Non-fiction authors from Canada

"The public-choice theorists would have us believe that nobody ever gets involved in governments or the political arena out of a desire to accomplish public [goals[]].... Needless to say, the notion that citizens would voluntarily band together to fight injustice and poverty in faraway parts of the world is incomprehensible to this kind of thinking. This perhaps explains the frequent attempt to dismiss those in the anti-globalization movement as nothing more than a group of self-seeking opportunists - as if there is some kind of money to be made in championing debt elimination for the Third World."

"Private courier companies are fine to handle the lucrative parts of the [postal] business. But they have little interest in servicing remote communities, so these areas get poor or non-existent service. Similarly, leaving health care and education to the private marketplace will result in fine services for the affluent but leave many others without access to decent services (or in some cases any services at all). While this kind of deficiency is bad enough when it comes to postal delivery, it becomes downright serious in areas like health care and education."

"Utterly left out of Tax Freedom Day [a holiday marking how many days an average person must work before his or her annual taxes are paid off] is any notion that taxes are what we pay to buy services that we all need and use, and that would be much more expensive or even impossible to purchase privately - fire and police protection, highways, roads, canals, coast guard services, snow removal, water purification, schools, hospitals, libraries, etc. Tax Freedom Day could undoubtably be moved up to early January if we were prepared to walk out of our dwellings that morning onto a dirt path and take our chances on what might befall us."

"Despite loud complaints from members of the financial elite about high tax levels, it's interesting to note that they still manage to live in the finest houses, eat at the best restaurants, shop at the most expensive stores. If this is coercion, we should all experience it."

"Those tempted to slough off the helpful role of the state [in the earning of private property] should... "compare the fortune accumulated by Cornelius Vanderbilt in America with what he might have accumulated had he been adopted when an infant by a family of Hottentots.""

"[[George W. Bush|[George W.] Bush]] explained that he wasn't willing to take the steps outlined in the Kyoto accords - steps that both the scientific world and the international political community had agreed, with a stunning degree of unanimity, were necessary for the future viability of the earth - because he wasn't willing to jeopardize the rate of growth of the American economy. In what sense is this a rational position?"

"All our confidence in our ability to act collectively is being undermined, with the subtext message Whatever it is, the private sector can do it better. Never mind that there's no evidence for this. Never mind, for instance, that the private US health-care system is 40 percent more expensive per capita than the Canadian public system, even though the Canadian system provides full coverage for all Canadians and the American system leaves some forty-three million without any coverage at all. This isn't because Canadians are smarter than Americans - it's because we have a public system and they don't."

""Short-term inequality remains a problem," writes [right-wing scholar Dinesh] D'Souza... "but is it a problem we can live with?" …After searching his soul for a few seconds, he apparently concludes that we can live with it. Of course, inequality always feels like less of a problem to those who don't live in corrugated shacks, which is why sales of D'Souza's book have probably been brisker in Manhattan than in, say, Addis Ababa or Khartoum."

"Not only has capitalism failed to bring us to the brink of a scarcity-free world, but in a sense, you could say that capitalism invented scarcity - at least as a deliberate method of economic organization.... The flipside of this bounty, this endless feast, is scarcity."

"Under the market system, there is demand for a product if a lot of people want it - but that demand counts for nothing if those people have no money. If they lack money, their demand essentially doesn't exist...This explains why the drug industry is not investing money to develop a cure for a disease known as sleeping sickness, which leaves its victims in a coma. The disease...killed 66,000 people last year and threatens to infect 60 million more - but the only people who are afflicted by it are poverty-stricken Africans with no clout in the marketplace. Interestingly, there is a drug called eflornithine that is effective in lifting victims out of their comas. But drug companies stopped producing eflornithine in 1995 because it was no longer profitable to continue. The drug was still desperately needed, but only by people without money. So, following modern market practices, these people were simply left in a coma."

"[A]s things now stand, the case that capitalism will make the world - not just the West - materially better off has simply not been convincingly demonstrated. Indeed, with almost 70 per cent of the world's people experiencing a decline in their real incomes in recent years, the opposite appears to be true. The wanton celebration of market capitalism while so many people throughout the world are lacking basic food and shelter seems, if not downright vulgar, at least a little insensitive."

"Canada got one break in the Walkerton tragedy: the deadly contamination of the Ontario town's water supply, which killed seven people in the summer of 2000, came from cow manure. If the contamination had come instead from, say, a toxic chemical produced by a foreign company, that would have been worse. Then the company might well have sued Canada for hundreds of millions of dollars."

"One of the striking aspects of the new trade deals is that while they have invested corporations with a new set of rights, they have attached no responsibilities to those rights. Notice how the lawsuits all go in one direction - corporations sue governments for infringing their corporate profit-making rights. A government can't sue a corporation for infringing the rights of its citizens by, say, polluting local drinking water."

"Like chewing gum or hair gel, water [according to the World Bank and IMF] is to be sold by the private sector at market rates. The needs of the people are all that's left out of this equation.... [A] World Bank document cites the "willingness to pay" on the part of the people in Ghana as evidence of their recognition of the "health benefits" of drinkable water. It's amazing, isn't it, how people are "willing" to pay huge amounts for things that they need in order to survive!"

"It is almost enough to make one's jaw drop to think that officials at the World Bank and the IMF would suggest that they have poverty alleviation in mind when they force governments to withdraw subsidies that enable poor people to get clean water to drink. If this is a policy aimed at helping the world's poor, it's interesting to imagine what a policy aimed at hurting the world's poor would look like."

"[W]e are assured not just that things will work out over time, but that scarcity is "vanishing before our eyes." Why, look - even as we watch - those 2.8 billion people are going to find food on their plates. Look again in a few hours and their shacks will have toilets - and then air conditioning. In a few days, they'll likely have DVD systems and be doing their banking by cellphone."

"[The] contention that today's rich person is simply the winner of a "race that is open for anyone to enter" takes no account of inheritance or how we are equipped as we enter that race. It doesn't acknowledge that some approach the starting line in streamlined Lycra suits and track shoes, with full knowledge of the rules, a determined attitude and belief in their own abilities, not to mention a close friendship with those setting the rules and choosing the winner. Others, hungry from not having had a meal that day, barely make it to the starting line, don't really understand the purpose of the race or its rules, lack self-confidence and are full of hostility, and are convinced that those officials at the side of the track are actually cops waiting to bust them."

"[W]e have things fundamentally backwards today: we let the needs of the economy dictate the nature of our society, while we should let the needs of our society determine the nature of our economy."

"Thomas Friedman dismissed the protesters in Quebec City as members of the "Coalition to Keep Poor People Poor." …The Coalition to Keep Poor People Poor might as well disband; its apparent goal is being accomplished in spades by pro-market forces. If the prospects of the world's poor improving their lot is one that supposedly upsets anti-capitalist protestors, they can confidently put their gas masks and get back to the shopping mall - global capitalism can be trusted to keep the poor in check without any help."

"In every organization there is a considerable accumulation of dead wood in the executive level."

"Occupational incompetence is everywhere. Have you noticed it? Probably we all have noticed it."

"In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."

"In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties. Do not be fooled by apparent exceptions."

"Some Blockett-type employees actually believe that they have received a genuine promotion; others recognize the truth. But the main function of a pseudo-promotion is to deceive people outside the hierarchy. When this is achieved, the maneuver is counted a success."

"Never stand when you can sit; never walk when you can ride; never Push when you can Pull."

"Incompetence plus incompetence equals incompetence"

"The only valid rule about the proper length of a statement is that it achieve its purpose effectively."

"On second thought, maybe the atheist cannot find God, for the same reason a thief cannot find a policeman."

"Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status."

"If you don't know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else."

"The habitually punctual make all their mistakes right on time."

"Television has changed the American child from an irresistible force into an immovable object."

"If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?"

"Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it."

"When you see yourself quoted in print and you're sorry you said it, it suddenly becomes a misquotation."

"Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them."

"Dr. Peter effectively destroys examples of seeming exceptions and is rather convincing that his principle is ubiquitous."

"There's a lyric in the middle of the song that says, "I want to decide between survival and bliss." Basically I'm talking about the difference between really being alive and really embracing the reason why I'm here on this earth versus my just being asleep and sleep walking and accepting the status quo and accepting somewhat of a suffering mentality to being here. It really is my responsibility to distinguish the difference between the two and choose which one I want. It's so easy for me to want to not take responsibility for my life and relinquish it and look outside of myself for the answers that I know very well are within me. It's so scary to be silent and it's so scary to go within, until I do it. And once I'm doing it, I just wonder why I wasn't doing this all the time. So that decision to be fully alive is one that is preceded by some pretty intense decisions and some choices and responsibility-taking that at times can be very intimidating, again, before I do it."

"When [Jagged Little Pill] came out, I feel like I immediately went into survival mode to keep the 'overwhelm' that comes from being famous at bay. Ten years later, I have the luxury of time and distance to formally honor it."

"For a long time, I didn't understand the idea of not being able to appeal to a human heart. And then Marianne Williamson (if I can dare drop her name)... we were doing a Q&A on stage, and there was a question about evil, and my quick, sort of spiritual response was (and I actually stand by it in some senses)... was that human beings are... maybe we're traumatised, maybe we're disconnected, and our behavior, ideally, would be separate from the truth of who we essentially are."

"Can't feel no pain when I'm thinking about you Dreaming isn't black and white Can't make no gain until my vision comes true Give it to me like I'd like to give it to you."

"I had high expectations It's something I could not compromise And when I saw you I wasn't ready It completely took my heart by surprise."

"And we hurt the ones that we love the most Why we do only heaven knows And I don't know why I'm still holding on, holding on.I reach in my heart to see If your love is alive in me But now I feel alone My feelings turn to stone My heart makes no apologies."

"Do I stress you out? My sweater is on backwards and inside out And you say, "How appropriate!""

"And there I go jumping before the gunshot has gone off, Slap me with the splintered ruler. And it would knock me to the floor if I wasn't there already. If only I could hunt the hunter."

"I want you to know that I'm happy for you, I wish nothing but the best for you both. An older version of me, Is she perverted like me? Would she go down on you in a theatre? Does she speak eloquently? And would she have your baby? I'm sure she'd make a really excellent mother."

"'Cause the love that you gave that we made Wasn't able to make it enough for you to be open wide, no. And every time you speak her name Does she know how you told me You'd hold me until you died? Till you died, but you're still alive.And I'm here to remind you Of the mess you left when you went away. It's not fair to deny me Of the cross I bear that you gave to me. You, you, you oughta know."

"'Cause the joke that you made in the bed that was me And I'm not gonna fade as soon as you close your eyes. And you know it. And every time I scratch my nails down someone else's back I hope you feel it. Well, can you feel it?"

"Sometimes is never quite enough If you're flawless, then you'll win my love. Don't forget to win first place. Don't forget to keep that smile on your face."

"I'm broke, but I'm happy. I'm poor, but I'm kind. I'm short, but I'm healthy, yeah. I'm high, but I'm grounded. I'm sane, but I'm overwhelmed. I'm lost, but I'm hopeful, baby.And what it all comes down to Is that everything's gonna be fine, fine, fine. 'Cause I've got one hand in my pocket And the other one is givin' a high five."

"Wait a minute, man You mispronounced my name You didn't wait for all the information Before you turned me away. Wait a minute, sir, You kind of hurt my feelings. You see me as a sweet back-loaded puppet And you've got meal ticket taste."

"I sang Alleluia in the choir (Alleluia) I confessed my darkest deeds to an envious man. My brothers, They never went blind for what they did, but I may as well have. In the name of the Father, the Skeptic and the Son, I had one more stupid question."

"I recommend getting your heart trampled on to anyone Yeah, oh. I recommend walkin' around naked in your living room Yeah.Swallow it down (What a jagged little pill) It feels so good (Swimming in your stomach) Wait until the dust settlesYou live, you learn. You love, you learn. You cry, you learn. You lose, you learn. You bleed, you learn. You scream, you learn."

"I had no choice but to hear you. You stated your case, time and again. I thought about it. You treat me like I'm a princess. I'm not used to liking that. You ask how my day was.You've already won me over In spite of me. And don't be alarmed if I fall Head over feet. And don't be surprised if I love you For all that you are. I couldn't help it, It's all your fault."

"A traffic jam when you're already late, A "No Smoking" sign on your cigarette break. It's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife. It's meeting the man of my dreams And then meeting his beautiful wife.And isn't it ironic? Don't you think? A little too ironic, And yeah, I really do think."

"There's an obvious attraction To the path of least resistance in your life Well there's an obvious aversion no amount of my insistence Could make you try tonight 'Cause it's easy not to So much easier not to And what goes around never comes around to you To you, to you, to you, to you, to you."

"Must be strangely exciting To watch the stoic squirm.Must be somewhat heartening To watch shepherd need shepherd But you, you're not allowed. You're uninvited An unfortunate slight."

"How 'bout me not blaming you for everything? How 'bout me enjoying the moment for once? How 'bout how good it feels to finally forgive you? How 'bout grieving it all one at a time?Thank you India. Thank you terror. Thank you disillusionment. Thank you frailty. Thank you consequence. Thank you, thank you silence."

"That I would be loved even when I numb myself That I would be good even when I am overwhelmed That I would be loved even when I was fuming That I would be good even if I was clingy.That I would be good even if I lost sanity That I would be good whether with or without you."

"How can you just throw words around? Like grieve and heal and mourn I feel fine we may not have been born As awake as you were It was much harder in those days We had paper routes uphill both ways We went from school to a job to a wife To instant parenthood."

"To all the unheard wisdom in the schoolyard, You think you're the right ones. You think you're the charmed ones, I'm sure. And how can you go on with such conviction? And who do you think you are? Why do you question me?"

"Supposed former infatuation junkie, I sink three pointers and you wax poetically."

"I remember vividly a day years ago, We were camping. You knew more than you thought you should know. You said I don't want ever to be brainwashed And you were mind-boggling, you were intense. You were uncomfortable in your own skin, You were thirsty. But mostly, you were beautiful."

"If we were their condemnations, If we were their projections, If we were our paranoias, I'd be joining you. If we were our incomes, If we were our obsessions, If we were our afflictions, I'd be joining you."

"Do you derive joy when someone else succeeds? Do you not play dirty when engaged in competition? Do you have a big intellectual capacity, But know that it alone does not equate to wisdom? Do you see everything as an illusion, But enjoy it even though you are not of it? Are you both masculine and feminine, politically aware, and don't believe in capital punishment?These are 21 things that I want in a lover, Not necessarily needs but qualities that I prefer."

"Dear popular boy, I know you're used to getting everything so easily, A stranger to the concept of reciprocity. People honor boys like you in this society."

"If it weren't for your maturity, none of this would have happened. If you weren't so wise beyond your years, I would've been able to control myself. If it weren't for my attention, you wouldn't have been successful and if If it weren't for me, you would never have amounted to very much.Ooh, this could be messy But you don't seem to mind, and Ooh, don't go telling everybody And overlook this supposed crime.We'll fast forward to a few years later And no one knows except the both of us. And I have honored your request for silence And you've washed your hands clean of this."

"I can feel so unsexy for someone so beautiful, So unloved and for someone so fine. I can feel so boring for someone so interesting, So ignorant for someone of sound mind."

"But this won't work as well as the way it once did Because I want to decide between survival and bliss. And though I know who I'm not I still don't know who I am, But I know I won't keep on playing the victim.These precious illusions in my head Did not let me down when I was a kid And parting with them is like parting with a childhood best friend."

"My misery has enjoyed company, And although I have ached, I don't threaten anybody. Sometimes I feel more bigness than I've shared with you. Sometimes I wonder why I quell When I'm not required to. I've tried to be small, I've tried to be stunted, I've tried roadblocks and all My happy endings prevented. Sometimes I feel it's all just too big To be true. I sabotage myself for fear of what My bigness could do."

"You're unsure and you're not ready, So that must mean I want you. You're unavailable and disinterested, To you I look for comfort. A million times in a million ways, I will try to change you. A million months and a million days, I'll try to convince you."

"When I'd speak of artistry you would roll your eyes skyward. When I'd speak of spirituality you would label it absurd. When I spoke of possibility you would frown and shake your head. If I had stayed much longer, I'd have surely imploded. These are my words. This is my house. These are my friends of which you've had no part of."

"How to lie to yourself and thereby to everyone else, How to keep smiling when you're thinking of killing yourself, How to numb a-la-holic to avoid going within, How to stay stuck in blue by blaming them for everything.I'll teach you all this in eight easy steps, A course of a lifetime, you'll never forget. I'll show you how to in eight easy steps, I'll show you how leadership looks when taught by the best."

"My tendency to want to do away feels natural and My urgency to dream of softer places feels understandable, But I knowThe only way out is through, The faster we're in, the better. The only way out is through ultimately."

"I wanna be naked running through the streets. I wanna invite this so-called chaos that you'd think I dare not be. I wanna be weightless flying through the air, I wanna drop all these limitations but the shoes upon my feet."

"Not in contact, not a letter, Such communication, telepathic. You've been vilified, used as fodder. You deserve a piece of every record."

"I feel this, truly proclaimed Will help the curbing of this tendency. I know this sharing of shame Will ensure that I won't forget myself so easily."

"I am the funniest woman that you've ever known. I am the dullest woman that you've ever known. I'm the most gorgeous woman that you've ever known and you've never met anyone Who's as everything as I am sometimes."

"There is no difference in what we're doing in here That doesn't show up as bigger symptoms out there. So why spend all our time in dressing our bandages When we've the ultimate key to the cause right here? Our underneath."

"Day one, day one, Start over again. Step one, step one, I'm barely making sense. For now, I'm faking it Until I'm pseudo making it. From scratch, begin again, But this time "I" as "I" And not as "we"."

"This is in praise of the vulnerable man, Why won’t you lead the rest of your cavalry home?"

"I'll be your keeper for life, as your guardian. I'll be your warrior of care, your first warden. I'll be your angel on call, I'll be on demand. The greatest honor of all, as your guardian."

"So now it's your, your religion against my, my religion My humble opinion against yours This does not feel like love It's you, your conviction against my, my conviction And I'd like to know what we'd see Through the lens of love Love, love, love."

"I wake up and first things first I’m of service I make sure your needs are met, as a selfless I give hard and serve hard and now I, I need a break I give big, I give all and now it’s time to regenerate."

"This is a life of extremes Both sides are slippery and enticing These are my places off the rails And this, my loose recollection of a falling I barely remember who I failed I was just trying to keep it together.This is my first wave of my white flag This is the sound of me hitting bottom This, my surrender, if that's what you call it In the anatomy of my crash."

"First thing that you'll notice is some separation from each other Yes, it's a lie, we've been believing since time immemorial There was an apple, there was a snake, there was division There was a split, there was a conflict in the fabric of life.One became two, and then everyone was out for themselves Everyone was pitted against each other, conflict ruled the realm All our devotions and temperaments are pulled from different wells We seem to easily forget we are made of the same cells."

"These are the reasons I drink The reasons I tell everybody I'm fine even though I am not These are the reasons I overdo it I have been working since I can remember, since I was single digits Now, even though I've been busted I don't know where to draw the line 'cause that groove has gotten so deep."

"There's nothing ironic about being stuck in a traffic jam when you're late for something. [pause] Unless you're a town planner. If you were a town planner... and you were late for a seminar of town planners at which you were giving a talk on how you solved the problem of traffic congestion in your area, and couldn't get to it because you got stuck in a traffic jam, that'd be well ironic! [mimicking a town planner] 'I'm sorry, lads, you'll never guess!'"

"When I got my first commission after Habitat, for a few weeks I couldn't draw.""

"Architecture is not about building the impossible, which we can do if we have enough money and enough tools and enough computers, it is about building what is appropriate and about attaining beauty through such an approach. I describe this premise as "inherent buildability and I believe it is central to what I do."

"One of the mistakes that Rand makes is that after she condemns a belief or an action, she goes on to tell you the psychology of the person who did it, as if she knows. I focus my judgment on the action and not on the person. My primary interest is: do I admire or dislike this behavior? And there, judgment is important for me. People often attribute all kinds of things to another person, without ever knowing where that person’s coming from. Most of the time, I regard the judgment of people as a waste of time. I regard the judgment of behavior as imperative."

"Rand always says, “Never pass up an opportunity to pass moral judgment.” Well I say: “Look for an opportunity to do something more useful instead.” Nobody was led to virtue by being told he was a scoundrel."

"Man's need of self-esteem entails the need for a sense of control over reality – but no control is possible in a universe which, by one's own concession, contains the supernatural, the miraculous and the causeless, a universe in which one is at the mercy of ghosts and demons, in which one must deal, not with the unknown, but with the unknowable; no control is possible if man proposes, but a ghost disposes; no control is possible if the universe is a haunted house."

"It would be hard to name a more certain sign of poor self-esteem than the need to perceive some other group as inferior."

"Pride is the emotional reward of achievement. It is not a vice to be overcome but a virtue to be attained."

"[I]f one day I look out from my cabin's porch and see a row of windmills spinning in the distance, I won't curse them. I will praise them. It will mean we are finally getting somewhere."

"More than a billion people lack adequate access to clean water."

"With the growing urgency of climate change, we cannot have it both ways. We cannot shout from the rooftops about the dangers of global warming and then turn around and shout even louder about the "dangers" of windmills."

"As an atheist, Suzuki declares, he has no illusions about life and death, adding that the individual is insignificant in cosmic terms. Human beings must come to terms with the unbearable reality that they, like all life, will be extinguished. What he finds most difficult, he confides, "is the idea that this guy looking back at me in the mirror, this person locked into my skull full of memories that make him who he is, this fellow who has known pain, joy, thoughts, having existed for such a brief flash in all eternity, is going to vanish forever at his death. Forever is such a long time, and 70, 80, 90, even 100 years is such a tiny interval in all of time.""

"The planet, hell! What about my nuts?"

"We now have access to so much information that we can find support for any prejudice or opinion."

"Oh, I think Canada is full too! Although it’s the second largest country in the world, our useful area has been reduced. Our immigration policy is disgusting: We plunder southern countries by depriving them of future leaders, and we want to increase our population to support economic growth. It’s crazy!"

"The question is have we met our match?"

"No matter what lengths politicians, corporate interests and others take to avoid, downplay and obfuscate serious issues around environmental degradation and our economic system’s destructive path, we can’t deny reality. Studies show we must refrain from burning most fossil fuel reserves to avoid catastrophic warming. In little more than a century, the human population has more than quadrupled to seven billion and rising, and our plastic-choked, consumer-driven, car-obsessed cultures have led to resource depletion, species extinction, ocean degradation, climate change and more. It’s past time to open our eyes and shift to a more sensible approach to living on this small, precious planet."

"Many solutions are being employed or developed, but not fast enough to forestall catastrophe. In Canada, we have federal and provincial governments hell-bent on expanding fossil fuel infrastructure and development to reap as much profit as possible from a dying industry and to satisfy the vagaries of short election cycles. The fossil fuel industry continues to receive massive subsidies, including a multi-billion-dollar taxpayer bailout for an American pipeline company, while clean energy receives far less support."

"I think we have to stop building cities to serve the car... We have to return to the notion that cities have become human habitats, cities are human created things."

"I meet a lot of parents that say, “what, what can I do”, you know, and I say, ‘“Stop driving your kids to school!” This is crazy. It'll be healthier for you and healthier for the environment. So it's not just the way we design our cities differently, but our own behavior within the cities."

"We now live within a globalized economy. So to live the way we are in Vancouver, it means that people in Mexico, people in Africa are having to change the way they're living."

"the biggest challenge we've got to do right away, stop the hyper consumption that demands that all of these areas serve us."

"If you look at the states in the United States, or the provinces, that have not really been able to come to grips with the COVID crisis, they are the ones led by people who said, “We got to get the economy going, the economy, the economy”, so that the the health and well being of the community or the the State is not as important as the economy...the ultra rich have just been getting richer and richer. So you know, the economy's not connected to the well being of people or the well being of the planet."

"We've got to begin to shut down fracking and the the more difficult areas, deep underground and the deep underwater. Shutdown the riskiest areas...Fracking is one of the dumbest ways that you can imagine getting your energy because of the water that you're using, polluting it."

"We can shut down immediately all subsidizing of the fossil fuel industry. We've got to shut down their ability to advertise, the way we did with tobacco."

"The most important thing is to say, we've got to be 50% off fossil fuels by 2030. And this is what we have to do every year, we've got to mandate reductions year after year after year, if we're serious about it."

"I think for the individuals -- make the word disposable an obscene word. If someone says, “Well, I got a disposable cup”, you cover your kid's ear and say, “Don't listen to that man, what a terrible thing to say”. Because the whole idea of disposable, that's a notion brought in by economists."

"We're changing the chemistry of the atmosphere. And we're doing it in a way that has never happened in nature. We're doing it so quickly. Nature, of course, has had fluctuations. We've gone from warm periods to ice ages. But that's been over 1000s and 1000s of years. We're doing it at an unprecedented rate. The experiment’s started. If we stopped all emissions today it will still take over a century to find equilibration. At the same time that we're adding stuff to the atmosphere at an unprecedented rate, we're cutting down, we're destroying the only real safety that we have, which is the web of living green things all over the planet."

"I think even a lot of really committed environmentalists, they think, well, if everybody drives an electric car, and we have all LED lights, and and you know, that somehow everything will be fine. No, it's not going to be that simple. Reduction of our fossil fuel use by 2030. Everything is going to change and we can't go on in this hyper consuming way. There going to be massive changes."

"the underlying root cause of our problem is that we've radically shifted in the way that we live on earth. For most of our existence, 95% of human existence, we were a nomadic hunter gatherer, we had to follow animals and plants do the seasons on their migration, carrying everything we owned. You know damn well you're deeply embedded in nature. And all of your ceremonies and in traditional cultures, their ceremonies are about thanking their creator for Mother Nature's abundance, and making a commitment to act properly in order to ensure that abundance will continue. That's what's needed, a recognition of a deeply embedded.. but we've elevated ourselves above all, we think that we're the top of the heap, and that everything is there for us to use in any way we can imagine. And now with environmentalism, oh, well, we have to be more careful. But we still are making that assumption-- we're at the top of the heap. So all of our solutions are all about serving us. We got to ensure jobs, we got to ensure the economy. We’ve got to ensure politically that… and we're not seeing that the deeper underlying thing is the way that we live on this planet"

"we've become totally narcissistic. And Donald Trump, to me, is the ultimate expression of that kind of narcissism. Me, me, me. Screw anybody else is not about me, me, me."

"There has been no media coverage of D Suzuki's extreme anti-immigration views.What would happen if a prominent conservative said same thing?"

"Suzuki’s extreme comments reveal how offside he is with Canadians"

"Whether Canada ends up as o­ne national government or two national governments or several national governments, or some other kind of arrangement is, quite frankly, secondary in my opinion… And whether Canada ends up with o­ne national government or two governments or ten governments, the Canadian people will require less government no matter what the constitutional status or arrangement of any future country may be."

"Universality has been severely reduced: it is virtually dead as a concept in most areas of public policy…These achievements are due in part to the Reform Party…"

"In terms of the unemployed, of which we have over a million-and-a-half, I don't feel particularly bad for many of these people."

"These proposals included cries for billions of new money for social assistance in the name of “child poverty” and for more business subsidies in the name of “cultural identity. In both cases I was sought out as a rare public figure to oppose such projects.”"

"Human rights commissions, as they are evolving, are an attack o­n our fundamental freedoms and the basic existence of a democratic society…It is in fact totalitarianism. I find this is very scary stuff."

"[Y]our country, and particularly your conservative movement, is a light and an inspiration to people in this country and across the world."

"It may not be true, but it's legendary that if you're like all Americans, you know almost nothing except for your own country. Which makes you probably knowledgeable about one more country than most Canadians."

"[S]ome basic facts about Canada that are relevant to my talk... Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it."

"In terms of the unemployed... don't feel particularly bad for many of these people. They don't feel bad about it themselves, as long as they're receiving generous social assistance and unemployment insurance."

"While [Montreal] it is a French-speaking city – largely – it has an enormous English-speaking minority and a large number of what are called ethnics: they who are largely immigrant communities, but who politically and culturally tend to identify with the English community."

"[W]e have a Supreme Court, like yours, which, since we put a charter of rights in our constitution in 1982, is becoming increasingly arbitrary and important. It is also appointed by the Prime Minister. Unlike your Supreme Court, we have no ratification process."

"[T]he NDP is kind of proof that the Devil lives and interferes in the affairs of men."

"[The Liberal party is a] moderate Democrat, a type of Clinton-pragmatic Democrat. It's moved in the last few years very much to the right on fiscal and economic concerns, but still believes in government intrusion in the economy where possible, and does, in its majority, believe in fairly liberal social values."

"In the last Parliament, [the Liberal Party] enacted comprehensive gun control..."

"There is an important caveat to its liberal social values. For historic reasons that I won't get into, the Liberal party gets the votes of most Catholics in the country, including many practising Catholics."

"Then there is the Progressive Conservative party, the PC party, which won only 20 seats. Now, the term Progressive Conservative will immediately raise suspicions in all of your minds. It should. It's obviously kind of an oxymoron."

"But the Progressive Conservative is very definitely liberal Republican. These are people who are moderately conservative on economic matters, and in the past have been moderately liberal, even sometimes quite liberal on social policy matters."

"In fact, before the Reform Party really became a force in the late '80s, early '90s, the leadership of the Conservative party was running the largest deficits in Canadian history."

"They were in favour of gay rights officially, officially for abortion on demand... This explains one of the reasons why the Reform party has become such a power."

"The Reform party is much closer to what you would call conservative Republican."

"Let me say a little bit about the Reform party because I want you to be very clear on what the Reform party is and is not... The Reform party is very much a leader-driven party."

"[The Reform Party] also has some Buchananist tendencies. I know there are probably many admirers of Mr. Buchanan here, but I mean that in the sense that there are some anti-market elements in the Reform Party."

"The predecessor of the Reform party, the Social Credit party, was very much like this. Believing in funny money and control of banking, and a whole bunch of fairly non-conservative economic things."

"[The Reform Party is] also the most conservative socially, but it's not a theocon party, to use the term. The Reform party does favour the use of referendums and free votes in Parliament on moral issues and social issues."

"Last year, when we had the Liberal government putting the protection of sexual orientation in our Human Rights Act, the Reform Party was opposed to that, but made a terrible mess of the debate. In fact, discredited itself on that issue, not just with the conventional liberal media, but even with many social conservatives by the manner in which it mishandled that."

"The party system that is developing here in Canada is a party system that replicates the antebellum period, the pre-Civil War period of the United States... [T]he dynamics, the political and partisan dynamics of this, are remarkably similar."

"The Bloc Québécois is equivalent to your Southern secessionists, Southern Democrats, states rights activists. The Bloc Québécois, its 44 seats, come entirely from the province of Quebec. But even more strikingly, they come from ridings, or election districts, almost entirely populated by the descendants of the original European French settlers."

"If you look at the surviving PC support, it's very much concentrated in Atlantic Canada, in the provinces to the east of Quebec. These are very much equivalent to the United States border states. They're weak economically. They have very grim prospects if Quebec separates. These people want a solution at almost any cost."

"The Liberal party is very much your northern Democrat, or mainstream Democratic party, a party that is less concessionary to the secessionists than the PCs, but still somewhat concessionary. And they still occupy the mainstream of public opinion in Ontario, which is the big and powerful province, politically and economically, alongside Quebec."

"The Reform party is very much a modern manifestation of the Republican movement in Western Canada; the U.S. Republicans started in the western United States."

"Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status."

"If Ottawa giveth, then Ottawa can taketh away… This is o­ne more reason why Westerners, but Albertans in particular, need to think hard about their future in this country. After sober reflection, Albertans should decide that it is time to seek a new relationship with Canada. …Having hit a wall, the next logical step is not to bang our heads against it. It is to take the bricks and begin building another home – a stronger and much more autonomous Alberta. It is time to look at Quebec and to learn. What Albertans should take from this example is to become "maitres chez nous"."

"You’ve got to remember that west of Winnipeg the ridings the Liberals hold are dominated by people who are either recent Asian immigrants or recent migrants from eastern Canada: people who live in ghettoes and who are not integrated into western Canadian society."

"It is imperative to take the initiative, to build firewalls around Alberta, to limit the extent to which an aggressive and hostile federal government can encroach upon legitimate provincial jurisdiction."

"After all, enforced national bilingualism in this country isn’t mere policy. It has attained the status of a religion. It’s a dogma which one is supposed to accept without question.…Make no mistake. Canada is not a bilingual country. In fact it is less bilingual today than it has ever been...As a religion, bilingualism is the god that failed. It has led to no fairness, produced no unity, and cost Canadian taxpayers untold millions."

"There is a continental culture. There is a Canadian culture that is in some ways unique to Canada, but I don't think Canadian culture coincides neatly with borders."

"I don't know all the facts on Iraq, but I think we should work closely with the Americans."

"I think in Atlantic Canada, because of what happened in the decades following Confederation, there is a culture of defeat that we have to overcome. …Atlantic Canada's culture of defeat will be hard to overcome as long as Atlantic Canada is actually physically trailing the rest of the country."

"I think there is a dangerous rise in defeatist sentiment in this country. I have said that repeatedly, and I mean it and I believe it."

"Mr. Speaker, I am sure the picture of the hon. member of the NDP [Svend Robinson] is posted in much more wonderful places than just police stations."

"This party will not take its position based on public opinion polls. We will not take a stand based o­n focus groups. We will not take a stand based o­n phone-in shows or householder surveys or any other vagaries of public opinion… In my judgment Canada will eventually join with the allied coalition if war on Iraq comes to pass. The government will join, notwithstanding its failure to prepare, its neglect in co-operating with its allies, or its inability to contribute. In the end it will join out of the necessity created by a pattern of uncertainty and indecision. It will not join as a leader but unnoticed at the back of the parade."

"We support the war effort and believe we should be supporting our troops and our allies and be there with them doing everything necessary to win"

"We should have been there shoulder to shoulder with our allies. Our concern is the instability of our government as an ally. We are playing again with national and global security matters."

""It [referring to calling a Minister "Idiot"] was probably not an appropriate term, but we support the war effort and believe we should be supporting our troops and our allies and be there with them doing everything necessary to win."

"The world is now unipolar and contains o­nly o­ne superpower. Canada shares a continent with that superpower. In this context, given our common values and the political, economic and security interests that we share with the United States, there is now no more important foreign policy interest for Canada than maintaining the ability to exercise effective influence in Washington so as to advance unique Canadian policy objectives."

"On the justification for the war, it wasn't related to finding any particular weapon of mass destruction. In our judgment, it was much more fundamental. It was the removing of a regime that was hostile, that clearly had the intention of constructing weapons systems. … I think, frankly, that everybody knew the post-war situation was probably going to be more difficult than the war itself. Canada remains alienated from its allies, shut out of the reconstruction process to some degree, unable to influence events. There is no upside to the position Canada took."

"But I'm very libertarian in the sense that I believe in small government and, as a general rule, I don't believe in imposing values upon people."

"We must aim to make Canada a lower tax jurisdiction than the United States."

"Same sex marriage is not a human right. … [U]ndermining the traditional definition of marriage is an assault on multiculturalism and the practices in those communities."

"Corruption is not a Canadian value!"

"I believe that all taxes are bad."

"Canada is a vast and empty country."

"Those of different faiths and no faith should seek areas of common agreement based on their different perspectives."

"Gar nar dai doe heem."

"I think people should elect a cat person. If you elect a dog person, you elect someone who wants to be loved. If you elect a cat person, you elect someone who wants to serve."

"Now I know it’s unfashionable to refer to colonialism in anything other than negative terms. And certainly, no part of the world is unscarred by the excesses of empires. But in the Canadian context, the actions of the British Empire were largely benign and occasionally brilliant...This genius for governance shown by the mother country at the time no doubt explains in part why Canada’s path to independence was so long, patient and peaceful."

"When Ralph Goodale tried to tax Income Trusts they showed us where they stood, they showed us their attitude towards raiding Seniors hard earned assets and a Conservative government will never allow either of these parties to get away with that."

"Kyoto is essentially a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations."

"The treatment of children in Indian residential schools is a sad chapter in our history… Two primary objectives of the residential schools system were to remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture."

"In exercising our sovereignty over these waters, we are not only fulfilling our duty to the people who called this northern frontier home, and to the generations that will follow; we are also being faithful to all who came before us, who through great hardship and sacrifice made a quest for knowledge of the North."

"It [the Iraq invasion] was absolutely an error. It's obviously clear the evaluation of weapons of mass destruction proved not to be correct. That's absolutely true and that's why we're not sending anybody to Iraq."

"Faith teaches that there is a right and wrong beyond mere opinion or desire. Most importantly, it teaches us that freedom is not an end in itself, that how freedom is exercised matters as much as freedom itself,"

"We also have no history of colonialism. So we have all of the things that many people admire about the great powers but none of the things that threaten or bother them."

"We're very concerned about CRTC's decision on usage-based billing and its impact on consumers. I've asked for a review of the decision./Nous sommes très préoccupés par la décision du CRTC sur la facturation selon l'usage. J'ai demandé qu'on examine cette décision. (From post made on http://www.facebook.com/#!/pmharper on 02/01/2011)."

"A transition is taking place in Egypt. In my judgement, there is no going back. I think the old expression, “They’re not going to put the toothpaste back in the tube on this one.”"

"I think I have been perfectly clear in saying that I hope Canadians do elect a majority government. I think this cycle of election after election, minority after minority is beginning to put some of the country's interests in serious jeopardy."

"When people think of Islamic terrorism, they think of Afghanistan, or maybe they think of some place in the Middle East, but the truth is that threat exists all over the world ... There are a number of threats on a number of levels, but if you are talking about terrorism it is Islamicism ... There are other threats out there, but that is the one that I can tell you occupies the security apparatus most regularly in terms of actual terrorist threats ... homegrown [Islamic] terrorism is something we keep an eye on."

"Out security agencies work with each other and with others around the globe to track people who are threats to Canada and to watch threats that may evolve. I think though, this is not a time to commit sociology, if I can use an expression. It’s time to treat this- these things are serious threats. Global terrorist attacks, people who have agendas of violence—deep and abiding threats to all the values that our society stands for."

"a light of freedom and democracy in what is otherwise a region of darkness will always have Canada as a friend"

"Israel is the Middle East’s only legitimate democracy, surrounded by cadres, warlords and villains that do not respect democracy or human rights. These bellicose nations jealously regard Israel, envying its success, stability, and might. Israel faces an impossible calculus between defending itself and facing angry outcries or risking its own destruction."

"we do not offer them a better health-care plan than the ordinary Canadian can receive. I think that’s something that new and old stock Canadians can agree with"

"I think he's just out to get the Jewish vote. But that's not the way to do it. That's so insincere. I know that Jews seem to think Stephen Harper is so pro-Israel. I think he's capitalizing on that."

"When I recently re-read the definition of the term, "malignant narcissism", I felt like I was sitting in the gallery of the House of Commons, watching Harper tell outrageous lies about his opponents (like how they support the Taliban or their family is a terrorist) under the libel protection afforded to him in the House, makeup running in its customary stream down the right side of his face, eyes flashing in that rare emotional occurrence mentioned above, lips pulled back against his teeth in an expression that more resembles a rabid dog about to attack than an actual, human smile..."

"Harper is a nerd who aspires to bullydom. He keeps his caucus on a short leash. He speaks to the public via ads. The press and the people - the ingrates! - cannot be trusted to stay on message."

"The [Afghans] understand the difficult truth that their best hope of freedom lies in a temporary experience of imperial rule."

"To defeat evil, we may have to traffic in evils: indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war."

"The dilemmas here are best illustrated by looking closely at pre-emptive war. It is a lesser evil because, according to our traditional understanding of war, the only justified resort to war is a response to actual aggression. But those standards are outdated. They were conceived for wars against states and their armies, not for wars against terrorists and suicide bombers. Against this kind of enemy, everyone can see that instead of waiting for terrorists to hit us, it makes sense to get our retaliation in first."

"The difference between us and terrorists is supposed to be that we play by these rules, even if they don't. No, I haven't forgotten Hiroshima and My Lai. The American way of war has often been brutal, but at least our warriors are supposed to fight with honor and can be punished if they don't. There is no warrior's honor among terrorists."

"A liberal society cannot be defended by herbivores. We need carnivores to save us, but we had better make sure the meat-eaters hunt only on our orders."

"The Only cure for nihilism is for liberal democratic societies - their electorates, their judiciary, and their political leadership- to insist that force is legitimate only to the degree that it serves defensible political goals. Thus implies a constant exercise of due diligence..."

"It was Reagan who began the realignment of American politics, making the Republicans into internationalist Jeffersonians with his speech in London at the Palace of Westminster in 1982, which led to the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy and the emergence of democracy promotion as a central goal of United States foreign policy."

"Until George W. Bush, no American president -- not even Franklin Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson -- actually risked his presidency on the premise that Jefferson might be right. But this gambler from Texas has bet his place in history on the proposition, as he stated in a speech in March, that decades of American presidents' excusing and accommodating tyranny, in the pursuit of stability in the Middle East inflamed the hatred of the fanatics who piloted the planes into the twin towers on Sept. 11. If democracy plants itself in Iraq and spreads throughout the Middle East, Bush will be remembered as a plain-speaking visionary."

"As a former denizen of Harvard, I’ve had to learn that a sense of reality doesn’t always flourish in elite institutions. It is the street virtue par excellence. Bus drivers can display a shrewder grasp of what’s what than Nobel Prize winners. The only way any of us can improve our grasp of reality is to confront the world every day and learn, mostly from our mistakes, what works and what doesn’t. Yet even lengthy experience can fail us in life and in politics. Experience can imprison decision-makers in worn-out solutions while blinding them to the untried remedy that does the trick."

"Here's what we shouldn't do. We shouldn't import failed criminal justice policies from the United States. Mega prisons and mandatory minimums have failed in the United States,we've got to learn from the failure of the American criminal justice policy. Get tough on guns, invest in crime prevention and invest in victim services"

"Moral globalisation is best understood not as a tide of convergence in which we are swept together into a single modernity, but instead as a site of struggle over whether, and to what extent, the cash nexus can be made to serve moral imperatives of equity and justice and which civilisational model – Chinese, American, or some other rival’s – will define the order of the twenty-first century."

"You shouldn’t go into politics just to prove yourself—skydiving would be an easier path."

"Ever since I entered Parliament in January, people have been asking me: Why have you gone into politics? As in: “Are you nuts?” No, I’m not nuts. This is my country, after all."

"I’m in politics to speak up for a Canada that takes risks, that stands up for what’s right. A Canada that leads."

"I believe in Canadians. I believe in you. As I said at the beginning, we are a serious people."

"There is only one thing we can do about this: live the way we are supposed to live, as our Constitution commands us to, with dignity and respect for all. Being an American is not easy. It is hard. We are required to keep some serious promises. We are judged by a high standard, one we crafted for ourselves in the founding documents of the republic, the ones that talk about the equality of all people, the ones that tell us that government is of the people, by the people and for the people. We need to live by this, at home and abroad, and it is just about the only thing we can do to face the hatred of those who want to destroy us. Our best defense is to stay true to who we are. Our best defense is to refuse to live in fear, of them, of ourselves, of anyone."

"We are living a moment of truth in Iraq, a moment in which we have to look fair and square at disagreeable realities, in which we have to look at ourselves. The pictures from Abu Ghraib prison are a kind of mirror in which we have to look at ourselves and ask: what kind of people did this? How did this become possible? Could I have done a thing like this to those people?"

"We do need to ask ourselves, as a society, as a free people, how we came to this pass. Those soldiers were acting in the name of America, and they disgraced its name. We have to ask who authorized them to do so. Who should take responsibility here? We need answers to these questions, and we need to take responsibility as citizens that we get answers, and that accountability is established, right up the chain of command if need be, so that we do not go here again as a country."

"Some voices are calling on America to circle the wagons. Some are even saying that our enemies do worse, so we should respond in kind. The problem here is that this is America. This is a constitutional republic based on the rule of law and equal respect for all persons. We can’t pretend that we can bend the rules any which way. We made the rules for ourselves. We have to live by them."

"As Interim Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada."

"Coalition if necessary, but not necessarily a coalition."

"Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming."

"The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements."

"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"

"Do what you think is interesting, do something that you think is fun and worthwhile, because otherwise you won't do it well anyway."

"Advice to students: Leap in and try things. If you succeed, you can have enormous influence. If you fail, you have still learned something, and your next attempt is sure to be better for it. Advice to graduates: Do something you really enjoy doing. If it isn’t fun to get up in the morning and do your job or your school program, you’re in the wrong field."

"C is a razor-sharp tool, with which one can create an elegant and efficient program or a bloody mess."

"Mechanical rules are never a substitute for clarity of thought."

"Associative arrays are very very useful things and if you are only going to have one data structure that's the one to have. Because you could build everything else with it if you want."

"Loving can cost a lot but not loving always costs more, and those who fear to love often find that want of love is an emptiness that robs the joy from life."

"You can, after all, produce an orgasm yourself if that's what you want, so we must go to bed for something more."

"Men don't come to see other women to help take out the garbage and if they wanted to put up the screens they would have stayed home. So mistresses tend to get a steady diet of whipped cream, but no meat and potatoes, and wives often get the reverse, when both would like a bit of each."

"But women often find their husbands don't love them for the things they value in themselves, and part of the charm of an affair is you can give what you want, and need only give if you choose."

"Marriages should be as diverse as the people in them are, which means that some will be one of a kind, and some totally different still. And those who don't want to love, honor and obey, should be able to promise each other anything they choose, without having to ask anyone what they think of that, particularly themselves."

"It is not possible for one person to meet all of another's needs and marriage partners who expect this soon find each other wanting."

"People who are loving toward each other set up their marriages so that it is possible for both partners to get what they need from life and so that no one is expected to give up his needs to meet those of his spouse. And when their partner meets one of their needs they accept it as a gift, instead of viewing each unmet one as if it were a betrayal."

"It's in the fight, in the striving, in the mountains unclimbed that fulfillment lies, so if you have nothing to strive for, you have nothing to make you happy. When it comes to "for better" or "for worse," "for better" is often harder on a marriage."

"Loving someone means helping them to be more themselves, which can be different from being what you'd like them to be, although often they turn out the same."

"Good marriages seem to function something like a buddy system-- the people in them swim in their own waters but keep a protective eye on each other, and should the whistle blow, turn up quickly to hold each other's hand. It's more important today than ever before to know what your priorities are because life links us with more people than our hearts can hold, so men who know what they will go to the wall for, as well as for whom, are the ones whom it is nicest to be married to, presuming you're the one they have at the top of their list."

"It's impossible for men and women who love each other not to hurt each other now and then, but most women would settle happily for a man who tried not to cause the same hurt twice."

"It's very important to decode your own messages, like saying "I feel angry" instead of kicking the cat, and people who learn to do this find they are misunderstood less often and, as a fringe benefit, are clawed by fewer cats."

"The best men are those who put their cards on the table when something is bothering them, and if possible do it quietly, not blaming anyone, and if they're faced with a hysterical partner, who is not herself, identify with what she feels even when they can't make head or tail out of what she says."

"Much of women's resentment toward men at the moment is related to their notion that men, since they are supposed to be superior, should meet all their needs, and that is a pretty heavy trip to lay one anyone and generally leaves men feeling they've been charged with the national debt."

"I have been furious with men who have expected me to be faithful, and I have been even more furious with those who did not, and once I screamed at a man whom I loved more than I'd intended to, "If I'm faithful to you, what bloody business is it of yours?""

"I'm not sure there can be loving without commitment, although commitment takes all kinds and forms, and there can be commitment for the moment as well as commitment for all time. The kind that is essential for loving marriages-- and love affairs, as well-- is a commitment to preserving the essential quality of your partner's soul, adding to them rather than taking away."

"If I had to choose between having someone physically faithful to me or having him committed to my preservation, I would opt for the latter because there is no doubt in my mind when I see couples at parties selling each other out which is the worst offense. Physical fidelity is a lovely thing if someone feels that way about you willingly, but relatively meaningless of you exact it for a price. And while it is easy enough to be faithful for the first five or ten years, it is more difficult by twice each year after that, so women as well as men are finding it hard to do."

"There are problems connected with infidelity and problems connected with being faithful at any cost, and I am for letting those concerned choose the problems they'd prefer. There need not be one rule for all. Infidelity is enlarging and fragmenting and very very dangerous, but it has been known to retrieve people as well as marriages, so it can't be only bad. And while a lot of women would probably consider it better to have the man they care about rip-off other women if he must but hurry home again, I think I'd rather he be concerned about the survival of the people he sleeps with, even those who are not me. Men who take advantage of one woman take advantage of them all, and if he's going to have an experience in which I can't share, then I'd rather it be a good one, so if there are any benefits to trickle down the spout they'll be the kind I'd want."

"We tend to think in terms of fixing blame, of establishing adultery and making clear who did what to whom, when what is most important is not what was done but that no one be hurt. It's not that we care that much if our mate rubs off a few cells of epidermis in friction with someone else, it's that we are all afraid if he does, he'll stop loving us. And men who've always had affairs, considering it good for their morale, find that they are fearful just like their wives when the shoe is on the other foot. Any new ethic, if it's to work, will have to find ways of reconciling growth with commitment, change with loyalty, and freedom with alienation, because a world in which new loyalties constantly replace old ones will make neurotics of us all."

"I've learned not to ask for everything, just to make sure that I get what I must have. It doesn't matter who else gets what-- it only matters if you're deprived. Really splendid men understand that and find ways to manage their lives to they never give away anything that is their wife's. And if there are times when they need more than one woman in their life, they give back what they get to both. Being faithful means not costing people you love more than they can afford to pay. The best men are committed to their partners as much as to themselves."

"Divorce is very expensive, both economically and psychologically as well, but it probably isn't any more so than living with someone who isn't really on your side."

"Nobody really wants to spend life with someone who has no other choice, and children who have been raised by a mother who gave up her life for them almost always spend years on an analyst's couch learning to spit in her eye."

"While single women may not have a man they can count on or call at four in the night, they do have the knowledge that when a man comes to see them he wants to be with them. And while he may come less often, he will really be there when he does."

"You tend to have far more real, intense friendships when you are single, perhaps because you can be more honest when you do not have the marriage or someone else's feelings to protect."

"If one of the problems of marriage is that safety can lead to complacency, then one of the advantages of being single is that one is never safe enough to grow complacent, and constantly having to prove oneself often leads to growth."

"There were women in the golden age of Greece, called hetaerae, who were celebrated by Socrates and philosophers of his time. Although they existed solely for their own pleasure and that of men, they were respected for their independence of mind and spirit and thought of highly by the Greeks. Single women in today's world can function like hetaerae, learning from many and giving back to whom they will, and for the woman who enjoys such a life, it can be a good one, and one both she and society can be the better for."

"When my dad died at the end of my sophomore year [at university], I stopped and took stock of my life. There was this real sense that my childhood was officially over. I decided I wanted to be an actor. I knew I was loved as a kid. The thing you can always rely on, your core person, comes from your family's attention and love. When my mother got sick, and I'd see her fight to survive, it gave me an early view of bravery and what life was about. I was able to prepare for it. Your mother dies, and you're eighteen, and you face a choice. Are you going to take drugs? Become a drunk? Or are you going to try to become more spiritual? Why not go with the thing that seems more positive? [pause] Why do I tend to be optimistic? Because the alternative is just crushing to my soul."

"I truly believe that when you're funny, you're blessed. Your whole life is kind of golden. I was happy, although it was not perfect happiness. There was illness and sadness and death."

"I'm totally aware of how lucky I am. I have health, family, children. I do work that gives me total joy and allows me to make a living, and maybe, if I'm lucky enough, I'll feel I've fulfilled a little bit of service to society because I brought other people some laughter."

"It's the bane of existence for anyone in comedy. 'The photograph must be funny!' So the people coordinating the shoot throw rubber chickens at you, 20 at a time. Or put a feathered hat on you. Or give you a clown nose. Of course, all of this makes you depressed, so you wind up looking more like you're promoting A Long Day's Journey Into Night."

"[Ed Grimley] lives in a retirement home in New Jersey. It's called the Retirement Home in New Jersey for Characters Who Were Interesting in the '80s for About an Hour. He's there with the Whiners, Gumby and Jon Lovitz's 'That's the ticket' guy."

"Attention, attention, the key to practice, so many teachers have said. It’s true. When we come to know, even a little, this truly miraculous and open nature of our being, we begin to appreciate the jewels and riches in these very simple instructions that come down to us through our teachers."

"Greed for results, for something dramatic, undermines practice completely. The effects of meditation are subtle and take time to mature. When we are constantly looking for some kind of sign or attainment from our practice, we are essentially looking outside ourselves."

"As compassion deepens, we find ourselves developing a nobility of the heart. Increasingly, and often to our surprise, we respond to difficult situations with calmness, clarity and directness. A quiet fearlessness or confidence is present as we no longer fear that we will compromise our own integrity. We find, too, a joy, a joy which arises from the knowledge that our every act is meaningful and helpful to the world."

"The vast array of methods and techniques which comprise Buddhism, particularly the Tibetan tradition, are all to help us come to know simply what we are, buddha, awake and aware. Time and time again, we are told that we are buddha, that the buddha qualities are present now, but that we just don’t know it. The problem, for many of us, is that this knowing is not a form of knowing that we are used to. We need tools and methods to dismantle the emotional blocks, the habitual patterns, the worries, concerns, expectations, and hopes that keep us from trusting and knowing what we are."

"To see what you've done, look at what you are. To see what you'll be, look at your actions."

"It says in the sutras that buddha nature pervades all beings. But this does not mean that there is some thing which is buddha nature. Rather, when all the confusion of samsara is cleared away, what remains is buddha nature."

"If you don't clearly understand what you are looking for in a teacher or in internal work, you will inevitably accept someone else's agenda as your own. While you may start internal transformative work on the suggestion or advice of another person, at some point your practice has to become a response to your own questions about life and being."

"Buddha did not ignore suffering or try to explain it away as an unfortunate side effect of a divine plan or cosmic order. Suffering was, for him, the central issue."

"At every stage of practice a price has to be paid for clarity. The price is the loss of an illusion."

"The fundamental effort in Buddhist practice is to develop a sufficient capacity in attention so that you can experience your own non-existence."

"By just taking a breath you're moving into attention a little bit and so you get much less caught up in reactivity. A practical application of this in your life is, never say anything before you've taken one breath. It's a very simple practice--changes the dynamics of conversation with other people completely."

"The importance of conventional life is greatly exaggerated and a good death can do wonders."

"Study void. Void is what makes everything possible. If there is no emptiness or open space in your life then very very few things are possible."

"When people thank and tell you how much you've helped them, what they say has nothing to do with you. This is just their way of expressing joy in their own experience. Remember this, too, when people complain or criticize."

"We're going to have to retire the word mindfulness. It's been hopelessly corrupted in English."

"Any form of idealism involves avoiding some specific pain or suffering."

"As you become more awake you actually find yourself with less and less choice about what you do in any given situation. And you have less choice because you see more clearly. This is a very important point. Clarity doesn’t create more options. It eliminates options because you see that they aren’t appropriate or they don’t work."

"When you read sutras don't seek to understand them. Stay in touch with precisely what they are eliciting in terms of experience in you."

"What's the dominant emotion associated with purity? Anger. The most aggressive people are the ones who insist on being utterly pure. It's responsible for countless wars at all levels of society. Far better to have no aspiration, no hope and relate to things just as they are."

"When you experience things completely, then you know what they are."

"Appeals to justice or fairness are almost always stories that hide or protect unacknowledged hurts or pains."

"Some find they can practice effectively by bringing attention to the arising of like, dislike and indifference in their meditation practice and daily life. Others are able to use the power of loving kindness, compassion, equanimity, or devotion to change the way they experience things. And still others develop or naturally have enough capacity in awareness that they experience attraction as delight, aversion as clarity, and indifference as non-thought."

"The most reliable way to cut through the thinking process is to bring attention to what you are experiencing in the body."

"Each time you sit down to practice, take a few minutes to feel in your heart why this is important to you."

"If it's a flash it's been an awfully long flash. I've been around for 20 years in one of the largest media and political markets in the country, so I'd call it more of a slow burn."

"We want to challenge the established ideas with new ideas."

"This gorgeous Chinese girl gets up and I fell in love instantly."

"Politics matters. Ideas matter. Democracy matters."

"I believe that when Paul Martin cancelled affordable housing across this country it produced a dramatic rise in homelessness and deaths due to homelessness and I've always said I hold him responsible for that."

"I ask you to join me in saying that enough is enough with Liberal arrogance and scandals and enough to the vote-buying promises of the Conservatives. There's a better choice, a third option, the NDP"

"Layton: After all these years of inaction, will the Prime Minister finally get something done and do something the former government would not do and that is to cancel the subsidies to big oil and big ass--I mean big gas and start putting-- Stephen Harper: Mr. Speaker, I promise to get to the bottom of it."

"This debate is coming down essentially to two visions — Mr. Harper's vision for Canada and my vision for Canada, and to a decision to be made by people disappointed by Mr. (Stephane) Dion"

"We have not made these choices lightly, Our decision was made in the full seriousness and clear knowledge of what is at stake."

"He's put a lock on the door of the House of Commons and he refuses to face the people of Canada through their elected representatives"

"This is a budget that does not protect the vulnerable, it doesn't protect the jobs of today and it doesn't create the jobs that we need for tomorrow."

"I remember a Stephen Harper once upon a time... You've become what you used to oppose... Mr. Harper, what happened to you? What changed?"

"Most Canadians, if they don't show up for work, they don't get a promotion. … You missed 70 per cent of the votes."

"“That’s been a hashtag fail." And on the temptations stemming from a life of crime: "With the bling and everything that comes with it.""

"Spring is here my friends and a new chapter begins."

"I've always favoured proposition over opposition. But we will oppose the government when it's off track.We'll support positive suggestions that we'll bring forward and support the government when it's making progress."

"It's a privilege and it's an honour and Olivia and I are certainly looking forward to visiting this beautiful, historic building and being able to stay there during the session when we're here in Ottawa."

"(The lockout) makes no sense unless you put it in the context of a wider strategy, which is to somehow weaken Canadians' commitment to Canada Post so that ultimately, when the government gets out there to privatize it, they think they can get the public on their side"

"I think we've come to where we are because of those positive ties and working together for working families. That's our priority and continues to be. It's been there since our founding and we've now achieved the best success we've ever had electorally. So I think you want to continue with what's working"

"Why has he closed the door on Canada Post? Here's a guy who says he was a terrific manager of the economy and all things economic yet he's shut down our postal service. It's certainly the wrong thing to do and it sends a very bad signal out to the working people that tromp up and down our sidewalks and deliver our mail … that he doesn't really respect the bargaining process."

"If I've tried to bring anything to federal politics, it's the idea that hope and optimism should be at their heart; we can look after each other better than we do today."

"Canada is a great country, one of the hopes of the world. We can be a better one – a country of greater equality, justice, and opportunity. We can build a prosperous economy and a society that shares its benefits more fairly. We can look after our seniors. We can offer better futures for our children. We can do our part to save the world’s environment. We can restore our good name in the world. We can do all of these things because we finally have a party system at the national level where there are real choices; where your vote matters; where working for change can actually bring about change. In the months and years to come, New Democrats will put a compelling new alternative to you. My colleagues in our party are an impressive, committed team. Give them a careful hearing; consider the alternatives; and consider that we can be a better, fairer, more equal country by working together. Don’t let them tell you it can’t be done."

"My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world."

"Mes amis, l’amour est cent fois meilleur que la haine. L’espoir est meilleur que la peur. L’optimisme est meilleur que le désespoir. Alors aimons, gardons espoir et restons optimistes. Et nous changerons le monde."

"It’s about saying, ‘Hi Olivia. How’s Beatrice doing?’ It’s about remembering each other and our loves and our lives together. Over the next few years, we won’t not be able to say, ‘Hi Jack. How’s Olivia doing?’ But you can say, ‘Hi Jack. How are we doing?’"

"Inevitably, we’ve fastened on those last memorable lines about hope, optimism and love. But the letter was, at its heart, a manifesto for social democracy. And if there was one word that might sum up Jack Layton’s unabashed, social democratic message, it would be “generosity.” He wanted, in the simplest and most visceral terms, a more generous Canada."

"Twenty years ago, he co-founded an organization dedicated to eliminating men’s violence against women the White Ribbon Campaign. What started as a meeting has grown into a movement against violence spanning 60 countries. Not long ago, my dad offered the new executive director some advice that I’ll share with you now. He said, ‘Always have a dream that’s longer than a life-time. If faut toujours avoir des rêves qui dépassent la durée de la vie. Friends: be loving, be hopeful, be optimistic. Together we can build the world of our dreams.’ And as he always said, ‘Don’t let anyone tell you it can’t be done.’"

"I had done this all by myself. No one had performed the magic for me. I and the shapes were alone together, revealing themselves in a silently respectful dialogue. Since I could bare lines into living reality, I was all powerful. I could read."

"We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but to read. Reading almost as much as breathing, is our essential function."

"A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading."

"reading is at the beginning of the social contract"

"I never talked to anyone about my reading; the need to share came afterwords."

"A book brings its own history to the reader."

"I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometric progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before."

"Nothing moves except my eyes and my hand occasionally turning a page, and yet something not exactly defined by the word "text" unfurls, progresses, grows and takes root as I read. But how does this process take place?"

"Augustine's description of Ambrose's silent reading (including the remark that he never read aloud) is the first definite instance recorded in Western literature."

"The American psychologist Julian Jaynes, in a controversial study on the origin of consciousness, argued that the bicameral mind - in which one of the hemispheres becomes specialized in silent reading - is a late development in humankind's evolution, and that the process by which this function develops is still changing."

"In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication."

"Socrates affirmed that only that which the reader already knows can be sparked by a reading, and that the knowledge cannot be acquired through dead letters."

"Something about the possession of a book - an object that can contain infinite fables, words of wisdom, chronicles of times gone by, humorous anecdotes and divine revelation - endows the reader with the power of creating a story, and the listener with a sense of being present at the moment of creation."

"At different times and in different places I have come to expect certain books to look a certain way, and, as in all fashions, these changing features fix a precise quality onto a book's definition. I judge a book by its cover; I judge a book by its shape."

"In our day, computer technology and the proliferation of books on CD-ROM have not affected - as far as statistics show - the production and sale of books in their old-fashioned codex form."

"Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen."

"One can transform a place by reading in it."

"To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft."

"From its very start, reading is writings apotheosis."

"Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion."

"Through ignorance, through faith, through intelligence, through trickery and cunning, through illumination, the reader rewrites the text with the same words of the original but under another heading, re-creating it, as it were, in the very act of bringing it into being."

"The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users."

"I know that something dies when i give up my books, and that my memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia."

"Possessing these books has become all important to me, because I have become jealous of the past."

"The listeners who buy books after a reading multiply that reading; the author who realizes that he or she may be writing on a blank page but is at least not speaking to a blank wall may be encouraged by the experience, and write more."

"It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth."

"As we read a text in our own language, the text itself becomes a barrier."

"As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope."

"Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible."

"Slothful, feeble, pretentious, pedantic, elitist - these are some of the epithets that eventually become associated with the absent minded scholar, the poor sighted reader, the book worm, the nerd."

"The shelves of books we haven't written, like those of books we haven't read, stretches out into the darkness of the universal library's farthest space. We are always at the beginning of the beginning of the letter A."

"Every text assumes a reader."

"It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed. Those books may no longer be available for consultation, they may exist only in the vague memory of a reader or in the vaguer-still memory of tradition and legend, but they have acquired a kind of immortality."

"Nietzsche’s arrival in modern philosophy signaled an unprecedented necessity: “probity”, “intellectual conscience”, Enlightenment radicalized by a new bravery that scorns any comforts like God."

"How can historicism consistently exempt itself from its own verdict that all human thought is historical?"

"Strauss’ whole study indicates that noble nature as Nietzsche presents it—no, embodies it—replaces divine nature as Plato presents it."

"The way of Socrates had shown itself to be a limited way because it concerned itself “only with the scientific investigation of justice and the virtues,” and it had shown itself to be an intransigent way because it chose “non-conformity and death.” Plato corrected the way of Socrates—he removed the limitation and tempered its intransigence."

"Nietzsche discovered the clue to esotericism early … “The fact of the pious fraud.”"

"Advanced technology is great at tasks such as keeping an airliner flying several thousand feet in the air, but is easily crippled by social complications."

"The invisible hand is an emergent property of this system, which never reaches an optimal equilibrium, but instead is fundamentally dynamic and unstable, with complex effects on society."

"Mathematics was not just about keeping track of were the moon was going, but also where the money was going."

"There is something intrinsically upside down and counter-intuitive in the relationship between money and happiness."

"A society in which each person is hell bent on maximizing his or her own utility, may therefore have declining overall utility."

"If the aim of economics is really to provide the greatest happiness to the most people, than it is rather shocking to discover that economic growth has no net effect on happiness. So what has gone wrong with the neoclassical prospect?"

"For even money itself has no value if there is no network of people to recognize it."

"Money, having freed itself from the physical universe, has become number itself, and finance a strange form of mathematical alchemy."

"The race to the moon was never really about the moon - its utility didn't rest in samples of moon rock. It was about capitalism versus communism, right versus left."

"Perfect order is boring, perfect randomness is boring, but complex systems are interesting."

"Adam Smith's invisible hand does exist, but as an emergent property of a complex system. It has a fuzzy tendency to reduce big price discrepancies, but it acts in a rather haphazard way."

"Not only is Homo economicus self-centered, he is a murdering psychopath. However, as with much of neoclassical economic thought, there is an element of circularity here."

"Economists often talk about the benefits of choice, but rational economic man doesn't actually have much freedom to chose, because he is a slave to his own preferences."

"The strength of capitalism does not lie in the neoclassical idea of stability, but in its ability to unleash this creative energy. like a chaotic mathematical system, it is capable of producing surprise."

"The market can quickly seize up. Prices don't adjust in a smooth continuous fashion, but instead abruptly reconfigure themselves, like the earth's crust during an earthquake."

"It has become increasingly evident, at least among those who aren't currency traders or true believers in the optimality of free markets, that it would be nice if this system could calm down a touch. One option is the Tobin tax, which would impose a tax of around 0.1 percent on currency trades, and act as a kind of damper on speculation."

"To build a genuinely sustainable economy, we need to recognize and embrace the dynamic nature of the world, and free ourselves from the dead holds of static dogma."

"Orthodox tools based on a normal distribution therefore fail exactly where they are most needed, at the extremes."

"The economy is crooked not straight; and mainstream economists are like flat-earthers who keep saying the world is flat despite all the evidence to the contrary."

"The economy is a nonlinear fractal system, where the smallest scales are linked to the largest, and the decisions of the central bank are affected by the gut instincts of the people on the street."

"It can be annoying to find out the name of a famous local landmark has no significance other than belonging to some distant relation or drinking buddy of the explorer."

"The neoclassical dogma of diminishing returns is completely wrong - success begets success and wealth begets wealth."

"The idea that money begets money, and that the rich and powerful enjoy unfair advantages, goes against what we are taught - or like to believe - about the capitalist system."

"The entire thrust of neoclassical thought is to argue that the free market economy is an efficient system that will optimize utility for all mankind, if only government will get out of the way. It therefore departs from classical economists such as Adam Smith, who recognized the importance of governments for regulating markets and preventing monopolies."

"The real reason for the longevity of the neoclassical model have less to do with science, and more to do with the social dynamics of the universities that propagate it, and its appeal to a particular mindset."

"To balance the economy, we need first to balance our priorities, and abandon rigid ideologies."

"You are the architect of your own destiny; you are the master of your own fate; you are behind the steering wheel of your life. There are no limitations to what you can do, have, or be. Except the limitations you place on yourself by your own thinking."

"You have within you the potential to accomplish wonderful things with your life. Your greatest responsibilities are to dream big dreams, decide exactly what you want, make a plan to achieve it … take action every single day in the direction of your dreams and goals, and resolve to never, never, never give up. When you take these actions, you put yourself on the side of the angels. You become unstoppable and your success becomes inevitable."

"Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others. Unsuccessful people are always asking, "What's in it for me?”"

"The gap between wishful thinking and reality is vast, but in a democratic society no contest of ideas and proposals can proceed in rational ways without all sides sharing at least a modicum of relevant information about the real world, rather than trotting out their biases and advancing claims disconnected from physical possibilities."

"Apple! Boy, what a story. No taxes paid, everything made abroad — yet everyone worships them. This new iPhone, there's nothing new in it. Just a golden color. What the hell, right? When people start playing with color, you know they're played out."

"I would love to stay at SNL forever. But you can't stay in the same place. People think you're a loser."

"I'm not gay, so I don't know much about Broadway musicals."

"My dad died, and my grandfather died, and my great-grandfather died. And the guy before him, I don't know. Probably died. … I come from a long line of death. That's my point. And so I fear it. I fear it a lot."

"Patton Oswalt, he told me, "I think the worst part of the Cosby thing was the hypocrisy." And I disagreed. Yeah, I thought it was the raping."

"Roseanne was so broken up [after her show was canceled] that I got Louis to call her, even though Roseanne was very hard on Louis before that. But she was just so broken and just crying constantly. There are very few people that have gone through what they have, losing everything in a day. Of course, people will go, 'What about the victims?' But you know what? The victims didn' t have to go through that."

"I am completely behind the #MeToo movement. You'd have to have Down Syndrome to not feel sorry for— #MeToo is what you want for your daughters and you want that to be the future world, of course""

"Every generation has believed they lived ins the End Time, @NellScovell. It is a product of Man's narcissism. Deeply, we believe that when we die, so then does the world. Which is true. Because when we die, we don't disappear, the world does."

"The only thing an old man can tell a young man is that it goes fast, real fast, and if you're not careful, it's too late. Of course, the young man will never understand this truth."

"You know, with Hitler, the more I learn about that guy the more I don't care for him."

"Macdonald is currently 49, and looks worryingly like he'll be hailed as one of the greats only in retrospect. Watch him at your earliest convenience, and start making recommendations soon."

"As a critic both of the Israeli occupation and of corporate-dictated globalization, it seems to me that the convergence that took place in Washington last weekend was long overdue. Despite easy labels like "anti-globalization," the trade-related protests of the past three years have all been about self-determination: the right of people everywhere to decide how best to organize their societies and economies, whether that means introducing land reform in Brazil, or producing generic AIDS drugs in India, or, indeed, resisting an occupying force in Palestine."

"The globalization movement isn’t anti-Semitic, it just hasn’t fully confronted the implications of diving into the Middle East conflict. Most people on the left are simply choosing sides and in the Middle East, where one side is under occupation and the other has the U.S. military behind it, the choice seems clear. But it is possible to criticize Israel while forcefully condemning the rise of anti-Semitism. And it is equally possible to be pro-Palestinian independence without adopting a simplistic "pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel" dichotomy, a mirror image of the good-versus-evil equations so beloved by President George W. Bush."

"Nothing is going to erase anti-Semitism, but Jews outside and inside Israel might be a little safer if there was a campaign to distinguish between diverse Jewish positions and the actions of the Israeli state. This is where an international movement can play a crucial role. Already, alliances are being made between globalization activists and Israeli "refuseniks," soldiers who refuse to serve their mandatory duty in the occupied territories. And the most powerful images from Saturday’s protests were rabbis walking alongside Palestinians. But more needs to be done. It’s easy for social justice activists to tell themselves that since Jews already have such powerful defenders in Washington and Jerusalem, anti-Semitism is one battle they don’t need to fight. This is a deadly error. It is precisely because anti-Semitism is used by the likes of Mr. Sharon that the fight against it must be reclaimed. When anti-Semitism is no longer treated as Jewish business, to be taken care of by Israel and the Zionist lobby, Mr. Sharon is robbed of his most effective weapon in the indefensible and increasingly brutal occupation. And as an extra bonus, whenever hatred of Jews diminishes, the likes of Jean-Marie Le Pen shrink right down with it."

"Whatever happens, it's time to bury neoliberalism. We need genuine wealth + power redistribution. Only a real left can fight fascism."

"If you're not arguing, your coalition isn't wide enough."

"movements, unlike capital, tend to move slowly. This is particularly true of movements that exist to deepen democracy and allow ordinary people to define their goals and grab the reins of history."

"If the world’s largest economy looked poised to show that kind of visionary leadership, other major emitters — like the European Union, China, and India — would almost certainly find themselves under intense pressure from their own populations to follow suit."

"Decades from now, if we are exquisitely lucky enough to tell a thrilling story about how humanity came together in the nick of time to intercept the metaphorical meteor, the pivotal chapter will not be the highly produced cinematic moment when Barack Obama won the Democratic primary and told an adoring throng of supporters that this would be “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” No, it will be the far less scripted and markedly more scrappy moment when a group of fed-up young people from the Sunrise Movement occupied the offices of Pelosi after the midterm elections, calling on her to get behind the plan for a Green New Deal — with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dropping by the sit-in to cheer them on."

"What will sustain us in the difficult years to come is a dream of the future that is not just better than ecological collapse, but a whole lot better than the barbaric ways our system treats human and nonhuman life right now."

"Those could be the famous last words of a one-term president, having wildly underestimated the public appetite for transformative action on the triple crises of our time: imminent ecological unraveling, gaping economic inequality (including the racial and gender wealth divide), and surging white supremacy."

"There is a grand story to be told here about the duty to repair — to repair our relationship with the earth and with one another, to heal the deep wounds dating back to the founding of the country. Because while it is true that climate change is a crisis produced by an excess of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it is also, in a more profound sense, a crisis produced by an extractive mindset — a way of viewing both the natural world and the majority of its inhabitants as resources to use up and then discard. I call it the “gig and dig” economy and firmly believe that we will not emerge from this crisis without a shift in worldview, a transformation from “gig and dig” to an ethos of care and repair...The Green New Deal will need to be subject to constant vigilance and pressure from experts who understand exactly what it will take to lower our emissions as rapidly as science demands, and from social movements that have decades of experience bearing the brunt of false climate solutions, whether nuclear power, the chimera of carbon capture and storage, or carbon offsets. But in remaining vigilant, we also have to be careful not to bury the overarching message: that this is a potential lifeline that we all have a sacred and moral responsibly to reach for."

"As Greta has told us so often: “Our house is on fire.” And I firmly believe that there are three things that have to align if we are going to douse the flames. First, we need the courage to dream of a different kind of future. To shake off the sense of inevitable apocalypse that has pervaded our culture. To give us a destination, a common goal, a picture of the world we are working towards.Greta Thunberg is one of the great truth-tellers of this or any time."

"And now this movement is gearing up for its biggest challenge yet: They have called on people of all ages to join the and go on strike, all around the world, on September 20. Because protecting the future is not a spectator sport."

"Thunberg and the many other amazing young organizers have been very clear that they do not want adults to pat them on the head and thank them for the hope infusion. They want us to join them and fight for the future alongside them. Because it is their right. And all of our duty."

"We have to get out of this “my crisis is bigger than your crisis: first we save the planet and then we fight poverty and racism, and violence against women”. That doesn’t work. That alienates the people who would fight hardest for change. This debate has shifted a huge amount in the US because of the leadership of the climate justice movement and because it is congresswomen of colour who are championing the Green New Deal."

"Not a day goes by that I don’t have a moment of sheer panic, raw terror, complete conviction that we are doomed, and then I do pull myself out of it. I’m renewed by this new generation that is so determined, so forceful. I’m inspired by the willingness to engage in electoral politics, because my generation, when we were in our 20s and 30s, there was so much suspicion around getting our hands dirty with electoral politics that we lost a lot of opportunities. What gives me the most hope right now is that we’ve finally got the vision for what we want instead, or at least the first rough draft of it. This is the first time this has happened in my lifetime."

"Look, we know this script. In 2008, the last time we had a global financial meltdown, the same kinds of bad ideas for no-strings-attached corporate bailouts carried the day, and regular people around the world paid the price... We know what Trump's plan is: a pandemic shock doctrine featuring all the most dangerous ideas lying around, from privatizing Social Security to locking down borders to caging even more migrants. Hell, he might even try canceling elections. But the end of this story hasn't been written yet."

"Instead of rescuing the dirty industries of the last century, we should be boosting the clean ones that will lead us into safety in the coming century (Green New Deal)."

"If there is one thing history teaches us, it's that moments of shock are profoundly volatile. We either lose a whole lot of ground, get fleeced by elites, and pay the price for decades, or we win progressive victories that seemed impossible just a few weeks earlier. This is no time to lose our nerve."

"In times of crisis, seemingly impossible ideas suddenly become possible...But whose ideas? Sensible, fair ones, designed to keep as many people as possible safe, secure, and healthy? Or predatory ideas, designed to further enrich the already unimaginably wealthy while leaving the most vulnerable further exposed?"

"There have been times in my reporting from disaster zones when I have had the unsettling feeling that I was seeing not just a crisis in the here and now, but getting a glimpse of the future – a preview of where the road we are all on is headed, unless we somehow grab the wheel and swerve... One of those moments arrived in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, as I watched hordes of private military contractors descend on the flooded city to find ways to profit from the disaster, even as thousands of the city’s residents, abandoned by their government, were treated like dangerous criminals just for trying to survive... I started to notice the same tactics in disaster zones around the world. I used the term “shock doctrine” to describe the brutal tactic of using the public’s disorientation following a collective shock – wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes or natural disasters – to push through radical pro-corporate measures, often called “shock therapy”."

"Texas is about as far from a Green New Deal as you can possibly get, seeing as a Green New Deal is a plan to bring together the need to get off fossil fuels in the next decade to radically decarbonize our energy system,.. to marry that huge infrastructure investment in the next green economy with a plan to battle poverty, to create huge numbers of good, union, green jobs, to take care of people. It’s a plan to have universal public healthcare and child care and a jobs guarantee. So it’s all the things that are not happening in Texas, because there isn’t just this extreme weather, which many scientists believe is linked to our warming planet — you know, you can’t link one storm with climate change, but the patterns are very clear, and this should be a wake-up call — but Texas is also suffering a pandemic of poverty, of exclusion, of racial injustice... we’ve heard this messaging, I think, because of panic, frankly, because the Green New Deal is a plan that could solve so many of Texas’s problems and the problems across the country, and Republicans have absolutely nothing to offer except for more deregulation, more privatization, more austerity. And so they have been frantically seeking to deflect from the real causes of this crisis, which is an intersection of extreme weather, of the kind that we are seeing more of because of climate change, intersecting with a deregulated, fossil fuel-based energy system."

"We should think about Ted Cruz’s ill-fated trip to Mexico not as a, quote-unquote, “mistake,” as he now describes it, but, in a way, as a metaphor, Amy, a metaphor for how these politicians actually think about the climate crisis. They don’t think it’s a hoax. They just say that publicly. They know it is real. You know, these are people with deep ties to the oil and gas industry, and the oil and gas industry is, in lots of ways, benefiting from the climate crisis, because there’s melting in the Arctic. It’s opening up trade routes because of that. They’re having to adapt all kinds of their own infrastructure to deal with the reality of climate change. They don’t really genuinely believe that it isn’t real. They’re on the frontlines of it in lots of ways. What they believe — and I think we’ve talked about this before on the show — is that this is somebody else’s problem. They believe that their wealth, their power and their privilege will protect them from the worst of its effects. And if we want to know what that looks like, it looks like Ted Cruz boarding a flight to Mexico in the middle of a disaster to go to the Ritz-Carlton in Cancún."

"What haunts me is not exactly the absence of literal space so much as a deep craving for metaphorical space: release, escape, some kind of open-ended freedom."

"When Nike says, just do it, that's a message of empowerment. Why aren't the rest of us speaking to young people in a voice of inspiration?"

"The title No Logo is not meant to be read as a literal slogan (as in No More Logos!), or a post-logo logo (there is already a No Logo clothing line, or so I'm told). Rather, it is an attempt to capture an Anticorporate attitude I see emerging among many young activists. This book is hinged on a simple hypothesis: that as more people discover the brand-name secrets of the global logo web, their outrage will fuel the next big political movement, a vast wave of opposition squarely targeting transnational corporations, particularly those with very high name-brand recognition."

"So, if consumers are like roaches, then marketers must forever be dreaming up new concoctions for industrial-strength Raid."

"With the tentacles of branding reaching into every crevice of youth culture, leaching brand-image content not only out of street styles like hip-hop but psychological attitudes like ironic detachment, the cool hunt has had to go further afield to find unpilfered space and that left only one frontier: the past."

"In many ways, schools and universities remain our culture's most tangible embodiment of public space and collective responsibility. University campuses in particular —with their residences, libraries, green spaces and common standards for open and respectful discourse - play a crucial, if now largely symbolic, role: they are the one place left where young people can see a genuine public life being lived. And however imperfectly we may have protected these institutions in the past, at this point in our history the argument against transforming education into a brand-extension exercise is much the same as the one for national parks and nature reserves: these quasi-sacred spaces remind us that unbranded space is still possible."

"While brands slowly transform the experience of campus life for undergraduates, another kind of takeover is under way at the institutional research level. All over the world, university campuses are offering their research facilities, and priceless academic credibility, for the brands to use as they please."

"As we look back, it seems like willful blindness. The abandonment of the radical economic foundation of the women's and civil-rights movements by the conflation of causes that came to be called political correctness successfully retrained generation of activists in the politics of image, not action."

"Despite different cultures, middle-class youth all over the world seem to live their lives as if in a parallel universe. They get up in the morning, put on their Levi's and Nikes, grab their caps and backpacks, and Sony personal CD players and head for school."

"Like so much of cool hunting, Hilfiger's marketing journey feeds off the alienation at the heart of America's race relations: selling white youth on their fetishization of black style, and black youth on their fetishization of white wealth."

"Rather than calling attention to the house of mirrors, that passes for empirical truth (as postmodern acadimics did), and rather than fighting for better mirrors (as the ID warriors did), today's media activists are concentrating on shattering the impenetrable shiny surfaces of branded culture, picking up the pieces and using them as sharp weapons in a war of actions, not ideas."

"When we lack the ability to talk back to entities that are culturally and politically powerful, the very foundations of free speech and democratic society are called into question."

"Job creation as part of the corporate mission, particularly the creation of fll time, decently paid, stable jobs, appears to have taken a back seat in many major corporations, regardless of company profits"

"Culture jamming is enjoying a resurgence, in part because of technological advancements but also more pertinently, because of the good old rules of supply and demand. Something not far from the surfaces of the public psyche is delighted to see the icons of corporate power subverted and mocked. There is, in short, a market for it. With commercialism able to overpower the traditional authority of religion, politics and schools, corporations have emerged a the natural targets for all sorts of free-floating rage and rebellion. The new ethos that culture jamming taps into is go-for-the-corporate-jugular."

"Free speech is meaningless if the commercial cacophony has risen to the point where no one can hear you."

"Too often, however, the expansive nature of the branding process ends up causing the event to be usurped, creating the quintessential lose-lose situation. Not only do fans begin to feel a sense of alienation from (if not outright resentment toward) once-cherished cultural events, but the sponsors lose what they need most: a feeling of authenticity with which to associate their brands."

"Since many of today’s best-known manufacturers no longer produce products and advertise them, but rather buy products and “brand” them, these companies are forever on the prowl for creative new ways to build and strengthen their brand images."

"Just when Americans most need information about the outside world - and their country's complicated and troubling place in it - they are only getting themselves reflected back, over and over and over: Americans weeping, Americans recovering, Americans cheering, Americans praying. A media house of mirrors, when what we all need are more windows on the world.”"

"Democracy isn't the work of the market's invisible hand; it is the work of real hands."

"The theory of economic shock therapy relies in part on the role of expectations on feeding an inflationary process. Reining in inflation requires not only changing monetary policy but also changing the behavior of consumers, employers and workers. The role of a sudden, jarring policy shift is that it quickly alters expectations, signaling to the public that the rules of the game have changed dramatically— prices will not keep rising, nor will wages. (p82)"

"The coups, wars and slaughters to instill and maintain pro-corporate regimes have never been treated as capitalist crimes but have instead been written off as the excess of overzealous dictators, as hot fronts in the Cold War, and now of the War on Terror. If the most committed opponents of the corporatist economic model are systematically eliminated, whether in Argentina in the seventies or in Iraq today, that suppression is explained- almost never as the fight for the advancement of pure capitalism. (p20)"

"The widespread abuse of prisoners is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system--whether political, religious or economic--that is rejected by large numbers of the people they are ruling. Just as ecologists define ecosystems by the presence of certain "indicator species" of plants and birds, torture is an indicator species of a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections. (p125)"

"As a means of extracting information during interrogations, torture is notoriously unreliable, but as a means of terrorizing and controlling populations, nothing is quite as effective. (p126)"

"It was this wave of reforms that turned China into the sweatshop of the world, the preferred location for contract factories for virtually every multinational on the planet. No country offered more lucrative conditions than China: low taxes and tariffs, corruptible officials and, most of all, a plentiful low-wage workforce that, for many years, would be unwilling to risk demanding decent salaries or the most basic workplace protections for fear of the most violent reprisals. (p190)"

"During the Cold War, widespread alcoholism was always seen in the West as evidence that life under Communism was so dismal that Russians needed large quantities of vodka to get through the day. Under capitalism, however, Russians drinks more than twice as much alcohol as they used to - and they are reaching for harder painkillers as well. (p238)"

"...This is what Keynes had meant when he warned of the dangers of economic chaos—you never know what combination of rage, racism and revolution will be unleashed. (p264)"

"As for journalists and activists, we seemed to be exhausting our attention on the spectacular physical attacks, forgetting that the parties with the most to gain never show up on the battlefield. (p326)"

"...extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves. In a way, it had happened already to the antiwar movement."

"By the time the think-tank lifers arrived in Baghdad, the crucial roles in the reconstruction had already been outsourced to Halliburton and KPMG. Their job as the public servants was simply to administer the petty cash, which in Iraq took the form of handling shrink-wrapped bricks of hundred-dollar bills to contractors. It was a graphic glimpse into the acceptable role of government in a corporatist state - to act as a conveyor belt for getting public money into private hands, a job for which ideological commitment is far more relevant than elaborate field experience. (p355)"

"Like Russia's gangsterism and Bush's cronyism, contemporary Iraq is a creation of the fifty-year crusade to privatize the world. Rather than being disowned by its creators, it deserves to be seen as the purest incarnation yet of the ideology that gave it birth. (p359)"

"Regardless of the overall state of the economy, there is now a large enough elite made up of new multi-millionaires and billionaires for Wall Street to see the group as "superconsumers," able to carry consumer demand all on their own. (p392)"

"When it comes to paying contractors, the sky is the limit; when it comes to financing the basic functions of the state, the coffers are empty. (p409)"

"The American Society of Civil Engineers said in 2007 that the U.S. had fallen so far behind in maintaining its public infrastructure -- roads, bridges, schools, dams -- that it would take more than a trillion and half dollars over five years to bring it back up to standard. Instead, these types of expenditures are being cut back. At the same time, public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity. It's easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated. The well-off, meanwhile, will withdraw into gated communities, their needs met by privatized providers. (p415)"

"The recent spate of disasters has translated into such spectacular profits that many people around the world have come to the same conclusion: the rich and powerful must be deliberately causing the catastrophes so that they can exploit them. (p426)"

"The dirty secret of the neoliberal era is that these ideas were never defeated in a great battle of ideas, nor were they voted down in elections. They were shocked out of the way at key political junctures. (p450)"

"It is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of diehard Stalinists at the height of the purges as of libertarian climate deniers today. p. 37"

"We started treating the atmosphere as a waste dump when we began using coal on a commercial scale in the late 1700s and engaged in similarly reckless ecological practices well before that. p. 159"

"The solution to global warming is not to fix the world, but to fix ourselves. p. 279"

"The resources required to rapidly move away from fossil fuels and prepare for the coming heavy weather could pull huge swaths of humanity out of poverty, providing services now sorely lacking, from clean water to electricity. p. 7"

"And there are plenty of signs that climate change will be no exception [to The Shock Doctrine]—that, rather than sparking solutions that have a real chance of preventing catastrophic warming and protecting us from inevitable disasters, the crisis will once again be seized upon to hand over yet more resources to the 1 percent. p. 8"

"… opposition movements … will need a comprehensive vision for what should emerge in the place of our failing system, as well as serious political strategies for how to achieve those goals. p. 10"

"...we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis. We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe—and would benefit the vast majority—are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets. p. 18"

"It is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when those elites were enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s. p. 18"

"Challenge the extreme ideology... blocking so much sensible action... to show how unfettered corporate power [poses] a grave threat to the habitability of the planet. p.20"

"… our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on Earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature. p. 21"

"We need a shift in political "power—specifically … a shift in who wields it, a shift away from corporations and toward communities, which in turn depends on whether or not the great many people who are getting a rotten deal under our current system can build a determined and diverse enough social force to change the balance of power. p. 25"

"There are all kinds of measures that would lower emissions substantively that could and should be done right now. p. 25"

"So this book proposes a different strategy: think big, go deep, and move the ideological pole far away from the stifling market fundamentalism that has become the greatest enemy to planetary health. If we can shift the cultural context even a little, then there will be some breathing room for those sensible reformist policies that will at least get the atmospheric carbon numbers moving in the right direction. p. 26"

"Maybe within a few years, some of the ideas highlighted in these pages that sound impossibly radical today—like a basic income for all, or a rewriting of trade law, or real recognition of the rights of Indigenous people to protect huge parts of the world from polluting extraction—will start to seem reasonable, even essential. p. 26"

"… the thing about a crisis this big, this all-encompassing, is that it changes everything. It changes what we can do, what we can hope for, what we can demand from ourselves and our leaders. It means there is a whole lot of stuff that we have been told is inevitable that simply cannot stand. And it means that a whole lot of stuff we have been told is impossible has to start happening right away." p. 28"

"… global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient, and barrier-free that ‘earth-human systems’ are becoming dangerously unstable in response. p. 450"

"… only mass social movements can save us now. Because we know where the current system, left unchecked, is headed. We also know, I would add, how that system will deal with the reality of serial climate-related disasters: with profiteering, and escalating barbarism to segregate the losers from the winners. p. 450"

"… if climate justice carries the day, the economic costs to our elites will be real—not only because of the carbon left in the ground but also because of the regulations, taxes, and social programs needed to make the required transformation. Indeed, these new demands on the ultra rich could effectively bring the era of the footloose Davos oligarch to a close. p. 457"

"[Climate justice economic demands] represent nothing less than the unfinished business of the most powerful liberation movements of the past two centuries, from civil rights to feminism to Indigenous sovereignty. … Such is the promise of a Marshall Plan for the Earth. p. 458"

"[Activism] becomes an entirely normal activity throughout society …. During extraordinary historical moments—both world wars, the aftermath of the Great Depression, or the peak of the civil rights era—the usual categories dividing ‘activists’ and ‘regular people’ became meaningless because the project of changing society was so deeply woven into the project of life. Activists were, quite simply, everyone. p. 459"

"We are products of our age and of a dominant ideological project. One that too often has taught us to see ourselves as little more than singular, gratification-seeking units, out to maximize our narrow advantage, while simultaneously severing so many of us from the broader communities whose pooled skills are capable of solving problems big and small. p. 460"

"how do you change a worldview, an unquestioned ideology? Part of it involves choosing the right early policy battles—game-changing ones that don’t merely aim to change laws but change patterns of thought. That means that a fight for a minimal carbon tax might do a lot less good than, for instance, forming a grand coalition to demand a guaranteed minimum income. That’s not only because a minimum income, as discussed, makes it possible for workers to say no to dirty energy jobs but also because the very process of arguing for a universal social safety net opens up a space for a fullthroated debate about values—about what we owe to one another based on our shared humanity, and what it is that we collectively value more than economic growth and corporate profits. p. 461"

"Indeed a great deal of the work of deep social change involves having debates during which new stories can be told to replace the ones that have failed us. Because if we are to have any hope of making the kind of civilizational leap required of this fateful decade, we will need to start believing, once again, that humanity is not hopelessly selfish and greedy—the image ceaselessly sold to us by everything from reality shows to neoclassical economics. p. 461"

"Fundamentally, the task is to articulate not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis—embedded in interdependence rather than hyperindividualism, reciprocity rather than dominance, and cooperation rather than hierarchy. p. 462"

"In the hot and stormy future we have already made inevitable through our past emissions, an unshakable belief in the equal rights of all people and a capacity for deep compassion will be the only things standing between civilization and barbarism. p. 462"

"The transformative movements of the past"modeled different values in their own behavior, and in the process liberated the political imagination and rapidly altered the sense of what was possible. They were also unafraid of the language of morality—to give the pragmatic, cost-benefit arguments a rest and speak of right and wrong, of love and indignation. p. 462"

"Abolitionists used "highly polarizing rhetoric" to emphasize their moral arguments. Climate activists need to take a similarly clear moral stance. p. 463"

"… there are plenty of solid economic arguments for moving beyond fossil fuels … But we will not win the battle for a stable climate by trying to beat the bean counters at their own game—arguing, for instance, that it is more cost-effective to invest in emission reduction now than disaster response later. We will win by asserting that such calculations are morally monstrous… p. 464"

"… there is little doubt that another crisis will see us in the streets and squares once again, taking us all by surprise. The real question is what progressive forces will make of that moment, the power and confidence with which it will be seized. p. 466"

"Because our house is on fire, and this should come as no surprise. Built on false promises, discounted futures, and sacrificial people, it was rigged to blow from the start. It's too late to save all our stuff, but we can still save each other and a great many other species, too. Let's put out the flames and build something different in its place. Something a little less ornate, but with room for all those who need shelter and care. Let's forge a Global Green New Deal-for everyone this time. (from the Introduction)"

"Suddenly we are no longer prisoners of the never-ending present in our social media feeds. We are part of a long and complex collective story, one in which human beings are not one set of attributes, fixed and unchanging, but rather, a work in progress, capable of deep change. By looking decades backward and forward simultaneously, we are no longer alone as we confront our weighty historical moment. We are surrounded both by ancestors whispering that we can do what our moment demands just as they did, and by future generations shouting that they deserve nothing less. (from "The Art of the Green New Deal")"

"The main reason that the elite attacks never succeeded in turning the public against the New Deal was that its programs were helping people. But another reason had to do with the incalculable power of art, which was embedded in virtually every aspect of the era's transformations. The New Dealers saw artists as workers like any other: people who, in the depths of the Depression, deserved direct government assistance to practice their trade. As Works Progress Administration director Harry Hopkins famously put it, "Hell, they've got to eat just like other people." ("The Art of the Green New Deal")"

"yes, we need to grow faster and do more. But the weight of the world is not on any one person's shoulders: Not yours. Not Zoe's. Not mine. It rests in the strength of the project of transformation that millions are already a part of. That means we are free to do the kind of work that will sustain us, so that we can all stay in this movement for the long run. Because that's what it will take."

"It's not that one sphere is more important than the other. It's that we have to do both: the local and the global. The resistance and the alternatives. The "nos" to what we cannot survive and the "yeses" that we need to thrive."

"the very idea that we, as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals, could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet's climate system or changing the global economy is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together, as part of a massive and organized global movement."

"We don't have the right to demand perfection from each other. But we do have the right to expect progress. To demand evolution. So, let's make some new mistakes."

"It Will Be a Massive Job Creator"

"Paying for It Will Create a Fairer Economy"

"It Taps the Power of Emergency"

"It's Procrastination-proof"

"It's Recession-proof"

"It's a Backlash Buster"

"It Can Raise an Army of Supporters"

"It Will Build New Alliances-and Undercut the Right"

"We Were Born for This Moment"

"That bleak view of humanity--that we are nothing more than a collection of atomized individuals and nuclear families, unable to do anything of value together except wage war-has had a stranglehold over the public imagination for a very long time. No wonder so many of us believed we could never rise to the climate challenge. But more than thirty years later, as surely as the glaciers are melting and the ice sheets are breaking apart, that "free-market" ideology is dissolving, too. In its place, a new vision of what humanity can be is emerging. It is coming from the streets, from the schools, from workplaces, and even from inside houses of government. It's a vision that says that all of us, combined, make up the fabric of society. And when the future of life is at stake, there is nothing we cannot achieve."

"Here is my attempt to decipher the chaos of doppelganger culture, with its maze of simulated selves and digital avatars and mass surveillance and racial and ethnic projections and fascist doubles and the studiously denied shadows that are all coming to the surface at once. It's going to take some wild turns-but rest assured that the point of this mapping is not to stay trapped inside the house of mirrors, but to do what I sense many of us long to do: escape its mind-bending confines and find our way toward some kind of collective power and purpose. The point is to make our way out of this collective vertigo, and get somewhere distinctly better, together. (from the Introduction)"

"Vertigo invades when the world we thought we knew no longer holds. The known world is crumbling. That's okay. It was an edifice stitched together with denial and disavowal, with unseeing and unknowing, with mirrors and shadows. It needed to crash. Now, in the rubble, we can make something more reliable, more worthy of our trust, more able to survive the coming shocks. (chapter 15, p342)"

"If there is anything this journey has taught that identity is not fixed. Not mine. Not Wolf's. Not even the barrier between our two identities. It's all fluid, shifting around and doubling constantly. Negotiating that doubling-between our younger selves and our older selves, between our public selves and our private selves, between our living selves and our dying selves-is a part of what it means to be human. A bigger part of being human, though, and certainly of living a good life, is not about how we make ourselves in those shifting sands of self. It's about what we make together. (from the Epilogue)"

"A critically important thought-leader in these perilous times, a necessary voice as a courageous movement of movements rises from the ashes."

"The greatest theorist of climate change."

"that’s something that Naomi Klein talks about a lot, is how we are sort of in this moment where imagination is one of the most valuable things we can bring to the table. And a failure of imagination means a failure of the spectrum of futures that are available to us. And I just, I like to think of — so I remind myself and others that there is still such a wide spectrum of possible futures, and we do get some choice in which ones we have."

"Journalist Naomi Klein notes, "every time I log on to activist news sites like Indymedia.org, which practice 'open publishing,' I'm confronted with a string of Jewish conspiracy theories about 9/11 and excerpts from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the tired old forgery from tsarist Russia that purported to represent the Zionist plot to take over the world."

"At the conference itself [Copenhagen 2009], she became an important voice for the NGOs shut out of the negotiating sessions, and made a convincing case that there was little chance of solving global warming in isolation from the other problems of power and poverty plaguing the globe."

"In a conclusion that the creators of South Park must have forced on her, Klein finds that the most authentic answers to our current troubles lie in the wisdom of Sioux tribes. The leftist trope of the "noble savage" whose Edenic insights must shame the civilisation that has usurped them stretches back at least as far as Rousseau. Yet many of these insights are to philosophy what panpipes are to music. Klein quotes LaDonna Brave Bull Allard who laughingly says that the grandkids "can't believe how little some of the white people know. They come running: 'Grandma! The white people don't know how to chop wood! Can we teach them?' I say, 'Yes, teach them.'" If you dream that the future of humanity might constitute more than wood-chopping, then you're probably a racist and Klein has little time and littler consolation for you. On another occasion an evidently awestruck Klein relays some native Sioux wisdom, viz: "There are things that are more important than money." Who knew? The aperçus of Klein's school of thought would be shamed by the school of Hallmark Cards."

"I count her among the most inspirational political thinkers in the world today."

"We attend the first Hawai'i screening of Naomi Klein's documentary at the mall movie theatre. The line for the documentary is long, almost as long as the Hawai'i endangered species list. Unlike the endangered species list, there aren't many natives in this line...When the natives in "This Changes Everything" cry, the white people in the theatre cry "white tears" extra-loudly. I hate it when white people cry extra-loudly, as if they've never seen native people cry in real life. When the documentary shows polluted native lands, the white people gasp extra-loudly. I hate it when white people gasp extra-loudly. "Stop gasping so loudly!" I shout in my head. "Everything already changed for native peoples centuries ago!" We sneak out of the theatre during the post-documentary discussion. I whisper to my wife: "The Geological Society should refer to this era of human destruction as the Wypipocene." She says we should make a documentary about how climate change is finally making white people uncomfortable. Titled: "Melting Glaciers, White Tears.""

"Naomi Klein's work has always moved and guided me. She is the great chronicler of our age of climate emergency, an inspirer of generations."

"Anita Sarkeesian: For me, the big picture has always been culture change, and pop culture was just a vehicle and a medium through which cultural change can happen or it can be influenced by; so it's not actually about video games. But it's about video games, right?"

"Anita Sarkeesian: I think it's important to recognize that harassment is, as someone had mentioned, not just what is legal and illegal, right? Harassment is threats of violence, but it's also the day-to-day grind of "you're a liar", "you suck", making all these hate videos to attack us on a regular basis, and the mobs that come from those hate videos, et cetera."

"Geraldine Doogue: I'm intrigued by Anita saying she had to learn about systems. You had to learn about the sociology of systems and structural change, and that was obviously quite a journey for you."

"We can trace the "woman as reward" trope all the way back the beginning of the medium itself as [...] upon successful completion of many arcade games, players were rewarded with a related "smooch of victory" trope, so named for the kiss the hero received as a reward for rescuing a kidnapped princess. Sometimes the prize is blatant, as with the "standard hero reward" in which the king will give his daughter to the hero. On other occasions it's taken a step further by employing the parallel of "sex for victory" or "rescue sex" trope."

"If you want to get to know a character, learn about their interests, goals or desires, their butt is probably not going to give you that information."

"Since mobile, indie and retro inspired games are built on a legacy of inequality in the medium the new wave of 80s and 90s nostalgia has brought with it a resurrection of the worst of the old-school damsel in distress stereotypes. Indeed, many of these new titles essentially function as love letters to the trope as a way of paying homage to classic games of years gone by."

"It's both possible, and even necessary, to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects."

"Why are [...] female characters in combat roles wearing high-heels? With all the fighting, running and climbing these women have to do, dressing them in high-heels is clearly a decision rooted in sexualized aesthetic pleasure rather than believability."

"Princess Peach is in many ways the quintessential stock-character version of the damsel in distress."

"For this video I tried to get a glimpse of Batman's rear end, but it's as if his cape is a piece of high-tech Wayne-Industries equipment designed to cover up his butt at all costs."

"The "mystical pregnancy" is one of the tropes that I loathe the most, because while other tropes represent women in stereotypical ways, this one hits us on a biological level."

"It gets worse and worse, it reinforces this idea of women as sexual objects, right; there's this idea of women as playthings for their amusement ... [that] we are not meant to be treated with respect."

"[On the Gamergate controversy] Ethics in journalism is not what's happening, in any way."

"Well, maybe the princess shouldn't be a damsel and she could save herself."

"When the media we create excludes girls and women, fails to depict them as leaders and innovators or treats them as little more than side-kicks, love interests and sex objects, is it any wonder that women are systematically excluded and under-represented in so many careers and leadership positions?"

"I'm exhausted. I know that it's not unusual for nonprofits to have a life cycle shorter than a lot of people would like, but there are unique challenges when they're so entwined with an individual (me) who has become a symbol (oops), for better and for worse. I'm hoping that it will be valuable to share the reality of the bone-deep burnout that comes from consistently saying yes to the growth of Feminist Frequency, often at the expense of protecting my personal boundaries, and the workload of our team. While I've already said my piece about the harassment that myself and others have experienced over the years, reflecting on it now I can express both a sense of pride that conversations about online abuse have become part of our lexicon, and a reality that it has come at the cost of my health and wellbeing."

"There's no such thing as sexism against men. That's because sexism is prejudice + power. Men are the dominant gender with power in society."

"Not a coincidence it's always men and boys committing mass shootings. The pattern is connected to ideas of toxic masculinity in our culture."

"Buying 1,000 dollar shoes ... — @anitasarkeesian"

"Anime is the most disgusting, sexist, and misogynistic form of media to ever come out of Japan. Anime defiles women and caters to perverts and losers. These cartoons are corrupting teenagers and promoting rape culture."

"Shortly after the abuse of Quinn began, Anita Sarkeesian, a prominent feminist media critic and blogger, began to receive a similar wave of threats. ... When Sarkeesian released a new video in her Tropes vs Women series, the mob, already attacking Quinn, connected the two women, seeing them as part of the same 'threat', and trolls began to abuse Sarkeesian as well. After her address was found and posted online, amid a mass of renewed death and rape threats, Sarkeesian, like Quinn, was forced to flee her home."

"Now, I'm no shrinking violet. I played hockey until half of my teeth were knocked down my throat. And I'm extremely competitive on a tennis court — I'll dive for any ball on any surface. But that experience at the slaughterhouse overwhelmed me. When I walked out of there, I knew I would never again harm an animal! I knew all the physiological, economic, and ecological arguments supporting vegetarianism, but it was that firsthand experience of man's cruelty to animals that laid the real groundwork for my commitment to vegetarianism."

"Proof itself, of any sort, is impossible, without an axiom (as Gödel proved). Thus faith in God is a prerequisite for all proof."

"First stop lying, then start speaking the truth."

"One of the things that struck me as near miraculous about music, especially in a rather nihilistic and atheistic society, is that it really does fill the void that was left by the death of God. And it's partly because you cannot rationally critique music. It speaks to you, it speaks of meaning, and no matter what you say about it, no matter how cynical you are, you cannot put a crowbar underneath that and lift it up and toss it aside."

"Competence can step in where popularity cannot go."

"Jordan B. Peterson: The earliest political memory I have, it was when Robert Kennedy was shot. I don't know how old I was, probably four or five. I watched his funeral and I thought, "I'm going to have a funeral like that." [question from off-camera]: What made you think you would have a funeral like that? Jordan B. Peterson: I have no idea—I have no idea why I thought that. [question from off-camera]: What struck you about the funeral? Jordan B. Peterson: That it was—well, that it was a very large public event. That there was a lot of grief that was associated with it. That was the first thing that really, kind of, had an impact on me, I suppose, that was part of the outside political world, but I was pretty young when that happened."

"The richest province in Canada is poorer than the poorest state in the United States"

"You might think, "Well, compassion is a virtue." Yes, it's a virtue, but any uni-dimensional virtue immediately becomes a vice, because real virtue is the intermingling of a number of virtues and their integration into a functional identity that can be expressed socially. Compassion can be great if you happen to be the entity towards which it is directed. But compassion tends to divide the world into crying children and predatory snakes. So if you're a crying child—hey, great. But if you happen to be identified as one of the predatory snakes, you better look the hell out. Compassion is what the mother grizzly bear feels for her cubs while she eats you because you got in the way."

"The future is the place of all potential monsters."

"You should be able to do things that you wouldn't do. That's the definition of a genuinely moral person. They could do it, but they don't."

"And the fact that in the United States [...] the students have been essentially handed a bill of indentured servitude here for their student loans is absolutely beyond comprehension. It seems to me that the bureaucracy has basically conspired to determine how to pick the pockets of the students' future earnings and they do that by offering them an extended adolescence with no quality control."

"I believe that when these podcasts work properly, the reason they are compelling, to the degree they manage to be compelling, is because what people are observing and participating in is the process by which two people mutually transform one another towards a higher good, so we are both struggling to make things clear and to approach something that we don't have yet, but it's in that struggle that motivation rises."

"I would say with regard to critical thought, and to some degree with regard to productive thought, an indeterminate proportion of that is dependent on speech. I don't think it's unreasonable to point out that thought is internalized speech. And that the dialectical process that constitutes critical thinking is internalized speech. […] The quality of our thoughts is actually dependent on our ability to speak our minds."

"The truth is something that burns—it burns off deadwood, and people don't like having their deadwood burnt off, often because they're 95% deadwood."

"When you try to analyze the operation of the set of ideas, you ought to find out first who the current proponents are in the conversation that's going on now. But then you need to trace it back to deeper ideas and the philosophers, and sometimes the theologians even (depending on how deep you go), from whom those ideas flow. And in order to understand the entire structure of the system of ideas and its interrelationships, so that you can understand its motivation and its nature, you have to delve deeper into the underlying history of the ideas."

"The question is: In these societies, cross-culturally, who is elevated to the status of elder? And you might say 'Well, it's the roughest, toughest, most dominant chimp, oppressive, patriarchal male.' and that actually happens to not be the case at all. And so what you do see is that productive males who are older, they have to be productive, who are simultaneously generous and reciprocal, and are recognized as such in their communities, hold the status of authority and help govern properly. And so we could say that there's no evidence whatsoever on the scientific or anthropological front that the doctrine that the prime human motivation for the construction of social relations is power. And I would add to that further that if you think that power is the fundamental motivation of humankind, that is a confession not an observation. And so look out for people who make that claim because they're making that claim to justify to themselves their own use of psychopathic and narcissistic social mediation strategies. And so I don't see that the leftists who make the claim that power is the fundamental motivation have a shred of evidence on their side sociologically, scientifically, anthropologically, politically, economically, theologically or ethically."

"Lex Fridman: How often do you gaze upon death, your own? How often do you remember, remind yourself that this ride ends? Jordan Peterson: Personally? Lex Fridman: Personally. Jordan Peterson: All the time. Lex Fridman: 'Cause you as a deep thinker and philosopher, it's easy to start philosophizing and forgetting that you might die today. Jordan Peterson: The angel of death sits on every word. How's that? Lex Fridman: How often do you actually consciously— Jordan Peterson: All the time. Lex Fridman: —notice the angel? Jordan Peterson: All the time."

"I've tried to maintain a relatively balanced view of the excesses on both sides of the political spectrum, but one thing I have clearly experienced repeatedly is that the Left will shun and exclude to a degree that's almost unknown on the Right. I've never had anyone on the Right, that I've talked to, refuse to talk to a hypothetical guest, for example. And I've had people on the Left, they just do that all the time. And I don't get that exactly. I think maybe it has to do with the association in personality between agreeableness and Leftist's proclivity. So the socialist types, the Lefties, are technically more agreeable. And I think maybe among agreeable people, if you don't go along with the agreeable game you are much more likely to be categorized as a predator."

"Part of the reason that politicians have come to believe that the public is stupid and has no attention span is that television had a 30-second attention span. So you had to assume your audience remembered nothing, knew nothing, and could flip out to a different channel at any moment. Plus the bandwidth was insanely expensive. Now all that is gone. I think that will be a revolution in political discourse."

"[About what Canadians may think about him being ordered, in 2023, to undergo social media communication coaching:] Either someone like me is wrong, or all of the institutions in Canada have become dangerously corrupt. Well, who the hell is going to believe the second one?"

"A huge problem on the social media side is that we put undue access to status in the hands of people who will misuse accusations to garner attention."

"Why would a dragon hoard gold? Because a dragon represents everything that you're afraid of. What's embedded in everything that you're afraid of? Absolutely everything that you need to find. Run from what you're afraid of? Run from exactly what you need to find."

"I regard free speech as a prerequisite to a civilized society, because freedom of speech means that you can have combat with words. That's what it means. It doesn't mean that people can happily and gently exchange opinions. It means that we can engage in combat with words, in the battleground of ideas. And the reason that that's acceptable, and why it's acceptable that people's feelings get hurt during that combat, is that the combat of ideas is far preferable to actual combat."

"You can kill people with compassion. That's the Freudian Oedipal situation. Think about working in a nursing home. There's a rule of thumb that we can use as a guide when interacting with people in general. It is this: Do not do anything for anyone that they can do themselves. You just steal it from them. Imagine that you're working with elderly people. It might be easier to do something for them than to let them struggle through it. But you just speed their demise by taking away their last vestiges of independence. People do the same thing with kids. The answer is: struggle through it."

"The kids are starting to burn this place and to trash it. They're dragging a grand piano down the stairs. It's the destruction of high culture, about which they're nothing but cynical, because they don't believe that hard work and sacrifice can produce something of any value. They want to bring it down and destroy it. You can see it in the story of Cain and Abel. Abel is hard working and everyone likes him, and he makes the proper sacrifices, so his life goes really well. And that's part of the reason that Cain hates him. He's jealous and resentful, but worse than that—if you're not doing very well and you're around someone who is doing very well it's painful, because the mere fact of their Being judges you. And so it's very easy to want to destroy that ideal so that you don't have to live with the terrible consequences of seeing it embodied in front of you. And so part of the reason that people want to tear things down is so that they don't have anything to contrast themselves against and to feel bad. And that's exactly what's happening here. Kids are destroying all of this culture, because the fact that it exists judges them."

"Do you want to be what you are or do you want to be what continually changes what you are?"

"You can't have the conversation about rights without the conversation about responsibility, because your rights are my responsibility. That's what they are, technically, so you just can't have only half of that discussion. And we're only having half of that discussion. Then the question is, "Well, what are you leaving out if you're only having that half of the discussion?" And the answer is, "Well, you're leaving out responsibility." And then the question is, "Well, what are you leaving out if you're leaving out responsibility?" And the answer might be: "Well, maybe you're leaving out the meaning of life." Here you are, suffering away. What makes it worthwhile? Rights? It's almost impossible to describe how bad an idea that is. Responsibility: that's what gives life meaning. Lift a load. Then you can tolerate yourself. Look at yourself: you're useless, easily hurt, easily killed. Why should you have any self-respect? Pick something up and carry it. Make it heavy enough so that you can think, yah, well, useless as I am, at least I can move that from there to there. For men, there's nothing but responsibility. Women have their sets of responsibilities: they're not the same. Women have to take primary responsibility for having infants, at least, and also for caring for them. They're structured differently than men for biological necessity. Women know what they have to do; men have to figure out what they have to do. And if they have nothing worth living for, then they stay Peter Pan—and why the hell not? The alternative to valued responsibility is impulsive, low-class pleasure. Why lift a load if there's nothing in it for you? And that's what we're doing to men and boys that's a very bad idea. "You're pathological and oppressive." "Fine, then! Why the hell am I going to play? If I get no credit for bearing responsibility, then you can be sure I won't bear any." But then your life is useless and meaningless, and you're full of self-contempt and nihilism, and that's not good. And so that's what I think is going on at a deeper level with regard to men needing this direction. A man has to decide that he's going to do something: he has to decide that."

"It's so interesting to watch the young men when you talk to them about responsibility. They're so goddamned thrilled about it. It just blows me away. It's like, "Really?!" That's the counterculture: Grow the hell up and do something useful! "Really? I can do that? Oh, I'm so excited by that idea! No one ever mentioned that before!" It's like, "Rights, rights, rights, rights…" Jesus! It's appalling. People have had enough of that. And they better have, because it's a non-productive mode of being. Responsibility, man: that's where the meaning in life is."

"The thing that's so interesting about being alive is that you're all in. No matter what you do you're all in; this is gonna kill you. So I think you might as well play the most magnificent game you can while you're waiting—because, do you have anything better to do, really?"

"If you are not capable of cruelty, then you are absolutely a victim of anyone who is. For those who are exceedingly agreeable, there is a part of them crying out for the incorporation of the monster within them, which is what gives them strength of character and self-respect, because it is impossible to respect yourself until you grow teeth. And if you grow teeth, you realize that you're somewhat dangerous, or seriously dangerous. Then you might be more willing to demand that you treat yourself with respect and that other people do the same thing. That doesn't mean that being cruel is better than not being cruel. What it means is that being able to be cruel, and then not being cruel, is better than not being able to be cruel, because in the first case you're nothing but weak and naïve, and in the second case you're dangerous but you have it under control. If you're competent at fighting, it actually decreases the probability that you're going to have to fight, because when someone pushes you you'll be able to respond with confidence, and with any luck a reasonable show of confidence, which is a show of dominance, will be enough to make the bully back off."

"Here's how you can tell someone is your friend: A) You can tell them bad news, and they'll listen. B) You can tell them good news, and they'll help you celebrate."

"People camouflage against the herd. People aren't after happiness, they're after not hurting."

"Life is suffering. Love is the desire to see unnecessary suffering ameliorated. Truth is the handmaiden of love. Dialogue is the pathway to truth. Humility is recognition of personal insufficiency and the willingness to learn. To learn is to die voluntarily and be born again, in great ways and small. So speech must be untrammeled, so that dialogue can take place, so that we can all humbly learn, so that truth can serve love, so that suffering can be ameliorated, so that we can all stumble forward to the Kingdom of God ."

"One of the things Jung said is that everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is, and you should know what your myth is, because it might be a tragedy, and maybe you don't want it to be."

"To know that the biblical stories have a phenomenological truth is really worth knowing, because the poor fundamentalists are trying to cling to their moral structure and I understand why, because it does organize their societies and it organizes their psyches so they've got something to cling to. But they don't have a very sophisticated idea of the complexity of the idea of what constitutes truth, and they try to gerrymander the biblical stories into the domain of scientific theory, promoting Creationism, for example, as an alternative scientific theory. That just isn't going to go anywhere, because the people who wrote these damn stories weren't scientists to begin with. There weren't any scientists back then. There's hardly any scientists now! Really, it's hard to think scientifically. Even scientists don't think scientifically outside the lab, and hardly even when they're in the lab. You've got to get peer-reviewed and criticized. It's hard to think scientifically. So, however, the people who wrote these stories thought more like dramatists think, like Shakespeare thought. But that doesn't mean that there isn't truth in it; it just means you have to be a little more sophisticated about your ideas about truth. And that's okay. There are truths to live by. Okay, fine—then we need to figure out what those are, because we need to live and maybe not to suffer so much. And so if you know that the Bible stories in general are trying to represent the lived experience of conscious individuals, then that opens up the possibility of a whole different realm of understanding and eliminates the contradiction that's been painful for people between the objective world and the claims of religious stories."

"I know that the evidence for genuine religious experience is incontrovertible, but it's not explicable. So I don't want to explain it away. I want to pull back from that and leave it as a fact and a mystery, and then we're going to look at this from a rational perspective, and say that the initial formulation of the idea of God was an attempt to abstract out the ideal and to consider it as an abstraction outside its instantiation. And that's good enough. It's an amazing thing if it's true. But I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater."

"The way that we behave contains way more information than we know. And part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge has been extracted as a consequence of us watching each other behave, and telling stories about it over thousands and thousands and thousands of years, extracting out patterns of behavior that characterize humanity, and trying to represent them party through imitations but also through drama, mythology, literature, and art, and all of that, to represent what we're like so we can understand what we're like. That process of understanding is what we see unfolding, at least in part, in the Biblical stories. It's halting and partial and awkward and contradictory and all of that, which is one of the things that makes it so complex, but I see in it the struggle of humanity to rise above its animal forebears and to become conscious of what it means to be human, and that's a very difficult thing."

"Everyone woke up and said, or thought, something like, "How is it that we came to believe any of this?" It’s like waking up one day and noting that you really don’t know why you put a Christmas tree up, but you’ve been doing it for a long time, and that’s what people do. There are reasons Christmas trees came about. The ritual lasts long after the reasons have been forgotten."

"A good work of fiction is more real than the stories from which it was derived. Otherwise it has no staying power. It's distilled reality. And some would say "it never happened," but it depends on what you mean by "happened." If it's a pattern that repeats in many, many places, with variation, you can abstract out the central pattern. So the pattern never purely existed in any specific form, but the fact that you pulled a pattern out from all those exemplars means that you've extracted something real. I think the reason that the story of Adam and Eve has been immune to being forgotten is because it says things about the nature of the human condition that are always true."

"You plunge into that underworld space, and that's also where you begin to nurse feelings of resentment and aggrievement and murder and homicide—and even worse. If people are betrayed enough, they become obsessed with the futility of Being itself, and they go to places where perhaps no one would ever want to go if they were in their right mind. And they begin to nurse fantasies of the ultimate revenge, and that's a horrible place to be. That's hell. That's why hell has always been a suburb of the underworld, because if you get plunged into a situation that you don't understand, and things are not good for you anymore, it's only one step from being completely confused, to being completely outraged and resentful, and then it's only one step from there to really looking for revenge. And that can take you places—well, that merely to imagine properly can be traumatic. And I've seen that with people many times. And I think that anybody who uses their imagination on themselves can see how that happens, because I can't imagine that there is a single person in the room who hasn't nursed fairly intense fantasies of revenge, at least at one point in their life—and usually for what appear to be good reasons. It can shake your faith in Being to be betrayed, but if it shakes it so badly that you turn against Being itself, that's certainly no solution. All it does is make everything that's bad even worse."

"Dante was trying to get to the bottom of what constitutes evil. There's a hierarchy of reprehensible behavior, and Dante thought it was betrayal. And I think that's right, because I believe the fundamental human resource is trust."

"What happens in the story of Adam and Eve is that when people become self-conscious, they get thrown out of Paradise and then they're in history. And history is a place where there's pain in childbirth, and where you're dominated by your mate, and where you have to toil like mad like no other animal because you're aware of your future. You have to work, and sacrifice the joys of the present for the future, constantly, and you know that you're going to die. And you have all that weight on you. How could anything be more true than that? Unless you're naïve beyond comprehension. There's something that's echoed about your life in that representation. We're such strange creatures, because we don't really fit into Being in some sense, and that's what's expressed in the notion of The Fall."

"There's no difference between the conquering of the unknown and the creation of habitable order."

"Most of the adventure genre is about how there is some enemy that's lurking, and someone rises up to confront it and maintain order. There's no getting away from that story."

"Something that's everything lacks limitation. There are advantages to not being able to do things. If you had everything you wanted at every moment at your fingertips, then there's nothing. There's no story. It's like Superman being able to bounces hydrogen bombs off of him. The whole series died because he didn't have any flaws. There's no story without limitation."

"The proper path of life is to take the tradition and spirit that is associated with consciousness as such, and to act it out in your own personal life in a way that is analogous with the way Christ acted it out in his life. What that means, in part, is the acceptance of the tragic preconditions of existence. That's partly betrayal by friends and by family and by the state, it's partly punishment for sins that you did not commit (the arbitrary nature of justice), and the fact of finitude. Your duty, and the way to set things right in the cosmos, is to accept all those details as necessary preconditions for being and to act virtuously despite all that. That's a very, very powerful idea."

"Without the support of your father—practically and metaphorically—without that behind you, without the knowledge of you as both a biological and cultural creature, without that depth of knowledge, you don't have the courage to do it, because you don't know what you are or what you could be. You're a historical creature, so you need all this collected wisdom, and all this dream-like information, and all this mythology and all this narrative, to inform you about what you are beyond what you see of yourself. You're pummeled down, and people pick on you, and there's 50 things about you that are horrible, and you have a self-esteem problem, and you're sort of hunched over—you've got all these problems, and so it's not easy to see the divinity that lurks behind that. Unless you're aware of the heroic stories of the past—the metaphysics of consciousness—I don't think you can have the courage that regards yourself as the sort of creature that can stand up underneath that intense existential burden and move forward in courage and grace."

"It's an open question, the degree to which the cosmos would order itself around you properly if you got yourself together as much as you could get yourself together. We know that things can go very badly wrong if you do things very badly wrong—there's no doubt about that. But the converse is also true. If you start to sort yourself out properly, and if you have beneficial effect on your family, first of all that's going to echo down the generations, but it also spreads out into the community. And we are networked together; we're not associated linearly; we all effect each other. So it's an open question, the degree to which acting out the notion that Being is good, and the notion that you can accept its limitations and that you should still strive for virtue. I don't think we know the limits of virtue. I don't think we know what true virtue could bring about, if we aimed at it carefully and practically. So the notion that there is something divine about the individual who accepts the conditions of existence and still strives for the good—I think that's an idea that's very much worth paying attention to. And I think the fact that people considered that idea seriously for at least 2000 years indicates that there's at least something to be thought about there."

"If religion was "the opium of the masses," then communism was the methamphetamine of the masses."

"The eternal dragon is always giving our fallen-down castles a rough time—always."

"Our ideas emerged out of the ground of our action over thousands and thousands of years. And when philosophers were putting forth those ideas, what they were doing wasn't generating creative ideas—they were just telling the story of humanity. It's already there. It's already in us. It's already in our patterns of behavior."

"The dragon is the imagistic representation of the functional category of predator. It's like this: If you're a monkey, then a bird will pick you off, like an eagle. That's the wings. If it wasn't an eagle, then it was a cat (dragon claws), because they climb trees and give you a good chomping. And if it wasn't a cat, then you go down to the ground and a snake would get you, or maybe the snake would climb up the tree. So a dragon is a cat-snake-bird. And that's the thing that you really want to avoid. And the other thing is that it breathes fire, which is interesting because fire was both greatest friend and greatest enemy of humanity."

"St. George is the hero who goes out to confront the dragon, and he frees the virgin from its grasp. I would say that's a pretty straightforward story about the sexual attractiveness of the masculine spirit that's willing to forthrightly encounter the unknown. It is a straight biological representation to me, and it's a really, really old story. It's the oldest written story we have, and it's basically the ancient Mesopotamian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, which basically plays out that story. You've seen this story played out a hundred different ways, and you never get tired of it, because it's the central story of mankind."

"Embodied imitation and dramatic abstraction constituted the ground out of which higher abstract cognition emerged. How else could it be? Clearly we were mostly bodies before we were minds. Clearly. And so we were acting out things way before we understood them."

"And then Snow White has to wait for the Prince to come rescue her, and you think: "How sexist can you get, that story?" Well, seriously, because that's the way that that would be read in the modern world, like, "She doesn't need a prince to come rescue her." That's why Disney made Frozen, that absolutely appalling piece of rubbish."

"The Bible is a collective attempt by humanity to solve the deepest problems that we have. The deepest of all problems that we have is the problem of self-consciousness. The unique predicament of human beings is that we are self-conscious. Not only is it true that we are mortal and that we die, but most crucial is the reality that we know we will die."

"There's an insistence that the Being that's spoken into being through truth is good. This is the most profound idea ever. It is also the most believable idea ever. What cures in therapy is truth. Of course, you must encounter the things that you're afraid of, but this is enacted truth, because if you know that there's something you need to do by your own set of rules and you're avoiding it, then you're enacting a lie. You're not speaking the lie, but you're enacting it, and that's the same thing: untruth. If I can get you to face what it is that you know you shouldn't be avoiding, then what's happening is that we're both partaking in the process of you attempting to act out your deepest truth. That improves people's lives radically. The clinical evidence for that is overwhelming. We know that if you expose people to the things that they're afraid of and are avoiding, they get better. You have to do it carefully, cautiously, and with their approval and participation. Of all the things that clinicians have established that's credible, that's #1. It's redemptive insofar as both people are telling the truth. The difference between deception and repression is very small. People can handle earthquakes and cancer and even death, but they can't handle deception. They can't handle the rug being pulled out from underneath them by people who they love and trust. This does them in. It makes them ill, it hurts them psycho-physiologically, and worse than that it makes them cynical, bitter, vicious, and resentful. And then they also start to act all that out in the world, and that makes it worse."

"To come up with the idea that you can bargain with the future is the major idea of humankind. We suffer. What do we do about it? We figure out how to bargain with the future. And we minimize suffering in that manner."

"Your values have to be hierarchically organized with something absolute at the top, because otherwise they do nothing but war. This is true if you're an individual and it's true if you're a state. If you don't know what the next thing you should do is, then there are 50 things you should do. Then, how are you doing to do any of them? You can't. You have to prioritize. Something has to be above something else. It has to be arranged in a hierarchy for it not to be chaotic, so there is some principle at the top of the hierarchy."

"Jung said that science is nested in a dream. The dream is that if we investigated the structures of material reality with sufficient attention and truth, we could then learn enough about material reality to then alleviate suffering—to produce the philosopher's stone, to make everybody wealthy, to make everybody healthy, to make everyone live as long as they wanted to live or perhaps forever. That's the goal—to alleviate the catastrophe of existence. The idea that the solutions to the mysteries of life enable us to develop such a substance, or multitude of substances, provided the motive force for the development of science. Jung traced that development of the motive force to over the period of 1,000 years. Jung went back into alchemical texts and interpreted them as if they were the dream upon which science was founded. Newton was an alchemist, by the way. Science did emerge out of alchemy. The question is, What were the alchemists up to? They were trying to produce the philosopher's stone, which was the universal medicament for mankind's pathology."

"The lion lying down with the lamb is the idea that is either projected back in time, saying that there was a time, or maybe that there will be a time, when the horrors of life are no longer necessary for life itself to exist. And the horrors of life are, of course, that everything eats everything else, and that everything dies, and that everything is born, and that the whole place is a charnel house. It's a catastrophe from beginning to end. This is the vision of it being other than that. There's a strong idea that human beings can interact with reality in such a way that the tragic and evil elements of it can be mitigated, so that we can move closer to a state of being where we have the benefits of existence without the catastrophe that seems to go along with it."

"The idea that paradise, the proper habitat of a human being, is a walled garden is a good one. It's an echo back to the chaos/order idea. Walls: culture. Garden: nature. The proper human habitat is a properly tended garden."

"A thing isn't quite real until you name it."

"Without that forward-going, courageous consciousness, a woman herself will drift into unconsciousness and terror. It's the sleep of the naïve and damned. She needs to wake herself up and bring her own masculine consciousness into the forefront so she can survive in the world. Unless woman is taken out of man, then she isn't a human being—she's just a creature."

"Snake predation was no joke. It shaped our evolutionary past. We're attuned to snakes. We are really good at detecting the camouflage pattern of snakes in the lower half of our visual field. There's evidence that the reason human beings have such acute vision—which means that our eyes were opened—is that we co-evolved with snakes and we learned how to see them. And then the price we paid for seeing was that our brain grew, because you need a lot of brainpower to see. And the consequence of our brain growing was that one day we woke up and discovered the future. And the future is where all the snakes might live instead of where they live right now. I already made the case that there's a tight link between what you eat and information—conceptual link as well as a practical link. But it's also the case that we can see colors. The question is: Why? The answer is: We evolved to see ripe fruit. In the story of Adam and Eve human beings are given vision by the snake and the fruit. That turns out to be correct."

"The woman offers the man fruit. Maybe that's how our female ancestors enticed males to join them in caring for offspring: "I'll offer you food, and in response we're going to make a team. That's the deal." And that's the human deal. That's why we're more or less monogamous and why we more or less pair-bond, and why something approximating marriage is a human universal. You can find exceptions, but who cares? Look at the vast pattern. The price we pay for having very large brains is that we're very dependent, and it takes a long time for us to get programmed, and because of that we need relatively stable family bonding, and that's basically what we've evolved. You don't get that without making males self-conscious. Why not impregnate and run? It's not "Why do men abandon their children?" that's the mystery. It's "Why do any men ever stick with them?" Just look at the animal kingdom. The simple and easiest thing is always the most likely thing to occur. It's the exception—the long-term commitment—that needs explanation."

"Women are attracted to men's ability to generate, to be productive, and to share. These qualities transcend wealth, which can disappear."

"What do people do that animals don't? Work. What does work mean? It means you sacrifice the present for the future. Why do you do that? Because you know that you're vulnerable, and because you're awake. From here on in, from this point forward, there's no return to unconscious paradise. I don't care how many problems you've solved so that today's okay. You have a lot of problems coming up. No matter how much you work, you're never going to work enough to solve all the problems. All you're going to do from here on in is to be terrified of the future. That's the price of waking up. It's the end of paradise, and that's the beginning of history."

"The selection pressure that women placed on men developed the entire species. There's two things that happened. The men competed for competence, since the male hierarchy is a mechanism that pushes the best men to the top. The effect of that is multiplied by the fact that women who are hypergamous peel from the top. And so the males who are the most competent are much more likely to leave offspring—which seems to have driven cortical expansion."

"The intellect is the most incredible human capacity. It is the highest of all human capacities, actually. However, it is also the thing that can go most terribly wrong, because the intellect can become arrogant about its own existence and its accomplishments, and it can fall in love with its own products. That's what happens with ideologies. You become obsessed with a human-constructed dogma of which you believe is 100% right, and it eradicates the necessity of anything transcendent."

"The Bible presents a cataclysm at the beginning of time, which is the emergence of self-consciousness in human beings, which puts a rift in the structure of Being. That's the right way to think about it. That's given cosmic significance. You can dispense with that and say that nothing that happens to human beings is of cosmic significance, that we're these short lived, mold-like entities that are like cancers on this tiny little planet, rotating out in the middle of nowhere on the edge of some unknown galaxy in the middle of infinite space, and nothing that happens to us matters. This is not a road that you can walk down and live well. For all intents and purposes, it's untrue. If fact, if you really walk down that road, and you take it really seriously, you end up not living at all. The kind of conclusions suicidal people draw about the utility of life, prior to wishing for its cessation, are very much like the conclusions that you draw if you walk down that particular line of reasoning long enough."

"The idea is that you could sacrifice something of value, and that would have transcendent utility. That is by no means an unsophisticated idea. In fact, it might be the greatest idea that human beings ever came up with."

"If the mother doesn't make the sacrifice, then you get the horrible Oedipal situation in the household, which is its own catastrophic hell. If the maternal sacrifice isn't there, then that doesn't work. If the paternal sacrifice isn't there, if the father isn't willing to put his son out into the world, then that's a non-starter because the kid doesn't grow up. And if the son isn't willing to do that, then who the hell is going to shoulder the responsibility? So if those three things don't happen, it's chaos, it's cataclysmic, it's hell. If they do happen—is it the opposite of that? Well, maybe you could say it depends on the degree to which they happen. And it's a continuum. How thoroughly can they happen? Well, we don't know, because you might say, "How good of a job do you do of encouraging your children to live in truth?" Well, that's part of the answer to this question. And the answer likely is that you don't do as good a job of it as you could. So it works out quite well, but you don't know how well it could work if you did it really well, or spectacularly well, or ultimately well or something like that. You don't know."

"Mary is the Great Mother. She is the Mother. That's what Mary is. Whether she existed or not is not the point. She exists at least as a hyper-reality. She exists as the Mother. What's the sacrifice of the Mother? That's easy: If you're a mother who's worth her salt, you offer your son to be destroyed by the world. That's what you do. And that's what's going to happen. He's going to be born, he's going to suffer, he's going to have his trouble in life, he's going to have his illnesses, he's going to face his failures and catastrophes, and he's going to die. That's what's going to happen, and if you're awake you know that, and then you say, "Well, perhaps he will live in a way that will justify that." And then you try to have that happen. And that's what makes you worthy of a statue like the Pieta. "Is it right to bring a baby into this terrible world?" Well, every woman asks herself that question. Some say no, and they have their reasons. Mary answers 'yes' voluntarily. Mary is the archetype of the woman who answers yes to life voluntarily. Not because she is blind. She knows what's going to happen. So she's the archetypal representation of the woman who says yes to life knowing full well what life is."

"Of course, my socialist colleagues and I weren’t out to hurt anyone. Quite the reverse. We were out to improve things—but we were going to start with other people. I came to see the temptation in this logic, the obvious flaw, the danger—but could also see that it did not exclusively characterize socialism. Anyone who was out to change the world by changing others was to be regarded with suspicion. The temptations of such a position were too great to be resisted."

"Behavior is imitated, then abstracted into play, formalized into drama and story, crystallized into myth and codified into religion—and only then criticized in philosophy, and provided, post-hoc, with rational underpinnings."

"Every explorer is therefore, by necessity, a revolutionary, and every successful revolutionary is a peacemaker."

"We require routine and tradition. That’s order. Order can become excessive, and that’s not good, but chaos can swamp us, so we drown—and that is also not good. We need to stay on the straight and narrow path."

"When the aristocracy catches a cold, as it is said, the working class dies of pneumonia."

"If you can bite, you generally don't have to."

"To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language)."

"So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence."

"Standards of better or worse are not illusory or unnecessary. If you hadn’t decided that what you are doing right now was better than the alternatives, you wouldn’t be doing it. The idea of a value-free choice is a contradiction in terms. Value judgments are a precondition for action. Furthermore, every activity, once chosen, comes with its own internal standards of accomplishment. If something can be done at all, it can be done better or worse."

"The first step, perhaps, is to take stock. Who are you? When you buy a house and prepare to live in it, you hire an inspector to list all its faults—as it is, in reality, now, not as you wish it could be. You’ll even pay him for the bad news. You need to know. You need to discover the home’s hidden flaws. You need to know whether they are cosmetic imperfections or structural inadequacies. You need to know because you can’t fix something if you don’t know it’s broken—and you’re broken. You need an inspector. The internal critic—it could play that role, if you could get it on track; if you and it could cooperate."

"The Bible is, for better or worse, the foundational document of Western civilization (of Western values, Western morality, and Western conceptions of good and evil). It's the product of processes that remain fundamentally beyond our comprehension. The Bible is a library composed of many books, each written and edited by many people. It's a truly emergent document—a selected, sequenced and finally coherent story written by no one and everyone over many thousands of years. The Bible has been thrown up, out of the deep, by the collective human imagination, which is itself a product of unimaginable forces operating over unfathomable spans of time. Its careful, respectful study can reveal things to us about what we believe and how we do and should act that can be discovered in almost no other manner."

"Was it really a good thing, for example, to so dramatically liberalize the divorce laws in the 1960s? It’s not clear to me that the children whose lives were destabilized by the hypothetical freedom this attempt at liberation introduced would say so. Horror and terror lurk behind the walls provided so wisely by our ancestors. We tear them down at our peril. We skate, unconsciously, on thin ice, with deep, cold waters below, where unimaginable monsters lurk."

"If your child is the kind of determined varmint who simply runs away, laughing, when placed on the steps or in his room, physical restraint might have to be added to the time out routine. A child can be held carefully but firmly by the upper arms, until he or she stops squirming and pays attention. If that fails, being turned over a parent’s knee might be required. For the child who is pushing the limits in a spectacularly inspired way, a swat across the backside can indicate requisite seriousness on the part of a responsible adult. There are some situations in which even that will not suffice, partly because some children are very determined, exploratory, and tough, or because the offending behaviour is truly severe. And if you’re not thinking such things through, then you’re not acting responsibly as a parent. You’re leaving the dirty work to someone else, who will be much dirtier doing it."

"There is little difference between sacrifice and work. They are also both uniquely human. Sometimes, animals act as if they are working, but they are really only following the dictates of their nature. Beavers build dams. They do so because they are beavers, and beavers build dams. They don't think, "Yeah, but I'd rather be on a beach in Mexico with my girlfriend," while they're doing it."

"It took untold generations to get you where you are. A little gratitude might be in order. If you’re going to insist on bending the world to your way, you better have your reasons."

"Freud was, after all, a genius. You can tell that because people still hate him."

"People organize their brains with conversation. If they don't have anyone to tell their story to, they lose their minds. Like hoarders, they cannot unclutter themselves."

"Group identity can be fractionated right down to the level of the individual."

"And let us not forget: wicked women may produce dependent sons, may support and even marry dependent men, but awake and conscious women want an awake and conscious partner. It is for this reason that Nelson Muntz of The Simpsons is so necessary to the small social group that surrounds Homer’s antihero son, Bart. Without Nelson, King of the Bullies, the school would soon be overrun by resentful, touchy Milhouses, narcissistic, intellectual Martin Princes, soft, chocolate-gorging German children, and infantile Ralph Wiggums. Muntz is a corrective, a tough, self-sufficient kid who uses his own capacity for contempt to decide what line of immature and pathetic behaviour simply cannot be crossed. Part of the genius of The Simpsons is its writers’ refusal to simply write Nelson off as an irredeemable bully. Abandoned by his worthless father, neglected, thankfully, by his thoughtless slut of a mother, Nelson does pretty well, everything considered. He’s even of romantic interest to the thoroughly progressive Lisa, much to her dismay and confusion (for much the same reasons that Fifty Shades of Grey became a worldwide phenomenon)."

"I had to force myself to concentrate, and to breathe, and to keep from saying and meaning “to hell with it” during the endless months that I was possessed by dread and terror. And I was barely able to do it. More than half the time I believed that I was going to die in one of the many hospitals in which I resided. And I believe that if I had fallen prey to resentment, for example, I would have perished once and for all—and that I am fortunate to have avoided such a fate."

"Much that is great starts small, ignorant, and useless. […] But today’s beginner is tomorrow’s master."

"Ambition is often—and often purposefully—misidentified with the desire for power, and damned with faint praise, and denigrated, and punished. And ambition is sometimes exactly that wish for undue influence on others. But there is a crucial difference between sometimes and always. Authority is not mere power, and it is extremely unhelpful, even dangerous, to confuse the two. When people exert power over others, they compel them, forcefully. They apply the threat of privation or punishment so their subordinates have little choice but to act in a manner contrary to their personal needs, desires, and values. When people wield authority, by contrast, they do so because of their competence—a competence that is spontaneously recognized and appreciated by others, and generally followed willingly, with a certain relief, and with the sense that justice is being served."

"You do not choose what interests you. It chooses you. Something manifests itself out of the darkness as compelling, as worth living for; following that, something moves us further down the road, to the next meaningful manifestation—and so it goes, as we continue to seek, develop, grow, and thrive. It is a perilous journey, but it is also the adventure of our lives. Think of pursuing someone you love: catch them or not, you change in the process."

"Who dares wins—if he does not perish. And who wins also makes himself irresistibly desirable and attractive, not least because of the development of character that adventure inevitably produces. And this is what makes us forever more than rabbits."

"Those who break the rules ethically are those who have mastered them first and disciplined themselves to understand the necessity of those rules, and break them in keeping with the spirit rather than the letter of the law."

"That is the nature of our ancestors: immensely courageous hunters, defenders, shepherds, voyagers, inventors, warriors, and founders of cities and states. That is the father you could rescue; the ancestor you could become."

"There is a high goal, a mountain peak, a star that shines in the darkness, beckoning above the horizon. Its mere existence gives you hope—and that is the meaning without which you cannot live."

"We have been telling [young people] for decades to demand what they are owed by society. We have been implying that the important meanings of their lives will be given to them because of such demands, when we should have been doing the opposite: letting them know that the meaning that sustains life in all its tragedy and disappointment is to be found in shouldering a noble burden."

"Perhaps communism may even have been a viable solution to the problems of the unequal distribution of wealth that characterized the industrial age, if all of the hypothetically oppressed were good people and all of the evil was to be found, as hypothesized, in their bourgeoisie overlords. Unfortunately for the communists, a substantial proportion of the oppressed were incapable, unconscientious, unintelligent, licentious, power mad, violent, resentful, and jealous, while a substantial proportion of the oppressors were educated, able, creative, intelligent, honest, and caring."

"Like God, however, ideology is dead. The bloody excesses of the twentieth century killed it."

"If you aim at nothing, you become plagued by everything."

"To write something long, sophisticated, and coherent means, at least in part, to become more complex, articulate, and deeper in personality."

"It is far better to become something than to remain anything but become nothing."

"It was the bringing together of a warring multiplicity under the unifying doctrines of Christianity that civilized Europe."

"Although Christ commits many acts that might be considered revolutionary, as we discussed in Rule I, He is nonetheless explicitly portrayed in the Gospels as the master of tradition."

"Making something beautiful is difficult, but it is amazingly worthwhile. If you learn to make something in your life truly beautiful—even one thing—then you have established a relationship with beauty. From there you can begin to expand that relationship out into other elements of your life and the world. That is an invitation to the divine. That is the reconnection with the immortality of childhood, and the true beauty and majesty of the Being you can no longer see. You must be daring to try that."

"Buy a piece of art. Find one that speaks to you and make the purchase. If it is a genuine artistic production, it will invade your life and change it. A real piece of art is a window into the transcendent, and you need that in your life, because you are finite and limited and bounded by your ignorance. […] It is for such reasons that we need to understand the role of art, and stop thinking about it as an option, or a luxury, or worse, an affectation. Art is the bedrock of culture itself. It is the foundation of the process by which we unite ourselves psychologically, and come to establish productive peace with others. As it is said, “Man shall not live by bread alone” (Matthew 4:4). That is exactly right. We live by beauty. We live by literature. We live by art. We cannot live without some connection to the divine—and beauty is divine—because in its absence life is too short, too dismal, and too tragic."

"I exposed myself to a larger number of paintings, I like to think, than anyone else in history. For at least four years, starting in 2001, I searched eBay, looking at roughly a thousand paintings a day, seeking the one or two in that number that were of genuine quality."

"Beauty leads you back to what you have lost. Beauty reminds you of what remains forever immune to cynicism. Beauty beckons in a manner that straightens your aim. Beauty reminds you that there is lesser and greater value. Many things make life worth living: love, play, courage, gratitude, work, friendship, truth, grace, hope, virtue, and responsibility. But beauty is among the greatest of these."

"That is what happens two people fall under the spell of love. For a while, both become better than they were, and see that, but then that magic fades away. Both receive that experience as a gift. Both have their eyes open and can see what is visible to no one else. Such love is a glimpse of what could be, if the relationship remained true. It is delivered as a gift initially, from fate, but requires tremendous effort to realize and maintain. And once that is understood, the goal is clear."

"Romance requires trust—and the deeper the trust, the deeper the possibility for romance."

"There is an ancient conceit in the book of Genesis (2:21–22) that Eve was taken out of Adam—created from his rib. Woman from man: this presents something of a mystery, reversing, as it does, the normative biological sequence, where males emerge from females at birth. It also gave rise to a line of mythological speculation, attempting to account for the strangeness of this creative act, predicated on the supposition that Adam, the original man produced by God, was hermaphroditic—half masculine and half feminine—and only later separated into the two sexes. This implies not only the partition of a divinely produced unity, but the incompleteness of man and woman until each is brought together with the other."

"That ghostly figure, the ideal union of what is best in both personalities, should be constantly regarded as the ruler of the marriage—and, indeed, as something as close to divine as might be practically approached by fallible individuals."

"There are three fundamental states of social being: tyranny (you do what I want), slavery (I do what you want), or negotiation."

"I have camped where the grizzly bears were plentiful. It is nice that they are on the planet and all that, but I prefer my grizzlies shy, not too hungry, and far enough away to be picturesque."

"We could use a poetic metaphor to represent the elements of experience that we have so far discussed (this is in fact how the world I am describing is usually considered). Imagine the realm of the Dragon of Chaos as the night sky, stretching infinitely above you on a clear night, representing what will remain forever outside your domain of understanding. Maybe you are standing on a beach, looking up, lost in contemplation and imagination. Then you turn your attention to the ocean—as grand in its way as the starry cosmos, but tangible and manifest and knowable, comparatively speaking. That is nature. It is not mere potential. It is there, in its unknowability, instead of removed from comprehension entirely. It is not yet tamed, however; not brought into the domain of order. And it is beautiful in its mystery. The moon reflects on its surface; the waves crash eternally and lull you to sleep; you can swim in its welcoming waters. But that beauty has a price. You better keep an eye out for sharks. And poisonous jellyfish. And the riptide that can pull you or your children under. And the storms that could destroy your warm and welcoming beach house."

"I think it is reasonable to posit that it is often the people who have had too easy a time—who have been pampered and elevated falsely in their self-esteem—who adopt the role of victim and the mien of resentment."

"Grief must be a reflection of love. It is perhaps the ultimate proof of love. Grief is an uncontrollable manifestation of your belief that the lost person’s existence, limited and flawed as it might have been, was worthwhile, despite the limitations and flaws even of life itself."

"The motivation that drives the commission of the worst human atrocities is an inevitable social consequence of the refusal of the self-conscious individual to make the sacrifices appropriate to establishing a harmonious life, and their consequent degeneration into a kind of murderous and resentment-filled rage propagating endlessly through its variations in society until everything comes to an end."

"You want to have a meaningful life? Everything you do matters. That's the definition of a meaningful life. But everything you do matters. So you're going to have to carry that with you."

"You use the observation of your own capability to bear responsibility, to buttress yourself against the terrors of being finite. You say, "Weak and miserable as I am, I can still stand up to the terrible tragedy of life and prevail!" And that's good enough."

"I think the idea of white privilege is absolutely reprehensible. And it's not because white people aren't privileged. You know, we have all sorts of privileges, and most people have privileges of all sorts, and you should be grateful for your privileges and work to deserve them, I would say. But the idea that you can target an ethnic group with a collective crime, regardless of the specific innocence or guilt of the constituent elements of that group—there is absolutely nothing that's more racist than that. It's absolutely abhorrent."

"There is nothing more useful in combating the tragedy of life than to struggle with all your soul on behalf of the good."

"The logical conclusion of intersectionality is individuality. There's so many different ways of categorizing people's advantages and disadvantages, that if you take that all the way out to the end you say, "Well, the individual is the ultimate minority"—and that's exactly right. And that's exactly what the West discovered. The intersectionalists will get there if they don't kill everyone first."

"12 principles for a 21st century conservatism: 1. The fundamental assumptions of Western civilization are valid. 2. Peaceful social being is preferable to isolation and to war. In consequence, it justly and rightly demands some sacrifice of individual impulse and idiosyncrasy. 3. Hierarchies of competence are desirable and should be promoted. 4. Borders are reasonable. Likewise, limits on immigration are reasonable. Furthermore, it should not be assumed that citizens of societies that have not evolved functional individual-rights predicated polities will hold values in keeping with such polities. 5. People should be paid so that they are able and willing to perform socially useful and desirable duties. 6. Citizens have the inalienable right to benefit from the result of their own honest labor. 7. It is more noble to teach young people about responsibilities than about rights. 8. It is better to do what everyone has always done, unless you have some extraordinarily valid reason to do otherwise. 9. Radical change should be viewed with suspicion, particularly in a time of radical change. 10. The government, local and distant, should leave people to their own devices as much as possible. 11. Intact heterosexual two-parent families constitute the necessary bedrock for a stable polity. 12. We should judge our political system in comparison to other actual political systems and not to hypothetical utopias."

"[First opening statement:] To read something you don’t just follow the words and follow the meaning, but you take apart the sentences and you ask yourself at this level of phrase and at the level of sentence and the level of paragraph, “Is this true? Are there counter-arguments that can be put forward that are credible? Is this solid thinking?” And I have to tell you, and I’m not trying to be flippant here, that I have rarely read a tract that made as many conceptual errors per sentence as The Communist Manifesto. It was quite a miraculous re-read. And it was interesting to think about it psychologically as well, because I’ve read student papers that were of the same ilk in some sense, although I’m not suggesting that they were of the same level of glittering literary brilliance and polemic quality. And I also understand that The Communist Manifesto was a call for revolution and not a standard logical argument, but that notwithstanding I have some things to say about the authors psychologically. The first thing is that is doesn’t seem to me that either Marx or Engels grappled with this particular fundamental truth, which is that almost all ideas are wrong. And it doesn’t matter if they're your ideas or someone else’s ideas; they’re probably wrong. And even if they strike you with the force of brilliance, your job is to assume first of all that they’re probably wrong and then to assault them with everything you have in your arsenal and see if they can survive. And what struck me about The Communist Manifesto was akin to something Jung said about typical thinking and this was the thinking of people who were not trained to think. He said that the typical thinker has a thought; it appears to them like an object might appear in a room; the thought appears and they just accept it as true. They don't go the second step, which is to think about the thinking. And that's the real essence of critical thinking. And so that's what you try to teach people in university, to read a text and think about it critically—not to destroy the utility of the text, but to separate the wheat from the chaff. And so what I tried to do when I was reading The Communist Manifesto was to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I'm afraid I found some wheat, yes, but mostly chaff, and I'm going to explain why, hopefully in relatively short order."

": Jordan Peterson: Why are you asking me that?"

": Danny Xia (from PhilTalk with Danny): Because you're a Christian."

": Jordan: You say that. I haven't claimed that."

": Danny: Well what is this? Is this "Christians vs. Atheist"?"

": Jordan: I don't know."

": Danny: You don't know where you are right now."

": Jordan: Don't be a smartass. [crosstalk] (I won't talk to you if you're a smartass.)"

": Danny: (Well, either you're a Christian or you're not.) Either you're a Christian or you're not. Which one is it?"

": Jordan: I could be either of them. But I don't have to tell you."

": Danny: You don't have to tell me. I was under the impression- I was invited to talk to a Christian. Am I not talking to a Christian?"

": Jordan: No, you were invited... to..."

": Danny: I think everyone should look at the title of the YouTube channel. You're probably in the wrong YouTube video."

": Jordan: You're really quite something, you are."

": Danny: Aren't I? And you're really quite nothing."

"{{Cite tweet |user=jordanbpeterson |number=1633882580746653696 |date=9 March 2023 |title=There are cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see"

"Countless men are grateful to Jordan Peterson for having the courage to speak his mind on a contentious social matter. This temporal issue brought him many enemies, but his timeless messages earned followers that vastly outnumber them. The sheer numbers testify that he is the right man at the right time, someone capable of showing young men that cleaning up their room has cosmic significance, and that imposing a little order upon chaos is good for the soul, which in turn is good for the world."

"Peterson can take the most difficult ideas and make them entertaining. He is fast becoming the closest that academia has to a rock star."

"For all the bizarre but now-familiar attempts to smear him as ‘far-right,’ Jordan Peterson is just a centrist liberal, with all the uninterestingness that that entails. But he’s a centrist liberal who has been demoralized by the officialization of polite falsehood enough to loudly speak what should be insipid truths. Platitudes like ‘Enlightenment values are worth preserving’ and ‘science is true even if when produces discomforting results’ now qualify as bomb-throwing."

"The startling success of his elevated arguments for the importance of order has made [Jordan Peterson] the most significant conservative thinker to appear in the English-speaking world in a generation."

"The more you hear Peterson babble about anything that isn’t himself, the more it becomes apparent that he’s simply not very intelligent or very well-read."

"Peterson is, in many ways, countercultural. He doesn't offer get-rich-quick schemes, or pick-up techniques. He is not libertine or libertarian. He promises that life is a struggle, but that it is ultimately worthwhile."

"Peterson tosses 2,000 years of Christian biblical theology and redefines what it means to be a Christian as mere truth-seeking — no repentance, no regeneration, no profession of faith, and it seems not even a conscious decision to become a follower of Jesus Christ. This Christ-less Christianity is so cut-rate as to make what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace” look downright expensive. …There is more of the postmodern about Peterson’s philosophy than one might imagine."

"My belief in how plant-based nutrition could boost athletic performance while also reducing the strain on the environment was, at the time, considered fringe at best. … Ten years later, it's now common for people to speak of their “plant-based diet.” Even “vegan” is a familiar word, seen on the most conventional restaurants' menus. The importance of avoiding animal products in our diet, whether for heath, physical and mental performance, environmental, ethical, or a combination of these reasons, is now well understood and widely accepted."

"Knowing that training is little more than breaking down muscle, I figured that what rebuilds that same muscle must be a major factor for recovery and therefore quicker improvement. If I was able to recover from each workout faster, I would be able to schedule them closer together and therefore train more than my competition. I would improve faster. As I suspected, food was the answer—high-quality, nutrient-dense, alkaline-forming, easily digestible food in proper proportions … Nutrition has a dramatic effect on recovery—that was unmistakable. … The result was astounding. Not only did my recovery time plummet but my energy level, strength-to-weight ratio, and endurance shot up. … On the cellular level, this diet was able to speed the renewal of muscle tissue. That meant that following this diet would actually help the body regenerate more frequently, suggesting that it could help reduce biological age."

"Stress is like fire: When controlled and used for a purpose, it serves us well. Left unbridled, it can consume us. In amounts that our body is capable of adapting to, certain stresses are beneficial. Exercise, for example, is a stress."

"When more nutrient-rich foods are present in the diet, the body does not have to eat as much as it would with less nutrient-rich foods. In addition, when the body is fed the nutrients it needs, the brain turns off the hunger signal. And so, the need to continually consume, a state many people who subsist on a refined-food diet experience, ceases, and not as much needs to be eaten and digested."

"Some of the greatest athletes in the world are vegetarians … There's a well-known triathlete name Brendan Brazier who is also vegan and quite successful. His sport is much more demanding than hockey so I knew if he can do it, I could also."

"The Vedas see the ultimate Truth behind all ephemeral truths. The Creation leads us to the Creator, to the highest knowledge, which is integrated into one. The Vedas still represent eternal truth in the purest form ever written. And they are what drew me to India in the first place, what kept me there, and what draws me back still. India is the only country that feels like home to me, the only country whose airport tarmac I have ever kissed upon landing."

"In the wake of the warriors came the priests. First the Franciscans, then the Jesuits, then the Dominicans, and lastly the Augustinians. All of these eager missionaries must have been disappointed to find that hardly anyone desired to be converted. But what really made their holy blood boil was finding their old foes, the Muslims and Jews, openly and brazenly practising their religions. A number of ex-Jews had come out to the colony, and although they had professed to be Christians back in Portugal, in Goa they showed a worrying tendency to revert to their old ways. The men of God set about clearing what one Dominican termed this ‘jungle of unbelief ’ with all the ardour of Amazon lumber barons."

"Just like the mullahs who had marched into Goa two hundred years before with the Bahamani sultans, these Catholic clergy were prepared to go to any lengths to spread their faith. Initially they pestered the Portuguese king for special powers, and then they pestered the pope to pester the king on their behalf."

"The first of these special powers arrived in 1540 when the viceroy received authority to ‘destroy all Hindu temples, not leaving a single one in any of the islands, and to confiscate the estates of these temples for the maintenance of the churches which are to be erected in their places.’ A frenzy of activity must have followed. The Italian cleric Father Nicolau Lancilotto, visiting Goa in 1545, reported that ‘there was not a single temple to be seen on the island.’ The island in question was Teeswadi, the main field of operations for the two priestly orders then on the scene. Once the islands of Bardez and Salcete were acquired, each order was able to stake out its own territory – the Franciscans clearing the ‘jungle’ of Bardez, and the Jesuits going to work on Salcete. By the time the Dominicans and the Augustinians arrived a few years later, however, there was not enough room for separate spheres of influence. A glance at the absurd profusion of churches standing cheek by jowl in Old Goa still conveys some idea of the spiritual excesses indulged in by these competing orders during their heyday."

"Children were flogged and slowly dismembered in front of their parents, whose eyelids had been sliced off to make sure they missed nothing. Extremities were amputated carefully, so that a person could remain conscious even when all that remained was a torso and head. Male genitals were removed and burned in front of wives, breasts hacked off and vaginas penetrated by swords while husbands were forced to watch."

"No one has the right routinely to override anyone else's rights, including those of animals. One must act in everyone's best interests as much as possible. [...] [Since] the law most unequivocally accords rights to persons, and typically denies rights to nonpersons, then practically, there is an imperative to deem sentient animals to be persons."

"I wanted to be at the apex of my story…For a long time, it felt as though things were happening to me. I felt as though I had no agency."

"Turning those revelations into art was a whole other thing…I did it, though — and that helped me realize my power, beyond the pain. Being able to illustrate those experiences for readers was a triumph, because it took everything to resist all the urges I have as a human being to present myself as good, or healed, or undamaged. I had to work against myself to make the memoir, and I ended up more empowered than I ever thought I could be."

"Women, not all, but many, like seeing they aren’t alone. My story is very common. I was abused. Mistreated. Hurt by men. I came up. Women resonate with that story because it’s theirs sometimes."

"I think people have to hit rock bottom to really know their faculties because they have to use those faculties to get out of that rock bottom. I really had to feel profoundly lonely to get myself out of the feeling of being profoundly lonely. But it was always there, that feeling of loneliness and existing with the absence of something that had been stripped from me."

"This writer once had the misfortune of meeting The Hindu editor, N. Ram. He arrived one morning in 1992 on our ashram doorstep with a Muslim friend. He did not identify himself except to say that his name was Ram, and was eager to push forward his companion who had nothing to say. Finally, his manner radiating hostility, he asked us our opinion about the demolition of the disputed building called Babri Masjid in Ayodhya earlier in the year. We replied that we did not feel that Muslims had any vested interest or claim in Ayodhya at all. It was a Hindu pilgrimage town for many centuries and had no religious value to Muslims. The disputed building was a victory monument built by a foreign invader’s governor who had wished to subdue and intimidate the Hindu inhabitants of the area. We wondered how Indian Muslims, the citizens of a free and independent India whose religious rights were protected, could place any value on such a structure? There was a dead silence for a minute after this reply, while Ram glared at us menacingly (his companion had closed his eyes and sunk down in his chair). “No use talking to you,” he said loudly. And he got up and stomped out of the room with his Muslim companion in tow. “Who was that?” I asked the Mataji of the ashram later. “Oh, that was Ram of The Hindu,” she said, laughing. “You can be sure of a bad press from now on! You had better find another name to write under. The one Ram knows you by will be on every black list by tomorrow.” And so it has come about. Jai Sri Ram!"

"While the belief that Thomas settled in South India came about as an honest mistake, the claim that he was martyred by Brahmins was always a deliberate lie, playing upon a possible confusion between the consonants of the expression “be ruhme”, meaning “with a spear”, and those of “Brahma” (Semitic alphabets usually don’t specify vowels). That was the gratitude Hindus received in return for extending their hospitality to the Christian refugees: being blackened as the murderers of the refugees’ own hero. If the Indian bishops have any honour, they will themselves remove this false allegation from their discourse and their monuments, including the cathedral in Chennai built at the site of Thomas’s purported martyrdom (actually the site of a Shiva temple). Indeed, they will issue a historic declaration expressing their indebtedness to Hindu hospitality and pluralism and pledging to renounce their anti-Hindu animus."

"The famous English historian Arnold Toynbee observed that the mission and death of St. Thomas in India was legendary but that his reported burial place in Mylapore was a centre of pilgrimage for Indian Christians. We observe that this pretended burial place of St. Thomas – an empty tomb that has been refurbished at the cost of lakhs of rupees since the publication of this book in 1991 – must now become a centre of pilgrimage for archaeologists, historians and philosophers who do not have a theological axe to grind like the pilgrims of old and the priests of today, but who would know the plain truth about old Mylapore and record it for our children."

"The revelation that the tomb of St. Peter is a fake will not come as a surprise to Europeans. They know better than anyone else the deceitful nature of the Roman Church. But the same revelation about the tomb of St. Thomas in Madras will come as a surprise to Indians. They know the story of St. Thomas in India because it has been repeated by interested persons of eminence and enterprise, and sometimes even of scholarship, since the sixteenth century. They accept it “on authority”"

"The Jesuit Bollandist Peeters and Maurice Winternitz, Professor of Indian Philology and Ethnology at the German University of Prague, categorically deny that St. Thomas came to India. And the Indian “St. Thomas” Christian K.E. Job, a cautious voice among three archbishops, eleven bishops, and fifty-three priests who contributed to the Mar Thoma Centenary Commemoration Volume 1952, writes, “But there are few records enabling one to be positive about the scene of the activities of each of these Apostles [Peter and Paul] and how each of them carried out the commands of their Master ... [and] certain knowledge about the other Apostles [Thomas and Bartholomew] is absolutely inadequate.”"

"This statement is patently absurd in the face of the evidence of the Acts itself. Mylapore has never been “a desert country” as Mazdai’s land is described in the Acts – his city is not described at all – and has never had a Zoroastrian king or a mountain with an ancient royal sepulchre in it. Mylapore has always been known as a Hindu pilgrimage town and busy port, with jasmine gardens, jungles, peacocks and lush coconut groves."

"There is simply nothing Indian, much less South Indian, in the setting and ambiance of the Acts of Thomas. All internal evidence suggests Syria, Iraq and Persia – or Parthia as it was called in the first century CE – as the place where the drama of the Acts was played out to its preordained end, or to a kingdom on the edge of the Roman Empire – like Edessa itself – as there are strong Greco-Roman influences in the text, India as a specific place and Gundaphorus and Misdaeus-Mazdai as Indian kings appear to be literary devices used by Bardesanes to give credibility to the unconventional religious theme of the book."

"C.B. Firth could have included the testimony of Origen’s teacher, the Greek missionary theologian Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-235), who had travelled from Greece to Italy, Syria and Palestine before settling in Egypt. Clement is known as an apologist rather than a father of the Church, as he tried to reconcile Platonic philosophy with Christian doctrine. He is the first orthodox Christian scholar to say that St. Thomas went to Parthia."

"The same could be said of the testimony of the second and third century Clement and Origen, and fourth century Eusebius, but the difference is that their earlier date and closeness to the alleged events and its first traditions – which are not recorded in a stylized religious fiction like the Acts – give them more credibility. They, too, had knowledge of the Acts and Teaching but chose to ignore them and declare that St. Thomas went to Parthia. Eusebius, who had done research at Edessa for his Ecclesiastical History but lived at Caesarea Maritima in Palestine, the port from which St. Thomas would have had to embark for India (unless he used the Gulf of Aqaba port of Eilat or the Egyptian ports of Elim or Berenice), certainly knew both traditions thoroughly and is a principal witness. Moreover he held unorthodox religious views and would have been sympathetic to the Christian theosophy expounded in the Acts. Yet he states that St. Thomas went from Jerusalem by land to proselytise the Parthians. This supports the tradition that St. Thomas went to Edessa to meet his disciple Addai, whom he had sent earlier to meet the Abgar – the same Edessa that would later honour him with a book, a mummy, a tomb, and a cult."

"But Clement, Origen and Eusebius are not the only early Christian scholars to say that St. Thomas went to Parthia. There is also the fourth century priest, Rufinus of Aquileia, who translated Greek theological texts into Latin, and the fifth century Byzantine church historian and legal consultant, Socrates of Constantinople, who also wrote an Ecclesiastical History after Eusebius, the second edition which is still completely extant and considered an indispensable documentary source of early church history."

"Both Rufinus and Socrates would have known the Greek version of the Acts which was made immediately after the Syriac text was written (if it wasn’t the other way round as some scholars believe). They would also have known the testimony of Ephraim, Gregory, Ambrose and Jerome for St. Thomas in India. Yet Rufinus and Socrates both declare that St. Thomas went to Parthia."

"The New Testament says almost nothing about St. Bartholomew, but an apocryphal story alleges that he founded a church at Kalyan, near Bombay, and left a Hebrew version of the Gospel of Mathew there. This book was later found by Pantaenus of Alexandria, who is said to have visited India in 190 CE. All historians since Tillemont agree that Pantaenus went to Arabia Felix, which, like Ethiopia, was often referred to as “India” by ancient writers. C.B. Firth says that St. Bartholomew went to a country bordering on the Red Sea, and Donald Attwater says that there is no proof that he visited India, Lycaonia (Turkey), or even Armenia where he was supposed to have been flayed alive."

"Bishop Medleycott is the godfather of Thomas-in-India scholarship in India, and even in his day he was accused of working under racial, religious, regional, linguistic, and political influences."

"But Bishop Medleycott’s victory went further. He got himself named as the St. Thomas authority in the prestigious Encyclopaedia Britannica, Fifteenth Edition, 1984, along with Chevalier F.A. D’Cruz, editor of the old Mylapore Catholic Register and author of St. Thomas the Apostle in India... The unsigned main entry for St. Thomas in the Encyclopaedia is muddled and dissembling and simply wrong in some places."

"These errors are deliberate and motivated, given their context and arrangement, and this St. Thomas entry in the Encyclopaedia has been written by a Catholic scholar who not only subscribes to the apostle’s alleged South Indian adventure, but wishes to place the Mylapore tale over that of the Malabar tradition. He does this by mixing the North Indian legend, represented by the Acts, with the South Indian fable that the Portuguese left in Mylapore, to promote his particular South Indian masala view. He gets away with the deception because nobody has read the Acts of Thomas and studied its references to the kings Gundaphorus and Misdaeus-Mazdai, and the execution of Judas Thomas on a mountain that contained an ancient royal tomb. On 19 September 1996 we decided to call the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s bluff and sent a letter, with a copy of this book (second revised edition), to the Encyclopaedia’s editor-in-chief in Chicago pointing out the errors in their St. Thomas entry. The editorial division representative Anthony G. Craine replied to us on 18 October 1996. He wrote, "We have received your book, and we have subsequently reviewed our coverage of Saint Thomas. While the Saint Thomas article that appears in the current printing of the Encyclopaedia Britannica differs slightly from the 1984 article to which you refer in your book, the current article does convey the same basic information. We have concluded that the portion of the article that refers to Thomas’ later life places too much emphasis on the unlikely scenario of his traveling to, and being martyred in India (emphasis added). We have referred this information to the appropriate editor so that the article can be revised in future printings of Britannica. We appreciate your bringing this matter to our attention.""

"The charge that the Encyclopaedia Britannica is a Catholic encyclopaedia intent on promoting a traditional Christian point of view remains. It has always been that way with the Encyclopaedia: Joseph McCabe, the great linguist and historian of early Christianity, could not get it to correct and change its wrong entries for early Christian history either."

"This single attributed reference to a Hindu scholar was too much for the Kerala Christian Wikipedia page administrator Tinucherian (Cherian Tinu Abraham). Within an hour of the post, he deleted our reference to Swami Tapsyananda and rolled back the other postings we had made that day. It was a real surprise to us. Where we had made an effort not to interfere with earlier postings, we discovered that the same courtesy was not extended to us and that we would not be informed when we had “offended” Tinucherian's Christian enterprise. We abandoned Wikipedia as a waste of time and effort and our contributions were soon perverted or deleted altogether."

"The concocted absurdities found in the Wikipedia Thomas the Apostle article today, which has neither citations or credible references, can be exposed with a single example: the statement in the Thomas and India subsection of the main article that the king who executed Judas Thomas for sorcery and crimes against women, Mazdai (also Masdai; Misdaeus in Greek), was "the local king at Mylapore". This is a preposterous statement. The name Mazdai is Persian and specifically identifies a person who is Zoroastrian by religion. Mazdaism identifies a worshiper of Ahura Mazda and is a synonym for Zoroastrianism. Associating the Acts of Thomas and its Persian king Mazdai with Mylapore is motivated Christian scholarship – something "Dr." Deivanayakam of the Madras-Mylapore Archdiocese would produce – and the fact that the Wikipedia administrator, Tinucherian, allows such unsupported statements to stand unchallenged shows that he is deeply involved in the crime of writing a deliberately false and perverted history of Christianity in Mylapore."

"The first Christians to emigrate to India came in 345 CE. They landed at Cranganore in Malabar, the ancient port of Muziris on the mouth of the Periyar River where it joined the Arabian Sea. They were four hundred refugees from Babylon and Nineveh, belonging to seven tribes and seventy-two families. They were fleeing religious persecution under the Persian king Shapur II. He had driven them out of Syria and Mesopotamia because he considered them a state liability. Rome, Persia’s arch enemy, had begun to christianise under Constantine, and Shapur had come to suspect the allegiances of his Christian subjects."

"These crosses may be evidence of the connection of the Christian church in India with Persia, but they may also be evidence of temple destruction and the planting of Christian relics in temple foundations – at least the one on St. Thomas Mount may be so considered. The motif on this black granite slab is cut in relief, and on each side of the cross, which is surmounted by a descending dove, are pillars crowned with supernatural composite animals, or yalis, from whose mouths issue an arch that joins together above the dove. These yalis are Hindu symbols, not Christian, and Veda Prakash, Director of the Institute for the Study of Western Religions, Madras, asserts that the cross on St. Thomas Mount is an over-cut temple stone. He claims support for this view from the most unexpected quarter. Dr. R. Arulappa, the former Roman Catholic archbishop of Madras, in Punitha Thomaiyar, says that yantra stones in temple foundations were dug up by the Portuguese at three of the four sites in Madras that they associated with St. Thomas and where they built churches – Mylapore, Little Mount at Saidapet, and Big Mount at St. Thomas Mount."

"The Nazarenes were an ancient Jewish sect whose most famous member before Jesus was Samson, 21 known from the Old Testament story. They gave special importance to uncut hair, which they believed to contain divine power, and were later associated with the Essenes, the nationalistic religious community on the Dead Sea to which Jesus and Thomas belonged."

"The Nazarene hierarchy of Jerusalem had fled to Edessa prior to the Jewish revolt against Rome in 66 CE, and it is only after the Nazarenes had lost the national cause that Jesus and Judas Thomas took on divine roles. Paul’s Greek – some say Gnostic – ideas were accepted over those of orthodox Judaism, and for the first time in history the appellation “Christian” came into use in Syria, even as the first Christian church was built at Edessa on the ruins of the demolished Greek temple: Jesus and Judas had ousted Castor and Pollux. Later, near the end of the second century, the Abgar, Edessa’s prince and Bardesanes’s friend, was baptized a Christian and Edessa became a Christian state."

"But from the beginning of the Christian era to the Arab invasions of the seventh century, Judas Thomas was and remained the central object of worship at Edessa. He had lived and taught in the city and if he did not die there, his body was returned soon afterwards from Persia. His cult was brought to India by Thomas of Cana and the four hundred Syrian refugees he led, in 345 CE, and even as St. Thomas was identified with Jesus, so Thomas of Cana came to be identified with St. Thomas within a few generations of his death in Malabar."

"This is an old idea. Henry Love had suggested it in the last century, in Vestiges of Old Madras, and before him England’s greatest historian, Edward Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, had asked if the Indian Thomas was an apostle, an Armenian merchant, or a Manichaean. Major T.R. Vedantham had again questioned the identity of St. Thomas in 1987, in the “St. Thomas Legend”, serialized in the South Madras News. He had carefully reviewed the material available and come to the inescapable conclusion that Thomas of Cana was the man whom Syrian Christians had made into their Indian apostle St. Thomas."

"The earliest records of the Madras area, including money-lenders' accounts, go back to the fourth century CE. They identify Mylapore, Triplicane and Tiruvottiyur as temple towns. The Nandikkalambakkam describes Mylapore as a prosperous port under the Pallavas, the early-fourth- to-late-ninth century emperors of Kanchipuram, who patronized various schools of Hinduism including Jainism and Buddhism, built temples and generously supported the arts. There is no record of a Christian church or saint's tomb at Mylapore before the Portuguese period, and Olschki is basing his comments on the wrong assumption that Marco Polo did visit Mylapore and that he found a church there. Friar Oderic is describing the original Kapaleeswara Shiva Temple on the Mylapore seashore (see Henry Yule's comment: "This is clearly a Hindu temple."), which the Tamil saint Jnanasambandar has positively identified as being there at least before the sixth century CE."

"Vasco da Gama’s mistake was corrected when he returned to Malabar in 1502 and was met by a deputation of Syrian Christians. They identified themselves, surrendered their ancient honours and documents, and invited him to make war on their Hindu king."

"George Menachery, a Catholic apologist and former adviser to the Kerala State Department of Archaeology, in Kodungallur: City of St. Thomas, writes, “They presented him a ‘Rod of Justice’ and swore allegiance to the Portuguese king and implored Portuguese protection. The Admiral received them very kindly and promised all help and protection. The significance of this event is variously interpreted by historians.” Indeed it is – but only Catholic historians prevaricate on why this high- ranking community of merchants and soldiers had turned on their king in this perfidious way. K.M. Panikkar, in Malabar and the Portuguese, writes, “More than this, they suggested to [Vasco da Gama] that with their help he should conquer the Hindu kingdoms and invited him to build a fortress for this purpose in Cranganore. This was the recompense which the Hindu rajas received for treating with liberality and kindness the Christians in their midst.” The Syrians had of course acted on the exigencies of their Christian religion, which harbours in its heart a demon that divides mankind into friend and foe on ideological grounds. King Shapur II of Persia had not been mistaken about the allegiances of his Christian subjects in the fourth century."

"The Portuguese were familiar with the St. Thomas legend long before they arrived in India. They knew Marco Polo’s Il Milione, made popular in Europe in the fourteenth century, and the earlier sixth century Latin romances De Miraculis [Beati] Thomae and Passio Thomae. The Passio Thomae was a redaction of the Acts of Thomas, but both Latin books contained a major diversion from the original story that would, like the seashore tomb in the Milione, permanently alter the course of the St. Thomas legend after the Portuguese had established themselves in Mylapore. The Passio Thomae had St. Thomas killed by a Pagan priest with a sword, and De Miraculis Thomae had him killed by a Pagan priest with a lance. These stories were at odds with the one found in the Acts of Thomas, which had the apostle executed on the orders of a Persian king, by four royal soldiers with spears. The Portuguese preferred the Pagan-priest-with-a-lance story found in De Miraculis Thomae. They added Marco Polo’s seaside tomb to it, and elements from Syrian Christian traditions that they had gathered in Malabar, and concocted a legend, largely European in character, that they identified with various Hindu sites in Malabar and Mylapore. The Portuguese story has not changed very much till today, though it has many variations."

"One version of the fable asserts that he converted 6,850 Brahmins, 2,800 Kshatriyas, 3,750 Vaishyas and 4,250 Shudras. Another version maintains it was 17,490 Brahmins, 350 Vaishyas and 4,280 Shudras – Kshatriyas are not included except for the Raja of Tiruvanchikulam. In a third version 40 Jews are among the converts, and in a fourth the converts are the Raja’s son and son-in-law, some Brahmins, and a lone barber to keep them all trimmed and shaved (he also would have had to circumcise the male converts, as Judas Thomas was an orthodox Jew and not part of St. Paul's innovations in favour of the Gentiles)."

"Now the fact that the South Indian St. Thomas story was not written down until 1892, as T.K. Joseph testifies, is an extraordinary circumstance for so famous a piece of Indian “history”. It also brings Bishop Medleycott of Trichur back into the picture. He was the great St. Thomas advocate in South India from 1887 to 1896, and had the motive and means to assist Varghese Palayur in writing his “ancient” composition. The Vatican had declared the apostolate of St. Thomas in South India as unverified after studying the Rabban Pattu, but the Roman Catholic Church in India then and now is still the only entity that reaps any benefit from the propagation of the myth among Indians."

"According to Namboodiri Brahmins themselves, they are the original Vedic Brahmins of Kerala. However there is no historical record to support this claim. Marxist historians claim that Namboodiri Brahmins arrived in Kerala only in the sixth century. If this is true, then we may speculate that the Namboodiri Brahmin community were originally Syrian Christian immigrants who converted to Vedic Hinduism. The claim that St. Thomas converted four Namboodiri families to Christianity was invented by Syrian Christians to give themselves caste status. It is doubtful if Judus Thomas would have called himself a Christian; he was a practicing Jew who would neither build churches nor carve crosses (the latter being abhorrent to his cultural sensibilities and not used as a Christian identity symbol until after the third century). The designation "Christian" was first used for St. Paul's converts in Antioch after 45 CE."

"This hill is crowned with a Portuguese church dedicated to the Virgin Mary as Our Lady of Expectation, and was built around 1547 on the foundations of a demolished Hindu temple. It contains a wooden icon of the Virgin said to have been painted by St. Luke and given to St. Thomas at Jerusalem, an eighth century Persian “bleeding” cross said to have been carved by St. Thomas (which stopped bleeding as soon as the British moved into the area), and two paintings of St. Thomas and his spear-bearing Hindu assassin. The older painting fixed behind the altar suggests an Iyengar Brahmin wearing namam on his forehead, about to stab the praying apostle from behind, and the other painting, one of a series of the martyred apostles, shows an unidentified Hindu as the assassin."

"This nineteenth century Gothic cathedral is built on a high point of the Mylapore beach and replaces the sixteenth century Portuguese church that was built on the same site. Both the church and bishop's house beside it are built over the area of the original Kapaleeswara Temple demolished by the Portuguese. The church, now designated a minor basilica, is dedicated to St. Thomas and contains two of his tombs, two sets of his relics including the bit of arm bone from Ortona, Italy, and the metal spearhead that is said to have killed him. Other churches in Madras that are associated with St. Thomas and are identified as having been built on temple sites are Luz Church in Mylapore and Our Lady of Health Church on Little Mount at Saidapet."

"But when T.K. Joseph wrote to the Encyclopaedia Britannica editor at Chicago in 1950, pointing out the errors in the Encyclopaedia’s 1947 Fourteenth Edition St. Thomas article, he was not successful in getting them corrected. We have shown in this book that the St. Thomas article in the Encyclopaedia’s 1984 Fifteenth Edition and 2010 Internet edition are also grossly mistaken. In 1996 the Encyclopaedia's editor had stated in a letter to us that "we have concluded that the portion of the article that refers to Thomas’ later life places too much emphasis on the unlikely scenario of his traveling to, and being martyred in India" 40 and promised to correct the St. Thomas entry. He has not done so and we can only conclude that the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s editors like their cooked- up St. Thomas story and plan to keep it for more editions to come."

"The myth of St. Thomas has also found sponsors in Chennai’s English- language press. Both The Hindu and Indian Express have published sanitized versions of the story on the children’s page of their newspapers after receiving copies of the first edition of this book. Their decision to do this was clearly made with malice aforethought and it has effectively put an end to any serious public discussion of St. Thomas in India. Today The New Indian Express in Chennai remains the chief sponsor of the tale, though it has been displaced in this pious work by the more attractive Congress-Christian newspaper Deccan Chronicle. The New Indian Express is also controlled by Christian interests and the nexus between its Brooklyn-returned pharisee editor-in-chief Aditya Sinha and the Church runs wide and deep. Lots of money and votes are at stake, and even as we write in March 2010 the paper has produced yet another St. Thomas article called “Under the bleeding cross” by Shilpa Krishnan."

"The British were generally less destructive than the Portuguese and the French, but they did not hesitate to attack temples that were in the way of construction works or to desecrate them as a means of intimidating the local populace. They fired on the temples of Kalahasti in Andhra Pradesh for this last reason; and Victoria Terminus in Bombay is built on the original site of that city’s famous Mumbai Devi Temple. In Madras they obliterated the small Hindu shrines that once stood inside Fort St. George. The fort now contains St. Mary’s Church, the first Protestant church built east of Suez. But it is the French who vied with the Portuguese in their Christian zeal to destroy Pagan places of worship. Henry Love, in Vestiges of Old Madras, records that they used temples as barracks in their military operations against the British. Between 1672 and 1674, at Madras, they fortified the rebuilt Kapaleeswara Temple in Mylapore and the Parthasarathy Temple in Triplicane when they were besieged by Golconda and the Dutch."

"On one of these voyages up the Coromandel Coast the Portuguese were blown ashore in a storm, at a fishing village 12 km south of Nagapattinam. They declared that the Virgin Mary had saved them and in thanksgiving took over the local Vel Ilankanni Amman Temple (which was the sister shrine of the Vel Thandakanni Amman Temple at Sikkil, closer to Negapattinam). This village has now become the famous Christian pilgrimage centre of Velankanni. The original Devi temple was enclosed within the first Portuguese church, known as the Mada Koil, that is situated at a distance from the present Basilica of Our Lady of Health. The stone image of the Devi was on public display until some years ago, but has since been removed and an image of the Virgin Mary put in its place. The hundreds of temples and thousands of idols destroyed by the Portuguese in Goa has been documented by A.K. Priolkar in The Goa Inquisition. And the historian T.R. de Souza, quoted by M.D. David in Western Colonialism in Asia and Christianity, writes, “At least from 1540 onwards and in the island of Goa before that year, all Hindu idols had been annihilated or had disappeared, all the temples had been destroyed and their sites and building material were in most cases utilized to erect new Christian churches and chapels.” 48. The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception is built on or beside this temple site, and the local tradition is that the broken Lingam is hidden under an altar in the church. The Christian practice of covering a desecrated image or sacred stone with an altar is very old and churches in England, France, Italy and Spain that have been built on Pagan sites are found to contain these images and other relics."

"San Thome Cathedral and Bishop’s House have been renovated and rebuilt many times over in the last hundred and fifty years, and there is a quiet effort being made by Church authorities to hide the evidence of destroyed Hindu, Jain and Buddhist 54 religious buildings that once occupied this sacred stretch of Mylapore seafront. The clean-up coincides with the work of resurrecting the communal Brahmin-killed- Thomas fable that was first propagated by the Portuguese – Marco Polo cannot be blamed for this story; his St. Thomas was accidentally killed by a pariah hunting peacocks."

"Indeed, since this book was published in 1995 the clean-up and rebuilding of San Thome Cathedral's compound, the second "St. Thomas” tomb, and the whole area surrounding the church on St. Thomas Mount has been total. All evidence of Hindu temples has been clandestinely removed and the ancient rubble disposed of in an unknown place. We have an eye-witness account of this nefarious work done by the Madras-Mylapore Archdiocese later in this book. The Franciscans, Dominicans and Jesuits who destroyed the temples of Goa, Kerala, Pondicherry and along the Tamil coast-line, were generally more circumspect than their Muslim counterparts. They did not leave much evidence behind in the churches they built on or near temple sites. But it is also true that Indian archaeologists have not studied Christian churches as closely and in the same probing manner that they have studied mosques and other Muslim monuments. The exception is German scholars whose work on Indian churches is yet to be translated and published in English. They assert that most sixteenth and seventeenth century churches in India contain temple rubble and are built on temple sites."

"Dr. R. Arulappa, the former Archbishop of Madras, is one such facile scholar – and yet he has made some unusual contributions to the study of Tamil history. In his book Punitha Thomayar – where he tries to show that Tiruvalluvar’s Kural is a Christian work – he mentions the finding of yantra stones in ancient foundations on all the sites in Madras associated with St. Thomas. He does not expand on these momentous discoveries or say where the stones are today, and it is not clear why he refers to them, but it is certainly true that the Agama Shastra requires the placing of such stones beneath the foundations of new temples before their construction begins."

"The Portuguese historian Gaspar Correa, probably the most credulous annalist in history, describes extensive ruins in Mylapore and its environs including Big Mount. He attributes this devastation to the wind and rain and angry sea rather than his bigoted and iconoclastic countrymen. But at the same time he gives backhanded testimony for a Shiva temple on the Mylapore beach."

"Today Tamil scholars say that Tiruvalluvar lived before the Christian era, usually placing him ca. 100 BCE, but some date him as early as ca. 200 BCE. The Madras-Mylapore Archdiocese claims he lived in the first century CE and that he was a disciple of St. Thomas. It is probable that his samadhi shrine was in or near the precincts of the ancient Kapaleeswara Temple on the beach and was destroyed when the Portuguese destroyed the temple."

"This is a small building on the northeast end of the estate and is called the San Thome Cathedral Museum. It contains – or used to contain – ancient carved stones and other temple artefacts. In 1990 a friend of this writer was refused entry on three occasions, though it was then ostensibly open to the public. Since the publication of this book in 1991, it was closed and kept in an inaccessible condition, but was opened again in 1995. We don't know its condition or position today in 2010. Its original contents and the carved stones that were lying in the Bishop's estate and San Thome churchyard – which the Church authorities have no moral right to possess – should have been removed to the Tamil Nadu Department of Archaeology or Madras Museum long ago. It is too late now: the Archdiocese has cleaned up the area and disposed of all Hindu temple remnants in an unknown place."

"Poompavai was the daughter of a wealthy sixth century Mylapore merchant called Siva Nesan Chettiar. He wanted to give her in marriage to the saint Jnanasambandar, but she died from snakebite before meeting him, when picking flowers for the Lord in the garden. Her father cremated her and kept the bones and ashes in a pot. When Jnanasambandar visited Mylapore, the Chettiar kept Poompavai’s ashes in front of him and narrated the story of her death. Jnanasambandar responded by singing eleven songs in praise of Lord Kapaleeswara, lamenting the death of the girl at the end of each song. When he had finished, the pot of ashes burst and a twelve-year-old girl stepped forth. Jnanasambandar then declined to marry her, saying that she was his “daughter”. Poompavai has her own shrine within the precincts of the Kapaleeswara Temple."

"Dr. Nagaswamy, in The Hindu article “Testimony of Religious Ethos”, mentions the findings of Buddhist relics and a mutilated Buddha image in Mylapore. The Chola period image is now in the Madras Museum. 55. Many of the famous churches of Europe are built on Pagan temple sites. They include St. Peter’s, Santa Maria Maggiore and Santa Maria Rotunda (The Pantheon) in Rome, Notre Dame in Paris, and St. Paul’s in London. St. Benedict built his monastery on an Apollo temple that he had destroyed himself, at Monte Cassino, Italy. The much revered Black Virgins found in churches and monasteries in Spain and Italy are images of the Egyptian Goddess Isis and Her son Horus. The list is very long. 56. These are at Malinkara, Parur, Gokamangalam, Niranam, Chayal and Kurakonikollam in Kerala, and Tiruvithancodu in Tamil Nadu (this being the “half church”, which is a converted Hindu temple)."

"The lamentable ignorance was with Fr. Hosten of course, for accepting unquestioned Marco Polo’s “tall tale”. He did not know that without Marco Polo there is no St. Thomas in a South Indian seashore tomb; he also did not know that all earlier accounts of the legend have St. Thomas buried on a mountain to the west of sub-continental India – in “India” that is Parthia, or Edessa, or mysterious Calamina."

"This is an open admission by the Portuguese that a church had been built on a temple site at Mylapore – only they have backdated the event to the first century and attributed the crime to St. Thomas. How extraordinary – or is it? The Portuguese, and Syrian Christians before them, had given the “honour” of temple-breaking to St. Thomas at Palayur, north of Cranganore, where an early seventeenth century Portuguese church built by the Jesuit Fr. James Fenicio rises amidst temple ruins today. Fr. A. Mathias Mundadan, in History of Christianity in India, Vol. I, writes, “The remains of old temples found at Palayur and near the other traditional churches 56 are proof of this.” Proof of what? Proof, it would seem, that St. Thomas destroyed temples at all the places where he is said to have built churches."

"The practice had indeed been followed from time immemorial, in the first Shiva temple where it originated, whose place on the beach was now usurped by the Portuguese church. The practice was to take the festival image around the temple and lower them three times to the ground, at the sanctum door before the muladeva. The Hindus were continuing the ritual in the second temple, and by taking the festival images to the church on the beach were reverencing the ancient mulasthana – even if Christians and Gaspar Correa vainly thought otherwise."

"The best evidence for a Shiva temple on the Mylapore beach is offered by the Tamil saints. Iyadigal Kadavarkon, the sixth century Shaivite prince of Kanchipuram, Jnanasambandar and Arunagirinathar, the sixth and fifteenth century Shaivite poets, consistently mention in their hymns that the Kapaleeswara Temple was on the seashore. Both saints show in these verses that the Lord was on the seashore, and Jnanasambandar marks that He was watching His devotees in the sea – that He must have been facing east. This is not the case today. The seventeenth century Vijayanagar temple is built inland and the Lord faces west, with the all – important flag pole and image of Nandi in the western courtyard before Him. This arrangement indicates that the present temple is a second temple, as the Agama Shastra does not permit a temple that has been moved from its original site and rebuilt to face in the same direction as its predecessor. Neither Jnanasambandar nor Arunagirinathar had reason to sing of the Lord by the sea if He was not there. Their testimony is impeccable and by itself destroys the argument for a seashore tomb of St. Thomas."

"They knew Marco Polo's story and knew, too, that the "Thomas" revered by Syrian Christians at Mylapore was not a martyr. This was not a very satisfactory circumstance for them or the Portuguese. Their passionate nature and martyrolatrous religion required a sacrifice. 57 All the apostles had suffered martyrdom except St. John, and St. Thomas was not going to get away with an accidental death in Portuguese territory. Moreover, if the Portuguese knew Marco Polo's story, they knew better the Latin fables Passio Thomae and De Miraculis Thomae, which had been circulating in Europe for a thousand years. Both legends deviated from the Acts of Thomas, in which St. Thomas had been executed by king's men with spears, and described his death as being at the hands of a Pagan priest of the Sun – or Zoroastrian – who, in one, had stabbed him with a lance, and in the other, with a sword. The Portuguese preferred De Miraculis Thomae, in which the priest used a lance, and had the romance published in Portugal in 1531 and 1552 to substantiate the "discovery" they had made at Mylapore in 1523. It did not matter to them that this European story, too, had St. Thomas buried on a mountain, while they had in their possession only a seashore tomb."

"Earlier, in 1521-22, the Portuguese had opened two tombs in the Shiva temple's northern precincts. One tomb contained a "black" skeleton, which, according to its inscription, belonged to a Chola king. The Portuguese nevertheless "identified" him as being a disciple of St. Thomas. The second tomb revealed a "white" skeleton, which, naturally, "belonged" to the white Jew Thomas. This second skeleton was sent to Goa for verification – where it languishes till today, unsung and unrecognised."

"As these diggings did not produce the required result, Diogo Fernandez was asked, in 1523, to excavate a third tomb which lay partly under the foundation of a dilapidated building that had been occupied by the Portuguese. He refused at first but was persuaded by the attending priest, Fr. Antonio Gil, who heard his confession and that of the two men, Braz Fernandez and Diogo Lourenco, who would assist him in the pious enterprise. They then began the excavation of a deep and elaborate, and very much empty, tomb. It was Saturday afternoon, and they continued the work into the late evening, when, on the suggestion of Diogo Fernandez, they abandoned their unproductive labours and retired for the night. The excavation was left open and unattended until the next morning, a Sunday, when the men began digging again. It was not long now before the grave disgorged bones that were "much worn out", portions of skull and spine, and a clay pot of earth "bedewed with blood", with a thigh bone in it, and hidden in the red earth an iron Malabar spearhead shaped like an olive leaf, which, after fifteen Christian centuries, still had a piece of wooden shaft miraculously preserved in its socket."

"The bones of "St. Thomas" were collected – there was no doubt this time in the Portuguese mind that they were his – and later, with due ceremony, placed in a Chinese coffer with silver locks, along with the bones of the Chola king, another "disciple" whose remains had been found nearby, and those of two children. The key to the coffer was then sent to the Viceroy at Goa, but two years later Fr. Penteado broke the locks as he felt that the bones were in a poor condition and needed attention. He transferred them to a wooden chest and hid this in a place known only to himself and Rodrigo Alvares. The chest was then presumed to be lost, and, in 1530, a new search was mounted for the relics. Diogo Fernandez was again called in and through his intercession with Rodrigo Alvares, the chest was found in a decayed condition under the main altar of the church – for a small church, the first Christian church to rise on the Mylapore beach, had been built, in 1523, by Augustinian friars beside the newly found “St. Thomas” tomb."

"...But if for the sake of argument it is agreed that the depositions of Diogo Fernandez are not fabricated – he could have been an uninformed witness to the “discovery” (though it is very unlikely) – then it must be said that the relics themselves most certainly are, in keeping with the ancient tradition of fraud so dear to the Church, 60 Veda Prakash, in Indiavil Saint Thomas Kattukkadai, shows that the relics were produced out of materials brought from Goa and then planted in the empty tomb. He also shows that the Portuguese reworked the existing Syrian Christian version of the myth, changing the Syriac be ruhme, meaning “by spear”, to read Brahmins in order to implicate Brahmins in the apostle’s murder. The Malabar tradition was thus brought into line with the European romance, De Miraculis Thomae, where St. Thomas is killed by a Pagan priest with a lance – though the contradiction of lance in the story and spear-head in the reliquary remains today. ... The question of whether the Portuguese relics are genuine or not – and whether the South Indian legend is history or not – will be conclusively answered as soon as the Archbishop of Madras gives them to independent forensic experts for testing. But he may be also aware that such a gesture would be redundant, as all of the bones of St. Thomas were resting in the cathedral at Ortona, Italy, while Diogo Fernandez was digging for them in Mylapore. They had been there since 1258, and before that at Chios, Greece, and Edessa, and in 1566 the Bishop of Ortona had issued a Deed of Verification for these bones, which, in itself, proves that the bones produced by the Portuguese out of the Mylapore tomb cannot possibly be those of St. Thomas. ... The Portuguese themselves appear to have treated this “momentous discovery” in a cavalier fashion, which is why the relics got lost in 1525. When they were located again, in 1530, the bones and spearhead – shaped like an olive leaf, though there are no olive trees in India – were transferred to a small box, locked up in a chapel in the church, and the key kept by the pastor. ... This church, originally built in 1523 and called San Thome or San Thome de Meliapore, was subsequently enlarged and extended, and the encroachment on the Kapaleeswara Temple began in earnest. The Christians had done this before, building a church against a temple wall and then taking over the temple, and that the Shiva temple survived as long as it did, up to 1566 according to some authorities, is grand testimony to the patient and courageous resistance the Hindus of Mylapore had put up against this ruthless Catholic power. Diogo Fernandez’s “St. Thomas” relics still remain in the church today. The iron spearhead and piece of skull are kept in a monstrance, along with the relics of St. Francis Xavier, St. Isabella, St. Vincentio and the Martyrs of Morocco. The first “St. Thomas” tomb, which contained the “white” skeleton that was sent to Goa, is empty and ignored, but the second “St. Thomas” tomb is pointed out to pilgrims and tourists. It contains the remainder of Diogo Fernandez’s “findings”, the pieces of spine and thigh bone, and, presumably, the pot of “blood-bedewed” earth. ... Yet this is not the end of the bones at San Thome. The cathedral also has in its possession a piece of Church-certified Ortona bone which it obtained from Cardinal Tisserant in 1953, after he had deposited the apostle’s right arm at Kodungallur (and demoted him from being the great Apostle of the East to simply being the Apostle of India). The pastor of San Thome can now say with some pride that he is the keeper of a real St. Thomas bone – keeping in mind that the acceptance of the Ortona gift is also an admission that the Portuguese relics in his care are not those of St. Thomas."

"This sly communal tale, invented by Jesuits and improved on by Fr. D'Souza, is peculiar to Madras. He tries to establish Hindu support for the story by quoting Hindu publications that repeat it. But Hindu traditions about Little Mount and the other "St. Thomas" sites are quite different and much older than those of the Portuguese. 62 They believe that the hillock, with its cave and spring and imprint of peacock's feet in the rock, was sacred to Murugan, and Hindu women used to visit the site even after the Portuguese had cleared it of shrines. In 1551, a church was built by the cave, called Blessed Sacrement Chapel, and the Jesuits built a second church by the spring of which nothing remains today. The archaeological evidence on the site was destroyed years ago when it was blasted to make way for the modern circular church. Called Our Lady of Health, that now stands there."

"Dr. R. Arulappa, in Punitha Thomayar, asserts that Big Mount was originally called Bhrigu Malai (Brungi in Tamil) and was the seat of the Hindu sage Bhrigu Rishi (Brungi Munivar) until St. Thomas came and chased him away. This story, like the one above, is another piece of fiction that has at its core a little truth. The hill was sacred to Shiva whom Bhrigu Rishi worshiped, and it is the Portuguese who chased the rishi away, not St. Thomas. The temple was destroyed around 1545, when they gained effective control of the hill, which was the highest point in the area and the southern limit of their territory. Portuguese historians describe it as being crowded with ruins then, and broken temple stones could still be found on its slopes, on the south and west side in 1995. The Archdiocese of Madras-Mylapore has since cleaned up the evidence with the connivance of the Archaeological Survey of India, and completely rebuilt the hilltop."

"The Portuguese had begun to settle around Big Mount as early as 1523 – the same year they "discovered" the tomb of "St. Thomas" – and one of the first to take up residence there was Diogo Fernandez. He would succeed in erecting a small chapel on the hill before 1545, but the construction of the church, called Our Lady of Expectation, did not commence until 1547. It was built on the east-west alignment of the temple foundation – the ancient granite base of the flag pole is on the eastern side of the church and this writer had observed it in 1991 – but the Portuguese reversed this order in keeping with established Christian practice when building on a Pagan site, and the church entrance is on the western side."

"It was when clearing the rubble for the church, in 1547, that the Portuguese "discovered" the famous Persian "St. Thomas" cross in the temple foundation. Diogo Fernandez is not implicated in this fraud, but the Vicar of San Thome, Fr. Gaspar Coelho, and the Captain of the Coromandel, Gabriel de Athaide, are, as the construction was under their direct supervision. St. Thomas could not have carved this cross; 63 it has been dated to the eighth century, and like its counterparts in Kerala was carved by a Syrian Christian named Afras who inscribed its border in Pahlavi (Persian) script. It was kept inside the church behind the altar, and used to "bleed" at irregular intervals up to 1704. This phenomenon stopped as soon as the sensible and schismatic British began to move into the area and build a cantonment."

"The church also has paintings of St. Thomas and his Hindu assassin. One of them, on the reredos of the altar, depicts an Iyengar Brahmin with namam about to stab the praying apostle from behind. It defeats its purpose inasmuch as Vaishnavas did not wear namam, the sectarian U- shaped forehead mark, until after Ramanuja introduced it in the eleventh century. The other painting, very large and part of a series of the apostles and their various modes of death, shows St. Thomas with a book, a lance, and his sturdy Hindu assassin, who, this time, does not wear sectarian marks or orthodox dress."

"And finally there is Luz Church, the first church the Portuguese would build in Mylapore and possibly the oldest standing Portuguese church on the Tamil coastline. It, too, is built on temple ruins, according to Archaeological Survey of India records, and was raised in 1516 by the Franciscan missionary priest Pedro da Atongia. The Catholic fortnightly Madras Musings says, "But with the Portuguese only occasional visitors to this coast from 1509 and settlers only from 1522, the dates on the stone plaque and above the church's entrance seem more likely the date of the establishment of a shrine in the 'grove of Thomas' than the date of the surviving building." Yes, indeed – but the "grove of Thomas" once contained a "pool of Vishnu". What happened to it in 1516?"

"Muthiah's allusion is to Pantaenus the Alexandrian, who is said to have visited "the land of the Indians" before 190 CE. The first reference is made by Eusebius, in his Ecclesiastical History, which others follow, but Dr. A. Mingana, an authority on the spread of Christianity in India, quoted by C.B. Firth in An Introduction to Indian Church History, asserts, "... the India they refer to is without doubt Arabia Felix. The fact has been recognised by all historians since Assemani and Tillemont, and has been considered as established even by such a conservative writer as Medleycott. It will be a matter of surprise if any responsible author will mention in the future Pantaenus in connection with India proper."

"Bishop Giovanni dei Marignolli, the Franciscan papal legate who built a Roman Catholic church in Quilon, in 1348, is the first person to use the appellation "St. Thomas" Christians. He did this to distinguish Syrian converts from low-caste Hindu converts in his congregation. This allowed the former Nestorians to retain their caste status as Roman Catholics. The appellation "St. Thomas" Christian is thus of Roman Catholic origin and indicates a social division within the Roman Catholic Church."

"We have only the many and various legends and even they continue to change with the changing political needs of the Church."

"The Rev. Dr. G. Milne Rae, author of The Syrian Church in India, was even more unsparing than T.K. Joseph in his criticism of the St. Thomas fable. He did not allow that St. Thomas came further east than Afghanistan, and told the Syrian Christians that they reasoned fallaciously about their identity and “wove a fictitious story of their origin”. The two “facts” that they worked from, he said, were (1) the ancient beliefs of their church that St. Thomas was the apostle of the Indians, and (2) that they were Christians of St. Thomas. The ratiocination of these points went like this: St. Thomas was the apostle of the Indians; we are Indians; therefore he is our apostle. If this is not proof enough, there is his tomb in Mylapore, and we have been called "St. Thomas" Christians from the first century."

"Moreover, there is no evidence that there ever was a Church of India, as such an early Thomas-founded church would have been called, though there was admittedly a Church of Persia founded by St. Thomas. Nor is there any record that Malabar ever had its own ecclesiastical hierarchy; hierarchs were always brought into India from Persia or Mesopotamia or, as today, from Antioch."

"The “martyred” St. Thomas has existed since the Acts of Thomas, ca. 210 CE, in which he is executed by King Mazdai for social crimes and sorcery. The Portuguese added the Brahmin assassin after 1517 and he has remained the first choice of the Roman Catholic Church since, for without him the Hindu community cannot be successfully maligned and the continuing cover-up of the destruction of temples in Mylapore cannot be successfully maintained by the Madras-Mylapore Archdiocese and its anti-Hindu secular sponsors in the government ."

"Arthur Frederick Ide, in Unzipped: The Popes Bare All, writes, "One primary reason Rome turned against the Christians was the Christians were violently intolerant. Christians would not accept altars to gods other than their own even though the Romans offered an altar to the Christian god. Christians spat upon those who would not convert. They hid documents. They alienated families. They prayed for the end of the empire and the enthronement of their god as the new king. These were actions which were socially disconcerting, disrupting, and dangerous. "Contrary to the Christian apologist Justin, the Christians were not dispatched from this life because they were Christians. Christians were executed only after their actions (not their beliefs) were seen as riot- inducing, treasonous, and detrimental to the family unit, and especially dangerous to the children.""

"Most ethnic and religious communities localise their myths of origin when they migrate to new lands and establish themselves there permanently. This is part of the psychological process of becoming a native. The tradition they bring from abroad is altered enough to identify its main themes and characters with local places. Time does the rest and the second and third generation soon forget the original story and its foreign locales. Inter-community relationships will mix in local legends with the imported myth. In the case of the Syrian Christians, the process was irresistible because the charismatic, semi-legendary Thomas of Cana who led the first Christian immigrants to Malabar from Persia and Mesopotamia in 345 CE, was not really any different a community hero than the charismatic, semi-legendary Thomas the Apostle. The fact that both leaders were also known as Thomas of Jerusalem would have made the identification of the fourth century merchant with the first century saint inevitable. None of this would amount to anything more than an ethnological curiosity except that the Syrian Christian tradition of St. Thomas became the property of the Portuguese and the Roman Catholic Church. Both imperialist powers needed more than anything else in their ideological arsenals this emotionally-charged fable to legitimize their presence and justify their violent, viciously bigoted conduct in India."

"...the forging of documents to create a fabricated social and religious history that Christians believe will give Christianity authority and prestige, and which disparages the ancient Hindu civilization that hosts it."

"The seventeenth century Jesuit missionary John de Britto was executed by the Raja of Ramnad for breaking the law. He had been repeatedly warned to stop his antisocial activities and stay out of the principality. Instead, he carefully planned his 'martyrdom' and went to great lengths to provoke the Raja. He was canonised in 1947 by a Vatican decree. On April 7, 1994, the Indian Express reported an assault on a prominent Madras social worker, S. Vidyakar, by a Christian family who lived next door to one of his houses for destitute women and children. Vidyakar states, "For some time now our social worker, Sundari, was being teased and taunted by some members of the family."Sundari adds, "They are Christians and start clapping and dancing whenever we sing [devotional songs] and taunt us about worshipping [stone]. When things went a little too far that evening and I was abused in filthy language, I called up Vidyakar and gave him details. " Vidyakar went to talk to the family the next day, but they attacked him with a log and broke his arm. This is not an isolated incident. It goes on all the time with the connivance of local police and politicians. This writer was also driven from his ashram in Thirumullaivoyal by Christian converts who were provoked by the fact that a white foreigner had become a Hindu sannyasi and lived like a Brahmin among Brahmins."

"The myth of St. Thomas in Malabar and Mylapore, which we have reviewed in this essay, is an Indian Christian communal fable that was exposed decades ago by the "St. Thomas" Christian historians T.K. Joseph and Rev. Dr. G. Milne Rae – the latter a reader at Madras Christian College. That it is advertised by the Madras-Mylapore Archdiocese as Indian history is to be expected of this criminal branch of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church; that it is accepted without critical review by the Government of India, and promoted by a racist Tamil Nadu state administration on political platforms to disparage Hindus, is quite another. 77 Their conduct as secular administrators is mala fide to say the least. It is a new twist to the old tale of treachery in the Acts of Thomas, but it is in keeping with the spirit of the original Syrian legend. The Acts tells us that Jesus sold his brother Judas called Thomas the Twin as a carpenter slave to the trader Abbanes for a handful of silver. Are we Hindus so ready and willing to do the same today to our own Bharatiya brother with this anti-national, culture- denying Portuguese tale?"

"It seems clear from a number of articles published and from the letters of protest or criticism sent to the Madras editor and suppressed (of which I have knowledge – obviously many more letters were received by the editor), that the editor responsible for the material published in the Express Weekend has consistently pursued a policy of promoting Roman Catholic doctrine at the expense of historical truth.... The manipulation of history and the suppression of facts is a major issue in this country.... Christians, Muslims and Communists know how to write history and then how to rewrite it to suit their current ideological needs. When the Indian Express covertly supports one of these parties – in this case the Roman Catholics – in rewriting Indian history, the affair becomes a matter of grave concern to everybody.... The Roman Catholic Church is the richest, largest and most sophisticated private publisher in India and the world. But this is not enough for them. They need the name of a fair-minded and respected daily to give their lies ... credibility – and unfortunately for the people of Madras they have found this in the Indian Express."

"Whatever the faults of the Indian Express in the 1990s, it had an honourable beginning and still had some of the moral authority it acquired in the Freedom Movement. This is not true of The Hindu which was established with the sole objective of making money from the British Raj. It was known as "The Sapper" prior to 1947 – even the British- owned Mail was more nationalistic - and after the White Sahib went away it was called "The Old Widow of Mount Road". 1 Its formula for success is a studied, high-tech mediocrity – name and form and no content – and a faithful toeing of the Chinese government line. It is class-conscious, casteist and fashionably anti-Hindu. Its moral response to any media- created national crisis – such as the demolition of an unauthorised Muslim building in Ayodhya – is to fill its columns with the lugubrious drivel of various popular Marxist professors. In short, The Hindu is self- righteous and boring unless one is looking for a suitable girl for a suitable boy with B.Com. and an American Green Card.... . Today in 2010 it is called "The Chindu" because of its slavish pro-China editorial policy. The Hindu has been a quisling newspaper throughout its whole career though it calls itself India's national newspaper."

"In fact, the Hindu community is doubly wronged. It not only did not kill the fictional St. Thomas but for the saint's cause it lost a number of important temples to the aggressive religious bigotry of the Portuguese. It took more than fifty years for the Portuguese to bring down the original Kapaleeswara Temple and build a St. Thomas Church in its place. I wonder how many Indian lives were lost in defence of the Great God Shiva and His house on the Mylapore beach.... The Archaeological Survey of India is deeply involved in the cover-up at San Thome Cathedral. It is a government department and therefore subject to the dictates of the politicians in power and their policy of minority appeasement. Even former directors of the Tamil Nadu Department of Archaeology like Dr. R. Nagaswamy, who have all the details of the destruction of the Kapaleeswara Temple by the Portuguese and the building of San Thome Cathedral on the ancient temple site, are not willing to speak out."

"The Christian claim to the site of the Holy Cross is based on the dream of a gullible but fanatical woman, and fortified with a faked excavation. 4 Remember the Ayodhya debate, where Hindu scholars were challenged to produce ever more solid proof of the traditions underlying the sacredness of the controversial site? Whatever proof they came up with was automatically, without any inspection, dismissed by the high priests of secularism as “myth” and “faked evidence”. It was alleged that there was a “lack of proof” for the assumption that Rama ever lived there. But in the case of the Christian sacred places, we do not just have lack of proof that the religion’s claim is true, but we have positive proof that its claim is untrue, and that it was historically part of a campaign of fraud and destruction.... This massive campaign of fraud and destruction was subsequently extended to the Germanic, Slavic and Baltic countries. Numerous ancient churches across Europe are so many Babri Masjids, containing or standing on the left-overs of so many Rama Janmabhoomi temples. Just after the christianisation of Europe was completed with the forced conversion of Lithuania in the fifteenth century, the iconoclastic zeal was taken to America, and finally to Africa and Asia....the tribal areas became the scene of culture murder by Catholic and Protestant missionaries. There are recent instances of desecration of tribal village shrines and sacred groves by Christians, assaults on Hindu processions both in the tribal belts and in the south, and attempts to turn the Vivekananda Rock Memorial at Kanyakumari into a Virgin Mary shrine. ...In South India, the myth of St. Thomas provided the background for a few instances of temple destruction at places falsely associated with his life and alleged martyrdom, especially the St. Thomas Church replacing the Mylapore Shiva Temple in Madras. In this case, the campaign of fraud is still continuing: till today, Christian writers continue to claim historical validity for the long-refuted story of the apostle Thomas coming to India and getting killed by jealous Brahmins. 8 The story is parallel to that of Jesus getting killed by the Jews, and it has indeed served as an argument in an elaborate Christian doctrine of anti- Brahminism which resembles Christian anti-Semitism to the detail. At any rate, it is a fraud...."

"After all, the Christian conquests in India and in America are two sides of the same coin. In the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, the Pope awarded one half of the world (ultimately comprising areas from Brazil to Macao, including Africa and India) to Portugal, and the other half (including most of America and the Philippines) to Spain, on condition that they use their power to christianise the population. The Spanish campaign in America had juridically and theologically exactly the same status as its Portuguese counterpart in India. If the result was not as absolutely devastating in India as it was in America, this was merely due to different power equations: the Portuguese were less numerous than the Spanish, and the Indians were technologically and militarily more equal to the Europeans than the Native Americans were. The Church’s intentions behind Columbus’s discovery of America and Vasco da Gama’s landing in India were exactly the same.....Seldom have I seen such viper-like mischievousness as in the most recent strategies of the Christian mission in India. It is a viper with two teeth. On the one side, there is the gentle penetration through social and educational services, now compounded with rhetoric of “inculturation”: glib talk of “dialogue”, “sharing”, “common ground”, fraudulent donning of Hindu robes by Christian monks, all calculated to fool Hindus about the continuity of the Christian striving to destroy Hinduism and replace it with the cult of Jesus....On the other side, there is a vicious attempt to delegitimize Hinduism as India’s native religion, and to mobilize the weaker sections of Hindu society against it with “blood and soil” slogans. Seeing how the nativist movement in the Americas is partly directed against Christianity because of its historical aggression against native society (in spite of Liberation Theology’s attempts to recuperate the movement), the Indian Church tries to take over this nativist tendency and forge it into a weapon against Hinduism. Christian involvement in the so-called Dalit (“oppressed”) and Adivasi (“aboriginal”) movements is an attempt to channel the nativist revival and perversely direct it against native society itself.It advertises its services as the guardian of the interests of the “true natives” (meaning the Scheduled Castes and Tribes) against native society, while labelling the upper castes as “Aryan invaders”, on the basis of an outdated theory postulating an immigration in 1500 BC. To declare people “invaders” because of a supposed immigration of some of their ancestors 3500 years ago is an unusual feat of political hate rhetoric in itself, but the point is that it follows a pattern of earlier rounds of Christian aggression. It is Cortes all over again...The attempt to divide the people of a country on an ethnic basis – whether it is a real ethnic distinction as in the case of Cortes’ Mexico, or a wilfully invented one as in the case of India – is an obvious act of hostility, unmistakably an element of warfare...."

"While in the post-colonial decades, Church rhetoric has markedly softened, its action on the ground has only become more aggressive. Shourie quotes intelligence reports on the role of missionaries in armed separatist movements in the North-East, and on their violations of the legal restrictions in Arunachal Pradesh on conversion by force or allurement. 12 The World Council of Churches officially supports separatism in the tribal areas (and even among the Schedules Castes, another “indigenous nation”!), in pursuit of the long cherished project of carving out Christian-dominated independent states. In its 1989 Darwin Declaration, the WCC announces: “Indigenous peoples strive for and demand the full spectrum of autonomy available in the principle of self- determination, including the right to re-establish our own nation-states. The Churches and governments have an obligation to see [this] come to reality by providing the necessary means, without any restriction attached.”...Therefore, “without any restriction”, Christians are teaching some sections of Hindu society hatred against other sections. You don’t normally try to create hostility between your friends, so the Church’s policy to pit sections of Hindu society against one another should be seen for what it is: an act of aggression...Exclusivist revelations have no appeal among educated people, especially after they have acquainted themselves with the Vedantic or Buddhist philosophies. That is why the Churches are investing huge resources in the battle for Asia’s mind, where they face their most formidable enemy. That is why they are so active in India: not only is India’s atmosphere of religious freedom more hospitable to them than the conditions of Islamic countries, or even of non-Islamic countries where proselytization is prohibited (countries as divergent as China, Myanmar, Israel, and, at least formally, Nepal); but they also know and fear the intrinsic superiority of the Indian religion."

"As Hindu spokesman Arun Shourie writes: “By an accounting [of the calumnies heaped upon India and Hinduism] I do not of course mean some declaration saying, ‘Sorry’. By an accounting Imean that the calumnies would be listed; the grounds on which they were based would be listed, and the Church would declare whether, in the light of what is known now, the grounds were justified or not; and the motives which impelled those calumnies would be exhumed.”"

"I also wanted to show that there was a carefully orchestrated cover-up in the Indian English-language media regarding the St. Thomas story. Indeed, even after two editions of the book, The New Indian Express and popular Deccan Chronicle remain the main purveyors of the fable through travel features and their christianised “secular” columnists. Little leftist magazines like The Indian Review of Books, edited by the St. Thomas advocate S. Muthiah, also put in a good word for St. Thomas when the opportunity arises. This is their unprofessional response to the exposure of a historical fraud that does not serve their financial interests....In Central India, Orissa, the North-East, even Arunachal Pradesh and Nepal where missionaries cannot officially operate, village temples are demolished and sacred images broken by new converts....Temple breaking in India seems to have originated in the 7th, 8th or 9th century with Nestorian Christian immigrants from Persia. They built churches on the broken temple foundations and then attributed the temple breaking to St. Thomas himself by claiming he built the churches in the 1st century. Franciscan, Dominican, and Jesuit priests destroyed temples in Goa, Malabar, and Tamil Nadu in the 16th century. St. Francis Xavier left a fascinating written record of his temple-breaking work on the Coromandel Coast. The Portuguese entombed the Vel Ilangkanni Amman Temple near Nagapattinam and turned it into the famous Velankanni church called Our Lady of Health Basilica. The Jesuits destroyed the Vedapuri Iswaran Temple in Pondicherry and the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception now sits on the site. The list is very long..... It does not enter the heads of these Indian media worthies that the BBC is a neo-colonialist radio network dedicated to the promotion of Christian culture and values and British government foreign policy, and that it does not have a kind word for Hindus or Hinduism or Hindu issues even though Hindus make up a large part of its world audience. ...The Christian churches are the largest landowners in India after the government. Much of this land is alienated temple land that was given to them by the British in the 19th century. They also own large amounts of prize commercial property in the cities. This fact has become a scandal among many of the Christian faithful who do not feel that their churches should be real estate agents and owners. However, this observation is not true of the newer, smaller American churches like Pentecostals and Evangelicals who have mounted a caste war against the Hindus and seek to provoke the Hindu community at every opportunity. They simply grab land in the towns and districts by painting crosses and Christian slogans on stones and hillsides and then claiming the property as their own.This activity is especially evident in Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. In Arunachal Pradesh where proselytizing and conversion are illegal, Christians claim whole villages and put up signboards that say “Non-Christians Not Allowed” at their entrances. These Arunachal converts originate from Mother Teresa’s institutions in Assam where they are indoctrinated and baptized and then sent back to their villages to convert the elders. ...They have already claimed the holy hill and all of India for Christ in their writings. I myself hope that the cross-raising comes soon. Perhaps then Hindu leaders and district officials will wake up to the threat that an aggressive, proselytizing Christianity poses to Hinduism’s most ancient sacred sites."

"Christian fanatics have sent a letter to Kanchi Kamakoti Shankaracharya Math, Kanchipuram, threatening to bomb the office of Kamakoti, a journal edited by T.S.V. Hari and published by T.V.S. Giri from Madras, if it does not stop a serial on the Hindu temples destroyed by Christians and converted into churches in the yesteryears. The journal has been publishing the serial based on authoritative historical sources and evidences produced by renowned research scholars."

"The destruction of the seashore Temple of Kapaleeswara is said to have taken place in 1561. The new temple at its present present site, about one km to the west, was built by pious Hindu votaries about three hundred years ago, i.e., about two hundred and fifty years after its destruction. When the Santhome Church was repaired in the beginning of the current century, many stones with edicts were found there. Among them one mentions Poompavai, the girl whom Tirujnanasambandar is said to have miraculously revived from her ashes kept in an urn."

"The consensus among most historians who do not have a theological axe to grind, is that the first Christians to arrive in India, landing at Cranganore, Kerala, came in 345 CE. They were four hundred refugees belonging to seven tribes of West Asia, who were fleeing religious persecution by the Persian Shapor II. Their leader was a Syrian who is known to history as Knae Thomman, Thomas Cananeus, Thomas of Cana, or Thomas the Merchant. It is probably this man whom the Syrian Christians later converted into the first century apostle-martyr St. Thomas. Though the myth of St. Thomas coming to Kerala in 52 CE was invented by Syrian Christians, it was resurrected and embellished in the sixteenth century by Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries who needed a pious story of persecution to cover up their own persecution of the Hindus. During this period they and their Portuguese masters destroyed the great Shiva temple on the Mylapore beach, the Murugan temple on Little Mount and the Hindu temple on Big Mount, and built Christian churches on the ruins."

"Under the recommendation of Diwan Col. John Munro, a British subject and agent of the East India Company, in 1812, the Queen of Travancore nationalized 378 wealthy temples. The villain Diwan tactically awarded a natural death to the temple with insufficient resources. Considering the geographical area, the number of the temples set ablaze or knocked down or tactically buried down in Travancore was proportionately much higher than that of temples demolished by the Muslim rulers of Northern India or Mysore Sultans."

"As of today, Christians and Muslims remain excluded from the benefits extended to Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe Indians, as their respective ideologies do not recognise caste. However, to get around this constitutional obstacle, the majority or near majority of Christians and Muslims have been classified by their religious and community leaders as Backward Class (BC) or Other Backward Class (OBC) and are enjoying the benefits extended by the State and Central Government to these classes to the determent of the Hindus in these classes."

"Around 40% of all Muslims are already enjoying the benefits of reservation under the OBC quota;"

"[In] Kerala, where the Muslims constitute 25% of the total state population, 99% are classified as OBCs and are claiming reservation quota;"

"In Tamil Nadu 93.3% Muslims have been notified as OBC by the state government in 2004-2005 whereas in 1999-2000 83% of Muslims were notified as OBC―a steep increase of 10% in just five years!"

"Only 10% of all Christians in the country are not availing of any kind of reservation and these would be largely the Goan and the Syrian Christians."

"This cornering is made possible only because of the constitutional right provided to minorities to start and run educational institutions. There is a move now afoot to equate degrees obtained from Muslim madrasas to the CBSE board so that the Muslims in the OBC spectrum may be enabled to corner another major chunk of the benefits of reservation just as the Christians are doing now."

"Around 70% of Christians and Muslims have been brought into the quota regime as backward communities or backward classes;"

"What can be inferred from this analysis is that Christians and Muslims who do not ideologically recognise caste divisions, have “stolen” most of the benefits meant for Hindu Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and Hindu Backward Classes and Other Backward Classes. If it comes about that “Dalit Christians” and “Dalit Muslims” are recognised by the Government as caste entities, then Christians and Muslims will hog all of the benefits with nothing left for Dalit Hindus. Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe Hindus will then have to convert to Christianity (or Islam) in order to obtain these benefits. The Indian bishops are aware of this and it is a part of their game plan to decimate the Hindu society in this way.]"

"If we consider the possibility that preference in reservation is given to anti-Hindu, irreligious Dravidian Tamils with marked political affiliations, then we begin to understand what is happening in the Madras High Court and in all other courts of Tamil Nadu. Reservation benefits are being hogged by the minorities and anti-Hindu Dravidian Tamils. Tamil Hindu SCs, BCs and MBCs are being increasingly marginalised and alienated from the mainstream."

"About San Thome Cathedral which houses his fake tomb―the real tomb for St. Thomas is at Ortona, Italy―it has been established by reputed Jesuit and Indian archaeologists that the church stands on the ruins of the original Kapaleeswara Shiva Temple destroyed by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. So do the churches at Little Mount and Big Mount stand on ruined Murugan and Shiva temples respectively. The “Bleeding Cross” Fr. Francis refers to and which is kept in the Portuguese church on Big Mount, has these words carved around the edge of it in Pahlavi script: “My lord Christ, have mercy upon Afras, son of Chaharbukht the Syrian, who cut this.” The cross is dated by experts to the seventh or eighth century."

"Arun Shourie has stated that the apology should include the following items: An honest accounting of the calumnies which the Church has heaped on India and Hinduism; informing Indian Christians and non Christians about the findings of Bible scholarship [including the St. Thomas legend]; Informing them about the impact of scientific progress on Church doctrine; Acceptance that reality is multi-layered and that there are many ways of perceiving it; Bringing the zeal for conversion in line with the recent declarations that salvation is possible through other religions as well."

"Dr. Koenraad Elst, educated in Europe’s most prestigious Catholic university in Leuven, Belgium, writes in his foreword to this book: “It is clear enough that many Christians including the Pope have long given up the belief in Thomas’s Indian exploits, or―like the Church Fathers―never believed in them in the first place. In contrast with European Christians today, Indian Christians live in a 17th century bubble, as if they are too puerile to stand in the daylight of solid historical fact. They remain in a twilight of legend and lies, at the command of ambitious “medieval” bishops who mislead them with the St. Thomas in India fable for purely selfish reasons.”"

"Syrian Christians were called Nasranis (from Nazarean) or Nestorians (by Europeans) up to the 14th century. Bishop Giovanni dei Marignolli the Franciscan papal legate in Quilon invented the appellation “St. Thomas Christians” in 1348 to distinguish his Syrian Christian converts from the low-caste Hindu converts in his congregation."

"The article “The Incredible Journey” by William Dalrymple in The Guardian, London, on 15 April 2000, is a wonderful exercise in pushing the beliefs of the “minorities”―in fact local enthusiasts of a global movement, helped by the foreign headquarters with resources and strategy―to the utmost. There is no document supporting the fond belief of the Christians [that St. Thomas arrived in Kerala in 52 AD], ritually incanted by all politicians and journalists whenever they mention Christianity. And there still is none after Dalrymple’s article, a fact that all his innuendo about new insights is meant to obscure."

"And note the irony: one always speaks of “doubting Thomas”, also the title of Dalrymple’s film, but the finality of this article is to provide intellectual respectability to the all-out secular effort of suppressing doubt about the Thomas myth."

"And when Christians did reach the coastal area of South India, probably as 4th- century refugees from the Persian empire that had turned hostile after the Christianization of its Roman rival, they were welcomed rather more cordially than any treatment given by Christians to Pagans. Far from being “murdered by the priests of Kali”, they were given hospitality and integrated into Hindu society, without any questions asked about the contents of their religion. Hindus have extended their hospitality more recently to Parsis, Armenians and Tibetan Buddhists; and more anciently to the Jews. That glorious record is the target of gross injustice in the fictional story of Saint Thomas."

"But it was a scholar-evangelist from the Anglican Church, Bishop Robert Caldwell (1814-91), who pioneered what now flourishes as the “Dravidian” identity. In his Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Race, he argued that the south Indian mind was structurally different from the Sanskrit mind. Linguistic speculations were turned into a race theory. He characterized the Dravidians as “ignorant and dense”, accusing the Brahmins―the cunning Aryan agents―for keeping them in shackles through the imposition of Sanskrit and its religion. His successor, another prolific Anglican missionary scholar, Bishop G.U. Pope, started to glorify the Tamil classics era, insisting that its underpinnings were Christianity, not Hinduism. Though subsequently rejected by serious scholars of Tamil culture, the idea was successfully planted that Hinduism had corrupted the “originally pure” Tamil culture by adding Sanskrit and Pagan ideas."

"With the Pattanam excavations thus taking a serious turn, Delhi based Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT) which had earlier attacked former ICHR chairman, Professor M.G.S. Narayanan in 2001 for raising serious allegations against the KCHR has virtually gone underground. Organisations which have currently come out against the KCHR and its Muziris Project have alleged that “these same historians who had earlier rebuffed Ramayana and Sri Ram as fictitious and fabricated are now digging for the bones of Apostle Thomas”."

"Romila Thapar has put forward the arrival of Apostle Thomas as an outcome of Mediterranean trade links of India in her work, The Penguin History of Early India, published in 2002. In 2006, Professor Kumkum Roy was advisor to NCERT Textbook Development Committee along with chief advisor, Professor Neeladri Bhattacharya, both from JNU."

"The effort made by some interested quarters to link the Muziris excavations with the visit of St. Thomas Apostle has been criticised by eminent archaeologist and former director of the Tamil Nadu Archaeological Survey of India, Dr. R. Nagaswamy. “When looking at the literature on the life of St. Thomas, it is not mentioned anywhere that he came to India. It is only a myth, which has now been connected with the excavations at Pattanam, near Kodungallur,” the former visiting professor of Jawaharlal Nehru University told Express. In fact, the ancient Muziris port must have been located in Kodungallur and not in Pattanam because all major ports in ancient times were situated at river mouths. And so it is safe to assume that Muziris was at Kodungallur, where the river joins the sea. He felt there was a hidden agenda by certain sections to propagate the idea that Muziris was connected to Pattanam, where St. Thomas is believed to have landed, and not with Kodungallur. “Myth cannot be called history. Connecting myth with history could only create confusion and distort history,” he said. “There is no substantial evidence to say that Pattanam is connected with Muziris. How was this conclusion reached? Those who claim to have found materials to connect Pattanam with Muziris have forgotten that these materials were also found in the eastern and the western coasts of the country,” said Dr. Nagaswamy."

"Dr. R. Nagaswami, eminent archaeologist, who had done some excavations at Santhome Church along with a Jesuit, quoted profusely from the writings of Jesuits and exploded the myth of the visit of St. Thomas to India. It was a Portuguese ruse to spread Christianity in India. He said Deivanayagam had taken the visit of St. Thomas to India as an established fact and, based on that, built his theory and conclusions. The fact was St. Thomas had not visited India at all. According to the evidence available, and books on St. Thomas, he had visited only Parthia, Dr. Nagaswami said. He said it was a sad reflection on the Institute of Tamil Studies which had published the book. It was shameful that Madras University had awarded a doctorate for the book without going into its merits."

"I'm just about to cross the street to Café Rimon when I see Natalie sitting on the shaded patio and my heart skips, trips and falls over itself."

"The day Lily meets Lana is her two-week anniversary in Israel. She's lying on her belly in the dried grass outside the apartment building she now calls home, watching insects through her macro lens. She's sweating in her faded blue jeans and Converse high-tops. Then a shadow eclipses her sun."

"Years later, when they are old, sitting on a porch somewhere overlooking the sea, someone would ask them how it all started, and he'd say, as soon as he saw her on the other side of the drinking fountain at the immigrant camp, he knew. (first lines of book)"

"It was my sister, Lizzie, who told me. Her voice-transmitted through telephone lines that ran underneath seas and borders from Sha'ariya, our Yemeni neighborhood at the edge of a suburb east of Tel Aviv, to this guesthouse counter in the Thai island of Ko Pha-ngan-echoed faintly. "Zohara," she said. Not Zorki, I noted. "You have to come home." You have to come home, a tinny version of her repeated."

"I woke up with an urge to write, to document everything [they] had shared with me about the women's songs. For the first time in forever, I felt inspired by something. The idea of oral poetry that was created and disseminated by a community of women fascinated me, the fluidity of it, the riffing and rewriting and borrowing, which stood against the idea of authorship as it was known and celebrated in the West. There was so much more I wished to know. (Chapter 14)"

"Maybe that's why the two of them felt so connected. Both waiting, both missing an integral part of themselves, the constant ache in their bodies throbbing like a phantom limb. (chapter 16)"

"Jerusalem, a city surrounded by thick forests and rolling hills, where the air was fresh and cool, where everything was ancient, biblical, suffused with meaning. (chapter 18)"

"On bad days, I looked at the paleness of the sky, and all I could see was how deeply fucked up everything was, how much the pain radiated from the earth, fury bubbling up like hot lava underneath the surface. Other days, mostly at the beach, I would breathe in the saturated air and be filled with gratitude. Despite everything, this was the only home I knew. Flawed, imperfect, but home. And though my sense of belonging was fractured, still I belonged here more than anywhere else. Maybe that's why I held on to this dream of peace so desperately. I needed to believe we were heading somewhere better. If peace came, maybe we would finally be able to let out the breath we'd been holding for forty-seven years, and exhale. (chapter 19)"

"Whatever resolve and certainty he had felt in the past few weeks had melted away. Strangely, there was some lightness in the unknowing, like a clenched fist had been unfurled. (chapter 34)"

"Growing up, I had often felt out of place in my own country, a feeling I couldn’t comprehend or name until much later. It had to do with my father; grief shakes the foundations of your home, unsettles and banishes you. It might have also had to do with the exclusion of my culture from so many facets of Israeli life, with not seeing myself in literature and in the media, with being taught in school a partial history about the inception of Israel that painted us as mere extras. Or perhaps that failed sense of belonging was an Israeli predicament, because how does one feel at home when home is unsafe, forever contested? When the fear of losing is so entrenched in us it has become a part of our ethos?"

"Home is collecting stories, writing them down, and retelling them. Home is writing, and it grounds, sustains, and nourishes me. Home is the page. The one place I always, always come back to."

"Leaving, I discovered, did not cure my displacement, but rather reinforced it."

"Home became the liminal space in between-between identities, between cultures, between languages- and I was content claiming that space as my own, pleased to be different."

"The sky cracked open like an eggshell"

"I would wish that I was the one leaving because that would be better than being left behind"

"I know about death…Our country is haunted by its dead, weighed down by loss and remembrance."

"I delight in the sound of Yemeni rolling out of my mouth, rejoice in accentuating the letters in that deep, melodic way, feeling as though in my own small way I'm keeping something alive-an endangered language, yes-but also more personally, our past, my childhood, as though in using these words I am channelling my ancestors."

"Writing in a second language...is like wearing someone else's skin, an act akin to religious conversion."

"Being away from home and its prejudice toward the Arabic language allowed my body to remember Arabic, lament what was lost, and reclaim my own Arabness."

"Mizrahi Jews, some of whom came later than Ashkenazi, faced prejudice and inequity in Israel. Their need to assimilate required an erasure of their past, a denial of their heritage and language, which wasn't just foreign, or diasporic, but also associated with the enemy. Yiddish and other European languages were also lost, but Arabic was more politically charged. Despite sharing roots with Hebrew, which should have made it feel familial, it became viewed as dangerous, and hearing it instilled fear."

"There are two Arabics I long for-my ancestral tongue and the language of this place-or is it really one? Arabic existed alongside my mother tongue for generations, a sister language whose words are often recognizable: bayit and beit, yeled and walad. They share many words, a similar ring, an etymological root, a lingual family, and yet they are estranged. If this is not a parable about the state of this region, I don't know what is."

"Some days I feel a physical ache for Arabic, a tug in my heart. How do you miss something you've never known? Can a language be lodged inside your body, folded into your organs, the same way we inherit memories from our ancestors, like trauma? How else can you explain the warmth that spreads inside my body when I hear it? The yearning?"

"Celebrating Yemeni Jews and Mizrahi stories has been one of my goals with this book and my work, in general. I think what you describe here is a common misconception in North America, because Ashkenazi Jews are a majority there. Not so in Israel, obviously. We’re talking 50-50 [population split], which is another thing people in North America are surprised to hear. But despite this, disparities in higher education and income still persist. And Mizrahi authors have still not made it into the canon in Israel, so most Israeli literature that is being read in Israel and abroad is written by Ashkenazi authors. I wanted to grant my community a place in literature. (2025)"

"(Do you think things are getting better here in terms of people’s understanding about the differences between Jews from different cultures?) AT There definitely seems to be more in the media now, and more books by Jewish authors whose background isn’t Ashkenazi. It’s improving, for sure. I feel like there’s more awareness about Mizrahi and Sephardi inclusion within Jewish spaces. But I still have to be that person who says things on social media, like, when there’s a post about Jewish food and the entire conversation is Ashkenormative, “Actually, that is not Jewish food. That is Ashkenazi Jewish food.” (2025)"

"I returned to Israel after 20 years in Canada because I wanted to see if I belonged here. The jury is still out. I’ve been gone for so long that I feel a little bit like an immigrant here, in Israel, too. This may be a case of the immigrant predicament: you no longer belong anywhere, or maybe you belong everywhere? I think my writing tries to make sense of that question (2022)"

"(Is her memoir consciously undergirded by feminist assertions of agency, and standing up to patriarchy?) I think this is an essential element of my memoir that is rarely discussed. As a young woman, it absolutely felt subversive and defiant in a way, wishing to break free from patriarchal expectations of me. But also, the fact that it felt so radical was on its own a testament to how oppressed women still are. It really shouldn’t be such a big deal, you know, to want to be free, to follow your heart. (2022)"

"The revolution of Mizrahi artists in Israel is really exciting and something I craved as a child, growing up without seeing myself portrayed in literature or history classes. I find the idea of what it means to be Jewish to be pretty narrow also outside of Israel. The majority of the books translated from Hebrew have been mostly by Ashkenazi authors, and so hopefully this book might contribute just a tiny bit to the act of complicating Jewish identity and showing that there’s more to Jewishness and more to the Israeli story. (2016)"

"I think there is an expectation when writing about Israel for it to be political, to be about the conflict, the situation (“hamatzav”) and this can be frustrating for someone not inclined to focus specifically on war stories. I’m interested in many conflicts: cultural clashes and dynamics within families and romantic relationships. I also wanted to capture how the political situation is always in the background: the way we live our lives with the sense of contention that is always present but not always on the forefront. The question is also what is political, because to me the book is political. My decision to write strictly Mizrahi characters was a political decision for me. To shed light on characters who are marginalized in Israeli society was also a political choice. Whenever I watch news from other places these are the things I want to know too: I want to see the family dynamics and love stories, and how people live amidst tragedy and war. This is one of the things I think fiction does best. (2016)"

"I never read Mizrahi writers or writers of color growing up, and never found myself or my family reflected in the books they assigned to us in school. I actually believed that there were no published Yemeni writers in Israel (of course they existed but I didn’t know that, because they had not received media attention, and were not taught in schools). It made me feel as though our stories weren’t worth telling and as though my dream of becoming a writer myself was far-fetched. The exclusion of Mizrahi writers (and Palestinian writers) in the school curriculum, to me, is an act of erasure that has yet to be rectified, and one which puts limitations on children’s dreams. It infuriates me. So as a result, my favorite poets growing up were all male and Ashkenazi, like Yehuda Amichai (whom I still love), Natan Zach, David Avidan. (2016)"

"maybe the best place is the in-betweeness, or the search for a home and a belonging, which is a very Jewish theme, or the act of wandering, the movement between places. In my twenties I wanted to believe that. I romanticized wandering and wore my nomadic lifestyle on my head like a crown, but it wasn’t a sustainable choice and eventually I got tired of travelling and living without some stability. So what is the best place on earth, then? Ultimately, the place where you feel most at home. In my case, it might have to be wherever my husband and child are. And other times, or actually at the same time, it is the page. (2016)"

"You’ve been writing your whole life, having published your first poem at age ten. What drives you to write? AT I can’t explain it. It’s like love. I feel like it chose me, not the other way around. (2015)"

"you write what you have to write. Life is too short to censor yourself. (2015)"

"…So much of the writing process is done in the privacy of your own home, often in your pajamas, so I love that research forces me to get out of the house, try new things, meet new people. It keeps me from getting too comfortable and pushes me outside my comfort zone. Despite writing about places I know and communities I'm familiar with, there was still a lot of research to be done, and thank God for that! It would be really boring to write only about stuff I know so well that I never have to leave my desk to explore..."

"I've always been a storyteller. Before I could write, I used to make up stories and tell them to my friends and family. They were always really dramatic, with ghosts and people falling into holes in the ground, and ships lost at stormy seas. Then, I started drawing comic strips and I would show them to my mom and narrate them. As soon as I learned the alphabet I started writing stories and poems. I wrote every day, usually in the afternoons, when my parents were napping. My sister (who is seven years older) and my father recognized my love of storytelling and writing early on, and they fostered and encouraged it…"

"…Obviously Israel will always be home. I feel it most intensely when I'm there for a long enough period. When I first arrive, I'm not so sure about it, but once I stay for a few weeks, it feels like I could easily move back and live there. It's beyond the fact that my entire family lives there: It's a visceral thing, an attachment to the physicality of the place, to how the place smells and tastes. I also have an intense connection to the sea in Israel; I actually have to say goodbye to it whenever I leave and it's always a difficult parting…"

"I often tell students that I understand the need to write something right after it happens, but if you’re trying to craft it into an actual piece of art, a memoir or a creative nonfiction, I always say it’s best to wait...You need some distance to really make sense of it, I think, in writing."

"I think a lot of women who have experienced sexual assault have the same story. It’s like an ulcer in our bodies. There is something positive about the experience of letting it out and telling the story."

"Israel is a very small place, as you know, there’s something that can feel very familial about it, which is both positive and not so positive at different times and different instances."

"(Do you think there’s been increased awareness of Mizrahi Jewish culture in English-language speaking communities?) I sure hope so. I do my part. It’s a small part. But every time I get to speak in front of people, I correct misconceptions, which happens often. People saying things like “Mizrahi Jews didn’t come to Israel until the founding of the country, so that’s maybe why …” And I’m like, “Actually, my great-grandmother came in 1907, and the first Yemeni immigration was at the same time as the Bilu immigration of the European Jews, exactly the same years, it just hasn’t been told.” So yeah, you have to do what you have to do."

"When you write your first book, you get to write it in a bit of a bubble. You don’t know if it will be published, as much as you hope and wish for it, you don’t really know that. It’s kind of a safer place to write. And then when you write the second book, you’re aware of readership, you’re aware of views, of an audience out there, of expectations, and it’s more work to shut that down."

"The sea is the setting for many of my formative memories: I spent many Saturdays there with my family, fell in love, had my first kiss, broke up with my first boyfriend. Later on I worked as a waitress on a Tel Aviv beach and got to work barefoot, watch hundreds of sunsets and sunrises, swim late at night. When I moved to Vancouver, I found myself living by water again. In Toronto where I now live, the lake doesn’t feel the same. It doesn’t offer the same promise, the same fantasy as the sea. It doesn’t satisfy my longings."

"Jewelry is an important part of Yemeni Jewish heritage. In Yemen, jewelry making was strictly a Jewish profession; the majority of the Jewish men were silversmiths and they were known for their fine craftsmanship. In fact, after the Jews went to Israel, Yemeni culture suffered a huge loss because they took their craft with them."

"I’ve never believed in “write what you know.” I believe in “write what you must.” So I tried, knowing that I very well might fail. When writing fiction, you need to find that kernel of truth within you and superimpose it onto your character."

"(Describe your female characters, their sexual aggressiveness.) AT: I like to think my women are badasses. The first person to point that out to me was one of my teachers at Guelph who said he appreciated that my female characters were sexually aggressive, that they wanted sex and went for it. It wasn’t something that I did consciously. I just wrote the kind of female characters I like to read. A part of it stems from my interest in gender dynamics in Israel, in particular the mandatory nature of the army service and how it shapes young men and women. I feel that being forced at such a young age to go into the army—still a male dominated environment—contributes to young Israeli women possessing what’s considered stereotypically male characteristics. It probably also has something to do with growing up and living in a warzone, a place where survival is an issue and the need to defend oneself is so instilled in our minds that people—regardless of gender—feel they need to develop a certain toughness, be on the offensive, even in everyday life."

"I was a terrible soldier. That’s the thing with mandatory service—it’s not for everyone, yet everyone has to go."

"For a long time I didn’t write about Israel at all. It’s such a volatile place and people have such strong opinions and everything you write about Israel is perceived as political. It is a double edged sword—some people may find your writing more alluring because of it while others may not want to go anywhere near it. At some point I had to stop worrying. I had to resign myself to the fact that I was going to piss people off, and that people are going to read the book and interpret it any way they like, and there is nothing I can do about it."

"Mizrahi literature has been overlooked in Israel—it’s getting better now, but when I was growing up I never read characters or authors that represented me. It made me feel invisible. There are more Mizrahi authors published nowadays, but Mizrahi literature is still underrepresented in the education system and in the Israeli canon. Unfortunately, Mizrahi authors have been translated a lot less than Ashkenazi authors."

"Perhaps Tsabari’s greatest attraction as a global storyteller is her absolute veracity— no holds barred, she has her reader in thrall with her art of fashioning her tellings with a refreshing turn of phrase. And like the burgeoning tribe of diasporic and postcolonial writers whose mother tongue is not English, she employs the once colonizer’s language to tell her stories in her own voice, that are being read by hundreds of thousands of immigrants who live in English-speaking countries which are their adopted homeland. Thus, the narrative is studded with unexpected gems — visual, audial, culinary and cerebral: “The sky cracked open like an eggshell”; “I would wish that I was the one leaving because that would be better than being left behind”; “I know about death…Our country is haunted by its dead, weighed down by loss and remembrance”...Tsabari’s creativity spins on the unique fulcrum of provoking the reader to think outside the box, and insidiously works to make the global reader understand the urgency to celebrate diversity with the art of acceptance."

"The celebrity character of Trumpism appeals to citizens that would otherwise be disengaged from politics, with Trump serving as a placeholder for their unsatisfied wants and dreams. The ability to translate the of celebrity into seems also to mean that one-time spectators can be similarly transformed into motivated voters."

"Much to the consternation of Republican elites, it also stands well outside of conservative ."

"It is true that our collective military strength has been a deterrent to communist aggression. It is equally true--now that both sides possess the means of mass annihilation--that military might alone will not solve our problems or protect us from encirclement."

"Our strength or weakness will depend on our success or failure to attract the loyalty and devotion of men at home and in the uncommitted nations. Our military strength has bought us time--expensive and precious time; time to examine the weaknesses in our private enterprise system and to make corrections--corrections needed to make the system more workable and more attractive to all."

"Since the industrial revolution, we have been plagued with periodic recessions and depressions, described as the "lows" of the business cycle. It should be made perfectly clear that these recessions, unlike famines, are not Acts of God, but simply attributable to the folly and inflexibility of man."

"Decades ago, visitors from other planets warned us about where we were headed and offered to help. But instead we, or at least some of us, interpreted their visits as a threat, and decided to shoot first and ask questions after… The veil of secrecy must be lifted and it has to be lifted now, before it is too late."

"They are very much afraid we might be stupid enough to start using atomic weapons again and that would be very bad for us and them as well... We are polluting our waters and our air, and we are playing around with these exotic weapons… and they don't like that. They'd like to work with us to teach us better ways, but only, I think, with our consent."

"(How do you answer UFO skeptics?) I get them to read my books and others; because there’s so much literature on the subject, that it is just amazing. And the skeptics, by large, have never done any reading on it. And it’s just like, take any other subject, physics or something that you are not familiar with, you can be skeptical of some of the rules and things people say if you haven’t taken time out to learn about it.... You have to read the books and get the evidence, and then you can check it out for yourself."

"There’s all kinds of proof, but only if you know where to look and taken the trouble to go and look... The United States government is the principle villain. Why is a good question, you should ask them, because basically, at a hearing we held a couple of years ago in Washington, the consensus of the witnesses at the hearing, of whom I was one, was that it was power and greed. They cover it up under the cloak of national security, but we all, I think the consensus of all of us who gave evidence there was that it had nothing to do with national security, it was a cover story to keep people from demanding answers, and that the real reasons were power and greed."

"We welcome... Paul T. Hellyer, P.C., B.A., who--before his 34th birthday--was sworn of Her Majesty's Privy Council for Canada and Associate Minister of National Defence. Mr. Hellyer was born on a farm near Waterford, Ontario, and, after his high school years there, enrolled at the Curtiss-Wright Technical Institute of Aeronautics in Glendale, California, from which he graduated in aeronautical engineering in 1941 before his 18th birthday. His services were quickly snapped up by Fleet Aircraft Ltd. of Fort Erie, where he progressed from junior draughtsman to group leader in engineering on the Cornell elementary trainers being supplied to the R.C.A.F... On the strength of the private pilot's license he had obtained while in California, Mr. Hellyer joined the R.C.A.F., but its need for pilots ended before he had earned his wings so he promptly left to serve with the Royal Canadian Artillery until war's end. Mr. Hellyer is now President of Curran Hall Limited, home builders, and of Trepil Realty Limited, a land development company. In 1949, he... was elected to the House of Commons... re-elected in 1953..February, 1956, before his 33rd birthday... appointed Parliamentary Assistant to The... Minister of National Defence... April, 1957, he became Associate Minister... Somewhere along the line Mr. Hellyer has found the time and energy to study voice at the Toronto Conservatory; to attend the Banff School of Fine Arts and to participate in operas produced there. He continues to sing as a member of the Westmoreland United Church choir."

"The Honorable Paul Hellyer, who was the National Defense minister of Canada in the ’60s, says the current “state of crisis” in the world has been “engineered by an unelected, unaccountable cabal of rich, ruthless and power-hungry people who have been deliberately keeping the majority of decent hard working taxpayers totally in the dark.” Before we can solve this world crisis, he says we must first “end the private bankers’ monopoly to print [create] money.”"

"Hellyer says there will never be peace and justice on Earth as long as central banks are privately owned....he claims that there are secret patents on “exotic energy technology” which must be released and made available to the world. “This suppressed technology could make it possible to convert from an oil economy to a clean economy in seven years.” But the big bankers could care less about the environment or our children’s future. Just like the Federal Reserve’s motto “Order out of chaos” which can be seen on the back of the U.S. dollar bill, they have deliberately manufactured a climate crisis and offer their communist New World Order as the solution. The above information is NOT a conspiracy theory and Paul Hellyer is NOT a tin foil hatter. He is an engineer, politician, writer and commentator who has had a long and varied career. He was the youngest person ever elected to the House of Commons in 1949 and now at age 96 holds the title of the longest serving current member of the Privy Council of Canada."

"There is something deeply troubling about a culture which makes humans into gods, and which puts people on pedestals to be worshipped. For, it glosses over all blemishes in its quest for the godly."

"While releasing the tax data, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that it should lead to enhanced insights for policymaking on taxation. What he did not say was that it was a scathing commentary on the nation. Unless the cultural idea of the nation as comradeship and fraternity is complemented by material and economic arrangements that realise this, the nation will remain only in name."

"The unifying logic of both neo-liberal capitalist development and Hindutva (which is technicism). Both have an instrumental attitude, the former towards economic growth and science and technology, and the latter towards culture. [...] Modernity is not technicism or the expansion of the market, it is a larger project in which technological and economic betterment is only one aspect. More significant is the liberation of the human mind from the shackles of unreason (in which science is a mere aid), the seeking of the end of all oppressions, satiating the craving for . Without this, there is no modernity."

"The joke is not on Modi. The joke is on the "educated" elite/middle class supporters of Modi who have made idiocy and ignorance fashionable."

"Rather than reduce this to the personality of Modi or his lack of knowledge, I am more interested in the fact how the Hindu Right has made a virtue of anti-intellectualism, ignorance, and fake news/propaganda in the last five years, and how people have been asked to believe the most illogical, irrational, untruthful statements coming out, especially from the PM."

"Other than these, the list of Mr Modi's gaffes is quite long. But again, what is crucial to note is that there has not been any scrutiny of this at all by the mainstream media. In this case, the biggest question to be asked is whether the PM actually ordered the Balakot air strike on the basis of his knowledge of radars, overriding military experts? In that case, it is shocking, and dangerous, for it is a national security issue."

"All the fantastical claims are coupled with the fact that Mr Modi has not given a single press conference, or an unscripted interview. This makes it impossible to question the PM on critical policy matters, and his grasp of them. [...] Ultimately, I see this as a part of the greatest exercise in anti-intellectualism, propaganda/fake news seen in Independent India, in which it is normal to defend the most absurd statement, and in which it has become impossible to distinguish between truth and falsehood."

"Generally, the death of a judge, in what seem to be mysterious circumstances, while presiding over a case against the second most powerful person in the country, and the closest associate of the head of the government, would be make prime-time television in a democracy. Similarly, the allegations of corruption against the family of the same person would have garnered media attention. But recent events in India prove otherwise. [...] Despite the explosive nature of the story and its potentially unprecedented implications for Indian democracy (in independent India's history, to my knowledge, there is no instance of a judge being assassinated) there was a stunned silence in the mainstream and big media, especially, the English-language television channels that have a disproportionate influence in the setting of the political ."

"Much of Narendra Modi's legitimacy among the Indian public comes from the perception that, unlike most of the political class, he is personally beyond reproach when it comes to financial corruption. Moreover, it was he who declared a war on corruption, the most emphatic example of which, the government claims, is the demonetization exercise. But Mr. Modi's silence on the corruption story finally exposed the hollowness of the government’s crusade against corruption, which in any case, has so far amounted to nothing more than targeted attacks against rival politicians. In politics, perceptions play a huge role. This is the first time that Mr. Modi's carefully crafted image as incorruptible and as a crusader against corruption has taken a considerable beating. WhatsApp messages, tweets and Facebook posts were rife with jokes about Mr. Shah’s businesses, and Mr. Modi’s silence."

"As examples from history show, when jokes start circulating about a powerful leader, cracks in political legitimacy begin to appear."

"But the more damaging development has been the role of the mainstream media in the face of government attempts to muzzle it. Just as in the judge story, there was silence about the corruption story in the media. Even when there was coverage, it was more about the defamation case filed by Mr. Shah rather than the merits of story itself. The rare television channel that has sometimes been critical of the Modi government and faced its wrath for doing so, succumbed, pulling down reportage about the Shah story. This is an extraordinary level of submissiveness displayed by the media. This must also be read in the context of the largest democracy’s abysmal ranking in the World . Last year, India ranked 133 out of 18 countries. And this year, it has declined to 136. Recently, the main mode of against journalists doing investigative stories has been through Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation (SLAPPs), like the one filed by Mr. Shah. Journalists face severe challenges, including physical violence and threat to life, in carrying out their work."

"So, the emerging “manufacture of consent” in favor of the ruling government does not happen only through active participation, or on criticism by the media, but also as a result of the egregious threats that the media personnel face."

"Jokes making fun of Mr. Modi, or Facebook posts of lay citizens, and films criticizing his government are met with police complaints, legal cases, and threats by the ruling party and its larger ideological family. BJP-led state governments have also introduced draconian bills to curb free speech. India’s democracy is at a critical juncture. After the Emergency declared by the Congress government in 1975 which legally curbed press freedoms, we have not witnessed such levels of abnegation of free speech. (The otherwise-activist Indian judiciary too has maintained a deafening silence on the judge’s death.) It would not be wrong to consider this present conjuncture as marking a deterioration in that regard."

"While all governments, in varying degrees, try to muzzle free speech or physically intimidate journalists, what is radically different under the Modi dispensation is the wider climate of intolerance fostered by the combustible combination of religion and nationalism aided by state power. This has led to unprecedented attacks against religious minorities on accusations like possessing/eating beef or the killings of those who are critics of the government. Dissent and criticism of government has been construed as an anti-national activity clearly demonstrated by the 40 sedition cases filed in 2016."

"When the largest democracy in the world, and the oldest one in the Global South, displays authoritarian tendencies betraying the promise of its founding fathers, it has implications beyond India."

"There could not be a more grisly method, even when it involves no violence, to cover up ghastly crimes committed by a people than to indulge in the fallacy of false equivalence. In this fallacy, two incomparable things are compared and declared to be equal because there are always two sides to the story. What is going on in the aftermath of the worst in Delhi since 1984, in which 34 Muslims and 15 Hindus have died, is precisely this fallacy. Thus, here, both Hindus and Muslims are at fault for the violence; hence the refusal to call it a or state-backed violence against Muslims despite all the evidence. completely obscures the root causes of a problem. It instead focuses on the immediate and the superficial, and is employed by well-intentioned observers as well as supporters when on the defensive. Thus, six years of relentless hate-mongering against Muslims is seen to be of no consequence in creating an absolutely inflammable social sphere."

"To place the responsibility of violence on the illiterate, poor and unemployed mobs is to completely miss the pathologies amongst us, the privileged and the powerful, which are the greatest enablers of violence."

"These are the times when on the most watched primetime television news debates every night, it is absolutely normal for the anchors and BJP spokespersons to call Muslim panelists terrorists and anti-nationals. [...] These are the times when a Union minister can declare that Rahul Gandhi is the son of a Muslim. Of course, the insinuation is that being a Muslim is a crime – plain and simple. To focus only on the Kapil Mishras, s, and the Parvesh Vermas, as if they are some elements which have gone rogue, is to miss that they are totally in sync with the discourse authored and sanctioned by none less than the prime minister of the Indian republic. Whenever confronted with this stark reality, Hindutva supporters respond with whataboutery."

"is denied through false equivalence."

"It is not that Hindutva supporters equate vastly different phenomena with vastly different consequences, but they also willfully gloss over facts."

"For the first time in Independent India, ordinary Muslims, especially women, have come out in large numbers, overwhelmingly in a peaceful fashion, breaking the shackles of the thoroughly self-serving and regressive religious and elite leadership, to protect Indian democracy and the constitution. This is a landmark moment. Yet, what does the legitimate and democratic protests get branded as? As “anti-nationals” and “traitors”."

"The narrative of is persisted with regard to the Delhi violence, despite the overwhelming evidence of the police acting emphatically in favour of one side."

"This is when false equivalence fails to recognise not only the unbridled state-backed violent but also its farcical nature. To counter false equivalence and to assert what happened in Delhi was an anti-Muslim pogrom, we do not have to take the morally dubious position of denying that there has been the loss of innocent lives among Hindus as well (after all, what can be more heartbreaking than losing a 15-year old boy – the youngest victim of the violence, Nitin Kumar – who was killed while stepping out to buy food), or that the victims are not capable of brutality. But to remain at the level of a statistical apportioning of grief, or false equivalence is to fundamentally misread the nature of the beast which has succeeded in replacing every critical problem in India with the narrative of a Hindu-Muslim war, and which has produced suffering even among the oppressors."

"I had never seen Gundul threaten or assault a woman, although he frequently charged male assistants. The cook was screaming hysterically. I thought, 'He's trying to kill her.' I began to realize that Gundul did not intend to harm the cook, but had something else in mind. The cook stopped struggling. 'It's all right,' she murmured. She lay back in my arms, with Gundul on top of her. Gundul was very calm and deliberate. He raped the cook. As he moved rhythmically back and forth, his eyes rolled upward to the heavens. I was in shock. Gundul let the cook go, stood up, and soundlessly, moved off the feeding platform into the trees. It was over just like that."

"... visitor to take the dugout back to Camp Leakey for help. My repeated blows had no effect on Gundul; but neither did he fight back very aggressively. I began to realize that Gundul did not intend to harm the cook, but had something else in mind. The cook stopped struggling. "It's all right," she murmured. She lay back in my arms, with Gundul on top of her. Gundul was very calm and deliberate. He raped the cook. As he moved rhythmically back and forth, his eyes rolled upward to the heavens. I was in shock. I felt as though this were happening to other people somewhere else, and I was watching from a distance. I have no idea how much time passed."

"I think that being isolated from the Hollywood world of premieres and red carpet events was probably good for me because I could ease into those at will and by my own choice. But in other aspects, when it comes to fanfare Hawaii is nuts and in L.A. they're all so jaded. They don't care. They see another star and it's like, 'oh yeah, we've seen a hundred of them before. You're a dime a dozen'. Which is a little bit easier to deal with."

"The only way to want millions of people invading your life is to be off your rocker. This industry is conducive to cuckoo. It likes cuckoo. It encourages cuckoo. I've had to find my sanity."

"I’m very proud of being a woman, and as a woman, I don’t even like the word feminism because when I hear that word, I associate it with women trying to pretend to be men, and I’m not interested in trying to pretend to be a man. I don’t want to embrace manhood, I want to embrace my womanhood."

"It’s funny, because there’s a lot of fear in Hollywood about ever being typecast, and I kind of feel like, “Man, if you’re going to be typecast, what better to be typecast as a kick-ass chick?” I try to put my stamp on these strong female characters, which is the idea that they’re strong because of their compassion, they’re strong because of their vulnerability, they’re strong because of their emotion and they’re strong in spite of their fear. And that’s why I do get involved very heavily in the creative process because I think it’s a dangerous trap that sometimes male writers can find themselves getting into where they’re trying to create a strong woman, but they actually don’t know what female strength looks like. They don’t know what it means and so they create strength that looks manly. And I think it’s really important that young women and women of all ages see female characters that represent true femininity and that that isn’t weak, but that’s strong."

""....I grew up in a world where feminism was all around me like a beacon of hope cutting through the opposing ideas I was being taught at home...."

"“...celebrate the women who have defied socialcensure and the state to remove the hijab...""

""...No Hijab Day is a day to support brave women across the globe who want to be free from the hijab. Women who want to decide for themselves what to wear or what not to wear on their heads. Women who fight against either misogynist governments that will imprison them for removing their hijab or against abusive families and communities that will ostracize, abuse and even kill them."

"...It will be difficult for Western women who wore hijab on Hijab Day, at the Women’s March,...not feel shame....how you’ve betrayed women, We all deserve freedom...not just you....STOP supporting our subjugation #FreeFromHijab"

"....Maybe they should read the whole Quran as well. It would be impossible for anyone with the slightest bit of empathy to read the Quran and—at the end of it—say that: “Islam is a religion of peace.” But people are generally good, and, if Muslims sat down with the Quran, translated it into their own language and read it, they would be horrified. They would not want to identify with whatever religion teaches these kinds of atrocious things. But most of them don’t even know what that book says. ..."

""...“What I was not prepared for was the tsunami of just hate and pushback and disdain that would come from people I thought were my people: people that believed in enlightenment values, Western values, and liberal values...”"

"....Many apologists for Islam have claimed “Muslims are the true feminists” or “Islam is a religion of peace,” and it is certainly possible to have Muslims who are feminists, and the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful people. Many verses in the Quran and Hadith support women and peace. But Yasmine’s story reveals that anyone pushing those narratives without acknowledging that much of Islamic doctrine does the opposite is either ignorant or dishonest...."

"In Unveiled, Yasmine Mohammed... putting the lie to the dangerous notion that criticizing the doctrine of Islam is a form of bigotry."

"“...These politically correct language initiatives are misguided and harmful. They create highly entitled professional “victims” who expect to be free from any offense, and they engender a stifling atmosphere where all individuals walk on eggshells lest they might commit a linguistic capital crime.”"

"Our African ancestors were the first to engage in breathing. By that logic, I think by breathing today, we are engaging in cultural appropriation of the first Homo sapiens. And so the only way I will ask you to stop being racist is to suffocate - to stop breathing."

"There is no better way to box stupidity than to satirize it."

"It is that unique constellation of genes that makes my personhood, that allows me to say ‘I don’t care what the costs may or may not be; I cannot go to sleep tonight knowing that I could have said something, but didn’t.‘"

"To be against evolutionary psychology is about as intelligent as to be against physics or against chemistry. It’s such a breathtakingly idiotic position."

"Battles require courage. You cannot go to war while being assured that nothing dire will befall you. That’s the reality; there’s no way to mitigate the risk. Now, you don’t have to be a frivolous martyr! You could be strategic as to when to intervene, when not to intervene, how to frame it. In that sense, you can be strategic. But there’s no avoiding it."

"Can we talk of integration until there is social integration? Unless there is integration in hearts and minds, you only have a physical presence and the walls are as high as the mountain tops."

"I knew my people when they lived the old way. I knew them when there was still a dignity in our lives, and a feeling of worth in our outlook. I knew them when there was unspoken confidence in the home, a certain knowledge of the path we walked upon. But we were living on the dying energy of a dying culture—a culture which was slowly losing its forward thrust. I think it was the suddenness of it all that hurt us so. We did not have time to adjust to the startling upheaval around us. We seemed to have lost what we had without a replacement of it. We did not have time to take this 20th-century progress and eat it little by little and digest it. It was forced feeding from the start, and our stomach turned sick."

"We paid, we paid, and we paid until we became a beaten race, poverty stricken and conquered. But you have been kind to listen to me, and I know that in your hearts you wish you could help. I wonder if there is much you can do, and yet there is a lot you can do. When you meet my children in your classrooms, respect each one for what he is: a child of our Father in heaven and your brother."

"And today, when you celebrate your hundred years, oh Canada, I am sad for all the Indian people throughout the land. For I have known you when your forests were mine; when they gave me my meat and my clothing. But in the long hundred years since the white man came, I have seen my freedom disappear like the salmon going mysteriously out to sea. The white man's strange customs, which I could not understand, pressed down upon me until I could no longer breathe."

"When I fought to protect my land and my home, I was called a savage. When I neither understood nor welcomed his way of life, I was called lazy. When I tried to rule my people, I was stripped of my authority... Oh God! Like the thunderbird of old I shall rise again out of the sea; I shall grab the instruments of the white man's success — his education, his skills — and with these new tools I shall build my race into the proudest segment of your society."

"My nation was ignored in your history textbooks – they were little more important in the history of Canada than the buffalo that ranged the plains. I was ridiculed in your plays and motion pictures, and when I drank your fire-water, I got drunk – very, very drunk. And I forgot...Oh Canada, how can I celebrate with you this centenary, this hundred years? Shall I thank you for the reserves that are left to me of my beautiful forests? For the canned fish of my rivers? For the loss of my pride and authority, even among my own people? For the lack of my will to fight back? No! I must forget what’s past and gone... Oh God in heaven! Give me back the courage of the olden chiefs. Let me wrestle with my surroundings. Let me again, as in the days of old, dominate my environment. Let me humbly accept this new culture and through it rise up and go on... I shall see our young braves and our chiefs sitting in the houses of law and government, ruling and being ruled by the knowledge and freedoms of our great land. So shall we shatter the barriers of our isolation. So shall the next hundred years be the greatest in the proud history of our tribes and nations."

"Chief Dan George of the Burrard tribe, who was best known for his role in the 1970 movie Little Big Man, died today in his sleep at Lions Gate Hospital. He was 82 years old. Besides his successful acting career, Chief Dan George was also known as an eloquent spokesman for native rights and the environment... He said he was impressed by the progress that Indians had made in his lifetime, noting that he himself, as an old man, had become more forward and bold... Some of our people stand and wait and don't talk for themselves, he said, but this is becoming a thing of the past. The younger Indians consider themselves equal to the white man. ... He said he was proud to see Indians who saw that film walk out of the theater and walk up to a white man and shake him by the hand. That's what they've got to do, you know - believe in themselves and try to fit in."

"I look forward to hearing Chief Dan George's Lament for Confederation read again and again during 2017. Let's revisit this honest and accurate piece of writing penned by an Indigenous leader who all of Canada proudly recognized and embraced. His uncompromising response to the centenary is an indication of the integrity of his character and resolve in who he was."

"It was 1967...The speech forcefully critiques colonization and calls on Indigenous people to “grab the white man’s instruments of success” to rise again. “Dad and the whole family were very nervous... To stand up and tell the truth in such a profound way, he had no idea how the public would take that.”... After his father finished speaking, there were a few seconds of stunned silence. Then the audience rose to their feet and filled the stadium with about 10 minutes of deafening applause. “He began to cry because he was so touched." He helped bring shameful parts of Canada’s history out of the shadows and inspired young Indigenous leaders... George’s address was so revolutionary, his daughter Amy George recalls, she feared he would be killed for delivering it.,, “Some people did get very angry, too. When we were walking off the field at the stadium, some people were saying ‘You’re nuts!’ and they were throwing bottles and empty cups at us,” she says. There hasn’t been much improvement in how Canada treats First Nations since George’s speech, says his grandson Rueben George."

"In 1302 Dante left in exile, accused of graft, embezzlement, opposition to the pope, and disturbance of the peace of Florence. Dante's two greatest works, ' and the Divine Comedy, were both written during his exile. The shock of expulsion from his native city and his bitterness and disappointment forced Dante to reconsider his views on the individual and society, and these two works exhibit a maturity and profundity that is lacking in his early lyric poetry."

"Despite its s and popes and kings, tenth-century Europe had a patrimonial, nucleated society based on the domination by great aristocratic families over everything (even the church) within their own territorial domains. Bastard sons and younger brothers of the local lords became s or s of local churches and . Religion, as well as government and economy and law, was dominated by the great families. Everything belonged to the lords, who became more greedy and aggressive—particularly on their own estates—as the years went by."

"The in property disputes moved slowly if that was the wish, as it often was, of the . He was allowed three formal (always accepted) s, excuses why he could not appear before his case was declared forfeit."

"Whatever the was—or continues to be—it still remains with us in its original form. Since the advent of s in the 1940s bubonic plague is very rare in the U.S.A., although there are still substantial outbreaks in eastern Asia, especially India. But in the 1980s there were three documented cases in the hill country of eastern California. One woman came down with the bubonic plague after she ran over a squirrel with a power mower. It is likely that the disease entered California at some port on a traveling on a ship from eastern Asia."

"Is historical writing to be addressed to a small group of academics or is it to be communicated to the educated world at large? I stand with the latter proposition, that history books are communicable to and accessible by the educated public at large. The ultimate task and obligation of a historian is to bring this kind of illumination to as wide an audience as possible."

"History does not warehouse well in neatly labeled boxes, for events do not exist in quarantined isolation. They exist on a broad spectrum, and all influence and shape each other. Historical episodes are rarely built on the ground of a single foundation. Most are the product of a tangled web of influences and cascading cause-and-effect relationships within a broader historical narrative. The mosquito and her diseases are no different."

"The religious component was only one motivation for the architects of the Crusades and was generally used as a shroud to mask their real intention, which at the core was political, territorial, and economic advantage."

"During both the past and present, commerce is one of the most efficient carriers of communicable disease."

"The willingness of Africans to participate in the slave trade in Africa allowed it to flourish. Africans delivered fellow Africans into the clutches of European subjugation and servitude, something the mosquito made impossible for Europeans to do themselves. The mosquito would not allow Europeans to pluck Africans from their homelands. Without African slavery, New World mercantilist plantation economics would have failed, quinine would not have been discovered, and Africa would have remained African. The entire Columbian Exchange would have been vastly different, or perhaps not have occurred at all. As it was, however, the Portuguese, and eventually the Spanish, English, French, Dutch, and other Europeans, were able to tap into the existing internal African slave culture that revolved around captives of war. Africans initially sold their captives to the Portuguese, and small, localized slave trade emerged. Originally, it generally operated under the cultural umbrella of customary and conventional African slavery. By exploiting this traditional feuding among African nations and social networks, Europeans were able to introduce a vastly different form of captive slavery, one of bulk commercial export. African leaders and monarchs began raiding traditional enemies and allies alike, solely for the purpose of capturing slaves to sell at a growing number of slave forts on the coast, operated by an increasingly broad range of European nationalities. The European demand was met by an African supply of African slaves."

"The Gates Foundation is the third-largest underwriter of global health research, trailing only the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom."

"The idea that we can control these unimaginably complex genetic encodings and ecosystems is like believing we can control the weather. Yes, we can affect it, but we can also certainly make it worse. We have no reason whatsoever to believe that we can engineer a perfectly desired outcome or fabricate a flawlessly designed product 100% of the time. It only takes one mistake, slipup, inadvertent human error to set us on a disastrous orbit or flight path."

"Acceptance was the first step. Loving my anxious self was the basis of making some changes that made my life easier. Anxiety is just one part of me, along with the fact that I'm a devoted friend and a good cook and I buy multiple copies of my favorite books because I love to give them away. I embrace my weird now. I'm not ashamed of who I am. When I started asking for help when I needed it, I learned there is nothing weak about doing that. I realize now that it is incredibly brave to admit when my anxiety is more than I can handle by myself. I still have anxiety sometimes, but I now have tools to help take my power back. I have compassion for myself when I'm having a hard time. I know that I can ride this difficult wave of emotion, and I'll be okay. I'm done pretending."

"The things I’ve done are different, but the values and interests that underlie them are quite the same."

"The sad thing is that one of the most enjoyable things in life is singing together with others, but it’s also one of the most efficient ways of spreading a virus."

"Governments are not always the best doctors when it comes to diagnosing economic ailments and prescribing the right treatment"

"Power is real and somebody is going to have it. So, if you would exercise it ethically and in the national interest, why shouldn't it be you? And why shouldn't it have been me?"

"Not the sexism that says 'We don't like women,'" she said. "It's the sexism that holds you to a different standard, that doesn't give you the benefit of the doubt, that operates on the assumption that you don't really belong there"

"As the years go on and nobody else has done this, I feel an obligation to remind people of what it really meant to be elected the leader of a governing party. The value of it is to inspire others to aspire"

"Unconsented sexual touching is a sexual assault, and somebody who does that, who thinks he has a right to do that, who does it thinking that it’s a reflection of his value because he’s a celebrity, et cetera, I mean that is predation"

"He has released a wave of misogynistic rhetoric in the guise of being opposed to political correctness, the giving permission of people to express the worst misogynistic attitudes is incredibly dangerous and very, very worrisome"

"The idea of delegitimizing the results, as a result of his own vanity, is something that he has taken on and it is very dangerous, the notion that you would want to open a wound and encourage people … to believe somehow an election was stolen from their candidate is really a crime against democracy"

"I'm sorry, if you're not worried about climate change, and you're not worried about resurgent authoritarianism, and you're not a champion of the rights of women to make the contributions they need to make in society, I’m not interested"

"They got to deal with it. [The party] ought not stick its head in the sand. It ought to show leadership. We talked about abortion, we talked about gun control, I dealt with a lot of issues that nobody in their right mind would choose to deal with but they had to be dealt with"

"Because of who you are and what you can do, lots of doors will open for you, and you have to decide which ones to go through."

"The Mahatma was a harmonizer of communities and people. Inclusion and not separation was his way. Hindutva disagreed with Gandhi on his interpretation of Hinduism. The agendas of Hindutva though strong on the issues of self-identity and self-definition, have tended to be separatist. The Vaishnava that he was, Gandhi believed in treating "the suffering of others as his own." From such a point of view, it seems clear that the intolerance of Hindutva will not permit the people of India to build a compassionate and just social order."

"What has stayed constant is a certain chippiness. Canadians feel both superior to and dependent on America, thus resenting it; they often get mistaken for Americans, and are afraid of being culturally subsumed. They feel the rest of the world ignores them, which is a pretty accurate perception. And they're always trying to define who they are (not American, not British, not boring) and not quite succeeding, being presented with the daunting challenge of a country that covers five-and-a-half time zones, speaks two languages and contains a province that periodically wishes to secede (and if it did so would set the four Atlantic provinces adrift)."

"In the churchyard she was set down while her male relations dug into the ground. A smell rose, of loam and of rain. Yetemegnu was brought to the front. Now she could see the priest who clambered into the shallow grave; see his censer swinging, one corner, another, another, overlaying earth with pious perfume. Hear the final prayers. Watch the bending backs lower their freight into the ground, head to the east, feet to the west, feel, like a blow to her own body, the first handful of soil land upon her mother."

"In the middle of war, Edemariam remembers soldiers so spooked that they fire rounds of machine-gun bullets into the heart of a tornado. Her grandmother shoves her and her cousin into the wardrobe. They sat crouched "among soft white dresses that smelled of incense and woodsmoke and limes"; her grandmother stood outside, sheltering them from all that passed. It is one startling, unforgettable story among an abundance of riches."

"All change is hard at first, messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end."

"Take excellent care of the front end of your day, and the rest of your day will pretty much take care of itself. Own your morning. Elevate your life."

"Remember, every professional was once an amateur, and every master started as a beginner. Ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary feats, once they’ve routinized the right habits."

"If you sense your life’s a mess right now, this is simply because your fears are just a little stronger than your faith."

"The business of business is relationships; the business of life is human connection."

"Limitation is nothing more than a mentality that too many good people practice daily until they believe it’s reality. It breaks my heart to see so many potentially powerful human beings stuck in a story about why they can’t be extraordinary, professionally and personally. You need to remember that your excuses are seducers, your fears are liars and your doubts are thieves"

"To have the results the Top 5% of producers have, you must start doing what 95% of people are unwilling to do. As you start to live like this, the majority will call you crazy. Remember that being labeled a freak is the price of greatness."

"There is no doubt in my mind about which type of vulture I want attendant upon my death. Any funeral industry catalogue will provide you with a long list of the unwelcome vultures. A book on the birds of the west coast will supply you with the one species I would be happy pick over my bones — the . There are few selfless acts toward the natural world available to human beings and the one that would cause us the least inconvenience is illegal — the simple act of being consumed by nature's prime scavengers."

"In these interviews I got a privileged glimpse into his century — and what a century. In mathematical terms, the population-savvy would have noted that 1910 to 2010 represents one of the steepest trajectories in rates of extinction the world has ever experienced, rivaling the . In his lifetime the number of humans had escalated from 1.75 billion to just under 7 billion, consuming proportionally more resources than in the past ten millennia to achieve a rising standard of living but also an obscene inequity. In poetic terms, Cowan the photographer and writer had captured the beauty and diversity of the wildlife and landscapes devoured. The loss of them was profound. What captured my imagination was that he was both early witness to and participant in these changes. He was the last of the naturalist-hunters and the first of the alarmed scientists."

"The in had disappeared by around 1983. They just suddenly stopped. They were just nowhere."

"“The most important thing that you can do with your [life] is to integrate it into the never ending story of God’s Kingdom,” Tunnicliffe said Wednesday. “God’s already at work in the world. He’s doing things. We just need to align with what He is doing.”"

"“If anyone tells you that we’ve gone soft on world evangelization, you can tell them that we are totally committed to world evangelization because it is only Jesus Christ that changes people’s lives,” he said."

"“We are also working on guidelines in area of evangelization and proselytization because we are under deep attack,” Tunnicliffe added."

"D'Argenson made the mistake of wishing to perpetuate in democratic America the exactions of Old World etiquette."

"Long after the monsoons cease in the plains of northern India and half the lunar year is over, there comes the widely-celebrated festival of Diwali, held on the day of the new moon in the month of Kattak. The raison d’étre of this festival of lights is so well known that it needs no explication.*” What may be recounted is how the festival crystallized into ‘the greatest festival of the Sikhs’.88 According to Sikh tradition the sixth guru, Hargobind Singh, on his release from Gwalior fort by the Mughal authorities, arrived in the city of Amritsar accompanied by fifty-two chieftains. The residents of the city were greatly elated and since then have celebrated the day of the festival with jubilation."

"Finally, a sustained campaign was launched to prevent Sikhs from taking part in festivals like Holi and Diwali. These were deemed un-Sikh festivities and an effort was made to replace them with innovations that would commemorate key events from the Sikh past. Babu Teja Singh made the most systematic proposals along these lines."

"A most spectacular sign of the success of popular opposition to Tat Khalsa hegemony comes from the domain of festive cycles. As stated previously, there had been a persistent campaign against Sikh participation in festivals like Holi and Diwali."

"But people refused to abandon festivities linked inextricably to the agrarian cycle and north Indian culture.° To renounce Holi celebrations, for instance, would have implied giving up a period of carnival, a time when indigenous society tolerated role reversal and the inversion of rigid social norms. Of all the groups within civil society, the non-elites were most unwilling to forgo this festival; it was the time of year when they took centre-stage without fear of reprisal. If the definitions of Sikh communal life had been left to the Tat Khalsa, the community today would have been without either the Holi or the Diwali festivities."

"You wouldn’t let your schooling interfere with your education."

"' Linnaeus. Mallard.—This is the predominant duck of the region, but it has only slight numerical superiority over the . Mallards were omnipresentin the waters of the entire territory, often varying only slightly in relative abundance from one lake to another. In only a few lakes were its numbers surpassed by any other species of ducks. In relation to all other ducks, its ratio varied from as low as 11 per cent to as high as 42, the average for 32 lakes being 26.3 per cent."

"After June 20, morning temperatures were between 45 and 50 degrees and slightly higher some days. The highest temperature in June was on the 27th, 60 degrees at eight in the morning. The mid-day temperatures average about 5 degrees higher. Insects were countless by latter part of June. Butterflies of several species, bumblebees, spiders, several species of gnat, flies, and mosquitoes were common. The end of June was characterized by rapidly melting snow, nesting activities of the birds, and the quick development of vegetation, Grasses, in particular, made fast headway in moist depressions. Actual bloom was not particularly noteworthy until early July. On June 28 the white heather, ', began sparingly to bloom. On June 30 the mountain avens, ', and the Arctic blueberry, ', suddenly burst into bloom. The Arctic Labrador tea, ', was just on the point of bloom on June 30. The last snowstorm of the season occurred on June 17 and the first rain the following day."

"The food of the chiefly consists of , especially the plentiful, widely distributed . These are caught by waiting their appearance at breathing holes in the ice, by crouching at the edges of floes, or by creeping up to the animal as it sleeps on the ice. The Eskimo assert that the polar bear also catches seals and young by seizing them in the water, from underneath, and dragging them onto an ice pan."

"The lives largely on s throughout the year. These they easily catch during the summer. In winter they dig through the snow for them or catch them as they wander on the surface. may constitute part of the diet and, rarely, the , especially the young. In winter, foxes are often very thin, thus indicating their difficulty of making a living during the season."

"New religions are like weeds in our garden. Society’s gardeners will attempt to pull out weeds to make room for cultured plants and familiar religions. However, some weeds may be cherished flowers in other lands, and those deemed “invasive” might be edible or have healing properties."

"Media reports on “cults” frequently show bias and hasty, inadequate research methods, and are shaped by a militant secularism that showcases a group’s weirdest beliefs without context or any explanatory framework. Many journalists openly declare their mandate to “unmask” the cults and their proto-criminal leaders. They will seek out apostates and whistleblowers who are dedicated to broadcasting the “bad news” about their former religion."

"There's never been a better time in human history to be a woman. And despite the blowback from misguided politicians, leftover s, and hypetmasculine s, women are closer to gaining than ever before. The journey ahead is bound to epic, and it will affect everything—our wallets, our jobs, our very future."

"There’s this extraordinary attitude that women should be second-class, put down, punished, not included. It is absolutely extraordinary to me. It doesn’t matter whether you are in or Iraq, Afghanistan or China — it’s the same thing."

"Women and girls have been on a perilous journaly of oppression and also wit and survival."

"' has a number of common names, one of which is monkshood, so called because of the enlarged that resembles a hood, under which the rest of the floral parts are hidden. Roots were used as poison bait for wolves, thus accounting for another popular name, wolfsbane. All aconitums have poisonous roots, leaves, and stems and warnings concerning their poisonous properties have been sounded since the late 1500s."

"' I always enjoy a good story, and the history of the blue false indigo, ', makes for good reading. This blue-flowered species was the first plant to be subsidized by the English government in the 1700s, the farmers in the colonies of Georgia and South Carolina grew it as a row crop for the British Empire to supplement true indigo ('). It was a good substitute, but not of the quality of true indigo, and thus came to be known as false indigo, or wild indigo. The false indigos come in three main colors—blue, white, and yellow—but new hybrids and selections are bringing this fine plant into mainstream gardening."

"The new program at the (UGA) consists of plant evaluation and new crop introduction. The definition of “new crop” used in the program is taxa that are new to the floriculture/landscape industry. New introductions are first evaluated in the for ease of propagation and placed in the trial gardens the subsequent spring. In the past, commercial growers were allowed to gather cuttings of new material and sell them under the names given to the new plant. The market determined the success or failure of the plant. Examples of successful plants which resulted from this “Open Grower” concept included ' ‘Homestead Purple’, ' ‘Margarita’, and new selections of ' ('). No charge for cuttings was applied and no funding returned to the department. However, an excellent working relationship between the department and industry developed."

"! The old enmities imprinted into my mind by hearsay and history lessons were not so easily eradicated. Russia, the massive land in the east, always in search of outlets to the sea, of land and more land to satisfy its gluttonous cravings for own its own purported security, a ruthless giant dangerously dwarfing its smaller neighbors. Nonetheless, soon after New Year I took the train south and on a dull wintry afternoon arrived in , the camp for Russian prisoners of war."

"My station is in the heart of the breeding grounds for the majority of the Eastern North-American s. Except for a few, such as the and the which breed in , most of their s come to an end in this Canadian zone. My traps stand in the midst of the woods surrounding my house, their locations carefully chosen according to season and the species expected to be visiting them."

"I used to be a crime reporter for a newspaper in a midsize Canadian city. We liked to say we had a population of a million people, but that figure included farming communities an hour's drive from downtown. For me, a more relevant statistic was the murder rate. There were a steady fifteen or twenty a year, maybe twenty-five if things were particularly good, at least good from a crime reporter's point of view. Mine was a foul profession. The object was to pry into the dark corners of life and drag out all that was vile and diseased for public contemplation: an infant girl raped with a flashlight, a toddler drowned in a backyard swimming pool while the baby-sitter napped, a young father crushed by a rowdy car of drunken teens. This was the daily routine, a steady stream of sorrow that gradually colored my vision of humanity and dulled my sense of compassion."

"2. , , Paris, France has been running what he calls "a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore" for 50 years. His store has long been a literary hub, attracting the likes of Henry Miller, Richard Wright, and William Burroughs. More importantly, George has been inviting people to live in his shop from its very first days. There are now 13 beds among the books, and he says that more than 40,000 people have slept there at one time or another. All he asks is that you make your bed in the morning, help out in the shop, and read a book a day. After living here for five months, I was inspired to write my own book about the place."

"is the anti-Paris. Lodged among the rocky cliffs on France's southern coast, it is a brash and sun-scoured city. Instead of the refined culture and polished façades of the capital, this sweaty port exudes a raw humanity difficult to find in the north. There is little of the wealth of Paris and none of the rush; in Marseille, it is still custom to take a in the afternoon and to spend the early evening sipping apéros under the cooling sky."

"During my four months at the bookstore, I read over one hundred and fifty books. ... That's the biggest luxury in life, right? Time. To have that time to be in one place to read ... or whatever you want — whatever your passion is."