Variant: What we needed were not words and promises but a steady accumulation of small realities.
Source: South of the Border, West of the Sun
“Commitment is what transforms a promise into reality.”
“God has promised to supply our needs. What we don’t have now we don’t need now.”
Source: The Path of Loneliness: Finding Your Way Through the Wilderness to God
Psychedelic Society (1984)
Context: Our ability to destroy ourselves is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves, and what is lacking is the clear vision of what should be done... What needs to be done is that fundamental, ontological conceptions of reality need to be redone. We need a new language, and to have a new language we must have a new reality... A new reality will generate a new language, a new language will fix a new reality, and make it part of this reality.
“We don’t need any more promises. We need to start keeping the promises we already made.”
Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s message for the New Year, 2004. un.org http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2003/sgsm9095.doc.htm
Quoted in Philosophy of Science Vol. 37 (1934), p. 157, and in The Truth of Science : Physical Theories and Reality (1997) by Roger Gerhard Newton, p. 176
Context: What is it that we humans depend on? We depend on our words... Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. We must strive continually to extend the scope of our description, but in such a way that our messages do not thereby lose their objective or unambiguous character … We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down. The word "reality" is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.
Source: Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970)
“We need a steady stream of cash. The American people have been uncommonly generous.”
While touring tsunami-devastated areas with his presidential predecessor, George H. W. Bush, February 20, 2005[citation needed]
2000s
