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21 " It would be both foolish and cumbersome to continue our everyday existences in bliss without first denying to ourselves, for the sake of excusing our own repugnance, the inherent cruelty from which modern civilization was conceived...And there can be no other path by which a fiercely competitive, yet social species, as humanity, can afford its members the level of safety, prosperity and stability—such that we enjoy now— without its initial pangs of cannibalism, brutality, dominance and cruelty to forge the foundations, very much like the lava which formed the ground upon which we now stand. Lava still erupts from the core. Brutality, Dominance, and Cruelty similarly erupt from ours; and they are no less prevalent now than in early human history. "
― Ashim Shanker , Only the Deplorable (Migrations, Volume II)
22 " No, I thought. Not just Hell. Really, Heaven was just as guilty. What kind of group could advocate goodness and not allow its members to love? "
― Richelle Mead , Succubus Revealed (Georgina Kincaid, #6)
23 " It is a promise which eminently deserves our observation that all who are united to Christ and acknowledge Him to be Christ and Mediator will remain to the end safe from all danger, for what is said of the body of the Church belongs to each of its members since they are one in Christ. "
― John Calvin
24 " The church is to help its members mature in Christ’s calling "
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25 " The history of the own that is grasped on too small a scale and the foreign that is treated too badly reaches an end at the moment when a global co-immunity structure is born, with a respectful inclusion of individual cultures, particular interests and local solidarities. This structure would take on planetary dimensions at the moment when the earth spanned by networks and built over by foams, was conceived as the own, and the previously dominant exploitative excess as the foreign. With this turn, the concretely universal would become operational. The helpless whole is transformed into a unity capable of being protected. A romanticism of brotherliness is replaced by a cooperative logic. Humanity becomes a political concept. Its members are no longer travellers on the ship of fools that is abstract universalism, but workers on the consistently concrete and discrete project of a global immune design. Although communism was a conglomeration of a few correct ideas and many wrong ones, its reasonable part - the understanding that shared life interests of the highest order can only be realized within a horizon of universal co-operative asceticisms - will have to assert itself anew sooner or later. It presses for a macrostructure of global immunizations : co-immunism. "
― Peter Sloterdijk , You Must Change Your Life
26 " The Pirates' most advanced and widely discussed technological innovation is an online system called LiquidFeedback, which allows the party to better understand what its members think about issues of the day. Here is how it works: Any member of the party can register (with the optino of using a pseudonym) with LiquidFeedback and propose that the Pirates should do x. If more than 10 percent of other members find this proposal intriguing, it passes to the next stage, in which party members can vote for or against it.After the proposal has been submitted, and before it has moved to the voting stage, other party members can launch counterproposals on a similar subject or make suggestions about how to improve the original one. What's interesting is that party members can transfer their votes to those they consider more knowledgeable about a given subject; thus, someone recognized as an expert on transportation policy might end up casting ten votes rather than one. To prevent some such experts from accumulating and abusing power, transferred votes can be recalled to their original " ownders." The votes cast in LiquidFeedback are not bniding; they simply inform party officials about the views of the grass roots. Big policy proposals are still discussed and voted upon at the party congress. LiquidFeedback thus aims to provide the intellectual inputs to the Pirates' work; the outputs are still determined by rather conventional means.This all sounds great in theory...but the reality is much grimmer. In one German region, reports Der Spiegel, the Pirates used LiquidFeedback to gather general opinions on only two issues, while only twenty votes were cast in the controversial law on circumcision. "
27 " If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflection of the voice; at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They need only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it. "
― George Orwell , 1984
28 " The downside of attending to the emotional life of groups is that it can swamp the ability to get anything done; a group can become more concerned with satisfying its members than with achieving its goals. Bion identified several ways that groups can slide into pure emotion - they can become " groups for pairing off," in which members are mainly interested in forming romantic couples or discussing those who form them; they can become dedicated to venerating something, continually praising the object of their affection (fan groups often have this characteristic, be they Harry Potter readers or followers of the Arsenal soccer team), or they can focus too much on real or perceived external threats. Bion trenchantly observed that because external enemies are such spurs to group solidarity, some groups will anoint paranoid leaders because such people are expert at identifying external threats, thus generating pleasurable group solidarity even when the threats aren't real. "
29 " I believe a family can be like that sports team. A successful family wins as a team. But if its members are intent upon winning their own individual battles with one another, the team loses. A winning solution is to work out the differences and, when it’s over, let it be over. Then they can get back in the game as a team. "
― Steve Goodier
30 " The generation that followed did not have the same concerns; none of its members attempted to follow the example of the past generation. There was no longer anyone with the noble determination to get to know the great men of the world, or if there were some individuals consumed with this curiosity, they were few in number. From then on, there remained only vulgar minds given over to hatred, envy and discord, who took an interest only in things which did not concern them, gossip, slander, calumny of one's neighbors, all those things which are the source of the worst of our troubles. "
― Cheikh Anta Diop , Precolonial Black Africa
31 " The Family of Man is more than three billion strong. It lives in more than one hundred nations. Most of its members are not white. Most of them are not Christians. Most of them know nothing about free enterprise or due process of law or the Australian ballot. "
32 " The denominational world tries to pressure its members to focus on the birth of Christ, but in doing so layers of guilt are imposed, and competition gets complicated as one Christmas program tries to outdo the other. "
33 " The hazing experience and then the subsequent participation in the group forces its members to maintain the status quo and traditions at all costs. It demands mindlessness and unquestioned loyalty, resulting in boring people who have little ability to think for themselves or have an opposing viewpoint from those who have the most social power. "
34 " A good cult delivers on its promises. A good cult nourishes the needs of its members, has transparency and integrity, and creates provisions for challenging its leadership openly. A good cult expands the freedoms and well-being of its members rather than limits them. "