{"id":101994,"date":"2017-11-20T12:01:27","date_gmt":"2017-11-20T12:01:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=101994"},"modified":"2017-11-19T17:22:29","modified_gmt":"2017-11-19T17:22:29","slug":"we-need-their-voices-today-22-and-yours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/11\/we-need-their-voices-today-22-and-yours\/","title":{"rendered":"We Need Their Voices Today! (22) And Yours!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction<\/em><\/p>\n

This is a collection of biographical sketches showing people whose wise voices from the past can help to guide us today. All of the women and men, brief glimpses of whose lives and ideas are portrayed here, gave a high place to compassion. None of them was a slave to greed. We need their voices today!<\/p>\n

[Note from <\/em>TMS editor: In the previous consecutive weeks it was posted one biographical sketch at a time.]<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

**********************************************<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Saint Francis said:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cBlessed is he who loves and does not therefore desire to be loved;
\nBlessed is he who fears and does not therefore desire to be feared;
\nBlessed is he who serves and does not therefore desire to be served;
\nBlessed is he who behaves well toward others and does not desire that others behave well toward him.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

William Blake said:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cEvery Night & every Morn
\nSome to Misery are Born
\nEvery Morn and every Night
\nSome are Born to sweet delight
\nSome are Born to sweet delight
\nSome are Born to Endless Night.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thomas Paine said:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by a contrary effect: that of taking rights away. Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights, in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few… They… consequently are instruments of injustice … The fact, therefore, must be that the individuals, themselves, each, in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a contract with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thomas Jefferson said:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mary Wollstonecraft said:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI entreat (men) to assist to emancipate their companion, to make her a help meet for them! Would men but generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience, they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers: in a word, better citizens.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

William Godwin said:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cTo whom does any article, suppose a loaf of bread, justly belong? I have an hundred loaves in my possession, and in the next street there is a poor man expiring with hunger, to whom one of these loaves would be a means of preserving his life. If I withhold this loaf from him, am I not unjust? If I impart it, am I not complying with what justice demands?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Marquis de Condorcet said:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cAny person who has contributed to the progress of mankind to the best of his ability becomes immune to personal disaster and suffering. He knows that human progress is inevitable and can take comfort and courage from his inner picture of the epic march of mankind, through history, towards a better future.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thomas Robert Malthus said:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThat population cannot increase without the means of subsistence is a proposition so evident that it needs no illustration. That population does invariably increase, where there are means of subsistence, the history of every people who have ever existed will abundantly prove. And that the superior power cannot be checked without producing misery and vice, the ample portion of \u00a0these two bitter ingredients in the cup of human life, and the continuance of the physical causes that seem to have produced them, bear too convincing a testimony.\u201d (He later modified this opinion and made it less pessimistic by allowing for the effect of preventive checks such as late marriage. Malthus considered birth control to be a form of vice, but today it is accepted as the most humane method of avoiding the grim Malthusian forces, famine, disease and war.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Percy Bysshe Shelly said:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cRise, like lions after slumber
\nIn unvanquishable number!
\nShake your chains to earth like dew
\nWhich in sleep had fallen on you:
\nYe are many, they are few!\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Robert Owen said:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat ideas individuals may attach to the term `Millennium’ I know not; but I know that society may be formed so as to exist without crime, without poverty, with health greatly improved, with little, if any, misery. and with intelligence and happiness increased a hundredfold; and no obstacle whatsoever intervenes at this moment except ignorance to prevent such a state of society from becoming universal.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

John Stuart Mill said:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThe only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Henry David Thoreau said:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cSimplify your life. Don’t waste the years struggling for things that are unimportant. Don’t burden yourself with possessions. Keep your needs and wants simple and enjoy what you have. Don’t destroy your peace of mind by looking back, worrying about the past. Live in the present. Simplify!\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Count Leo Tolstoy said:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThe sharpest of all contradictions can be seen between the government’s professed faith in the Christian law of the brotherhood of all humankind, and the military laws of the state, which force each young man to prepare himself for enmity and murder.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mahatma Gandhi said:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThey say that ‘means are after all means’. I would say that ‘means are after all everything’. As the means, so the end. Indeed, the Creator has given us limited power over means, none over end… The means may be likened to a seed, and the end to a tree; and there is the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree. Means and end are convertible terms in my philosophy of life.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Martin Luther King said:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete. There may have been a time when war served a negative good by preventing the spread of an evil force, but the power of modern weapons eliminates even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good. If we assume that life is worth living, and that man has a right to survival, then we must find an alternative to war … I am convinced that the Church cannot be silent while mankind faces the threat of nuclear annihilation. If the church is true to her mission, she must call for an end to the nuclear arms race.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wilfred Owen said:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIf in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
\nBehind the wagon that we flung him in,
\nAnd watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
\nHis hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,
\nIf you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
\nCome gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
\nObscene as cancer, bitter as the cud\\
\nOf vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
\nMy friend, you would not tell with such high zest
\nTo children ardent for some desperate glory,
\nThe old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
\nPro patria mori\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Albert Einstein said:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThe unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our ways of thinking, and thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophes.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Edna St. Vincent Millay said:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cMan, doughty Man, what power has brought you low,
\nThat heaven itself in arms could not persuade
\nTo lay aside the lever and the spade
\nAnd be as dust among the dusts that blow?
\nWhence, whence the broadside? Whose the heavy blade?…
\nStrive not to speak, poor scattered mouth; I know.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bertha von Suttner said:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cStrange how blind people are! They are horrified by the torture chambers of the Middle Ages, but their arsenals fill them with pride!\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

George Orwell said:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIn a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Helen Keller said:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cAlone we can do so little! Together we can do so much!\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

****************************<\/p>\n

Today, human civilization and the biosphere are facing a crisis. Here are the tasks which history has given to our generation:<\/strong><\/p>\n