“In accordance with my conception of life, I have chosen not to bring children into the world. A coin is examined, and only after careful deliberation, given to a beggar, whereas a child is flung out into the cosmic brutality without hesitation.”
Source: The Last Messiah (1933), To Be a Human Being https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4m6vvaY-Wo&t=1110s (1989–90)
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Peter Wessel Zapffe15
Norwegian philosopher, mountaineer, and author 1899–1990Related quotes
Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American writer and editor
Variant: Time is the most valuable coin in your life. You and you alone will determine how that coin will be spent. Be careful that you do not let other people spend it for you.
Baba Amte (1914–2008) Indian freedom fighter, social worker
An incident which he often narrated which profoundly affected him, page=4
Baba Amte: A Vision of New India
Morarji Desai (1896–1995) Former Indian Finance Minister, Freedom Fighters, Former prime minister
Morarji Desai speaks about life and celibacy
“I have deliberately chosen the uncertain path whenever I had the chance.”
Emily Hahn (1905–1997) American writer
Saturday Review of Literature, March 26, 1955
“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement
1960s, Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam (1967)
Context: A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be changed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
“Childhood, after all, is the first precious coin that poverty steals from a child.”
Anthony Horowitz book The House of Silk
Source: The House of Silk
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer
My Reviewers Reviewed (lecture from June 27, 1877, San Francisco, CA)
Ursula K. Le Guin book Four Ways to Forgiveness
"Betrayals", p. 1; first published in Blue Motel (1994)
Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995)