“The disproportion between our capabilities and our shared situations would be merely ironic or tragic if we were unable to diminish it. By doing so, we change, to our benefit, the quality of our relation to our cognitive and social assumptions. As a result, we also alter, to our advantage, the quality of our relations to one another. We put more of the infinite us into the finite worlds in which we live.”

— Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Source: False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987), p. 97

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

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Roberto Mangabeira Unger 94

Brazilian philosopher and politician 1947

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)
Context: We no longer have a coherent conception of ourselves, and our universe, and our relation to one another and our world. We no longer know, as the Middle Ages did, where we come from, and where we are going, or why. That is, we don't know what information is relevant, and what information is irrelevant to our lives.

“Although the future exists, you can avoid or alter it by changing you present condition. By the quality of our condition, we attract or are attracted to particular types of experiences. If our condition is good we do not attract or need to experience certain events that would otherwise be necessary to balance our lives. We exert control over and have responsibility for our future because it is determined by our present condition.”

Michio Kushi (1926–2014) Japanese educator

Source: Spiritual Journey: Michio Kushi's Guide to Endless Self-Realization and Freedom (1994, with Edward Esko), p. 63

“Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 20
Context: In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality. Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it.

“If people adopted a plant-based diet, the changes we would see in our individual health, in our national health situation and in this physical, environmental world we live in, would be so profound!”

Michael Klaper (1947) American physician

Interview in the documentary-film What the Health by Kip Andersen (2017).

“We are made ridiculous less by our defects than by the affectation of qualities which are not ours.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 163

“Unless we change ourselves as individuals and our culture—the way we relate to the earth—we can’t expect to make the overall changes in society that our necessary.”

John Bellamy Foster (1953) Sociology professor and Marxist writer

Interview with Left Voice (2017)

“To us Germans everything is religion. What we do we do not merely with our hands and brains, but with our hearts and souls. This has often become a tragic fate for us.”

Baldur von Schirach (1907–1974) German Nazi leader convicted of crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg trial

Quoted in "The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership" - by Joachim C. Fest - History - 1999 - Page 220

“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us... We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

"A Native Hill"
The Long-Legged House (1969)

“Time changes, and our desires change. What we
believe—even what we are—is ever-
changing. The world is change, which forever
takes on new qualities.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Selected Sonnets: A Bilingual Edition (2008), ed. William Baer, p. 70
Lyric poetry, Não pode tirar-me as esperanças, Mudam-se os tempos, mudam-se as vontades

“Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

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