“Prophets tend to be impatient with detailed analyses of particular choices made in the past—choices that determined how, month by month, we got to where we are from where we were. They tend to be equally impatient with how we can practically get from where we are today to some modest increments of improvement a month from now. To the prophet such preoccupation seems to be rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

— James Gustafson

Source: "Varieties of Moral Discourse: Prophetic, Narrative, Ethical and Policy", p. 50

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Prophets tend to be impatient with detailed analyses of particular choices made in the past—choices that determined how…" by James Gustafson?

James Gustafson 4

American academic 1925

Related quotes

“She—and I—were of an age now where we spent too much time wondering how things might have gone had we made a few different choices.”

Glen Cook book Soldiers Live

Source: Soldiers Live (2000), Chapter 38, “The Taglian Territories: The Dandha Presh” (p. 502)

“I will not sign a 30-day or a 60-day or a 90-day extension. That is just not an acceptable approach. And if we think it’s going to be hard -- if we think it’s hard now, imagine how these guys are going to be thinking six months from now in the middle of election season where they’re all up. It’s not going to get easier. It’s going to get harder. So we might as well do it now -- pull off the Band-Aid; eat our peas. Now is the time to do it. If not now, when?”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Regarding stopgap measures for the federal budget, White House press conference (11 July 2011) http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/07/11/press-conference-president
2011, Remarks on the economy (July 2011)

“The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.”

Rebecca Solnit book The Faraway Nearby

Source: The Faraway Nearby

“In relationships we tend to get lazy and think we know each other after months or years. This is a complete illusion, especially given that EMOTIONS and EXPERIENCES and THOUGHTS belonging to a person fluctuate every single day.”

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher

“even if we can’t change the big picture, our choices can alter the details. That’s how we rebel against destiny”

Rick Riordan book The Sword of Summer

Source: The Sword of Summer

“We spend over a trillion dollars, and pass countless laws, and devote entire agencies to preventing terrorist attacks on our soil, and rightfully so. And yet, we have a Congress that explicitly blocks us from even collecting data on how we could potentially reduce gun deaths. How can that be?
This is a political choice that we make to allow this to happen every few months in America. We collectively are answerable to those families who lose their loved ones because of our inaction.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2015, Remarks after the Umpqua Community College shooting (October 2015)

“This negation of our existence, and the omitting of our stories and histories, is one of the reasons I write — I write to exist. We cannot escape our past; our past determines what choices we make for the future. It determines how we act, how we see ourselves…”

Isabel Quintero

On the absence of people of color in her school curriculums in “‘My Writing is My Activism’: An Interview with Isabel Quintero” https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/my-writing-is-my-activism-an-interview-with-isabel-quintero/ in Los Angeles Review of Books (2017 Feb 1)

“the choices we made today were templates for the future.”

Richelle Mead book Frostbite

Source: Frostbite

“Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

On the first moon-landing, as quoted in The New York Times (21 July 1969)

“How we are almost nothing. We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe, but we simply respond, go this way or that by accident, survive or improve by the luck of the draw, with little choice or determination on our part.”

Michael Ondaatje book Divisadero

Source: Divisadero

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

James Gustafson 4

Related quotes

Related topics