“Quote Corner”

I thought I’d do several postings of favorite quotes and excerpts of mine….I’ll put these up sporadically but often. Hope you enjoy.

“I am a person. You are a person. Without you I am not a person, for only through you is language made possible and only through language is thought made possible, and only through thought is humanness made possible. You have made me important. Therefore, I am important and you are important. If I devalue you, I devalue myself. This is the rationale of the position I’m Ok-You’re Ok. Through this position only are we persons instead of things . Returning man to his rightful place of person-hood is the theme of redemption, or reconciliation, or enlightenment, central to all the great world religions. The requirement of this position is that we are responsible to and for one another, and this is the ultimate claim imposed on all men alike!”

-Thomas A. Harris, M.D. From his classic book on transactional analysis I’M OK-YOU’RE OK

Moral Relativity and its ironic Absoluteness

(I put up this image of Thomas A. Harris’ book “I’m Ok, You’re Ok” in order to promote a book that on the surface may seem like a cheesy self help book, but as is said “never judge a book by its cover.”)

Many of us in the west have grown up in a culture where the political correctness of our ideas is what defines them as morally acceptable. We have grown up in a culture where truth and morality are relative and consequently the only thing that is absolute is the relativeness of everything. We have become the ultimate absolutists by training ourselves to become unwavering relativists. We have gone from detesting the status quo to accepting and even respecting it. All of our good intentions not withstanding we have closed our minds under the mask of opening them. We all want to see a world where there is peace, where justice is upheld, where every person’s absolute and infinite value is unquestioned, and where hatred and destruction have no place. We are the ones who can make this place what we know and believe it should be, and yet we cower when we could take a stand for fear of judgment and interrupting the status quo. The status quo is a figment of our imaginations, the world is not changed by major revolutions and uproar rather the world is changed in a moment potentially by each and every one of us.  Without each other, we are nothing…just fragments. Let’s begin to embrace and change the world, because the world is us. Additionally each of us is a microcosm of the world at large so when we resolve to work on and better ourselves it is not only for our benefit but for the benefit of the entire world!