Great Throughts Treasury

"It must be clear that the whole mentality of human society - what is regarded as true or false, knowledge or ignorance; the nature of education and the curricula of the schools - all this differs according to the dominant system of truth accepted by a given culture or society." - Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin

"Any system of sensate truth and reality implies a denial of, or an utterly indifferent attitude toward, any supersensory reality or value. By definition, supersensory reality is nonexistent or, if it exists, is unknowable to us and therefore equivalent to the nonexistent. Being unknowable, it is irrelevant and devoid of interest (Kantian criticism, agnosticism, positivism, etc.). Hence it follows that the sensory cultures regard investigations of the nature of God and supersensory phenomena as superstitious or fruitless speculation. Theology and religion, as a body of revealed truth, are at best tolerated, just as many hobbies are tolerated; or are given mere lip service; or are transformed into a kind of scientific theology." - Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin

"The communists and fascists in politics are the analogues of the modernists in the fine arts. Both groups are in rebellion against the dominant sensate politico-economic and art systems; but both are essentially sensate. Accordingly, neither group can constitute the politico-economic or art system of the future. They are mainly destroyers and rebels - not constructive builders. They flourish only under the conditions peculiar to a period of transition. Being charged with destructive force, the modernists are too chaotic and distorted to serve as bearers of a permanent art culture." - Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin

"In such a culture, material values naturally become paramount, beginning with omnipotent wealth and ending with all the values that satisfy man's physiological needs and material comfort. Sensory utility and pleasure... become the sole criteria of what is good and bad... A further consequence of such a system of truth is the development of a temporalistic, relativistic, and nihilistic mentality. The sensory world is in a state of incessant flux and becoming. There is nothing unchangeable in it - not even an eternal Supreme Being. Mind dominated by the truth of the senses simply cannot perceive any permanency, but apprehends all values in terms of shift and transformation. Sensate mentality views everything from the standpoint of evolution and progress. This leads to an increasing neglect of the eternal values, which come to be replaced by temporary, or short-time, considerations. Sensate society lives in, and appreciates mainly, the present. Since the past is irretrievable and no longer exists, while the future is not yet here and is uncertain, only the present moment is real and desirable." - Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin

"The ideational system of truth is the very opposite of the sensate system. It is preoccupied primarily with supersensory reality and values. It is based on revelation, divine inspiration, and mystic experience. As such it is considered to be authentic and absolute. Its main concern is with God and His kingdom as the true reality. Therefore revealed religion and theology become the queen of genuine wisdom and science, empirical knowledge serving as a mere handmaid. The mentality dominated by the truth of faith is dedicated to the eternal verities, in contradistinction to the temporal truth of the senses" - Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin

"A further consequence of such a system of truth is the development of a temporalistic, relativistic, and nihilistic mentality. The sensory world is in a state of incessant flux and becoming. There is nothing unchangeable in it - not even an eternal Supreme Being. Mind dominated by the truth of the senses simply cannot perceive any permanency, but apprehends all values in terms of shift and transformation. Sensate mentality views everything from the standpoint of evolution and progress. This leads to an increasing neglect of the eternal values, which come to be replaced by temporary, or short-time, considerations. Sensate society lives in, and appreciates mainly, the present. Since the past is irretrievable and no longer exists, while the future is not yet here and is uncertain, only the present moment is real and desirable." - Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin

"Our public school system is our country's biggest and most inefficient monopoly, yet it keeps demanding more and more money." - Phyllis Schlafly, fully Phyllis McAlpin Stewart Schlafly

"We must now establish the basic principles, the basic values and beliefs which hold us together as Canadians so that beyond our regional loyalties there is a way of life and a system of values which make us proud of the country that has given us such freedom and such immeasurable joy." - Pierre Trudeau, aka Pierre Elliott Trudeau, fully Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau

"Here I shall present, without using Analysis [mathematics], the principles and general results of the Théorie, applying them to the most important questions of life, which are indeed, for the most part, only problems in probability. One may even say, strictly speaking, that almost all our knowledge is only probable; and in the small number of things that we are able to know with certainty, in the mathematical sciences themselves, the principal means of arriving at the truth—induction and analogy—are based on probabilities, so that the whole system of human knowledge is tied up with the theory set out in this essay. " - Pierre-Simon Laplace, Compte de Laplace, Marquis de Laplace

"It is interesting thus to follow the intellectual truths of analysis in the phenomena of nature. This correspondence, of which the system of the world will offer us numerous examples, makes one of the greatest charms attached to mathematical speculations. " - Pierre-Simon Laplace, Compte de Laplace, Marquis de Laplace

"The present state of the system of nature is evidently a consequence of what it was in the preceding moment, and if we conceive of an intelligence that at a given instant comprehends all the relations of the entities of this universe, it could state the respective position, motions, and general effects of all these entities at any time in the past or future. Physical astronomy, the branch of knowledge that does the greatest honor to the human mind, gives us an idea, albeit imperfect, of what such an intelligence would be. The simplicity of the law by which the celestial bodies move, and the relations of their masses and distances, permit analysis to follow their motions up to a certain point; and in order to determine the state of the system of these great bodies in past or future centuries, it suffices for the mathematician that their position and their velocity be given by observation for any moment in time. Man owes that advantage to the power of the instrument he employs, and to the small number of relations that it embraces in its calculations. But ignorance of the different causes involved in the production of events, as well as their complexity, taken together with the imperfection of analysis, prevents our reaching the same certainty about the vast majority of phenomena. Thus there are things that are uncertain for us, things more or less probable, and we seek to compensate for the impossibility of knowing them by determining their different degrees of likelihood. So it was that we owe to the weakness of the human mind one of the most delicate and ingenious of mathematical theories, the science of chance or probability. " - Pierre-Simon Laplace, Compte de Laplace, Marquis de Laplace

"Thus the system of the world only oscillates around a mean state from which it never departs except by a very small quantity. By virtue of its constitution and the law of gravity, it enjoys a stability that can be destroyed only by foreign causes, and we are certain that their action is undetectable from the time of the most ancient observations until our own day. This stability in the system of the world, which assures its duration, is one of the most notable among all phenomena, in that it exhibits in the heavens the same intention to maintain order in the universe that nature has so admirably observed on earth for the sake of preserving individuals and perpetuating species. " - Pierre-Simon Laplace, Compte de Laplace, Marquis de Laplace

"That which distinguishes him from the figurative artist is the fact that in his creations he frees himself from individual sentiments and from particular impressions which he receives from outside, and that he breaks loose from the domination of the individual inclination within him. It is therefore equally wrong to think that the non-figurative artist creates through ‘the pure intention of his mechanical process,’ that he makes ‘calculated abstractions,’ and that he wishes to ’suppress sentiment not only in himself but also in the spectator.’ It is a mistake to think that he retires completely into his system. That which is regarded as a system is nothing but constant obedience to the laws of pure plastics, to necessity, which art demands from him. It is thus clear that he has not become a mechanic, but that the progress of science, of technique, of machinery, of life as a whole, has only made him into a living machine, capable of realizing in a pure manner the essence of art. In this way, he is in his creation sufficiently neutral, that nothing of himself or outside of him can prevent him from establishing that which is universal. Certainly his art is art for art’s sake … for the sake of the art which is form and content at one and the same time." - Piet Mondrian, fully Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian

"Millions of singular sociocultural phenomena that make the superorganic world of reality appear to us in the form of the integrated systems and unintegrated congeries. If two or more singular superorganic phenomena are related to one another only by chance (by mere spatial or time adjacency) they are congeries having no real unity and interdependence between them. If two or more singular sociocultural facts are tied together meaningfully and causally in such a way that they articulate consistently the same set of meanings (values, norms) and empirically-in their vehicles and human members-show tangible (causal) interdependence of its important parts, such combination of any number of singular sociocultural phenomena makes an integrated cultural system or organized social system (Ganzbuten). Though overlooked by the majority of sociologists, the distinction between the systems and congeries is basic and important in many respects and especially for the purposes of adequate study of the sociocultural phenomena." - Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin

"Love is the supreme value around which all moral values can be integrated into one ethical system valid for the whole of humanity." - Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin

"And once we have given our community a good start, the process will be cumulative. By maintaining a sound system of education you produce citizens of good character, and citizens of sound character, with the advantage of a good education, produce in turn children better than themselves and better able to produce still better children in their turn, as can be seen with animals. " - Plato NULL

"Our doctrine of the immortality of the heavenly system rests on the firmest foundation once we have cited the sovereign agent, the soul, and considered, besides, the peculiar excellence of the bodily substance constituting the stars, a material so pure, so entirely the noblest, and chosen by the soul as, in all living beings, the determining principle appropriates to itself the choicest among their characteristic parts. No doubt Aristotle is right in speaking of flame as a turmoil, fire insolently rioting; but the celestial fire is equable, placid, docile to the purposes of the stars." - Plotinus NULL

"The Will of God is able to cope with the ceaseless flux and escape of body stuff by ceaselessly reintroducing the known forms in new substances, thus ensuring perpetuity not to the particular item but to the unity of idea: now, seeing that objects of this realm possess no more than duration of form, why should celestial objects, and the celestial system itself, be distinguished by duration of the particular entity?" - Plotinus NULL

"It would be simplistic to say that Divine Providence caused the fall of Communism. In a certain sense Communism as a system fell by itself. It fell as a consequence of its own mistakes and abuses. It proved to be a medicine more dangerous than the disease itself. It did not bring about true social reform, yet it did become a powerful threat and challenge to the entire world. But it fell by itself, because of its own inherent weakness." - Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL

"Where self-interest is suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control that dries up the wellspring of initiative and creativity. " - Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL

"Nevertheless, in the face of the undeniable mutability of even inanimate nature, there still rises the enigma of the unexplored microcosm. It seemed, in fact, that, unlike the organic world, inorganic matter was in a certain sense immutable. Its tiniest parts, the chemical atoms, were indeed capable of combining in most diversified manners, but they appeared to be endowed with a privilege of eternal stability and indestructibility, since they emerged unchanged from every chemical synthesis and analysis. A hundred years ago, the elementary particles were still regarded as simple, indivisible, and indestructible. The same idea prevailed regarding the material energy and forces of the cosmos, especially on the basis of the fundamental laws of the conservation of mass and energy. Some natural scientists went so far as to consider themselves authorized to formulate in the name of their science a fantastic monastic philosophy, whose sorry memory is linked up, among others, with the name of Ernst Haeckel. But in the very lifetime of the latter, toward the end of the last century, even this over-simplified conception of the chemical atom was shattered by modern science. The growing knowledge of the periodic system of chemical elements, the discovery of the corpuscular radiations of radio active elements, along with many other similar facts, have demonstrated that the microcosm of the chemical atom, with dimensions as small as ten-millionths of a millimeter, is a theater of continuous mutations, no less than the macrocosm known to all. It was in the sphere of electronics that the character of mutability was first established. From the electronic structure of the atom there emanate radiations of light and heat which are absorbed by outside bodies, corresponding to the energy level of the electronic orbits. In the exterior parts of this sphere there takes place the ionization of the atom and the transformation of energy in the synthesis and analysis of chemical combinations. At that time, however, it was possible to suppose that these chemico-physical transformations provided one last refuge for stability, since they did not reach the very nucleus of the atom, which is the seat of its mass and of the positive electric charge which determine the place of the chemical atom in the natural system of the elements, and where it seemed science had found, so to speak, an example of an absolutely stable and invariable being." - Pope Pius XII, born Eugenio Marìa Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli NULL

"Revered monks and people. This public rally is aimed at informing the whole world of the will of the people... Our purpose is to show that the entire people entertain the keenest desire for a multiparty democratic system of government." - Daw Aung San Suu Kyi

"Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man's self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man." - Daw Aung San Suu Kyi

"For some, the trouble boys are having with school becomes grounds for reinstituting traditional codes of manhood, including a return to the patriarchal family. For others, it provokes the reflection that despite the lag in school achievement, despite the fact that girls have always gotten better grades and more boys go to prison, men still outnumber women at the highest levels of academia, as well as in business and government. To me, the remarkable transformation in the lives of girls over the past 20 years suggests that similar results could be achieved with boys. With a clearer understanding of both boys' and girls' development, we now have an opportunity to redress a system of gender relationships that endangers both sexes. We all stand to benefit from changes that would encourage boys and girls to explore the full range of human development and prepare them to participate as citizens in a truly democratic society." - Carol Gilligan

"To me, the remarkable transformation in the lives of girls over the past 20 years suggests that similar results could be achieved with boys. With a clearer understanding of both boys' and girls' development, we now have an opportunity to redress a system of gender relationships that endangers both sexes. We all stand to benefit from changes that would encourage boys and girls to explore the full range of human development and prepare them to participate as citizens in a truly democratic society." - Carol Gilligan

"In the aftermath of September 11, and as the 9/11 Commission report so aptly demonstrates, it is clear that our intelligence system is not working the way that it should." - Hillary Rodham Clinton

"Many of the ideas from the first edition of this book about how to refocus the foster care system on the best interests of the child were later included in the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, which I worked on with the late Republican Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island and others. After the passage of that legislation, foster adoptions increased 64% nationwide from 31,030 the year the law passed to 51,000 last year. As First Lady, I met many young people aging out of foster care who had little of the emotional, social, and financial support families provide. I worked on the Foster Care Independence Act of 1999, which provides young people aging out of foster care with support services, including access to health care, educational opportunities, job training, housing assistance, and counseling. In the Senate, we passed a law that provides financial incentives to people who adopt older children." - Hillary Rodham Clinton

"Over the last several years, there has been a dramatic increase in media stories of abducted & abused children. Where there has not been an increase in the overall numbers of such cases, many families, and children, are more fearful. I have pushed for legislation that would appoint a national coordinator for AMBER alerts, and alert system for missing children; provide additional protections for children, and establish stricter punishments for sex offenders. That legislation passed the Congress in 2003." - Hillary Rodham Clinton

"The failure was principally political and policy driven, there were many interests that weren't at all happy about losing their financial stake in a way that the system currently operates, but I think I became a lightning rod for some of that criticism. [about her role, as First Lady, in attempting to win reforms in health care coverage]" - Hillary Rodham Clinton

"This decision, which is one of the most fundamental, difficult, and soul-searching decisions a woman and a family can make, is also one in which the government should have no role. I believe we can all recognize that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic choice to many women. Often, it's a failure of our system of education, and preventive services. It's often a result of family dynamics. This decision is a profound and complicated one; a difficult one, often the most difficult that a woman will ever make. The fact is that the best way to reduce the number of abortions is to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies in the first place." - Hillary Rodham Clinton

"To me it's a failure every time we keep a child in foster care for that child's entire life. You know, there should be a decision made to either re-unite a child by helping a family get back on its feet and take care of its children or we should remove the child and try to find a good loving home with the foster care system but much more importantly, trying to find a permanent home." - Hillary Rodham Clinton

"An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion soon degenerates. For force always attract men of low morality. " - Albert Einstein

"An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion, soon degenerates. For force always attracts men of low morality, and I believe it to be an invariable rule that tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels." - Albert Einstein

"Development of Western science is based on two great achievements: the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility to find out causal relationships by systematic experiment (during the Renaissance). In my opinion, one has not to be astonished that the Chinese sages have not made these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all." - Albert Einstein

"Each ray of light moves in the coordinate system 'at rest' with the definite, constant velocity V independent of whether this ray of light is emitted by a body at rest or a body in motion." - Albert Einstein

"Looking back at the wake of my ship one day in 1917, I became interested in its beautiful white path. I said to myself, That path is white because of the different refractions of light by the bubbles of water-H20 (not H0). The bubbles are beautiful little spheres. I wonder how many bubbles I am looking at stretching miles astern. I began to make calculations of how many bubbles there were per cubic foot of water. I began to find that in calculating the ship's white wake I was dealing in quintillions to the fourth power times quintillions to the fourth power or some such fantastically absurd number of bubbles. And nature was making those bubbles in sublimely swift ease! Any time one looks carefully at a bubble, one is impressed with the beauty of its structure, its’ beautiful sphericity glinting with the colors of the spectrum. It is ephemeral-elegantly conceived, beautifully manufactured and readily broken. Inasmuch as the kind of mathematics I had learned of in school required the use of the XYZ coordinate system and the necessity of employing in calculating the spheres, I wondered, to how many decimal places does nature carry out before she decides the computation can't be concluded? Next I wondered, to how many arbitrary decimal places does nature carry out the transcendental irrational before she decides to say it's a bad job and call it off? If nature uses she has to do what we call fudging of her design which means improvising, compromisingly. I thought sympathetically of nature's having to make all those myriad frustrating decisions each time she made a bubble. I didn't see how she managed to formulate the wake of every ship while managing the rest of the universe if she had to make all those decisions. So I said to myself, I don't think nature uses. I think she has some other mathematical way of coordinating her undertakings." - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

"There will come a time when the proper education of children, by a glorified system of spontaneous education of choice, similar to the Montessori System, will be made possible… Education by choice, with its marvelous motivating psychology of desire for truth, will make life ever cleaner and happier, more rhythmical and artistic." - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

"Topology provides the synergetic means of ascertaining the values of any system of experiences. Topology is the science of fundamental pattern and structural relationships of event constellations." - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

"While no politician or political system can ever afford to yield understandably and enthusiastically to their adversaries and opposers, all politicians can and will yield enthusiastically to the computers safe flight-controlling capabilities in bringing all of humanity in for a happy landing." - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

"Activity of the nervous system improves the capacity for activity, just as exercising a muscle makes it stronger." - Ralph Gerard, fully Ralph Waldo Gerard

"Materialism is distinctly an ontological theory, a theory of the stuff of reality. Its polar opposite is usually taken to be mentalism of some kind. Naturalism, on the other hand, is a cosmological position; its opposite is supernaturalism in the larger meaning of that term. I mean that naturalism takes nature in a definite way as identical with reality, as self-sufficient and as the whole of reality. And by nature is meant the space-time-causal system which is studied by science and in which our lives are passed. The whole nature of nature may not be exhaustively known, but its location and general characteristics come under the above categories." - R. W. Sellars, fully Roy Wood Sellars

"THE lessons of fear which the child receives from its parents are intensified by the methods employed at the school in which he receives his education and life-training. We glory in the fact that we have made great strides in the science of education, that we are more practical in the choice of subjects for study, that we have a deeper insight into the soul of the child. And yet, in our method of imparting knowledge and in the relations between teacher and pupil, we can boast of but little progress. We still look upon the child as a more or less unwilling receptacle that must be stuffed with learning. The teacher is still a being to be feared, the school room still a prison house, and learning a punishment. Our system of education is still based on reward and punishment. A high mark is still the encouragement for zeal in study, while the backward student is haunted by the prospect of a low grade. The child, under present methods, prepares his lessons either in order to gain the reward of a high mark, or for fear of the contempt and humiliation that accompanies a low grade. In other words, he works not because of the intrinsic interest of his work but in the hope of reward or in the fear of punishment. The first motive breeds the harmful spirit of competition in the young mind. " - Rabbi Morris Lichtenstein

"A system of ethics may be based either on fear or on love, but not on both. When based on fear, the letter of the law, as a rule, will be executed, but not its spirit. Because of fear, men may deal honestly with one another, but they will not necessarily be honest men, they may speak truthfully even and not be truthful. Fear develops a dual personality, one manifested in the presence of the object feared, the other, perhaps of extremely opposite tendencies, unfolded in the secret chamber of the heart. In a system of ethics based on fear, man is persuaded that he is weak and untrustworthy, that his nature is hopelessly corrupt, unable to master itself except at the lash of a Force lying outside himself. Man, it then would seem, is innately wicked ; his wickedness must be chained by threats of divine wrath and punishment ; he, of his own accord, would not walk in the path that is straight ; he must be forced into it by the gaps and ditches that are lurking dangerously outside this path. Such a system, in which man is convinced that he is unable to take care of himself, build his own character, merely tends to generate moral weakness and cowardice. A system of ethics based on love develops a unified personality, a oneness between thought and action. It enhances, more and more, the moral courage which is basic to man. Through love, man becomes conscious of the great force of goodness and virtue that lie within him. He knows that he is possessed of inherent goodness and godliness, if he knows that in himself is a spark of the divine, a force that makes for perfection. All he needs to do is to allow this divine spark to illuminate and permeate his whole being, and darkness and evil will disappear from his heart." - Rabbi Morris Lichtenstein

"Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?" - Quentin Crisp, born Denis Charles Pratt

"Speech is after all only a system of gestures, having the peculiarity that each gesture produces a characteristic sound, so that it can be perceived through the ear as well as through the eye. Listening to a speaker instead of looking at him tends to make us think of speech as essentially a system of sounds; but it is not; essentially it is a system of gestures made with the lungs and larynx, and the cavities of the mouth and nose. We get still farther away from the fundamental facts about speech when we think of it as something that can be written and read, forgetting that what writing, in our clumsy notations, can represent is only a small part of the spoken sound, where pitch and stress, tempo and rhythm, are almost entirely ignored. But even a writer or reader, unless the words are to fall flat or meaningless, must speak them soundlessly to himself. The written or printed book is only a series of hints, as elliptical as the neumes of Byzantine music, from which the reader thus works out for himself the speech-gestures which alone have the gift of expression." - R. G. Collingwood, fully Robert George Collingwood

"The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth. To make a goal of comfort or happiness has never appealed to me; a system of ethics built on this basis would be sufficient only for a herd of cattle." - Albert Einstein

"The adversary system is a kind of warfare in mufti." - R. I. Fitzhenry, fully Robert I. Fitzhenry

"Because the medical system does not yet understand the full range of human needs it wounds people - both doctors and patients. It does not recognize the full range of human strengths, either. What is needed for the healing of the medical system is what is needed for the healing of the culture. Because we are wounded in the same way as our institutions, when you are trained by an institution your wounds increase. In our training we are actually rewarded for our woundedness and punished for our wholeness. Medical training at the moment is like a disease. We have to recover from it, and many people never do. I am a recovering physician. The medical system does not trust process. The whole concept of fixing and broken suggests an insensitivity to the process nature of the world. The essential word of process is yet. Yet is seeing with feminine eyes. We are all works in process. That means that judgment is really inappropriate, or premature, because none of us are finished... yet." - Rachel Naomi Remen

"So, what is the task of the medical system? Our modern view of disease is that disease is centered in the body. The older view of disease is that it is soul loss, a loss of connection, of meaning, of purpose, of essence. If this is so, the real task of the medical system is to heal soul loss, to aid in the retrieval of the soul. The entire culture is ill with soul loss. What is needed is not to bring spirit into our work, to develop more of a spiritual practice or to go to church more. Our task is to recognize that we are always on sacred ground, that there is no split between the sacred and secular. That the living god is dancing on our back. That there is no task that is not sacred in nature and no relationship that is not sacred in nature. Life is a spiritual practice. Health care, which serves life, is a spiritual practice. Disease is a spiritual path, too. Much illness is caused by the loss of the soul. Many, many people live lives that are empty. This emptiness is caused, in some part, by living without meaning, or with meaning that is much too small, too trivial, or too material for the needs of a human being." - Rachel Naomi Remen

"The imbalance in the medical system, the emphasis on masculine-principle approaches and perceptions that pervades our entire culture, diminishes everybody. It diminishes the people who work within the system, and it diminishes the people who seek out the system for their healing. When you leave the doctor's office you may feel diminished, even though you have been given the right diagnosis and the right pills. Think of the masculine symbol, the circle with the arrow on one side. If someone relates to you in a predominantly masculine-principle style, you experience their strength, their capacity. You get rescued, as it were, and you feel smaller." - Rachel Naomi Remen