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Over-intellectualizing can justify practically anything. Reason has reasons that can create holocausts. In the 20th century, we have certainly seen how much killing and disaster has been championed with superb intellectual reasons.

Jean Houston

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Jean Houston
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: May 10
Author
Philosopher
Writer
New York City
New York
Much
Killing
Intellectualizing
Certainly
Championed
Intellectual
Superb
Century
Practically
Create
Holocaust
Seen
Justify
Anything
Disaster
Reason
Reasons

More quotes by Jean Houston

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Journalists are among a select group, along with warriors and executioners who are authorized to do harm. As James Fallows says, a lot of journalists think that isn't so, and that everything will wash out ultimately. But I don't think they are aware of the long-term damage.
Jean Houston
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Love to me is - the final lines in Dante's Paradiso, when he says, The love that moves the Sun and all the stars - it's what draws us together, it's why we have leaky margins with each other. It is that sumptuous, sensuous, sensitive quickening that happens when we really know ourselves as love and see ourselves as loving.
Jean Houston
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I've been around for a very long time, I've been around since God had baby cheeks.
Jean Houston
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If you travel as much as I do - 165,000 miles last year - you exist nowhere. You're always between heaven and earth, you're always arriving in a new place, you're always starting from the beginning - talk about origins - and you don't know quite what's going to unfold. You live in the unexpected and the inexplicable all the time.
Jean Houston
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We are sitting on a cornucopia of knowing that we had no way to access as a democracy. We couldn't get the democratization of the human capacity before our time.
Jean Houston
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At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.
Jean Houston
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Laughter lifts our spirits, surprises and sometime shocks our expectations, allows us to cross boundaries, reorders our priorities, and gives us access to ideas and associations we rarely ever thought to have.
Jean Houston
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The world needs the sense that we are all in it together.
Jean Houston
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The soul is the lure of our becoming.
Jean Houston
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If you're looking ecologically, then we are in very big trouble, yes. But if you're talking about people sinking, I'm not so sure that's true. There are cycles of rise and fall, as there have been since time immemorial.
Jean Houston
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You are not a passive observer in the cosmos. The entire universe is expressing itself through you at this very moment.
Jean Houston
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Occasionally we will be overwhelmed, but mostly we will be enchanted.
Jean Houston
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Vulnerable is a catch-all word like love and schizophrenia.
Jean Houston
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Around my eighth or ninth year I became interested in the world's religions. I was mathematically retarded but theologically precocious. I began to correspond with seikhs in India. After about the third letter they would ask about job opportunities in America.
Jean Houston
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We have barely begun to tap into the genius of our humanity.
Jean Houston
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You've had a whole lot of experience, but everything is also radically new at each moment, and you have to bring a kind of childlike second-level innocence to bear upon all situations, if you are going to be of use and you are going to really learn from the situation or the people.
Jean Houston
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Laughter is the loaded latency given us by nature as part of our native equipment to break up the stalemates of our lives and urge us on to deeper and more complex forms of knowing.
Jean Houston
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I believe that we are stewards of a time that is upon us - but often we need the encouragement of each other to be able to wake up to this extraordinary time and possibility.
Jean Houston
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Now is the time when we must renew ourselves and live as if we and all of life is sacred, and as if everything we do makes a difference.
Jean Houston
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Engaging it produces an intense force, which in turn produces a mutation in consciousness. You become who you really are.
Jean Houston