Lauren Groff Quotes

Society therefore is an ancient as the world.

Baseball exemplifies a tension in the American mind, the constant pull between our atomistic individualism and our yearning for community.

I'm interested in the ongoing war between the individual and community. That inner dissent against whatever group is surrounding you. No one wants to cede their selfhood to a group, right? And yet no one can exactly live outside the group, either. Even the most obstinate survivalist probably lives in some telepathic communion with all the other obstinate survivalists out there in the woods.

If it is man's privilege to be independent, it is equally his duty to be inter - dependent.

We have lived through the epoch of suppression of the masses; we are living in an epoch of suppression of the individual in the name of the masses; tomorrow will bring the liberation of the individual - in the name of man.

Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group.

While it is unlikely that poetry or art shall eliminate the reality of war in the twenty-first century, it is thrilling to know there remain individuals, and even entire communities, still willing to invest in art and poetry's own uniquely explosive contributions to the great, and small, dramas of human history.

No community has ever yet passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and fanaticism enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop a commercial civilization.

New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.

There's much talk about the problems of youth, but young people are not a problem. It's a natural evolution of things. We, who have known only how to make war and slaughter people, have no right to judge them, nor can we teach them anything.

It wasn't aliens that first made us gear up for war; it was our fellow humans.

When we have inner peace, we can be at peace with those around us. When our community is in a state of peace, it can share that peace with neighboring communities.

A free government with an uncontrolled power of military conscription is the most ridiculous and abominable contradiction and nonsense that ever entered into the heads of men.

Social evolution is a resultant of the interaction of two wholly distinct factors: the individual ... bearing all the power of initiative and origination in his hands; and, second, the social environment with its power of adopting or rejecting both him and his gifts. Both factors are essential to change. The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.

We, as humans, have actually developed a sense of social responsibility. We have gone beyond our basic instincts.

Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.

Under the constitution, there was never meant to be a federal police force. Even an FBI limited only to investigations was not accepted until this century. Yet today, fueled by the federal government's misdirected war on drugs, radical environmentalism, and the aggressive behavior of the nanny state, we have witnessed the massive buildup of a virtual army of armed regulators prowling the States where they have no legal authority. The sacrifice of individual responsibility and the concept of local government by the majority of American citizens has permitted the army of bureaucrats to thrive.

Muslim communities are the ones that going to see radicalization happening at a mosque or hear it in the community or even among their own family members. And the other part is that there is a narrative that ISIS and other jihadists pose that this is a war between Muslims and the rest of the world.

You go back and look at some of the ancient writings that exist throughout the world about wars and it's the same; the human beings' articulation of events is the same. That really fascinated me.

Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. Let him who is not in community beware of being alone.

Wild as man was, and disgusting as the more degraded tribes and communities were, the best of them, and all those from which further advance came, were marked by good qualities, or they could never have risen to a higher stage.

Whenever "A" attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon "B," "A" is most likely a scoundrel.

It really never came up, but I think that in present-day America, they're - you know, and I touched on it in the initial clip - is that we are in the middle of this culture war.

One concern I had while I was working actively in the intelligence community - being someone who had broad access, who was exposed to more reports than average individuals, who had a better understanding of the bigger picture - was that the post - World War II, post - Cold War directions of societies were either broadly authoritarian or [broadly] liberal or libertarian.

The cruelest foe is a masked benefactor. The wars which make history so dreary have served the cause of truth and virtue.