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1 " Also unfortunately, Congress is far too busy asking if baseball players are really as strong as they seem and trying to choke bankers with wads of cash to grant more funds to such trifling matters as the avoidance of space bullets, so they won't give NASA the money "
― Robert Brockway
2 " The matter of sedition is of two kinds: much poverty and much discontentment....The causes and motives of sedition are, innovation in religion; taxes; alteration of laws and customs; breaking of privileges; general oppression; advancement of unworthy persons, strangers; dearths; disbanded soldiers; factions grown desperate; and whatsoever in offending people joineth them in a common cause.' The cue of every leader, of course, is to divide his enemies and to unite his friends. 'Generally, the dividing and breaking of all factions...that are adverse to the state, and setting them at a distance, or at least distrust, among themselves, is not one of the worst remedies; for it is a desperate case, if those that hold with the proceeding of the state be full of discord and faction, and those that are against it be entire and united.' A better recipe for the avoidance of revolutions is an equitable distribution of wealth: 'Money is like muck, not good unless it be spread.' But this does not mean socialism, or even democracy; Bacon distrusts the people, who were in his day quite without access to education; 'the lowest of all flatteries is the flattery of the common people;' and 'Phocion took it right, who, being applauded by the multitude, asked, What had he done amiss?' What Bacon wants is first a yeomanry of owning farmers; then an aristocracy for administration; and above all a philosopher-king. 'It is almost without instance that any government was unprosperous under learned governors.' He mentions Seneca, Antonius Pius and Aurelius; it was his hope that to their names posterity would add his own. "
― Will Durant , The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers
3 " All work is the avoidance of harder work. "
― , Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays
4 " 17. One of the secrets of successful living is found in the word balance, referring to the avoidance of harmful extremes. We need food, but we should not overeat. We should work, but not make work our only activity. We should play, but not let play rule us. Throughout life, it will be important to find the safety of the middle ground rather than the imbalance of the extremes. "
― James C. Dobson , Life on the Edge: The Next Generation's Guide to a Meaningful Future
5 " The avoidance of pain is the avoidance of life. "
― Stefan Molyneux
6 " Mental anguish always results from the avoidance of legitimate suffering. "
7 " All mental unhappiness is the avoidance of legitimate suffering "
8 " All mental unhappiness is the avoidance of legitimate suffering. "
9 " The thing which disappoints me most about the human race is the extraordinary lack of substance and depth, and the avoidance of opportunities where there is a possibility of experiencing something profound. "
― Ray Mancini , Zen, Meditation & the Art of Shooting: Performance Edge - Sports Edition
10 " Intellectual labor is a common technique for the avoidance of thinking. "
― Peter Straub , If You Could See Me Now
11 " There is indeed something deeply wrong with a person who lacks principles, who has no moral core. There are, likewise, certainly values that brook no compromise, and I would count among them integrity, fairness, and the avoidance of cruelty. But I have never accepted the argument that principle is compromised by judging each situation on its own merits, with due appreciation of the idiosyncrasy of human motivation and fallibility. "
― Sonia Sotomayor , My Beloved World
12 " Involvement with the eight worldly dharmas keeps beings imprisoned in the realms of samsara and renders them susceptible to the hosts of emotions. The eight worldly dharmas are: praise and blame, gain and loss, fame and disgrace, happiness and suffering. The eight worldly dharmas constitute our attachment to hopes and fears: We hope for praise, gain, fame, and happiness while fearing blame, loss, disgrace, and suffering. Entangled in these eight concerns, we give our energy and intelligence to the pursuit of these hopes and the avoidance of these fears. Our way of thinking is completely dominated by these eight concerns, which the world proclaims to be of utmost importance. But Śāntideva reminds us that to achieve true peace of mind, one must " ... turn this thinking upside down," becoming indifferent to hope and unmoved by fear. "
13 " Ultimately, then, creativity and originality lie not in the avoidance of established forms but in the imaginative use of them. "
― Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein
14 " Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not see "
― G.K. Chesterton
15 " Only an unsatisfied preference is bad. In other words, he argues that although it is good to have fulfilled whatever desires one might have, one is not better off having a fulfilled desire than having no desire at all. By way of example, consider the case in which we ‘paint the tree nearest to Sydney Opera house red and give Kate a pill that makes her wish that the tree nearest to Sydney Opera House were red’*. Professor Fehige plausibly denies that we do Kate any favour in doing this. She is no better off than had we done nothing. What matters is not that people have satisfied desires but that they do not have unsatisfied ones. It is the avoidance of frustration that is important.* Fehige, Christoph, ‘A Pareto Principle for Possible People’, 513–14. "
― , Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence
16 " The little mutton-chopped man interrupted them to point out that in his opinion good was not the avoidance of evil, but something more positive than that: it was making the world a better place. "
17 " A typical vice of American politics is the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues. "