corimagua

“To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury; and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable; and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly; to listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart; to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasion, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious grow up through the common. This is to be my symphony.”

~William Ellery Channing

I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in the majority?

-Henry David Thoreau, “A Plea for Captain John Brown.”

I think white people are so afraid of the world they created that they don’t want to see, feel, smell, or hear it. The feeling of rain and snow on your face, being numbed by an icy wind and thawing out before a smoking fire, coming out of a hot sweat bath and plunging into a cold stream, these things make you feel alive, but you don’t want them anymore…. livings inside a body that no longer has a scent, hearing the noise from the hi-fi instead of listening to the sounds of nature, watching some actor on TV having a make-believe experience when you no longer experience anything for yourself…… It’s no good.

-John (Fire) Lame Deer, Sioux medicine man

They are all global issues. Whether we’re talking of the financial system going awry, whether we’re talking of corruption, whether we’re talking about geopolitics or energy or the environment. All of these are global problems that mankind is facing today and we still have one global tool between our hands that enables better communication, better sharing of knowledge, better participation in political and democratic processes. What i suspect is that a global universal internet is the only tool we have to address those global issues and that is why this fight for a free internet is the central fight that we all here have a responsibility to fight.

 -(Cypherpunks-Freedom and the Future of the Inthernet, pg 131)

To resist the frigidity of old age one must combine the body, the mind and the heart–and to keep them in parallel vigor one must exercise, study, and love.

-Karl von Bonstetten

I have felt deeply, even if the knowledge came to me rather late, that we live only through other lives that touch us and that to live in this way at all requires more care than most people are prepared to give. For ultimately there is nothing more astonishing, more fraught with mystery, than the mutual response that occurs across so many obstacles of time, of place, of background, and of the events that form us. When I have experienced it, it has seemed like the only security I have known.

-Kenneth E. Read, Social Anhtropologist

Despite the etymology of “civilization” from “city” and the development of the word “savage” from the Latin word for “forest”, the most savage way of life is now found in the centers of our most modern cities. Civilization has produced a savagery far worse than that which we once imputed to primitive tribes.

-Jack Weatherford, Savages and Civilization–Who Will Survive?

Prehistoric man was, on the whole, a more peaceful, cooperative, un-warlike, unaggressive creature than we are, and we of the civilized world have gradually become more and more disoperative, more aggressive and hostile, and less cooperative where it most matters, that is, in human relations. The meaning we have put into the term “savage” is more correctly applicable to ourselves.

-Ashley Montagu, The Direction Of Human Development

I have not let myself fall into despair, even when the news has not been what I hoped for. I just put one foot in front of the other and keep moving and am grateful for each day.

-Wilma Mankiller, Cherokee Nation Chief (1985-1995)