New Us Citizen Quotes

In order to align your life choices with your values, you will need to inquire about the effects of your actions (and inactions) on yourself and others. Although we are always stumbling upon new knowledge that shifts our choices and life direction, bringing conscious inquiry to life means that we continually ask questions that lead us to the information we need to make thoughtful decisions. Asking questions is liberating because we develop great understanding and discover more choices with our new knowledge. ~ Zoe Weil

Trust me, Jennifer. Just...trust me."
I drove another block or two. "Why should I?"
"Why shouldn't you?"
Because you left me, Cameron. After everything we went through. But I knew it wasn't his fault, any more than it was mine. It wasn't like either of us had control over our lives. We were at the mercy of our parents, both of us. Anyway, I'd already turned the car toward the freeway entrance. I turned on the car radio and we drove twenty minutes without talking. When the exit finally came into view, ugly warehouses and the new Wal-Mart looming before us, I said, "Let's go to my old apartment first. I haven't been there since we moved."
"I've gone by it a couple of times."
"Really?"
"Yeah. Living there with you was kind of my best memory."
I imagined that, him going to the apartment and looking up at the window and thinking about me. ~ Sara Zarr

Silently repeat to yourself: I forgive myself for any ways in which I knowingly or unknowingly caused hurt or harm to any living being or creature. I forgive all who have ever hurt or harmed me. Everything between us is now cleared up. ~ Michael Beckwith

We are not going to win because you have a new head coach, any more than you are going to fix a flat tire by changing the driver. We will win the minute all of us get rid of excuses as to why we can't win and stop wallowing in self-pity. ~ Lou Holtz

We flatter those we scarcely know, We please the fleeting guest; And deal full many a thoughtless blow, To those who love us best. Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone; For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth, But has trouble enough of its own. There is new strength, repose of mind, and inspiration in fresh apparel. ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and their spells, asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image, we recast them in an original creation. ~ Marcel Proust

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat, and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men, and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload h ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Man little knows what calamities are beyond his patience to bear till he tries them; as in ascending the heights of ambition, which look bright from below, every step we rise shows us some new and gloomy prospect of hidden disappointment; so in our descent from the summits of pleasure, though the vale of misery below may appear, at first, dark and gloomy, yet the busy mind, still attentive to its own amusement, finds, as we descend, something to flatter and to please. Still as we approach, the darkest objects appear to brighten, and the mortal eye becomes adapted to its gloomy situation. ~ Oliver Goldsmith

Every time I pulled her back in only to disappoint her, I had unintentionally been solidifying what her mum had been telling her all these years. That she wasn't enough, she wasn't enough for me to take a chance on her or on us. I'd realised all too late that I was a coward, while she was petrified of never being enough for someone; she kept offering me a chance to prove her worries wrong. She was the strong one here. ~ Sarah Clay

I came to dedicate my life to opening space to the average person and crafting designs for new spaceships that could take us far from home. But since Apollo ended, such travels were only in our collective memory. ~ Buzz Aldrin

I must confess that I am not at all partial to the fabrication of Weltanschauungen. Such activities may be left to philosophers, who avowedly find it impossible to make their journey through life without a Baedeker of that kind to give them information on every subject. Let us humbly accept the contempt with which they look down on us from the vatnage-ground of their superior needs. But since we cannot forgot our narcissistic pride either, we will draw comfort from the reflection that such 'Handbooks to Life' soon grow out of date and that it is precisely our short-sighted, narrow, and finicky work which obliges them to appear in new editions, and that even the most up-to-date of them are nothing but attempts to find a substitute for the ancient, useful and all-sufficient Church Catechism. We know well enough how little light science has so far been able to throw on the problems that surround us. But however much ado the philosophers may make, they cannot alter the situation. Only patient, persevering research, in which everything is subordinated to the one requirement of certainty, can gradually bring about a change. The benighted traveller may sing aloud in the dark to deny his own fears; but, for all that, he will not see an inch further beyond his nose. ~ Sigmund Freud

It's hard to remember that Jesus did not come to make us safe, but rather to make us disciples, citizens of God's new age, a kingdom of surprise. ~ Stanley Hauerwas

We have reached a new milestone as a human family. With seven billion of us now inhabiting our planet, it is time to ask some fundamental questions. How can we provide a dignified life for ourselves and future generations while preserving and protecting the global commons - the atmosphere, the oceans and the ecosystems that support us? ~ Ban Ki-moon

Without a word, we turn and walk away from the garden, new friends and the birthplace of the human race. As the darkness surrounds us once more, and Kat takes out her blue, green and yellow crystal, my thoughts turn to the story of Adam and Eve. Whether they were the first man and woman created by God himself, or the leaders of the first human tribe that evolved in the garden, I don't know, or care, but if they really did get the human race kicked out of Edinnu so long ago, I think they're a couple of jerks. ~ Jeremy Robinson

His eyes ran over her hungrily. "I couldn't get it out of my mind," he said, almost to himself, "the way it felt, back at my mother's house. I was never so hungry for anyone, but it wasn't completely physical, even then." He frowned. "I want you, Cecily, and I hate myself for it."
"What else is new?" She gestured toward the door. "Go home. And I hope you don't sleep a wink."
"I probably won't," he said ruefully. He moved toward the door, hesitating.
"Good night," she said firmly, not moving.
He stood with his back to her, his spine very straight. "I can trace my ancestors back before the Mexican War in the early 1800s, pure Lakota blood, undiluted even by white settlement. There are so few of us left…"
She could have wept for what she knew, and he didn't know. "You don't have to explain it to me," she said solemnly. "I know how you feel."
"You don't," he bit off. He straightened again. "I'd die to have you, just once." He turned, and the fire was in his eyes as they met hers, glittering across the room. "It's like that for you, too."
"It's a corruption of the senses. You don't love me," she said quietly. "Without love, it's just sex."
He breathed deliberately, slowly. He didn't want to ask. He couldn't help it. "Something you know?"
"Yes. Something I know," she said, lying with a straight face and a smile that she hoped was worldly. She was not going to settle for crumbs from him, stolen hours in his bed. Men were devious when desi ~ Diana Palmer

The changeover from one medium to another presents both opportunities and challenges. New technologies empower us, to be sure; but never without some cost which we universally fail to anticipate. We must avoid celebrating the advantages too enthusiastically, lest we miss the meaning of the challenges. For once the changeover is complete, the opportunities and challenges fully assimilated, we will certainly be impotent to undo them. ~ Peter K. Fallon

I worked at the original Coyote Ugly bar when I was a young, unpublished writer. Then later when I became a writer, I wrote an article about it for GQ. Disney read this article about this filthy, disgusting pit in the East Village [of New York City], where we used to set the bar on fire to get customers away from us, and said, "That's a great movie for kids!" They made the fantastic Coyote Ugly movie, now legendary. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

The terms of poetry - some simple, some complicated, some ancient, some new - should bring us closer to what we're hearing, enlarging our experience of it, enabling us to describe what we're reading, to feel and think with greater precision. ~ Edward Hirsch

For in this world, marked by sin, the gravitational pull of our lives is weighted by the chains of the "I" and the "self." These chains must be broken to free us for a new love that places us in another gravitational field where we can enter new life. ~ Pope Benedict XVI

In the US, what passes for Christianity - and it is, to say the least, a highly perverse, possessive individualist and capitalist version of what I would see as Christ's messianic ethical communism, to say the least - is a new civil religion, a civil religion of freedom. ~ Simon Critchley

Perhaps this new kind of reading will appeal to us after we give it a try. ~ S.A. Tawks

When the sovereign spirit within us is true to nature, it stands poised and ready to adjust to every change in circumstances and to seize each new opportunity. It doesn't approach an object with prejudice or preconception, but handles each thing dispassionately before embracing it and, if necessary, finds advantage in what opposes it. It is like fire in this regard. Whereas a feeble flame might suffocate under a pile of dry sticks, a robust fire consumes everything it touches. The more objects of any kind heaped on it, the higher it rises, the hotter it burns. ~ Marcus Aurelius

We're all here. We're close to the truck, and we met Kenton, a fine citizen of Salem. We rescued Izzy and found our way through a very sad darkness, dangers that we knew from Izzy's Orion interpretation would be waiting for us. We're definitely on the right track. ~ Jonathan Friesen

The young reinvent the universe," he said. "And they give the new universe to us as their gift. ~ Anne Rice

The mechanical clock," as Lewis Mumford wrote, "made possible the idea of regular production, regular working hours and a standardized product." In short, without the clock, capitalism would have been quite impossible.4 The paradox, the surprise, and the wonder are that the clock was invented by men who wanted to devote themselves more rigorously to God; it ended as the technology of greatest use to men who wished to devote themselves to the accumulation of money. In the eternal struggle between God and Mammon, the clock quite unpredictably favored the latter. Unforeseen consequences stand in the way of all those who think they see clearly the direction in which a new technology will take us. ~ Neil Postman

The I Ching tells us that for every ending there is a new beginning. In other words, what appears like a transition isn't really a transition; it's a continuum of existence. If you close your eyes for a moment the room will appear to go away. But does it really? Open your eyes again and the room will still be there. That's all death is. ~ Frederick Lenz

The sheer novelty and glamor of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power - thirty-two billion dollars a year - used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat. ~ Michael Pollan

Every evil weaves itself into the fabric of history, never to be undone. Yet at the same time - at the very same time - each of us gets a new soul with which to start the world again. It ~ Andrew Klavan

The idea that the president has the power to craft a new strategy both overstates his power and understates the power of reality crafted by those who came before him. We are all trapped in circumstances into which we were born and choices that were made for us. ~ George Friedman

Today there is much talk about democratic ideals in the outside world. But not in Germany! For here in Germany we had more than enough time-fifteen years-to acquaint ourselves with these democratic ideals. And we ourselves had to pick up the legacy left behind by this democracy.

Now we are being credited with many a truly astounding war aim, especially by the English. After all, England is quite experienced in issuing proclamations of objectives in warfare as it has waged the greatest number of wars the world over.

Truly astounding are the war aims announced to us today. A new Europe will arise. This Europe will be characterized by justice. This justice will render armament obsolete. This will lead to disarmament at last. This disarmament in turn will bring about an economic blossoming. Change and trade will spring up-much trade-free trade. And with the sponsorship of this trade, culture shall once more blossom, and not only culture will benefit, but religion will also prosper.

In other words: we are heading towards a golden age! Well, we have heard of this golden age before. Many times precisely the same people attempted to illustrate its virtues to us who are now flooding us with descriptions of its benefits. The records are old ones, played once too often. We can only pity these gentlemen who cannot even come up with a new idea to trap a great people. For all this they had already promised us in 1918.

Then, too, England's objecti ~ Adolf Hitler

What I wonder about the dreams is - all the new inventions people think up - how many of those things are made by people like me - like us? How many "inventions" are really memories, of the things we once knew? And - how many of us are there? ~ Diana Gabaldon

The world is full of folly and confusion, the lack of freedom has deep roots, the hope for justice and equality is dwindling, the odds against us are too great, it seems. We should be glad to be as well off as we are, people say, most people are worse off. Then they take a pill for insomnia. Or depression. Or life. When will a new generation come, one that understands the importance of equality, a generation of gardeners and foresters who can fell the big trees that block the light for all the lesser ones, and who can remove the suckers from the tree of knowledge. ~ Kjell Askildsen

The process of applying Mindfulness Burnout Prevention (MBP) in the workplace or any environment has a much more far-reaching effect than simply accessing equanimity throughout the vicissitudes of life. Continuous learning helps us to stay youthful, sharpen our mental faculties and wire new neural connections in our brain (making us better equipped to accomplish); it is also a sign of humility. ~ Christopher Dines

We all have a book in us. The first step is recognising this. Writing it is a whole new journey. ~ Kathryn Joyce

One of the attractive things about being in Scotland is that we have a very good pipeline of new people coming into the company from the excellent universities around us. ~ David Milne

Laughter sometimes hurts us, and sometimes it makes us feel better. No matter how down you feel... laughter brings a new ray of hope. Laughter brings happiness to the home. A smiling face is the best reward you can see. ~ Keiko Tobe

The almost complete, but temporary, loss of self that was involved - a loss of self present in all intense sexual encounters - doubled as an open door through which one could enter new areas of thought, as if one had left one's old self behind, as if within this new, amorphous territory, in which one was no longer one's previous self but had not yet become anything else, infinite modes of discovery became possible. The intimacy of our nakedness made us feel, or at least gave the illusion, that we were so much more directly engaged, both in dialogue with the larger world of ideas and with each other. This directness of being intertwined, exhausted and sated, of drifting in and out of sleep and having the strains of our discussions, of our nighty lessons, freely intermixed with half-remembered dreams forms the basis for a different kind of learning, learning that enters not only through the mind but also through skin and sweat and pores. In this way ideas are divested of their previously cold abstraction and instead gain heat, momentum and complicity. This is the deep learning, and there is no conduit for it other than one's intimate and ongoing personal experience. ~ Jacob Wren

We in our age are faced with a strange paradox. Never before have we had so much information in bits and pieces flooded upon us by radio and television and satellite, yet never before have we had so little inner certainty about our own being. The more objective truth increases, the more our inner certitude decreases. Our fantastically increased technical power, and each forward step in technology is experienced by many as a new push toward our possible annihilation. Nietzsche was strangely prophetic when he said,

"We live in a period of atomic chaos…the terrible apparition…the Nation State…and the hunt for happiness will never be greater than when it must be caught between today and tomorrow; because the day after tomorrow all hunting time may have come to an end altogether."

Sensing this, and despairing of ever finding meaning in life, people these days seize on the many ways of dulling their awareness by apathy, by psychic numbing, or by hedonism. Others, especially young people, elect in alarming and increasing numbers to escape their own being by suicide. ~ Rollo May

In order to become whole we must try, in a long process, to discover our own personal truth, a truth that may cause pain before giving us a new sphere of freedom. If we choose instead to content ourselves with intellectual "wisdom," we will remain in the sphere of illusion and self-deception. ~ Alice Miller

Empathy allows us to re-perceive our world in a new way and move forward. ~ Marshall B. Rosenberg

A local phrase book, entitled Speak in Korean, has the following handy expressions. In the section 'On the Way to the Hotel': 'Let's Mutilate US Imperialism!' In the section 'Word Order': 'Yankees are wolves in human shape - Yankees / in human shape / wolves / are.' In the section 'Farewell Talk': 'The US Imperialists are the sworn enemy of the Korean people.' Not that the book is all like this - the section 'At the Hospital' has the term solsaga ('I have loose bowels'), and the section 'Our Foreign Friends Say' contains the Korean for 'President Kim Il Sung is the sun of mankind.'
I wanted a spare copy of this phrase book to give to a friend, but found it was hard to come by. Perhaps this was a sign of a new rapprochement with the United States, or perhaps it was because, on page 46, in the section on the seasons, appear the words: haemada pungnyoni dumnida ('We have a bumper harvest every year'). ~ Christopher Hitchens

There's no law of physics that says we have to be an unsustainable society - in fact, quite the opposite. The planet's ready to work with us if we're ready to think differently, but we do have to make that jump and start to do things in new ways. ~ Alex Steffen

It's all there, it's all waiting. Of course it can be done; it depends upon ourselves.

You say: "But again, we're scattered individuals. Everything's against us. Governments, money, press, television - all the new forces are used against us." All the great forces, all the material powers of the world, you say, are against you. And so they are - you're quite right to feel that.

And I don't underrate them, but I don't despair and you shouldn't despair. Because you, like I, have read something of history. You know something of the record of the achievement of Europeans. And dark as this hour is, it's no darker, it's not as dark as some of the hours you've known in European history.

When everything was cowardice, treachery, and betrayal. And when the Saracen hordes from far outside Europe swept right across that continent, and would've come on over our own Britain too, if they hadn't been stopped. And it didn't only happen once, it's happened more than once.

Small bands of men in resolution, in absolute determination, giving themselves completely and saying "Europe shall live!" And they stood firm and faced the menace to Europe: its values, its civilizations, the glory of its achievement - all those things in mortal danger. And they stood firm, they faced it, they came together, and more and more ran it to their standards, and those hordes were thrown back. Again and again and again, our Europe lived in triumph because the will of Euro ~ Oswald Mosley

Mercy is the very foundation of the Church's life ... The Church's very credibility is seen in how she shows merciful and compassionate love ... Mercy is the force that reawakens us to new life and instills in us the courage to look to the future with hope. ~ Pope Francis

We are not doomed to make history repeat itself; it is open to us, through our own efforts, to give history, in our case, some new and unprecedented turn. As human beings, we are endowed with this freedom of choice, and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is up to us. ~ Arnold Joseph Toynbee

What doesn't kill us gives us something new to write about. ~ Julie Wright

Eighty-five percent of us in this country, by the way, live in coastal areas, so again, Katrina and Rita were not just about New Orleans. There were a lot of lessons that the nation can learn from us if they just pay attention to the things that are going on down here. ~ Mitch Landrieu

The truth is, new furniture or a better house will never really satisfy - they will just set new, higher standards for what is acceptable to us for our comfort and contentment. When you take care of what you have and find joy right where you are, you set the right tone and expectations for contentment in all circumstances moving forward. Whether things get better or worse, our standard will be to love what we have and be grateful for it (even when we might not like it). ~ Melissa Michaels

Our shared histories and common values make us natural trading partners and we will continue to work with both the United Kingdom and the European Union as we move forward with this new decision. ~ Justin Trudeau