want, not question whether we really need it.
Ignorance and bigotry, like other insanities, are incapable of self-government.
If the new government rejects our urgent appeal, we will, next year, in solidarity with our people, intensify our struggle for self-determination, our struggle for national liberation to establish self-government in our homeland.
We insist on producing a farm surplus, but think the government should find a profitable market for it. We overindulge in speculation, but ask the government to prevent panics. Now the only way to hold the government entirely responsible for conditions is to give up our liberty for a dictatorship. If we continue the more reasonable practice of managing our own affairs we must bear the burdens of our own mistakes. A free people cannot shift their responsibility for them to the government. Self-government means self-reliance.
In a true community we will not choose our companions, for our choices are so often limited by self-serving motives. Instead, our companions will be given to us by grace. Often they will be persons who will upset our settled view of self and world. In fact, we might define true community as the place where the person you least want to live with always lives
It is often said that in today's modern and postmodern world that the forces of darkness are upon us. But I think not; in the Dark and the Deep there are truths that can always heal. It is not the forces of darkness but of shallowness that everywhere threaten the true, and the good, and the beautiful, and that ironically announce themselves as deep and profound. It is an exuberant and fearess shallowness that everywhere is the modern danger, the modern threat, and that everywhere nonetheless calls to us as savior.
When you are gentled and quieted in your heart, you are incapable of relating to disappointment, incapable of feeling sorry for your self.
We demand entire freedom of action and then expect the government in some miraculous way to save us from the consequences of our own acts.... Self-government means self-reliance.
When our troubles are many we are often by grace made courageous in serving our God; we feel that we have nothing to live for in this world, and we are driven, by hope of the world to come, to exhibit zeal, self-denial, and industry.
Many said selfishness was the flaw of our modern age; but then self-conceit emerged from a corner of the deepest hell to join selfishness.
In modern Russia, you have no official, formal assessment of this past. Nobody in any Russian document has said that the policy of the Soviet government was criminal, that it was terrible. No one has ever said this.
We're all born listeners. And as a result of our modern lives, and living in a world that has less meaning than the natural world that we evolved to hear, we learn to think of listening not as taking in all the information with equal value, which is the definition of true listening. In our modern world, we tend to think of listening as focusing our attention on what is important and filtering out everything else.
As artists, it's tempting to forget the audience's needs. Too often, we're self-centered and self-indulgent in what we share with the world. We're prideful, only showing what we deem as perfect or what we think our peers will respect.
One of the great unresolved psychological enigmas of the modern western world is the question of what or who has persuaded us to accept as virtually axiomatic a self-view and a world-view that demand we reject out of hand the wisdom and vision of our major philosophers and poets in order to imprison our thought and our very selves in the materialist, mechanical and dogmatic torture-chamber devised by purely quantitative and third-rate scientific minds.
Related Authors
Irving Kahn Quotes
American
Investor
Ted Leonsis Quotes
American
Investor
Walter Schloss Quotes
American
Investor
Warren Hellman Quotes
American
Investor