Basic Necessities Quotes

it is hard to argue that housing is not a fundamental human need. Decent, affordable housing should be a basic right for everybody in this country. The reason is simple: without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.

Even needing to get to Angel, we couldn’t forget the basic necessity of eating.

I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people.

We all have choices. (Astrid) No we don’t, princess. Only people with money and influence have choices. For the rest of us, basic necessity dictates what we have to do to survive. (Zarek)

There is a rhythm to moving through the world alone. You discover what you can and cannot live without, the simple necessities and small joys that define a life. Not food, not shelter, not the basic things a body needs—those are, for her, a luxury—but the things that keep you sane. That bring you joy. That make life bearable.

To live intensely is a basic human necessity.

Many have marked the speed with which Muad'Dib learned the necessities of Arrakis. The Bene Gesserit, of course, know the basis of this speed. For the others, we can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.

Seeing the ocean in person feels almost as important as having food and shelter. It doesn’t seem farfetched to believe a charity should exist for the sole purpose of allowing people to afford a trip to the beach. It should be a basic human right. A necessity. It’s like years of therapy, rolled up into a view.

Treating each other and ourselves with care isn’t a luxury, but an absolute necessity if we’re going to thrive. Resting isn’t an afterthought, but a basic part of being human.

There are those who hold that to quibble over matters of taste in the basic necessities of life is an extravagance

Hunger and necessity are poor teachers of morality. A society that cannot provide the basics of life does not get its laws obeyed.

His way of coping with the days was to think of activities as units of time, each unit consisting of about thirty minutes. Whole hours, he found, were more intimidating, and most things one could do in a day took half an hour. Reading the paper, having a bath, tidying the flat, watching Home and Away and Countdown, doing a quick crossword on the toilet, eating breakfast and lunch, going to the local shops… That was nine units of a twenty-unit day (the evenings didn’t count) filled by just the basic necessities. In fact, he had reached a stage where he wondered how his friends could juggle life and a job. Life took up so much time, so how could one work and, say, take a bath on the same day? He suspected that one or two people he knew were making some pretty unsavoury short cuts.

Society must be organized in such a way that man's social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it. If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature.

But in order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The seas, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death--these are things that unite us all. We resemble one another in what we see together, in what we suffer together. Dreams change from individual, but the reality of the world is common to us all. Striving towards realism is therefore legitimate, for it is basically related to the artistic adventure.

I succumbed. Late-fifteenth-century verb, Old French succomber or Latin succumbere, but a basic necessity of the human condition, especially mine.

If you feel like a nearly-drowned rat that’s been dragged through the mud, all twisted up inside your mother’s borrowed, prized quilt, having been tossed about by gale force winds that managed to entangle you in barbed wire one-thousand miles from your goal in the middle of a hot, barren nowhere void of any basic necessities―then congratulations! You’re no observer but an actual participant in the game of life! Stand up and keep living.

If the world is to have a future, it lies in the hands of women. At time of this writing nearly half of all women in the Middle East are illiterate; millions in poor countries are shackled to the most basic daily urgencies of finding water and feeding children; the majority of the world's women exist in various forms of bondage to necessity, to poverty, and to men. (2007)

Accepting the world’s realities, even when you didn’t understand them, was a basic necessity of existence in Ozark life.

Sometimes being comforted by someone who loves you unconditionally was the most basic necessity in the world.

The truth was right there, so simple, a child could grasp it. Trees were responsible for the most basic necessity of life, the air we breathe.

I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people. Overall, the Pox has had the effect of an installment-plan World War III. In fact, there were several small, bloody shooting wars going on around the world during the Pox. These were stupid affairs—wastes of life and treasure. They were fought, ostensibly, to defend against vicious foreign enemies. All too often, they were actually fought because inadequate leaders did not know what else to do. Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war.

The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.

Famine sometimes increases the number of people who are overweight.

Necessity turns boss into a beggar.

Man’s mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch – or build a cyclotron – without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think. “But to think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call ‘human nature,’ the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs, or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival – so that for you, who are a human being, the question ‘to be or not to be’ is the question ‘to think or not to think.’ . . . “Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. . . Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer – and that is the way he has acted through most of his history (pages 1012-1013).

Much of the atrocities that are committed towards Arab women occur partly because the victim does not know that she has a basic right for her body to be hers, for her privacy to be respected and for her education to be a necessity not a privilege she receives if it is financially possible after her brother has been educated.

A man is NOT a financial plan. A woman is NOT a domestic plan. Money is an essential necessity- You must have and make your own money. Cooking and house chores are basic life skills- you must be able to make your own meals and put your house in order.....

Our hopes of avoiding the fate which threatens must...[be to make]adjustments that will be needed if we are to recover and surpass our former standards...and only if every one of us is ready to individually obey the necessities of readjustment shall we be able to get through a difficult period as free men who can choose their own way of life. Let a uniform minimum be secured to everybody by all means; but let us admit at the same time that with this assurance of a basic minimum all claims for a privileged security for particular classes must lapse....

The pursuit of happiness undeniably includes the pursuit of material well-being: minimally, being able to secure basic necessities. It can be overwhelming to consider how much happiness has been lost, how many capabilities snuffed out, by the swell of poverty in this land and our collective decision not to provide all our citizens with a stable and decent place to live.

Or take Varlam Shalamov, a poet who spent fifteen years imprisoned in a gulag. He once wrote how quickly normal people can crack under stress and uncertainty. Take a good, honest, loving person and strip them of basic necessities and you’ll soon get an unrecognizable monster who’ll do anything to survive. Under high stress, “a man becomes a beast in three weeks,” Shalamov wrote.

If he calls you names and/or belittles you, THAT IS ABUSE If things mysteriously go missing after you know you put them someplace, he's trying to make you look and feel crazy. THAT IS ABUSE If he tells you or your children that you are a bad mother, THAT IS ABUSE If he insists you account for every penny and does not provide for basic necessities while feeding his wants, THAT IS ABUSE

The Incas, although an authoritarian monarchy, had succeeded nevertheless during their short reign not only in creating a massive empire, but perhaps more importantly in guaranteeing all of the empire's millions of inhabitants the basic necessities of life: adequate food, water, and shelter. It was an achievement that no subsequent government -- Spanish or Peruvian -- has attained since

I have described a life of utter futility. If I work for the sake of money, spend money on basic necessities for life, and organize my life around working, then my life is a pointless spiral of work for the sake of work. It is like buying ice cream, immediately selling it for cash, and then spending the proceeds on ice cream (which one once again sells, … and so on). It is no less tragic than working for money and getting crushed by a falling anvil on the way to cash the paycheck. Activities are not worthwhile unless they culminate in something satisfying. For that reason, Aristotle argued that there must be something beyond work—the use of leisure, for the sake of which we work and without which our work is in vain. Leisure is not merely recreation, which we might undertake for the sake of work—to relax or rest before beginning to labor anew. Rather, leisure is an inward space whose use could count as the culmination of all our endeavors. For Aristotle, only contemplation—the activity of seeing and understanding and savoring the world as it is—could be the ultimately satisfying use of leisure.

Reason, according to Objectivism, is not merely a distinguishing attribute of man; it is his fundamental attribute-his basic means of survival. Therefore, whatever reason requires in order to function is a necessity of human life.

The fundamental error of Romanticism is to confuse what we need with what we desire. We all need certain basic things for life’s preservation and continuance; we all desire a more perfect life, complete happiness, the fulfilment of our dreams and ..... It’s human to want what we need, and it’s human to desire what we don’t need but find desirable. Sickness occurs when we desire what we need and what’s desirable with equal intensity, suffering our lack of perfection as if we were suffering for lack of bread. The Romantic malady is to want the moon as if it could actually be obtained.

What if you wake up hung-over the following morning, not dead, but realizing that you had killed somebody? Even worse, what if you wake up in the morning realizing you destroyed the things you loved most in your life? When she regained consciousness in the hospital scared and alone, Kate realized the nightmare was a reality… her parents were dead… her soul-mate was in prison… her life would never be the same. Through the eyes of many, Troy Trindle had it all… he was good-looking, popular, captain of the football team and dating the head cheerleader. What he lacked were the basic necessities; food, shelter and a family. Kate and Troy’s worlds collide when she moves to Alabama to resume training for a spot on the Olympic Gymnastics Team.

Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarian regimes which horrify us follow of necessity. From the collectivist standpoint intolerance and brutal suppression of dissent, the complete disregard of the life and happiness of the individual, are essential and unavoidable consequences of this basic premise, and the collectivist can admit this and at the same time claim that his system is superior to one in which the "selfish" interests of the individual are allowed to obstruct the full realisation of the ends the community pursues.

Living in this world with all its travail, so caught up in misery, sorrow and violence, is it possible to bring the mind to a state that is highly sensitive and intelligent? That is the first and an essential point in meditation. Second: a mind that is capable of logical, sequential perception; in no way distorted or neurotic. Third: a mind that is highly disciplined. The word 'discipline' means 'to learn', not to be drilled. Discipline is an act of learning - the very root of the word means that. A disciplined mind sees everything very clearly, objectively, not emotionally, not sentimentally. Those are the basic necessities to discover that which is beyond the measure of thought, something not put together by thought, capable of the highest form of love, a dimension that is not the projection of one's own little mind.

Love is an intense experience in one’s inner space. Many of us think love is a choice. We think experience and expression of love is a choice. We think that if we want to, we can handle love; otherwise we can let it go. No! It is not a choice as we think. It is a basic necessity of life.

There is a rhythm to moving through the world alone. You discover what you can and cannot live without, the simple necessities and small joys that define a life. Not food, not shelter, not the basic things a body needs—those are, for her, a luxury—but the things that keep you sane. That bring you joy. That make life bearable.

Capital takes away the autonomy of our time and makes it impossible for large segments of the population to leave the realm of necessity behind. In fact, the largest segment of the population is struggling hard to get access to basic necessities, which means that they have a very restricted capacity and time for freedom of expression.

It is not only temporality that is concealed although something like time always announces itself; even more well-known phenomena, like that of transcendence, the phenomena of world and being-in-the-world, are covered over. Nevertheless, they are not completely hidden, for the Dasein knows about something like ego and other. The concealment of transcendence is not a total unawareness but, what is much more fateful, a misunderstanding, a faulty interpretation. Faulty interpretations, misunderstandings, put much more stubborn obstacles in the way of authentic cognition than a total ignorance. However, these faulty interpretations of transcendence, of the basic relationship of Dasein to beings and to itself, are no mere defects of thought or acumen. They have their reason and their necessity in the Dasein's own historical existence. In the end, these faulty interpretations must be made, so that the Dasein may reach the path to the true phenomena by correcting them.

Industry rests on the iron law of economic determination. All history reveals that economic interests are the strongest ties that bind men together. That is not because men's hearts are evil & selfish. It is only a result of the inexorable law of life. The desire to live is the basic principle that compels men & women to seek a more suitable environment, so that they may live better & more happily.

Your complaints are not over the lack of necessities, but the abundance of benefits. You belly aches over the thrills, not the basics; over benefits, not the essentials. The source of your problems is your blessings.

This is because only two things can fulfill millennials: First is to be completely understood, accepted and respected by a loyal companion whom they respect themselves—a lifelong seduction with someone they can call their own. This level of understanding and intimacy is the only way they can heal the wounds of their treacherous childhood. The second thing is having enough money to live a lifelong vacation and help people along the way—as they are an emotional generation, they are actually compassionate about their fellowmen though they may not seem like it. Nothing dissatisfies this cohort more than the need to fend for basic necessities, as it goes against their lifelong quest to find fulfillment and reduces them to their base human urges they consider beneath them, like fighting for resources and food—an anathema to this generation who puts a premium on self-actualization.

Individuals are characterized by different degrees of propensity to socialize. There are individuals for whom any contact with other individuals is a painful necessity. They literally have to put up with people, and people have to put up with them. At the other extreme of the spectrum there are individuals who absolutely cannot live by themselves and are even ready to spend time in the company of people whom they do not really like rather than be alone. Between these two extremes, there is an extreme variety of conditions, although by far the greatest majority of people are closer to the type who cannot face loneliness than to the type who has no taste for human intercourse.

We assert now that Being is the proper and sole theme of philosophy. This is not our own invention; it is a way of putting the theme which comes to life at the beginning of philosophy in antiquity, and it assumes its most grandiose form in Hegel's logic. At present we are merely asserting that Being is the proper and sole theme of philosophy. Negatively, this means that philosophy is not a science of beings but of Being or, as the Greek expression goes, ontology. We take this expression in the widest possible sense and not in the narrower one it has, say, in Scholasticism or in modern philosophy in Descartes and Leibniz. A discussion of the basic problems of phenomenology then is tantamount to providing fundamental substantiation for this assertion that philosophy is the science of Being and establishing how it is such. The discussion should show the possibility and necessity of the absolute science of Being and demonstrate its character in the very process of the inquiry. Philosophy is the theoretical conceptual interpretation of Being, of Being's structure and its possibilities. Philosophy is ontological." ―from_The Basic Problems of Phenomenology_

But what happens when we live God’s way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely. Legalism is helpless in bringing this about; it only gets in the way. Among those who belong to Christ, everything connected with getting our own way and mindlessly responding to what everyone else calls necessities is killed off for good—crucified. Since this is the kind of life we have chosen, the life of the Spirit, let us make sure that we do not just hold it as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, but work out its implications in every detail of our lives. (THE MESSAGE)

Living ‘in accordance with nature’ means not only questioning convention and training ourselves to do without all except the necessities (plain food, water, basic clothing and shelter) but developing the inborn gift of reason which marks us off as different from the animal world. We are meant to set free or perfect this rational element, this particle of the universal reason, the ‘divine spark’ in our human make-up, so that it may campaign against and conquer pain, grief, superstition and the fear of death.

…In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production… [The realm of material production] remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.62

And then we do it all again, just as our forefathers did before us. It is a farming pattern, fundamentally unchanged from many centuries ago. It has changed in scale (as farms have amalgamated to survive, so there are fewer us of ) but not in its basic content. You could bring a Viking man to stand on our fell with me and he would understand what we were doing and the basic pattern of our farming year. The timing of each task varies depending on the different valleys and farms. Things are driven by the seasons and necessity, but not our will." (p. 32)

There is a rhythm to moving through the world alone. You discover what you can and cannot live without, the simple necessities and small joys that define a life. Not food, not shelter, not the basic things a body needs—those are, for her, a luxury—but the things that keep you sane.

It's an insidious twist of thought that leads one to demand women to give up their reproductive rights to force unwanted pregnancies but then, once birthed from the womb, to deny them access to basic necessities required for even a mediocre life like education, clean air, healthcare, and a fair wage. And these people have the audacity to call their position pro-life. These same people who bemoan the welfare state, yet refuse to require business to honor a fair wage, appear to want to create the very circumstances that they ceaselessly complain about. I dare say that by perpetuating this condition, by feeding the apparatus of poverty, they are satiating their narcissism. With poverty securely entrenched, these lucky few can sit back and smile with smug superiority. Because of course, they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, they worked harder, and they have earned what they have. It's a meritocracy, they say, if only by merit of their parent's color of flesh or social standing. So yes, let's churn out more children who will be unable to claw their way out of poverty, and if they just happen to defy the odds, let's brainwash them into believing this tripe called the American Dream so they will assist us as we throw their less fortunate fortunate siblings into the hungry machine of conservatism. Because we are really only interested in conserving the status quo.

Many of the beneficiaries of the welfare state have sought to fill the void with drugs, sex, violence and other self-indulgences, or joining in mob rampages over the grievance du jour. Far from an assurance of subsistence producing a relaxed sense of security and contentment, it seems instead to have produced a sense of inchoate grievance against a society that has left them adrift, with no intrinsically meaningful role in life, while others have both meaningful achievements and visibly higher standards of living than whatever is given to them as basic necessities—and all this amid unceasing emphasis on invidious comparisons and on how wrong it is that some have so much more than others.

The federal government could make a Rolls Royce affordable for every American, but we would not be a richer country as a result. We would in fact be a much poorer country, because of all the vast resources transferred from other economic activities to subsidize an extravagant luxury. [...] To have politicians arbitrarily change the price tags, so that prices no longer represent the real costs, is to defeat the whole purpose [of an economy: to make trade-offs, with the prices of a market economy representing the costs of producing things]. Reality doesn't change when the government changes price tags. Talk about "bringing down health care costs" is not aimed at the costly legal environment in which medical science operates, or other sources of needless medical costs. It is aimed at price control, which hides costs rather than reducing them. [...] Whether in France during the 1790s, the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik revolution, or in newly independent African nations during the past generation, governments have imposed artificially low prices on food. In each case, this led to artificially low supplies of food and artificially high levels of hunger. People who complain about the "prohibitive" cost of housing, or of going to college, for example, fail to understand that the whole point of costs is to be prohibitive. [...] The idea [that "basic necessities" should be a "right"] certainly sounds nice. But the very fact that we can seriously entertain such a notion, as if we were God on the first day of creation, instead of mortals constrained by the universe we find in place, shows the utter unreality of failing to understand that we can only make choices among alternatives actually available. [...] Trade-offs [as opposed to solutions] remain inescapable, whether they are made through a market or through politics. The difference is that price tags present all the trade-offs simultaneously, while political 'affordability' policies arbitrarily fix on whatever is hot at the moment. That is why cities have been financing all kinds of boondoggles for years, while their bridges rusted and the roadways crumbled.

The exchangeability that is expressed in money must inevitably have repercussions upon the quality of commodities themselves, or must interact with it. The disparagement of the interest in the individuality of a commodity leads to a disparagement of individuality itself. If the two sides to a commodity are its quality and it s price, then it seems logically impossible for the interest to be focused on only one of these sides: for cheapness is an empty word if it does not imply a low price for a relative good quality, and good quality is an economic attraction only for a correspondingly fair price. And yet this conceptual impossibility is psychologically real and effective. The interest in the one side can be so great that its logically necessary counterpart completely disappears. The typical instance of one of these case s is the ‘fifty cents bazaar’. The principle of valuation in the mode rn money economy finds its clearest expression here. It is not the commodity that is the centre of interest here but the price—a principle that in former times not only would have appeared shameless but would have been absolutely impossible. It has been rightly pointed out that the medieval town, despite all the progress it embodied, still lacked the extensive capital economy, and that this was the reason for seeking the ideal of the economy not so much in the expansion (which is possibly only through cheapness) but rather in the quality of the goods offered; hence the great contributions of the applied arts, the rigorous control of production, the strict policing of basic necessities, etc. Such is one extreme pole of the series, whose other pole is characterized by the slogan, ‘cheap and bad’—a synthesis that is possibly only if we are hypnotized by cheapness and are not aware of anything else. The levelling of objects to that of money reduces the subjective interest first in their specific qualities and then, as a further consequence, in the objects themselves. The production of cheap trash is, as it were, the vengeance of the objects for the fact that they have been ousted from the focal point of interest by a merely indifferent means.

In the same vein, the problem in economic life is supposedly greed, both outside ourselves in the form of all those greedy people and within ourselves in the form of our own greedy tendencies. We like to imagine that we ourselves are not so greedy—maybe we have greedy impulses, but we keep them under control. Unlike some people! Some people don’t keep their greed in check. They are lacking in something fundamental that you and I have, some basic decency, basic goodness. They are, in a word, Bad. If they can’t learn to restrain their desires, to make do with less, then we’ll have to force them to. Clearly, the paradigm of greed is rife with judgment of others, and with self-judgment as well. Our self-righteous anger and hatred of the greedy harbor the secret fear that we are no better than they are. It is the hypocrite who is the most zealous in the persecution of evil. Externalizing the enemy gives expression to unresolved feelings of anger. In a way, this is a necessity: the consequences of keeping them bottled up or directed inward are horrific. But there came a time in my life when I was through hating, through with the war against the self, through with the struggle to be good, and through with the pretense that I was any better than anyone else. I believe humanity, collectively, is nearing such a time as well. Ultimately, greed is a red herring, itself a symptom and not a cause of a deeper problem. To blame greed and to fight it by intensifying the program of self-control is to intensify the war against the self, which is just another expression of the war against nature and the war against the other that lies at the base of the present crisis of civilization.

Moral life, it is asserted, means serious life. Seriousness, and the ceremonial of seriousness—the flag and the oath to the flag—are the distinctive features of the closed society, of the society which by its very nature, is constantly confronted with, and basically oriented toward, the Ernstfall [the serious case, a central Schmittian concept], the serious moment, M-day, war. Only life in such a tense atmosphere, only a life which is based on constant awareness of the sacrifices to which it owes its existence, and of the necessity, the duty of sacrifice of life and all worldly goods, is truly human: the sublime is unknown to the open society. The societies of the West which claim to aspire toward the open society, actually are closed societies in a state of disintegration: their moral value, their respectability, depends entirely on their still being closed societies.

Humans are organisms, subject to physical laws, including, alas, the one that says entropy always increases. Diseases are molecules misbehaving; the basic requirement of life is metabolism, and death its cessation. While all doctors treat diseases, neurosurgeons work in the crucible of identity: every operation on the brain is, by necessity, a manipulation of the substance of our selves, and every conversation with a patient undergoing brain surgery cannot help but confront this fact. In addition, to the patient and family, the brain surgery is usually the most dramatic event they have ever faced and, as such, has the impact of any major life event. At those critical junctures, the question is not simply whether to live or die but what kind of life is worth living. Would you trade your ability—or your mother’s—to talk for a few extra months of mute life? The expansion of your visual blind spot in exchange for eliminating the small possibility of a fatal brain hemorrhage? Your right hand’s function to stop seizures? How much neurologic suffering would you let your child endure before saying that death is preferable? “Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurosurgical problem forces a patient and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?

The need for strict discipline as a basis for all military action is equally evident in the remaining texts. According to Ssu-Ma the perfect army, placed far in the legendary past, requires neither rewards nor punishments. To make use of rewards but impose no punishments is the height of instruction; to impose punishments but issue no rewards is the height of awesomeness. Finally, employing a mixture of both punishments and rewards—combining sticks with carrots, as modern terminology has it—will end up by causing Virtue to decline. Thus the basic idea of dao, which underlines every one of these texts, breaks through once again. Governed by necessity, the best-disciplined army is so flawless that it requires neither rewards nor punishments. Behaving as if it were a single personality, it will follow its commander of its own accord. However, as the remaining texts make clear, this is an ideal that is rarely, if ever, attained.

... who can forget the amazement of a child balancing an adult on a see-saw, simply by being placed at the right position. How could this be? Where did all that extra force come from!? The only wonder nowadays is that a physics student is unlikely to produce a satisfactory answer to this question. Perhaps we will be offered a few mumblings about moments, force times distance, laws of the lever perhaps even the "principle of virtual work". But we probably won't get an answer that seems to explain where that extra force comes from; and it is highly unlikely that we will get an answer that begins by establishing principles about rigid bodies, even though the rigidity of the lever is an absolute necessity for it to work. In fact, the whole path from Newton's Laws, which basically concern "point masses", to bodies whose shape and extent are significant, is often rather dubiously traversed, even though elementary physics courses blithely pose such problems of the most diverse sorts.

An age-old story, parricide. The Greeks loved parricide, Mr. Chester had been fond of saying; they loved it for its infinite narrative potential, its invocations of legacy, pride, honour, and dominance. They loved the way it struck every possible emotion because it so deviously inverted the most basic tenet of human existence. One being creates another, moulds and influences it in its own image. The son becomes, then replaces, the fater; Kronos destroys Ouranos, Zeus destroys Kronos and, eventually, becomes him.

But a bridge built primarily “to provide employment” is a different kind of bridge. When providing employment becomes the end, need becomes a subordinate consideration. “Projects” have to be invented. Instead of thinking only of where bridges must be built, the government spenders begin to ask themselves where bridges can be built. Can they think of plausible reasons why an additional bridge should connect Easton and Weston? It soon becomes absolutely essential. Those who doubt the necessity are dismissed as obstructionists and reactionaries.

I guess what I feel about that is that that’s a kind of necessity of my own stupidity. You know when I’m trying to write a piece, I’m not able, not capable of deciding beforehand, my angle or some overarching theory. And just personally, when I’m reading reviews or when I’m reading nonfiction, I’m wanting to see somebody thinking, you know? My favorite kind of criticism is of people thinking aloud. And so that’s what I’m trying to aim for. And also probably out of a kind of spirit of autodidacticism, which kind of follows me around, because my own education was kind of basic, and then suddenly very involved. It went from a kind of general state school, two thousand kids. A kind of messy, random education, and then, through what used to be a kind of British meritocracy, no money and you’re passed into a very fine university. But in between those two things, for me there’s like an enormous gap. And that gap is filled with fear of not knowing—of constantly not knowing. So I feel when I’m writing, I’m still in that place. I don’t think you ever completely get out of that place when you feel that you haven’t known.

Here's a resume of crucial knowledge you should have in today's world but universities are not providing: Financial - Not just on management, but also on how to profit, how to manage and control flows of income; Linguistic - In today's world, speaking only a language is prove of lack of education. Knowing two languages is a basic necessity, and knowing three languages is essential, while knowing four is merely the ideal situation. Which four languages? Chinese, English, Spanish, and another of your choice, just for fun; Intellectual - It's not about what you know; it’s all about how you think about what you know. Therefore, it's ridiculous to think that there’s only one answer and one way to examine our life. Most students are extremely dumb because they lack the ability to educate themselves, despite their certificates or where they’ve studied. They never read with an intention in mind. And as they graduate, they become completely futile as individuals. This situation is the same all over the world. Millions are graduating every year, without any significant knowledge to live with. Their books are often outdated once they graduate and they're unable to learn by themselves and develop the necessary skills to adjust to the economic society in which we live. Maybe they can keep a job for 3 or 5 years of their life, but then are surprised to lose it and never finding a suitable job again. The world is changing very fast and most people can’t or are unwilling to recognize this fact.

The inspired principles in the Constitution are the principles of the rule of law which, if preserved, guarantee liberty to every man. These principles are assumed in the Constitution because they had come to be assumed by Americans generally, as they struggled through several generations to find institutional safeguards for the liberty that they prized so highly. Many theoreticians of law and politics have rejected such a tenuous and fragile basis for a nation's freedom. They dream of constitutional arrangements based on clear libertarian principles which would maximize individual liberty whether or not the people understood or supported the basic principles. Their objection does raise the important secondary problem of preserving the liberty we have obtained. The early Americans themselves recognized the necessity of "public virtue" for the continuing security of their liberty. . . . The radicals of the left today seek freedom from social and material deprivation through the application of government power. On the right, according to your preferences in political taxonomy, we have either those libertarians who would go far beyond the classically liberal views of the Founding Fathers in restricting the role of government, or those reactionaries who would be willing to invoke arbitrarily the power of government to reshape moral society in their own image. Modern prophets seem to reject both the reactionary and radical left views. And in clearly recognizing a positive role for limited government, they refuse to join the libertarians.

A second element in the creation of commercial value is scarcity, the separation of people from whatever they might want or need. In artificial environments, where humans are separated from the sources of their survival, everything obtains a condition of relative scarcity and therefore value. There is the old story of the native living on a Pacific island, relaxing in a house on the beach, picking fruit from the tree and spearing fish in the water. A businessman arrives on the island, buys all the land, cuts down the trees and builds a factory. Then he hires the native to work in it for money so that someday the native can afford canned fruit and fish from the mainland, a nice little cinder-block house near the beach with a view of the water, and weekends off to enjoy it. The moment people move off land which has directly supported them, the necessities of life are removed from individual control. The things people could formerly produce for their survival must now be paid for. You may be living on the exact spot where a fruit tree once fed people. Now the fruit comes from five hundred miles away and costs thirty-five cents apiece. It is in the separation that the opportunity for profit resides. When the basic necessities are not scarce—in those places where food is still wild and abundant, for example—economic value can only be applied to new items. Candy bars, bottled or chemical milk, canned tuna, electrical appliances and CocaCola have all been intensively marketed in countries new to the market system. Because these products hadn’t existed in those places before, they are automatically relatively scarce and potentially valuable.

We are all poor; but there is a difference between what Mrs. Spark intends by speaking of 'slender means', and what Stevens called our poverty or Sartre our need, besoin. The poet finds his brief, fortuitous concords, it is true: not merely 'what will suffice,' but 'the freshness of transformation,' the 'reality of decreation,' the 'gaiety of language.' The novelist accepts need, the difficulty of relating one's fictions to what one knows about the nature of reality, as his donnée. It is because no one has said more about this situation, or given such an idea of its complexity, that I want to devote most of this talk to Sartre and the most relevant of his novels, La Nausée. As things go now it isn't of course very modern; Robbe-Grillet treats it with amused reverence as a valuable antique. But it will still serve for my purposes. This book is doubtless very well known to you; I can't undertake to tell you much about it, especially as it has often been regarded as standing in an unusually close relation to a body of philosophy which I am incompetent to expound. Perhaps you will be charitable if I explain that I shall be using it and other works of Sartre merely as examples. What I have to do is simply to show that La Nausée represents, in the work of one extremely important and representative figure, a kind of crisis in the relation between fiction and reality, the tension or dissonance between paradigmatic form and contingent reality. That the mood of Sartre has sometimes been appropriate to the modern demythologized apocalypse is something I shall take for granted; his is a philosophy of crisis, but his world has no beginning and no end. The absurd dishonesty of all prefabricated patterns is cardinal to his beliefs; to cover reality over with eidetic images--illusions persisting from past acts of perception, as some abnormal children 'see' the page or object that is no longer before them --to do this is to sink into mauvaise foi. This expression covers all comfortable denials of the undeniable--freedom --by myths of necessity, nature, or things as they are. Are all the paradigms of fiction eidetic? Is the unavoidable, insidious, comfortable enemy of all novelists mauvaise foi? Sartre has recently, in his first instalment of autobiography, talked with extraordinary vivacity about the roleplaying of his youth, of the falsities imposed upon him by the fictive power of words. At the beginning of the Great War he began a novel about a French private who captured the Kaiser, defeated him in single combat, and so ended the war and recovered Alsace. But everything went wrong. The Kaiser, hissed by the poilus, no match for the superbly fit Private Perrin, spat upon and insulted, became 'somehow heroic.' Worse still, the peace, which should instantly have followed in the real world if this fiction had a genuine correspondence with reality, failed to occur. 'I very nearly renounced literature,' says Sartre. Roquentin, in a subtler but basically similar situation, has the same reaction. Later Sartre would find again that the hero, however assiduously you use the pitchfork, will recur, and that gaps, less gross perhaps, between fiction and reality will open in the most close-knit pattern of words. Again, the young Sartre would sometimes, when most identified with his friends at the lycée, feel himself to be 'freed at last from the sin of existing'--this is also an expression of Roquentin's, but Roquentin says it feels like being a character in a novel. How can novels, by telling lies, convert existence into being? We see Roquentin waver between the horror of contingency and the fiction of aventures. In Les Mots Sartre very engagingly tells us that he was Roquentin, certainly, but that he was Sartre also, 'the elect, the chronicler of hells' to whom the whole novel of which he now speaks so derisively was a sort of aventure, though what was represented within it was 'the unjustified, brackish existence of my fellow-creatures.

To grasp incorrectly the basic problem of “man and woman,” to deny the most profound antagonism here and the necessity for an eternally hostile tension, perhaps in this matter to dream about equal rights, equal education, equal entitlements and duties — that’s a typical sign of a superficial mind. And a thinker who has shown that he’s shallow in this dangerous place — shallow in his instincts! — may in general be considered suspicious or, even worse, betrayed and exposed. Presumably he’ll be too “short” for all the basic questions of life and of life in the future, and he’ll be incapable of any profundity. By contrast, a man who does have profundity in his spirit and in his desires as well, together with that profundity of good will capable of severity and hardness and easily confused with them, can think about woman only in an oriental way: he has to grasp woman as a possession, as a property which he can lock up, as something predetermined for service and reaching her perfection in that service. In this matter he must take a stand on the immense reasoning of Asia, on the instinctual superiority of Asia: just as the Greeks did in earlier times, the best heirs and students of Asia, who, as is well known, from Homer to the time of Pericles, as they advanced in culture and in the extent of their power, also became step by step stricter with women, in short, more oriental. How necessary, how logical, even how humanly desirable this was: that’s something we’d do well to think about for ourselves!

The traditional reluctance in this country to confront the real nature of racism is once again illustrated by the manner in which the majority of American whites interpreted what the Kerner Commission had to say about white racism. It seems that they have taken the Kerner Report as a call merely to examine their individual attitudes. The examination of individual attitudes is, of course, an indispensable requirement if the influence of racism is to be neutralized, but it is neither the only nor the basic requirement. The Kerner Report took great pains to make a distinction between racist attitudes and racist behavior. In doing so, it was trying to point out that the fundamental problem lies in the racist behavior of American institutions toward Negroes, and that the behavior of these institutions is influenced more by overt racist actions of people than by their private attitudes. If so, then the basic requirement is for white Americans, while not ignoring the necessity for a revision of their private beliefs, to concentrate on actions that can lead to the ultimate democratization of American institutions. By focusing upon private attitudes alone, white Americans may come to rely on token individual gestures as a way of absolving themselves personally of racism, while ignoring the work that needs to be done within public institutions to eradicate social and economic problems and redistribute wealth and opportunity. I mean by this that there are many whites sitting around in drawing rooms and board rooms discussing their consciences and even donating a few dollars to honor the memory of Dr. King. But they are not prepared to fight politically for the kind of liberal Congress the country needs to eradicate some of the evils of racism, or for the massive programs needed for the social and economic reconstruction of the black and white poor, or for a revision of the tax structure whereby the real burden will be lifted from the shoulders of those who don't have it and placed on the shoulders of those who can afford it. Our time offers enough evidence to show that racism and intolerance are not unique American phenomena. The relationship between the upper and lower classes in India is in some ways more brutal than the operation of racism in America. And in Nigeria black tribes have recently been killing other black tribes in behalf of social and political privilege. But it is the nature of the society which determines whether such conflicts will last, whether racism and intolerance will remain as proper issues to be socially and politically organized. If the society is a just society, if it is one which places a premium on social justice and human rights, then racism and intolerance cannot survive —will, at least, be reduced to a minimum. While working with the NAACP some years ago to integrate the University of Texas, I was assailed with a battery of arguments as to why Negroes should not be let in. They would be raping white girls as soon as they came in; they were dirty and did not wash; they were dumb and could not learn; they were uncouth and ate with their fingers. These attitudes were not destroyed because the NAACP psychoanalyzed white students or held seminars to teach them about black people. They were destroyed because Thurgood Marshall got the Supreme Court to rule against and destroy the institution of segregated education. At that point, the private views of white students became irrelevant. So while there can be no argument that progress depends both on the revision of private attitudes and a change in institutions, the onus must be placed on institutional change. If the institutions of this society are altered to work for black people, to respond to their needs and legitimate aspirations, then it will ultimately be a matter of supreme indifference to them whether white people like them, or what white people whisper about them in the privacy of their drawing rooms.