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When Morpheus is being reprimanded for recklessly risking the security of the city of Zion by acting on his beliefs about Neo being 'The One,' he is told, "....Morpheus, not everyone believes what you believe."
His answer, "My belief does not require that they do."
Fran Healy of the band Travis wrote of a trip he made to South Africa:
"It appeals to our ego to consider what 'we' have and what 'they' need. The people I met were extremely poor, conditions were basic; alcoholism was rife. My first impression was typical of a westerner: I thought "these poor people" and I thought about what 'we', in the prosperous north could offer to people in poor developing countries. But, by the time I left, having been invited into homes, eaten and laughed with both kids and adults, talked with folk wherever I went, I came away thinking more about what they had to offer us."
More from Fran Healy of Travis:
"Our value system has gotten out of kilter with what is important in life. The people I met (in South Africa) had an abundance of natural generosity, exuberance, lust for life, sense of community and family. I am now more worried for us and the road we are walking, blinded by unconscious greed because we always look after number one. We all, rich and poor alike, have something very valuable to gain if we share the world's resources more fairly, and if we look again at what is really valuable in life."
Bono at the National Prayer Breakfast:
“God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.”
Andy Warhol - They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
Jonathan Sachs - Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth on The Dignity of Difference. "Maimonides lists the various levels of giving-to-others, all except one of which involve philanthropy. The supreme act, however, does not:
The highest degree, exceeded by none, is that of one who assists a poor person by providing him with a gift or a loan or by accepting him into a business partnership or by helping him find employment – in a word by putting him in a situation where he can dispense with other people's aid. This ruling is the result of a profound wrestling, within Judaism, with the fact that aid in the form of charity can itself be humiliating for the recipient. It can also create welfare dependency, reinforcing, not breaking the cycle of deprivation. The greatest act of Tzedakah (Social Justice) is therefore one that allows the individual to become self sufficient. The highest form of aid is one that enables individuals to dispense with aid. Humanitarian relief is essential in the short term, but in the long run, job creation and the promotion of employment are more important."
Neo: Why do my eyes hurt?
Morpheus: You've never used them before.
Toyohiko Kagawa - the preacher and campaigner for social justice whose devotion to the poor of Tokyo before, during and after the Second World War made him famous throughout Japan.
“God dwells among the lowliest of men. He sits on the dust heap among the prison convicts. He stands with the juvenile delinquents. He is there with the beggars. He is among the sick. He stands with the unemployed. Therefore let him who would meet God visit the prison cell before going to the temple. Before he goes to church let him visit the hospital. Before he reads the Bible let him help the beggar.”
Jurgen Moltmann in Jesus Christ for Today's World
"What does the gospel bring the poor? Not charitable works. Nor does it make them just as rich as the rest. What it does do is to give them new dignity and a powerful stimulus. The poor are no longer the suffering objects of oppression and humiliation. They are their own determining subjects, with the dignity of God's first children."
Mahatma Gandhi:
"You must be the change that you wish to see in the world"
"Economic equality is the master key to non-violent independence."
David Whyte in Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a pilgrimage of identity
"The great tragedy of speed as an answer to the complexities and responsibilities of existence is that very soon we cannot recognize anything or anyone who is not travelling at the same velocity as we are. Soon we begin to suffer a form of amnesia, caused by blurred vision of velocity itself, where those things germane to our humanity are dropped from our minds one by one."
Douglas Coupland in Life After God
"Some facts about me: I think I am a broken person. I seriously question the road my life has taken and I endlessly rehash the compromises I have made in my life. I have an unsecure and vaguely crappy job with an amoral corporation so that I don’t have to worry about money. I put up with halfway relationships so as not to have to worry about loneliness. I have lost the ability to recapture the purer feelings of my younger years in exchange for a streamlined narrow-mindedness that I assumed would propel me to "the top". What a joke. Compromise is said to be the way of the world and yet I find myself feeling sick trying to accept what it has done to me: the little yellow pills, the lost sleep. But I don’t think this is anything new in the world. This is not to say my life is bad. I know it isn't... but my life is not what I expected it might have been when I was younger. Maybe you yourself deal with this better than me. Maybe you have been lucky enough to never have inner voices question you about your own path – or maybe you answered the questioning and came out on the other side. I don’t feel sorry for myself in any way. I am merely coming to grips with what I know the world is truly like."
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