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Some of my favorite quotes...
When I heard the learned astronomers, -Walt Whitman "Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, it's unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for making it so." -Noam Chomsky "Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a fake messiah." -Richard Bach "Resist much. Obey little." - Walt Whitman "A poet returns to the valley and proclaims, 'How closed minded you all are.' He comments about the lack of interest in the arts, in social and environmental issues, in the poverty and inequality of our life. 'Little has changed in the valley.' "He was born and raised here, which supposedly grants him license to criticize and lecture us. Yet he speaks for many who think they know the valley. "How differently would others think of us if they knew the stories of a raisin harvest in a wet year or a peach without a home?" - from Epitaph for a Peach "What does [the community movement towards sustainability] have to do with college and university educators? Everything and nothing. What is happening in communities across the globe is immensely important to our future. If it takes hold, it is a light at the end of this dark postmodern tunnel of environmental exploitation and ruin. The story [of Plumas County] is therefore not just another "case study" in a course or two in the average college or university education. It is THE course, THE major, THE degree of the future. It is everything. ... David Orr remarks that universities offer only degrees in "upward mobility" and, curiously, people with the best ideas often have little formal education. What must we do? David Orr argues that the purpose of university education must be turned on its head. Colleges and universities must offer not degrees in upward mobility, but instead degrees in homecoming. Homecoming is about "restoring ecological and human scale to a civilization that has lost its sense of proportion and purpose...regenerating roots in particular places and traditions" (Orr)." - From "Seeking Sustainability-Community-based Resource Management", an essay in "Environmental Challenges for Higher Education: Integrating Sustainability into Academic Programs". "Emerson was saying in his library one evening that Harvard College now teaches all of the branches of learning. "Yes," said Thoreau, who had just graduated, "all the branches but none of the roots!" I am all for getting down to the roots of life. To miss those things that form and fortify the inner nature of the person is to miss the best thing there is here on earth. To enjoy simple beauty; to share in the creation of what ought to be; to enlarge the area of truth; to be the kind of person who will be essentially good in this world or in any other possible world, is to possess greater riches than the gold of Ophir. An education that trains a person to enjoy such durable wealth and riches partakes of the noblest art that has so far been discovered in this world. To be a teacher who knows how to enlarge the depth and scope of a person's life is the best gift there is." -Rufus Jones, New Eyes for Invisibles "Thousands of starfish washed ashore. A little girl began throwing them in the water so they wouldn't die. "Don't bother, dear" her mother said, "it won't make a difference." The girl stopped for a moment and looked at the starfish in her hand. "It will make a difference to this one." -Unknown "We hurry through the so-called boring things in order to attend to that which we deem more important, interesting. Perhaps the final freedom will be a recognition that every moment is 'essential' and that nothing at all is 'important'." - Helen M. Luke "A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving..." - Lao Tzu "Wendy said that, even today, when an Aboriginal mother notices the first stirrings of speech in her child, she lets it handle the 'things' of that particular country: leaves, fruit, insects and so forth. The child, at its mother's breast, will toy with the 'thing', talk to it, test its teeth on it, learn its name, repeat its name - and finally chuck it aside. 'We give our children guns and computer games,' Wendy said. 'They gave their children the land.'" - Bruce Chatwin in The Songlines "A growth process that benfits only the wealthiest minority and maintains or even increases the disparity between and within countries is not development." -The Cocoyoc Declaration |