Jeffrey Benjamin Quotes

Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice the ring that’s landed on your finger, a massive insect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end of a long tunnel. Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt in your voice under a blanket and said there’s two kinds of women—those you write poems about and those you don’t. It’s true. I never brought you a bouquet of sonnets, or served you haiku in bed. My idea of courtship was tapping Jane’s Addiction lyrics in Morse code on your window at three A.M., whiskey doing push-ups on my breath. But I worked within the confines of my character, cast as the bad boy in your life, the Magellan of your dark side. We don’t have a past so much as a bunch of electricity and liquor, power never put to good use. What we had together makes it sound like a virus, as if we caught one another like colds, and desire was merely a symptom that could be treated with soup and lots of sex. Gliding beside you now, I feel like the Benjamin Franklin of monogamy, as if I invented it, but I’m still not immune to your waterfall scent, still haven’t developed antibodies for your smile. I don’t know how long regret existed before humans stuck a word on it. I don’t know how many paper towels it would take to wipe up the Pacific Ocean, or why the light of a candle being blown out travels faster than the luminescence of one that’s just been lit, but I do know that all our huffing and puffing into each other’s ears—as if the brain was a trick birthday candle—didn’t make the silence any easier to navigate. I’m sorry all the kisses I scrawled on your neck were written in disappearing ink. Sometimes I thought of you so hard one of your legs would pop out of my ear hole, and when I was sleeping, you’d press your face against the porthole of my submarine. I’m sorry this poem has taken thirteen years to reach you. I wish that just once, instead of skidding off the shoulder blade’s precipice and joyriding over flesh, we’d put our hands away like chocolate to be saved for later, and deciphered the calligraphy of each other’s eyelashes, translated a paragraph from the volumes of what couldn’t be said.

Neither George Washington, nor Thomas Jefferson, nor Benjamin Franklin believed that Jesus was anything more than a divinely inspired and chosen human being—which is exactly what James and the earliest Christians believed.

The tragedy of life is often not in our failure, but rather in our complacency; not in our doing too much, but rather in our doing too little; not in our living above our ability, but rather in our living below our capacities” — Benjamin E. Mays

Despite Israel’s great religious and historical importance, at that time it had few significant Jewish communities—by the mid-twelfth century, only a few Jews remained in Israel. The Jews suffered from the invasion of the Christian crusaders, who burned synagogues and killed or forcibly converted some Jews. Many towns no longer had Jews, but there were a number of small communities left, ranging from twenty to two hundred families. There were about two hundred families in Jerusalem, and Benjamin described Jews praying at the Wailing Wall.

To help them understand that they are not to blame for their deceptive brain messages, we taught Steve and Sarah about Free Won’t, a term popularized by the well-known neuroscientist Benjamin Libet. In a series of carefully executed scientific experiments completed in the 1980s, Libet studied how people decide whether and when to move their own bodies and what generated the initial desire to move. While the meaning of what he discovered is still the subject of passionate disagreement in academic circles, the bottom line for you is this: Your brain—not your mind—generates the initial desires, impulses, thoughts, and sensations, but you can veto almost any action before it starts. This means that while you are not responsible for the emergence of thoughts, desires, impulses, urges, or sensations, you are responsible for what you do with them once they arise. Libet himself interpreted his results in this way and emphasized that you have a choice in whether or not to respond when your brain puts out the call—this is the essence of Free Won’t. As he described it in one of his landmark papers:7 The role of conscious free will [aka Free Won’t] would be, then, not to initiate a voluntary act but rather to control whether the act takes place. We may view the unconscious initiatives for voluntary actions as “bubbling up” in the brain. The conscious will then selects which of these initiatives may go forward to an action and which ones to veto and abort, with no act appearing. In other words, what Libet was saying is that you really can’t decide or determine what will initially grab your attention—your brain does. However, his research also indicated that once your initial attention is grabbed, you can determine whether you keep your attention focused on that object (and act on it) or veto it based on the principle of Free Won’t. Free Won’t turns out to be of the utmost importance because it tells us that we have, in essence, the power to veto almost any action, even though the desire to perform that action is generated by brain mechanisms entirely outside of our conscious attention and awareness. How might that Free Won’t express itself? Through Veto Power.

Success requires the repetition of right actions.” Jeffrey Benjamin “Success is the sum of small efforts repeated day in day out.

Success requires the repetition of right actions.” Jeffrey Benjamin “Success is the sum of small efforts repeated day in day out.” Robert Collier

Maybe this is all hindsight, but when I look back, I see that Ben’s life was like a refiner’s fire. Things that would have ground down any other man only made Benjamin stronger and sharper. Hardship purified him. He took the heat and he made it his own and at the core of it was the fact that he never ceased questioning his motivations, his desires and fears.

Madison followed Condorcet in expressing faith that a class of enlightened journalists and public officials, whom he, too, called the literati, could serve as “cultivators of the human mind,” using the new media to teach the public how to pursue happiness through reason rather than passion. As Madison put it in a crucial passage: “The class of literati is not less necessary than any other. They are the cultivators of the human mind—the manufacturers of useful knowledge—the agents of the commerce of ideas—the censors of public manners—the teachers of the arts of life and the means of happiness.”68 When he wrote about the literati, Madison had in mind elite journalists such as Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard or his own essays in The Federalist; the modern equivalent would be essays in the Atlantic or the New Yorker. Madison was confident that the literati could teach the public to converge around shared principles—such as a national attachment to republicanism, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—rather than descending into “prejudices, local, political, and occupational, that may prevent or disturb a general coalition of sentiments.