Caste System Quotes

The gist of it was the caste (privileged) hindus wanted the power to close the door on untouchables, but on no account could untouchables be given the power to close the door on themselves. The Masters knew that Choice was Power. ~ Arundhati Roy

It is often said that Islam is an egalitarian religion. There is much truth in this assertion. If we compare Islam at the time of its advent with the societies that surrounded it - the stratified feudalism of Iran and the caste system of India to the east, the privileged aristocracies of both Byzantine and Latin Europe to the west - the Islamic dispensation does indeed bring a message of equality. Not only does Islam not endorse such systems of social differentiation; it explicitly and resolutely rejects them. The actions and utterances of the Prophet, the honored precedents of the early rulers of Islam as preserved by tradition, are overwhelmingly against privilege by descent, by birth, by status, by wealth, or even by race, and insist that rank and honor are determined only by piety and merit in Islam. ~ Bernard Lewis

Class certainly loomed large in Katrina's aftermath. Blacks of means escaped the tragedy; blacks without them suffered and died. In reality, it is how race and class interact that made the situation for the poor so horrible on the Gulf Coast. The rigid caste system that punishes poor blacks and other minorities also targets poor whites. ~ Michael Eric Dyson

Fate determines your caste. You must accept it and live according to the rules."
You can't really believe that!"
I do believe it. That man's misfortune is that he cannot accept his caste, his fate."
I know that the Indians wear their caste as a mark upon their foreheads for all to see. I know that in England, we have our own unacknowledged caste system. A laborer will never hold a seat in Parliament. Neither will a woman. I don't think I've ever questioned such things until this moment.
But what about will and desire? What if someone wants to change things."
Kartik keeps his eyes on the room "You cannot change your caste. You cannot go against fate."
That means there is no hope of a better life. It is a trap."
That is how you see it," he says softly.
What do you mean?"
It can be a relief to follow the path that has been laid oud for you, to know your course and play your part in it."
But how can you be sure that you are following the right course? What if there is no such thing as destiny, only choice?"
Then I do not choose to live without destiny," he says with a slight smile. ~ Libba Bray

The failure to examine heterosexuality as an institution is like failing to admit that the economic system called capitalism or the caste system of racism is maintained by a variety of forces, including both physical violence and false consciousness. ~ Adrienne Rich

This book argues that mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow and that all those who care about social justice should fully commit themselves to dismantling this new racial caste system. ~ Michelle Alexander

An artist has to be humble, an editor must be officious, and a publisher must be somewhere out in the galaxy enjoying godhood. It was a caste system, pure and simple. And it was accepted that way. Nobody thought of contracts, nobody thought of insisting on better deals. ~ Jack Kirby

Bruno Bettelheim, a psychologist and educator at the University of Chicago, wrote one of the most perceptive articles about education in the aftermath of Sputnik. He observed that while liberal policymakers urged racial integration they simultaneously favored intellectual segregation. Writing in Commentary in 1958, he said that northern white liberals wanted to obliterate the color line while replacing it with a hierarchical caste system based on intelligence. The movement to the suburbs was one way to ensure that their own children had a leg up on everyone. But gifted programs (and the new Advanced Placement programs in high school) promised middle- and upper-class whites (and some blacks who made it out of poverty) greater access to the highest-quality education. Despite all the Jeffersonian talk about how talented inhered in all classes, the poor were unlikely to benefit from gifted programs or the new curriculum projects. A new caste system was in the making, parodied so brilliantly in Michael Young's 1958 fantasy, The Rise of the Meritocracy. Bettelheim sarcastically asked why elite liberals were so worried. "Have these so-called gifted been winding up in the coal mines, have so few of them managed to enter Harvard, Yale, City College, or the University of Chicago? ~ William J. Reese

Arguably the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, a primary function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in its time. Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen). Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be black. ~ Michelle Alexander

Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America. The Great Migration would become a turning point in history. It would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched. It would force the South to search its soul and finally to lay aside a feudal caste system. It grew out of the unmet promises made after the Civil War and, through the sheer weight of it, helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s. ~ Isabel Wilkerson

With no small amount of trepidation, we walked alone past a colony of black-faced monkeys we'd been told were extremely dangerous. We avoided eye contact and certainly didn't take pictures. And dearly wished our old Sherpa bag-carrying matey was nearby. We visited Gandhi's tomb. We saw saris being printed and hand-knotted carpets being fabricated and negotiated a decent price for a small hand-crafted rug of Mughal design that, as long as we keep the certificate of authenticity safe, should appreciated in value. We witnessed poverty beyond poverty, with 'untouchables' so poor that they are actually outside the caste system, and who can't even afford to live in the unsanitary slums described as 'unfit for human habitation. ~ Karl Wiggins

Bail out the bankers and bankrupt the school teachers - we will still teachI will never follow the lead of those who exclude the kids who need education the most so that my precious scores will rise. I will never line up with those whose idea of reform is the subtle segregation of the poor and desperate. I want no part of the American caste system. ~ John Kuhn

There was indeed a caste system in Maycomb, but to my mind it worked this way: the older citizens, the present generation of people who had lived side by side for years and years, were utterly predictable to one another: they took for granted attitudes, character
shadings, even gestures, as having been repeated in each generation and refined by time. Thus the dicta No Crawford Minds His Own Business, Every Third Merriweather Is Morbid, The Truth Is Not in the Delafields, All the Bufords Walk Like That, were simply guides to daily living: never take a check from a Delafield without a discreet call to the
bank; Miss Maudie Atkinson's shoulder stoops because she was a Buford; if Mrs. Grace Merriweather sips gin out of Lydia E. Pinkham bottles it's nothing unusual - her mother did the same. ~ Harper Lee

The fact that some African Americans have experienced great success in recent years does not mean that something akin to a racial caste system no longer exists. No caste system in the United States has ever governed all black people; there have always been "free blacks" and black success stories, even during slavery and Jim Crow. The superlative nature of individual black achievement today in formerly white domains is a good indicator that the old Jim Crow is dead, but it does not necessarily mean the end of racial caste. If history is any guide, it may have simply taken a different form. ~ Michelle Alexander

Caste is another name for control. Caste puts a limit on enjoyment. Caste does not allow a person to transgress caste limits in pursuit of his enjoyment. That is the meaning of such caste restrictions as inter-dining and inter-marriage ... These being my views I am opposed to all those who are out to destroy the Caste System.57 ~ B.R. Ambedkar

Quigley and Matthews took their investigation in Lake County beyond law enforcement personnel and established witnesses to civic officials, politicians, prominent businessmen, and grove owners in this largely rural area of central Florida with a population of thirty-six thousand. What they discovered was a county controlled not by politics, money, the citrus industry, or the law, but by an embittered contingent of the Ku Klux Klan intent upon codifying a racial caste system, through violent means if necessary, that would effectively deny blacks access to political influence, economic opportunity, and social justice. ~ Gilbert King

& everywhere he observed that casual brutality lighter races show the darker. ~ David Mitchell

That's one of the biggest losses, I think, to African American families, is that people, once they left, they turned away from the South. They didn't look back, and they often didn't tell their children about it. They didn't want to talk about it. It was too painful, what they'd gone through and the caste system of the South, which was Jim Crow. ~ Isabel Wilkerson

The notion that racial caste systems are necessarily predicated on a desire to harm other racial groups, and that racial hostility is the essence of racism, is fundamentally misguided. Even slavery does not conform to this limited understanding of racism and racial caste. Most plantation owners supported the institution of black slavery not because of a sadistic desire to harm blacks but instead because they wanted to get rich, and black slavery was the most efficient means to that end. By and large, plantation owners were indifferent to the suffering caused by slavery; they were motivated by greed. Preoccupation with the role of racial hostility in earlier caste systems can blind us to the ways in which every caste system, including mass incarceration, has been supported by racial indifference – a lack of caring and compassion for people of other races. ~ Michelle Alexander

By 1945, a growing number of whites in the North had concluded that the Jim Crow system would have to be modified, if not entirely overthrown. This consensus was due to a number of factors, including the increased political power of blacks due to migration to the North and the growing membership and influence of the NAACP, particularly its highly successful legal campaign challenging Jim Crow laws in federal courts. Far more important in the view of many scholars, however, is the influence of World War II. The blatant contradiction between the country's opposition to the crimes of the Third Reich against European Jews and the continued existence of a racial caste system in the United States was proving embarrassing, severely damaging the nation's credibility as leader of the "free world. ~ Michelle Alexander

Already he was realizing that he would be more ashamed of her in the city than he was here. Then, quite suddenly, he was not ashamed of her, but of himself. Deeply ashamed. ~ Warren Eyster

A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups. ~ Isabel Wilkerson

Indian leaders are saying, "You don't understand our caste system. It's really a lovely thing. People are very happy about it and so on." I don't think that's quite fair. ~ N. T. Wright

You do not win by struggling to the top of a caste system, you win by refusing to be trapped within one at all. ~ Naomi Wolf

By the mid-1770s, the system of bond labor had been thoroughly transformed into a racial caste system predicated on slavery. The degraded status of Africans was justified on the ground that Negros, like the Indians, were an uncivilized lesser race, perhaps even more lacking in intelligence and laudable human qualities than the red-skinned natives. The notion of white supremacy rationalized the enslavement of Africans, even as whites endeavored to form a new nation based on the ideals of equality, liberty, and justice for all. Before democracy, chattel slavery in America was born. ~ Michelle Alexander

What happens once you get a felony conviction? Now you are entering this American caste system where you can't get a job, you can't get a loan, you can't get a Pell grant, you can't get public housing. ~ Cory Booker

That the caste system must be abolished if the Hindu society is to be reconstructed on the basis of equality, goes without saying. Untouchability has its roots in the caste system. They cannot expect the Brahmins to rise in revolt against the caste system. Also we cannot rely upon the non-Brahmins and ask them to fight our battle. ~ B.R. Ambedkar

To say 'radical feminist' is only a way of indicating that I believe the sexual caste system is a root of race and class and other divisions. ~ Gloria Steinem

To dehumanize another human being is not merely to declare that someone is not human, and it does not happen by accident. It is a process, a programming. It takes energy and reinforcement to deny what is self-evident in another member of one's own species. ~ Isabel Wilkerson

Caste system is the most brilliantly administered scam in history. ~ Narendra Jadhav

Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system. ~ Seamus Heaney

Slavery was not merely an unfortunate thing that happened to black people. It was an American innovation, an American institution created by and for the benefit of the elites of the dominant caste and enforced by poorer members of the dominant caste who tied their lot to the caste system rather than to their consciences. ~ Isabel Wilkerson

The prevailing caste system cannot be successfully dismantled with a purely race-neutral approach. To ~ Michelle Alexander

सदियों से चली आ रही इस प्रथा के पार्श्व में जातीय अहम की पराकाष्ठा है। समाज में जो गहरी खाई है उसे प्रथा और गहरा बनाती है। एक साजिश है हीनता के भँवर में फँसा देने की।

Caste pride is behind this centuries-old custom.
The deep chasm that divides the society is made even deeper by
this custom, a conspiracy to trap us in the whirlpool of inferiority. ~ Om Prakash Valimiki

The way in which these two practices contain each other is that it has always been possible to use the one against the other: to use racism-sexism to prevent universalism from moving too far in the direction of egalitarianism; to use universalism to prevent racism-sexism from moving too far in the direction of a caste system that would inhibit the work force mobility so necessary for the capitalist accumulation process. ~ Immanuel Wallerstein

It's funny, but on a set there's a pecking order. There's a caste system, you know? It goes from the star down to the extra. That includes the crew as well. I've never liked that. ~ Peter Jason

Some men say that they should be satisfied with the abolition of untouchability only, leaving the caste system alone. The aim of abolition of untouchability alone without trying to abolish the inequalities inherent in the caste system is a rather low aim. ~ B.R. Ambedkar

Comics have a caste system - an editor has to act in a certain way, an artist has to be humble. ~ Jack Kirby

Feeling the inevitable claim of the this desert, he experienced a desire to throw off his civilized costume, hurl himself upon Josephina, either succumb, or return to Guadalajara, where men could only complain of having too many buttons to button or unbutton... ~ Warren Eyster

The Navy's caste system has the reputation of being about as rigid as any in the world. The first thing most Navy officer do when they meet you is look at your hands to see whether or not you're wearing a Naval Academy class ring. If you do, then you're about of the club. If you don't, then you're an untouchable. I was the original untouchable. The only things I wore on my knuckles were scars. ~ Richard Marcinko

The West remains obsessed by the caste system. ~ Francois Gautier

The Hindu caste system and its attendant laws of purity became deeply embedded in Indian culture. Long after the Indo-Aryan invasion was forgotten, Indians continued to believe in the caste system and to abhor the pollution caused by caste mixing. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Gender is the remaining caste system that still cuts deep enough, and spreads wide enough, to be confused with the laws of nature. To uncover the difference between what is and what could be, we may need the "Aha!" that comes from exchanging subject for object, the flash of recognition that starts with a smile, the moment of changed viewpoint that turns the world upside down. ~ Gloria Steinem

Emmett Till's death was an extreme example of the logic of America's national racial caste system. To look beneath the surface of these facts is to ask ourselves what our relationship is today to the legacies of that caste system - legacies that still end the lives of young African Americans for no reason other than the color of their American skin and the content of our national character. Recall that Faulkner, asked to comment on the Till case when he was sober, responded, 'If we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive and probably won't.' Ask yourself whether America's predicament is really so different now. ~ Timothy B. Tyson

It did not cross the minds of most Hindus that barring exceptions, they were responsible for Catholicism in India. The outcastes of Hinduism, the untouchables, who fell beyond the pale of the caste system had ample reason to convert to Catholicism. The caste-Hindus, as a matter of fact, left them no choice. As sub-humans they were little better than slaves. ~ Kiran Nagarkar

We have created a new caste system that forces thousands of people into homelessness, bans them from living with their families and in their communities, and renders them virtually unemployable. Some states permanently strip people with criminal convictions of the right to vote; as a result, in several Southern states disenfranchisement among African American men has reached levels unseen since before the Voting Rights Act of 1965. ~ Bryan Stevenson

In the Deep South, the unequal distribution of school funds based on Negroes' "mental inferiority" was one way the caste system maintained itself through the generations. "Inferior" students got inferior schools, but truly, it was the inferior schools that created the inferior students. The two years of study resulted in the book Deep South, a seminal book in modern anthropology. ~ Alison Stewart

Her father liked to say the caste system had been reborn on American soil, this time based on money, not blood. ~ Allison Singh

If you notice, the moral law in the other legal codes separates people (the Laws of Manu, the caste system, the Code of Hammurabi with the slave/owner distinction). In Islam, the violator is inferior to the obedient one. By contrast, in the Hebrew-Christian tradition, the law unifies people. No one is made righteous before God by keeping the law. It is only following redemption that we can truly understand the moral law for what it is
a mirror that indicts and calls the heart to seek God's help. This makes moral reasoning the fruit of spiritual understanding and not the cause of it. ~ Ravi Zacharias

The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that's why they are locked up or locked out, we are told. This feature makes the politics of responsibility particularly tempting, as it appears the system can be avoided with good behavior. But herein lies the trap. All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world. ~ Michelle Alexander

We aren't human."
"Yes. We. Are." His voice turns fierce. "I don't give a shit what the something-somethingth council of big important farts decreed, or how the geomests classify things, or any of that. That we're not human is just the lie they tell themselves so they don't have to feel bad about how they treat us. ~ N.K. Jemisin

Many characters in the novel are representative of types that exist in India. He represents the caste system in India with an air of superiority, the caste system in India and the people thinking that western things are better. ~ Anita Desai

I am neither a child, a young man, nor an ancient; nor am I of any caste. ~ Guru Nanak

There is no inconsistency whatsoever between the election of Barack Obama to the highest office in the land and the exis­tence of a racial caste system in the era of colorblindness. The current sys­tem of control depends on black exceptionalism; it is not disproved or undermined by it. ~ Michelle Alexander

Once GNU is written, everyone will be able to obtain good system software free, just like air. ~ Richard Stallman

Twitter was designed to be this system that you just scan for information that's important or useful to you and then walk away, and if you wanna take a break you take a break. ~ Evan Williams

All people cross the line from childhood to adulthood with a secondhand opinion of who they are. Without any questioning, we take as truth whatever our parents and other influentials have said about us during our childhood, whether these messages are communicated verbally, physically, or silently. ~ Heyward Bruce Ewart III

I believe benchmarking best practices can open people's eyes as to what is possible, but it can also do more harm than good, leading to piecemeal copying and playing catch-up. As one seasoned Toyota manager commented after hosting over a hundred tours for visiting executives, "They always say 'Oh yes, you have a Kan-Ban system, we do also. You have quality circles, we do also. Your people fill out standard work descriptions, ours do also.' They all see the parts and have copied the parts. What they do not see is the way all the parts work together." I do not believe great organizations have ever been built by trying to emulate another, any more than individual greatness is achieved by trying to copy another "great person. ~ Peter M. Senge

I've had my taste of intense fame, and I've got it out of my system. Now I'm free to choose parts which fulfil me in different ways. ~ Gina Bellman

We've developed a very complex filing system for existence. We see things in terms of good or bad. We feel happiness, joy, pain, loss, guilt and remorse. ~ Frederick Lenz

I feel outside of the system where you're male or female. So I just retired from caring. I don't represent myself as a man or as a woman. I represent myself by not participating as either. ~ Rae Spoon

Only very few - only humans, as far as we know - achieve the second level of transcendent movement. Through this, the environment is de-restricted to become the world as an integral whole of manifest and latent elements. The second step is the work of language. This not only builds the 'house of being' - Heidegger took this phrase from Zarathustra's animals, which inform the convalescent: 'the house of being rebuilds itself eternally'; it is also the vehicle for the tendencies to run away from that house with which, by means of its inner surpluses, humans move towards the open. It need hardly be explained why the oldest parasite in the world, the world above, only appears with the second transcendence. ~ Peter Sloterdijk

To attempt to enumerate the complicated variety of mischiefs in the whole system of the social economy, which proceed from a neglect of the maxims that uphold public credit, and justify the solicitude manifested by the House on this point, would be an improper intrusion on their time and patience. ~ Alexander Hamilton

Ask not first what the system does; ask what it does it to! ~ Bertrand Meyer

[Culture] denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms, by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life. ~ Clifford Geertz

The True Believer ignores anything that doesn't fit his belief system. Instead, he inevitably comes to hold those beliefs at a very profound level. They can become absolutely part of his identity. It is this that brings together the religious, the psychic, the cynic (as opposed to the open skeptic) and the narrow-minded of all kinds. It is something I encountered a lot among my fellow Christians. At one level it can be seen in the circular discussion which goes as follows:

Why do you believe in the bible?
Because it is Gods word.
And why do you believe in God?
Because of what it says in the bible.

At a less obvious level, it can be seen in the following common exchange:

Why do you believe Christianity is true?
Because I have the experience of a personal relationship with God.
So how do you know you're not fooling yourself?
Because i know it is real.

Even as an enthusiastic believer myself I could see this kind of tautology at work, and over time I realized that it is common to all forms of True Belief., regardless of the particular belief in question. The fact is, it's enormously difficult - and you need to be fantastically brave - to overcome the circularity of your own ideologies. But just because our identity might be tied up with what we believe, it doesn't make that belief any more correct. One wishes that True Believers of any sort would learn a little modesty in their convictions. ~ Derren Brown

America's most dangerous and threatening black man is the one who has been kept sealed up by the Northerner in the black ghettos - the Northern white power structure's system to keep talking democracy while keeping the black man out of sight somewhere, around the corner. ~ Malcolm X

When you live in Washington, D.C., you do get a sense, in a very direct way, of the durability of our government and really, the greatness of the American system. ~ Mark Leibovich

If you sense a deep human need, then you go back to all the basic science. If there is some missing, then you try to do more basic science and applied science until you get it. So you make the system to fulfill that need, rather than starting the other way around, where you have something and wonder what to do with it. ~ Edwin Land

There are times when the welfare system may appear as an impediment to growth. Yet the drive for growth should always bear in mind the fact that people also need security ~ Romano Prodi

This does not mean that every copyright must prove its value initially. That would be a far too cumbersome system of control. But it does mean that every system or category of copyright or patent should prove its worth. ~ Lawrence Lessig

The patrol system leads each boy to see that he has some individual responsibility for the good of his patrol. ~ Robert Baden-Powell

Our Supreme Court is not a court of law. It is a court of conjecture and political fad. ~ A.E. Samaan

If Earth is considered a closed system, there will be less for all forever. The frontier is closed, the wilderness is gone, nature is being destroyed by human consumers, while billions are starving. The future indeed looks grim, and there are, ultimately, no really long-range, positive solutions, nor motivation for making the sacrifices and doing the hard work needed now, unless we understand that we are evolving from an Earth-only toward an Earth-space or universal species. ~ Barbara Marx Hubbard

In a world of forty thousand choices, the old advice of 'everything in moderation' no longer cuts it. The signs are that many people have understandably had enough of this free-for-all of supersizing and hidden sugars, of type 2 diabetes and food waste. In the past five years, millions of eaters have rejected huge swaths of mainstream food and created their own rules to eat by. Such reactions offer a sliver of hope that eating -- for some populations anyway -- is finally moving in a healthier direction, with a new thoughtfulness about food and a return to vegetables. On the other hand, some of the new diet rules we have invented for ourselves are as extreme and unbalanced as the food system they seek to replace. ~ Bee Wilson

If Jesus Christ was the being which those mythologists tell us he was, and that he came into this world to suffer, which is a word they sometimes use instead of 'to die,' the only real suffering he could have endured would have been 'to live.' His existence here was a state of exilement or transportation from heaven, and the way back to his original country was to die. - In fine, everything in this strange system is the reverse of what it pretends to be. It is the reverse of truth, and I become so tired of examining into its inconsistencies and absurdities, that I hasten to the conclusion of it, in order to proceed to something better. ~ Thomas Paine

I fancy myself as being very good at Guitar Hero. I really don't play any other videogames. I kind of fell in love with Guitar Hero the first time I played it, and went out and bought a system for it. ~ CM Punk

After one hundred years of federal rule, the United States House of Representatives has moved to provide for the first meaningful route to self-determination for the Puerto Rican people under our federal system. ~ Dick Thornburgh

World peace through nonviolent means is neither absurd nor unattainable. All other methods have failed. Thus we must begin anew. Nonviolence is a good starting point. Those of us who believe in this method can be voices of reason, sanity, and understanding amid the voices of violence, hatred, and emotion. We can very well set a mood of peace out of which a system of peace can be built. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

I think we should have basically the same tax policy that Germany, Japan, the U.K., everybody else has, which is a tax rate in the mid-20s and no loopholes. Zero. The U.S. has the most antiquated tax system. And that means some people are going to pay more taxes, and some people are going to pay less. ~ Jeffrey R. Immelt

I was very excited about the idea that I could be an idealist, that I could be my age, the eager beaver who had hope in the justice system and the one who gets disappointed just like the audience. ~ Elisabeth Rohm

The tea party venerates the Constitution while despising the political system it has produced. ~ Gideon Rachman

I've seen marvelous things, Sunday. I've looked back from the edge of the system and seen this planet, this Earth, reduced to a tiny dot of pale blue. I know what that feels like. To think that dot is where we came from, where we evolved out of the chaos and the dirt. And I know what it feels like to imagine going further. To hold that incredible, dangerous thought in my mind, if only for an instant. To think: what if I don't go home? What if I just keep traveling? Watching that pale-blue dot fall ever further away, until the darkness swallowed it and there was no turning back. Until Earth was just a blue memory. ~ Alastair Reynolds

Our social and economic system cannot march toward better days unless it is inspired by things of the Spirit. It is here that the higher purposes of individualism must find their sustenance. ~ Herbert Hoover

We have a racially based justice system that overpunishes, fails to rehabilitate, and doesn't make us safer. ~ Piper Kerman

Capitalism, in its imperialist phase, is a system which considers war to be a legitimate instrument for settling international disputes, a legal method in fact, if not in law. ~ J. Stalin

An organism exists in its environment in only one mode, that of an open system responding to those segments of its environment to which it is genetically programmed to respond or to which it has learned to respond.
But a self must be placed in a world. It cannot not be placed. If it chooses by default not to be placed, then its placement is that of not choosing to be placed. ~ Walker Percy

The legal system is often a mystery, and we, its priests, preside over rituals baffling to everyday citizens. ~ Henry Miller

One of the great things about an open system like Android is it addresses all ends of the spectrum. Getting great low-cost computing devices at scale to the developing world is especially meaningful to me. ~ Sundar Pichai

The visa lottery system poses a national security threat. Under the program, each successful applicant is chosen at random and given the status of permanent resident based on pure luck. ~ Bob Goodlatte

Far from trying to rig the system, I have spent decades opposing cronyism and all political favors, including mandates, subsidies and protective tariffs - even when we benefit from them. ~ Charles Koch

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is eager to enter into close relationship with the Bank for International Settlements ... The conclusion is impossible to escape that the State and Treasury Departments are willing to pool the banking system of Europe and America, setting up a world financial power independent of and above the Government of the United States ... The United States under present conditions will be transformed from the most active of manufacturing nations into a consuming and importing nation with a balance of trade against it. ~ Louis Thomas McFadden

The first few weeks football players look at you like you are speaking a foreign language. My job is to get them to trust me, trust the system. I ask them to run in a way that makes no sense to them. ~ Ato Boldon

Meditation is not words, a mantram, or self hypnosis, the drug of illusions. It must happen without your volition. It must take place in the quiet stillness of the night, when you are suddenly awake and see that the brain is quiet and there is a peculiar quality of meditation going on. It must take place as silently as a snake among the tall grass, green in the fresh morning light. It must take place in the deep recesses of the brain. Meditation is not an achievement. There is no method, system or practice. Meditation begins with the ending of comparison, the ending of the becoming or not becoming. As the bee whispers among the leaves so the whispering of meditation is action. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Astronomers suspect that the Oort Cloud could extend as far as three light-years from our solar system. That is more than halfway to the nearest stars, the Centauri triple star system, which is slightly more than four light-years from Earth. If we assume that the Centauri star system is also surrounded by a sphere of comets, then there might be a continuous trail of comets connecting it to Earth. It may be possible to establish a series of refueling stations, outposts, and relay locations on a grand interstellar highway. Instead of leaping to the next star in one jump, we might cultivate the more modest goal of "comet hopping" to the Centauri system. This thoroughfare could become a cosmic Route 66. ~ Michio Kaku

Behind it, still expanding, still radiating, still slowly dissolving in the system to which it had given its name, the unnumbered twinkling fragments of the Orbital called Vavatch blew out toward the stars, drifting on a stellar wind that rang and swirled with the fury of the world's destruction. ~ Iain M. Banks

The man who is thus outside the confines of every value-combination, and has become the exclusive representative of an individual value, is metaphysically an outcast, for his autonomy presupposes the resolution and disintegration of all system into its individual elements; such a man is liberated from values and from style, and can be influenced only by the irrational. ~ Hermann Broch