Fear hems us in, stops us from thinking clearly, and prevents us from either challenging oppression or engaging calmly with the impersonal fates.
Interpretation
Fear limits our ability to think and act effectively.
This quote by George Monbiot expresses how fear can be a significant barrier to clear thinking and decisive action. It suggests that fear can imprison us, preventing us from confronting injustices and responding to lifeβs challenges with calmness and clarity.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming personal challenges.
The notions that nature exists to serve us; that its value consists of the instrumental benefits we can extract; that this value can be measured in cash terms; and that what can't be measured does not matter, have proved lethal to the rest of life on Earth.
I believe that anyone who wants to stand in a national election should receive a course of psychotherapy. Completing the course should be a qualification for office. This wouldn't change the behaviour of psychopaths, but it might prevent some people who exercise power from imposing their own deep wounds on others.
I became an environmentalist because I love the living world, but I spend much of my life thinking about electricity, industrial processes and civil engineering.
Places that have become agricultural deserts, trashed by giant corporations, could be reforested, drawing carbon dioxide from the air on a vast scale. The ecosystems of land and sea could recover, not just in pockets but across great tracts of the planet.
Never underestimate the power of intrinsic values. They inspire every struggle for a better world.
Why is it so easy to save the banks - but so hard to save the biosphere?
I too am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my particular hometown.
I am not a robot. I have a heart and I bleed.
This is the first teaching of the Knights: You will erase everything you had written in the book of your life up until now: restlessness, uncertainty, lies. And in the place of all this you will write the word courage.
People respond differently to people who are grieving. They reach out. But depression is so very isolating. It's hard to explain to anyone who has never been depressed how isolating it is. Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting.
It's not the violence of the few that scares me, it's the silence of the many
So I didn't pass. It was the army's decision that they didn't want me to go into the service. They're the boss. I don't want to say no whole lot about it.
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