United Order Quotes

Some of our Elders, and, in fact, some of the Twelve will tell you, 'yes, yes, the Order is a splendid principle and will bring happiness, etc., but it is not hardly time to enter into it, wait a little while until the people understand it better.' Why, they are fools! They don't know what they talk about. They have ears to hear and will not hearken, and have eyes to see and will not understand... When our conduct hedges up the way of angels how can they bless us?... How can they help us work out our salvation? When Joseph Smith was alive I can say that I never heard him lay one plan out for the people but would have been a success if it had been carried out as he directed. And I have seen the same thing in myself. I don't care how the world goes, what the President [of the U.S.] or his emissaries do. It matters nothing to me. What I am thinking of and interested about is how do the Latter-day Saints do? The devil is in the community and he has not been turned out... Well, I still have hope in Israel. ~ Brigham Young

Even a moment's reflection will help you see that the problem of using your time well is not a problem of the mind but of the heart. It will only yield to a change in the very way we feel about time. The value of time must change for us. And then the way we think about it will change, naturally and wisely.
That change in feeling and in thinking is combined in the words of a prophet of God in this dispensation. It was Brigham Young, and the year was 1877, and he was speaking at April general conference. He wasn't talking about time or schedules or frustrations with too many demands upon us. Rather, he was trying to teach the members of the Church how to unite themselves in what was called the united order. The Saints were grappling with the question of how property should be distributed if they were to live the celestial law. In his usual direct style, he taught the people that they were having trouble finding solutions because they misunderstood the problem. Particularly, he told them they didn't understand either property or the distribution of wealth. Here is what he said:

With regard to our property, as I have told you many times, the property which we inherit from our Heavenly Father is our time, and the power to choose in the disposition of the same. This is the real capital that is bequeathed unto us by our Heavenly Father; all the rest is what he may be pleased to add unto us. To direct, to counsel and to advise in the disposition of our time, pertain ~ Henry B. Eyring

There are dons who care for the intellect and the imagination, and there are priests who care for the spirit; but broadly speaking the function of universities and churches alike is to trim and tame enthusiasm, to suppress curiosity, and, in short, to whittle immortal souls into serviceable props of the established order. ~ Hugh Kingsmill

The sounds proceeding from the instruments of symphonic music seem to be the very organs of the mysteries of creation; for they reveal, as it were, the primal stirrings of creation which brought order out of chaos long before the human heart was there to behold them. ~ Richard Wagner

A true conception of the relation of the sexes will not admit of conqueror and conquered; it knows of but one great thing; to give of one's self boundlessly, in order to find one's self richer, deeper, better. ~ Emma Goldman

Well, obviously, she's feeling very sad, because of Cedric dying. Then I expect she's feeling confused because she liked Cedric and now she likes Harry, and she can't work out who she likes best. Then she'll be feeling guilty, thinking it's an insult to Cedric's memory to be kissing Harry at all, and she'll be worrying about what everyone else might say about her if she starts going out with Harry. And she probably can't work out what her feelings towards Harry are anyway, because he was the one who was with Cedric when Cedric died, so that's all very mixed up and painful. Oh, and she's afraid she's going to be thrown off the Ravenclaw Quidditch team because she's flying so badly."
A slightly stunned silence greeted the end of this speech, then Ron said, "One person can't feel all that at once, they'd explode. ~ J.K. Rowling

As we acquire a certain degree of equanimity in self-image, we are that much more likely to feel empathy for those around us. We know what it's like to be a "self" moving through the world of "others." When someone feels particularly isolated or in pain, we don't need a great deal of information in order to come to his or her aid. ~ Ram Dass

The Energy of a Trillion Atomic Bombs in Every Cubic Centimeter of Space

If our universe is only a pale shadow of a deeper order, what else lies hidden, enfolded in the warp and weft of our reality? Bohm has a suggestion. According to our current understanding of physics, every region of space is awash with different kinds of fields composed of waves of varying lengths. Each wave always has at least some energy. When physicists calculate the minimum amount of energy a wave can possess, they find that every cubic centimeter of empty space contains more energy than the total energy of all the matter in the known universe! Some physicists refuse to take this calculation seriously and believe it must somehow be in error. Bohm thinks this infinite ocean of energy does exist and tells us at least a little about the vast and hidden nature of the implicate order. He feels most physicists ignore the existence of this enormous ocean of energy because, like fish who are unaware of the water in which they swim, they have been taught to focus primarily on objects embedded in the ocean, on matter. ~ Michael Talbot

Losing something she loved had ripped her open in a way she had not expected. The pain hurt, but the pain was right. The Order had wrought a galaxy in which good capitulated to evil, where human feelings - Aryn's feelings - were crushed under the weight of Jedi nonattachment. ~ Paul S. Kemp

The United States Violence Against Women Act of 2005 requires that all victims of sexual assault be given free access to an evidence collection kit, ~ Jon Krakauer

There is something fundamentally wrong in treating the Earth as if it were a business in liquidation. ~ Herman E. Daly

We, the United States, have to be guilty. We have to be guilty. We have to be underperforming. We have to be not showing compassion or dignity or whatever code word is used to transmit the notion that we're mean-spirited, that we're selfish, and that we're probably bigoted and racist and don't want people here like that. ~ Rush Limbaugh

She had to defend him in order to defend herself. That was why people were so prickly about their partners, even their ex-partners. To admit that Duncan wasn't up to much was to own up publicly to the terrible waste of time, and terrible lapses in judgment and taste. She had stuck up for Spandau Ballet in just the same way at school, even after she had stopped liking them. ~ Nick Hornby

The fact that the bodies weren't my first concern–-pissing and bodies were, in that order - -helped too. Killers have different priorities. ~ Rob Thurman

In order to understand what another person is saying, you must assume it is true and try to imagine what it might be true of. ~ George Mitchell

The United States had a long bipartisan tradition of negotiating with even its worst enemies, from John Kennedy
'Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate
to Richard Nixon's opening with China, to Ronald Reagan's famous 'walk in the woods' with MIkhail Gorbachev. Obama's position was firmly in line with longstanding diplomatic practice. George W. Bush's post-9/11 policy
'You are either for us or against us'
was the exception, and a bad one. It removed subtlety from international affairs. ~ Mark Bowden

A person would have to change himself in order to be a living example of what he's singing about. ~ Jimi Hendrix

Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders. The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return. ~ Colin Powell

It was the United States, after all, which poured resources into the 1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp ~ Seumas Milne

Bonhoeffer examined and dismissed a number of approaches to dealing with evil. "Reasonable people," he said, think that "with a little reason, they can pull back together a structure that has come apart at the joints." Then there are the ethical "fanatics" who "believe that they can face the power of evil with the purity of their will and their principles." Men of"conscience" become overwhelmed because the "countless respectable and seductive disguises and masks in which evil approaches them make their conscience anxious and unsure until they finally content themselves with an assuaged conscience instead of a good conscience." They must "deceive their own conscience in order not to despair." Finally there are some who retreat to a "private virtuousness. Such people neither steal, nor murder,nor commit adultery, but do good according to their abilities. but... they must close their eyes and ears to the injustice around them. Only at the cost of self-deception can they keep their private blamelessness clean from the stains of responsible action in the world. In all that they do, what they fail to do will not let them rest. ~ Eric Metaxas

We might think of dollars as being 'certificates of performance.' The better I serve my fellow man, and the higher the value he places on that service, the more certificates of performance he gives me. The more certificates I earn, the greater my claim on the goods my fellow man produces. That's the morality of the market. In order for one to have a claim on what his fellow man produces, he must first serve him. ~ Walter E. Williams

In order to be Miss Anybody you had to have excellent grades, and I had terrible grades because of my dyslexia. ~ Fannie Flagg

Mr. President, call the toady of American imperialism to order. ~ Nikita Khrushchev

Over the last 15 months, we've traveled to every corner of the United States. I've now been in 57 states? I think one left to go. ~ Barack Obama

We waited for Congress to act. They couldn't act on the issue. So I just went ahead and signed an executive order which will unleash - [applause] - which says the federal agencies will not discriminate against faith-based programs. They ought to welcome the armies of compassion as opposed to turning them away. ~ George W. Bush

We need to be willing to be comfortable with discomfort in order to grow. ~ Michael Port

Nothing is more alien to the present age than idleness. If we think of resting from our labours, it is only in order to return to them.
In thinking so highly of work we are aberrant. Few other cultures have ever done so. For nearly all of history and all prehistory, work was an indignity. ~ John N. Gray

In order to decide, judge; in order to judge, reason; in order to reason, decide (what to reason about). ~ Philip N. Johnson-Laird

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That (a) the President of the United States is authorized to present, on behalf of the Congress, a gold medal of appropriate design to the family of the late Honorable Leo J. Ryan in recognition of his distinguished service as a Member of Congress and the fact of his untimely death by assassination while performing his responsibilities as a Member of the United States House of Representatives. ~ Leo Ryan

The effort of building an ideal society always leads to violence, often to very extensive violence. Because, whether we like it or not, it is not possible to create an ideal society with imperfect people. And this, unfortunately, we are. So the main purpose for Nazism as well as for Communism was to create a 'new person'. In order to make room for it, the world needed to be rid of its non-perfect models. ~ Mart Laar

I cannot get accustomed to war; my brain refuses to understand and explain a thing that is senseless in its basis. Millions of people gather at one place and, giving their actions order and regularity, kill each other, and it hurts everybody equally, and all are unhappy
what is it if not madness? ~ Leonid Andreyev

Classification, broadly defined, is the process of organizing knowledge into some systematic order. It has been considered the most fundamental activity of the human mind. ~ Lois Mai Chan

If we live in a world of states, and if out-of-state existence is impossible, then we all must live as national citizens. We are the nation, and the nation is us. This is as fundamental as it is an inescapable reality. Nationalism engulfs both the individual and the collective; it produces the 'I' and 'We' dialectically and separately. Not only does nationalism produce the community and its individual members: it is itself the community and its realized individual subjects, for without these there is no nationalism.

"Leading sociologists and philosophers have emphasized the pervasive presence of the community in individual consciousnesses, where the social bond is an essential part of the self. It is not only that the 'I' is a member of the 'We,' but, more importantly, that the 'We' is a necessary member of the 'I.' It is an axiom of sociological theory, writes Scheler, that all human knowledge 'precedes levels of self-contagiousness of one's self-value. There is no "I" without "We." The "We" is filled with contents prior to the "I." ' Likewise, Mannheim emphasizes ideas and thought structures as functions of social relations that exist within the group, excluding the possibility of any ideas arising independently of socially shared meanings. The social reality of nationalism not only generates meanings but is itself a 'context of meaning'; hence our insistence that nationalism constitutes and is constituted by the community as a social order. 'It is senseless to p ~ Wael B. Hallaq

There was a poor poet named Clough, Whom his friends all united to puff, But the public, though dull, Had not such a skull As belonged to believers in Clough. ~ Algernon Charles Swinburne

Mr. Irvine ... had given him advice: not
advice about how to think as much as advice about how to be, about how to be a curiosity in a world in which curiosities weren't often tolerated. "People are going to think certain things about you because of how you walk," Mr. Irvine had once said to him, and he had looked down. "No," he'd said. "Don't look down, Jude. It's nothing to be ashamed of. You're a brilliant man, and you'll be brilliant, and you'll be rewarded for your brilliance. But if you act like you don't belong, if you act like you're apologetic for your own self, then people will start to treat you that way, too." He'd taken a deep breath. "Believe me." Be as steely as you want to be, Mr. Irvine had said. Don't try to get people to like you. Never try to make yourself more palatable in order to make your colleagues more comfortable. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served. ~ Jane Jacobs

Moyers: Then what does love have to do with morality?
Campbell: Violates it ... Insofar as love expresses itself, it is not expressing itself in terms of the socially approved manners of life. That's why it is all so secret. Love has nothing to do with social order. It is a higher spiritual experience than that of socially organized marriage ... Love was a divine visitation, and that's why it was superior to marriage. ~ Joseph Campbell

I'm tied of hearing about temperance instead of abstinence, in order to please the cocktail crowd in church congregations. ~ Vance Havner

If we could sufficiently understand the order of the universe, we should find that it exceeds all the desires of the wisest men, and that it is impossible to make it better than it is, not only as a whole and in general but also for ourselves in particular, if we are attached, as we ought to be, to the Author of all, not only as to the architect and efficient cause of our being, but as to our master and to the final cause, which ought to be the whole aim of our will, and which can alone make our happiness. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

Illuminati?" Todd had asked. "I'm afraid I don't know much about that," Peter had replied. "I do know some of the world's greatest freethinkers have claimed membership. Enlighten me." He'd been eager to learn more. "The movement began in 1776, in Bavaria, as an offshoot of the Enlightenment," Todd explained. "Some believe that the group aspired to infiltrate and overthrow the governments of many European states. They called themselves, 'Perfectdibilists.'" "Why would an organization of that type be interested in an institute intent on proving the Bible's authenticity?" "For centuries, freethinkers of every generation have joined organizations like the Freemasons in order to associate with men of powerful influence. Money speaks volumes, ~ M. Sue Alexander

What I am saying every day to Malawians is that time has come for us to move from aid to trade. We have picked several sectors that we think we can focus on immediately in order for us to grow our economy. So we have decided to diversify agriculture, we decided to develop our tourism sector, we have decided to develop our mining sector. ~ Joyce Banda

We don't have to agree with each other in order to think well together. There is no need for us to be joined at the head. We are joined by our human hearts. ~ Margaret J. Wheatley

Moderation is represented as a virtue in order to restrain the ambition of great men, and to console those of a meaner condition in their lesser merit and fortune. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

The problem is everybody is worrying about explosive vests and people with AK-47s. We live in a day and age when someone sitting in Somalia or in Chile or in Perth, Australia, can be sitting there with a laptop and can theoretically take down one of our power grids or part of our infrastructure and do infinitely more damage. Nobody talks about that. It's not a question of who comes into the United States. We're way past that. ~ Ted Koppel

For similar folly, our own country, in the transition from the colonial period, also paid a fearful price; and from a like catastrophe the United States has been twice saved in our time by the arguments formulated by Turgot. ~ Andrew Dickson White

Then my mother shocked me. She said, " All those things that you want from your relationship, Liz? I have always wanted those things too." [She] showed me the handful of bullets she'd had to bite over the decades in order to stay happily married (and she was happily married ... ) to my father. "You have to understand how little I was raised to expect that I desired in life, honey. Remember- I come from a different time and place ... and you have to understand how much I love your father. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

A film has to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

One trouble: to be a professional anything in the United States is to think of oneself as an expert and one's ideas as semisacred, and to treat others in a certain way - professionally. ~ Marge Piercy