Wisdom
Page 8
- Ultimately, only diplomacy can bring about a durable solution to the challenge posed by Iran’s nuclear program. As President and Commander in Chief, I will do what is necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. However, I have a profound responsibility to try to resolve our differences peacefully, rather than rush towards conflict. Today, we have a real opportunity to achieve a comprehensive, peaceful settlement, and I believe we must test it.
- Dr. [Martin Luther] King [Jr.] had many other goals - many other more transcendent, non-racial, policy goals. Goals that apply to white people too. Like ending poverty, reducing the war aspects of our foreign policy, promoting the New Deal goal of universal employment, and so on. But his main accomplishment was ending 200
years of racial terrorism by getting black people to confront their fears... That is what Dr. King did. Not march, not give good speeches. He crisscrossed the south organizing people, helping them not be afraid, and encouraging them - like Gandhi did in India - to take the beating that they had been trying to avoid all their lives. Once the beating was over, we were free. - ¦This is not a tool to bring down regimes. We never though of ourselves like this. We were just, you know, cracking jokes about the status quo. And it’s a way to deal with our differences…I think it’s a very healthy, cathartic way of freedom of expression. As a matter of fact, having a show like this reflects well on the government – that it allows something like this.
- Adults who enter into public life implicitly consent to having less privacy, but their families - especially their children - should not be treated callously or thoughtlessly.
- [Melissa Harris-]Perry is not infallible. She is human. And like any other human, in recognizing that an action directly or indirectly causes someone harm, she owns up to responsibility, apologizes, and does what we all hope humans do: try to do better.
- I don’t ever want to have to need someone again - where you feel like, without them, you can’t be yourself.
- Politics is noble; it is one of the highest forms of charity, as Paul VI used to say. We sully it when we mix it with business. The relationship between the Church and political power can also be corrupted if common good is not the only converging point.
- People will often say, 'Why are you talking about feminism? Why aren't you talking about human rights?' And yes, but we're talking about [women] because there is a group of people in the world who fought for centuries, who have been systematically deprived of rights because they were women. So that's why we talk about women. That's why it has to be about women. Because those are the people whose rights have been taken away. And we can't somehow pretend, 'Oh, let's talk about the human race,' and make things all wishy washy. No, it's women. It has to be women. It has to be feminism. And you have to become one.
- Maybe we should be that way about the First Gentleman also, and really critique the way they look all the time - their choice of tie, or their hairstyle, or whatever. Or maybe their weight.
- I’m so sick and tired of all this violence, this gun violence. And how could I speak on it - you know - being one who has advocated violence and gun violence? The only way I could do it was through a song that spoke from the heart.
- From an athlete’s perspective, to cancel the Olympics in regards to the threats would be absolutely devastating - especially since the Olympics - it’s really about people meeting together through sports and putting aside their countries’ differences for that time.
- [Wendy] Davis [pursued] higher education, as her campaign website says, with ‘the help of academic scholarships, student loans, and state and federal grants.’ Now that she is in a high-profile and hotly partisan race, it has come out that she also benefited from the moral and financial support of her second - now ex - husband. In the process, though, behavior we would expect and hardly notice in a man is being portrayed as freakish and problematic in a woman.