Quotes from Healing Our World: In an Age of Aggression

“Indeed, taxation and other forms of aggression-through-government are so taken for granted in our culture that one of our most popular sayings is that "nothing is certain except death and taxes." Yet slavery was once as universal. Taxation is thought to be indispensable to civilization today, just as slavery once was. Advocates of taxation claim that since most people pay assigned taxes before the guns show up, they have implicitly agreed to it as the price of living in "society." Most slaves obeyed their master before he got out the whip, yet we would hardly argue that this constituted agreement to their servitude. Today, we have an enlightened perspective on slavery, just as one day we will have an enlightened perspective on taxes and other forms of aggression we now think of as "the only way.”
― Mary J. Ruwart, quote from Healing Our World: In an Age of Aggression

“Wealth is created when we use existing resources in new ways. Since such creativity is virtually limitless, wealth is too.”
― Mary J. Ruwart, quote from Healing Our World: In an Age of Aggression

“Aggression hides in our culture under many names. Taxation is only an example, but one of the most widespread and uneconomical. If this concept seems incredible to you, consider the shift in awareness that it implies. Are we like children, accepting five pennies for our dime?”
― Mary J. Ruwart, quote from Healing Our World: In an Age of Aggression

“We defer to authority figures because they are supposed to know more than we do. If a mistake is made, it's easy to lay the blame at their feet. Ultimately, however, we are responsible for choosing the authority figure we defer to. Choosing to defer to one who urges aggression against others still puts the responsibility on us.”
― Mary J. Ruwart, quote from Healing Our World: In an Age of Aggression

“Through taxation, pacifists are forced at gunpoint to pay for killing machines; vegetarians are forced at gunpoint to subsidize grazing land for cattle; nonsmokers are forced at gunpoint to support both the production of tobacco and the research to counter its impact on health. These minorities are the victims, not the initiators of aggression. Their only crime is not agreeing with the priorities of the majority. Taxation appears to be more than theft; it is intolerance for the preferences and even the moral viewpoints of our neighbors. Through taxation we forcibly impose our will on others in an attempt to control their choices.”
― Mary J. Ruwart, quote from Healing Our World: In an Age of Aggression

“When we consider that resources will one day be mined from planets other than the earth, that matter and energy are totally interchangeable, and that basic chemical elements can be transmuted, we realize that resource seeds are so abundant that they do not impose practical limitations on the creation of wealth at all.”
― Mary J. Ruwart, quote from Healing Our World: In an Age of Aggression

“The marketplace has many similarities to nature's rainforest and oceanic ecosystems. Left to their own devices, the marketplace and the earth's ecosystems are self-regulating. Neither requires our forceful intervention to establish a holistic balance in which a diversity of complimentary niches can evolve. Aggression in the marketplace or destruction in a natural ecosystem upsets this balance. Some of the niches are destroyed along with their occupants. Diversity is lost.”
― Mary J. Ruwart, quote from Healing Our World: In an Age of Aggression

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Popular quotes

“Fighting lets ye both say wha' needs to be said. Just be sure you fight clean, and dinna bring up old hurts or blame one another.”
― Karen Hawkins, quote from Sleepless in Scotland

“Her religious poetry was surprisingly slender, and as I was eager to know more about her religion, I asked her about this aspect of her poetry. She replied with these lines from Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn: 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'--that is all Ye know on eath, and all ye need to know'. Do not ask me to immortalise the great Mystery of Life. I am just a humble worker. For beauty, look to the Pslams, to Isaiah, to St. John of the Cross. How could my poor pen scan such verse? For truth, look to the Gospels-- four short accounts of God made Man. There is nothing more to say.”
― Jennifer Worth, quote from The Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times

“He uses you as a weapon against himself and not merely because you did. He sits in his car at traffic lights on his way out sometimes and tries to estimate how many times he has sat here, waiting at these traffic lights on his way somewhere without you, hoping to meet someone with the capacity to consign you to an anecdote, to be eventually confused with others. He thinks of you when the woman lying next to him thinks he's asleep.”
― Elliot Perlman, quote from Seven Types of Ambiguity

“This afternoon I sat at my window and alternately wrote at my new serial and watched a couple of dear, amusing, youngish maple-trees at the foot of the garden. They whispered secrets to each other all the afternoon. They would bend together and talk earnestly for a few moments, then spring back and look at each other, throwing up their hands comically in horror and amazement over their mutual revelations. I wonder what new scandal is afoot in Treeland.”
― L.M. Montgomery, quote from Emily's Quest

“a perfectly just God must punish bad deeds regardless of how many good ones someone has performed.”
― Norman L. Geisler, quote from I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist

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