Social Activists

"Each time a door closes, the rest of the world opens us. All we need to do is stop pounding on the door that just closed, turn around—which puts the door behind us—and welcome the largeness of life that now lies open to our souls. The door that closed kept us from entering a room, but what now lies before us is the rest of reality."

"In depression, the built-in bunk detector that we all possess is not only turned on but is set on high."

"When I understand this liability as a trade-off for my strengths, something new and liberating arises within me. I no longer want to have my liability “fixed”—by learning how to dance solo, for example, when no one wants to dance with me—for to do that would be to compromise or even destroy my gift."

"… honoring one’s created nature"

"Our strongest gifts are usually those we are barely aware of possessing. They are a part of our God-given nature, with us from the moment we drew first breath, and we are no more conscious of having them than we are of breathing."

"One of the hardest things we must sometimes do is to be present to another person's pain without trying to fix it, to simply stand respectfully at the edge of that person’s mystery and misery."

"Over the years I have met people who have made a very human claim on me by making known their need to be loved. For a long time my response was instant and reflexive, born of the "oughts" I had absorbed: "Of course you need to be loved. Everyone does. And I love you." It took me a long time to understand that although everyone needs to be loved, I cannot be the source of that gift for everyone who asks me for it. There are some relationships in which I am capable of love and otters in which I am not. To pretend otherwise, to put out promissory notes I am unable to honor, is to damage my own integrity and that of the person in need, all in the name of love."

"Here is another example of violating one's nature in the name of nobility, an example that shows the larger dangers of false love. Years ago, I heard Dorothy Day speak. Founder of the Catholic Worker movement, her long-term commitment to living among the poor on New York's Lower East Side—not just serving them but sharing their condition—had made her one of my heroes. So it came as a great shock. when in the middle of her talk, I heard her start to ruminate about the "ungrateful poor." I did not understand how such a dismissive phrase could come from the lips of a saint—until it hit me with the force of a Zen koan. Dorothy Day was saying, "Do not give to the poor expecting to get their gratitude so that you can feel good about yourself. If you do, your giving will be thin and short-lived, and that is not what the poor need; it will only impoverish them further. Give only if you have something you must give; give only if you are someone for whom giving is its own reward.""

"When the gift I give to the other is integral to my own nature, when it comes from a place of organic reality within me, it will renew itself—and me—even as I give it away. Only when I give something that does not grow within me do I deplete myself and harm the other as well, for only harm can come from a gift that is forced, inorganic, unreal."

"If I try to be or do something noble that has nothing to do with who I am, I may look good to others and to myself for a while. But the fact that I an exceeding my limits will eventually have consequences. I will distort myself, the other, and our relationship—and may end up doing more damage than if I had never set out to do this particular “good.”"

"If we are unfaithful to true self, we will extract the price from others."

"I waste energy on anger rather than investing it in hope."

"The attempt to live by the reality of our own nature, which means our limits as well as our potentials, is a profoundly moral regimen."

"I was fired because that job had little to do with who I am, with my true nature and gifts, what I care and do not care about. My resort to adolescent rebellion reflected that simple fact. … I was laughing to keep myself sane. Perhaps the research I was doing was what a good sociologist “ought” to do, but it felt meaningless to me, and I felt fraudulent doing it. Those feelings were harbingers of things to come, things that eventually led me out of the profession altogether. Obviously I should have dealt with my feeling more directly and exercised more self-control. Either I should have quit that job under my own steam or settled in and done the work properly. But sometimes the "shoulds" do not work because the life one is living runs crosswise to the grain of one's soul. At that time of my life, I had no feeling for the grain of my soul and of which way was crosswise. Not knowing what was driving me, I behaved with blind but blissful unconsciousness—and reality responded by giving me a big and hard-to-take clue about who I am."

"The idea of vocation I picked up in those circles created distortion until I grew strong enough to discard it. I mean the idea that vocation, or calling, comes from a voice external to ourselves, a voice of moral demand that asks us to become someone we are not yet—someone different, someone better, someone just beyond our reach. That concept of vocation is rooted in a deep distrust of selfhood, in the belief that the sinful self will always be “selfish” unless corrected by external forces of virtue. It is a notion that made me feel inadequate to the task of living my own life, creating guilt about the distance between who I was and who I was supposed to be."

"As young people, we are surrounded by expectations that may have little to do with who we really are, expectations held by people who are not trying to discern our selfhood but to fit us into slots. In families, schools, workplaces, and religious communities, we are trained away from true self toward images of acceptability; under social pressures … our original shape is deformed beyond recognition; and we ourselves, driven by fear, too often betray true self to gain the approval of others."

"If the engineer does not honor the nature of the steel or the wood or the stone, his or her failure will go well beyond aesthetics: the bridge or the building will collapse and put human life in peril. The human self also has a nature, limits as well as potentials. If you seek vocation without understanding the material you are working with, what you build with your life will be ungainly and may well put lives in peril, your own and some of those around you. “Faking it” in the service of high values is no virtue and has nothing to do with vocation. It is an ignorant, sometimes arrogant, attempt to override one’s nature, and it will always fail."

"The irony, often tragic, is that by embracing the scarcity assumption, we create the very scarcities we fear. … We create scarcity by fearfully accepting it as law and by competing with others for resources."

"A scholar is committed to building on knowledge that others have gathered, correcting it, confirming it, enlarging it. But I have always wanted to think my own thoughts about a subject without being overly influenced by what others have thought before me."

"Reality—including one’s own—is divine, not to be defied but honored."

"How can the government stop anyone from protesting? The land is not their 'father's property'. The citizens are the masters of this country and the ministers are their servants."

"If we want to rid the country of corruption, we have to take the initiative. We can’t keep waiting for someone else to do it."

"My fight is for the people. I will not allow my country to be looted anymore."

"This is not the time to sit back and relax. It's time to wake up and save the country."

"Every drop of my blood will contribute to the growth of this nation. I will keep fighting till my last breath."

"True patriotism is not just about waving the flag. It is about giving back to the country and standing up for what is right."

"It does not seem to me that the evidence concerning the being of a God, and concerning immortality, is such as to enable us to assert anything in regard to either of these topics."

"The United States has lost her unique position as a leader in the progress of civilization and has taken up her place simply as one of the grasping and selfish nations of the present day."

"The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent."

""There never was a good war," said Franklin. There have indeed been many wars in which a good man must take part, and take part with grave gladness to die if need be, a willing sacrifice, thankful to give life for what is dearer than life, and happy that even by death in war he is serving the cause of peace. But if a war be undertaken for the most righteous end, before the resources of peace have been tried and proved vain to secure it, that war has no defense, it is a national crime."

"In one of the Cremona hospitals, an Italian doctor had said: "We keep the good things for our friends of the Allied Army, and give our enemies the bare necessities. If they die, so much the worse!" and he added, to excuse these barbarous words, that he had heard from some Italian soldiers who had returned from Verona and Mantua, that the Austrians allowed the wounded of the Franco-Sardinian army to die uncared for. A noble lady of Cremona, Countess..., who had heard the doctor's words and had been devoting herself to the hospitals with the utmost zeal, made haste to show her disapproval by declaring that she gave exactly the same attention to the Austrians as to the Allies, and made no difference between friends and enemies. "For, she said, "Our Lord Jesus Christ made no such distinctions between men in well doing.""

"By Thy power, let there be peace, O God!"

"I was a mere tourist with no part whatever in this great conflict; but it was my rare privilege, through an unusual train of circumstances, to witness the moving scenes that I have resolved to describe. In these pages I give only my personal impressions; so my readers should not look here for specific details, nor for information on strategic matters; these things have their place in other writings."

"Why could not advantage be taken of a time of relative calm and quiet to investigate and try to solve a question of such immense and worldwide importance, both from the humane and Christian stand-point?"

"今天，我被起訴指控的罪名，是涉嫌「煽動顛覆政權和推翻制度」。這是一項嚴重的控罪，卻與我所做過的事，沒有多少法律關係...掌權的人和執法的者並不是為了六四而把我投獄，他們另有目的。"

"這個是人類歷史上的一個慘劇，而且是有大量的人為的因素造成的慘劇。天網恢恢，疏而不漏。"

"We have carried out the attempted premeditated murder of an entire nation. We were caught in that criminal act and have been obstructed. Now we have to suffer the punishment.... In the Balkan Wars, Serbia not only doubled its territory, but also its external enemies."

"It is now necessary to face the truth and to acknowledge against all prejudices that the struggle that the Albanian tribe is leading today is a natural and unavoidable historic struggle for a different political life than that experienced under Turkish rule – different also from that which its neighbours Serbia, Greece and Montenegro would like to force upon the Albanians."

"Grouping and mutuality of countries and peoples in the Balkans is the only road that leads to economic, national and political liberation."

"Unlimited enmity of the Albanian people against Serbia is the foremost real result of the Albanian policies of the Serbian government. The second and more dangerous result is the strengthening of two big powers in Albania, which have the greatest interests in the Balkans."

"I have no sense of why I lost my freedom and if you do not know how you lost something, how can you protect it?""

"The 81 days of detention were a nightmare. I am not unique; it happened to many people in China. Conditions were extreme, created by a system that thinks it is above the law and has become a kind of monstrous machine. There were so many moments when I felt desperate and hopeless. But still, the next morning, I heard the birds singing."

"I often ask myself if I am afraid of being detained again. I love freedom as much as anybody else, maybe more than most. But it is a tragedy to live your life in fear. It is worse than actually losing your freedom."

"China has not established the rule of law and thus there is no justice."

"This simple form of repression, of using the method of not letting anyone speak, will never succeed."

"The most unfair things that could have happened in a society fell upon a blind man. This is something that no one can accept or explain away with any excuse. Everyone will ask: 'Do we actually have to exist in a society like this?'"

"I will never leave China, unless I am forced to. Because China is mine. I will not leave something that belongs to me in the hands of people I do not trust."

"At midnight they can come into your room and take you away. They can put a black hood on you, take you to a secret place and interrogate you, trying to stop what you’re doing. They threaten people, your family, saying: 'Your children won’t find jobs.'"

"The Internet is uncontrollable. And if the Internet is uncontrollable, freedom will win. It’s as simple as that."

"China might seem quite successful in its controls, but it has only raised the water level. It’s like building a dam: it thinks there is more water so it will build higher. But every drop of water is still in there. It doesn’t understand how to let the pressure out. It builds up a way to maintain control and push the problem to the next generation."