Quotes About People

the beautiful redwood trim paid for by millions of people's desire to live anywhere else but here.

the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.

But America, it turns out, really is the greatest country. The people are so kind, the land is rich beyond imagining, and the authorities will cut a deal for useful information, even after booking you for multiple crimes.

No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.

Is the house on fire?" A shrug. A sideways pull of the lips. "Yes." "And you want to observe the handful of people who're screaming, Put it out, when everyone else is happy watching things burn.

So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don't see it. So the authority of people is bankrupt.

I thought it wasn't worth it, I thought no war is worth all this, this misery and this horror. Perhaps no war is, not even that first desperate war against fascism to which the Spanish people were abandoned by the democracies and by the Soviet Union as well, so that of Spain's 24 million souls, fully half a million died directly, or from hunger and disease, or immediately afterward in Franco's hundred thousand vindictive executions.

Truth is not always about pragmatic problem solving and making things "work," but about reconciling contradictions. Just because something might have some dire effects does not mean it is not true or even good. Just because something pleases people does not make it true either.

Good religion keeps God free for people and keeps people free for God. You cannot improve on that.

Comfortable people tend to see the church as a quaint antique shop where they can worship old things as substitutes for eternal things.

Jesus seems to often find love in people who might not have received much love themselves. Perhaps their deep longing for it became their capacity to both receive it and give it.

The innocuous mental belief systems of much religion are probably the major cause of atheism in the world today, because people see that they have not generally created people who are more strong, caring, or creative than other groups—and often a lot worse.

Was this how wars happened, the seeds of conflict, large and small, growing in the gap between what people wanted to believe and what they feared must be true?

Most people, he concluded, were selfish, greedy, unprincipled, venal, utterly irredeemable shit-eaters, but he'd also observed that these same people were highly sensitive to criticism.

Still, what made people tick was no great mystery, was it? Greed. Lust. Anger. Jealousy. You could almost let your voice fall right there. Love? Some people claimed it made the world go round, but he wasn't so sure about that. Love mostly turned out to be one of those other emotions, or a mixture of them, in disguise. Even if it did exist, Raymer doubted its relevance to much of anything.

But it was a nice way of ignoring another simple truth—that people changed, with or without wars, and that we sometimes don't know people as well as we think we do, that the worst errors in judgment often result from imagining we understand what has escaped us entirely.

What kind of town? What kind of country? What kind of people? If my father had been on the courthouse steps that day, he might have been able to summon his deeply held conviction that ours was a good town, a good country, and that we were good people, but I couldn't think what to say, and Gabriel seemed grateful that things made no better sense to me than they did to him.

They might have been interesting if the people beneath had done the writing, but the living had nothing worthwhile to say about the dead.

But I'll feel better about you in Connecticut. People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake. They can devote their whole lives to it.

the built environment is one thing, how people dwell in it another.

It was strange, in a way, that now it was only the people he remembered. At the time he had never thought about people at all, but only of issues, of theories and dogmas and the masses, and now that it was all over and half his brain had been lost in the fight he never thought of the issues at all. Charles

The results from both studies clearly indicated that in terms of short- and long-term happiness, buying experiences made people feel better than buying products.

Grace was created out of love so that we could be rescued from being nice people and become people who love the world the way Jesus does.

Goldwater was, in other words, a candidate for voters in Boston as much as those in Birmingham—catering to white voters who were against the idea of federal civil rights legislation but at the same time desperate to receive assurances that this didn't make them bad people.