Ladders Motivational Quotes

Books—they weren't ladders out of the abyss, but they were companions.

Go higher and higher, until it becomes impossible to bring you down, I wanna use a microscope to locate you, don't even dream of coming down.

Nobody but you have to believe in your dreams to make them a reality.

People can destroy people; People can also decorate. The former are misleaders; the latter are leaders.

Don't just climb the corporate ladder, master it! And if anyone tries to push you off, show them who's boss and climb even higher.

I’m on a side of a road somewhere, stuck in the middle of a very deep hole, with no way of getting out. Never mind how I got in there, it’s not relevant to the story. I’ll invent a back-story… I was walking to get pizza and a chasm opened up in the earth and I fell in, and now I’m at the bottom of this hole, screaming for help. And along comes you. Now, maybe you just keep walking. You know, there’s a strange guy screaming from the center of the Earth. It’s perhaps best to just ignore him. But let’s say that you don’t. Let’s say that you stop. The sensible thing to do in this situation is to call down to me and say “I’m going to look for a ladder. I will be right back.” But you don’t do that. Instead you sit down at the edge of this abyss, and then you push yourself forward, and jump. And when you land at the bottom of the hole and dust yourself off, I’m like “What the hell are you doing?! Now there are two of us in this hole!” And you look at me and say, “Well yeah, but now I’m highly motivated to get you out.” This is what I love about novels, both reading them and writing them. They jump into the abyss to be with you where you are

The Four Keys of Great Managers: 1. "When selecting someone, they select for talent ... not simply experience, intelligence or determination." 2. "When setting expectations, they define the right outcomes ... not the right steps." 3. "When motivating someone, they focus on strengths ... not on weaknesses." 4. "When developing someone, they help him find the right fit ... not simply the next rung on the ladder.

What if not just women, but both men and women, worked smart, more flexible schedules? What if the workplace itself was more fluid than the rigid and narrow ladder to success of the ideal worker? And what if both men and women became responsible for raising children and managing the home, sharing work, love, and play? Could everyone then live whole lives?

It is in vain to try and stop a star from rising, even with a ladder.

Start today creating a vision for yourself, your life, and your career. Bounce back from adversity and create what you want, rebuild and rebrand. Tell yourself it's possible along the way, have patience, and maintain peace with yourself during the process.

Leaders motivate people to understand that they can do better than they’ve already done and go farther than they’ve reached.

Ladder of success is made by nails of Patience.

Don’t just GO through life, GROW through it. For Life comes to you only once . . . never to return! Climb the Ladder of Life, step by step-RVM

People conceptualize conditioning in different ways," he said. "Some think it's a ladder straight up. Others see plateaus, blockages, ceilings. I see it as a geometric spiraling upward, with each spin of the circle taking you a different distance upward. Some spins may even take you downward, just gathering momentum for the next upswing. Sometimes you will work your fanny off and see very little gain; other times you will amaze yourself and not really know why.

Leaders are farmers; they cultivate human beings by adding values to them till they are fully grown as successful people for harvesting.

Learning from failure boosts a leader's chance of staying ahead of his standards. Leaders who rise quickly after falling are always stable.

Words do less than 10 things, but actions do more than 10 thousand things. Leaders don’t talk in vain; they follow with actions.

Leaders inform, inspire and improve people. They educate, empower and enrich the value of their followers. They make impacts.

Leaders don’t step on toes of dwarfs. They mount shoulders of giants.

When a guru tells me about my infinite creative power at times I believe it at others, doubts are louder But by observing nature this truth flows strongest when I glance at a seed and see a whole forest

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.

In retrospect I realize that fate was a ladder on which, at the time, I could not afford to miss a single rung. To skip out on even one scene would have meant never making it to the top, although it would have been by far the easier choice. What motivated me was probably that little light still left in my half-dead heart, glittering in the darkness. Yet without it, perhaps, I might have slept better.

Being a person who pushes himself to his or her own limits in order to become as great as he or she can possibly be means being a person who is constantly faced with some kind of fear. May it be mental or physical, may you be an athlete or a writer, YOU are facing fear, every single day, by doing something your mind or body never did before. But by overcoming that fear you take one step higher on the ladder, and the goal is to take those steps every single day.

The common goal of leaders is to increase the value and productivity of people. Leaders inspire others to do better than they would have done when not inspired.

People can push people down; People can also push people up. The former are misleaders; the latter are leaders.

If you look at this development from the perspective of a university president, it’s actually quite sad. Most of these people no doubt cherished their own college experience—that’s part of what motivated them to climb the academic ladder. Yet here they were at the summit of their careers dedicating enormous energy toward boosting performance in fifteen areas defined by a group of journalists at a second-tier newsmagazine. They were almost like students again, angling for good grades from a taskmaster. In fact, they were trapped by a rigid model, a WMD.

A leader does not only discover what people can do better. He teaches, guides and mentor them to do it exceptionally well. When a seed comes into contact with a leader, fruits are produced.

Reward sensitivity motivates us to pursue goals like sex and money, social status and influence. It prompts us to climb ladders and reach for faraway branches in order to gather life’s choicest fruits.

In the prologue, I explained the gradual and subtle process in which history is re-written to fit a country's present self-image. As a result, many rich-country people recommend free-trade, free-market policies in the honest belief that these are policies that thier own ancestors used in order to make their countries rich. When the poor countries protest that those policies hurt, those protests are dismissed as being intellectually misguided or as serving the interests of their corrupt leaders. It never occurs to those Bad Samaritans that the policies they recommend are fundamentally at odds with what history teaches us to be the best development policies. The intention behind their policy recommendations may be honourable, but their effects are no less harmful than those from policy recommendations motivated by deliberate ladder-kicking.

When one is born into a religion that is not too unsuitable for pronouncing the name of the Lord, when one loves that native religion, well-oriented and pure, it is difficult to conceive of a legitimate motive to abandon it before direct contact with God offers the soul to the divine will itself. Beyond this threshold, the change is only legitimate as an act of obedience. In fact history shows how this rarely happens. More often— perhaps always— the soul that reaches the highest spiritual regions is confirmed in the love of the tradition that served as its ladder. If the imperfection of the native religion is too great, or if it appears in a native environment under a form that is too corrupt, or if circumstances prevent that religion from being born or even kills it, the adoption of a strange religion is legitimate. Legitimate and necessary for certain people; not, without a doubt, for all. It is the same for those who have been raised without any religious practice. In all other cases, to change religions is an extremely grave (serious) decision and it is even more serious to push someone else to do so. It is still an infinitely more serious exercise, in this sense, to officially apply such pressure upon conquered lands.

Maybe you are in the Abyss of Emotional Bankruptcy looking for a way out, looking for the next rung in the ladder on your climb to the Peak of Happiness, or you may even be at the Peak of Happiness already, looking for a way to stay there. Wherever you are in life, this book is designed to give you the tools necessary to help you achieve your goals.

The Underworld guards the secrets. It's got the skeletons in the closet, and any other skeletons you might wish to get your hands on. It's got the stories, or quite a few of them. 'There is something down there and you want it told,' as poet Gwendolyn MacEwen says. The swimmer among the jewelled dead — double-gendered, like the seer Tiresias — in Adrienne Rich's poem 'Diving Into the Wreck' has a similar motive: There is a ladder. The ladder is always there ...

A reward-sensitive person is highly motivated to seek rewards—from a promotion to a lottery jackpot to an enjoyable evening out with friends. Reward sensitivity motivates us to pursue goals like sex and money, social status and influence. It prompts us to climb ladders and reach for faraway branches in order to gather life’s choicest fruits. But sometimes we’re too sensitive to rewards. Reward sensitivity on overdrive gets people into all kinds of trouble. We can get so excited by the prospect of juicy prizes, like winning big in the stock market, that we take outsized risks and ignore obvious warning signals.

also been a white-collar worker in my career. In my experience, there are two types of people who do this type of work: Achievers and Hiders. Achievers are the people who want to perform at a high level. They are ambitious, motivated and energetic. They are full of ideas and want to move up the corporate ladder, which are great attributes to have. But there is a downside for the Achiever. The moment a person decides to be an Achiever, they become a target. Their boss sees them as threatening to their job, so they start to hold them down or take shots at their reputation. Their peers see them as a person who will either embarrass them or keep them from getting a promotion, so they start to do what they can to undermine their accomplishments. So, to remain an Achiever and survive in this hostile environment, a person must become good at one thing that has nothing to do with their productivity—and that’s politics. They must learn how to navigate the political world by diminishing their enemies and strengthening their relationship with powerful people. In fact, some of the most successful people in the corporate world aren’t Achievers at all. They are pure politicians. So if you decide to work in the corporate environment and to be an Achiever, you must accept the fact that you must become a good politician also. Now, let’s talk about the Hiders. These are the people who HATE politics, but still need a job. They learn not to be the ambitious Achiever. They don’t stand out. They don’t speak up in meetings. They don’t bring new ideas. They HIDE. They keep their heads down and do as they’re told. They do just enough so that they aren’t talked about negatively. They survive. And this has worked for decades. But in the New Economy, it’s becoming much more difficult to hide. And people are running out of time. So, back to our Perfect Career List: Can a white-collar job deliver on the list? Again, the clear answer is no—certainly not in very many areas. Sales

Given the proper motivation, you can make it so learning and knowledge isn’t a chore, and is rather a rung on the ladder to your overall goal and sense of gratification. What’s more important when you have a bigger goal is that you focus on efficiently making something work. You might not be worried about the specifics as much, but you will probably have the same end result. From there, you have the choice to start deliberate practice, rehearsal, and fine-tuning everything, but simply having the right motivation this will get you to a point of competency and even make you stand out.

What paralyses you with fear is someone's ladder for a living.

And it infuriated her, too. She’d been just like Freddie. And she couldn’t see where Jake’s lack of motivation came from. Both she and Steve had the work ethic in spades, but Jake just stood at the foot of the ladder, looking up and shrugging at the idea of climbing.

When researchers coded the motives for bad behavior among workers in hundreds of Sprouse’s interviews, they found that the most common were a sense of injustice and a lack of control.

Don’t just GO through life, GROW through it. For Life comes to you only once . . . never to return! Climb the Ladder of Life, step by step.

You feel like there is so much more to you than you allow anyone to see. There is a sense of untapped potential hosting all the selves you could be. ‘But I know so little, and I’m so small,’ you shrug and sigh, ‘I wish I was a bird, but I don’t know how to fly.’ The grand oak tree you’re leaning against interrupts you with a whisper, ‘Little human, you’re forgetting a word, the one you put in the end but serves to begin it all. Instead of complaining about not having this or that, consider harnessing the power of “yet.” ‘You don’t know how to fly yet. ‘You don’t know how to love yet. ‘You don’t know how to be successful yet. ‘The things you can achieve expand indefinitely when you stop making plans based on what you already know and begin relying on what you can learn as you grow.

In retrospect, I realise that fate was a ladder on which, at the time, I could not afford to miss a single rung. To skip out on even one scene would have meant never making it to the top, although it would have been by far the easier choice. What motivated me was probably that little light still left in my half-dead heart, glittering in the darkness. Yet without it, perhaps, I might have slept better.

You have true authority over your life. Your life force energy is expanding and your potential is limitless. Tap in and prepare yourself to climb the ladder towards all that you desire. It is yours to claim.

Before we can attempt to love people who are hard to love, we need to understand the importance of love and to know what love is and is not. Loving and being loved make life worth living. Love is the energy of life, and it is what motivates people to get up each day and keep going. Some people are motivated by making money, so they get up each day to climb the ladder of worldly success. Even though they may think they love what they do, they are loving something that can never fulfill or satisfy them. Anything apart from God has no ability to make and keep us happy.

Deliver what others never expected and watch how you climb the ladder of success faster...

The higher you go the lonelier you become. As you progress up the career ladder, things change dramatically. You will have far fewer colleagues; it gets increasingly lonely and there is much greater responsibility. The level of fear, uncertainty, and doubt will jump and so will stress levels. Hence, all the more reason why you should be a self-starter.

You have authority over your life. Your life force is expanding. Your potential is limitless. Tap in and prepare yourself to climb the ladder of all that you desire. It is yours to have.

Leaders create awareness in their followers about the great potentials they carry and how to release them for the benefit of all. Leaders are motivators,

When motivation flows, people see work as interesting as music. They enjoy it till they do more than they could have done. Leaders motivate people to do greater things.

Leadership is built on inspirations. Inspiration does both the theoretical and the practical job. By inspiration, people are not only informed to know what is right. But they are also convinced to always do what’s right.

Don’t just GO through life, GROW through it. For Life comes to you only once, never to return! Climb the Ladder of Life, step by step.-RVM

Isaac’s wife Salina “caught religion” when the Presbyterian produced an eclipse of the sun, and although she was most partial to the Baptist, she attended all the church services in Stay More, and Isaac sometimes accompanied her out of curiosity, which is the bottom rung on the ladder of motives for going to church, the other rungs being, in ascending hierarchy: 2, being too timid to refuse, 3, a sense of duty, 4, a desire to mingle with others, 5, a desire to learn the means of salvation, 6, a desire to be saved, 7, lust for paradise in the hereafter, 8, schizophrenic need to need, 9, insanity, and 10, sainthood.

Don’t just GO through life, GROW through it. For Life comes to you only once...never to return! Climb the Ladder of Life, step by step.-RVM

Building castles in the air is only wise if you build a ladder to reach them.

Don’t just GO through life, GROW through it. For Life comes to you only once . . . never to return! Climb the Ladder of Life, step by step.

Higher you step up to the ladder of success.. lesser you need to speak about yourself.. your deeds should do so.

Allport suggested that self-esteem can often be a goal in itself: “most people want to be higher on the status ladder than they are” (p. 371). However, self-enhancement can be based in avoidance as well as approach motives. Insecurity

Life is akin to climbing a ladder. If your focus is on reaching the top of the ladder while moving up the ladder, you are bound to fall. But instead if you focus on the next step, the top is not too far

Life is akin to climbing a ladder. If your focus is on reaching the top while moving up the ladder, you are bound to fall. But instead if you focus on the next step, the top is not too far

In our lives, we need some hope to be able to proceed to the next ladder, without it, we're failures.

Open the door and step in, Climb the ladder to the top, either way you have to make the first move. ~Janiece Rendon

If you want to climb the ladder all the way to the top, you have to be willing to go above and beyond to do what you are capable of. Surpass your expectations and do something you can be proud of.

If you want to climb the ladder all the way to the top, you have to be willing to go above and beyond to do what you are capable of. Surpass your expectations, and do something you can be proud of.

Work smart, not hard, and you will go far. With every step, you will climb the ladder, your efforts will pay off, and you will reach the top, just like a shining star.

Work smart, not hard and you will go far. With every step, you will climb the ladder, your efforts will pay off and you will reach the top, just like a shining star.

When you come down to it, alignment is about helping people understand what you want them to do. Most contributors will be motivated to ladder up to the top-line OKRs—assuming they know where to set the ladder. As our team got larger and more layered, we confronted new issues. One product manager was working on Premium, the enhanced subscription version of our app. Another focused on our API platform, to enable third parties like Fitbit to connect to MyFitnessPal and write data to it or applications on top of it. The third addressed our core login experience. All three had individual OKRs for what they hoped to accomplish—so far, so good. The problem was our shared engineering team, which got caught in the middle. The engineers weren’t aligned with the product managers’ objectives. They had their own infrastructure OKRs, to keep the plumbing going and the lights on. We assumed they could do it all—a big mistake. They got confused about what they should be working on, which could change without notice. (Sometimes it boiled down to which product manager yelled loudest.) As the engineers switched between projects from week to week, their efficiency dragged.

You have true authority over your life. Your life force energy is expanding and your potential is limitless. Tap in and prepare yourself to climb the ladder of all that you desire. It is yours to claim.

For work that requires more than just climbing, rung by rung, up a ladder of instructions, rewards are more perilous. The best way to avoid the seven deadly flaws of extrinsic motivators is to avoid them altogether or to downplay them significantly and instead emphasize the elements of deeper motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose

Such a madness to fear fears. Don't you know stars started shining because they were afraid of the dark?

Why work so hard to create something out of nothing when so many others have already done it and a million times better as they are experts and me just starting? My attention wanders to the fingerprint my inky index left on the paper a reminder of the unique spark that no one else can leave the exact same mark

Regardless of the details of your story, your time bank is growing smaller every day. You are the manufacturer! You have the power to set the tone and control the factory floor.

It’s impossible to predict how long it will take for you to move past your fear. It depends on how strong your anxiety is, how much time you can spare to expose yourself to each step on your ladder, and how motivated you are to change.

The price of the secret of your success has been paid by someone; ride on their ladder.

When you accept the status quo, you become resistant to progress and change. Let not the contentment of your past successes stop you from achieving bigger and better goals. To push yourself up the ladder, to make things occur at a larger scale, you will have to rock the boat, ruffle some feathers and challenge the present circumstances.

The ladder of success is made from nails of patience.

People have two kinds of mouth: the first they use to disabuse your mind when you're climbing the ladder of success; the second they use to sing your praises when you reach the top of the ladder.

Giving is motivated by love. Because God loved us, he gave. Because we love him, we give.

Don’t just GO through Life, GROW through it. For Life comes to you only Once . .. . Never to Return! Climb the Ladder of Life, step by step.

Some of the obstacles in life. They are not dead end, but they are there as a ladder to lift you up. More obstacles you get , the higher you go.

Climb the ladder of faith, where your soul speaks to your sense.

No one wants to help ambitious people during their time of growing up and climbing the ladder of success, but all of us want to be proud of them once they become successful!

Another way to understand the difference between equality and equity is to realize that addressing equity issues strikes at the source of the problem rather than dealing with the symptoms, one by one. Our attachment to the myth of meritocracy—which is the notion that companies are structured to reward only the most talented and determined individuals15—is increasingly being viewed as out of touch because it doesn’t acknowledge our very real differences, and how much harder the journey up the ladder, or even onto the ladder, is for some. An insightful article by author Amy Sun makes this clear: Treating everyone exactly the same actually is not fair. What equal treatment does do is erase our differences and promote privilege. Equity is giving everyone what they need to be successful. Equality is treating everyone the same.16 Surrounding Yourself with a Trusted Few If you’ve recognized some of yourself in this chapter, you’re likely feeling motivated to take a closer look at your potential to be a more inclusive leader. Similarly, if you want to support your colleagues in their journey out of Unawareness, this chapter has likely provided many points of entry to transformational conversations. It’s important to note that this stage of your journey might be somewhat private. If you realize you haven’t given certain people a fair chance, you might not want to broadcast that to your colleagues. (Not only would this be damaging to your reputation, it could also make other people feel bad.) But as you become aware of your biases, you’ll start to understand how you can do things differently to better support others. It is a learning process, and it helps to have support from people you trust. When you’re ready, seek out conversations with a trusted few who can help you find your balance, your vocabulary, and begin to identify new skills.

The defenses that form a person’s character support a grand illusion, and when we grasp this we can understand the full drivenness of man. He is driven away from himself, from self-knowledge, self-reflection. He is driven toward things that support the lie of his character, his automatic equanimity. But he is also drawn precisely toward those things that make him anxious, as a way of skirting them masterfully, testing himself against them, controlling them by defying them. As Kierkegaard taught us, anxiety lures us on, becomes the spur to much of our energetic activity: we flirt with our own growth, but also dishonestly. This explains much of the friction in our lives. We enter symbiotic relationships in order to get the security we need, in order to get relief from our anxieties, our aloneness and helplessness; but these relationships also bind us, they enslave us even further because they support the lie we have fashioned. So we strain against them in order to be more free. The irony is that we do this straining uncritically, in a struggle within our own armor, as it were; and so we increase our drivenness, the second-hand quality of our struggle for freedom. Even in our flirtations with anxiety we are unconscious of our motives. We seek stress, we push our own limits, but we do it with our screen against despair and not with despair itself. We do it with the stock market, with sports cars, with atomic missiles, with the success ladder in the corporation or the competition in the university. We do it in the prison of a dialogue with our own little family, by marrying against their wishes or choosing a way of life because they frown on it, and so on. Hence the complicated and second-hand quality of our entire drivenness. Even in our passions we are nursery children playing with toys that represent the real world. Even when these toys crash and cost us our lives or our sanity, we are cheated of the consolation that we were in the real world instead of the playpen of our fantasies. We still did not meet our doom on our own manly terms, in contest with objective reality. It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.

You don’t just take what you can get when you’re young and able-bodied and reasonably intelligent. You set lofty goals, climb the ladder, fighting for every step. You scoot up to the wall between the sane and the insane and at least look over. Does anyone have an excuse to live an ordinary life? Not when you have all the resources you need to succeed. Not when it’s just about motivation.

Modern-day Ulysses does not travel in wooden ships, but on ladders made of hundred dollar bills

Karma is the very essence of life, curse being a snake bite and blessing is the ladder/lift in the game of life.

What do we have really? Sad tricks with ladders and shoes, tricks with salt, impurely motivated recurring attempts to build character.

Thus, unlike the previous Pluralistic View, the Integral View is truly holistic, not in any New Age woo-woo sense but as being evidence of a deeply interwoven and interconnected and conscious Kosmos. The Pluralistic View, we saw, wants to be holistic and all-inclusive and nonmarginalizing, but it loathes the modern Rational View, absolutely cannot abide the traditional Mythic View, goes apoplectic when faced with a truly Integral View. But the Integral stages are truly and genuinely inclusive. First, all of the previous structure-rungs are literally included as components of the Integral structure-rung, or vision-logic, a fact that is intuited at this stage. Views, of course, are negated, and so somebody at an Integral View is not including directly a Magic View, a Mythic View, a Rational View, and so on. By definition, that is impossible. A View is generated when the central self exclusively identifies with a particular rung of development. Somebody at a Rational View is exclusively identified with the corresponding rung at that stage—namely, formal operational. To have access directly to, say, a Magic View—which means the View of the world when exclusively identified with the impulsive or emotional-sexual rung—the individual would have to give up Rationality, give up the concrete mind, give up the representational mind, give up language itself, and regress totally to the impulsive mind (something that won’t happen without severe brain damage). The Rational person still has complete access to the emotional-sexual rung, but not the exclusive View from that rung. As we saw, rungs are included, Views are negated. (Just like on a real ladder—if you’re at, say, the 7th rung in the ladder, all previous 6 rungs are still present and still in existence, holding up the 7th rung; but, while you are standing on the 7th rung, you can’t directly see what the world looks like from those earlier rungs. Those were gone when you stepped off those rungs onto higher ones, and so at this point you have all the rungs, but only the View from the highest rung you’re on, in this case, the 7th-rung View.) So a person at Integral doesn’t directly, in their own makeup, have immediate access to earlier Views (archaic, magic, mythic, and so on), but they do have access to all the earlier corresponding rungs (snsorimotor, emotional-sexual, conceptual, rule/role, and so on), and thus they can generally intuit what rung a particular person’s center of gravity is at, and thus indirectly be able to understand what View or worldview that person is expressing (magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, and so on). And by “include those worldviews” what is meant is that the Integral levels actively tolerate and make room for those Views in their own holistic outreach. They might not agree fully with them (they don’t do so in their own makeup, having transcended and negated junior Views), but they intuitively understand the significance and importance of all Views in the unfolding sweep of evolutionary development. Further, they understand that a person has the right to stop growing at virtually any View, and thus each particular View will become, for some people, an actual station in Life, and their values, needs, and motivations will be expressions of that particular View in Life. And thus a truly enlightened, inclusive society will make some sort of room for traditional values, modern values, postmodern values, and so on. Everybody is born at square 1 and thus begins their development of Views at the lowest rung and continues from there, so every society will consist of a different mix of percentages of people at different altitude rungs and Views of the overall spectrum. In most Western countries, for example—and this varies depending on exactly how you measure it—but generally, about 10% of the population is at Magic, 40% at traditional Mythic, 40%-50% at modern Rational, 20% at postmodern Pluralistic, 5% at Holistic/Integral, and less than 1% at Super-Integral.

In life I've learnt to CHERISH the moments with those I meet in life, CONQUER my fears, CLIMB the ladder of opportunities, COUNT my blessings, and CARE for the needy.

Their career goals are very different than those of previous generations. Unlike Baby Boomers or Gen Xers, Millennials don’t see “climbing the career ladder” as the ultimate goal. They want more than a paycheck. They want mentorship and meaning. Survey after survey shows young workers don’t feel an attachment to their employers as their parents did. They dislike structured hierarchies and wish to be part of communities with shared interests and passions. They don’t want to be managed; they want to be inspired. Leaders like Kat Cole motivate young workers because those employees can see themselves in her identity story.

He is a ladder bearer—a silent architect of others' ascent. He is committed to holding the ladder so that others can climb their way to greatness.

And so, it would be sad enough if Japanese internment could be dismissed as an aberration of the American past, but the feelings and reasonings that resulted in that injustice are all too present in the nation today. On December 7, 2015, the seventy-fourth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Washington Post reported, “Donald Trump called Monday for a ‘total and complete shutdown’ of the entry of Muslims to the United States ‘until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.’” After his election, President Trump attempted to institute just such a ban. For a time, district and circuit courts, the lower two rungs on the federal judiciary ladder, ruled against the Trump administration, calling the proposal racially motivated, but eventually, after transparently sanitizing the initiative by restricting the order to citizens of specific countries that Trump claimed, without evidence, were hotbeds of terrorism, the Supreme Court in Hawaii v. Trump upheld the ban, as in Korematsu, on the grounds of national security.

What are we without this? Whirling in the dark universe, alone, afraid, unable to influence fate— What do we have really? Sad tricks with ladders and shoes, tricks with salt, impurely motivated recurring attempts to build character. What do we have to appease the great forces? And I think in the end this was the question that destroyed Agamemnon, there on the beach, the Greek ships at the ready, the sea invisible beyond the serene harbor, the future lethal, unstable: he was a fool, thinking it could be controlled. He should have said I have nothing, I am at your mercy.