Towards a just & healthy democracy in the Commonwealth... and beyond!

Quotes

Few people have the imagination for reality.
--Goethe

The project of radical transformative conservatism is nothing less than the restoration and creation of human association, and the elevation of society and the people who form it to their proper central and sovereign station.
--Phillip Blond

It is essential to release humanity from the false fixations of yesterday, which seem now to bind it to a rationale of action leading only to extinction.
--Richard Buckminster Fuller (Introduction: The Wellspring of Reality)

We are here as local information harvesters, local problem-solvers in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe. The fact that we get away from physical problems doesn't mean we go away from problems. The problems are really rarely physical.
--Richard Buckminster Fuller (Only Integrity is Going to Count, 1983)

I have to say, I think that we are in some kind of final examination as to whether human beings now, with this capability to acquire information and to communicate, whether we're really qualified to take on the responsibility we're designed to be entrusted with. And this is not a matter of an examination of the types of governments, nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with economic systems. It has to do with the individual. Does the individual have the courage to really go along with the truth?
--Richard Buckminster Fuller (Only Integrity is Going to Count, 1983)

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
--Richard Buckminster Fuller

In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
--Eric Hoffer

Security is mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.
--Helen Keller

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.
--Lao Tzu

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
--Alan Watts

Vision is the blazing campfire around which people will gather. It provides light, energy, warmth and unity.
--Bill Newman

By opposing something we maintain it
-- Ursula Le guin

The liberal thing
--Deval Patrick, asked what he thought was the biggest misconception about him (Boston Globe, 11/12/2006)

There are many possible mechanisms for limiting growth. That current growth rates of population and industrialization will stop is inevitable. Unless we choose favorable processes to limit growth, the social and environmental systems by their internal processes will choose for us. The natural mechanisms for terminating exponential growth appear the least desirable. Unless the world understands and begins to act soon, civilization will be overwhelmed by forces we have created but can no longer control.
--Jay Forrester (Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems, 1971)

The people who voted for him weren't organized in any kind of new or powerful way, and the special interests--banks, energy companies, health interests, car-makers, the military-industrial complex--sat first at the table and wrote the menu. Myth met reality, and came up wanting.
--Micah Sifry, on President Obama's first year in office

While the electoral system presents serious obstacles, the far bigger obstacle in the US has been the unwavering commitment of the leaders of labor, peace, and environmental organizations to the Democrats who consistently betray their progressive goals. We can end these self-inflicted defeats through independent political action.
--Howie Hawkins, former Green Party candidate for US Senate

The procedure we are pursuing is that of true democracy. Semi-democracy accepts the dictatorship of a majority in establishing its arbitrary, ergo, unnatural, laws. True democracy discovers by patient experiment and unanimous acknowledgement what the laws of nature or universe may be for the physical support and metaphysical satisfaction of the human intellect's function in universe.
--Richard Buckminster Fuller (Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1963)

¡Cuan superior es la suma de las luces a la suma de las riquezas! How superior is the amount of light to the sum of wealth!
--Simón Bolívar

Only one species on earth does not have full employment and that is Homo sapiens.
--Paul Hawken (Blessed Unrest)

Picture the collective presence of all human beings as an organism. Pervading that organism are intelligent activities, humanity's immune response to resist and heal the effects of political corruption, economic disease, and ecological degradation, whether they are the result of free-market, religious, or political ideologies.
--Paul Hawken (Blessed Unrest)

Who would have thought that with a Democratic administration in Washington, D.C. and with a Democratic administration in Massachusetts, federal incentives could be used to move Massachusetts toward more privatization in public education, chain-run charter schools, less public accountability, more attacks on collective bargaining, and less due process for teachers? All this appears in the bill passed by the Massachusetts Senate as the Education Reform Act of 2009.
--Marilyn J. Segal, Executive Director, Citizens For Public Schools

Getting the economic wind behind our backs instead of always in our face, making the economic force of gravity work to build local food and local energy systems, is incredibly important and it's very much the same work as trying to slow down this ruinous climate change.
--Bill McKibben, 350.org

This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists. The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not from the action of a conforming majority. But, from the creative maladjustment of a transformed minority.
--Martin Luther King, Jr. (Strength to Love)

Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' But conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but because conscience tells one it is right.
--Martin Luther King, Jr.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places?and there are so many?where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
--Howard Zinn

If the gods had intended for people to vote, they would have given us candidates.
--Howard Zinn

I want to put out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don't cause spills. They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn't come from the oil rigs, they came from the refineries onshore.
--President Barack Obama, April 2, 2010

We had this incredibly rich relationship that we built with the grass-roots network the last time. And then we got in, and we let it go. And there are reasons for that. But I think it's a terrible thing. We missed it. I missed it personally. And I think a lot of the folks in the organization missed it.
--Governor Deval Patrick, to a room of supporters, trying to reignite the grassroots, February 2010