Institutional Person Quotes & Sayings

Her way of being religious was as nonconformist as her nonreligious life had been. She was skeptical about many of the practices of the institutional church. She preferred to trust in the personal relationship she had grown to experience with God. This relationship transformed her ability to be in community and enabled her to see the essence of those around her: "The longer I live, the more I see God at work in people who don't have the slightest interest in religion and never read the Bible and wouldn't know what to do if they were persuaded to go inside a church."

For Dorothy [Day], the bread broken at Mass wasn't any more holy than the bread broken at shelters and soup kitchens. Church didn't happen in a building. It happened in the way people related to each other. Christ wasn't any more present in the liturgy than he was when on person listened with compassion to the pain of another. — Helen LaKelly Hunt

The encrusted religious structure is not changed by its institutional dependents--they are part of the crust. It is changed by one who goes alone to the wilderness, where he fasts and prays, and returns with cleansed vision. In going alone, he goes independent of institutions, forswearing orthodoxy ("right opinion"). In going to the wilderness he goes to the margin, where he is surrounded by the possibilities--by no means all good--that orthodoxy has excluded. By fasting he disengages his thoughts from the immediate issues of livelihood; his willing hunger takes his mind off the payroll, so to speak. And by praying he acknowledges ignorance; the orthodox presume to know, whereas the marginal person is trying to find out. He returns to the community, not necessarily with new truth, but with a new vision of the truth; he sees it more whole than before. — Wendell Berry

Since the early days, [the church] has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was an apologist for the divine right of kings. — H.L. Mencken

It seems unavoidable that history will always link the reestablishment of the State of Israel with the tragedy of the Holocaust. — David Novak

We can't have your people fighting each other, I said. The 'royal we' is very important in police work; it reminds the person you're talking to that behind you stands the mighty institution that is the Metropolitan Police, robed in the full majesty of the law and capable, in manpower terms, of invading a small country. You only hope when you're using that term that the whole edifice is currently facing in the same direction as you are. — Ben Aaronovitch

True pleasure is the pleasure of sharing. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Every age has its temptations, its weaknesses, its dangers. Ours is in the line of the snobbish and the sordid. — Rutherford B. Hayes

Ruby is the littler one, right?" said Erika's mother in her regular voice. "How old is she? Two?" "Yes," said Clementine. "What happened? Nobody saw her fall in? Where was her mother? What was Clementine doing? — Liane Moriarty

There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman. — Lena Dunham

It's no secret that big institutional investors have a lot of advantages on Wall Street. They get the first chance to buy hot initial public offerings. They get to meet in person with companies' managements. — Alex Berenson

Whenever I realize I'm being a goofball, I write it down. When I release the joke onstage, I love watching the effect it has on the audience. No one wants to see someone talk who takes themselves too seriously. — Billy Gardell

I enjoyed coming and going without telling or explaining, being free. I enjoyed listening without talking. I enjoyed being wherever I was without being noticed. But then when the dark change came over my mind, I was in a fix. My solitariness turned into loneliness . . .

That, I guess, is why I got so sad. I was living, but I was not living my life. So far as I could see, I was going nowhere. And now, more and more, I seemed also to have come from nowhere. Without a loved life to live, I was becoming more and more a theoretical person, as if I might have been a figment of institutional self-justification: a theoretical ignorant person from the sticks, who one day would go to a theoretical somewhere and make a theoretical something of himself - the implication being that until he became that something he would be nothing. — Wendell Berry

I think that most of my books are part of some process of self-education, often about the places I go to. Most of all, they are about the peculiar tension between institutional loyalty and loyalty to oneself; the mystery of patriotism, for a Brit of my age and generation, where it runs, how it should be defined, what it's worth and what a corrupting force it can be when misapplied. All that stuff is just in me and it comes out in the characters. I don't mean to preach, but I know I do, and I'm a very flawed person. It's quite ridiculous. — John Le Carre

Promiscuity is the death of love. — Edna O'Brien

Unless institutional power reinforces the hurt and prejudice suffered by a group, it is not oppression. By definition, a person of color cannot be racist, or a woman sexist, because they do not have the institutionalized power to act on their prejudices. Also, by definition, all white people are racist, not just because of the personal attitudes that we usually think of as racist, but because of the privilege white skin brings in our society. Whites cannot say they are not racist because they are born into a society that teaches racism and reinforces white privilege every day even before they can be aware of it. Whites can choose, however, to be active antiracists, which means making a commitment to a lifelong process of learning to recognize racism in themselves and in the institutions they are part of and taking steps to stop it. — Linda Stout