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"If I were a lawmaker, I would propose a law to ban willow oak. If I were a genetic engineer, I would make willow oak leaves ten times bigger. If I were a billionaire, I would build a house on Antarctica, live there, and forget about those slender leaves for the rest of my life." (Anonymous) "Dear Valued Customers: Please dispose ONLY toilet paper into the toilet. All other wastes, please dispose them into the trash cans." (sign in a restaurant restroom) "To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk." (Thomas Edison) "世の中、言葉で言い表せる事には限度があります。例え言い表せたとしても、正確では無いかも知れません。いや、言葉で表せる事柄なんて、実は、ほとんど無いのかも知れないのです。" [小説 山猫と猫姫] "『自閉症』という言葉は間違っていると思うよ。……それだと、なんだか、自分から閉じこもっているように聞こえる。だけど、……何か違うことを……訴えていたような気がする。え〜と、例えば、過去の怨念か何かが呪いを掛けて、……殻の中に閉じ込めてしまっているような感じかな。そして、……その殻に小さな穴を見つけた時に、その穴を通して必死に外の世界に助けを求めようとする……。……そして、その穴はすごく小さいので、そこに全力を費やすことが出来て、それで、ものすごい能力を発揮できるんじゃないかと" (ソメユ) [小説 タイスの変奏曲] "人間なんて、完全な人はいないわよ。誰でも、欠陥があるものよ。人間の生命や生殖機能なんて、ギリギリのところで成り立っているのよ。" (語り手) [小説 勇気を出して] "Children become dangerous as soon as they learn power & manipulation." (Anonymous) "Nobody wants to work with a self-interested, self-absorbed, self-serving self-promoter. If you think about it, neither would you." (Steve Tobak) [Entrepreneur] "年をとって幸せになれない世の中は、若者にとっても希望がもてません。" (片岡妙晶) [Asahi] "年をとってなくしたのは「羞恥心」じゃなくて「恐怖心」だった。私をおびえさせていたのは、「若い女」というだけで見ず知らずの私に性暴力を振るう男性加害者であり、被害に遭えば被害者のほうに落ち度があると責めてくる社会の風潮だった。" (田房永子) [Asahi] "The American food system is not broken -- it is functioning as designed, a system optimized for efficiency, not one optimized for resilience and nutrition. But our food system is killing us, and that happened long before Covid-19. It is bound to continue unless we take steps now to leverage food as medicine." (Akash Goel, Michel Nischan, Bill Frist and Tom Colicchio ) [World News Delivered] "[M]ost of America’s wounds from the pandemic are self-inflicted." (Maz Do) [HuffPost] "[L]as sociedades de tradición más colectivista se han enfrentado mejor con la pandemia, al menos en cuanto a la movilidad. Por el contrario, las naciones donde domina el individualismo lo estarían haciendo peor." (Miguel Ángel Criado) [EL PAÍS] "Cooperation is always better than competition. But it is especially so when a lot of people are suffering." "天災は人災だ。人災は天災だ。" "A mob's always made up of people, no matter what." (Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee) "You never understand a person until you consider things from his point of view" (Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee) "男なら、たとえ、溝の中でも前のめりで死ね" (司馬遼太郎の『竜馬がゆく』) "My ultimate goal is to disappear spiritually, without physically disappearing, and to become the world spiritually, until physically becoming the world." "人は生きてきたように死ぬ" (沼野尚美)、そして、"人は死ぬように生きる。" "My job is not to get sick ... until I really need to." "なんの取り柄もない人だけど、もう何十年も、朝早く起きて家族の朝ごはんとお弁当を作っているんだね。" "Our worth is determined ... not by what we do in life, but by what we do with what life gives us." (Chris Hedges, interpreting the work/life of Eugène Delacroix) [truthdig] "Disaster originates in an initial overreaction to Conflict and then escalates to the level of gross Abuse." (Sarah Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse) "Perfectionism is often driven less by the child's lack of progress and more by the parents' own anxiety." (Ross Greene, The Explosive Child) "Perfectionism is a myth and social media is its storyteller. We need to teach a healthy skepticism toward the suspiciously “perfect” lives promoted through social media posts and mainstream media advertisements." [AlterNet] "Sedentary lifestyles are killing us – we need to build activity into our everyday lives, not just leave it for the gym." (Vybarr Cregan-Reid) [Guardian] "If children are not protected from their abusers, then the public will one day have to be protected from the children." (Nancy Gibbs) "The most effective anti-violence policy that can be adopted is to raise fewer children in poverty." (Mike Males) "Youth violence does not exist as a singular youth issue separate from adult violence." (Mike Males) "[T]the only influence on youthful alcohol practices has remained adult alcohol practices." (Mike Males) "[A]ny effort to teach youngsters abstinence from these substances is a little like trying to promote chastity in a brothel." (RH Hopkins and others) "[S]ocieties which don't have problems with adult drinking don't have problem with teenage drinking." (Texas Council on Alcoholism) "Screwed-up kids have even more screwed-up parents." (Mike Males) "Fix environments, and most kids will fix themselves." (Mike Males) "If suicide ... is a complex response to hopelessness ... rather than to depression ..., then it cannot be alleviated by injection of programs, classes, and treatments." (Mike Males) "Whether for evil or good, regimes have never succeeded in educating, propagandizing, or forcing adolescents to behave differently from the adults around them." (Mike Males) "Know oneself, be in control of your food intake and be aware of your body." (simple advice for well-being by I Gusti Mangku, a Balinese healer) [NY Times] "Many who drive their own lives to help others often realize that they do not change what causes the need for their help" (David S. Buckel) "We came to the conclusion that the criminal system was not the best suited to deal with this situation [about drugs] ... The best option should be referring them to treatment, but we do not force or coerce anyone. If they are willing to go, it's because they actually want to, so the success rate is really high. We can surely say that decriminalization does not increase drug usage, and that it does not mean legalizing drugs. It's still illegal to use drugs in Portugal, it's just not considered a crime. It's possible to deal with these users outside the criminal system." (Nuno Capaz) [Alternet] "America Has Failed Its Kids on Guns. It’s Time to Let Them Lead." (NY Times Editorial Board) "Character is about what you do when no one is watching" (Paul Equale) "There are times an old-fashioned alarm clock may be a better choice than an Amazon Echo Spot. When you don’t want someone taking a picture of what you do in bed, for example." (Brian X. Chen) "[E]ach time I travel to the U.S. to see family and friends, I am struck by how irrational American values and priorities have begun to appear compared to those I am accustomed to in Europe. ... most of my friends in the U.S. think putting in hours of overtime is normal, and afterward they often continue working at home. They eat bland, unhealthy, mass-produced food packed with hormones, coloring agents, and chemical preservatives. They medicate themselves in order to sleep, and they wash down pharmaceuticals to suppress hypertension, high cholesterol, anxiety, or depression every morning with watery, over-sweetened coffee. On average, my compatriots in the U.S. have around a third the vacation time of their European counterparts. They have less support if they lose their jobs, much less time off if they become parents, and much, much less of a voice to push for better terms within an American legal system designed to defend the rights of corporations, not individuals. Because of that, access to health care and higher education in the U.S. is increasingly seen as a luxury that will inevitably leave millions saddled in debt. ... But there's one trend that bothers me more than all the others, and this is it: Most of the Americans I talk to don't seem to recognize these glaring disparities, or, if they do, they're not concerned." (Eric J. Lyman) "欲にキリなし、地獄に底なし" (Japanese proverb) "In 2015, the United States reported 13,286 non-suicide gun deaths. Japan reported exactly one." (Michael Daly) "In my large file of mass murders, if you look decade by decade, the numbers of victims are fairly small up until the 1960s ... That’s when the deaths start going way up. When the AK-47s and the Kalashnikovs and the Uzis — all these semiautomatic weapons, when they became so easily accessible." (Dr. Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist at Columbia University) "The poverty of teen mothers is an extension of their poverty prior to motherhood." (Mike A. Males) "Life in all its fullness is mother nature obeyed." (Weston A. Price) "病は口から入り、禍は口から出る。" (Japanese proverb) "ある尊敬する老いたる文豪は死ぬとき『さわやかだ』と言って死んだそうですが、さわやかさを実感して死ねれば、それでいいのではないのですか。人生は美しい、私はそれを知って生きてゆきたい。ところがこの世には愚かなものが多すぎて、人生の美しさを知らず、花が爛漫と咲におっている下を歩きながら、何か金でも落っこっていないかとさがして、ないので血眼になって、人生は醜いと言っている人が少なくないのではないですか、。。。" (武者小路実篤「真理先生」) "The population which has the problem possesses the best resources for dealing with the problem." (Carl Rogers, A Way of Being) "Knowing what really happened [i.e., conflict based on differences] is more important than deciding who to punish [as if it were abuse]." "this confusion between Abuse and Conflict exists in our historic moment in all structured relationships: from the most intimate partnerships to the government's relationship to its own people, and to the geopolitical dynamics between nations." (Sarah Schulman) "All human relationships have power dynamics and that is neither good nor bad. Power is not the problem. It's how it is wielded." (Catherine Hodes) "To think of moving forward through questions rather than answers means a different sort of politics, a different sort of organization." (John Holloway) "The most common response is to design a set of incentives so that selfish people will act as if they were concerned about others and therefore do the right thing" (Samuel Bowles) "[I]f you control people enough, they may begin to act as if they want to be controlled. As a self-protective strategy, they become focused outward--looking for clues about what the people in one-up positions expect of them, looking for what will keep them out of trouble." (Edward Deci) "Allow yourself to fail and you will be more likely to succeed." (Edward Deci) "The proper question [i.e., "how to motivate others"] is not, "how can people motivate others?" but rather, "how can people create the conditions within which others will motivate themselves." (Edward Deci) "Only people who are doing something that goes against their own sense of right and wrong have to spend time and energy spinning out a self-justifying story." (C. Terry Warner) "[T]he healing of the soul cannot be forced." (C. Terry Warner) "Being overly concerned about our personal progress is just one of the ways we can slip back into self-absorption." (C. Terry Warner) "When we find ourselves preoccupied with fixing others, we can know that we have either lost our softness of heart and generosity of spirit, or else we never regained it." (C. Terry Warner) "If I ever attempt suicide, I'd like someone to save me, unless I have reached a point at which I accurately believe that the amount of joy left in my life cannot exceed the amount of sorrow or pain." (Andrew Solomon) "If you created a relationship [with your kids] that is very transactional [e.g., using a sticker chart], what do you expect when everyone gets older? ... I'm not saying that giving kids a sticker is going to make them send their parents to assisted living, but if you think about the idea, it's a step in that direction." (Dan Ariely) "東西南北どこに住む人が一番幸福かというと、北の人が春の暖かさを感じられもっとも幸せといいます" (壇蜜) "The chief cause of problems is solutions." (Milton Berle) "Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived." (Thomas Merton) "Choosing a partner is choosing a set of problems." (Dan Wile, referring to marriage) "We can forget our childhood, but we cannot deny it." (anonymous) "Following the mainstream culture without questioning its impact is like driving blindfolded." "The greatest damage done by neglect, trauma, or emotional loss is not the immediate pain they inflict but the long-term distortions they induce in the way a developing child will continue to interpret the world and her situation in it." (Gabor Maté) "The belief that anyone "should" be any different than he or she is is toxic to oneself, to the other, and to the relationship." (Gabor Maté) "Drugs do not make the addict into a criminal; the law does." (Gabor Maté) "As psychosocial integration is a fundamental human need, and free-market society, by its nature, produces mass dislocation at all times (not just during times of collapse), and as addiction is the predominant way of adapting to dislocation, addiction is endemic and spreading fast." (Bruce Alexander) "The most promising way of controlling addiction is not prevention of experimentation, but prevention of dislocation." (Bruce Alexander) "Depression is a response to past loss, and anxiety is a response to future loss." (George Brown) "The best winning strategy is not to compete." "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." (Marcel Proust) "[R]egardless of its rewards, the life based solely on achievements represents with remarkable accuracy the approach/avoidance conflict that creates an environment of helplessness in which trauma can occur." (Robert Scaer) "I believe that the absence of adequate nurturing during infanthood is child abuse. However, the concept of nurturing goes well beyond early maternal bonding; it extends into the childhoods and teenage years, when parents may make unreasonable demands for excellence or perfection and withhold intrinsic love and valuation of the child as a person." (Robert Scaer) "Your best gift to your baby is to take care of yourself and surround yourself with people who honor that priority." (Robin Karr-Morse and Meredith Wiley) "[I]mmoblity can be encountered with or without fear. ... it is only when the immobility becomes inextricably and simultaneously coupled with intense fear and other strong negative emotions that we get the entrenched trauma feedback loop in the form of persistent posttraumatic stress disorder. ... the key to resolving trauma is being able to uncouple and separate the fear from the immobility." (Peter A. Levine) "The degree to which we cannot deeply feel our body's interior is the degree to which we crave excessive external stimulation." (Peter A. Levine) "If I had to design a system that was intended to keep people addicted, I'd design exactly the system that we have right now ... I'd attack people, and ostracize them. ... to create a system where you ostracize and marginalize and criminalize people, and force them to live in poverty with disease, you are basically guaranteeing they will stay at it." (Gabor Maté) "It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict. It is the need to escape from a harsh reality." (Shirley Chisholm) "Amish children are taught that they are not more important than others." (Amish tour guide) "[I]f we want our children to behave well, we have to treat them well." (Bruce Perry) "If you can prescribe opiates for back pain, why can't you prescribe them for psychological pain?" (Johann Hari) "Human beings only become addicted when they cannot find anything better to live for and when they desperately need to fill the emptiness that threatens to destroy them ... The need to fill an inner void is not limited to people who become drug addicts, but afflicts the vast majority of people of the late modern era, to a greater or lesser degree." (Bruce Alexander) "What kids need to protect them from addiction are the fundamentals of a life: a sense of meaning and involvement, purposeful activity and achievement, caring about themselves and others, and the ability to manage themselves. The importance of these values and skills is not surprising. What's surprising is that we've lost sight of these being the best antidotes to addiction." (Stanton Peele) "We are addicted to commercial quick fixes designed by experts. But these have never really solved any problem, e.g., addiction, mental health, educational issues, etc. The most effective approaches to these problems always emphasize the motivation and intention of each individual and the importance of a nurturing environment. Unfortunately, there are no quick fixes or pills for these." "... the nuclear family isn't a viable unit. The two-parent or one-parent family doesn't work, you need more support than that. And day care and baby-sitters maybe make a difference, but they don't take the place of a couple of grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles who you don't have to pay to love your children." (Elise Klein) "Too often, we feel obligated to prolong living beyond what's reasonable. This conviction is wedded to the common American misperception that anything is possible." (Karen Speerstra & Herbert Anderson) "Traumatic memories are fundamentally different from the stories we tell about the past. They are dissociated: The different sensations that entered the brain at the time of the trauma are not properly assembled into a story, a piece of autobiography." (Bessel Van der Kolk) "We were taught to think and plan seven generations ahead of ourselves. We're not here on Mother Earth just to live and go away." (Carol Craig (Yakama) via Alison Owings) "People who feel safe and meaningfully connected with others have little reason to squander their lives doing drugs or staring numbly at television; they don't feel compelled to stuff themselves with carbohydrates or assault their fellow human beings. However, if nothing they do seems to make a difference, they feel trapped and become susceptible to the lure of pills, gang leaders, extremist religions, or violent political movements--anybody and anything that promises relief. As the ACE study has shown, child abuse and neglect is the single most preventable cause of mental illness, the single most common cause of drug and alcohol abuse, and a significant contributor to leading causes of death such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke, and suicide." (Bessel Van der Kolk) "As a society, we have a choice: we can continue to focus only on expanding systems that provide late-stage treatment or containment for people who suffer from trauma and related pathologies--a path becoming increasingly unaffordable--or we can begin to invest in building physically and emotionally healthy children from the beginning." (Robin Karr-Morse and Meredith Wiley) "[I]f you are an American, ... you're 2,059 times more likely to die by your own hand with a weapon of your choosing than in a terrorist attack anywhere on Earth." (Tom Engelhardt) "Rewards do not undermine people's intrinsic motivation for dull tasks because there is little or no intrinsic motivation to be undermined." (Deci, Ryan, and Koestner) "Things aren't always as they seem." (Father of John Hunter, among others) "I understood that what kind of life I do not have is completely irrelevant. It only matters what kind of life I have when I have it." (Cassie via Stephen Levine) "Outside the walls of our prison is the unknown. It is not secure, but it is free. We do not know what is outside the walls of the prison of our mind, because we have never ventured there. While our fear projects what is there, it cannot know. Fear cannot leave the prison because it must always guard its inmates." (Steven Harrison) "Giving without relationship creates an object out of a human being." (Steven Harrison) "If I had my life to live over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid." (Muriel Spark) "I've worked with people who have said, 'I have no good qualities; there's just nothing about me that's beautiful.' And I say, 'That sure must be a drag, to feel like that, so unloved and unlovable.' 'Year, it feels really awful not to be able to love anyone, even myself, even a little.' 'There must be lots of people who feel like that.' 'It's terrible for someone to feel like this. They're so lonely, so cut off from everyone.' And here's this incredible compassion for the human condition coming out of them. They are talking so lovingly about themselves because they have uncovered a care for the unloved which was always present but was previously inaccessible. Now they have recognized someone in need, and that someone happens to be themselves, and now they can direct feelings of well-being to that place within themselves which so wishes to be whole." (Steven Levine) "The problem is that we have internalized this fight-or-flight strategy and see lions where there are none." (Rodney Smith) "American often undermine children by parenting "backwards": pushing our babies to be independent while hovering over older kids. This fosters dependence--exactly the opposite of what we hope for." (Christine Gross-Loh) "In Finland, "school readiness" has a different meaning than it does in the United States: it's not about kids being ready for school, it's about schools being ready to meet the needs of each child." (Christine Gross-Loh) "Perhaps someday we will have an "811" number to bring a flying squad of palliative care and hospice doctors and nurses to the home to provide reassurance to the panicked family and pain management to the dying, as an alternative to a brutal final tour through 911, the ER, and the ICU." (Katy Butler) "I'm going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump." (a suicide note) "To drop opinion, belief, attachment, greed, or envy is to die--to die every day, every moment." (J. Krishnamurti) "The mind can be aware of the unknown only when it dies to the known--dies without any motive, without the hope of reward or the fear of punishment. Then I can find out what death is while I am living--and in that very discovery there is freedom from fear." (J. Krishnamurti) "The best things in life are not things." || "You can tell when you're on the right track. It's usually uphill." (Amish proverbs) "For the immature, fear is often a prime motivator for right action. Rules, laws, restrictions and the threat of punishment for forbidden actions are all ways to insure that the individuals control themselves. A childish mentality does not love self-restraint, so it requires external rules for its and others' safety and well-being." (Marsha Sinetar) "Optimism is wonderful; goals can sometimes be useful; even positive thinking and positive visualisation have their benefits. The problem is that we have developed the habit of chronically overvaluing positivity and the skills of 'doing' in how we think about happiness, and that we chronically undervalue negativity and the 'not-doing' skills, such as resting in uncertainty or getting friendly towards failure." (Oliver Burkeman) "To be a good human is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertainty, and on a willingness to be exposed. It's based on being more like a plant than a jewel: something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility." (Martha Nussbaum via Oliver Burkeman) "The art of dying well is the art of living well. There is no telling when the story will finish. And so the most important time in your life is none other than right now." (Stephen Kiernan) "We are concerned about providing overly aggressive, unwarranted care, while care that is optimally suited to the dying person's needs is often not available or is not covered by insurance." (AMA) "Death is different from what anyone knows, and luckier." (Walt Whitman) "Children who have been exposed to these kinds of experiences [dying]--in a safe, secure, and loving environment--will then raise another generation of children who will, most likely, not even comprehend that we had to write books on death and dying and had to start special institutions for the dying patients; they will not understand why there was this overwhelming fear of death, which, for so long covered up the fear of living." (Elisabeth Kübler-Ross) "Learning is spiritual. It won't come from outside; it can only come from inside." "I don't have to be anything special to investigate the truth, to find real freedom. I don't have to worry about being anyone or anything. I don't have to worry about anything, because I'm not that, either." (Steven Levine, paraphrasing the words of the most open-hearted and clear-minded people nearing death) "Learning to die is learning to dissolve past the holdings of this moment, opening fresh to the next without clinging anywhere. We are each day, each moment, learning to die: to dissolve into the ocean of pure being." (Steven Levine) "[T]he important thing is not how parents perceive their children think of them but how the children really think of their parents." "People die as they live, but more so. To expect something different is to set yourself up for disappointment and failure." / "The best way to share the journey of dying is simply to be with the dying person, sharing quiet times and gentle moments." (Maggie Callanan) "The only thing unnatural about death is how we try to defeat it, and when we can't, how we try to hide it." / "[Y]ou do not live until you take a risk at living." / "I was once so angry that our future had been stolen from us, but the thief was the anger that blinded us to the only thing that we had really ever had, the present moment." (patients' words via William Hablitzel) "Charity and chance and narrow selectivity are not the way to educate the children of a genuine democracy." (Jonathan Kozol) "[T]he culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. We're teaching the wrong things. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it. Create your own. Most people can't do it." (Morrie Schwartz via Mitch Albom) "Blame is the lie by which we convince ourselves that we are victims. It is the lie that robs us of our serenity, our generosity, our confidence, and our delight in life." (C. Terry Warner) "Fear sells not only newspapers and television shows and all kinds of things we don't really need but also, most sinister of all, wrong-minded, often greed- and control-driven solutions to complex problems." (Robin Karr-Morse and Meredith S. Wiley) "If the younger generation does not take pride in becoming like its elders, then the society has lost its own continuum, its own stability, and probably does not have a culture worth calling one, for it will be in a constant state of change from one unsatisfactory set of values to another." (Jean Liedloff) "A happy person, fulfilled in their connection to their friends, family, and community and in the expression of their vocation, is likely to be useful and productive in their life and to help weave the collective fabric of a functional society. What else should a society need from education other than the happiness of its people? What else should we demand for our children other than their happiness?" (Steven Harrison) "Why do we model health care, education, and even community and family development after business? Why can't we model virtually all organizations, including business ones, after (loving) family and (friendly) community?" "Life is not what we normally think. It is just exactly what it is, only if we dare to and are able to see it." * End of List * |