Chris Yun > Chris's Quotes

“Love all, trust a few,
Do wrong to none: be able for thine enemy
Rather in power than use; and keep thy friend
Under thy own life's key: be check'd for silence,
But never tax'd for speech.”
― William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well

“Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth

“People don't need enormous cars; they need admiration and respect. They don't need a constant stream of new clothes; they need to feel that others consider them to be attractive, and they need excitement and variety and beauty. People don't need electronic entertainment; they need something interesting to occupy their minds and emotions. And so forth. Trying to fill real but nonmaterial needs-for identity, community, self-esteem, challenge, love, joy-with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to never-satisfied longings. A society that allows itself to admit and articulate its nonmaterial human needs, and to find nonmaterial ways to satisfy them, world require much lower material and energy throughputs and would provide much higher levels of human fulfillment.”
― Donella H. Meadows, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

“We don't think a sustainable society need be stagnant, boring, uniform, or rigid. It need not be, and probably could not be, centrally controlled or authoritarian. It could be a world that has the time, the resources, and the will to correct its mistakes, to innovate, to preserve the fertility of its planetary ecosystems. It could focus on mindfully increasing quality of life rather than on mindlessly expanding material consumption and the physical capital stock.”
― Donella H. Meadows Jorgen Randers Dennis Meadows, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update

“First, anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher
must "once in his life" withdraw into himself and attempt,
within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences
that, up to then, he has been accepting. Philosophy wisdom
(sagesse) is the philosophizer's quite personal affair. It must
arise as His wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending
toward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from
the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute
insights.”
― Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Public education does not serve a public. It creates a public. And in creating the right kind of public, the schools contribute toward strengthening the spiritual basis of the American Creed. That is how Jefferson understood it, how Horace Mann understood it, how John Dewey understood it, and in fact, there is no other way to understand it. The question is not, Does or doesn't public schooling create a public? The question is, What kind of public does it create? A conglomerate of self-indulgent consumers? Angry, soulless, directionless masses? Indifferent, confused citizens? Or a public imbued with confidence, a sense of purpose, a respect for learning, and tolerance? The answer to this question has nothing whatever to do with computers, with testing, with teacher accountability, with class size, and with the other details of managing schools. The right answer depends on two things, and two things alone: the existence of shared narratives and the capacity of such narratives to provide an inspired reason for schooling.”
― Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School

“An empirical philosophy is in any case a kind of intellectual disrobing. We cannot permanently divest ourselves of the intellectual habits we take on and wear when we assimilate the culture of our own time and place. But intelligent furthering of culture demands that we take some of them off, that we inspect them critically to see what they are made of and what wearing them does to us. We cannot achieve recovery of primitive naïveté. But there is attainable a cultivated naïveté of eye, ear and thought.”
― John Dewey, Experience and Nature

“If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.”
― John Dewey

“Education is a social process; education is growth; education is not preparation for life but is life itself.”
― John Dewey

“The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.”
― John Dewey

“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

“Our patience will achieve more than our force.”
― Edmund Burke

“I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education

“People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.”
― Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

“Why should we build our happiness on the opinons of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses

“Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.”
― Edmund Burke

“What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly - that is the first law of nature.”
― Voltaire

“One of the great problems of philosophy, is the relationship between the realm of knowledge and the realm of values. Knowledge is what is; values are what ought to be. I would say that all traditional philosophies up to and including Marxism have tried to derive the 'ought' from the 'is.' My point of view is that this is impossible, this is a farce.”
― Jacques Monod

“Modern societies accepted the treasures and the power offered them by science. But they have not accepted - they have scarcely even heard - its profounder message: the defining of a new and unique source of truth, and the demand for a thorough revision of ethical premises, for a complete break with the animist tradition, the definitive abandonment of the 'old covenant', the necessity of forging a new one. Armed with all the powers, enjoying all the riches they owe to science, our societies are still trying to live by and to teach systems of values already blasted at the root by science itself.”
― Jacques Monod

“Everything comes from experience; yet not from actual experience, reiterated by each individual with each generation, but instead from experience accumulated by the entire ancestry of the species in the course of its evolution.”
― Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology

“In science there is and will remain a Platonic element which could not be taken away without ruining it. Among the infinite diversity of singular phenomena science can only look for invariants.”
― Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology

“The past has no power over the present moment.”
― Eckhart Tolle

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
― Primo Levi

“When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken.”
― Benjamin Disraeli

“All is mystery; but he is a slave who will not struggle to penetrate the dark veil.”
― Benjamin Disraeli

“How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.”
― Benjamin Disraeli

“To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge”
― Benjamin Disraeli

“Sir, I shall not defeat you - I shall transcend you.”
― Benjamin Disraeli

“Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.”
― Benjamin Disraeli