Susan Neiman Quotes

#1. You may substitute knowledge for superstition without satisfying the needs that drive people into superstition's arms.

Susan Neiman

#2. Ordinary goodness is fraught with veins of vanity and self-interest and above all with pleasure
because goodness makes you feel more alive.

Susan Neiman

#3. Philosophy's greatest task is to enlarge our sense of possibility.

Susan Neiman

#4. When consuming goods rather than satisfying work becomes the focus of our culture, we have created (or acquieced in) a society of permanent adolescents.

Susan Neiman

#5. If life is a gift, then the more you partake in it, the more you show thanks.

Susan Neiman

#6. Unconsciously, I had prepared the perfect trap in which to catch and hold my soul.

Dirk Benedict

#7. Dogma
ideas uninformed by experience
is a form of ingratitude.

Susan Neiman

#8. Rousseau introduced the idea of false needs, and showed how the systems we live in work against our growing up: they dazzle us with toys and bewilder us with so many trivial products that we are too busy making silly choices to remember that the adult ones are made by others.

Susan Neiman

#9. So the force of the Self also travels through the psychic nerves and, pervading the entire body, imparts sentience to the senses, and that if this knot is cut, the Self will remain as it always is, without any attributes.

Ramana Maharshi

#10. Doing what you can to move your part of the world closer to the way it should be, while never losing sight of the way it is, is what being a grown-upmcomes to.

Susan Neiman

#11. Most of us no longer have the luxury of asking whether a job is genuinely productive, but only whether it pays well and has tolerable conditions.

Susan Neiman

#12. Human attempts to construct moral order are always precarious: If righteousness too often leads to self-righteousness, the demand for justice can lead to one guillotine or another.

Susan Neiman

#13. Vitality is not the denial of mortality, but the grown-up way of facing it.

Susan Neiman

#14. Negotiating small differences is part of being a grownup; no one can tell you in advance where to put your foot down.

Susan Neiman

#15. Carles Puyol is a Barcelona legend. He could have been playing every two weeks but he has shown dignity until the end.

Cesc Fabregas

#16. Freedom cannot simply mean doing whatever strikes you at the moment: that way you're a slave to any whim or passing fancy. Real freedom involves control over your life as a whole, learning to make plans and promises and decisions, to take responsibility for your actions' consequences.

Susan Neiman

#17. [ ... ] God's message is that we are largely on our own. We are the ones who give moral guidelines body and life. You can take, if you will, your solace in heaven, but you must work out your ethics on earth.

Susan Neiman

#18. Whatever else you may need to get clarity, you must start with open eyes.

Susan Neiman

#19. As long as your ideas of what's possible are limited by what's actual, no other idea has a chance.

Susan Neiman

#20. Not only deprives workers of the fruits of their labour by paying them 1/200th of the salary that goes to their CEO (the international average as of this writing, not including bonuses and stock options); it deprives workers of the very meaning of labour itself

Susan Neiman

#21. Imitation is the sincerest form of television.

Fred Allen

#22. We want to make an impact on the world, but we end up making or selling playthings that are developed to keep us distracted and designed to deconstruct. We have turned the activities that were meant to be the stuff of life into mere means of subsisting in it.

Susan Neiman

#23. Every time you accept the claim that you can't change human nature or you have to accept the way the world is, you are accepting the foundations of the worldview that grounded the ancien regime.

Susan Neiman

#24. Growing up means realizing that no time of one's life is the best one, and resolving to savor every second of joy within reach. You know each will pass, and you no longer experience that as betrayal.

Susan Neiman

#25. Oh, honey, I'm from Oklahoma! This is who I am - middle-class all the way!

Annette Bening

#26. Reason drives your search to make sense of the world by pushing you to ask why things are as they are. For theoretical reason, the outcome of that search becomes science; for practical reason, the outcome is a more just world.

Susan Neiman

#27. One great function of the arts is to keep ideals alive in a culture that does not yet realize them.

Susan Neiman

#28. I'm Catholic In My Complications And Buddhist In My Aspirations'

~George O'dowd

Boy George

#29. Unlike kitsch, moral clarity is hard to come by. It means working to make sense of things you do not even want to acknowledge. It often means not knowing if you ever get it right.

Susan Neiman

#30. I can't work without it [music]. And it has to be the right kind, because if it's not then I get into a bad mood. I work with a remote so that I can change CDs instantly if I need to.

Cindy Sherman

#31. Don't be scared, Captain No-Fun, we got this.

Jay Crownover

#32. Once you have a Dex in your lap, you can't go back," I said. I looked over at Perry. "Ain't that right, kiddo?

Karina Halle