Alan Briskin famous quotes

We know that uncertainty creates anxiety and sometimes desperate attempts to find something to believe in. Uncertainty engenders real opportunity as well as misleading choices, great leaders as well as false messiahs, and new ways of understanding the world alongside hollow maxims and deceptive promises. Understandably, we seek guides and guideposts to ease the anxiety of the journey. But we also need to depend on our own insights and imagination to cultivate, from our own experience, a way to move forward.
-- Alan Briskin

#Real #Moving Forward #Believe

Wisdom in groups is earned by gathering useful data, exploring diverse perspectives, respecting different viewpoints, and then shaped through critical reflection on behalf of tangible outcomes.
-- Alan Briskin

#Reflection #Perspective #Different

Developing wisdom in community is to constantly learn and relearn that expedience in the short term - whether for efficiency or profitability - can lead to disasters in the long term in financial, ecological, political, social, and spiritual spheres.
-- Alan Briskin

#Spiritual #Long #Political

Wisdom in groups emerges as a product of commitments we make with ourselves and to each other. These stances are not abstract rules but tangible practices that must be renewed each time we are in groups. They are essentially commitments and attitudes that foster collaboration and positive collective action.
-- Alan Briskin

#Attitude #Commitment #Collaboration

Wisdom is not developable, as if it's a matter of luck or personality or genetics. Well it's just not the case. Wisdom involves our accumulated knowledge about a subject but also a reverence for life, for an understanding that our immediate actions have long-term consequences, and for an appreciation that there are different ways of knowing and understanding situations.
-- Alan Briskin

#Appreciation #Personality #Understanding

Collective wisdom is about our capacity to recognize interdependence and to make decisions demonstrating that we have a stake in each other, that we can indeed care for each other and the physical planet we share.
-- Alan Briskin

#Decision #Care #Share

Our characterization of collective folly is that sound judgment is not feasible when there is forced or false agreement in groups. We also show how group polarization sets the stage for risky and even dangerous decisions to be made. How we navigate between false agreement and polarization is the kind of mastery that collective wisdom represents.
-- Alan Briskin

#Decision #Kind #Judgment

The image is a great reminder how we create our world through interpretations made up of language and symbols. Our language and symbols are always incomplete versions of a greater reality. Here is why inquiry is such a powerful tool when compared to simple advocacy. Inquiry allows us to discover what might be outside the cave instead of arguing about the shadows on the wall.
-- Alan Briskin

#Wall #Powerful #Simple

The whole bible is the working out of the relationship between God and man. God is not a dictator barking out orders and demanding silent obedience. Were it so, there would be no relationship at all. No real relationship goes just one way. There are always two active parties. We must have reverence and awe for God, and honor for the chain of tradition. But that doesn't mean we can't use new information to help us read the holy texts in new ways.

Subtle, funny and touching, with a striking downbeat authenticity. Director Craig Zobel is the real thing.

Together, these advocates create a pro-Israeli case so compelling that the idea and reality of Israel has worked itself deep into American culture, politics and foreign policy. Many American Jews refuse to accept it, but the real debate between Israel’s supporters and detractors in America is all but over.

Self - development should be a perpetual process. In life you are either growing or rotting. You're moving forward or backwards; there is no standing still.

Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.

Food is ever-changing and ever moving forward and getting more and more complex.

Some otherwise sane scientists have seriously proposed that we tuck this deadly garbage under the edges of drifting continents but how can they be sure the moving land masses will climb over the waste and not just push it forward?

I still secretly believe that afternoons are the time for the test card and you shouldn't watch television when the sun is out.

I'm still agnostic. But in the words of Elton Richards, I'm now a reverant agnostic. Which isn't an oxymoron, I swear. I now believe that whether or not there's a God, there is such a thing as sacredness. Life is sacred. The Sabbath can be a sacred day. Prayer can be a sacred ritual. There is something transcendent, beyond the everyday. It's possible that humans created this sacredness ourselves, but that doesn't take away from its power or importance.

I believe the collapse of the House of Windsor is tied in with the collapse of the Church of England.