Quotes About Participation

The great question in disappointment is whether we allow it to bring us to ground, to a firmer sense of our self, a surer sense of the world, and what is good and possible for us in that world, or whether we experience it only as a wound that make us retreat from further participation.

Everybody has to be able to participate in a future that they want to live for. That's what technology can do.

If you don't participate, you're just taking up oxygen. (Bunny) Life is a banquet. Approach it with hunger. (Chuck)

Giving is the only way of taking part

If you participate in a competition, you have a chance to lose. If you don't participate, you are already a loser.

Winning is something, but participation is everything.

Democracy is self-creating coherence.

Democracy makes many taxing demands on its practitioners, but suspension of the intelligence is not one of them.

Guys don't get romantically involved." "What do they get?" "Involved, period.

To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active.

It's our job to look at the issues and elect people. Once we've done that, that's our part over with. It's not up to us to run the country.

In his analysis of the sublime effect, Edmund Burke termed 'horror' the state of mind of a person whose participation in speech is threatened. The power which exceeds the capacity of interlocution resembles night.

Luca even hears Abuela lightly scolding them all, not because she actually disapproves, Luca realizes, but because a casual reprimand is Abuela's way of participating, and that is the thing, really,

arms raised. "Me, me!" she says. "Good, I need lots of helpers!" "I heard he was a

In the strict sense of the term, a true democracy has never existed, and never will exist.

W]e need not become fixated upon our own suffering, whatever its origin. We offer it up, thus participating in the well-being of the universe. When we experience an illness or depression not as our own but as the universe's, we are one with all beings who experience this kind of suffering. (78)

If more people were actively engaged in advocating their positions I think we'd have a better society.

Being alive, you have to do something. Not doing anything is also some kind of action.

that if you don't read nobody does

The idea of an election is much more interesting to me than the election itself...The act of voting is in itself the defining moment.

The way to come to tolerate and then enjoy being involved in the world is by being in the world.

Disgust at collective killing is of very recent date and should not be over-estimated. Today everyone takes part in public executions through the newspapers. Like everything else, however, it is more comfortable than it was. We sit peacefully at home and, out of a hundred details, can choose those to linger over which offer a special thrill. We only applaud when everything is over and there is no feeling of guilty connivance to spoil our pleasure.

If there is a problem somewhere... this is what happens. Three people will try to do something concrete to settle the issue. Ten people will give a lecture analyzing what the three are doing. One hundred people will commend or condemn the ten for their lecture. One thousand people will argue about the problem. And one person -- only one -- will involve himself so deeply in the true solution that he is too busy to listen to any of it... [W]hich person are you? -Fr. Longère

People tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will descend like fine weather if you're fortunate. But happiness is the result of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly.