Daniel Moore > Daniel's Quotes

“Throughout history we humans have struggled to find meaning in the awesome contradiction of our human condition. Neither philosophy, nor psychology nor biology has, until now, been able to provide the truthful explanation.”
― Jeremy Griffith, FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

—T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets (Gardners Books; Main edition, April 30, 2001) Originally published 1943.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?”
― William Blake

“We humans have cooperative, selfless and loving moral instincts, the voice or expression of which we call our conscience—which is the complete opposite of competitive, selfish and aggressive instincts. As Charles Darwin said, "The moral sense… affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals.”
― Jeremy Griffith, FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition

“The moral sense perhaps affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals”
― Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

“Essentially, what has happened is that humans have become so habituated to living in Plato’s dark cave of denial that when finally given the means to exit the cave and stand in the warm, healing sunshine of self-understanding,”
― Jeremy Griffith, FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition

“We humans don’t suffer from a genetic-opportunism-driven ‘animal condition’, but a conscious-mind-based, psychologically troubled HUMAN CONDITION.”
― Jeremy Griffith, FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition

“In a world fast going crazy from the effects of the human condition, this is the now desperately needed reconciling understanding that brings about a new world for humans FREE of the agony of the human condition. In short, this is the understanding that ends human suffering and unites the human race.”
― Jeremy Griffith, FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition

“The playwright George Bernard Shaw also warned of how difficult it is to introduce a new paradigm of thinking — especially one that dares to confront the historically unbearably confronting and off-limits subject of the human condition — when he said that ‘All great truths begin as blasphemies’ (Annajanska, 1919).”
― Jeremy Griffith, The Interview: How We Can Finally End All the Turmoil & Suffering in the World!

“Bonobos provide the perfect evidence for how our distant ape ancestors became cooperative and loving.”
― Jeremy Griffith, The Interview: How We Can Finally End All the Turmoil & Suffering in the World!

“The human condition is the immensely mentally insecure and psychologically distressed state that all humans have suffered from as a result of a clash between our species’ original non-understanding, dictatorial, instinctive orientations to the world, and our newer fully conscious mind that needs to understand the world to operate.”
― Jeremy Griffith, The Human Condition: What exactly is it, what caused it, and how the human race has finally liberated itself from the horror of it.

“The World Transformation Movement is the disseminator of this psychologically relieving and transforming, Instinct vs Intellect, ‘holy grail of insight’ explanation of the human condition—the insight humanity has tirelessly worked toward, yearned for, and now so desperately needs!”
― Jeremy Griffith, The Human Condition: What exactly is it, what caused it, and how the human race has finally liberated itself from the horror of it.

“The agony of being unable to answer the question of why are we the way we are, divisively instead of cooperatively behaved, has been the particular burden of life. It has been our species' particular affliction or condition — our human condition.”
― Jeremy Griffith, FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition

“Love is unconditional selflessness”
― Jeremy Griffith, FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition

“What's needed on Earth is love of the dark side of ourselves”
― Jeremy Griffith, FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition

“The increasingly thoughtful child can see the whole horribly upset world and would be understandably totally bewildered and deeply troubled by it”
― Jeremy Griffith, FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition

“The truth is, the hypocrisy of humans is everywhere”
― Jeremy Griffith

“A fresh approach is needed — an analysis of our human situation from a basis that recognises and confronts the psychological dimension to our behaviour”
― Jeremy Griffith, FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition

“….So much crueller than any British colony, they say, so much more brutal towards the local Africans, so much more manipulative after begrudgingly granting independence. But the history of British colonialism in Africa, from Sierra Leone to Zimbabwe, Kenya to Botswana and else-where, is not fundamentally different from what Belgium did in the Congo. You can argue about degree, but both systems were predicated on the same assumption: that white outsiders knew best and Africans were to be treated not as partners, but as underlings. What the British did in Kenya to suppress the pro-independence mau-mau uprising in the 1950s, using murder, torture and mass imprisonment, was no more excusable than the mass arrests and political assassinations committed by Belgium when it was trying to cling on to the Congo. And the outside world's tolerance of a dictator in the Congo like Mobutu, whose corruption and venality were overlooked for strategic expedience, was no different from what happened in Zimbabwe, where the dictator Robert Mugabe was allowed to run his country and its people into the ground because Western powers gullibly accepted the way he presented himself as the only leader able to guarantee stability and an end to civil strife. Those sniffy British colonial types might not like to admit it, but the Congo represents the quintessence of the entire continent’s colonial experience. It might be extreme and it might be shocking, but what happened in the Congo is nothing but colonialism in its purest, basest form.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart

“And he had distilled the quintessential problem of Africa that generations of academics, intellectuals and observers have danced around since the colonial powers withdrew. Why are Africans so bad at running Africa?”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

“When going on a journey it is not just the strength of a man’s legs, but the provisions he prepares for the trip.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: The Terrifying Journey through the World's Most Dangerous Country

“The old man might have been drunk, but he was right. Outsiders have robbed and exploited the people of the Congo ever since the days of the first European and Arab slavers. The territory that Stanley staked in the name of Leopold witnessed what many regard as the first genocide of the modern era, when millions of Congolese were effectively worked to death trying to meet the colonialists’ almost insatiable demand for resources, most notably rubber. And since independence, foreign powers have toyed with the Congo, stripping its mineral assets and exploiting its strategic position, never mindful of the suffering inflicted on its people. And that really was the point. At every stage of its bloody history, outsiders have tended to treat Congolese as somehow sub-human, not worthy of the consideration they would expect for themselves. For progress to be made, outsiders must treat Congolese as equals and they could do worse than follow the example of an amazing white woman I discovered after we got back to Kalemie.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart

“The statesmen leaving the Berlin Congress smugly convinced themselves that the people of Bosnia would benefit from the diplomatic finesse of having the Western Austro-Hungarians replace the Eastern Ottomans. What they had actually done, however, was quite the opposite, sowing seeds of resentment that would eventually destroy the status quo of the entire Western world.”
― Tim Butcher, The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War

“As my history teachers drilled into me, the First World War provided the preconditions for the Second World War and thereby the tension of the Cold War. The war of 1914–18 was Ground Zero for modern history, the end of an old order that had held sway for hundreds of years, the fiery forging of a new world.”
― Tim Butcher, The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War

“the normal laws of development are inverted here in the Congo. The forest, not the town, offers the safest sanctuary and it is grandfathers who have been more exposed to modernity than their grandchildren. I can think of nowhere else on the planet where the same can be true.” p141”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart

“It's like zen. Only not as subtle.”
― J. J. Connolly, Layer Cake

“Meditation is concentrating the front of the mind with a mundane task so the rest of the mind can find peace.”
― J.J. Connolly, Layer Cake

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“...things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life