Strategy Motivational Quotes

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Whenever I am in a difficult situation where there seems to be no way out, I think about all the times I have been in such situations and say to myself, "I did it before, so I can do it again.
Idowu Koyenikan (Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability)
Success comes from the inside out. In order to change what is on the outside, you must first change what is on the inside.
Idowu Koyenikan (Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability)
When you work on something that only has the capacity to make you 5 dollars, it does not matter how much harder you work – the most you will make is 5 dollars.
Idowu Koyenikan (Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability)
12--Lose Battles, But Win The War: Grand Strategy Grand strategy is the art of looking beyond the present battle and calculating ahead. Focus on your ultimate goal and plot to reach it.
Robert Greene (The 33 Strategies of War)
Never underestimate the power you have to take your life in a new direction.
Germany Kent
Today is a new day and it brings with it a new set of opportunities for me to act on. I am attentive to the opportunities and I seize them as they arise. I have full confidence in myself and my abilities. I can do all things that I commit myself to. No obstacle is too big or too difficult for me to handle because what lies inside me is greater than what lies ahead of me. I am committed to improving myself and I am getting better daily. I am not held back by regret or mistakes from the past. I am moving forward daily. Absolutely nothing is impossible for me.
Idowu Koyenikan (Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability)
Events in life mean nothing if you do not reflect on them in a deep way, and ideas from books are pointless if they have no application to life as you live it.
Robert Greene (The 33 Strategies of War)
6 Ways To Give Your Mind A Break: 1. Stop stressing 2. Stop worrying 3. Give rest to the problems weighing you down 4. Lighten up 5. Forgive yourself 6. Forgive others
Germany Kent
If you are on social media, and you are not learning, not laughing, not being inspired or not networking, then you are using it wrong.
Germany Kent
Whenever we want to combat our enemies, first and foremost we must start by understanding them rather than exaggerating their motives.
Criss Jami (Killosophy)
A man may plant a tree for a number of reasons. Perhaps he likes trees. Perhaps he wants shelter. Or perhaps he knows that someday he may need the firewood.
Joanne Harris (Runemarks (Runemarks, #1))
Success in life is not for those who run fast, but for those who keep running and always on the move.
Bangambiki Habyarimana (Pearls Of Eternity)
Advice to my younger self: 1 Start where you are with what you have 2 Try not to hurt other people 3 Take more chances 4 If you fail, keep trying
Germany Kent
If you're reading this, I hope God opens incredible doors for your life this year. Greatness is upon you. You must believe it though.
Germany Kent
No one else knows exactly what the future holds for you, no one else knows what obstacles you've overcome to be where you are, so don't expect others to feel as passionate about your dreams as you do.
Germany Kent
At the very moment when people underestimate you is when you can make a breakthrough.
Germany Kent
Pivoting does not mean changing your goal but rather changing your strategy to realize that goal.
Steve Pemberton (The Lighthouse Effect: How Ordinary People Can Have an Extraordinary Impact in the World)
When employees are able to feel what you feel and see what you see in your idea, you won’t need anything else to motivate them, and success will become inevitable.
Pooja Agnihotri (17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure)
In business 'professionalism' is not a tactic but a moral value.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
You gotta make it a priority to make your priorities a priority.
Richie Norton
Positive thinking is powerful thinking. If you want happiness, fulfillment, success and inner peace, start thinking you have the power to achieve those things. Focus on the bright side of life and expect positive results.
Germany Kent
5 Ways To Build Your Brand on Social Media: 1 Post content that add value 2 Spread positivity 3 Create steady stream of info 4 Make an impact 5 Be yourself
Germany Kent
Your Monday morning thoughts set the tone for your whole week. See yourself getting stronger, and living a fulfilling, happier & healthier life.
Germany Kent
We must learn and then teach our children that niceness does not equal goodness. Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait. People seeking to control others almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning. Like rapport-building, charm and the deceptive smile, unsolicited niceness often has a discoverable motive.
Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
Tweet others the way you want to be tweeted.
Germany Kent (You Are What You Tweet: Harness the Power of Twitter to Create a Happier, Healthier Life)
Success is not just about what you achieve, but also about how you impact others. Be a leader, inspire those around you, and leave a lasting legacy.
Shubham Shukla (Career's Quest: Proven Strategies for Mastering Success in Your Profession: Networking and Building Professional Relationships)
When you find yourself in the thickness of pursuing a goal or dream, stop only to rest. Momentum builds success.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
Be around people that make you want to be a better person, who make you feel good, make you laugh, and remind you what's important in life.
Germany Kent
Don't look for the next opportunity. The one you have in hand is the opportunity.
Paul Arden (It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want To Be)
Poetry empowers the simplest of lives to confront the most extreme sorrows with courage, and motivates the mightiest of offices to humbly heed lessons in compassion.
Aberjhani (Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays)
Freedom of Speech doesn't justify online bullying. Words have power, be careful how you use them.
Germany Kent
You don't need to work hard to earn an empire; there is an army of slaves to do it for you.
Bangambiki Habyarimana (Pearls Of Eternity)
An entrepreneur is a man who knows he can fail, but he does not accept to fail before he actually fails, and when he fails he learns from his errors and moves on.
Bangambiki Habyarimana (Pearls Of Eternity)
7 keys to getting more things done: 1 start 2 dont make excuses 3 celebrate small steps 4 ignore critics 5 be consistent 6 be open 7 stay positive
Germany Kent
Life has more meaning in the face of Death.
Robert Greene (The 33 Strategies of War)
Do not worry about who get the credit or praise of the work done. Continue work to give your best.Your reward may come unexpected.
Lailah Gifty Akita
They copied my product, they copied my strategies yet they failed miserably in the business, because they couldn't copy my professionalism.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Seven Ways To Get Ahead in Business: 1. Be forward thinking 2. Be inventive, and daring 3. Do the right thing 4. Be honest and straight forward 5. Be willing to change, to learn, to grow 6. Work hard and be yourself 7. Lead by example
Germany Kent
Magic always happens when you direct your inner powers to the object you want to change.
Bangambiki Habyarimana (Pearls Of Eternity)
Your words control your life, your progress, your results, even your mental and physical health. You cannot talk like a failure and expect to be successful.
Germany Kent
Don't promote negativity online and expect people to treat you with positivity in person.
Germany Kent
Without hope we fail to exist.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Think Great: Be Great! (Beautiful Quotes, #1))
In the modern workplace, you gotta be a jack-of-all-trades. Mastering your career is all about being adaptable, versatile, and always learning.
Shubham Shukla (Career's Quest: Proven Strategies for Mastering Success in Your Profession: Networking and Building Professional Relationships)
Though no one can backtrack and create a brand new start, Everyone is capable of taking their life in a brand new direction.
Germany Kent
Be yourself....and make the world adjust!
Germany Kent
Want to make waves in the business world? Then you gotta be bold, take risks, and always be ready to pivot.
Shubham Shukla (Career's Quest: Proven Strategies for Mastering Success in Your Profession: Networking and Building Professional Relationships)
Be creative while inventing ideas, but be disciplined while implementing them.
Amit Kalantri
If you don't put anything in place, do not expect miraculous results to appear.
Germany Kent
Success sits on a mountain of mistakes
Bangambiki Habyarimana (The Great Pearl of Wisdom)
They say that success is a journey, not a destination. But let's be real, the destination is pretty sweet - especially if it comes with a six-figure salary and a company car.
Shubham Shukla (Career's Quest: Proven Strategies for Mastering Success in Your Profession: Networking and Building Professional Relationships)
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.
Shubham Shukla (Career's Quest: Proven Strategies for Mastering Success in Your Profession: Networking and Building Professional Relationships)
Success is not just about hard work, it's about working smart. So, take a break from the grind and strategize like a pro.
Shubham Shukla (Career's Quest: Proven Strategies for Mastering Success in Your Profession: Networking and Building Professional Relationships)
They say that the first step to success is setting clear goals. Well, I've got plenty of goals - like finally getting that corner office with a view, and firing my most annoying colleague.
Shubham Shukla (Career's Quest: Proven Strategies for Mastering Success in Your Profession: Networking and Building Professional Relationships)
Early is a priceless timepiece owned by the successful.
Johnnie Dent Jr.
Then I resolved that I would go back out there and somehow cope with the situation, despite the fact that I lacked a strategy and was frightened to the pit of my being.
William Styron (Sophie’s Choice)
To achieve career mastery, you must first master yourself. Take the time to assess your strengths, weaknesses, and goals, and then chart a course for success.
Shubham Shukla (Career's Quest: Proven Strategies for Mastering Success in Your Profession: Networking and Building Professional Relationships)
If you want to achieve career mastery, then you need to be willing to put in the work. But don't worry, the view from the top is totally worth it.
Shubham Shukla (Career's Quest: Proven Strategies for Mastering Success in Your Profession: Networking and Building Professional Relationships)
If you're not driving business growth and profitability, then you might as well be a houseplant. So get out there and make some money, honey!
Shubham Shukla (Career's Quest: Proven Strategies for Mastering Success in Your Profession: Networking and Building Professional Relationships)
Professional development is important, but let's not forget about the most important kind of development - personal brand development. Because in the modern workplace, it's not what you know, it's who knows you.
Shubham Shukla (Career's Quest: Proven Strategies for Mastering Success in Your Profession: Networking and Building Professional Relationships)
And I know when you’re a teenager everybody feels different and alien to the other people around them but there seems to be an added dimension when you’re queer. It’s because for that period of time you’re more isolated than anybody else and you truly think you are the only one of your kind. So you create fantastic barriers and defence strategies for yourself to survive. And when you get older and realise that you can take them down it’s an internal and eternal struggle to do so. Fear is the best anti-motivator in the world.
Sean Kennedy (Tigers and Devils (Tigers and Devils #1))
Motivating others leads to success whereas inspiring others leads to greatness.
Ken Poirot
You cannot intimidate people with real bullets, but you can intimidate them with fake gun.
Amit Kalantri
If we all work together there is no telling how we can change the world through the impact of promoting positivity online.
Germany Kent
There is no shortcut for hard work that leads to effectiveness. You must stay disciplined because most of the work is behind the scenes.
Germany Kent
The modern job market is like a game of musical chairs. You need to be the one with a chair when the music stops, or you're out of luck.
Shubham Shukla (Career's Quest: Proven Strategies for Mastering Success in Your Profession: Networking and Building Professional Relationships)
The workplace is like a battlefield, and you need to be a warrior to survive. So arm yourself with knowledge and fight for your place in the corporate world.
Shubham Shukla (Career's Quest: Proven Strategies for Mastering Success in Your Profession: Networking and Building Professional Relationships)
People fail because one of two reasons: 1: They don't know what to do to improve 2: They know what to do and simply aren't doing it Either way you can take action and change your life.
Rob Liano
If you are not able to see your goals, they will take longer to achieve, and sometimes “longer” is "never.
Honoree Corder (Tall Order! Seven Master Strategies to Organize Your Life and Double Your Success in Half the Time)
Corporate strategy is usually only useful if you get people engaged with helping you to make it work.
Max McKeown (The Strategy Book)
Be selective in your battles...
Brandi L. Bates (Remains To Be Seen)
When push to the wall. You have to develop strategies to scale over the wall.
Lailah Gifty Akita (On Eagles Wings:Rise)
While good strategy content is based on a compelling value proposition for buyers with a robust profit proposition for the organization, sustainable strategy execution is based largely on a motivating-people proposition.
W. Chan Kim (Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant)
In all spheres of life, there are constraints. You have to develop your own strategy to overcome each constraint.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Think Great: Be Great! (Beautiful Quotes, #1))
If you are going to become limitless, you must summon the explorer within you.
Lorii Myers (No Excuses, The Fit Mind-Fit Body Strategy Book (3 Off the Tee, #3))
Failure is a trickster with a keen sense of irony and cunning. It takes great delight in tripping one when success is almost within reach
Napoleon Hill
Immerse yourself in the world or the industry that you wish to master.
Robert Greene (The Daily Laws: 366 Meditations on Power, Seduction, Mastery, Strategy and Human Nature)
We all look for strategies or techniques that will free us from the pain of relationships and the hard work good relationships demand. We hope that better planning, more effective communication, clear role definitions, conflict resolution strategies, gender studies, and personality typing--to name just a few -- will make the difference. There may be value in these things, but if they were all we needed, Jesus' life, death, and resurrection would be unnecessary or, at best, redundant. Skills and techniques appeal to us because they promise that relational problems can be fixed by tweaking our behavior without altering the bent of our hearts. But the Bible says something very different. It says that Christ is the only real hope for relationships because only he can dig deep enough to address the core motivations and desires of our hearts. Most dangerous aspect of your relationships is not your weakness, but your delusions of strength. Self-reliance is almost always a component of a bad relationship.
Paul David Tripp
Excerpt from Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book Awards Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality. Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this – letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write. Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words. I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.
Ursula K. Le Guin
...the reward centers of the brain--where the pleasure of those high-calorie foods registers--also respond to other substances that bring about pleasure....But those reward centers also respond to other gratifying things, like watching a sunset or experiencing a loving touch...So while you may not be able to change the wiring in your brain, you can "feed" those reward centers other pleasures...Biology isn't destiny when you have effective strategies...
Bob Greene (The Life You Want: Get Motivated, Lose Weight, and Be Happy)
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.
Germany Kent
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)
Let go of the misconception that our motivational state must match the task at hand. In fact, social psychologists have demonstrated that attitudes follow behaviors more than (or at least as much as) behaviors follow attitudes. When you start to act on your intention as intended, you will see your attitude and motivation change.
Timothy A. Pychyl (Solving the Procrastination Puzzle: A Concise Guide to Strategies for Change)
What makes a person unique is their vision, their belief, their passion, and their flat out unwillingness to give up.
Julieanne O'Connor (SPELLING IT OUT FOR YOUR CAREER (Spelling It Out, #2))
Stand strong in your value. That starts by knowing your value.
Julieanne O'Connor (SPELLING IT OUT FOR YOUR CAREER (Spelling It Out, #2))
Few of us realize our potential; because if we did, we would pursue our passion and walk in our purpose.
Germany Kent
niceness does not equal goodness. Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait. People seeking to control others almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning. Like rapport-building, charm and the deceptive smile, unsolicited niceness often has a discoverable motive.
Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
Introspection makes our conscious motives and strategies transparent to us, while we have no sure means of deciphering them in others. Yet we never genuinely know our true selves. We remain largely ignorant of the actual unconscious determinants of our behavior, and therefore we cannot accurately predict what our behavior will be in circumstances beyond the safety zone of our past experience. The Greek motto “Know thyself,” when applied to the minute details of our behavior, remains an inaccessible ideal. Our “self” is just a database that gets filled in through our social experiences, in the same format with which we attempt to understand other minds, and therefore it is just as likely to include glaring gaps, misunderstandings, and delusions.
Stanislas Dehaene (Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts)
In business, sport, entertainment and beyond an idea is worth next to nothing. The energy, effort, passion, talent, tenacity, strategy, resilience and resourcefulness to see it through and make something of it is worth everything.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
A goal is a dream with its work boots on. A goal is a dream you’ve decided to make real. A goal is a destination you’re working toward instead of an idea you’re only considering or hoping for. Hope is a beautiful thing and an incredibly valuable tool to help keep us motivated and inspired about the possibility for the future. But let’s be very clear on this point: hope is not a strategy.
Rachel Hollis (Girl, Stop Apologizing: A Shame-Free Plan for Embracing and Achieving Your Goals (Girl, Wash Your Face))
Most of us are continually engaged in some form of pursuit. We are seeking excellence within one or more areas in our lives, and that is the basis of our motivation. It is human nature to have a need to get ahead, need a little something more—it’s in our DNA. Although we may not be certain of what we need at any given moment, we know there’s something. It’s a competitive itch and desire to improve that never goes away.
Lorii Myers (No Excuses, The Fit Mind-Fit Body Strategy Book (3 Off the Tee, #3))
As you go through your career, you will begin to find the areas of work you love and in which you will shine; you will, hopefully, find a field where you can maximize the motivators and satisfy the hygiene factors. But it’s rarely a case of sitting in an ivory tower and thinking through the problem until the answer pops into your head. Strategy almost always emerges from a combination of deliberate and unanticipated opportunities. What’s important is to get out there and try stuff until you learn where your talents, interests, and priorities begin to pay off. When you find out what really works for you, then it’s time to flip from an emergent strategy to a deliberate one.
Clayton M. Christensen (How Will You Measure Your Life?)
Fuselier arrived at Columbine with one assumption: multiple gunmen demanded multiple tactics. Fuselier couldn’t afford to think of his adversaries as a unit. Strategies likely to disarm one shooter could infuriate the other. Mass murderers tended to work alone, but when they did pair up, they rarely chose their mirror image. Fuselier knew he was much more likely to find a pair of opposites holed up in that building. It was entirely possible that there was no single why—and much more likely that he would unravel one motive for Eric, another for Dylan.
Dave Cullen (Columbine)
because the cigarette or spliff was an indispensable technology, a substitute for speech in social situations, a way to occupy the mouth and hands when alone, a deep breathing technique that rendered exhalation material, a way to measure and/or pass the time. More important than the easily satisfiable addiction, what the little cylinders provided me was a prefabricated motivation and transition, a way to approach or depart from a group of people or a topic, enter or exit a room, conjoin or punctuate a sentence. The hardest part of quitting would be the loss of narrative function; it would be like removing telephones or newspapers from the movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age; there would be no possible link between scenes, no way to circulate information or close distance, and when I imagined quitting smoking, I imagined “settling down,” not because I associated quitting with a more mature self-care, but because I couldn’t imagine moving through an array of social spaces without the cigarette as bridge or exit strategy.
Ben Lerner (Leaving the Atocha Station)
The greatest threat to success is not failure, but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us. The outcome becomes expected. And as our habits become ordinary, we start derailing our progress to seek novelty. Perhaps this is why we get caught up in a never-ending cycle, jumping from one workout to the next, one diet to the next, one business idea to the next. As soon as we experience the slightest dip in motivation, we begin seeking a new strategy—even if the old one was still working. As Machiavelli noted, “Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly.
James Clear (சின்னஞ்சிறு பழக்கங்கள் - கடுகளவு மாற்றங்கள், கற்பனைக்கெட்டா விளைவுகள்)
Strategies that relax and replenish can restore one’s reservoir of willpower and are thus helpful in ADHD. These strategies include: times of relaxation such as meditation, positive emotions, self-talk that is encouraging, time of play, physical exercise, adequate breaks, or even having a snack that increases blood glucose. Motivational strategies such imagery, or physical reminders of or talking about future rewards can also help.
Lidia Zylowska (The Mindfulness Prescription for Adult ADHD: An 8-Step Program for Strengthening Attention, Managing Emotions, and Achieving Your Goals)
Anyone who is truly crazy, in my book, wouldn't be able to understand the dialectic of crazy and not-crazy. Listen, I've worked for the pharmaceutical companies, they have a vested belief in making you believe that if you have a chemical imbalance you need them to be 'cured' of your current issues and personality. Indefinitely. Imagine diagnosing personality only in terms of its negative aspects. Does this strike you as a strategy designed for health? The only way to deal with a problem is to fucking deal with it. Get inside what positive motivation, what intention, makes you behave in the way you are... and how you could maybe satisfy that need in a healthier or at least more agreeable manner. America wants quick, easy and painless; being a real person is slow, difficult and very messy.
James Curcio (Join My Cult!)
When we notice someone suffering and immediately decide to help them, it “says” to our associates, “See how easily I’m moved to help others? When people near me are suffering, I can’t help wanting to make their situation better; it’s just who I am.” This is a profoundly useful trait to advertise; it means you’ll make a great ally. The more time other people spend around you, the more they’ll get to partake of your spontaneous good will. It’s this function of charity that accounts for a lot of the puzzles we discussed earlier. For one, it explains why we donate so opportunistically. Most donors don’t sketch out a giving strategy and follow through as though it were a business plan.
Kevin Simler (The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life)
ONE OF THE main differences between standard and behavioral economics involves this concept of “free lunches.” According to the assumptions of standard economics, all human decisions are rational and informed, motivated by an accurate concept of the worth of all goods and services and the amount of happiness (utility) all decisions are likely to produce. Under this set of assumptions, everyone in the marketplace is trying to maximize profit and striving to optimize his experiences. As a consequence, economic theory asserts that there are no free lunches—if there were any, someone would have already found them and extracted all their value. Behavioral economists, on the other hand, believe that people are susceptible to irrelevant influences from their immediate environment (which we call context effects), irrelevant emotions, shortsightedness, and other forms of irrationality (see any chapter in this book or any research paper in behavioral economics for more examples). What good news can accompany this realization? The good news is that these mistakes also provide opportunities for improvement. If we all make systematic mistakes in our decisions, then why not develop new strategies, tools, and methods to help us make better decisions and improve our overall well-being? That’s exactly the meaning of free lunches from the perspective of behavioral economics—the idea that there are tools, methods, and policies that can help all of us make better decisions and as a consequence achieve what we desire.
Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions)
(Inevitably, someone raises the question about World War II: What if Christians had refused to fight against Hitler? My answer is a counterquestion: What if the Christians in Germany had emphatically refused to fight for Hitler, refused to carry out the murders in concentration camps?) The long history of Christian “just wars” has wrought suffering past all telling, and there is no end in sight. As Yoder has suggested, Niebuhr’s own insight about the “irony of history” ought to lead us to recognize the inadequacy of our reason to shape a world that tends toward justice through violence. Might it be that reason and sad experience could disabuse us of the hope that we can approximate God’s justice through killing? According to the guideline I have proposed, reason must be healed and taught by Scripture, and our experience must be transformed by the renewing of our minds in conformity with the mind of Christ. Only thus can our warring madness be overcome. This would mean, practically speaking, that Christians would have to relinquish positions of power and influence insofar as the exercise of such positions becomes incompatible with the teaching and example of Jesus. This might well mean, as Hauerwas has perceived, that the church would assume a peripheral status in our culture, which is deeply committed to the necessity and glory of violence. The task of the church then would be to tell an alternative story, to train disciples in the disciplines necessary to resist the seductions of violence, to offer an alternative home for those who will not worship the Beast. If the church is to be a Scripture-shaped community, it will find itself reshaped continually into a closer resemblance to the socially marginal status of Matthew’s nonviolent countercultural community. To articulate such a theological vision for the church at the end of the twentieth century may be indeed to take most seriously what experience is telling us: the secular polis has no tolerance for explicitly Christian witness and norms. It is increasingly the case in Western culture that Christians can participate in public governance only insofar as they suppress their explicitly Christian motivations. Paradoxically, the Christian community might have more impact upon the world if it were less concerned about appearing reasonable in the eyes of the world and more concerned about faithfully embodying the New Testament’s teaching against violence. Let it be said clearly, however, that the reasons for choosing Jesus’ way of peacemaking are not prudential. In calculable terms, this way is sheer folly. Why do we choose the way of nonviolent love of enemies? If our reasons for that choice are shaped by the New Testament, we are motivated not by the sheer horror of war, not by the desire for saving our own skins and the skins of our children (if we are trying to save our skins, pacifism is a very poor strategy), not by some general feeling of reverence for human life, not by the naive hope that all people are really nice and will be friendly if we are friendly first. No, if our reasons for choosing nonviolence are shaped by the New Testament witness, we act in simple obedience to the God who willed that his own Son should give himself up to death on a cross. We make this choice in the hope and anticipation that God’s love will finally prevail through the way of the cross, despite our inability to see how this is possible. That is the life of discipleship to which the New Testament repeatedly calls us. When the church as a community is faithful to that calling, it prefigures the peaceable kingdom of God in a world wracked by violence.
Richard B. Hays (The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics)
Thank you Neil, and to the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks from the heart. My family, my agent, editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as mine, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice at accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction—writers of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists. I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. (Thank you, brave applauders.) Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write. (Well, I love you too, darling.) Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I have had a long career and a good one. In good company. Now here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want—and should demand—our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom. Thank you.
Ursula K. Le Guin