One City Quotes

“one of the greatest lessons that comes from meditation is that a relaxed curiosity about life and sleepwalking through it are two radically different choices”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“If we long to save the whole world but we can’t deal with our own family and friends, something has gone wrong in our understanding of what it means to be human.”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“...thoughts aren't the problem. Problems only develop when thoughts no longer arise from or refer to actual experience. That's when thoughts start ossifying into their own bureaucratic institutions, becoming assumptions and dogma.”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“When we get overwhelmed by the larger moral implications of our work, we overlook the smaller, more imperceptible effects of our labor. Interdependence is about the little things you do. It’s not just what you produce, but how you treat the people around you, who labor with you. And there is always something we can do that is positive—ALWAYS.”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“There’s a bumper sticker that says, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Anyone who never gets angry when he sees their friends and loved ones doing things that are harmful to themselves or others has to be pretty numb to the deep sadness of suffering. Anyone who just walks on by when she sees humans being treated like objects needs to take a second look. And a third one.”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“According to a meditator’s understanding of how mindfulness and awareness operate and develop in the mind, the problem with multitasking is simple: if we have too many objects for our mindfulness to keep track of at one time, our mind can’t deepen its familiarity with any of them. With too many points of focus, the mind can’t really immerse itself in each object’s function beyond the realm of superficial glances. If our attention is split-screened, our mindfulness has to leapfrog around to assemble a coherent picture. And when we leapfrog from object to object, task to task, we only delve halfheartedly into each of the particular objects of our attention.”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“The moment of WANT is really the misunderstood urge to connect with the world around us.”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“We only have one wireless connection with the real Internet, and that’s our mind. There isn’t a single moment in our lives when our mind is not functioning as the basis of all our interactions—not even one. So it makes sense to train ourselves in the skilful operation of this basic interface. This is what meditation is for.”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“war doesn't end war any more than a heroin fix ends a heroin addiction.”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“instead of countering the culture, we have to transform it. We have to use existing cultural forms to peel back the layers of the blazing digital façades and reveal the beating heart underneath.”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“Even if it’s just a tiny flicker of awkwardness, there will always be fear, every moment, as long as there are beings who live in a network of change and interdependence. To be a being inherently implies change and interdependence ; these are the true brands of our existence. Getting connected necessarily means experiencing fear.”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“Fear is not to be dismissed. A moment of fear is actually a message that we are in a new and unfamiliar place within the network of interdependence. Fear is the awkwardness of stepping into a new neighborhood of our mind. Dismissing it actually keeps us comfortable for even less time than a poorly made pair of expensive sneakers. But if we let it in, something new and unexpected is bound to happen.”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“The overarching implication of the truth of interdependence is that reality is never static. The”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“Within our twenty-first century modes of communication, truth can be easily manipulated and framed to get the viewer of the information to receive it in a predetermined way, to elicit a desired spin of “truth.” Turning on the light doesn’t guarantee the clarifying of confusion anymore. If all of the media of our societal experience make us believe that a rope is a snake, then a rope becomes a snake, either in darkness or the light of day.”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“At its heart, infotainment represents the indiscriminate combination of two mental longings, conflated by our ignorance. These two impulses are: 1. the impulse to be informed—to know what is real and what isn’t, in ourselves and the world around us (the “info”); and 2. the desire to be entertained and comforted, to be reassured about the correctness of our personal and collective tendencies (the “tainment”).”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“Running for the hills is not the way to go. We live in a time where there are actually fewer and fewer places left to run away to. Therefore, it’s imperative to find ways to use your energy to dive into—not run from—existing paths of livelihood. A hip-hop mogul or an oil executive are powerful already. There’s no reason they couldn’t be powerfully selfless and compassionate as well.”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“given the way companies function, this change is only possible if the principles and interests guiding corporations shift from being centered on profit to being centered on the morality of interdependence, which means benefit (profit) to all the communities we and they share. And that movement relies on each company’s stockholders beginning to deepen their practices of generosity to overcome the hungry-ghost mentality, because these stockholders happen to also be consumers. Thus consumers have to demand changes in the M.O. of the companies we collectively control. So, our practices of generosity and livelihood (in other words, consumption and production) are . . . well . . . connected.”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“Whenever we mentally compartmentalize our work away from our more creative or more spiritual being, we construct a false dichotomy. This schism has to collapse on the level of universal interdependence. If your week and life are segregated this way, you’re going to cause suffering—at the very least for yourself. You’ll guiltily and resentfully acquiesce to your place in the world.”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“This is perhaps the greatest lesson that interdependence has to offer us about right livelihood (and right living in general) in the twenty-first century: no person, and no profession, comes out completely clean, ever. On the other hand, no one is inherently defiled.”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“There is no surer sign of a society in decline than one that builds prisons faster than schools, as happens in many American states. In”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“An important purpose of the practice of nonviolence is to constantly debunk the myth that there’s a way to make it through life without ever having to feel pain or discomfort.”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“The purveyor of violence always hurts himself before he hurts anyone else. When”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“If we misuse anger we can fall prey to the destructiveness of violence. Violence is what happens when anger is misunderstood. Intelligence and transformative action are what manifest when anger is seen clearly and utilized properly.”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“The twentieth century was almost a hundred straight years of wars among empires of hungry ghosts, viciously addicted to the fleeting economic fix of creating new enemies. Each war carried a surprisingly similar rhetoric of xenophobia. And each time, violence was presented as the necessary precursor for a true and lasting peace. We were always fighting in the present so, somehow, we wouldn’t have to fight in the future; fighting them over there so we wouldn’t have to fight them over here, and on and on. Each time the rhetorical future became the actual present and then the textbook past, the cycle proved to be both endless and fruitless. The twenty-first century is picking up right where the twentieth left off, with better weapons. There’s only one little problem with the logic of violence: war doesn’t end war—any more than a heroin fix ends a heroin addiction.”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“DISCIPLINE DOESN’T MEAN LIMITING your freedom. It’s the impetus for developing a structure to your activity, which comes from taking deadly seriously—with a strong sense of humor—the truth of interdependence.”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“When we try to do more than one thing at a time, another deeper problem starts to develop. In the frenzy of juggling it all, we tend to shift our focus away from the things that matter and toward activities we don’t really need to be doing at all. We”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“We’re a society of entertainment junkies, hooked from birth, individually and collectively, fed the sugar-high dazzle of entertainment through an intravenous cable tube. And the cruelest joke of any bad habit is that when you’re hooked, you don’t really even enjoy the fix anymore.”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“When we aren’t personally acquainted with the beings who make up our community, the truth of interdependence becomes an abstraction. And when the connections between us become abstract, we start to doubt they exist. And when that doubt settles in like a rolling fog, we shrug away our responsibility to others. The”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“to engage in any path of well-being or self-development, some small part of us must already believe that we’re worth developing.”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence

“human beings are simply not self-sufficient. We rely on each other for work, education, sustenance, friendship, art, culture, community, and love.Yet so much of the time we scurry from place to place, task to task, moment to moment, craving isolation and feigning anonymity. This is the paradox of contemporary living.”
― Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence