Source: Paths to Otherwhere (1996), Ch. 38
Context: The combining of their differing perspectives into one viewpoint was a new, vividly revelational experience for both. Now she understood what Dave and Hugh had meant when they talked about seeing everything in ways they had never grasped before, which they found impossible to describe.
It reminded her of Sam's repeated assertion of the connectedness of all people, all life, and ultimately all things; that the perceptions of separateness and alienation that form the roots of strife are illusions. She still didn't understand it — not in any way she could have put into words; but, to some degree at any rate, she could feel it. Sam believed that what mystics tried to describe was the freeing of consciousness — deliberately or otherwise — from the restraints that normally define identity, into the quantum-connected paths of the Multiverse.
The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Eleven, Spiritual Adventure: Connection to the Source
Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (2014)
Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980)
A Universal History of Iniquity, preface to the 1954 edition; tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)
Context: I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. [... ] The baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources.
1860s, First Inaugural Address (1861)
Context: Plainly, the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.
The Geographical History of America (1936)
Source: Life Itself : A Memoir (2011), Ch. 54 : How I Believe In God
Context: Quantum theory is now discussing instantaneous connections between two entangled quantum objects such as electrons. This phenomenon has been observed in laboratory experiments and scientists believe they have proven it takes place. They’re not talking about faster than the speed of light. Speed has nothing to do with it. The entangled objects somehow communicate instantaneously at a distance. If that is true, distance has no meaning. Light-years have no meaning. Space has no meaning. In a sense, the entangled objects are not even communicating. They are the same thing. At the “quantum level” (and I don’t know what that means), everything may be actually or theoretically linked. All is one. Sun, moon, stars, rain, you, me, everything. All one. If this is so, then Buddhism must have been a quantum theory all along. No, I am not a Buddhist. I am not a believer, not an atheist, not an agnostic. I am more content with questions than answers.
Lee Kuan Yew, Legislative Assembly Debates, April 27, 1955
1950s
“Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but rather by what one owns.”
Presidency (1977–1981), The Crisis of Confidence (1979)
Context: In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.
Context: In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.
The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next 5 years will be worse than the past 5 years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.
As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.
These changes did not happen overnight. They've come upon us gradually over the last generation, years that were filled with shocks and tragedy.
We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the Presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate.
