“This instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing,” she said. “Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.”
– Meryl Streep
Thank you Meryl Streep for reminding us to question and speak up. Read her full Golden Globes speech, or watch it here.
“In a small room one does not say what one would in a large room.”
– Louis Kahn
“When people talk, listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out, know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling. Try that for practice.”
– Ernest Hemingway
(via)
“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.”
– Maya Angelou
(via @DesignCrush)
George Michael in 1990 describing the role of the media in manipulating people into cruelty and lack of compassion.
(via Sarah Kendzior)
“Those who have no shame have no honor.”
– Ethiopian proverb
“What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it. Don’t complain.”
― Maya Angelou
“Tyranny does not begin with violence; it begins with the first gesture of collaboration. Its most enduring crime is drawing decent men and women into its siege of truth.”
– Evan Osnos, When Tyranny Takes Hold
(via Caterina Fake)
“We should spare ourselves the burden of loneliness. We are far from the only ones with this problem. Everyone is more anxious than they are inclined to tell us. Even the tycoon and the couple in love are suffering. We’ve collectively failed to admit to ourselves what we are truly like.”
A long and interesting read: Calm by Alan de Botton
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
— R. Buckminster Fuller
“Let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.…
And stand together, yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”– Kahlil Gibran
The Difficult Balance of Intimacy and Independence: Beloved Philosopher and Poet Kahlil Gibran on the Secret to a Loving and Lasting Relationship
“The purpose of life is to discover your gift.
The work of life is to develop it.
The meaning of life is to give your gift away.”
– David Viscott
From the book: “Finding Your Strength in Difficult Times: A Book of Meditations”
“If there were one word that could act as a standard of conduct for one’s entire life, perhaps it would be thoughtfulness.”
– Confucius
“The truth is: Belonging starts with self-acceptance. Your level of belonging, in fact, can never be greater than your level of self-acceptance, because believing that you’re enough is what gives you the courage to be authentic, vulnerable and imperfect.”
– Brene Brown
‘A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.’
– Albert Camus
(via)
Hope is a state of mind, not a state of the world
Either we have hope within us or we don’t.
Hope is not a prognostication—it’s an orientation of the spirit.
You can’t delegate that to anyone else.
Hope in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy
when things are going well,
or the willingness to invest in enterprises
that are obviously headed for early success,
but rather an ability to work for something to succeed.
Hope is definitely NOT the same as optimism.
It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well,
but the certainty that something makes sense,
regardless of how it turns out.
It is hope, above all, that gives us strength to live
and to continually try new things,
even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.
In the face of this absurdity, life is too precious a thing
to permit its devaluation by living pointlessly, emptily,
without meaning, without love, and, finally, without hope.
– Vaclav Havel
(via a commenter in this post)
“People are complicated… Societies and cultures are really complicated… These are living organisms, and it’s messy. And your job as a citizen and as a decent human being is to constantly affirm and lift up and fight for treating people with kindness and respect and understanding.”
– Barack Obama
From this New Yorker piece by David Remnik.
(via)
“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.”
– Toni Morrison
No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear: Toni Morrison on the Artist’s Task in Troubled Times
“Time heals what reason cannot!”
– Seneca
“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”
– Maya Angelou
“Both skepticism and wonder are skills that need honing and practice. Their harmonious marriage within the mind of every schoolchild ought to be a principal goal of public education. I’d love to see such a domestic felicity portrayed in the media, television especially: a community of people really working the mix — full of wonder, generously open to every notion, dismissing nothing except for good reason, but at the same time, and as second nature, demanding stringent standards of evidence — and these standards applied with at least as much rigor to what they hold dear as to what they are tempted to reject with impunity.”
– Carl Sagan
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
– Maya Angelou