iosephvs bibliothecarivs > Recent Status Updates

2/2 'But if moderation means slowing up in the move for justice and capitulating to the whims and caprices of the guardians of the deadening status quo, then moderation is a tragic vice which all men of good will must condemn. We must continue to move on.'

'I know some people are saying we must slow up.... They are saying we must adopt a policy of moderation. Now if moderation means moving on with wise restraint and calm reasonableness, then moderation is a great virtue that all men of good will must seek to achieve in this tense period of transition.' 1/2

'There is no shame in not knowing. Uncertainty is real. It need not be glossed over or buried. We can embrace it, even while we try to understand what we can.'

'The realization that everyone I knew, myself included, would someday die sent me into a kind of existential crisis.... I devised a plan, a kind of personal superstition. Every evening while being tucked in I would say to my parents, "Don't forget! Don't die!" and every evening my mother [Ann Druyan] would say, "I promise!" and my dad [Carl Sagan], accuracy zealot that he was, would say "I'll do my best!"'

'Even with our species flourishing, the chances of any one of us being born are still remote. Think of all the slight variations in human migration patterns, for example, that could have kept your great-great grandparents from ever crossing paths. If you have any European ancestry, someone in your lineage had to survive the black death in the 14th century, which killed more than half the people on the continent.'

'To say "I don't believe" in something doesn't mean that I am certain it doesn't exist. Just that I have seen no proof that it does, so I am withholding belief.'

'We needn't resort to myth to get that spine-chilling thrill of being part of something grander than ourselves.'

'It was darkly fascinating... how close you can veer to the bad bits of history by taking a line on something, anything, every stance a deviance in one way or another.'

'A popular trolling technique from neocons wishing to aggrieve the ecologically minded is to remind them that the Nazis were the first European Green Party. It hurts because it's true. The Nazis were ecologists, ecologists over humanists, which is probably where it started to go wrong....'

'Nothing soaks up the sound of human things like a thick bank of trees.'

'Whenever you take a stand for truth and justice, you are liable to scorn. Often you will be called an impractical idealist or a dangerous radical. Sometimes it might mean going to jail. If such is the case, you must honorably grace the jail with your presence.'
6 November 1956

'You can make a place magical by ridding it of the things that make it ordinary.'

'As soon as you describe your belief as identical to someone else's, you diminish its infinite complexity into a simplified and more concrete form. The process of engagement ends.'

'Magic is technology of unknown mechanism.'

'We could do with a reminder that humans are fallible, and finite. We do not think enough about the fragility of our strange, sanitised reality.'

'It is our human reduction of the vastness of the world that creates the assumption of simplicity of non-human things. There is nothing intrinsically simple about any of it.'

"[The Catholic Church]'s development in the Dark Ages belies the etymology of its name: it set itself out as a universal Church, one that could take in a breadth of existing beliefs and rituals. The send of 'catholic' as liberal and all-embracing is more developed in English than in other languages, and at the wild outer reaches of our wet and windy island, far from Rome, there was greater room for compromise."

"I thought I could hear a distant hum, or roar, and braced myself for revelation, but it was the A465"

"An unremarkable journey alters when its success cannot be taken for granted."

'Radical inequality and massive forms of oppression have been features--fundamental features--of the American way of life.' - Sydney Eckman Ahlstrom, quoted in the introduction by James M. Washington, p. xviii

'Many Americans do not understand or have forgotten how indebted we are to the stubborn tradition of the loyal opposition in American history.' - from the introduction by James M. Washington, p. ix