Conservative Motivational Quotes

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Beauty is not who you are on the outside, it is the wisdom and time you gave away to save another struggling soul like you.
Shannon L. Alder
An awakened imagination works with a purpose. It creates and conserves the desirable, and transforms or destroys the undesirable.
Neville Goddard
Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.
Robert A. Heinlein
The Founders believed, and the Conservative agrees, in the dignity of the individual; that we, as human beings, have a right to live, live freely, and pursue that which motivates us not because man or some government says so, but because these are God-given natural rights.
Mark R. Levin (Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto)
When we reconnect with nature, we will be restore ourselves.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Think Great: Be Great! (Beautiful Quotes, #1))
If there was a reason why he preferred the liberal tendency to the conservative one (also held to by many of his circle), it was not because he found the liberal tendency more sensible, but it more closely suited his manner of life.
Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)
The "omnivore's dilemma" (a term coined by Paul Rozin) is that omnivores must seek out and explore new potential foods while remaining wary of them until they are proven safe. Omnivores therefore go through life with two competing motives: neophilia (an attraction to new things) and neophobia (a fear of new things). People vary in terms of which motive is stronger, and this variation will come back to help us in later chapters: Liberals score higher on measures of neophilia (also known as "openness to experience"), not just for new foods but also for new people, music, and ideas. Conservatives are higher on neophobia; they prefer to stick with what's tried and true, and they care a lot more about guarding borders, boundaries, and traditions.
Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion)
Motivation is bullshit, if you ask me this country could use a little less motivation. The people who are motivated are the ones who are causing all the trouble! Stock swindlers, serial killers, child molesters, Christian conservatives? These people are highly motivated, highly motivated. I think motivation is overrated, you show me some lazy prick who's lying around all day watching game shows and stroking his penis and I'll show you someone who's not causing any fucking trouble ok?
George Carlin
YOU ARE JUST You are not just for the right or left, but for what is right over the wrong. You are not just rich or poor, but always wealthy in the mind and heart. You are not perfect, but flawed. You are flawed, but you are just. You may just be conscious human, but you are also a magnificent reflection of God.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
Ministry, then, is not about "using" relationships to get individuals to accept a "third thing," whether that be conservative politics, moral behaviors or even the gospel message. Rather, ministry is about connection, one to another, about sharing in suffering and joy, about persons meeting persons with no pretense or secret motives. It is about shared life, confessing Christ not outside the relationship but within it. This, I learned, was living the gospel. I
Andrew Root (Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry: From a Strategy of Influence to a Theology of Incarnation)
Many outsiders clarified that they believe Christians have a right (even an obligation) to pursue political involvement, but they disagree with our methods and our attitudes. They say we seem to be pursuing an agenda that benefits only ourselves; that we expect too much out of politics; they question whether we are motivated by our economic status rather than faith perspectives when we support conservative politics; they claim we act and say things in an unchristian manner; they wonder whether Jesus would use political power as we do; and they are concerned that we overpowered the voices of other groups.
David Kinnaman (unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity... and Why It Matters)
complacent.26 When it comes to hiring, raising money, or even conserving energy, people aren’t rational robots. Where they stand in relation to others affects motivation.
Jonah Berger (Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior)
In study after study, subjects who see the world as a threatening and dangerous place tend to be more politically conservative. Those who see the world as safe, and who are motivated by exploring and trying new experiences, tend to support more liberal views.
Keith Payne (The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die)
Up until the mid-eighties, there was always a shared assumption that the Right controlled the currency of outrage; part of what made conservatives “conservative” was their discomfort with profanity and indecency and Elvis Presley’s hips. But then — somewhat swiftly, and somehow academically — it felt as if the Left was suddenly dictating what was acceptable to be infuriated over (and always for ideological motives, which is why the modifier “politically” felt essential). This created a lot of low-level anxiety whenever people argued in public.
Chuck Klosterman (I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined))
Liberals are more likely to see people as victims of circumstance and oppression, and doubt whether individuals can climb without governmental help. My own analysis using 2005 survey data from Syracuse University shows that about 90 percent of conservatives agree that “While people may begin with different opportunities, hard work and perseverance can usually overcome those disadvantages.” Liberals — even upper-income liberals — are a third less likely to say this.
Arthur C. Brooks
New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. If conservatives get to call universal health care "socialized medicine," I get to call private, for-profit health care "soulless vampire bastards making money off human pain." Now, I know what you're thinking: "But, Bill, the profit motive is what sustains capitalism." Yes, and our sex drive is what sustains the human species, but we don't try to fuck everything. It wasn't that long ago when a kid in America broke his leg, his parents took him to the local Catholic hospital, the nun stuck a thermometer in his ass, the doctor slapped some plaster on his ankle, and you were done. The bill was $1.50; plus, you got to keep the thermometer. But like everything else that's good and noble in life, some bean counter decided that hospitals could be big business, so now they're not hospitals anymore; they're Jiffy Lubes with bedpans. The more people who get sick, and stay sick, the higher their profit margins, which is why they're always pushing the Jell-O. Did you know that the United States is ranked fiftieth in the world in life expectancy? And the forty-nine loser countries were they live longer than us? Oh, it's hardly worth it, they may live longer, but they live shackled to the tyranny of nonprofit health care. Here in America, you're not coughing up blood, little Bobby, you're coughing up freedom. The problem with President Obama's health-care plan isn't socialism. It's capitalism. When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what's in it for Blue Cross Blue Shield. And it's not just medicine--prisons also used to be a nonprofit business, and for good reason--who the hell wants to own a prison? By definition, you're going to have trouble with the tenants. It's not a coincidence that we outsourced running prisons to private corporations and then the number of prisoners in America skyrocketed. There used to be some things we just didn't do for money. Did you know, for example, there was a time when being called a "war profiteer" was a bad thing? FDR said he didn't want World War II to create one millionaire, but I'm guessing Iraq has made more than a few executives at Halliburton into millionaires. Halliburton sold soldiers soda for $7.50 a can. They were honoring 9/11 by charging like 7-Eleven. Which is wrong. We're Americans; we don't fight wars for money. We fight them for oil. And my final example of the profit motive screwing something up that used to be good when it was nonprofit: TV news. I heard all the news anchors this week talk about how much better the news coverage was back in Cronkite's day. And I thought, "Gee, if only you were in a position to do something about it.
Bill Maher (The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass)
what motivated explorers? What inspired Magellan, battered by South America’s strange williwaw winds, to hold to his course through an unknown strait with no guarantee that it would lead to an untraversed sea? What makes adult and child alike feel so desperate at the prospect of abandoning their advance along shining rails, across shining seas, that lead beyond the boundaries of their familiar world? What inspires an explorer to undertake a voyage with no destination, to search with no objective, to travel with no itinerary other than the uncharted, the unfathomed, the unexpected?
Jacques-Yves Cousteau (The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus: Exploring and Conserving Our Natural World)
As the historian and author Randall Balmer writes, “It wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools.”33
Katherine Stewart (The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism)
I use “anticapitalist” because conservative defenders of capitalism regularly say their liberal and socialist opponents are against capitalism. They say efforts to provide a safety net for all people are “anticapitalist.” They say attempts to prevent monopolies are “anticapitalist.” They say efforts that strengthen weak unions and weaken exploitative owners are “anticapitalist.” They say plans to normalize worker ownership and regulations protecting consumers, workers, and environments from big business are “anticapitalist.” They say laws taxing the richest more than the middle class, redistributing pilfered wealth, and guaranteeing basic incomes are “anticapitalist.” They say wars to end poverty are “anticapitalist.” They say campaigns to remove the profit motive from essential life sectors like education, healthcare, utilities, mass media, and incarceration are “anticapitalist.” In doing so, these conservative defenders are defining capitalism. They define capitalism as the freedom to exploit people into economic ruin; the freedom to assassinate unions; the freedom to prey on unprotected consumers, workers, and environments; the freedom to value quarterly profits over climate change; the freedom to undermine small businesses and cushion corporations; the freedom from competition; the freedom not to pay taxes; the freedom to heave the tax burden onto the middle and lower classes; the freedom to commodify everything and everyone; the freedom to keep poor people poor and middle-income people struggling to stay middle income, and make rich people richer. The history of capitalism—of world warring, classing, slave trading, enslaving, colonizing, depressing wages, and dispossessing land and labor and resources and rights—bears out the conservative definition of capitalism.
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
Some of our underlying motives include:fn1 ■ Conserve energy ■ Obtain food and water ■ Find love and reproduce ■ Connect and bond with others ■ Win social acceptance and approval ■ Reduce uncertainty ■ Achieve status and prestige
James Clear (Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones)
Powell was first of all a scientist with a deep curiosity about nature, and this curiosity motivated his explorations. Because Powell viewed the landscape and waterscape as a scientist, he realized that the arid West couldn't fit into America's Manifest Destiny dreams, and thus he became a pioneering conservationist.
Don Lago (The Powell Expedition: New Discoveries about John Wesley Powell's 1869 River Journey)
(...) his (Adam Smith's) theory of sympathy rejected self-love as the basic motive for behaviour. He also defined virtue as consisting of three elements: propriety, prudence and benevolence. By this he meant propriety or the appropriate control and directing of our affections; prudence or the judicious pursuit of our private interests; and benevolence or the exercise of only those affections that encourage the happiness of others. How poor Adam Smith got stuck with disciples like the market economists and the neo-conservatives is hard to imagine. He is in profound disagreement with their view of society. (V - From Ideology Towards Equilibrium)
John Ralston Saul (The Unconscious Civilization)
The witch mania is shameful. How could we do it? How could we be so ignorant about ourselves and our weaknesses? How could it have happened in the most “advanced,” the most “civilized” nations then on Earth? Why was it resolutely supported by conservatives, monarchists, and religious fundamentalists? Why opposed by liberals, Quakers and followers of the Enlightenment? If we’re absolutely sure that our beliefs are right, and those of others wrong; that we are motivated by good, and others by evil; that the King of the Universe speaks to us, and not to adherents of very different faiths; that it is wicked to challenge conventional doctrines or to ask searching questions; that our main job is to believe and obey - then the witch mania will recur in its infinite variations down to the time of the last man. Note Friedrich von Spee’s very first point, and the implication that improved public understanding of superstition and skepticism might have helped to short-circuit the whole train of causality. If we fail to understand how it worked in the last round, we will not recognize it as it emerges in the next.
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
Always, during both the low points and high points in our lives, if we needed to escape, we went bush. We were so lucky to share a passion for wildlife experiences. Tasmania, the beautiful island state off the southern coast of Australia, became one of our favorite wildlife hot spots. We so loved Tassie’s unique wildlife and spectacular wilderness areas that we resolved to establish a conservation property there. Wes and Steve scouted the whole island (in between checking out the top secret Tasmanian surf spots), looking for just the right land for us to purchse. Part of our motivation was that we did not want to see the Tasmanian devil go the way of the thylacine, the extinct Tasmanian tiger. A bizarre-looking animal, it was shaped like a large log, with a tail and a pouch like a kangaroo. It had been pushed off of the Australian mainland (probably by the dingo) thousands of years ago, but it was still surviving in Tasmania into the 1930s. There exists some heartbreaking black-and-white film footage of the only remaining known Tassie tiger in 1936, as the last of the thylacines paces its enclosure. Watching the film is enough to make you rededicate your life to saving wildlife.
Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
The ultimate and most profound reason for the German decline is the fact that the racial problem was ignored, and that its importance in the historical development of nations wasn't grasped. Events that take place in the life of nations are not due to chance, but are the natural results of the effort to conserve and multiply the species and the race--even if people aren't conscious of the inner motives of their conduct.
Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf Volume I)
Jimmy Carter’s pollster Pat Caddell understood how dangerous all this could prove to the Democratic coalition: blue-collar voters were vulnerable to conservative appeals because they were “no longer solely motivated by economic concerns—which have traditionally made them Democrats.” Now that they feared “change in society” more than losing their place in the middle class, they were “one of the most vulnerable groups in the Democratic coalition.
Rick Perlstein (Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980)
I never swallowed in its entirety the free-market rhetoric of the Thatcherites. But I deeply sympathized with Thatcher’s motives. She wanted the electorate to recognize that the individual’s life is his own and the responsibility of living it cannot be borne by anyone else, still less by the state. She hoped to release the talent and enterprise that, notwithstanding decades of egalitarian claptrap, she believed yet to exist in British society. The
Roger Scruton (How to Be a Conservative)
Fear, anxiety, the terror of mortality—it must be a drag being right-wing. But despite that, in a multinational study, rightists were happier than leftists.42 Why? Perhaps it’s having simpler answers, unburdened by motivated correction. Or, as favored by the authors, because system justification allows conservatives to rationalize and be less discomfited by inequality. And as economic inequality rises, the happiness gap between the Right and the Left increases.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
Ludwig von Mises wrote a book on socialism that predicted the catastrophe we see before us. Socialist economy, he argued, was economic irrationality, and socialist planning a prescription for chaos. Only a capitalist market could provide a system of rational allocations and rational accounts. Only private property and the profit-motive could unleash the forces of individual initiative and human creativity to produce real and expanding wealth—not only for the rich but
David Horowitz (The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz (My Life and Times 1))
Chronicling the passage of whales has led me to an understanding that we, as a species, now sand at a crossroads. We can face the possibility of our own extinction and work to avert it, or we can flow the more traditional path of earths organisms and fall blindly over the edge. If there's one trait that characterised human beings, it's the will to survive. This, I believe, will motivate us to work with the natural world rather than opposite it, which is all we need to do to give the children of earth - of all species - the opportunity to thrive.
Alexandra Morton (Listening to Whales: What the Orcas Have Taught Us)
This isn’t some libertarian mistrust of government policy, which is healthy in any democracy. This is deep skepticism of the very institutions of our society. And it’s becoming more and more mainstream. We can’t trust the evening news. We can’t trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateway to a better life, are rigged against us. We can’t get jobs. You can’t believe these things and participate meaningfully in society. Social psychologists have shown that group belief is a powerful motivator in performance. When groups perceive that it’s in their interest to work hard and achieve things, members of that group outperform other similarly situated individuals. It’s obvious why: If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it’s hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all? Similarly, when people do fail, this mind-set allows them to look outward. I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day. Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents. Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers. I have watched some friends blossom into successful adults and others fall victim to the worst of Middletown’s temptations—premature parenthood, drugs, incarceration. What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault. My dad, for example, has never disparaged hard work, but he mistrusts some of the most obvious paths to upward mobility. When
J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis)
Social psychologists have found that with divisive moral issues, especially those on which liberals and conservatives disagree, all combatants are intuitively certain they are correct and that their opponents have ugly ulterior motives. They argue out of respect for the social convention that one should always provide reasons for one’s opinions, but when an argument is refuted, they don’t change their minds but work harder to find a replacement argument. Moral debates, far from resolving hostilities, can escalate them, because when people on the other side don’t immediately capitulate, it only proves they are impervious to reason.
Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature)
Atheism is the default position in any scientific inquiry, just as a-quarkism or a-neutrinoism was. That is, any entity has to earn its admission into a scientific account either via direct evidence for its existence or because it plays some fundamental explanatory role. Before the theoretical need for neutrinos was appreciated (to preserve the conservation of energy) and then later experimental detection was made, they were not part of the accepted physical account of the world. To say physicists in 1900 were 'agnostic' about neutrinos sounds wrong: they just did not believe there were such things. As yet, there is no direct experimental evidence of a deity, and in order for the postulation of a deity to play an explanatory role there would have to be a lot of detail about how it would act. If, as you have suggested, we are not “good judges of how the deity would behave,” then such an unknown and unpredictable deity cannot provide good explanatory grounds for any phenomenon. The problem with the 'minimal view' is that in trying to be as vague as possible about the nature and motivation of the deity, the hypothesis loses any explanatory force, and so cannot be admitted on scientific grounds. Of course, as the example of quarks and neutrinos shows, scientific accounts change in response to new data and new theory. The default position can be overcome.
Tim Maudlin
That impulse, which rules equally in the noblest and the ignoblest, the impulse to the conservation of the species, breaks forth from time to time as reason and passion of spirit; it has then a brilliant train of motives about it, and tries with all its power to make us forget that fundamentally it is just impulse, instinct, folly and baselessness. Life should be loved, for . . .! Man should benefit himself and his neighbour, for . . .! And whatever all these shoulds and fors imply, and may imply in future! In order that that which necessarily and always happens of itself and without design, may henceforth appear to be done by design, and may appeal to men as reason and ultimate command, for that purpose the ethi-culturist comes forward as the teacher of design in existence;
Friedrich Nietzsche (The Gay Science)
Despite the Bank of England gaining independence for setting UK monetary policy in 1998 and in the process being freed from political meddling; it has recently come under renewed attack from the lunatic fringe within the UK's Conservative Party, especially amongst arch Brexiteers such as Jacob Rees-Mogg (a.k.a. JackOff Grease-Smug to his growing number of detractors) who appear hell-bent on undermining the current bank governor's every move. When Mark Carney rightly sounds the alarm bells of the potential dangers to the UK economy resulting from a 'no deal' Brexit, he should be allowed to offer those wise words of warning without being subjected to Rees-Mogg's tiresome whining and monotonous droning on about politically motivated statements. It's high time this pestilent gnat modified his tune before a large fly swat of public outrage takes him down.
Alex Morritt (Lines & Lenses)
Steve Jobs was famous for what observers called his “reality distortion field.” Part motivational tactic, part sheer drive and ambition, this field made him notoriously dismissive of phrases such as “It can’t be done” or “We need more time.” Having learned early in life that reality was falsely hemmed in by rules and compromises that people had been taught as children, Jobs had a much more aggressive idea of what was or wasn’t possible. To him, when you factored in vision and work ethic, much of life was malleable. For instance, in the design stages for a new mouse for an early Apple product, Jobs had high expectations. He wanted it to move fluidly in any direction—a new development for any mouse at that time—but a lead engineer was told by one of his designers that this would be commercially impossible. What Jobs wanted wasn’t realistic and wouldn’t work. The next day, the lead engineer arrived at work to find that Steve Jobs had fired the employee who’d said that. When the replacement came in, his first words were: “I can build the mouse.” This was Jobs’s view of reality at work. Malleable, adamant, self-confident. Not in the delusional sense, but for the purposes of accomplishing something. He knew that to aim low meant to accept mediocre accomplishment. But a high aim could, if things went right, create something extraordinary. He was Napoleon shouting to his soldiers: “There shall be no Alps!” For most of us, such confidence does not come easy. It’s understandable. So many people in our lives have preached the need to be realistic or conservative or worse—to not rock the boat. This is an enormous disadvantage when it comes to trying big things. Because though our doubts (and self-doubts) feel real, they have very little bearing on what is and isn’t possible. Our
Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Adversity to Advantage)
conservatives (or conservative nationalists) who became Nazis out of what Hermann Rauschning calls “the best of motives.” Rauschning joined the party in the early 1930s and became the Nazi mayor of the city of Danzig, believing in “the eternal values of the nation” and “a political order rooted in the nation.” He had a personal relationship with Hitler but soon discovered that his aims for Germany were not the Nazis’ aims, and in 1934 he left the party and fled to Switzerland. National Socialism, he had concluded, was not a conservative movement but a revolutionary one, “the destroyer of all order and all the things of the mind.” The only thing it understood was force and it held to no beliefs other than the acquisition of power and then more power. Rauschning was prescient enough to see that there was nothing to prevent the unscrupulous, nihilistic Hitler from forming an alliance with his supposed archenemy, Stalin. In a widely read book, The Revolution of Nihilism, published in 1938, he issued a warning that many did not wish to hear. The West, he said, had to prepare for “a clear, open, absolutely unflinching struggle” against the Nazis. For “nothing, not even the threat of world war, will deter them from their course.” Then
Barry Gewen (The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World)
Starting with Theodor Adorno in the 1950s, people have suggested that lower intelligence predicts adherence to conservative ideology. Some but not all studies since then have supported this conclusion. More consistent has been a link between lower intelligence and a subtype of conservatism, namely right-wing authoritarianism (RWA, a fondness for hierarchy). ... The standard, convincing explanation for the link is that RWA provides simple answers, ideal for people with poor abstract reasoning skills. The literature has two broad themes. One is that rightists are relatively uncomfortable with ambiguity; ... . The other is that leftists, well, think harder, have a greater capacity for what the political scientist Philip Tetlock of the University of Pennsylvania calls "integrative complexity". In one study, conservatives and liberals, when asked about the causes of poverty, both tended toward personal attributions (“They’re poor because they’re lazy”). But only if they had to make snap judgments. Give people more time, and liberals shifted toward situational explanations (“Wait, things are stacked against the poor”). In other words, conservatives start gut and stay gut; liberals go from gut to head. ... Why? Some have suggested it’s a greater respect for thinking, which readily becomes an unhelpful tautology. Linda Skitka of the University of Illinois emphasizes how the personal attributions of snap judgments readily feel dissonant to liberals, at odds with their principles; thus they are motivated to think their way to a more consonant view. In contrast, even with more time, conservatives don’t become more situational, because there’s no dissonance.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
Political philosophers of the Enlightenment, from Hobbes and Locke, reaching down to John Rawls and his followers today, have found the roots of political order and the motive of political obligation in a social contract – an agreement, overt or implied, to be bound by principles to which all reasonable citizens can assent. Although the social contract exists in many forms, its ruling principle was announced by Hobbes with the assertion that there can be ‘no obligation on any man which ariseth not from some act of his own’.1 My obligations are my own creation, binding because freely chosen. When you and I exchange promises, the resulting contract is freely undertaken, and any breach does violence not merely to the other but also to the self, since it is a repudiation of a well-grounded rational choice. If we could construe our obligation to the state on the model of a contract, therefore, we would have justified it in terms that all rational beings must accept. Contracts are the paradigms of self-chosen obligations – obligations that are not imposed, commanded or coerced but freely undertaken. When law is founded in a social contract, therefore, obedience to the law is simply the other side of free choice. Freedom and obedience are one and the same. Such a contract is addressed to the abstract and universal Homo oeconomicus who comes into the world without attachments, without, as Rawls puts it, a ‘conception of the good’, and with nothing save his rational self-interest to guide him. But human societies are by their nature exclusive, establishing privileges and benefits that are offered only to the insider, and which cannot be freely bestowed on all-comers without sacrificing the trust on which social harmony depends. The social contract begins from a thought-experiment, in which a group of people gather together to decide on their common future. But if they are in a position to decide on their common future, it is because they already have one: because they recognize their mutual togetherness and reciprocal dependence, which makes it incumbent upon them to settle how they might be governed under a common jurisdiction in a common territory. In short, the social contract requires a relation of membership. Theorists of the social contract write as though it presupposes only the first-person singular of free rational choice. In fact, it presupposes a first-person plural, in which the burdens of belonging have already been assumed.
Roger Scruton (How to Be a Conservative)
You are a thinker. I am a thinker. We think that all human beings are thinkers. The amazing fact is that we tend to think against artificial intelligence — that various kind of computers or artificial robots can think, but most of us never cast any doubt on human thinking potential in general. If during natural conservation with human any computer or artificial robot could generate human-like responses by using its own ‘brain’ but not ready-form programming language which is antecedently written and included in the brain design and which consequently determine its function and response, then that computer or artificial robot would unquestionably be acknowledged as a thinker as we are. But is it absolutely true that all humans are capable of using their own brain while interpreting various signals and responding them? Indeed, religion or any other ideology is some kind of such program which is written by others and which determines our vision, mind and behavior models, depriving us of a clear and logical thinking. It forces us to see the world with its eyes, to construct our mind as it says and control our behavior as it wants. There can be no freedom, no alternative possibilities. You don’t need to understand its claims, you need only believe them. Whatever is unthinkable and unimaginable for you, is said higher for your understanding, you cannot even criticise what seems to be illogical and absurd for you. The unwritten golden rule of religion and its Holy Scripture is that — whatever you think, you cannot contradict what is written there. You can reconcile what is illogical and absurd in religion with logic and common sense, if it is possible, if not, you should confine your thinking to that illogicality and absurdity, which in turn would make you more and more a muddled thinker. For instance, if it is written there that you should cut head or legs of anyone who dare criticize your religion and your prophet, you should unquestionably believe that it is just and right punishment for him. You can reason in favor of softening that cruel image of your religion by saying that that ‘just and right punishment’ is considered within religious community, but not secular society. However, the absurdity of your vision still remains, because as an advocate of your religion you dream of its spread all over the world, where the cruel and insane claims of your religion would be the norm and standard for everyone. If it is written there that you can sexually exploit any slave girl or woman, especially who doesn’t hold your religious faith or she is an atheist, you should support that sexual violence without any question. After all of them, you would like to be named as a thinker. In my mind, you are a thinker, but a thinker who has got a psychological disorder. It is logical to ask whether all those ‘thinkers’ represent a potential danger for the humanity. I think, yes. However, we are lucky that not all believers would like to penetrate into deeper ‘secrets’ of religion. Many of them believe in God, meditate and balance their spiritual state without getting familiar with what is written in holy scriptures or holding very vague ideas concerning their content. Many believers live a secular life by using their own brain for it. One should love anybody only if he thinks that he should love him/her; if he loves him/her because of God, or religious claims, he can easily kill him/her once because of God, or religious claims, too. I think the grave danger is the last motive which religion cause to arise.
Elmar Hussein
only the dead keep secrets." "it is not easy. Taking a life, even when we knew it was required." "most people want only to be cared for. If I had no softness, I'd get nowhere at all." "a flaw of humanity. The compulsion to be unique, which is at war with the desire to belong to a single identifiable sameness." "someone always gains, just like someone always loses." "most women are less in love with the partners they choose than they are simply desperate for their approval, starving for their devotion. They want most often to be touched as no one else can touch them, and most of them inaccurately assume this requires romance. But the moment we realize we can feel fulfilled without carrying the burdens of belonging to another, that we can experience rapture without being someone's other half, and therefore beholden to their weaknesses, to their faults and failures and their many insufferable fractures, then we're free, aren't we? " " enough, for once, to feel, and nothing else. " " there was no stopping what one person could believe. " " I noticed that if I did certain things, said things in certain way, or held her eye contact while I did them, I could make her... Soften toward me. " " I think I've already decided what I'm going to do, and I just hope it's the right thing. But it isn't, or maybe it is. But I suppose it doesn't matter, because I've already started, and looking back won't help. " " luck is a matter of probabilities. " "you want to believe that your hesitation makes you good, make you feel better? It doesn't. Every single one of us is missing something. We are all too powerful, too extraordinary, and don't you see it's because we're riddled with vacancies? We are empty and trying to fill, lighting ourselves on fire just to prove that we are normal, that we are ordinary. That we, like anything, can burn. " " ask yourself where power comes from, if you can't see the source, don't trust it. " " an assassin acting on his own internal compass. Whether he lived or died as a result of his own choice? Unimportant. He didn't raise an army didn't fight for good, didn't interfere much with the queen's other evils. It was whether or not he could live with his own decision because life was the only thing that truly matters. " " the truest truth : mortal lifetimes were short, inconsequential. Convictions were death sentences. Money couldn't buy happiness, but nothing could buy happiness, so at least money could buy everything else. In term of finding satisfaction, all a person was capable of controlling was himself. " " humans were mostly sensible animals. They knew the dangers of erratic behavior. It was a chronic condition, survival. My intention is as same as others. Stand taller, think smarter, be better. " " she couldn't remember what version of her had put herself into that relationship, into that life, or somehow into this shape, which still looked and felt as it always had but wasn't anymore. " " conservative of energy meant that there must be dozens of people in the world who didn't exist because of she did. " " what replace feelings when there were none to be had? " " the absence of something was never as effective as the present of something. " "To be suspended in nothing, he said, was to lack all motivation, all desire. It was not numbness which was pleasurable in fits, but functional paralysis. Neither to want to live nor to die, but to never exist. Impossible to fight." "apology accepted. Forgiveness, however, declined." "there cannot be success without failure. No luck without unluck." "no life without death?" "Everything collapse, you will, too. You will, soon.
Olivie Blake (The Atlas Six (The Atlas #1))
For every tree, we plant, we saves a life.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Think Great: Be Great! (Beautiful Quotes, #1))
They’d read about this in class, how stereotypes distorted, affected, reflected reality. Asians were peaceful. Gays were nonviolent. As were women. Blacks (and sometimes Mexicans) were rarely accused of hate crimes for a number of reasons, but the underlying logic was that they were naturally predisposed to violence and mischief, and so seldom was any attack on whites motivated by hate. Contrarily, it was extremely easy to claim, and prove, that a white perpetrated a hate crime. In fact, popular opinion among the liberals was that conservatives were motivated by hate in everything they did wrong: hiring practices, legal negotiations, and any criminal activity affecting blacks, Mexicans, or gays. If Denver decided that Daron had intended to send a message of terror, then Daron’s every denial must have sounded like an attempt to protect his co-conspirators.
T. Geronimo Johnson (Welcome to Braggsville)
I went into the ministry to use the church to elicit political change according to a soft Marxist vision of wealth distribution and proletarian empowerment. Edrita [his wife] could sense that I was on a long and uncertain path. She was always more conservative than I, but she did share my basic social values and was willing at least to let me test my political follies...Whenever I read the New Testament after 1950, I was trying to read it entirely without its crucial premises of incarnation and resurrection. That required a lot of circular reasoning for me to establish what the text said. I habitually assumed that truth in religion was finally reducible to economics (with Marx) or psychosexual motives (with Freud) or self assertive power (with Nietzsche). It was truly a self-deceptive time for me, but I had no inkling of its insidious dangers.
Thomas C. Oden (A Change of Heart)
Let me describe how that same thought applies to the world of education. I recently joined a federal committee on incentives and accountability in public education. This is one aspect of social and market norms that I would like to explore in the years to come. Our task is to reexamine the “No Child Left Behind” policy, and to help find ways to motivate students, teachers, administrators, and parents. My feeling so far is that standardized testing and performance-based salaries are likely to push education from social norms to market norms. The United States already spends more money per student than any other Western society. Would it be wise to add more money? The same consideration applies to testing: we are already testing very frequently, and more testing is unlikely to improve the quality of education. I suspect that one answer lies in the realm of social norms. As we learned in our experiments, cash will take you only so far—social norms are the forces that can make a difference in the long run. Instead of focusing the attention of the teachers, parents, and kids on test scores, salaries, and competition, it might be better to instill in all of us a sense of purpose, mission, and pride in education. To do this we certainly can't take the path of market norms. The Beatles proclaimed some time ago that you “Can't Buy Me Love” and this also applies to the love of learning—you can't buy it; and if you try, you might chase it away. So how can we improve the educational system? We should probably first rethink school curricula, and link them in more obvious ways to social goals (elimination of poverty and crime, elevation of human rights, etc.), technological goals (boosting energy conservation, space exploration, nanotechnology, etc.), and medical goals (cures for cancer, diabetes, obesity, etc.) that we care about as a society. This way the students, teachers, and parents might see the larger point in education and become more enthusiastic and motivated about it. We should also work hard on making education a goal in itself, and stop confusing the number of hours students spend in school with the quality of the education they get. Kids can get excited about many things (baseball, for example), and it is our challenge as a society to make them want to know as much about Nobel laureates as they now know about baseball players. I am not suggesting that igniting a social passion for education is simple; but if we succeed in doing so, the value could be immense.
Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions)
The r-type liberal will feel motivated to eliminate all fitness disparities by preventing anyone from possessing a means of engaging in self defense, such as concealed firearms, knives, truncheons, or other weapons. This will have the effect of preventing any segment of the populace from exhibiting a superior level of fitness, and enjoying a related competitive advantage. One will see this in any major city, where carrying firearms for self defense is forbidden. In such jurisdictions, BB-guns, many common pocket knives, and even non-lethal defense weapons such as pepper spray and stun-guns will also be forbidden. This
Anonymous Conservative (The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics: How Conservatism and Liberalism Evolved Within Humans)
What I slowly realized was that the religious-right leaders we were helping to gain power were not 'conservatives' at all, in the old sense of the word. They were anti-American religious revolutionaries. The new religious right was all about religiously motivated 'morality,' which it used for nakedly political purposes. The leaders of the new religious right were different from the older secular right in another way. They were gleefully betting on American failure. What began to bother me was that so many of our new 'friends' on the religious right seemed to be rooting for one form of apocalypse or another. In the crudest form, this was part of the evangelical fascination with the so-called end times. The worse things got, the sooner Jesus would come back. But there was another component: the worse everything got, the more it proved that America needed saving, by us!
Frank Schaeffer (Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back)
This would be the first croc research trip where both Bindi and Robert were old enough to participate. Robert was two and a half, and walking and talking like a serious little man. Bindi, of course, had been involved in croc research trips before. But now she had new motivation. We were in the middle of filming her own nature show, Bindi the Jungle Girl. This was important for Steve. “There’d be nothing that would make me happier than having Bindi just take over filming and I could take it easy and run the zoo, do my conservation work, and let Bindi have the limelight,” Steve would say. It might have seemed like an unusual thing to say about a kid who just turned eight, but Bindi was no ordinary kid. She had a calling. I would sense it when I was around her, just as I sensed it when I first met Steve. Although Bindi was a regular kid most of the time--playing and being goofy, with me making her eat her vegetables, brush her teeth, and go to school on time--there were many moments when I’d see someone who’d been here before. Bindi would participate in the filming in such a way that she always made sure a certain conservation message came through, or she’d want to do a take again to make sure her words got the message across properly. I continued to marvel at the wise being in this little person’s body. I kept catching glimpses, like snapshots through the window of a moving train, of this person who knew she was working toward making the world a better place. Watching her evolve was truly special.
Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
Smith did not regard economic freedom as the sum of politics, nor did he believe that self-interest is the only, or even the most important, motive governing our economic behaviour. A market can deliver a rational allocation of goods and services only where there is trust between its participants, and trust exists only where people take responsibility for their actions and make themselves accountable to those with whom they deal. In other words, economic order depends on moral order.
Roger Scruton (How to Be a Conservative)
They say campaigns to remove the profit motive from essential life sectors like education, healthcare, utilities, mass media, and incarceration are “anticapitalist.” In doing so, these conservative defenders are defining capitalism.
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
So how can we improve the educational system? We should probably first rethink school curricula, and link them in more obvious ways to social goals (elimination of poverty and crime, elevation of human rights, etc.), technological goals (boosting energy conservation, space exploration, nanotechnology, etc.), and medical goals (cures for cancer, diabetes, obesity, etc.) that we care about as a society. This way the students, teachers, and parents might see the larger point in education and become more enthusiastic and motivated about it. We should also work hard on making education a goal in itself, and stop confusing the number of hours students spend in school with the quality of the education they get.
Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions)
The most comprehensive survey yet of research into the impacts of payments to promote ecological conservation—whether to collect more litter and plant more trees or harvest less timber and catch fewer fish—finds that most of the schemes studied were unintentionally crowding out, rather than crowding in, people’s intrinsic motivation to act.57 Instead of engaging existing intrinsic commitments, such as pride in cultural heritage, respect for the living world, and trust in the community, some schemes inadvertently serve to erode those very values and replace them with financial motivation. ‘Using money to motivate people can throw up surprising results,’ says Erik Gómez-Baggethun, one of the study’s authors. ‘We often don’t understand the complex interplay of human values and motivations well enough to anticipate what will happen, and so that calls for caution’.
Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
What then, in the last analysis, is wrong with such a single-minded presentation of the American Revolution as the national coming of age? . . . What I find objectionable about this dominant motif in our historical fiction is, first of all, that it has been prompted by such conservative motives: by defensive nostalgia, by elitism, by national chauvinism, by a sense of our moral superiority as a people, and by a desire to de-revolutionize the American Revolution. Presenting our Revolution as the national rite of passage made it seem historically unique and non-replicable. One comes of age only once. Therefore, having had our revolution . . . we need not have another one—ever again. Besides, they declared, it was a political revolution, and in no respect a social revolution. Moreover, it provided us with such a beautifully structured society, as well as such an ideal frame of government, that we will never require anything more than minor adjustments—some occasional fine-tuning.
Michael Kammen (A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination)
If you believe in a cause and are prepared to stand up for it with passion and perseverance, you can make a difference. Conserving our natural environment will not make you materially rich but there is no greater satisfaction than having made our planet a better place to live on, even if it is just in a very small way.
Garth Owen-Smith (An Arid Eden)
Broken Compass I will not pretend that these leaders I’ve referenced were motivated by their desire for biblical adherence. Perhaps there was a time when that case could have been made, but with the exception of Jerry Falwell Sr., who died long before the Trump evangelical was born, all of these men have utterly reversed their positions in favor of Donald Trump. After the Access Hollywood tape of Donald Trump leaked in October 2016, Ralph Reed, who was quoted in this chapter saying “character matters” in his condemnation of Bill Clinton, had a far more pragmatic view of the situation. In an email to the Washington Post, Reed referred to the contents of the recording as “disappointing” but ultimately dismissed the idea the recording should impact his endorsement of Trump, saying, “People of faith are voting on issues like who will protect unborn life, defend religious freedom, grow the economy, appoint conservative judges and oppose the Iran nuclear deal.” Translation: Character doesn’t matter now because voters don’t care.
Ben Howe (The Immoral Majority: Why Evangelicals Chose Political Power Over Christian Values)
Old people vote. You know who votes in the swing states where this election will be fought? Really old people. Instead of high-profile videos with Cardi B (no disrespect to Cardi, who famously once threatened to dog-walk the egregious Tomi Lahren), maybe focus on registering and reaching more of those old-fart voters in counties in swing states. If your celebrity and music-industry friends want to flood social media with GOTV messages, let them. It makes them feel important and it’s the cheapest outsourcing you can get. Just don’t build your models on the idea that you’re going to spike young voter turnout beyond 20 percent. The problem with chasing the youth vote is threefold: First, they’re unlikely to be registered. You have to devote a lot of work to going out, grabbing them, registering them, educating them, and motivating them to go out and vote. If they were established but less active voters, you’d have voter history and other data to work with. There are lower-effort, lower-cost ways to make this work. Second, they’re not conditioned to vote; that November morning is much more likely to involve regret at not finishing a paper than missing a vote. Third, and finally, a meaningful fraction of the national youth vote overall is located in California. Its gigantic population skews the number, and since the Golden State’s Electoral College outcome is never in doubt, it doesn’t matter. What’s our motto, kids? “The Electoral College is the only game in town.” This year, the Democrats have been racing to win the Free Shit election with young voters by promising to make college “free” (a word that makes any economic conservative lower their glasses, put down the brandy snifter, and arch an eyebrow) and to forgive $1.53 trillion gazillion dollars of student loan debt. Set aside that the rising price of college is what happens to everything subsidized or guaranteed by the government.17 Set aside that those subsidies cause college costs to wildly exceed the rate of inflation across the board, and that it sucks to have $200k in student loan debt for your degree in Intersectional Yodeling. Set aside that the college loan system is run by predatory asswipes. The big miss here is a massive policy disconnect—a student-loan jubilee would be a massive subsidy to white, upper-middle-class people in their mid-thirties to late forties. I’m not saying Democrats shouldn’t try to appeal to young voters on some level, but I want them to have a realistic expectation about just how hard it is to move those numbers in sufficient volume in the key Electoral College states. When I asked one of the smartest electoral modeling brains in the business about this issue, he flooded me with an inbox of spreadsheets and data points. But the key answer he gave me was this: “The EC states in play are mostly old as fuck. If your models assume young voter magic, you’re gonna have a bad day.
Rick Wilson (Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump--and Democrats from Themselves)
What good came of all this exploration? It was a question philosophes found irresistable. Progress was their almost irresistable answer. But Diderot, the secular pontiff of the Enlightenment, the editor of the Encyclopédie, did not agree. In 1773 he wrote a denunciation of explorers as agents of a new kind of barbarism. Base motives drove them: 'tyranny, crime, ambition, misery, curiousity, I know not what restlessness of spirit, the desire to know and the desire to see, boredom, the dislike of familiar pleasures' - all the baggage of the restless temperament. Lust for discovery was a new form of fanaticism on the part of men seeking 'islands to ravage, people to despoil, subjugate and massacre.' The explorers discovered people morally superior to themselves, because more natural or more civilized, while they, on their side, grew in savagery, far from the polite restraints that reined them in at home. 'All the long-range expeditions,' Diderot insisted, 'have reared a new generation of nomadic savages ... men who visit so many countries that they end by belonging to none ... amphibians who live on the surface of the waters,' deracinated, and, in the strictest sense of the word, demoralized. Certainly, the excesses explorers committed - of arrogance, of egotism, of exploitation - showed the folly of supposing that travel necessarily broadens the mind or improves the character. But Diderot exaggerated. Even as he wrote, the cases of disinterested exploration - for scientific or altruistic purposes - were multiplying. If the eighteenth century rediscovered the beauties of nature and the wonders of the picturesque, it was in part because explorers alerted domestic publics to the grandeurs of the world they discovered. If the conservation of species and landscape became, for the first time in Western history, an objective of imperial policy, it was because of what the historian Richard Grove has called 'green imperialism' - the awakened sense of stewardship inspired by the discovery of new Edens in remote oceans. If philosophers enlarged their view of human nature, and grappled earnestly and, on the whole, inclusively with questions about the admissability of formerly excluded humans - blacks, 'Hottentots,' Australian Aboriginals, and all other people estranged by their appearance or culture - to full membership of the moral community, it was because exploration made these brethren increasingly familiar. If critics of Western institutions were fortified in their strictures and encouraged in their advocacy of popular sovreignty, 'enlightened despotism,' 'free thinking,' civil liberties, and human 'rights,' it was, in part, because exploration acquainted them with challenging models from around the world of how society could be organized and life lived.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto (Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration)
.” They say wars to end poverty are “anticapitalist.” They say campaigns to remove the profit motive from essential life sectors like education, healthcare, utilities, mass media, and incarceration are “anticapitalist.” In doing so, these conservative defenders are defining capitalism. They define capitalism as the freedom to exploit people into economic ruin; the freedom to assassinate unions; the freedom to prey on unprotected consumers, workers, and environments; the freedom to value quarterly profits over climate change; the freedom to undermine small businesses and cushion corporations; the freedom from competition; the freedom not to pay taxes; the freedom to heave the tax burden onto the middle and lower classes; the freedom to commodify everything and everyone; the freedom to keep poor people poor and middle-income people struggling to stay middle income, and make rich people richer. The history of capitalism—of world warring, classing, slave trading, enslaving, colonizing, depressing wages, and dispossessing land and labor and resources and rights—bears out the conservative definition of capitalism.
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
I keep using the term “anticapitalist” as opposed to socialist or communist to include the people who publicly or privately question or loathe capitalism but do not identify as socialist or communist. I use “anticapitalist” because conservative defenders of capitalism regularly say their liberal and socialist opponents are against capitalism. They say efforts to provide a safety net for all people are “anticapitalist.” They say attempts to prevent monopolies are “anticapitalist.” They say efforts that strengthen weak unions and weaken exploitative owners are “anticapitalist.” They say plans to normalize worker ownership and regulations protecting consumers, workers, and environments from big business are “anticapitalist.” They say laws taxing the richest more than the middle class, redistributing pilfered wealth, and guaranteeing basic incomes are “anticapitalist.” They say wars to end poverty are “anticapitalist.” They say campaigns to remove the profit motive from essential life sectors like education, healthcare, utilities, mass media, and incarceration are “anticapitalist.” In doing so, these conservative defenders are defining capitalism. They define capitalism as the freedom to exploit people into economic ruin; the freedom to assassinate unions; the freedom to prey on unprotected consumers, workers, and environments; the freedom to value quarterly profits over climate change; the freedom to undermine small businesses and cushion corporations; the freedom from competition; the freedom not to pay taxes; the freedom to heave the tax burden onto the middle and lower classes; the freedom to commodify everything and everyone; the freedom to keep poor people poor and middle-income people struggling to stay middle income, and make rich people richer. The history of capitalism—of world warring, classing, slave trading, enslaving, colonizing, depressing wages, and dispossessing land and labor and resources and rights—bears out the conservative definition of capitalism.
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
Conservatives, whose political motive is generally mere human altruism, and whose tightest point of natural agreement is an abstract, ill-defined ideal which has no clear recipe for implementation, is generally stated as vaguely as possible so as to attract the largest possible headcount, and exhibits patterns of error perfectly adapted to deflect the respect of the intelligent, cannot conceivably compete on any level playing field with the self-coordinating progressive movement, which has no ideals at all—being defined only by the willingness to swallow some drop, teaspoon, quart or vat of epistemic ordure, as a ticket to hop on the big bandwagon, inhale the party line and join the winning team.​
Mencius Moldbug (A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations)
So how can we improve the educational system? We should probably first rethink school curricula, and link them in more obvious ways to social goals (elimination of poverty and crime, elevation of human rights, etc.), technological goals (boosting energy conservation, space exploration, nanotechnology, etc.), and medical goals (cures for cancer, diabetes, obesity, etc.) that we care about as a society. This way the students, teachers, and parents might see the larger point in education and become more enthusiastic and motivated about it. We should also work hard on making education a goal in itself, and stop confusing the number of hours students spend in school with the quality of the education they get. Kids can get excited about many things (baseball, for example), and it is our challenge as a society to make them want to know as much about Nobel laureates as they now know about baseball players. I am not suggesting that igniting a social passion for education is simple; but if we succeed in doing so, the value could be immense.
Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions)
Over a large range of cases, environmental problems arise from our entirely reasonable habit of taking the benefits of our activities, while passing on the costs. The environment is degraded because we externalize the costs of what we do; and the solution is to find the motives that will return the costs to the one who creates them.
Roger Scruton (How to Be a Conservative)
In the light of this, it seems to me, we should recognize that the problem of climate change that occupies international negotiations today is not in fact a diplomatic problem. It is primarily a scientific problem: the problem of discovering a cheap and effective source of clean energy that will remove both the cost of signing up to a treaty and the motive to defect from it. The solution to this scientific problem is indeed more likely to be found through international cooperation – but cooperation among scientists, not among states.
Roger Scruton (How to Be a Conservative)
It is my argument that American liberalism is a totalitarian political religion, but not necessarily an Orwellian one. It is nice, not brutal. Nannying, not bullying. But it is definitely totalitarian--or "holistic", if you prefer--in that liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say. Sex is political. Food is political. Sports, entertainment, your inner motives and outer appearance, all have political salience for liberal fascists. Liberals place their faith in priestly experts who know better, who plan, exhort, badger, and scold. They try to use science to discredit traditional notions of religion and faith, but they speak the language of pluralism and spirituality to defend "nontraditional" beliefs. Just as with classical fascism, liberal fascists speak of a "Third Way" between right and left where all good things go together and all hard choices are "false choices". The idea that there are no hard choices--that is, choices between competing goods--is religious and totalitarian because it assumes that all good things are fundamentally compatible. The conservatives or classical liberal vision understands that life is unfair, that man is flawed, and that the only perfect society, the only real utopia, waits for us in the next life. Liberal fascism differs from classical fascism in many ways. I don't deny this. Indeed, it is central to my point. Fascisms differ from each other because they grow out of different soil. What unites them are their emotional or instinctual impulses, such as the quest for community, the urge to "get beyond" politics, a faith in the perfectibility of man and the authority of experts, and an obsession with the aesthetics of youth, the cult of action, and the need for an all powerful state to coordinate society at the national or global level. Most of all, they share the belief--what I call the totalitarian temptation--that with the right amount of tinkering we can realize the utopian dream of "creating a better world".
Jonah Goldberg (Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning)
Environmental conservation is a collective responsibility to safeguard, and nurture the global ecosystem.
Wayne Chirisa
My visit was a melancholy one, quite apart from its mournful motive. I had expected tremendous enjoyment from seeing the city again, talking with my old friends, and taking part, if for only a moment, in the busy and complex life with which I was once so familiar. But when I got there I felt isolated, faraway, and unable to adapt myself to the places and persons I had longed to see...Part of me seemed by now foreign to their interests, ambitions, activities, and hopes; their life was no longer mine and it no longer touched me. After a few days, which passed in a flash, I set out again, with no regret...I thought of my feeling of strangeness, and of the complete lack of understanding among those of my friends who concerned themselves with political questions, of the country to which I was now hurrying back...But although they listened with apparent interest, very few of them seemed really to follow what I was saying. They were men of various temperaments and shades of opinion, from stiff-necked conservatives to fiery radicals.
Carlo Levi (Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year)
Sir Roger Scruton, a conservative political philosopher, pointed out that the thinkers who motivated the New Left treated things like the “patriarchal family,” prisons and madhouses, selfish desire, and “heterosexual respectability” as manifestations of the power of the bourgeoisie.
Jon Harris (Christianity and Social Justice: Religions in Conflict)
Trauma-related manifestations of impaired cortical development or functioning may include communication disorders, understanding causality, motivation, academic problems, conservation of matter, ordering events, classifying, forming hypothesis, problem solving, or moral and ethical thinking.
Cathy A. Malchiodi (What to Do When Children Clam Up in Psychotherapy: Interventions to Facilitate Communication (Creative Arts and Play Therapy))
God, the Holy spirit and the bible is there to change people lives, but people who are inexorable, conservative , stagnant and stubborn to change. People who don’t want to change. Now want to change the bible and to change God. 2 Timothy 3:16 Revelation 1:3
De philosopher DJ Kyos
According to the Hill article, those heading up the Great Reset must follow the policies of “American Socialists” such as Senators Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and initiate the multi-trillion-dollar New Green Deal. It was the economic shutdowns during the virus that served as the motivation for this new order. The main purpose behind this radical agenda is to save the planet due to Climate Change.
Perry Stone (America's Apocalyptic Reset: Unmasking the Radical's Blueprints to Silence Christians, Patriots, and Conservatives)
The truth is that highly partisan conservatives and liberals are shockingly clueless about the other side—about their motives and everything else. One 2018 study from the Journal of Politics has revealed that the average Democrat believes that more than 40 percent of Republicans earn over $250,000 per year, when in fact just 2.2 percent do.13 And Republicans believe that nearly 40 percent of Democrats are gay or lesbian, when just over 6 percent are.
Arthur C. Brooks (Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt)
Energy is precious, and the brain is wired to conserve it whenever possible. It is human nature to follow the Law of Least Effort, which states that when deciding between two similar options, people will naturally gravitate toward the option that requires the least amount of work.* For example, expanding your farm to the east where you can grow the same crops rather than heading north where the climate is different. Out of all the possible actions we could take, the one that is realized is the one that delivers the most value for the least effort. We are motivated to do what is easy.
James Clear (Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones)
As a matter of principle, I didn’t believe a president should ever publicly whine about criticism from voters—it’s what you signed up for in taking the job—and I was quick to remind both reporters and friends that my white predecessors had all endured their share of vicious personal attacks and obstructionism. More practically, I saw no way to sort out people’s motives, especially given that racial attitudes were woven into every aspect of our nation’s history. Did that Tea Party member support “states’ rights” because he genuinely thought it was the best way to promote liberty, or because he continued to resent how federal intervention had led to an end to Jim Crow, desegregation, and rising Black political power in the South? Did that conservative activist oppose any expansion of the social welfare state because she believed it sapped individual initiative, or because she was convinced that it would benefit only brown people who’d just crossed the border? Whatever my instincts might tell me, whatever truths the history books might suggest, I knew I wasn’t going to win over any voters by labeling my opponents racist.
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
I have the greatest respect for conservation biologists. I care very much about conserving the rain forest and the wildlife in Indonesia, but I also found it disheartening. It often feels like you are fighting a losing battle, especially in areas where people depend so heavily on these natural resources for their own survival. After graduation, I decided to return to the original behavioral questions that motivated me. Although monogamy—both social and genetic—is rare in mammals, social monogamy is the norm in birds. Plus, birds are everywhere. I figured that if I turned my attention to studying our feathered friends, I wouldn’t have to spend months on end trying to secure research permits and travel visas from foreign governments. I wouldn’t even have to risk getting bitten by leeches (a constant problem in the Mentawais*). Birds seemed like the perfect choice for my next act. But I didn’t know anyone who studied birds. My PhD was in an anthropology department, without many links to researchers in biology departments. Serendipitously, while applying for dozens of academic jobs, I stumbled across an advertisement for a position managing Dr. Ellen Ketterson’s laboratory at Indiana University. The ad described Ketterson’s long-term project on dark-eyed juncos. Eureka! Birds! At the time, her lab primarily focused on endocrinology methods like hormone assays (a method to measure how much of a hormone is present in blood or other types of biological samples), because they were interested in how testosterone levels influenced behavior. I had no experience with either birds or hormone assays. But I had spent the last several years developing DNA sequencing and genotyping skills, which the Ketterson lab was just starting to use. I hoped that my expertise with fieldwork and genetic work would be seen as beneficial enough to excuse my lack of experience in ornithology and endocrinology. I submitted my application but heard nothing back. After a while, I did something that was a bit terrifying at the time. Of the dozens of academic positions I had applied to, this felt like the right one, so I tried harder. I wrote to Dr. Ketterson again to clarify why I was so interested in the job and why I would be a good fit, even though on paper I seemed completely wrong for it. I described why I wanted to work with birds instead of primates. I explained that I had years of fieldwork experience in challenging environments and could easily learn ornithological methods. I listed my laboratory expertise and elaborated on how beneficial it could be to her research group, and how easily I could learn to do hormone assays and why they were important for my research too. She wrote me back. I got the job.
Danielle J. Whittaker (The Secret Perfume of Birds: Uncovering the Science of Avian Scent)
We are within a whisper of arriving at the first law. Suppose we have a closed system and use it to do some work or allow a release of energy as heat. Its internal energy falls. We then leave the system isolated from its surroundings for as long as we like, and later return to it. We invariably find that its capacity to do work—its internal energy—has not been restored to its original value. In other words, the internal energy of an isolated system is constant. That is the first law of thermodynamics, or at least one statement of it, for the law comes in many equivalent forms. Another universal law of nature, this time of human nature, is that the prospect of wealth motivates deceit. Wealth—and untold benefits to humanity—would accrue to an untold extent if the first law were found to be false under certain conditions. It would be found to be false if work could be generated by an adiabatic, closed system without a diminution of its internal energy. In other words, if we could achieve perpetual motion, work produced without consumption of fuel. Despite enormous efforts, perpetual motion has never been achieved. There have been claims galore, of course, but all of them have involved a degree of deception. Patent offices are now closed to the consideration of all such machines, for the first law is regarded as unbreakable and reports of its transgression not worth the time or effort to pursue. There are certain instances in science, and certainly in technology, where a closed mind is probably justified.
Peter Atkins (The Laws of Thermodynamics: A Very Short Introduction)
We conserve what is available in abundance (energy) and waste what is limited (time)
Sukant Ratnakar (Quantraz)
In 2012, psychologists Richard West, Russell Meserve, and Keith Stanovich tested the blind-spot bias—an irrationality where people are better at recognizing biased reasoning in others but are blind to bias in themselves. Overall, their work supported, across a variety of cognitive biases, that, yes, we all have a blind spot about recognizing our biases. The surprise is that blind-spot bias is greater the smarter you are. The researchers tested subjects for seven cognitive biases and found that cognitive ability did not attenuate the blind spot. “Furthermore, people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.” In fact, in six of the seven biases tested, “more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.” (Emphasis added.) They have since replicated this result. Dan Kahan’s work on motivated reasoning also indicates that smart people are not better equipped to combat bias—and may even be more susceptible. He and several colleagues looked at whether conclusions from objective data were driven by subjective pre-existing beliefs on a topic. When subjects were asked to analyze complex data on an experimental skin treatment (a “neutral” topic), their ability to interpret the data and reach a conclusion depended, as expected, on their numeracy (mathematical aptitude) rather than their opinions on skin cream (since they really had no opinions on the topic). More numerate subjects did a better job at figuring out whether the data showed that the skin treatment increased or decreased the incidence of rashes. (The data were made up, and for half the subjects, the results were reversed, so the correct or incorrect answer depended on using the data, not the actual effectiveness of a particular skin treatment.) When the researchers kept the data the same but substituted “concealed-weapons bans” for “skin treatment” and “crime” for “rashes,” now the subjects’ opinions on those topics drove how subjects analyzed the exact same data. Subjects who identified as “Democrat” or “liberal” interpreted the data in a way supporting their political belief (gun control reduces crime). The “Republican” or “conservative” subjects interpreted the same data to support their opposing belief (gun control increases crime). That generally fits what we understand about motivated reasoning. The surprise, though, was Kahan’s finding about subjects with differing math skills and the same political beliefs. He discovered that the more numerate people (whether pro- or anti-gun) made more mistakes interpreting the data on the emotionally charged topic than the less numerate subjects sharing those same beliefs. “This pattern of polarization . . . does not abate among high-Numeracy subjects. Indeed, it increases.” (Emphasis in original.) It turns out the better you are with numbers, the better you are at spinning those numbers to conform to and support your beliefs.
Annie Duke (Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts)
Every small step we take towards environmental conservation paves the way for a brighter, greener tomorrow.
Pep Talk Radio
Let us weave the threads of conservation into the fabric of our society, ensuring a strong foundation for the future.
Pep Talk Radio
Consider how many conservatives are motivated by hatred of the wealthy or elites. They do not know who these elites are, and have never met them, which is why they cannot comprehend that these elites are simply getting wealthy by following the trend cascade. Such “conservatives” talk about guillotines and revolutions as if these would solve the situation, forgetting that what got us into this situation was overthrowing our natural leaders and replacing them with the temporary favorites of the mob. The people who succeed in this society do so by taking advantage of trends. If a lot of people believe something, there is money and power in it. Therefore, if you want to succeed, you repeat the dogma and intensify it without considering that it is true. Nothing else explains why you suddenly have circus freaks walking the streets, working in government, and dominating what is left of your arts and culture. The elites, Freemasons, Jews, Bilderbergers, Davos, and Illuminati did not do this to you; you did it to yourselves.
Brett Stevens
One major problem is the Biblical ignorance of so many ministers. This is understandable among those who do not believe the Scripture, but it is inexcusable among conservative ministers. Too many preachers are not capable of studying for themselves and so are mainly dependent on commentaries. Too many preachers are busy with methods and programs and do not (in fact, cannot) study the Bible accurately. Therefore, unless there is a verse which solves the problem by direct statement, they have neither the interest nor the ability to come to an accurate position based on the entire tenor of Scripture. These ministers, many of whom do not believe in tongues, are not sure enough to speak against the present tongues movement. Lacking enough insight to see that this neutral position is impossible, they leave their people wide open to all kinds of experiences and to unsound spiritual influences. If someone opens himself to the spiritual influences present, no matter what his intentions and how pure his motives. if the spirit is false, he may come under its influence.
Thomas R. Edgar (Miraculous Gifts: Are They for Today?)
By ideology, Count Antoine Destutt de Tracy meant those ideas drawn from competing political philosophies designed to inspire political loyalties and motivate political action (Lakoff 2011).
Donald R. Kinder (Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public (Chicago Studies in American Politics))
Ministry, then, is not about "using" relationships to get individuals to accept a "third thing," whether that be conservative politics, moral behaviors or even the gospel message. Rather, ministry is about connection, one to another, about sharing in suffering and joy, about persons meeting persons with no pretense or secret motives. It is about shared life, confessing Christ not outside the relationship but within it. This, I learned, was living the gospel.
Andrew Root (Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry: From a Strategy of Influence to a Theology of Incarnation)
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Amanda Flowers
On matters where it is difficult or impossible to pin the blame for their policies' failures on conservatives, the fallback position has been to hurl a slur at anyone pointing out the obvious failure....The left's never-ending use of these worn-out attacks on the character and motivations of those who disagree with them has caused them to lose their effect....At the ground level, since liberals have lost the ability to win any and every political discussion by hurling a slur, they are simply resorting to the next level in political interaction: violence and physical intimidation.
Sean Harshey
Incidentally, conservatives are attempting to destroy this system via “tort reform,” the capping of damages at levels so low that the attorneys could no longer afford to function as police and prosecutors and the whole system would break down. Their motivation is to make the market “free” from the loss of profit through lawsuits for harming or defrauding the public. THE
George Lakoff (Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision)
There is, in the circumstances of modern life, only one solution to the problem of resentment, and that is social mobility. The worst thing that the state can do is to create those traps – the poverty trap, the welfare trap, the education trap – which deprive people of the motives and the skills to improve their lot, and retain them in a state of permanent discontented dependence on a world that they cannot fully enter. In
Roger Scruton (How to Be a Conservative)
It is a scientific fact that our perceptions are strongly influenced by our desires and motivations. When we are hungry, food-related words tend to grab our attention more than words that are not related to food. You can observe the similar situation related to sexual hunger. Until you cannot satisfy your sexual hunger, your attention will be focused on sexual thing more than normal. That is why conservative societies, which tend to suppress sexual drives, are more implicitly sex-oriented than are liberal societies, which tolerate them. Without any regard to severe suppression of sexuality, no society can reject the fact that sexual thoughts float through a man’s brain, on average, many times each day, and it has no connection with morality. The reason lies in the design of male brain, which devotes two and a half times to sexual drives in comparison with female brain. Total and complete covering of the female body and strict prohibition against emotional contact with her only trigger the sexual fantasy of the male brain, which, in turn, leads to sexual savagery and aggressiveness, making discomfort both for the person himself and for others.
Elmar Hussein
Dear Goodreads diary, Thanks for receiving me all this time with hands wide open… Thanks for being patient to listen to all my gibberish. Still, I gotta go now. I’ll be absent for some time… But I want to tell you one last story… 2 years ago, a little boy came to me and asked for my help. He was desperate and tired of his life. He asked for my friendship and I was reluctant to accept his offer. I’ve always denied his emails or text messages. I know that boys are BASTARDS, though he looked like a little bird, lost and without wings…The way he talks in missing and dreams, oh GOD I wanna forget about all… it disgusts me each time to remember that he didn’t respect that I’m a conservative girl and tried his ways on me even though I’ve always asked him to stop it…. I mean, I’m 5 years older than him…. His father got sick. They reaaaaaaaally needed help. Though I’ve always known he was a “bastard” like everybody else, I couldn’t possibly leave his mom’s calls unanswered when she always asked for my help. I’ve been through all they’ve been through. I couldn’t give up on them while I knew how much it means to stand for someone who’s been tested for his father. I’m an orphan. How could I possibly walk away? + Our dear Prophet (PBUH) would never treat a misdeed with a misdeed…I’m a girl who loves GOD…I wouldn’t be as mean as him… Still, each time he was acting like bastards act. That meanness I can read in his text messages. That DISRESPECT…. I knew he used every possible memory for his ulterior motives. I kept silent for two years…I knew he was making a show… I mean even if he wasn’t making it because he saw something in me (that everybody saw, not only him), he would be making a show for his friends … Still, I’m not the one who would leave a friend in the middle of the dark…at one point in time, I called him brother…. hhh…. Thought maybe if he knows that I’m his older sister, he’ll think that the way he talked or the things he asked are things you only ask from a girlfriend and not me… he persisted…. I tested him once and he like a fool fell into the trap… I knew I should walk away even if I’d hear that his father would die… I spent whole night throwing in my disbelief…. How could people be so tricky…I’m 5 years older…. Eventually, he made his show… Thank GOD, a colleague… a mouthy colleague… started talking about everyone at school including me and him…that was heaven’s door wide open for me. Though 14 years ago, my friends started talking about me and another boy, I wouldn’t leave him for the world because I knew he was a decent boy… This time, I dived in… One month later, he came into my class not caring what my colleagues would talk…That made me sure that he wants to carry his show over… You know diary, what kills a person the most is not death. Hurt can kill…deception can kill…not apologizing can kill… Bad memories can kill…and I didn’t want to leave him with bad memories…I sent my last text message, told him to fulfill all his dreams and said goodbye…. Still I’ve never felt relieved… I texted him again, faced him with the facts, he thought he fooled me again….I said sorry and goodbye… forever…I waited for some time and then I quit my job so they don’t understand a thing about my motives… I spent two amazing months home; that I would always remember because they’ve changed me a lot…They brought me back to life again…But when I came back, all the bad memories came back again… Dear diary, I know you’ve got tired of my complaints, but I have nobody else to talk to the way I talk to you… I need to forget all the bad memories he left me with… I know I CAN, but I need some time away from you…Even though he’s like a “tafcha” in my life now… still, I have to forgive him… I’m not someone who would spend her time hating people…People like me talk in books and ideas in their social networks… Wait for me diary…I’ll be back…
Goodbye Bro
As the legal historian Richard Epstein memorably put it, the “ink was scarcely dry on the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” which forbade the government as well as employers from taking race into account for any reason, when policies of racial discrimination began proliferating throughout the public and private sectors. In the historical blink of an eye, colorblindness transformed from an idea whose time had finally come into a symptom of moral backwardness—from a noble principle responsible for beating slavery and Jim Crow into a marker of evil. In the half century since the victories of the civil rights movement, some of America’s most celebrated scholars have been hard at work writing a false history of colorblindness. In their view, colorblindness was not the motivating principle behind the anti-racist activism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but was instead an idea created by white racists, conservatives, and reactionaries. Kimberlé Crenshaw, for instance, has criticized the “color-blind view of civil rights” that she alleges “developed in the neoconservative ‘think tanks’ during the seventies.” George Lipsitz, a black-studies professor at the University of California, writes that colorblindness is part of a “long-standing historical whiteness protection program” associated with “Indigenous dispossession, colonial conquest, slavery, segregation, and immigrant exclusion.” According to these scholars, there is no contradiction to reconcile: colorblindness had nothing to do with abolition or the civil rights movement to begin with; colorblindness has instead always been a Trojan horse for white supremacy.
Coleman Hughes (The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America)
Sometimes, it's not worth investing words in those who don't value dialogue or listen with an open heart. Like casting pearls before swine, it's better to conserve our energy and share our wisdom with those who truly seek understanding and connection.
Shaila Touchton