A Quote by Wes Jackson
Our task is to build cultural fortresses to protect our emerging nativeness. They must be strong enough to hold at bay the powers of consumerism, the powers of greed and envy and pride. One of the most effective ways for this to come about would be for our universities to assume the awesome responsibility to both validate and educate those who want to be homecomers -- not necessarily to go home but to go someplace and dig in and begin the long search and experiment to become native.
Quote Topics
About
Assume
Awesome
Bay
Be Strong
Become
Begin
Both
Build
Come
Consumerism
Cultural
Dig
Educate
Effective
Emerging
Enough
Envy
Experiment
Fortresses
Go
Go Home
Greed
Hold
Home
Long
Most
Must
Native
Necessarily
Our
Powers
Pride
Protect
Responsibility
Search
Someplace
Strong
Strong Enough
Task
Those
Universities
Want
Ways
Would
Would Be
Quote Author
Related Quotes
It is for us to pray not for tasks equal to our powers, but for powers equal to our tasks, to go forward with a great desire forever beating at the door of our hearts as we travel toward our distant goal.
How long before we white people get over our bitter resentments about being demoted to the status of equality with non-whites? . . . How long until we white people will stop insisting that blacks exercise personal responsibility, build strong families, educate themselves enough to edit the Harvard Law Review, and work hard enough to become President of the United States, only to threaten to assassinate them when they do?
Everything - our houses, our clothes, our hairstyles - is meant to help us forget ourselves and to protect us from vanity, greed and envy, which are just forms of selfishness. If we have little, and want for little, and we are all equal, we envy no one.
We must be strong at home if we are going to be strong abroad. We understand that. So we want to be strong at home in our morale or in our spirit, we want to be strong intellectually, in our education, in our economy and, where necessary, militarily.
We do, then, most solemnly before God and the world declare that regardless of every consequence, at the risk of every distress, the arms we have been compelled to assume we will use with perseverance, exerting to their utmost energies all those powers which our Creator hath given us to preserve that liberty which he committed to us in sacred deposit and to protect from every hostile hand our lives and our properties.
If we believe in the rebirth of our civilization... then clearly this renaissance must begin in the chambers of our own hearts... We cannot wait for society to change, or for our institutions to be renewed. We, as individuals, must assume responsibility for our own personal transformation.
Recently, I was giving a speech and I said that it's time for many of us to "go home." Not necessarily to move back home but rather to go back to our communities and support those outreach programs and those people who could use our assistance.
If you or I want to be healthy (whether it's our digestion, our reproduction, our skin, or anything) we have to assume greater responsibility for our wellness. One of the best ways to do that is to be familiar with and to use on a regular basis, plant medicines.
Greed, envy, sloth, pride and gluttony: these are not vices anymore. No, these are marketing tools. Lust is our way of life. Envy is just a nudge towards another sale. Even in our relationships we consume each other, each of us looking for what we can get out of the other. Our appetites are often satisfied at the expense of those around us. In a dog-eat-dog world we lose part of our humanity.
If we would be sanctified, our course is clear and plain—we must begin with Christ. We must go to him as sinners, with no plea but that of utter need, and cast our souls on him by faith, for peace and reconciliation with God.... If we would grow in holiness and become more sanctified, we must continually go on as we began, and be ever making fresh applications to Christ.
We are more connected than ever before, more able to spread our ideas and beliefs, our anger and fears. As we exercise the right to advocate our views, and as we animate our supporters, we must all assume responsibility for our words and actions before they enter a vast echo chamber and reach those both serious and delirious, connected and unhinged.
The duty of universities is toward their nation, for which they must prepare leaders in all fields and these must be necessarily ethnically native. For it is intolerable that a nation educate for itself alien leaders in its universities.
Many of us incorrectly assume that a spiritual life begins when we change what we normally do in our daily life. We feel we must change our job, our living situation, our relationship, our address, our diet, or our clothes before we can truly begin a spiritual practice. And yet it is not the act but the awareness, the vitality, and the kindness we bring to our work that allows it to become sacred.
I want to build a bridge to the 21st century in which we create a strong and growing economy to preserve the legacy of opportunity for the next generation by balancing our budget in a way that protects our values and ensuring that every family will be able to own and protect the value of their most important asset, their home.
So we draw lines around our property, our counties, our cities, our states, our countries. And, boy, do we act as if those lines are important. I mean, we go to war. We will kill and die to protect those boundaries. Nature couldn't give two hoots about our national boundaries.
Take the Long Way Home is a song that I wrote that's on two levels - on one level I'm talking about not wanting to go home to the wife, 'take the long way home' because she treats you like part of the furniture. But there's a deeper level to the song, too. I really believe we all want to find our true home, find that place in us where we feel at home, and to me, home is in the heart. When we’re in touch with our heart and we're living our life from our heart, then we do feel like we found our home.
