Backbone Of Our Family Quotes

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We still don't know how to put morality ahead of politics, science, and economics. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of our actions-if they are to be moral-is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success.
Václav Havel
I'm beginning to wonder," said Kent, sitting down now on an overturned wooden tub. "Who do I serve? Why am I here?" You are here, because, in the expanding ethical ambiguity of our situation, you are steadfast in your righteousness. It is to you, our banished friend, that we all turn—a light amid the dark dealings of family and politics. You are the moral backbone on which the rest of us hang our bloody bits. Without you we are merely wiggly masses of desire writhing in our own devious bile." Really?" asked the old knight. Aye," said I. I'm not sure I want to keep company with you lot, then.
Christopher Moore (Fool)
Girls aside, the other thing I found in the last few years of being at school, was a quiet, but strong Christian faith – and this touched me profoundly, setting up a relationship or faith that has followed me ever since. I am so grateful for this. It has provided me with a real anchor to my life and has been the secret strength to so many great adventures since. But it came to me very simply one day at school, aged only sixteen. As a young kid, I had always found that a faith in God was so natural. It was a simple comfort to me: unquestioning and personal. But once I went to school and was forced to sit through somewhere in the region of nine hundred dry, Latin-liturgical, chapel services, listening to stereotypical churchy people droning on, I just thought that I had got the whole faith deal wrong. Maybe God wasn’t intimate and personal but was much more like chapel was … tedious, judgemental, boring and irrelevant. The irony was that if chapel was all of those things, a real faith is the opposite. But somehow, and without much thought, I had thrown the beautiful out with the boring. If church stinks, then faith must do, too. The precious, natural, instinctive faith I had known when I was younger was tossed out with this newly found delusion that because I was growing up, it was time to ‘believe’ like a grown-up. I mean, what does a child know about faith? It took a low point at school, when my godfather, Stephen, died, to shake me into searching a bit harder to re-find this faith I had once known. Life is like that. Sometimes it takes a jolt to make us sit and remember who and what we are really about. Stephen had been my father’s best friend in the world. And he was like a second father to me. He came on all our family holidays, and spent almost every weekend down with us in the Isle of Wight in the summer, sailing with Dad and me. He died very suddenly and without warning, of a heart attack in Johannesburg. I was devastated. I remember sitting up a tree one night at school on my own, and praying the simplest, most heartfelt prayer of my life. ‘Please, God, comfort me.’ Blow me down … He did. My journey ever since has been trying to make sure I don’t let life or vicars or church over-complicate that simple faith I had found. And the more of the Christian faith I discover, the more I realize that, at heart, it is simple. (What a relief it has been in later life to find that there are some great church communities out there, with honest, loving friendships that help me with all of this stuff.) To me, my Christian faith is all about being held, comforted, forgiven, strengthened and loved – yet somehow that message gets lost on most of us, and we tend only to remember the religious nutters or the God of endless school assemblies. This is no one’s fault, it is just life. Our job is to stay open and gentle, so we can hear the knocking on the door of our heart when it comes. The irony is that I never meet anyone who doesn’t want to be loved or held or forgiven. Yet I meet a lot of folk who hate religion. And I so sympathize. But so did Jesus. In fact, He didn’t just sympathize, He went much further. It seems more like this Jesus came to destroy religion and to bring life. This really is the heart of what I found as a young teenager: Christ comes to make us free, to bring us life in all its fullness. He is there to forgive us where we have messed up (and who hasn’t), and to be the backbone in our being. Faith in Christ has been the great empowering presence in my life, helping me walk strong when so often I feel so weak. It is no wonder I felt I had stumbled on something remarkable that night up that tree. I had found a calling for my life.
Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
Kate Millett: Marxist, feminist, advocate for gay rights, for new sexuality, for new spousal relationships, and on and on. She channeled her revolutionary energies into a campaign to take down marriage and family, the backbone of American society. And she practiced what she preached. Though she was married, she practiced lesbianism, becoming bisexual. She had started that lifestyle at Columbia while writing Sexual Politics. This would, predictably, end her marriage to her husband, who found the trashing of these norms unnatural and detrimental to the health of their marriage. Of course, to many in our brave new world, this makes Kate a heroine. Today, the bio for Kate Millett at the “GLBTQ” website hails her as a “groundbreaking” “bisexual feminist literary and social critic.
Paul Kengor (The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism's Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration)
Education established the backbone for America’s great experiment in civilization; it enabled American industry, commerce, and military to thrive and supplied the intellectual reagent to spur the growth of the American social consciousness that paved the road to eliminate the vestiges of discrimination that tainted this hallowed ground. Education bridges communities together and provides reinforcement to generations of families. Formal edification is worthless unless we also develop our spiritual pillars in a manner that enables a great civilization to deploy its enhancement in technology to improve the health and general welfare of all people.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
I adored my best friend. Reyna Vargas was the most genuine, kindhearted person I’d ever met. I’d felt an urgent need to take her under my wing the first day she joined our school at the start of senior year. She was so soft-spoken and delicate that she would need protection if she was going to survive the hallways of Xavier Catholic School, where privilege was the backbone of the curriculum and the air itself was infused with the fresh leather scent of entitlement. The kids at my school were carbon copies of their CEO fathers and corporate counsel mothers. They’d been trained since birth to smell blood in the water from a mile away. Xavier bullies could teach the CIA innovative new torture tactics. Reyna had been a brand-new shiny target in a plaid pleated skirt until I took her in my arms and claimed her. No one at school had dared touch her after that.
Jill Ramsower (Perfect Enemies (The Five Families, #6))
It is an open question whether or not “liberal democracy” in its present form can provide a thought-world of sufficient moral substance to sustain meaningful lives. This is precisely the question that Vaclav Havel, then newly elected as president of Czechoslovakia, posed in an address to the U.S. Congress. “We still don’t know how to put morality ahead of politics, science, and economics,” he said. “We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of our actions—if they are to be moral—is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success.” What Havel is saying is that it is not enough for his nation to liberate itself from one flawed theory; it is necessary to find another, and he worries that Technopoly provides no answer. To
Neil Postman (Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology)
Ain’t No Sinner (The Sonnet) When we think ourselves weak, We become weak. When we think ourselves sinner, We become sinner most meek. Yes we are fundamentally cruel and divisionistic, Yes the evil in us is stronger than our good. That's because our ancestors survived through cruelty, They didn't have much scope to practice their good. But we ain’t our ancestors in our way of life, We don’t have to watch out for predators in every bush. Then why do we still behave like predators ourselves, Why don’t we break this tribalistic tradition of ambush! No more cruelty either on ourselves or on those around! Embolden your backbone into a fountain of kinship unbound.
Abhijit Naskar (The Gentalist: There's No Social Work, Only Family Work)
Offsprings of Africa (Black History Sonnet) If a black family lives long enough in a cold climate, in about 100 generations or so, their descendants will be born white. This is how the white people were born, Because we all come from a black mother. No matter where we live on earth, We're all Africans - our homeland, Africa. Till you get this anthropological fact, You are but a traitor to earth. Black History is World History, We are all offsprings of Africa.
Abhijit Naskar (Bulletproof Backbone: Injustice Not Allowed on My Watch)