Prevailing Quotes - Page 8

• [The] prevailing reason at this time is, that the Act of Parliament is against the Magna Charta, and the natural rights of Englishmen, and therefore, according to Lord Coke, null and void.

  Thomas Hutchinson

  Rights, America, Null

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• The system functioned relatively automatically, and the prevailing system of racial meanings, identities, and ideologies already seemed natural. Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states were Black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms, an adaptation to the needs and demands of the current political climate.

  Michelle Alexander

  Race, Color, Racism

  Michelle Alexander (2013). “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, p.58, The New Press

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• Like an army defeated
  The snow hath retreated,
  And now doth fare ill
  On the top of the bare hill;
  The Ploughboy is whooping — anon — anon!
  There's joy in the mountains:
  There's life in the fountains;
  Small clouds are sailing,
  Blue sky prevailing;
  The rain is over and gone.

  William Wordsworth

  Rain, Army, Clouds

  William Wordsworth, Stephen Gill (2000). “The Major Works”, p.248, Oxford University Press, USA

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• So far as this has gone, I am satisfied to see a spirit prevailing that promises to send the system out free from those vexations and abuses that might be warranted by the terms of the Constitution. It must never be forgotten, however, that the liberties of the people are not so safe under the gracious manner of government, as by the limitation of power.

  Richard Henry Lee

  Government, People, Promise

  Richard Henry Lee (1825). “Memoir of the Life of Richard H. Lee, and His Correspondence with the Most Distinguished Men in America and Europe”

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• A work of art can be called revolutionary if, by virtue of the aesthetic transformation, it represents, in the exemplary fate of individuals, the prevailing unfreedom and the rebelling forces, thus breaking through the mystified (and petrified) social reality, and opening the horizon of change (liberation).

  Herbert Marcuse

  Art, Fate, Reality

  Herbert Marcuse (2007). “Art and Liberation: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse”, p.62, Routledge

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• Despotism has forever had a powerful hold upon the world. Autocratic government, not self-government, has been the prevailing state of mankind. The record of past history is the record, not of the success of republics, but of their failure.

  Calvin Coolidge

  Powerful, Past, Government

  Calvin Coolidge (2001). “The Price of Freedom: Speeches and Addresses”, p.343, The Minerva Group, Inc.

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• A revolution without a prior reformation would collapse or become a totalitarian tyranny. A reformation means that masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don't know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won't act for change but won't strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution

  Saul Alinsky

  Mean, Past, Self

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• Theres another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution.

  Saul Alinsky

  Letting Go, Attitude, Acceptance

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• Prevailing prayer is that which secures an answer. Saying prayers is not offering prevailing prayer. The prevalence of prayer does not depend so much on quantity as on quality.

  Charles Grandison Finney

  Prayer, Offering, Quality

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• The proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives. Today sometimes it seems that the opposite order is prevailing.

  Pope Francis

  Religious, Order, Opposites

  Pope Francis (2015). “Encountering Truth: Meeting God in the Everyday”, p.18, Image

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• We are here among you as seekers of refuge from our present-your future-a time of worldwide famine, exhausted fuel supplies, terminal poverty-the end of the capitalistic experiment. Once we came to understand the simpl...truth that earth's resources were limited, in fact soon to run out, the whole capitalistic illusion fell to pieces. Those of us who spoke this truth were denounced as heretics, as enemies of the prevailing economic faith. Like religious Dissenters of an earlier day.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Running, Religious, Enemy

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• I don’t know, I don’t feel right unless I’ve got the sea and mountains nearby. People are mostly a product of where they were born and raised. How you think and feel’s always linked to the lay of the land, the temperature. The prevailing winds, even.

  Haruki Murakami

  Thinking, Wind, Sea

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• and while faith based on theological reasoning is today universally engaged in a bitter struggle with doubt and resistance from the prevailing brand of rationalism, it does seem that the naked fundamental experience itself, that primal seizure of mystic insight, stripped of religious concepts, perhaps no longer to be regarded as a religious experience at all, has undergone an immense expansion and now forms the soul of that complex irrationalism that haunts our era like a night bird lost in the dawn.

  Robert Musil

  Religious, Struggle, Night

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• This is what happens: somebody—girl usually—got a free spirit, doesn't get on too good with her parents. These kids, they're like tied-down helium balloons. They strain against the string and strain against it, and then something happens, and that string gets cut, and they just float away. And maybe you never see the balloon again . . . Or maybe three or four years from now, or three or four days from now, the prevailing winds take the balloon back home . . . But listen, kid, that string gets cut all the time.

  John Green

  Girl, Kids, Home

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• The prevailing idea seems to be, that I come to God and ask Him for something that I want, and that I expect Him to give me that which I have asked. But this is a most dishonouring and degrading conception. The popular belief reduces God to a servant, our servant: doing our bidding, performing our pleasure, granting our desires. No, prayer is a coming to God, telling Him my need, committing my way unto the Lord, and leaving Him to deal with it as seemeth Him best.

  Arthur W. Pink

  Prayer, Ideas, Giving

  Arthur W. Pink (2007). “The Sovereignty of God”, p.107, Lulu.com

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• It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion that they were created rather to feel than reason, and that all the power they obtain must be obtained by their charms and weaknesses.

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Justice, Diversity, Sorrow

  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman ch. 4 (1792)

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• Darwin was one of our finest specimens. He did superbly what human beings are designed to do: manipulate social information to personal advantage. The information in question was the prevailing account of how human beings, and all organisms, came to exist; Darwin reshaped it in a way that radically raised his social status. When he died in 1882, his greatness was acclaimed in newspapers around the world, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey, not far from the body of Isaac Newton. Alpha-male territory.

  Robert Wright

  Greatness, Territory, Information

  Robert Wright (2010). “The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology”, p.377, Vintage

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• Meditation on any theme, if positive and honest, inevitably separates him who does the meditating from the opinion prevailing around him, from that which can be called "public" or "popular" opinion.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Meditation, Doe, Opinion

  "What is Philosophy?". Book by José Ortega y Gasset, p. 15, 1964.

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• At present, when the prevailing forms of society have become hindrances to the free expression of human powers, it is precisely the abstract branches of science, mathematics and theoretical physics, which ... offer a less distorted form of knowledge than other branches of science which are interwoven with the pattern of daily life, and the practicality of which seemingly testifies to their realistic character.

  Max Horkheimer

  Character, Expression, Theoretical Physics

  Max Horkheimer (1972). “Critical Theory: Selected Essays”, p.133, A&C Black

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• Pragmatism ... reflects with almost disarming candor the spirit of the prevailing business culture, the very same attitude of 'being practical' as counter to which philosophical meditation as such was conceived.

  Max Horkheimer

  Attitude, Philosophical, Meditation

  Max Horkheimer (2013). “Eclipse of Reason”, p.35, A&C Black

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• It occurred to me that there have always been selkie women: women who did not seem to belong to this world, because they did not fit into prevailing notions of what women were supposed to be. And if you did not fit into those notions, in some sense you weren't a woman. Weren't even quite human. The magical animal woman is, or can be, a metaphor for those sorts of women.

  Theodora

  Animal, World, Fit

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• Much more than an entertaining set of exaggerated facts, fiction is a metaphoric method of describing, dramatizing and condensing historical events, personal actions, psychological states and the symbolic knowledge encoded within the collective unconscious; things, events and conditions that are otherwise too diffuse and/or complex to be completely digested or appreciated by the prevailing culture.

  Tom Robbins

  Collective Unconscious, Historical, Fiction

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• The ultimate evil is the weakness, cowardice, that is one of the constituents of so much human nature. When, rarely, unalloyed nobility does occur, its chances of prevailing are slim. Yet it exists, and its mere existence is reason enough for not wiping the name of mankind off the slate.

  John Simon

  Names, Evil, Slim

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• Most of all people respond to a film tackling grave subjects that question and go against the prevailing mood.

  Philippe Claudel

  People, Film, Mood

  Source: www.indiewire.com

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• The evolution of cultures appears to follow the pattern of the evolution of species. The many different forms of culture which arise correspond to the "mutations" of genetic theory. Some forms prove to be effective under prevailing circumstances and others not, and the perpetuation of the culture is determined accordingly.

  B. F. Skinner

  Different, Mutation, Culture

  B.F Skinner (2012). “Science And Human Behavior”, p.434, Simon and Schuster

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