My notes from book The Way We Are

• p13 Where are you, friend to whom I could tell the truth without plunging you into despair?
• p16 Because, in the evolution from animal life to human life, along with the gain in knowledge and awareness, we have gained also the ability to deceive ourselves. We arrange not to know our nature, not to see what we are up to. Our self-deceptions are so dense, piled on so thick, like layers of paint on a canvas already painted, laid on from school and pulpit and lectures and TV and Internet, that it is all but impossible to break through, to get a clear view of what we really are.
• p16 We are in fact largely the opposite of what we think we are.
• p17 To be human is to be false.
• p23 We kill to take the female or the territory of a rival. A rival is one who has a female or a territory we desire.
• p24 We are children of slime, our teeth break bone, suck marrow, we live on others; we devour their lives without ever seeing their faces. The magic of money and commerce keeps them far away, their screams unheard.
• p24 Leather shoes and belt, mink coat, alligator handbag, gloves of calf, lizard watchbands, peacock feathers - how we deck ourselves in the skins and scraps - yet never strike a blow, never cut a throat. We push away our own destructiveness, make it alien, become finally unaware, see only the destructiveness of others.
• p31 In animals, fear is episodic; in humans, because of their enlarged consciousness, fear is constant. Even in our pleasures, our triumphs, fear is a lurking presence. We are never safe. We live in vivid awareness of dangers not present but remembered or anticipated - drought and famine and predators, pain and pestilence and war. And something new; the awareness that we will die.
• p34 It is the morality of individuals that makes possible the orderly life of aggregates.
• p34 And the savagery that these collectives, these super-beasts in their super-jungle, are able to inflict on each other and on their moral constituents is so much more destructive than anything that could be done by individuals.
• p38 As a viable social arrangement, anarchy is but a dream of the disaffected.
• p38 All groups make rules that limit individual behavior. These limitations are deemed necessary by the group to secure its survival. That survival then depends on the ability od the group to enforce its rules. So begins morality.
• p39 The rules that determine right and wrong, therefore, are made, not by the most inclusive group, nor by the wisest, nor by the one best qualified to judge such matters, but by the strongest. The rules that shape our lives defend the interests of the holders of power. In matters of conscience, warriors instruct priests. The draft resister claims a higher authority, but the state sends him to jail.
• p41 Animals live within the limits of their lives as biologically given, within circumstances that are environmentally given. There is no separation of self from environment, therefore no sense of self. There is no knowledge of death, no watching of one's actual condition, hence no need to transcend that condition. Needs are immediate; when they are met the animal is content. There are no transcendent needs.
• p42 What Christianity does for the true believer is given him strength to bear it. Redeems it. That's the word! The scheme of things redeems the way things are.
• p43 Man searches for a scheme of things larger than his own life, with greater authority, to which he may belong. The hunger from which this search issues is profound and inalienable. If he can find such a scheme and make his life "mean" something in it, that is, contribute to it, makes a difference, he will have ferried something of his mortal self across the gulf of death to become a part of something that will live on. The doomed life must leave a residue of value. The carrier and guarantor of this value is a man-made scheme of things perceived as reality and presumed to be eternal.
• p46 The rain swirls and beats. Lightning reveals a familiar schoolyard in a ghostly light. I feel a sudden poignancy. Images strikes my mind. The wind is the scream of a lost spirit, searching the earth and finding no good, recalling old bereavements, lashing the land with tears. Consciousness leaves my body, moves out in time and space. I undergo an expanding awareness of self, of separateness, of time flowing through me, bearing me on, knowing I have a chance, the one chance all of us have, the chance of a life, knowing a time will come when nothing lies ahead and everything lies behind, and hoping I can then look back and feel it well spent. How, in the light of fixed stars, should one live? So begins the hunger for meaning.
• p47 Did Christ invented Christianity? I think not. He created disorder, led a rabble, was an irritant to existing schemes of things. The scheme of things which is Christianity, of which his teaching are the nucleus, was the creation of many people over a span much longer than his life. Indeed, by the time it could have been called Christianity it had taken on a character he would have repudiated.
• p48 Should ever any scheme of things acquire absolute authority it would exclude from awareness anything beyond its limits. Nothing then could contend with it and no change could occur. It and the society it organized would be static and immortal. Each individual by allegiance to that scheme would share in that immortality. The dread of death would be overcome.
• p48 We seek the larges possible scheme, not in a hunger for truth, but in a hunger for meaning. The more comprehensive the scheme, the greater its promise of banishing dread. If we can make our lives mean something in a cosmic scheme we will live in the certainty of immortality. The very great success of Christianity for a thousand years follows upon its having been of universal scope, including and accounting for everything, assigning to all things a proper place; offering to every man, whether prince or beggar, savant or fool, the privilege of working in the Lord's vineyard; and upon its being accepted as true throughout the Western world.
• p49 When the ruling scheme of things comes to seem untrue or unimportant, one's efforts within it become meaningless. One's whole life becomes meaningless. The Heavenly City falls into ruins. The avenue to immortality ends on an abyss. One is cast back on his individual life, stares ahead through a transparence of days to death, which stands at the end.
• p49 Life then is borne forward on waves of cynicism and despair. One seeks distraction, death-defying games perhaps which invoke the specter from which one flinches. By surviving the heightened risk one may achieve briefly the illusion of mastery. ... Sometimes the distraction is less desperate and may contain creative possibilities. What began as a distraction from the loss of meaning and the dread of death may come itself to have meaning and to protect against dread.
• p53 The will to power is that quality of a living thing that leads it to grab hold of its environment, to take in what nourishes it, as much as it can, to shoulder aside whoever is interested in the same thing, to trample whatever stands in its way, to grow, to become bug and strong, and to multiply. There is no moderation; nothing is too much. The aim of the maggot is to make more maggots, to transform the entire universe into maggots. The drive is blind, knows no internal limit, will continue until stopped.
• p55 To gain power is to gain respect; it is also - equally, inevitably - to be hated. He who is afraid to be hated is handicapped in his pursuit of power, for with each gain in power will come an increase in hatred. The greater the fear of this hatred, the greater the obstacle to the pursuit of power. One continues on a course of increasing power until fear calls a halt.
• p61 The members of the group have become moral, they live within limits, while for the group itself there is no good and no evil.
• p61 Morality is conservative, aims to preserve what is valuable in life. Meaning, therefore, must be antecedent to morality. For meaning establishes value. If life is without meaning, there is nothing worth preserving: All is equal, anything goes.
• p61 What binds us together in a community is shared beliefs. Vital yet unnoticed, like the air we breathe, they constitute the meaning of life, tell us how to interpret our experience, determine what we experience. With them we grasp the world, make sense of what happens to us, find our place, arrange our lives into known patterns. We feel at home; we know how to live. They constitute our scheme of things.
• p62 But something is left over. Something of bereavement or pain or mystery is unaccounted for, experience of which we cannot make sense, with which we cannot come to terms. This is the margin of terror. If we are loyal to the received wisdom, we look away, pretend it does not exist, is of no importance, a deviation, a neurosis perhaps; experience is falsified, but the scheme of things is not impugned. The received wisdom spreads its sheltering umbrellas. If one is loyal to deviant experience, to the pain and the mystery, one is apostate to the common faith and hence estranged from those who live by it, which is pretty much everybody. One finds oneself alone in a desert where one's specialness is scant comfort.
• p63 Our holiest fictions designate what is right and what is wrong, constitute a scheme of things that redeems the way things are. The way things are is the will to power of groups. The scheme of things conceals the way of power behind a lofty and glittering facade. The whole system hangs on the efficacy of images and words, the keeping of promises, the observance of convention.
• p64 Parts serve the whole. The organism grows larger and more powerful by virtue of finding better and better ways to exploit its constituents. Slaves may be made to man the oars and drive the galley, but it requires the constant attention of a slave master cracking the whip. But if the slaves can be converted to a faith in the ship and its mission, then no slave master will be needed - he will now be free to help with the cannon - while the ship slices forward ever faster, with power, more dangerous to its enemies.
• p64 There is no alternative to power, no other position - not Christianity nor the Golden Rule nor brotherly love nor nonviolence; not self-sacrifice not the turning of the other cheek. For all these various abnegations of power by parts of a whole are, unwittingly, in the service of increased power to the whole; and the morality created by such renunciations is used by the aggregate to increase the power with which it then pursues more power.
• p64 Good and evil come into existence as defined by power, and are shaped to protect power. They filter down from rulers, magistrates, educators, from bishops, priests, and Sunday school teachers to parents, who shape the conscience of children, imprint the limits, instill the guilt.
• p65 The state claiming morality is like a murderer claiming innocence by pointing out that his hands and feet moved lawfully during the performance of the crime.
• p66 But the group can never, as a group, govern itself, cannot organize and exploit its potential power. For this, leaders are required, leaders with a vision of how the group may become even more stronger. And such leaders can appear only if certain individuals within the morally organized collective are themselves immoral, break the rules in pursuit of personal power. So the greatest chance of survival falls, paradoxically, to that collective which has achieved solidarity by morality and, at the same time, contains within itself a leaven of opportunists who will exploit that morality for personal power.
• p68 It comes about, therefore, that those individuals who are gifted and able, and who in the pursuit of power are not much burdened by loyalty to shared beliefs, who indeed are skilled at professing and representing these beliefs while at the same time violating them in pursuit of personal aggrandizement ... those people strive for and achieve leadership and come thereby to be in the position of controlling and directing the enormous power of the state.
• p72 Most significant power now is power over people. The ability to win the respect, the belief, the support, the allegiance, the following, the obedience, of people - this is power.
• p72 Neurotics are those who are crippled in the pursuit of power by internal constraints, impediments build into character by childhood experiences. All of us start out weak in the hands of the strong, and a parent inclined to exploit that discrepancy can teach a child that any transgression of rules will yield pain and humiliation.
• p78 Force, like a heat-seeking missile, finds out those who lack the will to use it.
• p79 We can stand evil and cruelty; what we cannot stand is lack of order. If the reigning scheme of things is intact, that is, believed in, and thereby endowed with authority, then we can tolerate murder and mayhem to uphold it. But if the scheme of things falls, leaving us un unlimited freedom, we churn about in chaos until rescued by some other creed that claims our allegiance, takes our freedom, and restores order.
• p80 The greater evil is wrought by those who intend good, and are convinced they know how to bring it about; and the greater their power to bring it about, the greater the evil they achieve while trying to do it. Not content modestly to oppose evil, they in their arrogance undertake to eliminate it completely, thereby creating greater evil. The war to end all wars prepares the way for bigger wars, for destructions more vast.
• p80 An animal lives its life according to its nature and its circumstances, and therefore is never in the position of having to conclude that it has wasted its life. But a human being, out of fear of breaking the rules, may waste his life, may observe himself being afraid to live it.
• p81 Because we are afraid, we live in groups. Alone one is weak; in the crowd one will become strong. If the crowd grows rapidly and achieves great density, a moment of discharge will arrive, leveling hierarchies of power, making all equal; there will be no one above giving order, making us fell weak and afraid, because everything above will be destroyed; we will surge through the streets, smashing windows and doors, overturning police cars, burning palaces.
• p83 The extent to which the individual is committed to the shared beliefs of his community measures the extent to which he has been willing to give up individual power in the interests of community. When shared beliefs are firm, the collective wields great power, its constituents correspondingly less. When shared beliefs are destroyed, the collective loses power.
• p85 Morality is not a vision of ends, however desirable, but a system of restraints in the pursuit of any end.
• p89 There is, therefore, a constant struggle between the individual and the state. For the state to gain power, individuals must lose power. The state would like to eat up all individual power, all independence, discretion, freedom, autonomy. The individual opposes this demand, insists that the state not take any more. In times of danger to the state, however, individuals can be persuaded to relinquish additional bits of freedom, since the security of the individual rests ultimately with the security of the state. In a crisis we vote war credits and military conscription. And the state, knowing this, is always tempted to create crises that will justify arrogating to itself additional increments of the independence of its components.
• p101 When life has meaning, desire is held to its proper place - "proper" being the shape and scope and authority allowed to it by the interlocking structure of values that constitutes the meaning of life. When life is without meaning, desire is a wildfire out of control.
• p102 To desire nothing is to be dead. The glory of life - and there is no other - lies in the desiring of something so much that one will do one's utmost to achieve it, spending the self, going all the way, holding nothing back.
• p105 Desire is endless and unappeasable, is most intense where most forbidden, and is never far from despair.
• p111 Well, then how much? What is the rule to guide us in the judicious breaking of rules? What is a wise measure of violation?
• p113 May God have mercy on those whose fate is in my hands.
• p116 The observance of rules, with a wise measure of slippage, coupled with the violation of rules, with an ironic measure of prudence, creates flexibility, strengthens the group, and thereby creates the possibility of nonviolent change in the social order.
• p120 How to live? Who knows the question knows not how. Who knows not the question cannot tell.
• p120 Those who live for themselves alone, unburdened by the needs and rights of others, observing the rules only yo the degree required to stay out of jail, always in a running skirmish with the group but never in conflict within themselves, they know how, know without ever having known the question: Fuck you, buddy! I've got mine, now you get yours.
• p121 But the question that cannot be answered cannot, either, be shelved.
• p128 Love and the end of love, like life and death, must be praised as one.
• p131 Falling in love is madness. No treatment is required, indeed none is effective. It is self-limited in time, recovery is certain and spontaneous. In the aftermath, however, one may find oneself joined for life to a partner one would not in any normal state have chosen.
• p133 Concurrently, as we grow older, we become less and less able to love others, and if we live long enough we become incapable of loving at all, out concern reaching then no further than our pains and malfunctions. Irritably away of the diminishment of love coming towards us, we tend not to notice that we, equally, are giving less to others.
• p133 Two things I know for sure about love: no one ever gets enough, and you can't get more by asking. To the beggar for money a few real coins may fall, but the beggar for love is a fool. Into his upturned hat, along with the humiliation, will fall only scraps of guilt and duty falsely labeled as love. The only way to get more love is to give more love.

Just notes from book The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy written by Viktor E. Frankl:

• p8 If we take people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat them as if they were what they ought to be, we help them to become what they are capable of becoming. --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• p9 What, ultimately, does psychoanalysis hope to accomplish in its treatment of neurotics? Its alleged goal is to help bring about a compromise between the demands of the unconscious on the one hand and the requirements of reality on the other.
• p9 In contrast, the goal of individual psychology goes deeper. Beyond mere adjustment, it demands of the patient a courageous reshaping of reality; to the id's "must" it opposes the ego's "will." But we must now ask ourselves whether these goals are all there are; whether a break-through into another dimension may not be permissible, or even requisite in order to yield a true picture of the total psycho-physico-spiritual entity which is man. Only then shall we be in a position to help the suffering human person entrusted to us, and trusting us, to achieve his own wholeness - and health.
• p13 Every psychotherapist knows how often in the course of his psychiatric work the question of the meaning of life come up.
• p15 We repeat: the psychic health or illness of the holder of a world-view has no bearing on the correctness of incorrectness of that view. Two times two equals four even if a paranoiac makes the statement. Our evaluation of idea does not depend on the psychic origins of those ideas.
• p17 We would certainly not be entitled to brand something as "true" because it was "healthy" or, vice versa, something as "false" because it was "sick."
• p21 For when man opposes the limitations of nature, when as a human being he "takes a stand" on them, when he ceases to be subjugated and blindly obedient to the constraints imposed by the biological factor (race), the sociological factor (class), or the psychological factor (characterological type) - only then can he be judged morally.
• p22 In striking and conscious contrast to pagan thought, it is held that a man can be ethically judged only where he is free to decide and to act responsibly; he is not to be judged where he is no longer free.
• p25 Psychotherapy endeavors to bring instinctual facts to consciousness. Logotherapy, on the other hand. seeks to bring to awareness the spiritual realities. As existential analysis it is particularly concerned with making men conscious of their responsibility - since being responsible is one of the essential grounds of human existence. If ti be human is, as we have said, to be conscious and responsible, then existential analysis is psychotherapy whose starting-point is consciousness of responsibility.
• p26 Whether expressed or implicit, this is an intrinsically human question. Challenging the meaing of life can therefore never be taken as a manifestation of morbidity or abnormality; it is rather the truest expression of the state being human, the mark of the most human nature in man.
• p39 "The most certain science is conscience."
• p40 Only when the emotions work in terms of values can the individual feel pure "joy." This is the explanation of why joy can never be an end in itself; it itself, as joy, cannot bu purposed as a goal. How well Kierkegaard expressed this in his maxim that the door to happiness opens outward. Anyone who tries to push this door open thereby causes it to close still more.
• p43 For even though only a single moment is in question - the greatness of a life can be measured by the greatness of a moment: the height of a mountain range is not given by the height of some valley, but by that of the tallest peak. In life, too, the peaks decide the meaningfulness of the life, and a single moment can retroactively flood an entire life with meaning.
• p52 ... human freedom is not a "freedom from" but a "freedom to"
• p69 Instinctual gratification and biological reproduction are, after all, only two aspects of marriage - and not even the most important ones. The spiritual factor of love is more essential.
• p69 If all man were perfect, then every individual would be replaceable by anyone else. From the very imperfection of men follows the indispensability and inexchangeability of each individual; for each is imperfect in his own fashion. No man is universally gifted; but the bias of the individual makes for his uniqueness.
• p69 A bilogical example will make this clear. As is well known, when one-celled life forms evolve into many-celled organisms they pay the price of losing their immortality. They also sacrifice their omnipotence. They exchange all-aroundness for specificity.
• p70 But an individual existence not only must have the community in order to become meaningful; vice versa, the community needs the individual existence in order for it itself to have meaning. Therein lies an essential distinction between community and the mere mass.
• p72 By escape into the mass, man loses his most intrinsic quality: responsibility. On the other hand, when he shoulders the tasks set him by society, man gains something - in that he adds to his responsibility. To escape into the mass is to disburden oneself of individual responsibility.
• p73 When it comes to evaluating people, collectivism leads us astray.
• p76 During no moment of his life does man escape the mandate to choose among possibilities. Yet he can pretend to act "as if" he had no choice and no freedom of decision. The "acting as if" constitutes a part of the human tragicomedy.
• p79 To have been is the "safest" form of being. By being past, possibilities are saved from passing away; only unrealized possibilities pass away.
• p82 The eternal combat between man's spiritual freedom and his inward and outward destiny is what intrinsically makes up his life.
• p97 Freedom is not something we "have" and therefore can lose; freedom is what we "are."
• p105 While the values of the first category are actualized by doing, experiential values of the first category are actualized by doing, experiential values are realized by the passive receiving of the world (nature, art) into the ego. Attitudinal values, however, are actualized wherever the individual is face with something imposed by destiny. From the manner in which a person takes these things upon himself, assimilates these difficulties into his own psyche, there flows ans incalculable multitude of value-potentialities. This means that human life can be fulfilled not only in creating and enjoying, but also in suffering!
• p108 Suffering therefore establishes a fruitful, one might say a revolutionary, tension in that it makes for emotional awareness of what ought not to be. To the degree that a person identifies himself with things as they are, he eliminates his distance from them and forfeits the fruitful tension between what is and what ought to be.
• p109 But activity does not exist for the purpose of our escaping boredom; rather, boredom exists so that we will escape inactivity and do justice to the meaning of our life.
• p110 But the act of looking at something does not create that thing; neither does the act of looking away annihilate it.
• p111 There is a type of melancholia in which sadness is conspicuous bu its absence. Instead, the patients complain that they cannot feel sad enough, that they cannot cry out their melancholy, that they are emotionally cold and inwardly dead. Such patients are suffering from what we call melancholia anæsthetica. Anyone acquainted with such cases knows that greater despair can scarcely exist than the despair of such person because they are unable to be sad.
• p113 "Life is not anything; it is only the opportunity for something." --Hebbel
• p118 The work in itself does not make person indispensable and irreplaceable; it only gives him the chance to be so.
• p118 ... the job at which one works is not what counts, but rather the manner in which one does the work.
• p127 "Where love is lacking, work becomes a substitute; where work is lacking, love becomes an opiate." --Alice Lyttkens
• p127 The person who is wholly wrapped up in his work, who has nothing else, needs that week-end bustle. In any city, Sunday is the saddest day of the week. It is on Sunday, when tempo of the working week is suspended, that the poverty of meaning in everyday urban life is exposed.
• p129 To the person hungry for excitement the greatest possible sensation is death - in art as well as in reality. The dullard newspaper-reader sitting at his breakfast table is avid for stories of misfortune and death. But mass misfortunes and deaths en masse cannot satisfy him; apparently the anonymous mass seems to abstract. And so your newspaper-reader may feel the need to go to a movie and see a gangster film. His pattern is like that of every addict: his hunger for sensation requires a nervous jolt to satisfy it; the jolt to the nerves engenders a more intense hunger, and so the dose must be constantly stepped up. What such a person really gets out of these vicarious deaths if the contrast effect: it seems as though other people are always the ones who must die. For this type of person is fleeing what most horrifies him: the certainty of his own death - which his existential emptiness makes unbearable to him. The certainty of death terrifies only the person who has a guilty conscience toward his life.
• p132 Love is living the experience of another person in all his uniqueness and singularity.
• p141 In fact love is only one of the possible ways to fill life with meaning, and is not even the best way.
• p144 For where the quality of happiness in love is lacking, the lack must be compensated by quantity of sexual pleasure.
• p149 "Love sees a person the way God meant him." --Von Hattingberg
• p150 Awareness of values can only enrich a person. In fact, this inner enrichment partly constitutes the meaning of his life, as we have seen in our discussion of experiential values. Therefore, love must necessarily enrich the lover. This being so, there can be no such thing as "unrequited, unhappy love"; the term is self-contradictory. Either you really love - in which case you must feel enriched, whether ot not the love is returned; or you do not really love, do not actually intend the inner being of another person, but rather miss it completely and look only for something physical "about" him or some (psychological) character trait which he "has."
• p185 The logotherapist is not concerned with treating the individual symptom or the disease as such; rather, he sets out to transform the neurotic's attitude toward hi neurosis.
• p185 Pressure generates counterpressure.
• p197 "The intellect, like an opera glass, should only be turned up to a certain point; if you screw it any farther, you see more hazily" --Leo Tolstoy
• p213 ... the act of knowing makes the subject into an object.
• p221 "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." --Franklin D. Roosevelt
• p225 I would venture to say that humor also deserves to be mentioned among the basic human capacities. After all, no animal is able to laugh.
• p241 A.V., aged forty-five, married and the mother of a sixteen-year-old son, had a twenty-four-year history of phobic neurosis consisting of severe claustrophobia, such as fear of riding in cars or elevators, of heights, and of crossing bridges. She also had a fear of collapsing, of leaving the house, of open spaces, of being alone, and of becoming paralyzed. ... She spent the last four years in a state hospital, where she remained continuously in a disturbed ward. Again she received electro-shock therapy and intensive drug therapy, with barbiturates, phenothiazines, MAO inhibitors, and amphetamine compounds; all to no avail.
• p254 However, there are patients whose sleep is disturbed so that they are awakened early in the morning by a noisy neighborhood, for instance, and cannot sleep further because of anger at their neighbors and their hyper-intention to fall asleep again. I advise such patients simply to imagine that they are urged to leave their bed to do something disagreeable - for example, shoveling snow or coal at five o'clock in the morning. It they yield to this fantasy, they suddenly feel so tired that they fall asleep again.
• p276 The physician should never be allowed to take over the patient's responsibility; he must never permit that responsibility to be shifted to himself; he must never anticipate decisions or impose them upon the patient. His job is to make it possible for the patient to reach decision; he must endow the patient with the capacity for deciding.
• p291 In 1960 I had arrived at the conviction that "phobias are partially due to the endeavour to avoid the situation in which anxiety arise."
• p294 The normally functioning eye does not see itself, it is rather overlooking itself; likewise man is human to the extent that he overlooks and forgets himself bu giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love. By being immersed in work or in love, we are transcending ourselves and, thereby, actualizing ourselves.
• p296 If man can find and fulfill a meaning in his life he becomes happy but also able and capable of coping with suffering. If he can see a meaning he is even prepared to give his life. On the other hand, if he cannot see a meaning he is equally inclined to take his life even in the midst, and in spite, of all the welfare and affluence surrounding him.
• p300 And I won't forget an interview I once heard on Austrian's TV given by a Polish cardiologist who, during World War II, had organized Warsaw ghetto upheaval. "What a heroic deed," exclaimed the reporter. "Listen," calmly replied the doctor, "to take a gun and shoot is no great thing; but if the SS leads you to a gas chamber or to a mass grave to execute you on the spot, and you can't do anything about it, except for keeping your head high and going your way with dignity, you see, this is what I would call heroism." He should know.

After complaining that my X thousand pages big Bible that I have at home is too big to carry around and also to read in my limited time that I have for books at home, my friend went, bought and gave me new testament in Slovak. So I accepted the gift and read the 4 gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and as usual kept notes.

First of all I find it really interesting that such an old book is still readable and what is more impressive that a lot (most?) of things apply today like they did 2000 years ago. It's like Harman wrote:

Second the fact that at that time there we no dictaphones and it looks like a lot of the text was written only very late after it happen, still there are a lot of details and exact quotes. For sure back then common people had much better memory, because they had no other way to note things down only in their mind. They had different tools, skills and possibilities, still they core of what makes humans humans persisted.

Here are my raw notes without comments. I'll post the comments later.

What to do?

What not to do?

Where to go?

What good things to do for eternal life?

Why parables?

Why is that we pay much more attention to the ones who fails, loose their way, need help or rescue?

Who belongs to the kingdom of God?

Who doesn't belong to the kingdom of God?

What is astonishing?

What is an impact of words of goodness?

How much to judge?

Should we keep the law?

Should he kept the law?

Why do people who really know someone can not honor him?

Where does the evil come from?

Why should we share? Why should we give?

What to do with temptation?

How to become better?

Who is great?

Who is good?

Who is blessed?

What will happen to the ones who will kill His son?

Depart in peace?

How to recognize good?

Should we hide?

Who is my neighbour?

What happens to a man after he gets rid of his unclean spirits?

Why is there darkness in me?

Who is responsible?

Who can follow?

Where is the kingdom of God?

Dead of Jesus?

Where is Jesus?

What is the future?

What is judgement day?

The rest of my notes:

Here are my notes from book "The Structure of Value" by Robert S. Hartman, man who send his life searching for an answer to the question of - What is good?

• p3 Some students begin by forming an opinion ... and it is not till afterwards that they begin to read the texts. They run a great risk of not understanding them at all, or of understanding them wrongly. What happens is that a kind of tacit contest goes on between the text and the preconceived opinions of the reader; the mind refuses to grasp what is contrary to its idea, and the issue of the evidence of the text but that the text yields, bends, and accommodates itself to the preconceived opinion. --Fustel de Coulanges
• p44 There is a jocular saying that the philosopher knows less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything, while the scientist knows more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing.
• p47 Our social and moral knowledge, thus, is in the alchemistic stage, and our social and moral life bears witness to it.
• p50 Just as the medieval schoolmen preferred to look through their theological glasses rather than through Galileo's telescope, so today's positivists and naturalists prefer to look through the telescopes and microscopes of science rather than through the lenses of inner vision discovered by G.E.Moore.
• p67 The middle Ages were not what the romantic imagination paints, but instead a rugged age much more insensitive than ours todays. Tortures, burnings, hangings were public spectacles, their thrill was like today's bullfights or prizefights. The ladies of high society went to the place of execution the night before and slept in their coaches in order not to miss the entertainment. However ghastly and shocking these tortures were to any normal person, what is far more shocking is the fact that so many people of fashion found pleasure and excitement in them.
• p67 Today's moral reality is still philosophical; it is not fundamentally different from that of antiquity or the Middle Ages. We have the same fundamental values and disvalues, even through we practice them with greater refinement, including torture. The new moral science ought to revolutionize our moral understanding itself and hence our moral practice, in the same way that natural science has revolutionized our understanding of nature and out sensitivity to it. The precise knowledge of the axiological relations ought to make us more sensitive to moral reality. It ought to teach us more profoundly the art of living.
• p69 Thus, the new science will add spirit to technology, value to energy, human sensitivity to the sensitivity of instruments. It will develop man as natural science has developed matter. The world of natural science will be succeeded by the world of moral science. The world of value will follow the course of the world of fact, to ever subtler refinement of moral sensitivity. For value must follow the structure of moral science as fact followed that of natural science. As the structure of each science is refined, so is its subject matter.
• p70 What to an American appears as one thing, appears to an African as an entirely different thing. If an American and a North African were to draw the battleship Missouri - the experiment has been made - the American's drawing would look like a photograph and the African's like a dream, for the latter lacks a frame of reference to make it understandable to his intellect, even though his eyes see it - just as the schoolmen did no see what Galileo showed them. We see what we have a mind to see.
• p80 Science, we have noted, uses concepts of generality with precision while philosophy uses concepts of generality without precision.
• p92 We can see with our own eyes that the core of the material world is found in some formula - which are nothing but small black signs on white paper - of Newton, Einstein, and others, and that from these symbols arose the technological world of today and its nuclear power. The whole development began with Galileo, in whose mind the fundamental transformation of which we have spoken took place, and Aristotelian concepts became symbols. It is thus beyond doubt that the difference between philosophy and science is defined by the difference between abstractions from the commonsense world and constructions of ideal relations applicable to this world. It is equally beyond doubt that the world will not be morally efficient unless the same transition takes place in moral philosophy.
• p96 Ethics in all its forms comes down to the question, what is the principle of the "Good." ... Positive morals cannot be appealed to, for each answers the question materially in a different manner. One sees happiness, another satisfaction, a third justice, a fourth love as the Good. ... Philosophy has early recognized the complete onesidedness of positive morality and consequently searched for the Principle of the Good as something more general, superordinated to these fragmentary insights. It was looked for as the genus to the manifold of the species. The Platonic "Idea of the Good" was the most radical such attempt. But what is the content of such an "Idea of the Good"? It has been looked for in vain. Neither Plato nor any later philosopher has been able to determine it. --Nicolai Hartmann
• p100 It would then be nonsense to speak, for example, of economic value; for the genus would be like speaking of green flying saucers.
• p103 The value predicate "good", thus is a property of concepts rather than of objects. When a person understands that a thing "is good," is is not necessary that he knows anything of the thing in question; but he must know something of the concept of which the thing is an instance. He must know what is an automobile but he does not have to know what is my automobile. The word "good" applies not to the knowledge of the particular automobile but to the knowledge of the concept "automobile."
• p103 A thing is good if it fulfills the intension of its concept.
• p108 Why ought I to be good? Is it better to be good than bad? Is it conceivable that it would be better to be bad than good? Ought the good to be? Ought what is to be good? Is the best better than the good? If the good out to be, what about the best? Is the perfect better than the good? Is the perfect better than the best? Ought what is to be perfect? If the perfect ought to be, ought the good not to be? Is the best good enough? Is the best perfect? Is the perfect worse rather then better than the good? Is there any good at all? Is all good relative? What is the value of value? What is the value of fact? Is value?
• p108 To This level belong the interrelationships between the various value sciences, and the the value aspects of the natural sciences, e.g. the relation between music and astronomy in Pythagoras between astronomy and theology in Plato, between theology and chemistry in alchemy, the confusion ethics and other sciences, the confusion sciences and their subject matter, statements such as "To be good is to do God's will," "To be good is to be preferred," "To be good is to feel satisfied," "To be good is to be a proletarian"; the value nature of Leibniz's or Spinoza's metaphysics, the value value nature of Horney's, Maslow's or Fromm's psychology, the value nature of a value theory, etc.
• p109 I can value a thing only if I know it, that is, if I know its name and its properties. That this is true is confirmed by the fact that when we want to value something precisely we call in an expert. The difference between him and us is that he knows more about the thing than we do. This knowledge and valuation go hand in hand. It follows that the world as a whole, if it is to be judged valuationally, must be understood, and this in turn means that if value is possible the world can be understood. In other words, the world itself is rational insofar as it is valuable.
• p111 Anything which under one concept is good because it fulfills the concept may under another concept be bad because it does not fulfill that concept. Thus, as Spinoza observed, a good ruin is a bad house, and a good house is a bad ruin. It is art of the optimist always to find that concept in terms of which the thing appears good, and that of the pessimist always to find that concept in terms of which that thing appears bad. The thing is always the same...
• p111 Goodness or Badness of the World. A thing is good if it has all the properties of its concept. The proper concept of the world must contain all the natural properties there are, have been, or will be. The world is that which has all these properties and this always fulfills its concept. Therefore it is good. If a concept of the world is posited that does not contain all the properties there are, then it is not the concept of the world, and wrong thinking results, in the light of which the world is bad because it does not fulfill the concept posited. The goodness of the world is, of course, not ethical but axiological goodness. Although the world as such is good, the things in it may, indeed must be, both good and bad; for as we have seen anything that is good under one concept may be bad under another. Badness thus is the transposition of concepts or the incompatibility of things which in themselves are good. The world, thus, axiologically good as it is, contains the maximum variety of good and bad things.
• p113 The fulfillment by a thing of a singular concept, understood in this sense, constitutes intrinsic value. Intrinsic value is the valuation of poets and artists, lovers and mystics, magicians and advertisers, chefs de cuisine and politicians, creative theologians and scientists. It is emphatic - and empathic - valuation.
• p115 As can be demonstrated, the value of a person is infinitely higher than that of a group. It is infinitely more valuable, in the strictly-defined sense of infinity, to be a morally good person than to be a good member of society, say a good conductor, baker or professor.
• p121 When an idea which has grown familiar as an unanalyzed whole is first resolved accurately into its component parts - which is what we do when we define it - there is almost always a feeling of unfamiliarity produced by the analysis, which tends to cause a protest against the definition. --Bertrand Russell
• p125 To say, for example, that a murderer cannot be good is to commit this fallacy. A murderer cannot be morally good, but he can be good as a murderer, that is, he can murder well.
• p132 By intrinsic properties of a thing we shall understand 1] all the properties which make up the description of the thing, and 2] all the properties which characterize this and no other thing, and 3] all the properties without which the thing would not be what it is.
• p145 Since the good is not a descriptive property but a logical one it cannot be grasped by the senses. It is in this respect an "irreal" quality, as the phenomenologists hold. Trying to catch it by naturalistic methods is like capturing an electron by observation. The unreality or nondecriptiveness of good is like an uncertainty relation of moral science. The only way to penetrate to goodness is by the eye of the mind, a Gedankenexperiment in the sense of Planck, an intuition in the sense of Moore. One has to capture its formal structure.
• p166 In terms of choice or preference this means that we ought to choose or prefer what is good; that we ought not to choose what is bad; that we ought to choose what is better; and that we ought not to choose what is worse. It also means that 1] it is good for us rather than what is bad for us, 2] it is good for us to choose what is better for us rather than what is worse for us, 3] it is better for us to choose what is good for us rather than what is bad for us, and 4] it is better for us to choose what is better for us rather than what is worse for us. In terms of existence it means that, since an existing thing has more properties than a nonexisting thing, existence is better than nonexistence, it is better to exist than not to exist, things ought to exist rather than not exist.
• p193 Fact is one of the possibilities of varying the given in imagination. --Edmund Husserl
• p194 Geometric circles, triangles, electrons, numbers, and the like - systemic things - cannot as such be either good or bad. They can only be, or not be, such things. The values connected with systemic concepts, therefore, can only be synthetic being or not being, complete fulfillment or complete nonfulfillment, perfection or nonperfection. Systemic value is the value of Perfection. As Aristotle rightly says, a number cannot be "mutilated"; for the loss of a unit makes it another number. But a cup can be mutilated; for the loss of a handle still leaves it a cup.
• p195 If systemic value is the value of Perfection and extrinsic value that of Goodness, singular or intrinsic value is the value of Uniqueness.
• p210 According to the axiom, a thing is good if it has all its intensional properties, fair if it has more intensional properties than it lacks, bad if it lacks more than it has, and no good if it lacks most of the intensional properties. We were able in this way to define the fundamental value terms.
• p252 The minimum abstraction has the maximum structure and the maximum abstraction has the minimum structure.
• p268 The terms "positive" and "negative" were defined by means of the term "ought." The positive value of a thing is that which it ought not to be. As we have seen, a thing ought always to be good and ought not to be bad; it ought always to fulfill and ought never not to fulfill the intension of its concept: it ought, in other words, always be as valuable as possible.
• p268 This implies, as we have seen, that no thing as such is bad; all that is, is good the way it is. But the combination of things can be bad; and bad is indeed nothing but the incompatibility of things, or things in transposition, which means the lack of a positive concept covering the things in question; of a concept, that is, which fulfills or contains the expositions of both. ... A good Buick and a good Ford transpose each other when they collide; and the wreck may be called a transposition in the literal sense of the word. The result is both a bad Buick and a bad Ford, or rather, a Buick disvalued in terms of a Ford and vice versa. The wreck, however, is a good wreck, fulfilling the definition of "wreck," which in turn means a combination of two bad cars.
• p269 A good man, a good rope, and a good Christmas tree are transposed when the man is hanged by the rope on the Christmas tree. As a transposition, this is axiologically bad; but it is an axiologically good bad, that is, a good transposition, namely, a good hanging. On the other hand, if a man pulls the Christmas tree behind him on a rope we have a composition of values, of the same elements, and the complex value "man-pulling-Christmas-tree" or "Christmas-tree-puller," the concept of which contains all three connotations in question. The actual person fulfilling this concept is "a good Christmas-tree-puller."
• p276 Thus, a person who values a system not for its inherent systemic merit S but out of his own personal needs disvalues its systemic values in terms of his own person. He is really an antisystemic person, and anti-intellectual posing as an intellectual. He uses the system to build up his own ego, that is, he uses it as rationalization, and then values intrinsically, again out of personal need, this rationalization of building up of his own pseudo-self. Here belong fanatics of all kinds. Fetishists behave analogously toward things.

Man's Search for Meaning is a book written by Viktor E. Frank who was a psychiatrist at the University Clinic in Vienna at the time when he was brought to concentration camp, which he survived. As such he has a a lot to say about suffering, about overcoming suffering and also what comes after. He seemed to have found an answer to the question of "How is it possible to say yes to life in spite of everything?". Viktor E. Frank is founder of "The Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy" - logotherapy. In his own words:

Despite the evil that he survived he kept optimistic and found his meaning in life without need for revenge. He returned back to Vienna after WWII.

And the Meaning of life?

Here are my notes:

• p5 On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles - whatever one mau choose to call them - we know: the best of us did not return.
• p7 We are indebted to the Second World War for enriching our knowledge of the "psychopathology of the masses" (if I may quote a variation of the well-known phrase and title of a book by LeBon), for the war gave us the war of nerves and it gave us the concentration camp.
• p22 Disgust, horror and pity are emotions that our spectator could not really feel any more. The sufferers, the dying and the dead, became such commonplace sights to him after a few weeks of camp life that they could not move him any more.
• p37 The truth - that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.
• p38 My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind: I didn't even know if she were still alive. I knew only one thing - which I have learned well by now: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.
• p44 To draw an analogy: a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative.
• p48 No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
• p66 Fundamentaly, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him - mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in concentration camp. Dostoevski said once, "There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings." These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom - which cannot be taken away - that makes life meaningful and purposeful.
• p67 If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
• p69 This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. "I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard," she told me. "In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously." Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, "This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness." Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. "I often talk to this tree," she said to me. I was startled and didn't quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. "Yes" What did it say to her? She answered, "It said to me, 'I am here - I am here - I am life, eternal life.'"
• p71 A man who let himself decline because he could not see any future goal found himself occupied with retrospective thoughts. In a different connection, we have already spoken of the tendency there was to look into the past, to help make the present, with all its horrors, less real. But in robbing the present of its reality there lay a certain danger. It becomes easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive of camp life, opportunities which really did exist. Regarding our "provisional existence" as unreal was in itself an important factor in causing the prisoners to lose their hold on life; every thing in a way became pointless. Such people forgot that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking the camp's difficulties as a test of the inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequences. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless.
• p72 Instead of taking the camp's difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless.
• p74 What does Spinoza say in his Ethics? Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.
• p76 Nietzsche's words, "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how"
• p77 We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly. Our answers must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.
• p91 A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering has no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and still more intensely.
• p98 Let me explain why I have employed the term "logotherapy" as the name for my theory. Logos is a Greek word which denotes "meaning". Logotherapy, or, as it has been called by some authors, "The Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy," focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man's search for such a meaning. According to logotherapy, this striving to find a meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in man. That is why I speak of a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle (or, as we could also term it, the will to pleasure) on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered, as well as in contrast to the will to power on which Adlerian psychology, using the term "striving for superiority," is focused.
• p104 Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, of the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man need in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology "homeostasis," i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. What man needs is not homeostasis but what I call "noödynamics," i.e., the existential dynamics in a polar field of tension where one pole is represented by a meaning that is to be fulfilled and the other pole by the man who has to fulfill it. And one should not think that this holds true only for normal conditions; in neurotic individuals, it is even more valid. If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So if therapists wish to foster their patients' mental health, they should not be afraid to create a sound amount of tension through a reorientation toward the meaning of one's life.
• p106 The existential vacuum is a widespread phenomenon of the twentieth century. This is understandable; it may be due to a two fold loss which man has had to undergo since he became a truly human being. At the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal's behavior is imbedded and by which it is secured. Such security, like Paradise, is closed to man forever; man has to make choices. In addition to this, however, man has suffered another loss in his more recent development inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed his behavior are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tell him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).
• p108 The Meaning of Life? To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: "Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?" There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one's opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it. As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
• p111 Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.
• p113 In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.
• p122 Pleasure is, and must remain, a side-effect of by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself.
• p138 To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to "be happy". But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to "be happy". Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation. This need for a reason is similar in another specifically human phenomenon - laughter. If you want anyone to laugh you have to provide him with a reason, e.g., you have to tell him a joke. In no way is it possible to evoke real laughter by urging him, or having him urge himself, to laugh. Doing so would be the same as urging people posed in front of a camera to say "cheese,", only to find that in the finished photographs their faces are frozen in artificial smiles.
• p139 In the first, as I was told by American soldiers, a behavior pattern crystallized to which they referred as "give-up-itis." In the concentration camps, this behavior was paralleled by those who one morning, at five, refused to get up and go to work and instead stayed in the hut, on the straw wet with urine and feces. Nothing - neither warnings nor threads - could induce them to change their minds. And then something typical occurred: they took out a cigarette from deep down in a pocket where they had hidden it and started smoking. At that moment we knew that for the next forty-eight hours or so we would watch them dying. Meaning orientation had subsided, and consequently the seeking of immediate pleasure had taken over.
• p150 Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.
• p150 In fact, the opportunities to act properly, the potentialities to fulfill a meaning, are affected by the irreversibility of our lives. But also the potentialities alone are so affected. For as soon as we have used an opportunity and have actualized a potential meaning, we have done so once and for all. We have rescued it into the past wherein it has been safely delivered and deposited. In the past, nothing is irrevocably lost, but rather, on contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured. To be sure, people tend to see only the stubble fields of transitoriness but overlook and forget the full granaries of the past into which they have brought the harvest of their lives: the deeds done, the loves loved, and last but not least, the sufferings they have gone through with courage and dignity. From this one may see that there is no reason to pity old people. Instead, young people should envy them. It is true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. But they have more than that. Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past - the potentialities they have actualized - and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past. ... But today's society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy an, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual's value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler's program, that is to say, "mercy" killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer.
• p153 Sigmund Freud once asserted, "Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly yo hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge." Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the "individual differences" did not "blur" but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints. ... You may of course ask whether we really need to refer to "saints." Wouldn't it suffice just to refer to decent people? It is true that they form a minority. More than that, they always will remain a minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.

Twitter

How to get count per link?

        http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://www.perl.org/
        {"count":351,"url":"http://www.perl.org/";}

Statistics tool?

Not yet but soon? https://dev.twitter.com/blog/introducing-twitter-web-analytics

How to hook to an event?

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/intents/events

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4947825/is-there-a-callback-for-twitters-tweet-button

        twttr.events.bind('tweet',    tweetIntentToAnalytics);

How to create button?

http://twitter.com/goodies/tweetbutton https://dev.twitter.com/docs/tweet-button

    <script src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
    <div>
      <a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button"
         data-url="http://bit.ly/twitter-api-announce";
         data-counturl="http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-api-announce";
         data-count="vertical"
         data-lang="es">Tweet</a>
    </div>

Supports Open Graph?

No - https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/1244

Facebook

How to get count per link?

        http://graph.facebook.com/?id=http://www.perl.org/
        {
           "id": "http://www.perl.org/";,
           "shares": 370
        }

Statistics tool?

http://www.facebook.com/insights/

Needs meta tag on the root page.

        <meta property="fb:page_id" content="159636650742750" />

How to hook to an event?

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/javascript/FB.Event.subscribe/

How to create button?

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/

        <div id="fb-root"></div>
        <script>(function(d, s, id) {
          var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
          if (d.getElementById(id)) {return;}
          js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;
          js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_GB/all.js#xfbml=1";
          fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
        }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));</script>

        <div class="fb-like" data-href="http://www.perl.org/"; data-send="false"
        data-layout="button_count" data-width="450" data-show-faces="true"
        data-action="recommend"></div>

Supports Open Graph?

Yes - https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/

Debug tool - http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug

Google+

How to get count per link?

        https://plusone.google.com/u/0/_/+1/fastbutton?count=true&url=http://www.perl.org/

Statistics tool?

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Navigate to "+1 Metrics"

How to hook to an event?

        <g:plusone size="tall" callback="plusone_vote"></g:plusone>

How to create button?

http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/

        <!-- Place this tag where you want the +1 button to render -->
        <g:plusone></g:plusone>

        <!-- Place this render call where appropriate -->
        <script type="text/javascript">
          window.___gcfg = {lang: 'en-GB'};

          (function() {
                var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true;
                po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js';
                var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s);
          })();
        </script>

Supports Open Graph?

Yes - https://developers.google.com/+/plugins/+1button/

Here are my notes from a book called Freedom to Live written by Rober S. Hartman. Hartman devoted his life to answering a simple question of - What is good? - and thinking how to organize good. In his own words:

I think it's similar question or a concern as - Why is it so easy to destroy anything and why it is so hard to create or invent new things? Or why does a little bit of goodness does nothing to evil and why does a little bit of evil destroys the whole goodness? Why does one nuclear bomb can kill thousands of people in a flash of minute and one hospital heal only couple of people in week?

So why? Isn't this just the way it works?

Hartman experienced the "atmosphere" first world wars, he saw his uncle in tears who was send to war and who knew he is going to die there.

Hartman acknowledges and reasons that many evil things back in the history were done in the name of "good". Good for us, good for them, good for the nation or good for the eternal life. The question of what good actually is, is a really tough one.

Consider the joy of the nation that thought the first world war will bring them anything good:

And the result? Was is good or bad? From a statistical point of view... :

Hartman went on with his search and even acquired law degree in hope that the law knows the answer.

This note is also a perfect reasoning why law is not enough. There has to be "something" more.

What has philosophy to say about good?

So we are stuck:

Hartman say that the most important thing everyone should do is self awareness!

Despite the fact that ourselves is the closes "person" to us, it should be the best known. But this is not the case!

The Anthony de Mellos book is all about self awareness. He also wrote that it's the most important thing. But unlike de Mello, Hartman tried to develop and reason tools and ways how to recognize good and evil.

There is interesting chapter called "George's -- and Everyone's -- Problem" which is considering everyone's problem and that is if to stay at work which forces unethical practices or which is ignoring the human being role during the working hours.

As a person who could perceive both first and second world war, Hartman was really worried about the cold ward and the danger of nuclear war. Still he was looking forward to the future and had faith that things can change.

This book is out of print now which is a really big shame. The only way how to get is a library or to buy used one.

Here are my notes from the book:

Chapter 1 - I was born to die.

• p9 This was the day when Kaiser Wilhelm and his six sons, each in a uniform of the various military formations, showed their faces and their power - the power of Germany - to the German people. Germany, whose imperial word was obeyed around the world, from Dares-salaam to Kiaochow, from Heligoland to Samoa, from Windhuk and Lome, Rabaul and Bougainville to Bikini and Eniwetok. All these, circling the globe, were German military bases. The world listened when the German Kaiser spoke. He was power, world power. Deutschland, "Deutschland über alles" was no vain boast.
• p10 The shock of seeing the death head atop the Kaiser in the Tiergarten was the first of four remembered experiences which by the time I was five years old had shaped my life. The second memory is of my father and mother dancing through the living room one August day in 1914 because my father had been accepted as a volunteer in the Kaiser's army. The glory of the Kaiser had entered our home. There were handshaking and congratulations all around. Germany, the greatest, the most cultured country in the world, had been attacked by her enemies, perfidious Albion, degenerate France, and brutal, backward Russia; and Germany responded as one man.
• p11 This spectacle of marching men, with its aesthetic commotion, the songs and flowers, the flags and music, went on day after day for four years. Though it stirred me, I saw the dark side only. I remember thinking of the final destination, the helplessness of the fallen man disappearing into the black and bottomless manhole.
• p12 My first three experiences were harbingers of the fourth. I came to think of my first three as the Face of Death, the Dance of Death, and the March of Dead. In the fourth I felt Death itself.
• p12 I remember asking, "Uncle Alex, why are you crying?" He said "I have to go to war." "Why do you have to go to war?" I asked. "The Emperor commands it." "Well," I said, "stay and don't go." And he looked at me with eyes so sad I have never forgotten them. "I can't," he said, "and I am going to die." As he said this I felt steel tongs gripping my body. A cold dread filled me. I turned and ran from the room.
• p13 Reflecting upon this chilling experience today, I still feel the monstrousness of an earthly power that can send a young man of twenty-two to die.
• p18 Every day during a certain period one of my teachers -- a gentleman of the old imperial school, obviously -- required us to stand up at the beginning of class and repeat in chorus a kind of loyalty oath: "I was born to die for Germany"
• p20 My birth, a cosmic event for the universe, an existential event for me, a blissful event for my parents, was a military event for Germany. It was manpower, a particle of the collective power of the nation. Thus, life was reduced to a matter of military supply. Love was reduced to the biological function of mating; happiness at the birth of a baby became satisfaction at the addition of war material; and death became a statistic.
• p20 The key, I decided, lay somewhere in the correct answer to the question, "Why does a killer in war get a medal and in peace the electric chair?" In my diary I wrote on May 17, 1927: I have seen something remarkable. I was just in the movie and in the news there appeared Von Hindenburg. The people applauded. It seems people must always be enthusiastic for something. We must be careful not to direct this hunger for enthusiasm towards the military. But there must be some direction.
• p21 I have seen something remarkable. I was just in the movie and the news there appeared Von Hindenburg. The people applauded. It seems people must always be enthusiastic for something. We must be careful not to direct this hunger for enthusiasm toward the military. But there must be some direction.
• p23 Examples of this fallacy are given in every logic textbook: "Men are numerous; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is numerous." "The crowd is dense; John is a member of the crowd: therefore John is dense." In these examples the reasoning is obvious fallacious. But "Germany is powerful; I am a German; therefore I am powerful" was not obviously fallacious to Germans. Because Germany was militarily powerful in 1914, every German worker or mailman thought he was powerful.
• p24 Germany lost in the First World War 1,808,545 dead, or three percent of her population. After the war the birth rate made up for this loss in 6.4 years. Thus it could be argued from a collective viewpoint, Germany lost nothing. But the individual casualty was a man, loved and loving, and his loss was irreplaceable. It was a life lost, a life wasted, dumped into a manhole. The state takes human life supposedly to protect the whole. But is a human life of less value than a collective?
• p33 I thought to myself, if evil can be organized so efficiently, why cannot good? Is there any reason for efficiency to be monopolized by the forces for evil in the world? Why is it so difficult to organize good? Why have good people in history never seemed to have had as much power as bad people? I decided I would try to find out why and devote my life to doing something about it.

Chapter 2 - What is good?

• p43 But when I got my law degree from the University of Berlin in 1932, I hadn't learned a single thing from law about good and bad. The law doesn't say. It tells only what is legal and illegal. It is an instrument that can be used for good or evil. Law like science, is morally neutral. With science you can make the Sahara bloom or you can turn the world into a desert. With law you can make evil look good by making it legal.
• p46 Science has changed the physical way we live so much that Julius Caesar or Columbus would not comprehend it. Unfortunately, it is equally certain that Jesus Christ would find mankind little changed. For the inner landscape in which he was interested and where he hoped to establish the Kingdom of God looks as barren and sterile, as chaotic and anarchic, as neglected and uncultivated as in his day.
• p48 I can't tell you what goodness is, I can only tell you what it is like. It is like the sun that radiates everything, that warms everything, that makes everything fertile and brings forth everything.
• p48 Believe it or not, you go through the whole of philosophy and nowhere do you find the solution to the problem of what is goodness in general.
• p50 Now we knew how to make a bomb that would destroy hundreds of thousands of people, but we still didn't seem to know how to make ourselves good men. We might blow up our whole world before enough of us could find out.
• p52 When a person understands that a thing "is good" he doesn't need to know anything of the thing in question, but he must know something of the concept of which the thing is an instance.
• p53 A thing is good when it has all the properties it is supposed to have, or put another way, a thing is good when it fulfills its definition. In other words, goodness is the fulfillment of anything's concept or definition.
• p58 When one reflects that more human being have been killed by other human being in this century than in all previous recorded history, it is no hard to conclude that some things have gone wrong.
• p61 The more I am aware of my Self, the more, and the more clearly, I define and fulfil my Self, the more I am a morally good person, a good 'I'. I am morally good if I am as I am. All the words of ethics mean this very same thing, this identification of myself with myself; being sincere, honest, genuine, true, having self-respect, integrity, authenticity.
• p66 This Self-awareness is different from knowing. Some people know everything but are aware of nothing, like the man in the Thurber cartoon about whom one woman whispered to another, "He doesn't know anything but facts." Others are aware of everything but know nothing. The first are informed fools, the second uninformed sages. The first are intellectuals without moral insight, the second are simple people with intuitive moral insight.
• p69 She just is. ... She is, as we call it, transparent to her self. She is free to pour all her energies into living for others. Such a person we call a saint. Maria is a small-gauge saint. A great saint would be a person who matches the depth of his own being with the width of his intellectual horizont. This was Jesus.
• p69 Smartness doesn't help. You have to be, just be; you have to be natural and not pretend, not be proud or ashamed of this or that. You have to be able to put your worldly matters in their places. To be is probably the most difficult and, at the same time, the most important task of our moral lives.
• p70 Children sense Personality; they respect a person who respects himself.
• p72 You get your power in crises. A genius is in a continual crisis. He gets his power all the time. When you read the stories of men of science, like Newton, or of art like Bach or Michelangelo, you find that when asked their secret they gave almost the same answer: Anybody can do it who doesn't do anything else day and night. ... A genius puts his whole Self into a problem. He's not necessarily a good person morally -- he's just a genius. There's a difference between a great man and a great good man.
• p74 We are all one, and when we do a wrong thing everyone has done it with us. That is why we are afraid that everyone knows. I am responsible for everybody else and everybody else is responsible for me. This is the meaning of love.
• p76 I'm result of creation, of evolution. I began in infinity, and where do I end? Do I end with my death? Well, there's my son and my granddaughter. I am a link in the chain of generations on earth. Even though I have no children, my Self, my spirit, as I said, is not in space and time. How then can it die in space and time? It cannot die. Body and mind may fall away, but the spirit must go on to eternity.
• p79 Self-aware, and who are truly themselves without knowing it. They are like people who enjoy the symphony without knowing the score. Should they learn the score, they would enjoy the music even more.
• p80 I have moral values to the degree that I fulfil my definition of my Self. To the degree that I am I, I am a morally good person. Moral goodness is the depth of man's being himself, and that is the greatest goodness in the world. For what we find within us when we penetrate to the roots of our Selves, no matter what route we take, can only be described as God.
• p80 So it is with many of us Americans. We play into the hands of the communists by putting money and other extrinsic values ahead of human value. The increase in juvenile delinquency, crime, corruption, and graft in American life is evidence of the leaks in our moral dikes. Violence is fast becoming part of the American way. Indeed, according to sociologist Lewis Yablonsky, a new kind of criminality is emerging, one who maims or kills and destroys for kicks and who has no regard for the rights and feelings of others.
• p81 "We May Be Rich But They Are Happy" was the title of an article by British economist Barbara Ward in The New Your Times Magazine (May 5, 1968) in which she pondered the question, "Will the spread of Western technology cause the people of Asia and Africa to lose their secret of self-fulfilment?" "Our technical society," she writes, "so wrapped up in means and manipulation, too often fails to give us direction and dedication, without which we can be rich and healthy and strong, yet bored and joyless as well."
• p84 God is valued systemically in theology, extrinsically in comparative religion, and intrinsically by a personal salvation. God is the supreme value, the value of values. Nothing more valuable is thinkable.
• p88 Value, we may say, is meaning. When we say that life has meaning we mean it has value. The richer its meaning, the richer its value. When we say that life has no meaning, we mean it has no value. The poorer its meaning, the poorer its value. A meaningless life is without value, is no good.
• p93 "To burn a man alive does not defend a doctrine, but slays a man... We do not testify to our own faith by burning another, but only by our readiness to be burned on behalf of our faith."
• p99 A group of factory girls were given better working conditions, and productivity increased. Then the improvements were taken away from them, but productivity still increased. The girls got mid-morning breaks and a shortened work week, and productivity increased. The breaks were eliminated and the work week lengthened, still productivity increased. No matter what was done, productivity went up. Roethlisberger and Dickson, the men conducting the research, were puzzled and wondered what kind of logic was at work here. They concluded: What is done is not so important; what is really important is the human attention given the girls and the cooperation they give in return.

Chapter 3 - George's -- and Everyone's -- Problem

• p103 We have defined goodness -- anything is good when it has all the properties it's suppose to have -- and we've build a scientific axiology around that axiom. With this science we have found that we can know and measure value in its systemic, extrinsic (social) , and intrinsic (Self or spiritual) dimensions, and we've found that a human life in its infinity is the most valuable thing there is.
• p103 Men...have for the most a very lowly conception of themselves, that is to say, they have no conception of being spirit, the absolute of all that a man can be...Not only does a man prefer to dwell in the cellar; he loves that to such a degree that he becomes furious if anyone would propose to him to occupy the bel étage which stands empty at his disposition -- for in fact he is dwelling in his own house... Yet man does yearn to be better than he is, to be truly himself. The divine does persist within; but we are torn this way and that. Social and business pressures push us, and we go along, but the spark within is hard to extinguish, and even as we hurry to conform we may pause to wonder if this is all there is to life, and we glance uneasily over our shoulders (once a week or more), wondering vaguely if we haven't forgotten something, a cheerful word perhaps, a quiet moment, a little love -- could it possibly be ourselves we have forgotten?
• p105 The Harvard Business Review reports that eighty percent of the executives who would talk about it admitted that unethical practices are a generally accepted practice in their respective industries. Everyone of us, I have no doubt, knows personally of men who, under severe pressure and moral strain, have deserted their Selves and "cracked up" physically or mentally. Such value crises do not occur only in business, of course; they happen in the home, in the church, in politics, in every part of our lives.
• p106 The danger arises, I think, from the growth of organizational bigness. The life of the Organisation is apt to become more important then the life of the individual. George and Jim are likely to become loyal Organization servants first, human beings second; executives first, lovers, husbands, fathers, or real persons second. Even friendships are likely to depend entirely upon their extrinsic value to the Organization. In all this, human intrinsic values naturally would take a beating. The inner Self would be practically lost.
• p107 Nevertheless, men who know how to work with people are increasingly in demand in business. Surveys, indeed, indicate this quality is priced much more highly than technical skill in holders of upper echelon positions. Inability to cooperate with others and inability to judge people have been found to be two of the most frequent reasons for executive failure.
• p108 A nation that aspires only to material progress, says historian Arnold J. Toynbee, is doomed to economic stagnation, boredom, and moral decay. No society, he insist, has ever flourished without a spiritual meaning. The same thing could be said about a man -- after all, most mental cases result from dull, hopeless, meaningless lives -- and the same thing could be said about a business, for businessman needs spiritual meaning in what he does as much as anyone.
• p111 Thus, Self-development is not a luxury; it is a necessity for our being truly ourselves on all three levels. So George's own inner being has to become part of his job. He has to live on the top (intrinsic) level in whatever he does, and he -- George himself -- has to do it; nobody else can live there for him.
• p113 You feel wonderful to be alive. Faith is exactly this -- to feel good in the world and to feel that the world is good.
• p117 I used to think I was the most important guy in creation. Now I'm not so sure. Even so, my wife hes to keep reminding me, "Be humble."
• p117 I know a fellow who is an engineer, one of the most lovable persons I know. He has many properties of faith, but he also has a deep-seated, intrinsic fear. He lacks serenity, is often on the defensive, is not expansive but narrow, and is easily hurt. Actually he is extremely successful in a material way, with a beautiful home and a garage full of Cadillacs. But he is always fearful he will lose all he has tomorrow. He feels he's no good; he shouldn't have been born; life isn't really worth the trouble.
• p121 A wife who loves is usually more mature than a man. She loves you as a husband, not as an important or not-so-important man, and she may love you when you're asleep more than at any other time. To women, both the intellectual and -- if true women -- the social play small roles relative to love and compassion. Man are often lured by their intellectual and social power to insensitivity and disregard of the spiritual. Having to deal directly with the creation of life, women are usually more sensitive to intrinsic value.
• p125 If, on the other hand, my life does have meaning for me, I will be quite concerned about the organization I work for, because it would have to dovetail with my own meaning. It it doesn't and I keep on working for it, I'm either a fake or unhappy or both. I cheat myself. I waste the divine capital that I am. I sell myself to the world, and I will pay for this betrayal by neurosis, by drinking too much, or by otherwise destroying my self, as if I ware saying that I am not worth the gift of life.
• p127 For if the organization helps me to fulfill my purpose, I certainly will want to contribute one hundred percent of myself instead of holding back forty percent -- as studies have shown the average worker does -- and hurting myself as well as the company.

Chapter 4 - My self and religion

• p131 For me, Jesus is that person who for the first time in human history articulated the nature of man's infinity in God. He gave added emphasis to the place of man in religious concepts.
• p133 For unless you like your Self you cannot like anybody else. Unless you fell that you are important, nothing can be important to you. You must make yourself worthy of yourself to be worthy of your fellow man and of God. If you don't take yourself seriously, if you take yourself as an accident that might just s well not have happened, then you are lost; you cannot fulfill the meaning of your life.
• p135 To those of us who aspire to Christianity, Jesus is he who came so that we may live, in the mediator between us and God. He must not be an historical character in space and time; the minute he becomes such we lose him and we lose Christianity. He must be outside of space and time, an intrinsic rather than an extrinsic person. We can understand Jesus only if we have a living relationship with him, as if he were along at our side -- the eternal contemporary.
• p142 The entire world is nothing in comparison with human personality, with the unique person of man.
• p145 He meant what he said: offer the other cheek also to be smitten.This, Jesus implies, will take the wind out of the sail of the other's anger, for there is no greater incentive for evil-doing than resistance to it. When you don't resist evil, you drain the fun from it. Nothing is more disconcerting to a ruffian than politeness.
• p146 What is the secret? You have to find a logic that is different from that of the evildoer but which embraces both him and you. Since his logic is of the finite -- where he is on one side and you are on the other -- the surest way is to insert the logic of the infinite into the situation. This will embrace you and him on the same level, lifting him to yours. It will let him save face and make him understand you, through in his own, sometimes curious way.
• p149 We need desperately to develop our sensitivity to evil, just as we need to develop our sensitivity to good, for we cannot overcome that which we don't know. So few people can smell evil, sensitivity or vicariously, precisely because they have failed to develop their sense of values.
• p150 These people, of course, do not want to be evil. They think they do good -- as did Hitler. Somehow their values must be reversed; what they call "good" must be shown to be evil, and what they call "evil" to be good. This again, evil must be overcome by good -- and by love.
• p151 If you have conformed all your life, have never done anything particularly bad or anything particularly good, have lived according to the rules and customs, systemically and extrinsically, you will never even know what moral depth you have. You have never developed a sensitivity for either good or evil. You are a social machine, and there cannot be much joy in Heaven for a zombie.
• p152 I believe the great impression Pope John XXIII made on all mankind was because he, with articulate goodness, filled the vacuum the churches had left. Alas, his work did not lead to action and, like Jesus, he left us no method to follow it up.
• p152 How often do we turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, give the man out cloak? How often do we try to overcome evil by good?
• p153 Our lore is full of stories of men laying down their lives for the sake of what they think or what they have or what they want; but how many have laid down what they think or have or want for the sake of their lives?

Chapter 5 - It's not too late

• p161 Human being as individuals generally want the good, but as soon as they start thinking and acting in collective terms, i.e., in terms of a group, a mob, a race, a state, a nation, they tend to fall easy prey to evil. Since in the systemic only the system counts, all evil can be given a systemic status and thus appear justified. The legal system in particular has been used to justify evil.
• p163 There is nothing wrong with our war logic; only the logic itself is wrong.
• p168 If, however, you value thinking most highly, and there is a flaw in your thinking, then you value most highly something which is faulty, and all your valuation, all your history, goes wrong.
• p170 It is the result of a trilogy of tragedies. The first was the Tragedy of Rome -- military despotism; the second, the Tragedy of Feudalism -- military absolutism; the third, the Tragedy of Democracy -- military giantism. The process is the same throughout, repeated on ever higher turns of the spiral of history: the exploitation of the civil -- with its rhythm of birth, life, love, and death -- by military state.
• p179 Neither the German not the Russian nor the American nor, for that matter, the French, the English, the Indian, the Chinese, or any other revolution has challenged the supremacy of the state's military power over the life and death of its citizens. Revolutions as far have meant nothing but the transition of sovereign power from owners to managers. The machine grinds on not, as before, at the ruler's command, but "with the consent of the governed." It infiltrates today's political institutions. Juridical safeguards such as separation of power, bills or rights, guarantees of individual freedom, civil liberties, and the like scratch the surface but do not change the core. Every constitution contains an emergency trap door through which the rights, the freedoms, and the liberties of the individual can disappear. Strangely enough, these very rights and liberties come to justify, ideologically, the slaughters of the revolutions and the subsequent "just" wars of the republics. What was done before for the glory of the King is now done for the glory of the People -- for Liberty, for Freedom, for Brotherhood. These human ideals join others, including the idea of Christian love, which at various times have been used to justify murders, massacres, and wars. The United States of America began predominantly as a civil society, with an insistent warning from George Washington "never to run the course which has hitherto marked the Destiny of Nations" and permit its military function to become dominant. Yet even the United States has been drawn into the maelstrom of feudal power apparatus and has build the most powerful, most deadly military machine in all history. Today's nation state is a feudal relic -- but it rides on the wings of a jet stream.
• p183 What can we do about it, you and I? There is no quick, easy solution, but there is a solution. The good takes time; one cannot be good in a hurry. A life can be extinguished in the flick of a second, but how painstakingly must the surgeon work to replace even one torn nerve. This is why peace will not come through so-called strong men. They look for easy and fast solutions. It will come through men of patience, compassion, and humility -- men of faith.
• p186 Our days cries for moral leadership. We must mobilize our compassion and the intrinsic moral goodness of America to break the power chain of divine sovereignties and permit the human state to succeed the military state. For it is the moral goodness of America that makes this country great, the goodness that recognizes the infinite intrinsic value of the human person. We need to translate this moral goodness into international relations. We need to export it, for, in the long run, it -- rather our wealth, our standard of living, and our named power -- is what attracts the rest of the world to America. I have no doubt that the Soviet Union fears our goodness much more than our badness.

Playing around with apt-cpan and apt-pm made me wonder how to get them installed on fresh clean system without installing too many dependencies - preferably nothing at all. So my concern was - How to get a bunch of Perl scripts to the OS without affecting it? Then I've recalled hearing about pp and gave it a try. The result? => Alien::Debian::Apt::PM

Alien::Debian::Apt::PM is basically one huge (10MB) binary - alien-debian-apt-pm and a custom Build.PL that will create all the necessary symlinks once the basic binary is installed. Alien::Debian::Apt::PM has no dependencies besides Module::Build 0.36 so the system stays clean even when installed via CPAN shell. Other way how to "install" is to simply copy the binary to the system path and create those symlinks. See the distribution Pod for details how to install and use.

Subject: YAPC::Europe 2011 - Talk & Tutorial Evaluations
Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2011 15:04:10 +0100
To: Jozef Kutej <jozef@kutej.net>

Hi,

In this email, please find the feedback received from the surveys available for
YAPC::Europe 2011. 

An Explanation of the Tables:

For the table matrix below, each row represents the question asked of the respondee,
with the columns representing the rating given, graded from 1 to 10, where 1 represents
a low rating and 10 a high one. The values in each cell represent the number of
respondees who rated the question with a particular value.

Due to space restrictions, the text of each question has been truncated. The full text for
the questions are as below:

* Your prior knowledge of subject?
* Speaker's knowledge of subject?
* Speaker's presentation of subject?
* Quality of presentation materials?
* Overall presentation rating?


Demystify file system hierarchy for deployments:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
| Questions         |  1 |  2 |  3 |  4 |  5 |  6 |  7 |  8 |  9 | 10 |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
| Your prior knowle |  - |  - |  - |  - |  3 |  - |  - |  2 |  - |  - |
| Speaker's knowled |  - |  - |  - |  - |  1 |  - |  - |  2 |  - |  2 |
| Speaker's present |  - |  - |  - |  1 |  2 |  - |  - |  2 |  - |  - |
| Quality of presen |  - |  - |  - |  2 |  1 |  - |  - |  2 |  - |  - |
| Overall presentat |  - |  - |  - |  1 |  2 |  - |  - |  2 |  - |  - |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Regards,
Barbie.
--
YAPC Conference Surveys <http://yapc-surveys.org>
QA Hackathons <http://qa-hackathon.org>

Yes, we people have an enormous over potential of doing something, enthusiastically or even fanatically. If we are not building pyramids, temples, cathedrals, monuments, castles, electronic devices, internet or space ships, we may direct our energy to something evil like war.

At the moment it seems we directed our global effort towards technology and science. Thanks to the fact that people believe in technological progress, work hard to get an expensive gadgets, spend their time with computer games, smart phones, believe in getting rich on the internet, keeps everyone busy.

That's why we should be thankful to the technology.