Our schools were designed to produce the workforce required by 19th-century factories. The desired product was workers who would sit silently at their benches all day, behaving identically, to produce identical products, submitting to punishment if they failed to achieve the requisite standards. Collaboration and critical thinking were just what the factory owners wished to discourage.

---G. Monbiot, The Guardian.

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I cannot without deceit and corruption love a self abstracted from the vision, involvement and investment of others...there is an interiority that is hidden from me.

--Rowan Williams, Lost Icons.

I survey the world from my lofty heights, am detached from it. I have nothing to say about -for or against-the violence all around me..I am not a part of it..(the delusions continue)...I appreciate art/poetry/nature, have seen through the shenanigans of the experts and the politicians. I'm even quite spiritual (even though I say so myself). 

I'm not sure about the two-state solution. I'm not sure about any state solution. The truth is within (says the modern-day Gnostic). 

The being between birth and death scrawls -in matter and in events- a pattern which, taken as a whole, expresses his unique identity. This man is not a sealed personality moving through an alien environment. He is the sum total of all that he does and all that happens to him and all that comes within his range, spread out (from our point of view) in time and space, but a single, timeless fact in the mind of God. What we are and where we are cannot ultimately be divided...In the last resort, a man looks at the love or anger within him and says, So this is me. Looks at his withered hand or the garden he has planted and says, So this is me. Looks finally upon his enemy and his death and says, So this is me.

---Gai Eaton, King of the Castle

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"Connectedness or recognition are fundamental to any position that can reasonably be called human." 

What would it mean, for example, for an American to recognize the atrocities against the Red man? Or the violence that lies at its origins (slavery and segregation)? Or for the Pakistanis to bear witness to the horrors committed against what was then East Pakistan?

Without a sense of shame is there only the posturing of the isolated ego and its defence mechanisms? (Of course, 'shame' itself has often been shameless..honour killings are just one example).