Unsafe World Quotes

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Women have got to make the world safe for men since men have made it so darned unsafe for women.
Nancy Astor the Viscountess Astor
Starting over can be the scariest thing in the entire world, whether it’s leaving a lover, a school, a team, a friend or anything else that feels like a core part of our identity but when your gut is telling you that something here isn’t right or feels unsafe, I really want you to listen and trust in that voice.
Jennifer Elisabeth (Born Ready: Unleash Your Inner Dream Girl)
Effy hated that she couldn’t tell right from wrong, safe from unsafe. Her fear had transfigured the entire world. Looking at anything was like trying to glimpse a reflection in a broken mirror, all of it warped and shattered and strange.
Ava Reid (A Study in Drowning (A Study in Drowning, #1))
The terrible things that happen to us in life never make any sense when we're in the middle of them, floundering, no end in sight. There is no rope to hang on to, it seems. Mothers can soothe children during those times, through their reassurance. No one worries about you like your mother, and when she is gone, the world seems unsafe, things that happen unwieldy. You cannot turn to her anymore, and it changes your life forever. There is no one on earth who knew you from the day you were born; who knew why you cried, or when you'd had enough food; who knew exactly what to say when you were hurting; and who encouraged you to grow a good heart. When that layer goes, whatever is left of your childgood goes with her. Memories are very different and cannot soothe you the same way her touch did.
Adriana Trigiani (Big Stone Gap (Big Stone Gap, #1))
This last week has been a little hell for both of us simply because I didn't understand my own feelings. And because I can't understand them, I blame her for provoking in me feelings that make my world seem suddenly unsafe.
Paulo Coelho (The Zahir)
No one worries about you like your mother, and when she is gone, the world seems unsafe, things that happen unwieldy. You cannot turn to her anymore, and it changes your life forever. There is no one on earth who knew you from the day you were born; who knew why you cried, or when you'd had enough food; who knew exactly what to say when you were hurting; and who encouraged you to grow a good heart. When that layer goes, whatever is left of your childhood goes with her.
Adriana Trigiani (Big Stone Gap (Big Stone Gap, #1))
The U.S-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country — a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.
Gloria E. Anzaldúa (Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza)
I lie to her. Because this world is not safe. The people who are supposed to protect us, the people we are supposed to trust -- I know that sometimes they are the ones who do the most harm.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Long Game (The Fixer, #2))
Contraceptives save the lives of mothers and newborns. Contraceptives also reduce abortion. As a result of contraceptive use, there were 26 million fewer unsafe abortions in the world’s poorest countries in just one year, according to the most recent data.
Melinda French Gates (The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World)
People used to die naturally. Old age used to be a terminal affliction, not a temporary state. There were invisible killers called “diseases” that broke the body down. Aging couldn’t be reversed, and there were accidents from which there was no return. Planes fell from the sky. Cars actually crashed. There was pain, misery, despair. It’s hard for most of us to imagine a world so unsafe, with dangers lurking in every unseen, unplanned corner.  All of that is behind us now, and yet a simple truth remains: People have to die. It
Neal Shusterman (Scythe (Arc of a Scythe, #1))
American society is uncomfortable with the idea that some people’s lives are difficult past the point of sanity and that they aren’t necessarily to blame. There’s no way you can argue that everyone has a difficult life. This is an incredible culture; the majority of people live in amazing comfort, with real dignity, maybe more comfort and dignity than any other culture in the history of the world. We live relatively safe and sane lives, which, if you’ve ever loved anybody and therefore feared for them, is a wonderful thing. But part of our moral responsibility is to keep in our minds those whose lives are unsafe and insane. In this way, fiction can be like a meditation, a way of saying: Though things are this way for me right now, they could be different later and are different for others this very moment.
George Saunders
In a cruel world kindness is certainly an unsafe virtue
Munia Khan
Despite the behavior by some that she considered unfathomably dangerous only fourteen days ago, she also gets it. People in the new world fall into two categories: safe and unsafe. But who’s to say which lives the better, fuller life?
Josh Malerman (Malorie (Bird Box, #2))
we can go below our hardened ways to the soft impulses that birth them. Instead of breaking the bone of our stubbornness, we can nourish the marrow of our feeling unheard. Instead of breaking the bone of our fear, we can cleanse the blood of our feeling unsafe. Instead of counting the scars from being hurt in the world, we can find and re-kiss the very spot in our soul where we began to withhold our trust.
Mark Nepo (The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have)
Right now I am like the unborn baby in the womb, knowing nothing except the comforting warmth of the amniotic fluid in which I swim, the comforting nourishment entering my body from a source I cannot see or understand. My whole being comes from an unseen, unknown nurturer. By that nurturer I am totally loved and protected, and that love is forever. It does not end when I am precipitated out of the safe waters of the womb into the unsafe world. It will. It end when I breathe my last, mortal breath. That love manifested itself joyously in the creation of the universe, became particular for us in Jesus, and will show itself most gloriously in the Second Coming. We need not fear.
Madeleine L'Engle (Miracle on 10th Street and Other Christmas Writings)
I read about a little girl who had to navigate an unsafe world, a world without boundaries. This child was left alone most of the time—if not physically, emotionally. And then every once in a while, it would hit me that that child was me.
Ariel Leve (An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir)
What was reckless, I decided, was the way people were writing off huge swaths of the world as unsafe, unstable, unfriendly, when all they needed to do was go and see for themselves
Amanda Lindhout (A House in the Sky)
It was true what I'd once said about the stars - some things are seen more clearly in light...and some things are seen more clearly in darkness. Because somewhere in the dark of the night, Calder pulled me close to him and we agreed in ways both spoken and unspoken that the world was ugly and broken, and love was ridiculously dangerous and absurdly unsafe...and that we would love anyway.
Mia Sheridan (Finding Eden)
There’s no question in my mind but that the disciplinary approach societies the world over have followed from time immemorial is a significant reason our world is such an unsafe and largely insane planet.
Shefali Tsabary (Out of Control: Why Disciplining Your Child Doesn't Work... and What Will)
The reporting rate is even lower in New York City, with an estimated 96% of sexual harassment and 86% of sexual assaults in the subway system going unreported, while in London, where a fifth of women have reportedly been physically assaulted while using public transport, a 2017 study found that 'around 90% of people who experience unwanted sexual behavior would not report it... Enough women have experienced the sharp shift from 'Smile, love, it might never happen,' to 'Fuck you bitch why are you ignoring me?'... But all too often the blame is out on the women themselves for feeling fearful, rather than on planners for designing urban spaces and transit environments that make them feel unsafe... Women are often scared in public spaces. In fact, they are around twice as likely to be scared as men. And, rather unusually, we have the data to prove it.
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
What looked safe was not safe. What looked hard and unsafe was probably safer. Anyway, safe was somewhere else in the world.
David Halberstam (The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War)
the issue of dependency lies at the core of the human experience. If our needs aren’t met during infancy when we’re utterly vulnerable and helpless, if our parents make us feel unsafe in the world from early on, it will shape our ability to trust and depend upon other people for the rest of our lives.
Joseph Burgo (Why Do I Do That?)
We know how unsafe the world is for us. We are like cliffs staring down at a raging sea, battered by winds and salt and spray and unable to wrench ourselves away from the supposed inevitability of it all. But though we may recede under the relentless thrashing, still we stand tall. The world and all its angry currents cannot break us, no matter how hard it tries. Still, this erosion of the spirit is a bitter pill to swallow.
Clementine Ford (Fight Like a Girl)
White lady tears might seem to not be a big deal, but they are actually quite dangerous. When white women signal through their tears that they feel unsafe, misunderstood, or attacked, the whole world rises in their defense. The mythic nature of white female vulnerability compels protective impulses to arise in all men, regardless of race.
Brittney Cooper (Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower)
Ah, adventure! Ah, romance! Ah, courtly graces and the noble gestures! Don't you wish you knew people like that? Don't you wish we could still walk around in cloaks and boots and breeches, with leather doublets and flowing white dueling shirts and swords strapped around our waists? Of course, if we did, given the way things are today, there'd be people out there lobbying for sword control, and we'd need a National Sword Association and bumper stickers that would read "Swords don't kill people, knights kill people," and there would be a five-day waiting period and background check before you could buy a rapier. We'd have drive-by lungings and people would be afraid of children carrying broadswords to school. "Milady" would be regard as a sexist term and feminists would go absolutely berserk if any woman called a man "Milord." Ralph Nader would probably get quarter horses banned because they are too small and unsafe in a collision and someone would figure out a way to put seat belts and air bags on our saddles. That's why people join the SCA and read fantasy novels, because the real world sucks.
Simon Hawke (The Ambivalent Magician (Reluctant Sorcerer #3))
In a world that is becoming increasingly dangerous and materialistic, there is a dire need to help people discover their purpose and understand that we all have a need towards investing in an egalitarian, humane, just and responsible society or otherwise tomorrow eve our own children shall be unsafe.
Jeroninio Almeida (Karma Kurry for the Mind, Body, Heart & Soul)
1. Because of our lengthy, vulnerable childhood – where for so many years we rely upon our parents to meet our needs and protect us from the dangers of the world – the issue of dependency lies at the core of the human experience. If our needs aren’t met during infancy when we’re utterly vulnerable and helpless, if our parents make us feel unsafe in the world from early on, it will shape our ability to trust and depend upon other people for the rest of our lives. Consider
Joseph Burgo (Why Do I Do That?)
A girl yesterday during my program asked me a question; Sir, Why is this world an Unsafe place? And i had confusion not clarity... No answers
Dinesh Kumar
When we choose to live our lives in fear we become convinced that the world is unsafe.
Tracy J. Thomas (Zen in the Garden: Finding Peace and Healing Through Nature)
Her father is a burden she shouldn’t have to carry, but she does. He had made her feel unsafe in the world when his one job was to make her feel protected.
Krystalle Bianca (Perfectly Entwined)
I want my girls to know who they are and have strong family connections. I want them to be educated. I want them to travel the world. I want them to be able to support themselves, and if they choose to be in a long-term relationship, it will be based on their strengths, not their weaknesses. And I know that in order for them to get there, it is important that I take more than a surface glance at how I ended up in my unhealthy and unsafe relationship with their father. Only then will I ever have any hope of keeping my history from repeating itself in their future.
Lizbeth Meredith (Pieces of Me: Rescuing My Kidnapped Daughters)
Just at this point of my progress, Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read. To use his own words, further, he said, "If you give a [n****r] an inch, he will take an ell. A [n****r] should know nothing but to obey his master--to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best [n****r] in the world. Now," said he, "if you teach that [n****r] (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.
Frederick Douglass (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass)
There are times we need a hug. A prayer. A listening ear. The tricky part is that it’s not always easy to know when those times will come along. So God made a plan for us to gather, to not neglect meeting together.9 That happens in church, at Sunday school, and in Bible studies, and it happens in our homes — those times when we regularly gather to strengthen the spiritual safety net we all need.
Susie Davis (Unafraid: Trusting God in an Unsafe World)
Maya had one of those sudden “pow” moments sneak up on her, the ones all parents experience, when you are simply overwhelmed by your love for your child, when you are awestruck and you can feel something rising inside of you and you just want to hold onto it and yet, at the same time, that caring, that fear of losing this person, scares you into near paralysis. How, you wonder, will you ever relax again, knowing how unsafe the world is? Lily
Harlan Coben (Fool Me Once)
I saw firsthand how difficult living with my grandfather had become for Gam. My grandfather’s odd behavior had started with small things, such as hiding her checkbook. When she confronted him, he accused her of trying to bankrupt him. When she tried to reason with him, he became enraged, leaving her feeling shaken and unsafe. He worried constantly about money, terrified that his fortune was disappearing. My grandfather had never been poor a day in his life, but poverty became his sole preoccupation; he was tortured by the prospect of it.
Mary L. Trump (Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man)
Gudrun Zomerland has written about trauma as “the shaking of a soul.” “The German word for trauma [is] ‘Seelenerschütterung.’ The first part, ‘Seele’ means soul. . . . ‘Erschütterung’ is something that shakes us out of the ordinary flow and out of our usual sense of time into an extraordinary state.”32 Trauma, then, is a soul-shaking experience that ruptures the continuity of our lives and tosses us into an alternate existence. When this soul shaking occurs frequently and early in life, as a result of prolonged neglect, what was originally an extraordinary state gradually becomes ordinary. It is the world as we know it—unsafe, unreliable, and frightening. This is a profound loss and a lingering sorrow that is difficult to hold. The failure of the world to offer us comfort in the face of trauma causes us to retreat from the world. We live on our heels, cautiously assessing whether it is safe to step in; we rarely feel it is. One man I worked with slowly revealed how he expected less than zero from life. He deserved nothing. He had a hard time asking for salt at a restaurant. His persistent image in therapy was of a small boy hiding behind a wall. It was not safe for him to venture into the world. He was terrified of being seen. I know, because I lived this way for forty years, wary and determined to prevent further pain by remaining on the margins of life, untouchable and seemingly safe.
Francis Weller (The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief)
The immediate answer that comes to mind is ‘humility.’ Because you’ve got to be humble, and you’ve got to be coachable. . . . Later, when I was running training, we would fire a couple leaders from every SEAL Team because they couldn’t lead. And 99.9% of the time, it wasn’t a question of their ability to shoot a weapon, it wasn’t because they weren’t in good physical shape, it wasn’t because they were unsafe. It was almost always a question of their ability to listen, open their mind, and see that, maybe, there’s a better way to do things. That is from a lack of humility. . .
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
As long as the book is read, people would die for it. She had been wrong to wait, wrong to think a safer time and place to stand for the truth would find her. Truth made the world unsafe. Truth spurred evil into action . There would be no end to evil, not in this world, not while the book was still open.
Ginger Garrett (Wolves Among Us (Chronicles of the Scribe, #3))
Few people can be happy," says a famous philosopher, "unless they hate some other person, nation or creed." "Creed" refers to what people believe, and I believe that everyone in the world should feel as welcome and safe as I did in that library. But of course that is not how the story goes. People are unwelcome and unsafe all over the world, and it is other people who make them feel that way. We all do. We are miserable at home, or at school, scared when we walk the streets, and we are terrorized in all sorts of places, ghastly and desperate, all over the globe. Not all suffering is the same, and we are not all suffering at the same time, but every person or nation or creed as had their turn, or is waiting their turn to suffer to to force suffering on us, sometimes so terribly that for some of us, at some moment somewhere in the world, the only escape is into the world of the imagination, because we cannot really imagine what is happening and what we have done.
Lemony Snicket (Poison for Breakfast)
With rare exception, almost every study that has looked at the relationships between beliefs in different conspiracy theories has found these kinds of correlations. Americans who believe that their government is hiding aliens at Area 51 are more likely to think vaccines are unsafe. Londoners who suspect a conspiracy was behind the July 7, 2005, bombings on the London Underground are more likely to suspect that the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. was the result of conspiracy by the U.S. government. Austrians who believe there was a conspiracy behind a well-known crime, the kidnapping of Natascha Kampusch, are more likely to believe that AIDS was manufactured by the U.S. government. Germans who believe the Apollo moon landings were faked are more likely to believe that the New World Order is planning to take over. Visitors of climate science blogs who think climate change is a hoax are more likely to think that Princess Diana got whacked by the British royal family.
Rob Brotherton (Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories)
BALDWIN: There’s no such thing as safety on this planet. No one knows that much. No one ever will. Not only about the world but about himself. That’s why it’s unsafe. This is what the whole sense of tragedy is really about. People think that a sense of tragedy is a kind of … embroidery, something irrelevant, that you can take or leave. But, in fact, it is a necessity. That’s what the Blues and Spirituals are all about. It is the ability to look on things as they are and survive your losses, or even not survive them—to know that your losses are coming. To know they are coming is the only possible insurance you have, a faint insurance, that you will survive them.
James Baldwin (James Baldwin: The Last Interview: and other Conversations (The Last Interview Series))
The reason so many people feel unhappy, unsuccessful, and unsafe is they forgot where their true happiness, success, and safety lie. Remembering where your true power lies reunites you with the Universe so that you can truly enjoy the miracles of life. And, most important, so your happiness can be an expression of joy that elevates the world.
Gabrielle Bernstein (The Universe Has Your Back: Transform Fear to Faith)
And as she grieved, she realized that she had never trusted the world to keep herself or those she loved safe. From the moment of her mother’s death, she had known that terror could be around the next corner at any moment. Had there ever been a time when she felt the clutch of fear in her gut loosen its grip, so that she could have faith in the future?
Jacqueline Winspear (The Consequences of Fear (Maisie Dobbs, #16))
when we say, “Be careful!” to our child, we’re not giving the message that we care, even though that’s what we feel. We’re giving the message that the world is an unsafe place and we don’t have confidence in our child to navigate it. Could you say, instead, “Have fun!”? Could you just move closer to the climbing gym to spot him and say, “Wow, I see you climbing so high!”?
Laura Markham (Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids: How to Stop Yelling and Start Connecting (The Peaceful Parent Series))
Growing up gay is still a very isolating and annihilating experience for too many young people. While you are a gay little boy, our society—in its classrooms, its playgrounds, its religious institutions—has no place for you and doesn’t want you to exist. You are erased. A gay little boy doesn’t know who he can turn to, doesn’t know who to trust. He hears people whispering, he watches TV, and he realizes how unsafe the world can be if you don’t fit in.
Joe Kort (10 Smart Things Gay Men Can Do To Improve Their Lives)
Consider this: I have been to every country in the world, and that includes North Korea, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Venezuela. People often ask me about “dangerous” countries, no doubt thinking of the headline makers, the countries on the “do not travel” lists. I always respond that no country in the world is completely unsafe and no country in the world is completely safe. For me, a Black woman living in America, the U.S. has proven to be the most dangerous.
Jessica Nabongo (The Catch Me If You Can: One Woman's Journey to Every Country in the World)
We have no obligation to endure or enable certain types of certain toxic relationships. The Christian ethic muddies these waters because we attach the concept of long-suffering to these damaging connections. We prioritize proximity over health, neglecting good boundaries and adopting a Savior role for which we are ill-equipped. Who else we'll deal with her?, we say. Meanwhile, neither of you moves towards spiritual growth. She continues toxic patterns and you spiral in frustration, resentment and fatigue. Come near, dear one, and listen. You are not responsible for the spiritual health of everyone around you. Nor must you weather the recalcitrant behavior of others. It is neither kind nor gracious to enable. We do no favors for an unhealthy friend by silently enduring forever. Watching someone create chaos without accountability is not noble. You won't answer for the destructive habits of an unsafe person. You have a limited amount of time and energy and must steward it well. There is a time to stay the course and a time to walk away. There's a tipping point when the effort becomes useless, exhausting beyond measure. You can't pour antidote into poison forever and expect it to transform into something safe, something healthy. In some cases, poison is poison and the only sane response is to quit drinking it. This requires honest self evaluation, wise counselors, the close leadership of the Holy Spirit, and a sober assessment of reality. Ask, is the juice worth the squeeze here. And, sometimes, it is. You might discover signs of possibility through the efforts, or there may be necessary work left and it's too soon to assess. But when an endless amount of blood, sweat and tears leaves a relationship unhealthy, when there is virtually no redemption, when red flags are frantically waved for too long, sometimes the healthiest response is to walk away. When we are locked in a toxic relationship, spiritual pollution can murder everything tender and Christ-like in us. And a watching world doesn't always witness those private kill shots. Unhealthy relationships can destroy our hope, optimism, gentleness. We can lose our heart and lose our way while pouring endless energy into an abyss that has no bottom. There is a time to put redemption in the hands of God and walk away before destroying your spirit with futile diligence.
Jen Hatmaker (For the Love: Fighting for Grace in a World of Impossible Standards)
There’s a brutal irony to the fact that many of the features of our built world that are billed as keeping us safe also make us feel unsafe. If one wanted to take a cynical point of view, one might posit that, at times, this is an intended outcome. And that certain individuals or institutions may want us to feel unsafe for their own selfish ends. But why would anybody actively want to make us feel unsafe? The Polyvagal Theory offers a simple explanation: When we feel unsafe, our bodies shut down our ability to critically think or learn in favor of a need for immediate survival.
Stephen W. Porges (Our Polyvagal World: How Safety and Trauma Change Us)
To the night version of her (mother) I owe free-floating anxiety. I am no longer a child in an unsafe home, but anxiety became habit. My brain is conditioned. I worry. I recheck everything obsessively. Is the seat belt fastened, are the reservations correct, is my passport in my purse? Have I done something wrong? Have I said something wrong? I'm sorry - whatever happened must be my fault. Is everyone all right, and if they aren't, how can I step in? That brilliant serenity prayer: God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. To all the children of alcoholics I want to say, Good luck with that. If I don't do it myself, it won't get done (this belief is often rewarded in this increasingly incompetent world). Also, I panic easily. I am not the person you want sitting in the exit row of an airplane. And distrust. Just in general, distrust. Irony. Irony, according to the dictionary, is the use of comedy to distance oneself from emotion. I developed it as a child lickety-split. Irony was armor, a way to stick it to Mom. You think you can get me? Come on, shoot me, aim that arrow straight at my heart. It can't make a dent because I'm wearing irony.
Delia Ephron (Sister Mother Husband Dog: Etc.)
It is the most difficult thing a person can be asked to do. And knowing that it is for the greater good doesn’t make it any easier. People used to die naturally. Old age used to be a terminal affliction, not a temporary state. There were invisible killers called “diseases” that broke the body down. Aging couldn’t be reversed, and there were accidents from which there was no return. Planes fell from the sky. Cars actually crashed. There was pain, misery, despair. It’s hard for most of us to imagine a world so unsafe, with dangers lurking in every unseen, unplanned corner. All of that is behind us now, and yet a simple truth remains: People have to die.
Neal Shusterman (Scythe (Arc of a Scythe, #1))
She exasperated him. Society necessarily has a great many little rules, especially relating to the behaviour of women. One accepted them, and life ran smoothly and without embarrassment, or as far as that is possible where there are two sexes. Without the little rules, everything became queer and unsafe. When he had married Julia, he had thought her woefully ignorant of the world; had looked forward, indeed, to assisting in her development. But she had been grown up all the time; or, at least, she had not changed. The root of the trouble was not ignorance at all, but the refusal to accept. ‘If only she would!’ he thought now, staring at her; ‘If only she would accept’ The room was between them. She stood there smiling, blinking still in the bright light. He was still fanning the air peevishly with his hand.
Elizabeth Taylor (At Mrs Lippincote's (Virago Modern Classics Book 4))
Regardless of whether they identify with queerness, asexual people do need to recognize that if they are heteroromantic or aromantic, they may be seen as a reminder of straightness; when queer people create their own space, they sometimes don’t like to feel that someone they count as straight (or benefits from heterosexual privilege) is in it. There is much evidence of a need for a “safe space,” and people who don’t identify as LGBT are far more likely to be coming from a position of ignorance and may behave/speak/dominate in ways that heterosexual people tend to do. In short, LGBT people want to have a space where what they hear from the heterosexual world all the time is not going to come up when they’re in this supportive atmosphere. Some LGBT folks feel unsafe discussing their issues in the presence of people who haven’t experienced them or couldn’t experience them.
Julie Sondra Decker (The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality)
In a safe, globalized world such a hybridization model can limp along so long as the commodities flow out and the money flows in. But in an unsafe, fractured world where trade is sharply circumscribed, outright national collapse will by far not be the biggest problem these peoples face. In these countries the very population is vulnerable to changes farther abroad. The industrial technologies that reduce mortality and raise standards of living cannot be uninvented, but if trade collapses, these technologies can be denied. Should anything impact these countries’ commodity outflows or the income or product inflows, the entire place will break down while experiencing deep-rooted famine on a biblical scale. Economic development, quality of life, longevity, health, and demographic expansion are all subject to the whims of globalization. Or rather, in this case, deglobalization
Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
As a result of the experiences we’ve had, it is quite natural to feel unsafe in the world around us. However, from the soul’s perspective, just by enduring each harsh outcome—whether it seems cruel, senseless, or completely justified—we gain the gifts of evolutionary benefit. Each gift rests dormant in our energy fields, like a hidden savings account that accrues wealth. This wealth is a deeper enlightenment. Contrary to the old spiritual paradigm that believes evolution only occurs to those who are always on their best emotional behavior, the new paradigm offers a more inclusive view. Whether we responded consciously or not to these unforeseen, unavoidable circumstances, just by having these experiences the transformative benefits are already encoded within us. However, the cultivation of heart-centered consciousness allows these gifts from our past and future to be recognized and integrated more fully into our daily lives.
Matt Kahn (Everything Is Here to Help You: A Loving Guide to Your Soul's Evolution)
avoiding death is avoiding life, dodging life is inviting death. For most people, if life becomes unpleasant or burdensome, then, knowingly or unknowingly, they start dodging life. Once you start dodging life, you are invariably inviting death. There is no better method in the world to dodge life except to invite death. Either you do it consciously or you do it unconsciously. One major contribution to the multiple, complex ailments that you see on the planet these days is that people are trying to dodge life and, in the process, are inviting death. The body is only cooperating with this. The body is just fulfilling your desire to invite death. Ask, and it shall happen! People are trying to avoid life because they think it is unsafe. You should know that the only safe place on the planet is your grave. Nothing happens there. There is no safety in life itself. Like I said earlier, tomorrow morning you may be dead, no matter how much security you create for yourself. I am not wishing you this, but it does not matter how healthy you are, how well you are right now, tomorrow you may be dead. It is a real possibility. So there is no such thing as security in this life. The moment you start seeking security, naturally, you become death-oriented. Unknowingly, you will seek death.
Sadhguru (Death; An Inside Story: A book for all those who shall die)
[…] fantasy does not exist comfortably with reality. It has a natural tendency to realise itself: to remake the world in its own image. The harmless wanker with the video-machine can at any moment, turn into the desperate rapist with a gun. The 'reality principle' by which the normal sexual act is regulated is a principle of personal encounter, which enjoins us to respect the other person, and to respect, also, the sanctity of his body, as the tangible expression of another self. The world of fantasy obeys no such rule, and is governed by monstrous myths and illusions which are at war with the human world — the illusions, for example, that women wish to be raped, that children have only to be awakened in order to give and receive the intensest sexual pleasure, that violence is not an affront but an affirmation of a natural right. All such myths, nurtured in fantasy, threaten not merely the consciousness of the man who lives by them, but also the moral structure of his surrounding world. They render the world unsafe for self and other, and cause the subject to look on everyone, not as an end in himself, but as a possible means to his private pleasure. In his world, the sexual encounter has been 'fetishised', to use the apt Marxian term, and every other human reality has been poisoned by the sense of the expendability and replaceability of the other.
Roger Scruton (Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation)
There, at the top of the stairs, was the world: acres and miles of open land, an arc of the planet, curving off and lighted in the distance under the morning sky. The building we had just passed through was, it turned out, only the entrance to an open dig, where Chinese archaeologists were in the years-long process of excavating a buried army of life-sized clay soldiers. I saw what looked like human bodies coming out of the earth. Straight trenches cut the bare soil into deep corridors or long pits. From the trench walls emerged an elbow here, a leg and foot there, a head and neck. Everything was the same color, the terra-cotta earth and the people: the color of plant pots. Seeing the broad earth under the open sky, and a patch of it sliced into deep corridors from which bodies emerge, surprises many people to tears. Who would not weep from shock? I seemed to see our lives from the aspect of eternity. I seemed long dead and looking down. For it is in our lifetimes alone that people can witness the unearthing of the deep-dwelling army of Emperor Qin—the seven thousand or the ten thousand soldiers, their real crossbows and swords, their horses and chariots, bared to the light for the first time in 2,200 years. “In the pictures of the old masters,” Max Picard wrote in The World of Silence, “people seem as though they had just come out of the opening in a wall; as if they had wriggled their way out with difficulty. They seem unsafe and hesitant because they have come out too far and still belong more to silence than themselves.
Annie Dillard (For the Time Being: Essays (PEN Literary Award Winner))
In the real world, however, the claim that censorship or enforced orthodoxy protects minorities and the marginalized has been comprehensively disproved, again and again and again. “Censorship has always been on the side of authoritarianism, conformity, ignorance, and the status quo,” write Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman in their book Free Speech on Campus, “and advocates for free speech have always been on the side of making societies more democratic, more diverse, more tolerant, more educated, and more open to progress.”30 They and former American Civil Liberties Union president Nadine Strossen, in her powerful book Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship, list the horrors and oppressions which have befallen minorities in the name of making society safe from dangerous ideas. “Laws censoring ‘hate speech’ have predictably been enforced against those who lack political power,” writes Strossen.31 In America, under the Alien and Sedition Acts, authorities censored and imprisoned sympathizers of the opposition party (including members of Congress) and shut down opposition newspapers; under the Comstock laws, they censored works by Aristophanes, Balzac, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce (among others); under the World War I anti-sedition laws, they convicted more than a thousand peace activists, including the Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, who ran for president in 1920 from a prison cell.32 In more recent times, when the University of Michigan adopted one of the first college speech codes in 1988, the code was seized upon to charge Blacks with racist speech at least twenty times.33 When the United Kingdom passed a hate-speech law, the first person to be convicted was a Black man who cursed a white police officer.34 When Canadian courts agreed with feminists that pornography could be legally restricted, authorities in Toronto promptly charged Canada’s oldest gay bookstore with obscenity and seized copies of the lesbian magazine Bad Attitude.35 All around the world, authorities quite uncoincidentally find that “hateful” and “unsafe” speech is speech which is critical of them—not least in the United States, where, in 1954, the U.S. Postal Service used obscenity laws to censor ONE, a gay magazine whose cover article (“You Can’t Print It!”) just happened to criticize the censorship policies of the U.S. Postal Service.
Jonathan Rauch (The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth)
The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that’s why they are locked up or locked out, we are told. This feature makes the politics of responsibility particularly tempting, as it appears the system can be avoided with good behavior. But herein lies the trap. All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world. The notion that a vast gulf exists between “criminals” and those of us who have never served time in prison is a fiction created by the racial ideology that birthed mass incarceration, namely that there is something fundamentally wrong and morally inferior about “them.” The reality, though, is that all of us have done wrong. As noted earlier, studies suggest that most Americans violate drug laws in their lifetime. Indeed, most of us break the law not once but repeatedly throughout our lives. Yet only some of us will be arrested, charged, convicted of a crime, branded a criminal or felon, and ushered into a permanent undercaste. Who becomes a social pariah and excommunicated from civil society and who trots off to college bears scant relationship to the morality of crimes committed. Who is more blameworthy: the young black kid who hustles on the street corner, selling weed to help his momma pay the rent? Or the college kid who deals drugs out of his dorm room so that he’ll have cash to finance his spring break? Who should we fear? The kid in the ’hood who joined a gang and now carries a gun for security, because his neighborhood is frightening and unsafe? Or the suburban high school student who has a drinking problem but keeps getting behind the wheel? Our racially biased system of mass incarceration exploits the fact that all people break the law and make mistakes at various points in their lives and with varying degrees of justification. Screwing up—failing to live by one’s highest ideals and values—is part of what makes us human.
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
The owner of the coal mines, Baron Takaharu Mitsui (1900–1983), a graduate of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and world famous as a philatelist, was head of one of the two most powerful industrial families in Japan (along with Mitsubishi), and among the wealthiest men in the country. His mines produced half of its coal, though those at Omuta had been closed down in the 1920s as unsafe. He was well aware of the work and living conditions of the POWs, having visited the camp several times in his open touring car. Like other companies that used Allied prisoners as slave labor—Mitsubishi, Nippon Steel, Kawasaki—Mitsui paid the Japanese army a leasing fee per prisoner of two yen per day (above the average Japanese daily income), and the army kept the money. Though the prisoners were supposedly being paid a wage that was a minuscule fraction of this, very few ever received anything.
George Weller (First Into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War)
You wanted to think something lasted when you loved someone. Some part of that connection remained, that the person stayed inside you in a way. But maybe that wasn't always true. And maybe with someone like Phoebe, you didn't want them lingering on the outskirts of your heart, reminding you how unsafe the world was. Maybe it was better to forget some people completely. If you could. If that was even possible.
Blake Nelson (Phoebe Will Destroy You)
When early environmental influences are chronically stressful, the developing nervous system and the other organs of the PNI super-system repeatedly receive the electric, hormonal and chemical message that the world is unsafe or even hostile. Those perceptions are programmed in our cells on the molecular level.
Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No)
Instead of a hostile environment where others will despise you for your vulnerability, mistakes, and humanness, the world will start to appear more inviting, more adventurous, and friendlier. That sense of always being on the edge of rejection will begin to dissolve. You will start to feel and know on a deep level that the world is safe in many ways, that people are generally friendly, and that people generally like you and want what is best for you. If someone does not like you, then you have the ability to respond to him or her with assertiveness, by setting a boundary, or by distancing yourself. You have many options to deal with the parts of the world that are unsafe, and for the most part, you do not need to live in fear of other people.
Aziz Gazipura (The Solution To Social Anxiety: Break Free From The Shyness That Holds You Back)
Safety is synonymous with comfort, and comfort is antithetical to confrontation and growth. I have never grown in my life without being disciplined, confronted, or challenged. I have never matured and become better at much of anything, unless I was first made to feel dissonance and discomfort. Safe spaces will encourage students to do nothing more than what they already do and become nothing more than what they already are. If each of us is "good" enough, then feeling safe in that goodness may be fine. But, if we are hell-bent in our sin, then true love and good education calls for someone to stand in our way and say, "This may make you fell threatened and unsafe, but you're not as good as you think you are. Life isn't about you. You need to stop your bad behavior and think about others more than yourself!". The irony is that, while today's students are quick to deny the reality of sin, at the same time they are crying to be protected from ideas and actions they see as "sinful"--things they don't want to hear; things they don't want to see or experience; things and people they believe to be wrong. This new world of "safe spaces" is very much an "us" versus "them" paradigm. Consequently, because today's post-mods and millennials see themselves as sinless, anyone who dares disagree with them is sinful. In an effort to protect themselves from anyone and any idea they disagree with their call for "safety" has become a tool of emotional and ideological fascism.
Everett Piper (Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth)
She stepped away so Sam’s arm slid off her. Then she headed down the trail at a fast pace. “Hey,” Sam said, trotting to keep up. “Are you okay?” “Yeah,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I be?” “Seemed like those guys were bugging you.” “No. I mean, they were. But I had it covered.” “Oh yeah?” “Yeah.” She was mad at the guys, not Sam, she reminded herself. But at the same time she was mad at guys in general. A species Sam just happened to belong to. “Well, in that case,” Sam said, “I shouldn’t hold my breath for a thank-you?” “Probably not.” McKenna kept walking, fast, uphill. Behind her, she heard Sam stop, felt his eyes on her back. “You’re welcome!” he called. She didn’t turn around, just lifted her hand and waved as she walked on. Men. Making the whole world believe that a woman couldn’t and shouldn’t feel safe on her own. Even a strong, tough woman like Linda, who’d managed to survive a war. It made McKenna seriously mad. Why should she have to feel unsafe? Didn’t this world belong to her as much as it belonged to any man? Yes, it did. McKenna refused to let them make her feel unsafe, either by cornering her, or by
Marina Gessner (The Distance from Me to You)
We have bridges that are falling down in towns that are filled with teenagers addicted to opioids. Schools that are unsafe, forty thousand homeless veterans. It’s time to put the world on notice: we need to take care of our own.
Ben Coes (The Island (Dewey Andreas #9))
to financial chaos. In the early 1970s, when credit cards were new, politicians of all stripes denounced them as unsound, unsafe and predatory, a view widely shared even by those who used the cards themselves: Lewis Mandell discovered that Americans were ‘far more likely to use credit cards than to approve of them’. This nicely captures the paradox of the modern world, that people embrace technological change and hate it at the same time. ‘People don’t like change,’ Michael Crichton once told me, ‘and the notion that technology is exciting is true for only a handful of people. The rest are depressed or annoyed by the changes.’ Pity the inventor’s lot then. He is the source of society’s enrichment and yet nobody likes what he does.
Matt Ridley (The Rational Optimist (P.S.))
There’s always time to learn,” Sebastian said. “That’s what life is about. Learning not to repeat the mistakes of the past. You see, I was trying to lead you towards an understanding. Most people see the world as a series of either-or decisions where one can either fight or retreat, but there’s always another choice.
Frank Tayell (Unsafe Haven (Surviving The Evacuation #4))
Nietzsche’s notion that morality is really about taste is very helpful in thinking about our current moral climate. So often the language we use confirms that Nietzsche’s perspective is now a cultural intuition. So often we will speak of morality in terms of taste or aesthetics: “That remark was hurtful;” “That idea is offensive;” “That viewpoint makes me feel unsafe.” Notice that such expressions do not make a statement about whether the matters in hand are right or wrong. In fact, the underlying assumption is that the offensiveness or hurtfulness of them is identical with the moral content. The subjective response has become the ethical criterion for judgment.
Carl R. Trueman (Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution)
We live in a world where we consider pain to be, largely, an avoidable experience. Worldwide, the over-the-counter analgesic market was worth over US$30 billion in 2007. For many of us, even a mild headache or sprain has us reaching for the paracetamol (acetaminophen) or the ibuprofen. Yet, a little over a century and a half ago, things were very different. For most people, especially poor people, pain was more or less a daily experience. There were no readily available analgesics, which meant that pain of all kinds simply had to be endured. Poor nutrition, poor sanitation, overcrowding, and unsafe working conditions created an environment in which problems like rickets, abscesses, and toothache flourished. In the absence of pain relief, childbirth was a dreaded experience for many women. Occasionally, a person would be suffering so dreadfully from pain that he or she would submit to surgery, without any form of anaesthetic. A limb crushed by the wheel of a cart would, in the absence of antibiotics, quickly turn gangrenous and cause the death of its owner – if not swiftly amputated.
Aidan O'Donnell (Anaesthesia: A Very Short Introduction)
India understood at last what it meant to be a parent. She had created this child, loved and nurtured it, coaxed its development, strengthened its heart, and ironed its core. Served as its center and also built her life around it. And now, now she had no choice but to send it into a cruel, unsafe world where she could neither control nor protect
Laurie Frankel (Family Family)
They are, in fact, more likely to elevate the general mood, but not necessarily by talking the most or by running the show. More often, they contribute through quiet encouragement of whoever is motivated to speak or lead. Like many of those who get stuck in loneliness, some of the socially gifted are actually quite shy. Some have a threshold for connectedness that predisposes them to feel the pain of disconnection very acutely, and for them, shipping out to manage offshore operations in Singapore might not be the best career move. Susan did a very simple thing: She showed genuine interest in another human being, expecting nothing in return. That’s all it took to make a meaningful connection, which, at least briefly, improved life for each of them. Understand that much of your friend or loved one’s disagreeable behavior may be the result of fight-or-flight responses to a sense of being unsafe in the world, and that you can’t win by arguing. The most effective approach often is to directly address the person’s most basic emotions, which include dejection and fear. Remember that we humans often use words and logic merely to rationalize our primitive emotions and prior expectations.
John T. Cacioppo (Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection)
On March 28, 2013, President Barack Obama signed the short-term spending bill HR 933 into law to prevent the government from shutting down. Discreetly slipped inside the bill, however, was an additional rider—section 735, dubbed the Farmer Assurance Provision.   Environmental activists had their own nickname for it: the “Monsanto Protection Act.” Outraged, they argued that the rider—which had been written by Senator Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), in collaboration with Monsanto itself[1]—would provide big agribusiness with immunity from judicial oversight. In effect, it would allow the US Department of Agriculture to approve of the planting of genetically modified crops even if the judiciary had declared them unsafe.
Jason Louv (Monsanto vs. the World: The Monsanto Protection Act, GMOs and Our Genetically Modified Future)
But while these are all important determinants in explaining the tide of anti-Muslim sentiment that has washed over Europe and North America in recent years, there is another, more fundamental factor that must be addressed. It involves a 2010 poll showing that nearly a quarter of Americans continue to believe that President Barack Obama is himself a Muslim, a 10 percent jump from a similar survey taken in 2008. Among registered Republicans, the number is nearly 40 percent; among self-described Tea Party members, it is upward of 60 percent. In fact, polls consistently show that the more one disagrees with President Obama’s policies on, say, healthcare or financial regulation, the more likely one is to consider him a Muslim. Simply put, Islam in the United States has become otherized. It has become a receptacle into which can be tossed all the angst and apprehension people feel about the faltering economy, about the new and unfamiliar political order, about the shifting cultural, racial, and religious landscapes that have fundamentally altered the world. Across Europe and North America, whatever is fearful, whatever is foreign, whatever is alien and unsafe is being tagged with the label
Reza Aslan (No God But God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam)
According to estimates from the World Health Organization, of the estimated 20 million desperate women who risk their lives through unsafe abortion each year, about 47,000 die. Stated alternatively, about 1 woman in 425 dies trying to control her fertility, her body, and her destiny this way.
David A. Grimes (Every Third Woman In America: How Legal Abortion Transformed Our Nation)
Why should she have to feel unsafe? Didn't this world belong to her as much as it belonged to any man? Yes it did. McKenna refused to let them make her feel unsafe, either by cornering her, or by making her feel like she needed one to protect her
Marina Gessner
The next day, I talked to two friends; obviously, I didn't use myself as an example, but I asked them if they had ever felt aroused when they caught another man staring at their wife's cleavage. They didn't really answer the question because it's such a taboo. But they both agreed that it's always nice to know that your wife is desired by another man, although they wouldn't go any further than that. Is this a secret fantasy hidden in the hearts of all men? I don't know. This last week has been a little hell for both of us simply because I didn't understand my own feelings. And because I can't understand them, I blame her for provoking in me feelings that make my world seem suddenly unsafe.
Paulo Coelho (The Zahir)
So to walk even as he walked." 1 John 2:6 Why should Christians imitate Christ? They should do it for their own sakes. If they desire to be in a healthy state of soul--if they would escape the sickness of sin, and enjoy the vigour of growing grace, let Jesus be their model. For their own happiness' sake, if they would drink wine on the lees, well refined; if they would enjoy holy and happy communion with Jesus; if they would be lifted up above the cares and troubles of this world, let them walk even as he walked. There is nothing which can so assist you to walk towards heaven with good speed, as wearing the image of Jesus on your heart to rule all its motions. It is when, by the power of the Holy Spirit, you are enabled to walk with Jesus in his very footsteps, that you are most happy, and most known to be the sons of God. Peter afar off is both unsafe and uneasy. Next, for religion's sake, strive to be like Jesus. Ah! poor religion, thou hast been sorely shot at by cruel foes, but thou hast not been wounded one-half so dangerously by thy foes as by thy friends. Who made those wounds in the fair hand of Godliness? The professor who used the dagger of hypocrisy. The man who with pretences, enters the fold, being nought but a wolf in sheep's clothing, worries the flock more than the lion outside. There is no weapon half so deadly as a Judas-kiss. Inconsistent professors injure the gospel more than the sneering critic or the infidel. But, especially for Christ's own sake, imitate his example. Christian, lovest thou thy Saviour? Is his name precious to thee? Is his cause dear to thee? Wouldst thou see the kingdoms of the world become his? Is it thy desire that he should be glorified? Art thou longing that souls should be won to him? If so,
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Christian Classics: Six books by Charles Spurgeon in a single collection, with active table of contents)
I cry now as I think about it, big tears rolling down my cheeks, splashing on my laptop. How I didn’t recognize it at the time as one more love note from God. For the excruciatingly beautiful way God loved me in my past even when I didn’t see it. For the way he loves me right now as I sit here recalling this memory. He loves me in the future, scattering notes ahead on the path I’ve yet to see. God loves me.
Susie Davis (Unafraid: Trusting God in an Unsafe World)
Maya had one of those sudden “pow” moments sneak up on her, the ones all parents experience, when you are simply overwhelmed by your love for your child, when you are awestruck and you can feel something rising inside of you and you just want to hold onto it and yet, at the same time, that caring, that fear of losing this person, scares you into near paralysis. How, you wonder, will you ever relax again, knowing how unsafe the world is?
Harlan Coben (Fool Me Once)
It was living raw and to the edge of who you were, stripping away all the layers of bullshit that kept you alive in the unsafe parts of the world.
Kit Rocha (Beyond: Volume Two (Books #4-6))
Speculation, the process of expressing and exploring tentative ideas in public, made people, especially in the work setting, intensely vulnerable, and that… people came to experience their workplace meetings as unsafe. People’s willingness to engage in delicate explorations on the edge of their thinking could be easily suppressed by an atmosphere of even minimal competition and judgement. ‘Seemingly acceptable actions such as close questioning of the offerer of an idea, or ignoring the idea … tend to reduce not only his speculation but that of others in the group.’37 Even
Bob Hughes (The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World)
Surgery has, essentially, four big killers wherever it is done in the world: infection, bleeding, unsafe anesthesia, and what can only be called the unexpected. For the first three, science and experience have given us some straightforward and valuable preventive measures we think we consistently follow but don’t. These misses are simple failures—perfect for a classic checklist.
Atul Gawande (The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right)
Eating fruits and vegetables is vaguely logical. Get sleep. Don’t live in the most polluted parts of the world. Don’t smoke. Don’t do unsafe things like skiing and hang gliding, which are inconceivably more dangerous than eating ‘unhealthy’ foods. Exercise is pretty likely good for you. Don’t drink too much alcohol—one or two drinks a day. And that’s about it.
A.J. Jacobs (Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection)
I worked for one of those who pushed back against the majority. He was the lone member of the FOMC who voted against the professor’s theories at that fateful meeting. He fought the good but lonely fight, and I, in my capacity as trusted adviser, waged many a battle with him. But the sad truth is we lost the people’s war. In a world rendered unsafe by banks that were too big to fail, we came to understand the Fed was simply too big to fight. I wrote this book to tell from the inside the story of how the Fed went from being lender of last resort to savior—and then destroyer—of America’s economic system.
Danielle DiMartino Booth (Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve is Bad for America)
The foundation appears to see the Global South as both a dumping ground for drugs deemed too unsafe for the developed world and a testing ground for drugs not yet determined to be safe enough for the developed world.”121
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
Paranoid parenting is a powerful way to teach kids all three of the Great Untruths. We convince children that the world is full of danger; evil lurks in the shadows, on the streets, and in public parks and restrooms. Kids raised in this way are emotionally prepared to embrace the Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people—a worldview that makes them fear and suspect strangers. We teach children to monitor themselves for the degree to which they “feel unsafe” and then talk about how unsafe they feel. They may come to believe that feeling “unsafe” (the feeling of being uncomfortable or anxious) is a reliable sign that they are unsafe (the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings). Finally, feeling these emotions is unpleasant; therefore, children may conclude, the feelings are dangerous in and of themselves—stress will harm them if it doesn’t kill them (the Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker).
Jonathan Haidt (The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure)
It was the genius of Orseolo to fully understand that Venice's growth, perhaps its very survival, lay far beyond the waters of the lagoon. He had already obtained favorable trading agreements with Constantinople, and, to the disgust of militant Christendom, he dispatched ambassadors to the four corners of the Mediterranean to strike similar agreements with the Islamic world. The future for Venice lay in Alexandria, Syria, Constantinople, and the Barbary Coast of North Africa, where wealthier, more advanced societies promised spices, silk, cotton, and glass — luxurious commodities that the city was ideally placed to sell on into northern Italy and central Europe. The problem for Venetian sailors was that the voyage down the Adriatic was terribly unsafe. The city's home waters, the Gulf of Venice, lay within its power, but the central Adriatic was risky to navigate, as it was patrolled by Croat pirates. Since the eighth century these Slav settlers from the upper Balkans had established themselves on its eastern, Dalmatian shores. This was a terrain made for maritime robbery. From island lairs and coastal creeks, the shallow-draft Croat ships could dart out and snatch merchant traffic passing down the strait. Venice had been conducting a running fight with these pirates for 150 years. The contest had yielded little but defeat and humiliation. One doge had been killed leading a punitive expedition; thereafter the Venetians had opted to pay craven tribute for free passage to the open seas. The Croats were now seeking to extend their influence to the old Roman towns farther up the coast. Orseolo brought to this problem a clear strategic vision that would form the cornerstone of Venetian policy for all the centuries that the Republic lived. The Adriatic must provide free passage for Venetian ships, otherwise they would be forever bottled up. The doge ordered that there would be no more tribute and prepared a substantial fleet to command obedience.
Roger Crowley (City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire)
That was how easy it was. This was how the world worked, now he understood. Nathan was finally seeing the other side. That if you could be momentarily unsafe in your head, there was even more safety guaranteed to you for miles. He would go home and fuck his wife like a king. If she was in the mood to do that!
Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Long Island Compromise)
What Makes a Good Commander? “The immediate answer that comes to mind is ‘humility.’ Because you’ve got to be humble, and you’ve got to be coachable. . . . Later, when I was running training, we would fire a couple leaders from every SEAL Team because they couldn’t lead. And 99.9% of the time, it wasn’t a question of their ability to shoot a weapon, it wasn’t because they weren’t in good physical shape, it wasn’t because they were unsafe. It was almost always a question of their ability to listen, open their mind, and see that, maybe, there’s a better way to do things. That is from a lack of humility. . . . “We put these guys through very realistic and challenging training, to say the least. If there are any guys who went through training when I was running it, right now they’re chuckling because it was very realistic. In fact, it was borderline psychotic. We put so much pressure on these guys and overwhelmed them. A good leader would come back and say [something like one of the following], ‘I lost it, I didn’t control it. I didn’t do a good job. I didn’t see what was happening. I got too absorbed in this little tiny tactical situation that was right in front of me.’ Either they’d make those criticisms about themselves, or they’d ask, ‘What did I do wrong?’ And when you told them, they’d nod their head, pull out their notebook, and take notes. That right there, that’s a guy who’s going to make it, who’s going to get it right. The arrogant guys, who lacked humility, they couldn’t take criticism from others—and couldn’t even do an honest self-assessment because they thought they already knew everything. Stay humble or get humbled.
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
After trauma, your ideas about yourself, others, or the world in general can become inflexible and quite extreme. Here are examples of changes in thinking: you believe that you are a failure because you did not prevent what happened, that the world is now a totally unsafe place, or that no one can be trusted. An example of a change in feelings is that you may feel more irritable, short-tempered, and angry after the trauma than you did before. Trauma memories can cause painful feelings that can be overwhelming. You can become so overwhelmed that you may quickly zone out or go numb. When unpleasant feelings are repeatedly numbed, it also becomes difficult to feel pleasant feelings, such as happiness and love.
Louanne Davis (Meditations for Healing Trauma: Mindfulness Skills to Ease Post-Traumatic Stress)
No one worries about you like your mother, and when she is gone, the world seems unsafe, things that happen unwieldy. You cannot turn
Adriana Trigiani (Big Stone Gap (Big Stone Gap, #1))
James employs a similar move. Psychology is ‘the science of finite individual minds’ or ‘the Science of Mental Life’ (PP: 6, 15). It ‘assumes as its data (1) thoughts and feelings, and (2) a physical world in time and space with which they coexist and which (3) they know’ (PP: 6). It is also a natural, verifiable science. Psychology ‘contents itself with verifiable laws, and seeks only to be clear, and to avoid unsafe hypotheses’ (PP: 182, emphasis removed). James commends his British empiricist predecessors for taking phenomena such as personal identity ‘out of the clouds’ and placing them within the scope of empirical science, allowing inquiry into the mind to proceed in the same way as inquiry about the human body or any other natural phenomenon
Cheryl Misak (Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein)
Others in global development, including groups like Oxfam and leaders like Paul Farmer, take a view that’s more grounded in history and politics. They see in today’s poverty the results of a colonial and imperial history that was designed to exploit countries and people. That exploitation continues in the lives of poorly paid workers in unsafe sweatshops stitching our clothing, in factories that pollute over there so we can have clean air over here, and in poor people using their bare hands to mine the metals that make our high-end smartphones work.
Raj Kumar (The Business of Changing the World: How Billionaires, Tech Disrupters, and Social Entrepreneurs Are Transforming theGlobal Aid Industry)
Every fiber in my body feels flush with adrenaline, a response to a threat I can’t quite pinpoint, thinking about all the ways my brother and dad are unsafe in this world. But deeper than that, bone-deep, there’s a dark hum, pain like a shadow, the ancestral trauma that lives in me.
Christine Pride (We Are Not Like Them)
We're innocent, but the weight of the world is on our shoulders We're innocent, but the battles left us are far from over We're not the ones whose pollution blackened our skies and ruined our streams We're not the ones who made the nuclear bombs that threaten our lives We're not the ones who let the children starve in faraway lands We're not the ones who made the streets unsafe to walk at night And even if we try and not become too overwhelmed And if we make some contribution to the plight we see Still, our descendents will inherit our mistakes of today They'll suffer just the same as we, and never wonder why
Dexter Holland
Access to clean water is one of the most serious problems in the developing world. According to the World Health Organization, 1.8 million people die every year from diarrheal diseases.120 Of these victims, 90 percent are children under five, mostly in developing countries. Eighty-eight percent of these cases are attributed to unsafe water supply and sanitation. It’s not shortage of water per se that is the problem; it’s access to clean water. Water obtained from rivers and wells is infested with deadly bacteria, viruses, and larger parasites. These could be killed by simply boiling the water, but the energy necessary to do that is prohibitively expensive, so people die or suffer.
Vivek Wadhwa (The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future)
Unable to contain his delight at his own notional demise, and now surrounded by the smiling black shapes of the men who had demised him, Patton launched into a warm, by-God speech. “I’m not going to make the world safe for Democracy,” he said in his gravelly falsetto. “I’m going to make it unsafe for Dictators.
Benjamin H. Milligan (By Water Beneath the Walls: The Rise of the Navy SEALs)
We can return and begin again by facing ourselves. In this way, we can go below our hardened ways to the soft impulses that birth them. Instead of breaking the bone of our stubbornness, we can nourish the marrow of our feeling unheard. Instead of breaking the bone of our fear, we can cleanse the blood of our feeling unsafe. Instead of counting the scars from being hurt in the world, we can find and re-kiss the very spot in our soul where we began to withhold our trust.
Mark Nepo
this ship originally came here looking for more slaves. They followed the records of the old crew, who had landed here earlier, and murdered them. If this ship goes back to Earth, someone’s going to take the flight paths and trace them back to this world and make everyone that lives here unsafe. I’m sorry to say that there are dozens of families living here that would be endangered. You guys are outvoted.
Ruby Dixon (Lauren's Barbarian (Icehome, #1))