Robert C. Solomon Quotations

So if the euro, if Euroland is to become a reserve center, if the euro is to become a reserve currency, Euroland will have to have a deficit in its overall balance of payments.

To the extent that the United States has, I don't like the word hegemony, the United States has influence around the world, I don't think that's based on to any significant degree on the fact that countries use the dollar as their major reserve.

There has been talk in Europe about American hegemony being somehow based upon the use of the dollar in the world. I just don't see that connection at all.

Love can be understood only "from the inside," as a language can be understood only by someone who speaks it, as a world can be understood only by someone who lives in it.

Chances are the movements of the euro as against the dollar will be relatively moderate.

If a currency is to become a growing, an increasing reserve currency, there has to be not only a demand for it there has to be a supply of it.

The dollar is currently the principal reserve currency in the world.

On private transactions, I'll just go very quickly now, a major difference between the United States and Euroland is that in Europe banks are much more important in financial transactions than in the United States.

There is a European Central Bank, of course, established and it has the structure similar to the Federal Reserve system, not precisely the same but similar.

The United States as usual has a sizable deficit in the current account of its balance of payments, trade account and other current accounts, current account items.

In the United States, securities markets are much more developed than they are in Europe.

The major material advantage, financial advantage from having a reserve currency is that between 200 and 300 billion dollar bills, that may be twenty, fifty, hundred dollar bills as well as ones, exist in the world - a lot of them in Russia as you all know I'm sure.

The reserve currency role seems to add prestige to an area and some people in Europe have talked about the desirability of the euro becoming an international reserve currency.

There's a stability and growth pact which was agreed for the eleven countries which tries to limit the size of budget deficits among the eleven countries.

The dollar went up some eighty percent in real terms as I recall now or something like that - from '80 to '85.

The prices of all imports would rise if the dollar depreciates.

Another question has been raised rather widely in Europe, in Japan as well as in the United States is what, to what extent will the euro become a reserve currency.

Back in those days, in the fifties and sixties, countries had balance of payment's deficits or surpluses, those were reflected much more than today in movements of reserves among countries.

Some countries that are close to Europe that already hold Deutschemarks, clearly would automatically hold euros, those are countries in Eastern Europe mainly, a few countries in Africa.

Today we have so much more flow of private capital that most international imbalances are financed that way, by private capital movements.

So you can be pretty sure that central banks around the world will not start dumping dollars on the market in order to buy euros.

The dollar performs internationally all three functions of money, as a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a standard of value.

The dollar is the main private currency for investment purposes, for transactions purposes, as a vehicle currency as it's called.

The brain can be seen as a complex machine, like a gooey computer.

High-class kitsch may well be "perfect" in its form and and composition: the academic painters were often masters of their craft. Thus, the accusation that a work of kitsch is based not on lack of for or aesthetic merit but on the presence of a particularly provocative emotional content. (The best art, by contrast, eschews emotional content altogether.)

High kitsch, whatever else may be said of it, cannot be openly dismissed as cheap.

Indeed, some kitsch seems to be flawed by its very perfection, its technical virtuosity and its precise execution, its explicit knowledge of the tradition

The trumped-up charges against kitsch and sentimentality should disturb us and make us suspicious.

Trust and the ability to identify trustworthiness are not the same thing, although trust and trustworthiness are logically linked.

Trust is a skill learned over time so that, like a well-trained athlete, one makes the right moves, usually without much reflection.

True, trust necessarily carries with it uncertainties, but we must force ourselves to think about these uncertainties as possibilities and opportunities, not as liabilities.

Many people are blind to trust, not so much to its benefits as to its nature and the practices that make it possible.

Familiarity can no longer be a necessary condition for trust.

Building trust means thinking about trust in a positive way.

Building trust begins with an appreciation and understanding of trust, but it also requires practice and practices.

Trust is a skill, one that is an aspect of virtually all human practices, cultures, and relationships.

We also confuse trust with familiarity.

Spirituality can be severed from both vicious sectarianism and thoughtless banalities. Spirituality, I have come to see, is nothing less than the thoughtful love of life. [Spirituality for the Skeptic]

Trust is built step by step, commitment by commitment, on every level.

Whether one sees the world as God's creation or as a secular mystery that science is on the way to figuring out, there is no denying the beauty and majesty of everything from mountain ranges, deserts, and rain forests to the exquisite details in the design of an ordinary mosquito.

Sexuality is primarily a means of communicating with other people, a way of talking to them, of expressing our feelings about ourselves and them. It is essentially a language, a body language, in which one can express gentleness and affection, anger and resentment, superiority and dependence far more succinctly than would be possible verbally, where expressions are unavoidably abstract and often clumsy.

All trust involves vulnerability and risk, and nothing would count as trust if there were no possibility of betrayal.

For all of the advice in the magazines on "How to Keep your Love Alive," the salvation of love is not the prolongation of sexual desire but the shared lifelong cultivation of a romantic lightheartedness that softens conflicts and anxieties and focuses serious attention even as it undermines seriousness as such. It's hard to fall out of love so long as you're laughing together.

What gives life meaning is a form of rebellion, rebellion against reason, an insistence on believing passionately what we cannot believe rationally. The meaning of life is to be found in passion—romantic passion, religious passion, passion for work and for play, passionate commitments in the face of what reason knows to be meaningless.

Trust is almost always conditional, focused, qualified, and therefore limited.

Trust is not bound up with knowledge so much as it is with freedom, the openness to the unknown.

Thus when I have to summarize naturalized spirituality in a single phrase, it is this: the thoughtful love of life.

Trust opens up new and unimagined possibilities.