Quotes about Foundation

You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd.  You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation.  It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced.  In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers.  That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world. 

I'm not perfect.  I think more highly of snow and ice than love.  It's easier for me to be interested in mathematics than to have affection for my fellow human beings.  But I am anchored to something in life that is constant.  You can call it a sense of orientation; you can call it woman's intuition; you can call it whatever you like.  I'm standing on a foundation and have no farther to fall.  It could be that I haven't managed to organize my life very well.  But I always have a grip - with at least one finger at a time - on Absolute Space.

We all start small. We pray and pick up what mitzvot we can practice. We respect each other and do right by others. We strive to learn what G-d wants from us through Torah study - and suddenly we are all part of the foundation on which the world is built.

Peace between countries must rest on the solid foundation of love between individuals.

Look, the sower went out, took a handful of seeds, and scattered them. Some fell on the road, and the birds came and gathered them. Others fell on rock, and they didn't take root in the soil and didn't produce heads of grain. Others fell on thorns, and they choked the seeds and worms ate them. And others fell on good soil, and it produced a good crop: it yielded sixty per measure and one hundred twenty per measure.

There may have been somewhere, as a few eighteenth-century philosophers dreamed, a group of peaceful men who got together one evening after work and drew up a Social Contract to form the state. But nobody has been able to find an actual record of it. Practically all the governments whose origins are historically established were the result of conquest—of one tribe by another, one city by another, one people by another. Of course there have been constitutional conventions, but they merely changed the working rules of governments already in being.

The foundation of all human relations is common experience.