YouSaid · the spoken record

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

lines on the record
159
first
2023-07-06
most recent
2023-07-06
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “He took his duty, he embraced the task and the absurdity of life. And he pushed the stone up the hill. And that if we do that and if we find ways of being of service to others, that is the ultimate. That's the key to the lock. That's the solution to the puzzle.”

    2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Sisyphus was kind of the iconic hero of the Stoics. And he was a man because he did something good. He delivered a gift to humanity. He angered the gods and they condemned him to push a rock up the hill every day, and then it would roll down. When he got to the top it would roll down and he'd spend the night going back down the hill to collect it and then rolling it back up the hill again. And the task was absurd, it was insurmountable, he could never win. But the last line of that book is one of the great lines, which is something to the extent that I can picture as if it is smiling because Camus' belief was that even though his task was insurmountable, that he was a happy man. And he was a happy man because he put his shoulder to the stone.”

    2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Suppose that Camus Viewed the world and the way that the Stoics did and a lot of the existentialists was that it was so absurd and that the problems and the tasks that were given just to live a life are so insurmountable that the only way that we can kind of get back the gods for giving us this impossible task of living life was to embrace it and to enjoy it and to do our best at it. I mean, to me, I, you know, I read Kimu and particularly in the myth of Sisyphus as kind of as a parable that, and it's the same lesson that I think he writes about in the plague. We're all given these insurmountable tasks in our lives, but by doing our duty, by being of service to others, we can bring meaning to a meaningless chaos and we can bring order to the universe.”

    2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah, I do agree with that. And He was not unique in saying that. You know, Thomas Jefferson said that the Tree of Liberty has to be watered with the blood of each generation. And what he meant by that is that you can't live off, we can't live off the laurels of the American Revolution. We had a group, we had a generation where between 25,000 and 70,000 Americans died, they gave their lives, they gave their livelihoods, they gave their status, they gave their property, and they put it all on the line to give us our Bill of Rights, but those Bill of Rights the moment that we sign them, there were forces within our society. That began trying to chip away at them. And that, you know, happens in every generation. And it is the obligation of every generation to safeguard and protect those freedoms.”

    2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “To me, freedom does not mean chaos. And it does not mean anarchy, it means that it has to be accompanied by restraint if it's going to. live up to its promise and self-restraint. What it means, the capacity for human beings to exercise and to fulfill their creative energies unrestrained as much as possible by government.”

    2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Winthrop was a white man and a Protestant that every immigrant group had Who came after them kind of adopted that belief? And I know my family came over, all of my grandparents came over in 1848 during the potato famine. And they saw this country as unique in history as something that That was part of kind of a broader spiritual mission. And so I'd say that from a 30,000 foot level, I grew up so proud of this country and believing that it was the greatest country in the world and for those reasons.”

    2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Land we have to take this country as a gift from God and then turn it into an example for the rest of the world of God's love, of God's will. And wisdom 200 years later, 250 years later, a different generation, they're mainly Deus. There are people who had a belief in God, but not so much a love of particularly religious cosmologies. You know, the framers, the Constitution believe that we were creating something that would be replicated around the world and that it was an example in democracy, there would be this kind of wisdom from the You know that. And the word wisdom means a knowledge of God's will. That somehow God would speak through the collective in a way that he or she could not speak through totalitarian regimes. And I think that that's something that even though”

    2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And all of them in one way or another are modeled on the American experience. And it's kind of extraordinary because sort of our first contact with our first serious and sustained contact with the European culture and continent was in 1608 when John Winthrop came over with his Puritans in the sloop Arbella. And Winthrop gave this famous speech where he said this is going to be a city on a hill. This is going to be an example for all the other nations in the world. And he warned his fellow Puritans they were sitting at this great expanse of land. He said, we can't be seduced by the lure of real estate or by the carnal opportunities of”

    2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I would say there's so many things that I love about the country on the landscapes and the waterways and the people, et cetera, but on the kind of the higher level And that term has been given a bad name, particularly by the neocons, the actions of the neocons in recent decades who have turned that phrase into kind of a justification for forcing people to adopt American systems or values at the barrel of a gun. But my father and uncle used it in a very different way, and they were very proud of it. I grew up very proud of this country because we were the exemplary nation in the sense that we were an example of Democracy all over the world when we first launched our democracy in 1780, we were the only democracy on earth. And by the Civil War, by 1865, there were six democracies. Today, there's probably 190.”

    2023-07-06 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #388 – Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source