"The predominant world view shared by the majority of American Indian nations is that of the circularity of existence. It is a universe in which, as Black Elk put it, 'the Power of the world always works in a circle and everything tries to be round.' The cycle of the seasons, the circling of the sun and moon, even the round shapes of the nests of birds, are evidence of this. Just as every point on a circle is equal to every other point, no place being closer to the center than any other, all created things are regarded as being of equal importance. All things — not only humans and animals and plants, but even the winds, the waters, fire, and the stones — are living and sentient. Further, just as the strands of a spider web are so interconnected that touching one makes all the others tremble, in that circular universe everything is connected to everything else."  --Joseph Bruchac

"Trickster was eating. Only one piece of meat remained on his plate. He reached for it with both hands. His right hand grabbed one side of that piece of meat and his left hand grabbed the other.

" 'This meat is mine,' said his right hand.

" 'No, it is mine,' said his left hand.

"Trickster tried to stop them, but his hands would not listen. They began to struggle over that piece of meat. They tugged back and forth. Finally his hands got so angry that they attacked each other with knives. The scars from that fight can be seen as the lines on every person's palms."  --Joseph Bruchac

"There is no death. Only a change of worlds."  --Chief Si'ahl [Seattle], Suquamish Chief

“Just be yourself. People will see it eventually. Just be yourself.”  --Pedro Pascal

“It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.”  --Eleanor Roosevelt, US delegate to the UN 

“There are different kinds of knowledge, all equally necessary to the perfection of human life: knowledge of what is true, knowledge of what is good, and knowledge of what is beautiful.”  --Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (1912)

"A great composer's music will always last and last, perhaps forever, because people keep on feeling emotion whenever they hear it. And that lasting quality is perhaps the most important meaning of the word 'classical'. A classic is something that lasts forever."  --Leonard Bernstein

“It’s important to protect people, especially those simply asking for the right to exist in bodies that belong to them and in the world that they never asked to be brought into.

“It’s a very, very small, vulnerable, inspiring, courageous and brave community that fills me with a lot of inspiration. Therefore, it’s very important to protect that. They would do that for us.”  --Pedro Pascal

“The nature of moral judgments depends on our capacity for paying attention.”  --Susan Sontag

On Turning the Other Cheek

The fact that the world today is what it is suggests, to say the least, that this concept is far from being cherished universally. The reasons for its unpopularity are twofold. First, what is required for this concept to be put into effect is a margin of democracy. This is precisely what 86 percent of the globe lacks. Second, the common sense that tells a victim that his only gain in turning the other cheek and not responding in kind yields, at best, a moral victory, i.e., quite immaterial. The natural reluctance to expose yet another part of your body to a blow is justified by a suspicion that this sort of conduct only agitates and enhances Evil; that moral victory can be mistaken by the adversary for his impunity.

[...]

But whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also

And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.

And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.

The meaning of these lines is anything but passive for it suggests that evil can be made absurd through excess; it suggests rendering evil absurd through dwarfing its demands with the volume of your compliance, which devalues the harm. This sort of thing puts a victim into a very active position, into the position of a mental aggressor. The victory that is possible here is not a moral but an existential one.

[...]

I must admit that I feel somewhat uneasy talking about these things: because turning or not turning that other cheek is, after all, an extremely intimate affair. The encounter always occurs on a one-to-one basis. It’s always your skin, your coat and cloak, and it is your limbs that will have to do the walking. To advise, let alone to urge, anyone about the use of these properties is, if not entirely wrong, indecent. All I aspire to do here is to erase from your minds a cliché that harmed so many and yielded so little. I also would like to instill in you the idea that as long as you have your skin, coat, cloak, and limbs, you are not yet defeated, whatever the odds are."

--Joseph Brodsky

"The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even — if you will — eccentricity. That is, something that can’t be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned impostor couldn’t be happy with. Something, in other words, that can’t be shared, like your own skin — not even by a minority."  --Joseph Brodsky

 "... I changed my mind and do no longer speak of “radical evil.” … It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never “radical,” that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither death nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is “thought-defying,” as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality.” Only the good has depth that can be radical." --Hannah Arendt

“All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die.”  --John Steinbeck

"The holes of oblivion [alternative facts] do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story.

[…]

"The lesson of such stories is simple and within everybody’s grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that “it could happen” in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation."  --Hannah Arendt

“Throughout our nervous history, we have constructed pyramidic towers of evil, ofttimes in the name of good.”  --Maya Angelou

"What we regard as Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good.”  --Joseph Brodsky

“Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it.”  --Simone Weil

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."  --Philip K. Dick

 

"The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not."  --Philip K. Dick

 “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”  --Philip K. Dick

“What is essential is invisible to the eye.”  --Antoine de Saint-Exupéry  

"Charlie Kirk himself understood that politics today is performed through provocation, memes, and culture war — what Utah’s Governor Spencer Cox calls “algorithmically incentivized ghoulishness.” Kirk thrived in that world, mixing the habits of a democratic debater with the instincts of a pugilist. His method was to provoke, to needle, to troll — often in the name of debate and free speech. That mix — democratic in aspiration, combative in style — made him both a powerful voice in America’s fractured public square and a symbol of its degradation. His murder, so young, at the hands of a young man undone by the same meme-saturated culture is a tragic irony. It shows just how thin the line has become between pluralist debate and weaponized alienation."  --Roger Berkowitz, The Fine Line Between Pluralist Debate and Weaponized Alienation

"We can take this moment in history and continue to delude ourselves about our violent past and present condition, relying on our most primitive instincts, or we can decide to come together and demand a humanitarian path forward. A path that sees respect for the human condition, one that ensures we take care of each other, one that does not determine a person's value based on who they voted for but instead recognizes the cardinal virtue of every human being–here and abroad."  --Nina Turner

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."  --Martin Luther King, Jr.

“This world, as we all know, can be so full of criticism and discrimination and negativity. So, to get to be part of something… that can bring you light, make you smile, make you dance… I’m so grateful. So grateful to do that.”  --Sabrina Carpenter 

"While isolation concerns only the political realm of life, loneliness concerns human life as a whole. Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without destroying the public realm of life, that is, without destroying, by isolating men, their political capacities. But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content with this isolation and destroys private life as well. It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man."  --Hannah Arendt

"Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men* as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist."  --Hannah Arendt

 “Love, but be careful what you love.”  --Saint Augustine 

“Hell is empty, the devils are all here.”  --Shakespeare     

“The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with the bone.”  --Shakespeare  

“Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage. It is a tale told by an idiot. Full of Sound and Fury, signifying nothing.”  --Shakespeare   

"With awe and wonder you look around, recognizing the preciousness of the earth, the sanctity of every human being on the planet, the ultimate unity and interdependence of all beings - somos todos un pais. Love swells in your chest and shoots out of your heart chakra, linking you to everyone/everything. ... You share a category of identity wider than any social position or racial label. This conocimiento motivates you to work actively to see that no harm comes to people, animals, ocean - to take up spiritual activism and

the work of healing.  --Gloria E. Anzaldua, _now let us shift ... the path of conocimiento ... inner work, public acts_ (2008)

"[Alexander von] Humboldt revolutionized the way we see the natural world. He found connections everywhere. Nothing, not even the tiniest organism, was looked at on its own. “In this great chain of causes and effects,” Humboldt said, “no single fact can be considered in isolation.” With this insight, he invented the web of life, the concept of nature as we know it today.

"When nature is perceived as a web, its vulnerability also becomes obvious. Everything hangs together. If one thread is pulled, the whole tapestry may unravel."  --Andrea Wulf

"In the autocracy that is taking shape from the executive branch in 2025, there is no perceptible ideological logic. There are whiffs of nativism, manifest destiny, and isolationism borrowed from pre-1945 American history. But greed, an addictive desire for fame, and a wide enthusiasm for the theatrical capacity to dominate the public arena with nostalgic myths — a talent Donald Trump undeniably possesses — are at the center of Trumpism. Fame and wealth are Trump’s only currencies, aside from a perverse pleasure in humiliating individuals and celebrating cruelty, primarily in the acts of detention and deportation, and threats of legal prosecution without just cause. There is no idealism except some extreme version of Ayn Rand’s glorification of individualism, selfishness, and self-interest. Whatever Trump may stand for, it is a far cry from the traditional ideals of American democracy and a pluralist society — a “melting pot” of sorts — based in part on a long history of immigration from many different continents and cultures.”  --Leon Botstein