Conservative or liberal, we are all constitutionalists.
I don’t think I really like myself. And I blame the Old Man for this.
I couldn’t rid myself of the sense that Roy was in danger somehow, that old demons were driving him toward an abyss, and that if only I was a better brother, my intervention would prevent his fall.
Listen to understand rather than listen to respond.
Kyle was a good kid; he still cared about something. Would that be enough to save him?
That’s the only way to cure an illness, right? Diagnose it.” She.
I find myself thinking that somewhere down the line both guilt and empathy speak to our own buried sense that an order of some sort is required, not the social order that exists, necessarily, but something more fundamental and more demanding; a sense, further, that one has a stake in this order, a wish that, no matter how fluid this order sometimes appears, it will not drain out of the universe.
He’s basically a good man. But he doesn’t know me. Any more than he knew that girl that looked after your mother. He can’t know me, not the way I know him. Maybe some of these Hawaiians can, or the Indians on the reservation. They’ve seen their fathers humiliated. Their mothers desecrated. But your grandfather will never know what that feels like.
I hadn’t grown up in Compton, or Watts. I had nothing to escape from except my own inner doubt. I.
I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder – alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware – is inadequate to the task.
Everything is organized. If something is broken, I fix it. If something goes wrong, it’s my own fault. If I have it, I send money to the family, and they can do with it what they want, and I won’t depend on them, and they won’t depend on me.
Nested in the soft, forgiving bosom of America’s consumer culture, I felt safe; it was as if I had dropped into a long hibernation.
If we aren’t willing to pay a price for our values, if we aren’t willing to make some sacrifices in order to realize them, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all.
The result is autobiographical, although whenever someone’s asked me over the course of these last three years just what the book is about, I’ve usually avoided such a description. An autobiography promises feats worthy of record, conversations with famous people, a central role in important events. There is none of that here.
Like any value, empathy must be acted upon.
The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power – and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition. But.
What an amazing gift to help people, not just yourself.
As I watched the two of them disappear into dusk, I realized I had never noticed which way the river ran.
This dual sense of individual advancement and collective decline that I thought accounted for some of the most troubling attitudes I heard in some conversations.
One thing other nations can learn from Hawaii, he says, is the willingness of races to work together toward common development, something he has found whites elsewhere too often unwilling to do. I.