by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Quotes and Aphorisms
[Philosopher Hannah] Arendt concluded that evil in the modern world is done neither by monsters nor by bureaucrats, but by joiners.
That evil, Arendt argued, originates in the neediness of lonely, alienated bourgeois people who live lives so devoid of higher meaning that they give themselves fully to movements. It is the meaning [Adolf] Eichmann finds as part of the Nazi movement that leads him to do anything and sacrifice everything. Such joiners are not stupid; they are not robots. But they are thoughtless in the sense that they abandon their independence, their capacity to think for themselves, and instead commit themselves absolutely to the fictional truth of the movement. It is futile to reason with them. They inhabit an echo chamber, having no interest in learning what others believe. It is this thoughtless commitment that permits idealists to imagine themselves as heroes and makes them willing to employ technological implements of violence in the name of saving the world.
–Professor Roger Berkowitz
Misreading ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’
New York Times
See also my blog post on the MCI Worldcom fraud, Integrity Ebbs by Inches
by Tony Mayo | Quotes and Aphorisms, Stress Management
Because it is possible to create [one’s self,] one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever.
Now creating, actualizing one’s possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail himself of his possibilities; one is shirking his responsibility to himself. Hence refusal to actualize one’s possibilities brings guilt toward one’s self.
–Rollo May in The Meaning of Anxiety
via Kierkegaard on Anxiety and Creativity | Brain Pickings.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, How to Set Goals, Quotes and Aphorisms, Recommended Books
What a wonderful power the machine gives you but, is it going to dominate you? The statement of what the need and want is must come from you not from the machine. Not from the government that’s teaching you or not even from the clergy, it has to come from one’s own inside and the minute that you let that drop and take what the dictation (dictator) of the time is instead of the dictation of your own eternity is you have capitulated to the devil and you are in hell.
–Joseph Campbell
The Hero’s Journey
by Tony Mayo | For Executive Coaches, Quotes and Aphorisms
Theory
Whether you can
observe a thing
depends upon the
theory you are using.
–Albert Einstein
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Quotes and Aphorisms
Cheerful Giver
The point is this: the one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.
Each of you must give as you have made up your mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.
And God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work.
–II Corinthians 9:6-8
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Quotes and Aphorisms
Shut Me Out
They drew a circle that shut me out
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win;
We drew a circle that took them in.
–Edwin Markham
by Tony Mayo | Communication, Conversation, & Confrontation, For Business Owners, Quotes and Aphorisms
The principles of meeting facilitation, as delineated three centuries ago.
…a mutual deference is affected; contempt of others disguised; authority concealed; attention given to each in his turn; and an easy stream of conversation maintained, without vehemence, without interruption, without eagerness for victory, and without any airs of superiority. These attentions and regards are immediately agreeable to others, abstracted from any consideration of utility or beneficial tendencies: they conciliate affection, promote esteem, and extremely enhance the merit of the person who regulates his behaviour by them.
–David Hume 1711-1776
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
Section VIII Of Qualities Immediately Agreeable To Others.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Quotes and Aphorisms
Indifference
The opposite of love is not to hate
It is indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness
It is indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy
It is indifference.
And the opposite of life is not death
It is indifference.
–Elie Wiesel
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Quotes and Aphorisms
In the Arena
It is not the critic who counts;
not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena,
whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood;
who strives valiantly;
who errs, who comes short again and again, because
there is no effort without error and shortcoming;
but who does actually strive to do the deeds;
who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions;
who spends himself in a worthy cause;
who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and
who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that
his place shall never be with those
cold and timid souls
who neither know victory nor defeat.
–President Theodore Roosevelt
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Quotes and Aphorisms
Life is not lost by dying!
Life is not lost
minute by minute,
day by dragging day,
in all the thousand
small, uncaring ways,
The smooth appeasing
compromises of time.
Life can be lost without
vision but not lost by death.
Lost by not caring,
not willing,
not going on
beyond the ragged edge of
fortitude
To something more –
something no man has ever
seen.
–Stephen Vincent Benét
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