Gary > Gary's Quotes

“...ideas of hope are deeply disturbing to a certain kind of presumptive progressive, one who is securely established one way or another...Another part of the Puritan legacy is the belief that no one should have joy or abundance until everyone does, a belief that's austere at one end, in the deprivation it endorses, and fantastical in the other, since it awaits a universal utopia. Joy sneaks in anyway, abundance cascades forth uninvited...Joy doesn't betray, but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine act of insurrection.”
― Rebecca Solnit

“However well you do in the competition for the greatest toys, longest life, and healthiest brain, the best medical research indicates that eventually you’re going to be dead. And you’re going to stay dead for many years longer than you were alive, and all that will be left of you is people’s memories of you, which is to say, your reputation.”
― Michael Kinsley, Old Age: A Beginner's Guide

“Ministers should be the most political of animals because, in contrast to much of what passes as politics in our time, those in the ministry cannot help but be about the formation of a people who can know they need one another to survive. To ask those in the ministry to take seriously your political responsibilities may well entail a radical reorientation of what those in the ministry do. That is particularly true if you believe as I do that we are living at the end of Christendom. Recovering”
― Stanley Hauerwas, The Work of Theology

“I need to be clear. I am not suggesting that the individual wealthy person is dull. Rather I am suggesting that a social order bent on producing wealth as an end in itself cannot avoid producing people whose souls are superficial and whose daily lives are captured by sentimentalities. They ask questions like, “Why does a good god let bad things happen to good people?” Such a people cannot imagine what kind of people would write and sing the Psalms.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Working with Words: On Learning to Speak Christian

“To live in the light of the resurrection is to refuse to use the powers that crucified Jesus in the name of achieving justice. Thus the sentence, “Christians are called to be nonviolent not because we believe nonviolence is a strategy to make war less likely, but because in a world of war, as faithful followers of Christ, we cannot imagine being anything else than nonviolent; it is a nonviolence, moreover, that may make the world more violent because the world will use violence rather than have the order it calls peace exposed as violence.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, The Work of Theology

“The anemic liberal class continues to assert, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that human freedom and equality can be achieved through the charade of electoral politics and constitutional reform.”
― Chris Hedges, The Death of the Liberal Class