“And if we cannot even talk about these things -- if we cannot talk honestly and openly not just in the comfort of our own circles, but with those who look different than us or bring a different perspective, then we will never break this dangerous cycle.”
2016, Memorial Service for Fallen Dallas Police Officers (July 2016)
Context: [S]o much of the tensions between police departments and minority communities that they serve is because we ask the police to do too much and we ask too little of ourselves. As a society, we choose to underinvest in decent schools. We allow poverty to fester so that entire neighborhoods offer no prospect for gainful employment. We refuse to fund drug treatment and mental health programs. We flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book and then we tell the police “you’re a social worker, you’re the parent, you’re the teacher, you’re the drug counselor.” We tell them to keep those neighborhoods in check at all costs, and do so without causing any political blowback or inconvenience. Don’t make a mistake that might disturb our own peace of mind. And then we feign surprise when, periodically, the tensions boil over. We know these things to be true. They’ve been true for a long time. [... ] And if we cannot even talk about these things -- if we cannot talk honestly and openly not just in the comfort of our own circles, but with those who look different than us or bring a different perspective, then we will never break this dangerous cycle.
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Barack Obama 1158
44th President of the United States of America 1961Related quotes
De Abaitua interview (1998)
Context: To me, when we talk about the world, we are talking about our ideas of the world. Our ideas of organisation, our different religions, our different economic systems, our ideas about it are the world. We are heading for a radical revision where you could say we are heading towards the end of the world, but more in the R. E. M. sense than the Revelation sense. That is what apocalypse means – revelation. I could square that with the end of the world, a revelation, a new way of looking at things, something that completely radicalises our notions of the where we were, when we were, what we were, something like that would constitute an end to the world in the kind of abstract – yet very real sense – that I am talking about. A change in the language, a change in the thinking, a change in the music. It wouldn’t take much – one big scientific idea, or artistic idea, one good book, one good painting – who knows – we are at a critical point where the ideas are coming thicker and faster and stranger and stranger than they ever were before. They are realised at a greater speed, everything has become very fluid.
"The Power of One", TIME Magazine (26 August 2002) http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1003125,00.html
“If we wish the death of our enemies, we cannot talk about the community of man.”
Source: Power and Innocence (1972), Ch. 11 : The Humanity of the Rebel
Context: The authentic rebel knows that the silencing of all his adversaries is the last thing on earth he wishes: their extermination would deprive him and whoever else remains alive from the uniqueness, the originality, and the capacity for insight that these enemies — being human — also have and could share with him. If we wish the death of our enemies, we cannot talk about the community of man. In the losing of the chance for dialogue with our enemies, we are the poorer.
Interview with Bill Neely https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45odEv_1DAY (July 2016) on " NBC: Exclusive Interview with Bashar al-Assad https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/syria-s-president-bashar-al-assad-speaks-nbc-news-n608746"
Variant: If there's any message, it is ultimately that it's okay to be different; that it's good to be different, that we should question ourselves before we pass judgment on someone who looks different, behaves different, talks different, is a different color.
A lecture at Königsberg (1775), as quoted in A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources (1946) by H. L. Mencken, p. 955
Context: The wish to talk to God is absurd. We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend — and we cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in Him. The uses of prayer are thus only subjective.
Full transcripts of Trump's calls with Mexico and Australia By Greg Miller, Julie Vitkovskaya and Reuben Fischer-Baum; Aug. 3, 2017 https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/politics/australia-mexico-transcripts/?utm_term=.95d2f93766d6 (Friday, January 27, 2017)
2010s, 2016, January
