Morale Builder Quotes

The respectable family that supports worthless relatives or covers up their crimes in order to "protect the family name"(as if the moral stature of one man could be damaged by the actions of another) -the bum who boasts that his great-grandfather was an empire-builder, or the small-town spinster who boasts that her maternal great-uncle was a state senator and her third cousin gave a concert at carnegie hall (as if the achievement of one man could rub off on the mediocrity of another) -the parents who search geneological trees in order to evaluate their prospective son-in-law. -the celebrity who starts his autobiography with a detailed account of his family history -All these are samples of racism.

The news today about "Atomic bombs" is so horrifying one is stunned. The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world! Such explosives in men's hands, while their moral and intellectual status is declining, is about as useful as giving out firearms to all inmates of a gaol and then saying that you hope "this will ensure peace" . . . Well we're in God's hands. And He does not look kindly on Babel-builders. (letter 102)

the Army saw slang as a morale builder no matter how cynical it became.

Paul was an attorney. And this was what his as yet brief career in the law had done to his brain. He was comforted by minutiae. His mortal fears could be assuaged only by an encyclopedic command of detail. Paul was a professional builder of narratives. He was a teller of concise tales. His work was to take a series of isolated events and, shearing from them their dross, craft from them a progression. The morning’s discrete images—a routine labor, a clumsy error, a grasping arm, a crowded street, a spark of fire, a blood-speckled child, a dripping corpse—could be assembled into a story. There would be a beginning, a middle, and an end. Stories reach conclusions, and then they go away. Such is their desperately needed magic. That day’s story, once told in his mind, could be wrapped up, put aside, and recalled only when necessary. The properly assembled narrative would guard his mind from the terror of raw memory. Even a true story is a fiction, Paul knew. It is the comforting tool we use to organize the chaotic world around us into something comprehensible. It is the cognitive machine that separates the wheat of emotion from the chaff of sensation. The real world is overfull with incidents, brimming over with occurrences. In our stories, we disregard most of them until clear reason and motivation emerge. Every story is an invention, a technological device not unlike the very one that on that morning had seared a man’s skin from his bones. A good story could be put to no less dangerous a purpose. As an attorney, the tales that Paul told were moral ones. There existed, in his narratives, only the injured and their abusers. The slandered and the liars. The swindled and the thieves. Paul constructed these characters painstakingly until the righteousness of his plaintiff—or his defendant—became overwhelming. It was not the job of a litigator to determine facts; it was his job to construct a story from those facts by which a clear moral conclusion would be unavoidable. That was the business of Paul’s stories: to present an undeniable view of the world. And then to vanish, once the world had been so organized and a profit fairly earned.

I believe, then, that the characteristic or moral elements of Gothic are the following, placed in the order of their importance: 1. Savageness. 2. Changefulness. 3. Naturalism. 4. Grotesqueness. 5. Rigidity. 6. Redundance. These characters are here expressed as belonging to the building; as belonging to the builder, they would be expressed thus: - 1. Savageness or Rudeness. 2. Love of Change. 3. Love of Nature. 4. Disturbed Imagination. 5. Obstinacy. 6. Generosity. And I repeat, that the withdrawal of any one, or any two, will not at once destroy the Gothic character of a building, but the removal of a majority of them will. I shall proceed to examine them in their order.

Indeed, claims Kimmerling, there is nothing unique in the self-identity of the Zionist settlers. Like most settlers in North America, South Africa, and Algeria, the Zionists did not see themselves as colonialist, but as “builders of a new and more moral society, than that of their country of origin . . . Zionism also always stressed its good intentions towards the local population, and preferred to ignore the consequences which it brought about for them.”57

Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Introduction Chapter 1. - The Objectivist Ethics Chapter 2. - Mental Health versus Mysticism and Self-Sacrifice Chapter 3. - The Ethics of Emergencies Chapter 4. - The “Conflicts” of Men’s Interests Chapter 5. - Isn’t Everyone Selfish? Chapter 6. - The Psychology of Pleasure Chapter 7. - Doesn’t Life Require Compromise? Chapter 8. - How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society? Chapter 9. - The Cult of Moral Grayness Chapter 10. - Collectivized Ethics Chapter 11. - The Monument Builders Chapter 12. - Man’s Rights Chapter 13. - Collectivized “Rights” Chapter 14. - The Nature of Government Chapter 15. - Government Financing in a Free Society Chapter 16. - The Divine Right of Stagnation Chapter 17. - Racism Chapter 18. - Counterfeit Individualism Chapter 19. - The Argument from Intimidation INDEX

The need for security calls for a protector; achievement calls for a motivator; cooperation calls for a team builder; understanding calls for a nurturer; creativity calls for an innovator; moral values call for a transformer; spiritual fulfillment calls for a sage, or seer.

If, as I believe, the conceptual structures we construct today are too complicated to be accurately specified in advance, and too complex to be built faultlessly, then we must take a radically different approach. Let us turn to nature and study complexity in living things, instead of just the dead works of man. Here we find constructs whose complexities thrill us with awe. The brain alone is intricate beyond mapping, powerful beyond imitation, rich in diversity, self-protecting, and self-renewing. The secret is that it is grown, not built. So it must be with our software systems. Some years ago Harlan Mills proposed that any software system should be grown by incremental development.[11] That is, the system should first be made to run, even though it does nothing useful except call the proper set of dummy subprograms. Then, bit by bit it is fleshed out, with the subprograms in turn being developed into actions or calls to empty stubs in the level below. I have seen the most dramatic results since I began urging this technique on the project builders in my software engineering laboratory class. Nothing in the past decade has so radically changed my own practice, or its effectiveness. The approach necessitates top-down design, for it is a top-down growing of the software. It allows easy backtracking. It lends itself to early prototypes. Each added function and new provision for more complex data or circumstances grows organically out of what is already there. The morale effects are startling. Enthusiasm jumps when there is a running system, even a simple one. Efforts redouble when the first picture from a new graphics software system appears on the screen, even if it is only a rectangle. One always has, at every stage in the process, a working system. I find that teams can grow much more complex entities in four months than they can build.

The powers of the time had first rushed to the city of the most powerful man in the world, the German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. But five years later, they came to Leopold II. In 1890, Brussels became the capital of colonizing Europe. The city held an anti-slavery conference, to strengthen Berlin-1885 and "to put an end to the Negro Slave Trade by land as well as by sea, and to improve the moral and material conditions of the natives". It was, in accordance with the mentalities of the time, a proclamation of "fundamental rights of populations", starting with the most basic: the right to life. Berlin-1885 had already expressed similar rights in the search for " the preservation of the native tribes, and to care for the improvement of the conditions of their moral and material well-being, and to help in suppressing slavery, and especially the slave trade". The Treaty of Brussels-1890 was also contracted "in the name of God Almighty". It ordered to put an end to the crimes and devastation of the slavers and to provide the benefits of peace and civilization on the continent.

In the name of all the producers who had kept you alive and received your death ultimatums in payment, I now answer you with a single ultimatum of our own: Our work or your guns. You can choose either; you can’t have both. We do not initiate the use of force against others or submit to force at their hands. If you desire ever again to live in an industrial society, it will be on our moral terms. Our terms and our motive power are the antithesis of yours. You have been using fear as your weapon and have been bringing death to man as his punishment for rejecting your morality. We offer him life as his reward for accepting ours. “You who are worshippers of the zero—you have never discovered that achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. Joy is not ‘the absence of pain,’ intelligence is not ‘the absence of stupidity,’ light is not ‘the absence of darkness,’ an entity is not ‘the absence of a nonentity.’ Building is not done by abstaining from demolition; centuries of sitting and waiting in such abstinence will not raise one single girder for you to abstain from demolishing—and now you can no longer say to me, the builder: ‘Produce, and feed us in exchange for our not destroying your production.’ I am answering in the name of all your victims: Perish with and in your own void. Existence is not a negation of negatives. Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us. Perish, because we have learned that a zero cannot hold a mortgage over life.

What we can and must do is undertake the construction of an environment that will provide the proper conditions for his normal development. The child's psychic energy, once awakened, will develop according to its own laws and have an effect on us as well. The mere contact with a human being developing in this way can renew our own energies. The child developing harmoniously and the adult improving himself at his side make a very exciting and attractive picture. This is the treasure we need today—helping the child become independent of us and make his way by himself and receiving in return his gifts of hope and light. In this new picture, the adult will appear not only as the builder of the external world, but, even more importantly, as the protector of the moral and spiritual forces that appear anew in every human being born. —Montessori, Education and Peace

We call it the moral sentiment. As we are, so we do; and as we do, so it is done to us; we are the builders of our fortunes.

The capacities teachers need to build among students in order to equip them to become nation builders are: The capacity for research or inquiry; Capacity for creativity and innovation, particularly the creative transfer of knowledge; Capacity to use high technology; Capacity for entrepreneurial leadership; Capacity for moral leadership.