1709 quotes found
"The Internet is not for sissies."
"Note that I hold the single-author record for total CERT advisories, proving that in my copious youth I knew how to sling code but not how to manage risk."
"Fragmentation is like classful addressing -- an interesting early architectural error that shows how much experimentation was going on while IP was being designed."
"You sound like a man with a vision. Care to pass that bong over this way?"
"The internet has no government, no constitution, no laws, no rights, no police, no courts. Don't talk about fairness or innocence, and don't talk about what should be done. Instead, talk about what is being done and what will be done by the amorphous unreachable undefinable blob called the internet user base."
"personally i prefer the MX RR and a stylized name, but i was trying to solve the problem rather than create an industry."
"Isc remains deeply apologetic that prior versions of BIND did not properly catch the configuration error that you appear to have built your business on."
"Usually they finish by whining «but I WANT it!!! and so, I tell them: «So what? Everybody wants something. I want a pony. Get over it."
"While discussing the merits of djbdns over BIND (2004): Niek: "Bind people don't ack djb points and vice versa." Paul Vixie: i don't ack djb's existence, not merely his 'points.'"
"With usenet gone, we just don't teach our kids entertainment-level hyperbole any more."
"I've been lawsuit-threated [sic] by experts, and i can tell you from that experience, dv8 appears to not be an expert."
""We'll probably just play the greatest hits set again, give the people the shit they want to hear." (from a 2008 interview)"
""Some people are desperately looking for scapegoats, they just don't want to see the truth!" (Jon commenting on the parents that blame music for the violence.)"
""The kids out there want something they can relate to, something that's real; most of that whiny stuff isn't real. The cheesy pop songs just bore me to death." (commenting on how he feels about rock and pop.)"
""It's my purse."(talking about his sporran)"
""If he gets into drugs or something stupid like that, then I'll kick his ass, but otherwise he's got to live his life, even now." (talking about son and parenthood.)"
"The music industry can make you feel like a prostitute."
"The fans have been really incredible everywhere we've been....You want to make sure you put on the best concert of your life to show them how appreciative you are."
""People die from typewriters falling on their heads." (talking about taking chances because you can die at any moment.)"
""They're all, 'Dude, we're sorry. We were just kids. Your know how kids are. Growing up' and I'm just like "Shut up!'" (talking about when he meets people from his high school.)"
"I like reading Ball Tongue lyrics and all that stuff. And they published a book, and I wouldn't give my lyrics, and it's all wrong in the book, and I giggle. It's funny."
""When you’re really depressed it's good to hear someone be hurt too, when I get depressed I listen to my own fucking music. I put us on." (on his suicidal tendencies.)"
"I think I'm a clinical worrier, I worry about everything and I've always been that way. I want to make sure that everything works out as planned and I just get lost in my worries and fears. As if that isn't enough, I also worry about everybody else and try to carry their burden. It's like I'm trying to carry the weight of the whole world on my shoulders."
"You laugh at me because I'm different, I laugh at you because you're all the same."
"[When asked if he is going to go to his high school reunion] "Yeah, I can't wait. I'm going to show up in a helicopter.""
"We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say — and to feel — "Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.""
"The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty."
"Out of a thousand centuries they drew the ancient admiration of the footman for the horseman. They knew instinctively that a man on a horse is spiritually as well as physically bigger than a man on foot."
"In every bit of honest writing in the world ... there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. There are shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. Try to understand each other."
"I must go over into the interior valleys. ... There are five thousand families starving to death over there, not just hungry but actually starving. The government is trying to feed them and get medical attention to them, with the Fascist group of utilities and banks and huge growers sabotaging the thing all along the line, and yelling for a balanced budget. In one tent there were twenty people quarantined for small pox and two of the women are to have babies in that tent this week. I've tied into the thing from the first and I must get down there and see it and see if I can do something to knock these murderers on the heads. Do you know what they're afraid of? They think that if these people are allowed to live in camps with proper sanitary facilities they will organize, and that is the bugbear of the large landowner and the corporate farmer. The states and counties will give them nothing because they are outsiders. But the crops of any part of this state could not be harvested without them. ... The death of children by starvation in our valleys is simply staggering. ... I'll do what I can. ... Funny how mean and little books become in the face of such tragedies."
"You see this book is finished and it is a bad book and I must get rid of it. It can't be printed. It is bad because it isn't honest. Oh! the incidents all happened but — I'm not telling as much of the truth about them as I know. In satire you have to restrict the picture and I just can't do satire. I've written three books now that were dishonest because they were less than the best that I could do. One you never saw because I burned it the day I finished it. ... My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other and then I deliberately write this book, the aim of which is to cause hatred through partial understanding. My father would have called it a smart-alec book. It was full of tricks to make people ridiculous. If I can't do better I have slipped badly. And that I won't admit — yet."
"It is a nice thing to be working and believing in my work again. I hope I can keep the drive. I only feel whole and well when it is this way."
"For the first time I am working on a book that is not limited and that will take every bit of experience and thought and feeling that I have."
"Boileau said that Kings, Gods and Heroes only were fit subjects for literature. The writer can only write about what he admires. Present-day kings aren't very inspiring, the gods are on a vacation and about the only heroes left are the scientists and the poor … And since our race admires gallantry, the writer will deal with it where he finds it. He finds it in the struggling poor now."
"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."
"All hell has broken loose. I admit our Russian is limited, but we can say hello, come in, you are beautiful, oh no you don't. … So in our pride we ordered for breakfast an omelet, toast and coffee and what has just arrived is a tomato salad with onions, a dish of pickles, a big slice of watermelon and two bottles of cream soda. Something has slipped badly."
"No little appetite or pain, no carelessness or meanness in him escaped her; no thought or dream or longing in him ever reached her. And yet several times in her life she had seen the stars."
"I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. It might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit."
"One man was so mad at me that he ended his letter: “Beware. You will never get out of this world alive.”"
"If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick."
"Yesterday in that dog lifted his leg on a tree that was 20 feet across, 80 feet high and a 1,000 years old — what's left in life for that poor dog?"
"Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals."
"The profession of book-writing makes horse-racing seem like a solid, stable business."
"The President must be greater than anyone else, but not better than anyone else. We subject him and his family to close and constant scrutiny and denounce them for things that we ourselves do every day. A Presidential slip of the tongue, a slight error in judgment — social, political, or ethical — can raise a storm of protest. We give the President more work than a man can do, more responsibility than a man should take, more pressure than a man can bear. We abuse him often and rarely praise him. We wear him out, use him up, eat him up. And with all this, Americans have a love for the President that goes beyond loyalty or party nationality; he is ours, and we exercise the right to destroy him."
"Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic."
"Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard."
"Woody is just Woody. Thousands of people do not know he has any other name. He is just a voice and a guitar. He sings the songs of a people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that people. Harsh voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim, there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for those who will listen. There is the will of the people to endure and fight against oppression. I think we call this the American spirit."
"This is the story of Danny and of Danny’s friends and of Danny’s house."
"“Thou knowest not what bitches women are,” Danny said wisely. “I do know,” said Pilon. “Thou knowest not.” “I do know.” “Liar.”"
"Ah, the prayers of the millions, how they must fight and destroy each other on their way to the throne of God."
"If two generous paths branch from the highroad of life and only one can be followed, who is to judge which is best?"
"Two gallons is a great deal of wine, even for two paisanos. Spiritually the jugs may be graduated thus: Just below the shoulder of the first bottle, serious and concentrated conversation. Two inches farther down, sweetly sad memory. Three inches more, thoughts of old and satisfactory loves. An inch, thoughts of bitter loves. Bottom of the first jug, general and undirected sadness. Shoulder of the second jug, black, unholy despondency. Two fingers down, a song of death or longing. A thumb, every other song each one knows. The graduations stop here, for the trail splits and there is no certainty. From this point on anything can happen."
"It is a fact verified and recorded in many histories that the soul capable of the greatest good is also capable of the greatest evil. Who is there more impious than a backsliding priest? Who more carnal than a recent virgin? This, however, may be a matter of appearance."
"It is a time of quiet joy, the sunny morning. When the glittery dew is on the mallow weeds, each leaf holds a jewel which is beautiful if not valuable. This is no time for hurry or for bustle. Thoughts are slow and deep and golden in the morning."
"The story was gradually taking shape. Pilon liked it this way. It ruined a story to have it all come out quickly. The good story lay in half-told things which must be filled in out of the hearer’s own experience."
"The candle aimed its spear of light at heaven, like an artist who consumes himself to become divine."
"It is astounding to find that the belly of every black and evil thing is as white as snow. And it is saddening to discover how the concealed parts of angels are leprous."
"Ghosts could walk freely tonight, without fear of the disbelief of men; for this night was haunted, and it would be an insensitive man who did not know it."
"“It is worth while to be kind and generous,” he said. “Not only do such actions pile up a house of joy in Heaven; but there is, too, a quick reward here on earth. One feels a golden warmth glowing like a hot enchilada in one’s stomach.”"
"What pillow can one have like a good conscience?"
"It was a glorious game. Theft robbed of the stigma of theft, crime altruistically committed—what is more gratifying?"
"Beans are a roof over your stomach. Beans are a warm cloak against economic cold."
"Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra."
"He was very rich, he bought eggs to throw at a Chinaman. And one of those eggs missed the Chinaman and hit a policeman. So, Danny was in jail."
"Death is a personal matter, arousing sorrow, despair, fervor, or dry-hearted philosophy. Funerals, on the other hand, are social functions. Imagine going to a funeral without first polishing the automobile. Imagine standing at a graveside not dressed in your best dark suit and your best black shoes, polished delightfully. Imagine sending flowers to a funeral with no attached card to prove you had done the correct thing. In no social institution is the codified ritual of behavior more rigid than in funerals. Imagine the indignation if the minister altered his sermon or experimented with facial expression. Consider the shock if, at the funeral parlors, any chairs were used but those little folding yellow torture chairs with the hard seats. No, dying, a man may be loved, hated, mourned, missed; but once dead he becomes the chief ornament of a complicated and formal social celebration."
"Well, God knows he don't need any brains to buck barley bags. But don't you try to put nothing over, Milton. I got my eye on you."
"What the hell kind of bed you giving us, anyways. We don’t want no pants rabbits."
"Well, that glove's fulla vaseline." "Vaseline? What the hell for?" "Well, I tell ya what — Curley says he's keepin' that hand soft for his wife."
"Ain't many guys travel around together. I don’t know why. Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other."
"A powerful, big-stomached man came into the bunkhouse."
"His ear heard more than is said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought."
"Guy don't need no sense to be a nice fella. Seems to me sometimes it jus' works the other way around. Take a real smart guy and he ain't hardly ever a nice fella."
"We could live offa the fatta the lan’."
"Books ain't no good. A guy needs somebody — to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody."
"They come, an' they quit an' go on; an' every damn one of 'em's got a little piece of land in his head. An' never a God damn one of 'em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Ever'body wants a little piece of lan'. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It's just in their head."
"I seen too many guys with land in their head. They never get none under their hand."
"You watch your place, nigger. I could get you strung up on a tree so easy, it ain't even funny."
"You ain't worth a greased lack pin to ram you into hell."
"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream."
"It has always seemed strange to me," said Doc. "The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success."
"He was a fine steady man, Juan Chicoy, part Mexican and part Irish, perhaps fifty years old, with clear black eyes, a good head of hair, and a dark and handsome face. Mrs Chicoy was insanely in love with him and a little afraid of him too, because he was a man, and there aren't very many of them, as Alice Chicoy had found out. There aren't very many of them in the world, as everyone finds out sooner or later."
"Mr. Pritchard was a businessman, president of a medium-sized corporation. He was never alone. His business was conducted by groups of men like himself who joined together in clubs so that no foreign element or idea could enter. His religious life was again his lodge and his church, both of which were screened and protected. One night a week he played poker with men so exactly like himself that the game was fairly even, and from this fact his group was convinced that they were very fine poker players. Wherever he went he was not one man but a unit in a corporation, a unit in a club, in a lodge, in a church, in a political party. His thoughts and ideas were never subjected to criticism since he willingly associated only with people like himself. He read a newspaper written by and for his group. The books that came into his house were chosen by a committee which deleted material that might irritate him. He hated foreign countries and foreigners because it was difficult to find his counterpart in them. He did not want to stand out from his group. He would like to have risen to the top of it and be admired by it; but it would not occur to him to leave it. At occasional stags where naked girls danced on the tables and sat in great glasses of wine, Mr. Pritchard howled with laughter and drank the wine, but five hundred Mr. Pritchards were there with him."
"Her body and her mind were sluggish and lazy, and deep down she fought a tired envy of the people who, so she thought, experienced good things while she went through life a gray cloud in a gray room. Having few actual perceptions, she lived by rules. Education is good. Self-control is necessary. Everything in its time and place. Travel is broadening. And it was this last axiom which had forced her finally on the vacation to Mexico."
"He wondered why he stayed with her. Just pure laziness, he guessed. He didn't want to go through the emotional turmoil of leaving her. In spite of himself he'd worry about her and it was too much trouble. He'd need another woman right away and that took a lot of talking and arguing and persuading. It was different just to lay a girl but he would need a woman around, and that was the difference. You got used to one and it was less trouble.[…] But there was another reason too. She loved him. She really did. And he knew it. And you can't leave a thing like that. It's a structure and it has an architecture, and you can't leave it without tearing off a piece of yourself. So if you want to remain whole you stay no matter how much you may dislike staying. Juan was not a man who fooled himself very much."
"He didn't believe in psychiatrists, he said. But actually he did believe in them, so much that he was afraid of them."
"She envied Camille. Camille was a tramp, Mildred thought. And things were so much easier for a tramp. There was no conscience, no sense of loss, nothing but a wonderful, relaxed, stretching-cat selfishness. She could go to bed with anyone she wanted to and never see him again and have no feeling of loss or insecurity about it. That was the way Mildred thought it was with Camille. She wished she could be that way, and she knew she couldn't. Couldn't because of her mother. And the unbidden thought entered her mind—if her mother were only dead Mildred's life would be so much simpler. She could have a secret little place to live somewhere. Almost fiercely, she brushed the thought away. "What a foul thing to think," she said to herself ceremoniously. But it was a dream she often had."
"For it is said that humans are never satisfied, that you give them one thing and they want something more. And this is said in disparagement, whereas it is one of the greatest talents the species has and one that has made it superior to animals that are satisfied with what they have."
"A plan is a real thing, and things projected are experienced. A plan once made and visualized becomes a reality along with other realities—never to be destroyed but easily to be attacked."
"Luck, you see, brings bitter friends."
"For every man in the world functions to the best of his ability, and no one does less than his best, no matter what he may think about it."
"He had said, "I am a man," and that meant certain things to Juana. It meant that he was half insane and half god. It meant that Kino would drive his strength against a mountain and plunge his strength against the sea. Juana, in her woman's soul, knew that the mountain would stand while the man broke himself; that the sea would surge while the man drowned in it. And yet it was this thing that made him a man, half insane and half god, and Juana had need of a man; she could not live without a man. Although she might be puzzled by these differences between man and woman, she knew them and accepted them and needed them. Of course she would follow him, there was no question of that. Sometimes the quality of woman, the reason, the caution, the sense of preservation, could cut through Kino's manness and save them all."
"When you argue with a child," she said warmly, "you give a good argument and the child says yah, yah! You understand him and he doesn't listen, so the child wins."
"Victor's unfortunate choice it was always to mis-see, to mis-hear, to misjudge. He read softness into her because of the softness of her voice, when she was only remembering. His was the self-centered chaos of childhood. All looks and thoughts, loves and hatreds, were directed at him. Softness was softness towards him, weakness was weakness in the face of his strength. He preheard answers and listened not. He was full-coloured and brilliant—all outside of him was pale."
"He brought his malformed wisdom, his pool-hall, locker-room, joke-book wisdom to the front."
"Mordeen said: "I used to wonder why this love seemed sweeter than I had ever known, better than many people ever know. And then one day the reason came to me. There are very few great Anythings in the world. In work and art and emotion—the great is very rare. And I have one of the great and beautiful. Now say your yah, yah, Victor, like a child unanswerably answering Wisdom. You will have to do that, I think.""
"His guard was up now and he wasn't listening; he was only angry because here was a world he could not enter and so he had to disbelieve in its existence. He fell back on the world he knew."
"I do understand. I understand that you are offered a loveliness and you vomit on it, that you have the gift of love given you such as few men have ever known and you throw on it the acid of your pride, your ugly twisted sense of importance."
"It is so easy a thing to give—only great men have the courage and courtesy and, yes, the generosity to receive."
""Let us go," we said, "into the Sea of Cortez, realizing that we become forever a part of it; that our rubber boots slogging through a flat of eel-grass, that the rocks we turn over in a tide pool, make us truly and permanently a factor in the ecology of the region. We shall take something away from it, but we shall leave something too." And if we seem a small factor in a huge pattern, nevertheless it is of relative importance. We take a tiny colony of soft corals from a rock in a little water world. And that isn't terribly important to the tide pool. Fifty miles away the Japanese shrimp boats are dredging with overlapping scoops, bringing up tons of shrimps, rapidly destroying the species so that it may never come back, and with the species destroying the ecological balance of the whole region. That isn't very important in the world. And thousands of miles away the great bombs are falling and the stars are not moved thereby. None of it is important or all of it is."
"We sat on a crate of oranges and thought what good men most biologists are, the tenors of the scientific world — temperamental, moody, lecherous, loud-laughing, and healthy.[…] Your true biologist will sing you a song as loud and off-key as will a blacksmith, for he knows that morals are too often diagnostic of prostatitis and stomach ulcers. Sometimes he may proliferate a little too much in all directions, but he is as easy to kill as any other organism, and meanwhile he is very good company, and at least he does not confuse a low hormone productivity with moral ethics."
"Among primitives sometimes evil is escaped by never mentioning the name, as in Malaysia, where one never mentions a tiger by name for fear of calling him. Among others, as even among ourselves, the giving of a name establishes a familiarity which renders the thing impotent. It is interesting to see how some scientists and philosophers, who are an emotional and fearful group, are able to protect themselves against fear. In a modern scene, when the horizons stretch out and your philosopher is likely to fall off the world like a Dark Age mariner, he can save himself by establishing a taboo-box which he may call "mysticism" or "supernaturalism" or "radicalism." Into this box he can throw all those thoughts which frighten him and thus be safe from them."
"We are no better than the animals; in fact in a lot of ways we aren't as good."
"There is a strange duality in the human which makes for an ethical paradox. We have definitions of good qualities and of bad; not changing things, but generally considered good and bad throughout the ages and throughout the species. Of the good, we think always of wisdom, tolerance, kindliness, generosity, humility; and the qualities of cruelty, greed, self-interest, graspingness, and rapacity are universally considered undesirable. And yet in our structure of society, the so-called and considered good qualities are invariable concomitants of failure, while the bad ones are the cornerstones of success. A man — a viewing-point man — while he will love the abstract good qualities and detest the abstract bad, will nevertheless envy and admire the person who though possessing the bad qualities has succeeded economically and socially, and will hold in contempt that person whose good qualities have caused failure. When such a viewing-point man thinks of Jesus or St. Augustine or Socrates he regards them with love because they are the symbols of the good he admires, and he hates the symbols of the bad. But actually he would rather be successful than good. In an animal other than man we would replace the term “good” with “weak survival quotient” and the term “bad” with “strong survival quotient.” Thus, man in his thinking or reverie status admires the progression toward extinction, but in the unthinking stimulus which really activates him he tends toward survival. Perhaps no other animal is so torn between alternatives. Man might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox. He has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness. Perhaps, as has been suggested, his species is not set, has not jelled, but is still in a state of becoming, bound by his physical memories to a past of struggle and survival, limited in his futures by the uneasiness of thought and consciousness."
"Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then — the glory — so that a cricket song sweetens the ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished…"
"Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in art, in music, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man. And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning blows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken. And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for it is the one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost."
"In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world. We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is."
"Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass."
"Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there’s time, the Bastard Time."
"Woman and women is two different things," said Suzy. "Guy knows all about women, he don't know nothing about a woman."
"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it."
"Doc cried to no one, "Give me a little time! I want to think.[…] Everyone has something. And what has Suzy got? Absolutely nothing in the world but guts. She's taken on an atomic world with a sling-shot, and, by God, she's going to win! If she doesn't win there's no point in living any more. "What do I mean, win?" Doc asked himself. "I know. If you are not defeated, you win""
"No one knows how greatness comes to a man. It may lie in his blackness, sleeping, or it may lance into him like those driven fiery particles from outer space. These things, however, are known about greatness: need gives it life and puts it in action; it never comes without pain; it leaves a man changed, chastened, and exalted at the same time — he can never return to simplicity."
"It is a matter of disillusion to young male Americans otherwise informed, to discover that the French are a moral people — judged, that is, by American country-club standards."
"I have known many people to ask for advice but very few who wanted it and none who followed it."
"Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts, perhaps fear of a loss of power."
"I don't anticipate trouble and so I anticipate trouble."
"It is the misfortune of men to want to do a thing well, even a thing they do not want to do at all."
"You are a good man, Sire, and a good man draws women as cheese draws mice."
"The one thing our species is helpless against is good fortune. It first puzzles, then frightens, then angers, and finally destroys us."
"The human fetus is born upside down. But it is not true that a child becomes upright after birth. Observe the feet of children and young people when they are at rest. The feet are nearly always higher than the head, No matter how hard he may try, the growing boy, and particularly girl, cannot keep the feet down. The fetal position is very strong. It takes eighteen to twenty years for the feet finally to accept the ground as their normal home. It is my hypothesis that you can judge maturity exactly by the relationship of the feet to the ground."
"I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen."
"It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone."
"I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it."
"Can you honestly love a dishonest thing?"
"People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don’t dream at all."
"I guess I’m trying to say, Grab anything that goes by. It may not come around again."
"The incident seemed to prove to me that intentions, good or bad, are not enough."
"When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something—anything—before it is all gone."
"Farewell has a sweet sound of reluctance. Good-by is short and final, a word with teeth sharp to bite through the string that ties past to the future."
"We can shoot rockets into space but we can’t cure anger or discontent."
"For the most part people are not curious except about themselves."
"Failure is a state of mind. It’s like one of those sand traps an ant lion digs. You keep sliding back. Takes one hell of a jump to get out of it."
"Are cats strange animals or do they so resemble us that we find them curious as we do monkeys?"
"If you want to keep a friend never test him."
"You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future."
"Only God sees the sparrow fall, but even God doesn’t do anything about it."
"I'm sorry," Ethan said. "You have taught me something — maybe three things, rabbit footling mine. Three things will never be believed — the true, the probable, and the logical. I know now where to get the money to start my fortune."
"My dreams are the problems of the day stepped up to absurdity, a little like men dancing, wearing the horns and masks of animals."
"It is odd how a man believes he can think better in a special place. I have such a place, have always had it, but I know it isn't thinking I do there, but feeling and experiencing and remembering. It's a safety place — everyone must have one, although I never heard a man tell of it."
"They successfully combined piracy and puritanism, which aren't so unlike when you come right down to it. Both had a strong dislike for opposition and both had a roving eye for other people's property."
"Sometimes it's great fun to be silly, like children playing statues and dying of laughter. And sometimes being silly breaks the even pace and lets you get a new start."
"No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself."
"Does anyone ever know even the outer fringe of another? What are you like in there? Mary — do you hear? Who are you in there?"
"When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you've got two new people. Maybe that means — hell, it's complicated."
"A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers."
"I guess we're all, or most of us, the wards of that nineteenth-century science which denied existence to anything it could not measure or explain. The things we couldn't explain went right on but surely not with our blessing. We did not see what we couldn't explain, and meanwhile a great part of the world was abandoned to children, insane people, fools, and mystics, who were more interested in what is than in why it is. So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic, because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out."
"What a wonderful thing a woman is. I can admire what they do even if I don't understand why."
"Even if teen-age children aren't making a sound, it's quieter when they're gone. They put a boiling in the air around them. As they left, the whole house seemed to sigh and settle. No wonder poltergeists infest only houses with adolescent children."
"What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can read only a few and those perhaps not accurately."
"A little hope, even hopeless hope, never hurt anybody."
"Can you disbelieve in something you don't know about? […] It isn't that I don't believe but that I don't know."
"To be alive at all is to have scars."
"No one wants advice — only corroboration."
"Ellen, only last night, asked, 'Daddy, when will we be rich?' But I did not say to her what I know: 'We will be rich soon, and you who handle poverty badly will handle riches equally badly.' And that is true. In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms."
"In the dusk I saw her smile, that incredible female smile. It is called wisdom but it isn't that but rather an understanding that makes wisdom unnecessary."
"The misery stayed, not thought about but aching away, and sometimes I would have to ask myself, Why do I ache? Men can get used to anything, but it takes time."
"There's something desirable about anything you're used to as opposed to something you're not."
"You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway."
"All men are moral. Only their neighbors are not."
"A man is a lonely thing."
"Maybe not having time to think is not having the wish to think."
"Strength and success— they are above morality, above criticism. It seems then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it."
"Not only the brave get killed, but the brave have a better chance of it."
"Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is — and a woman too, I guess."
"… we've got so many laws you can't breathe without breaking something."
"The things everyone knows are most likely to be wrong."
"Like most modern people, I don't believe in prophecy or magic and then spend half my time practicing it."
"A crime is something someone else commits."
"A secret's a terribly lonesome thing."
"There's nobody as lonely as an all-married man."
"In my heart there may be doubt that I deserve the Nobel award over other men of letters whom I hold in respect and reverence — but there is no question of my pleasure and pride in having it for myself. It is customary for the recipient of this award to offer personal or scholarly comment on the nature and the direction of literature. At this particular time, however, I think it would be well to consider the high duties and the responsibilities of the makers of literature."
"Such is the prestige of the Nobel award and of this place where I stand that I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession and in the great and good men who have practiced it through the ages."
"Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches — nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species."
"Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion. My great predecessor, William Faulkner, speaking here, referred to it as a tragedy of universal fear so long sustained that there were no longer problems of the spirit, so that only the human heart in conflict with itself seemed worth writing about. Faulkner, more than most men, was aware of human strength as well as of human weakness. He knew that the understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer's reason for being. This is not new. The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement."
"The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit — for gallantry in defeat — for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man, has no dedication nor any membership in literature."
"With humanity's long proud history of standing firm against natural enemies, sometimes in the face of almost certain defeat and extinction, we would be cowardly and stupid to leave the field on the eve of our greatest potential victory."
"We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God. Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world — of all living things. The danger and the glory and the choice rest finally in man. The test of his perfectibility is at hand. Having taken Godlike power, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some deity might have. Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man — and the Word is with Men."
"A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it."
"When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked… In other words, I don’t improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable."
"A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby."
"Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping."
"The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage."
"The techniques of opening conversation are universal. I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost."
"When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find himself a good and sufficient reason for going."
"And now, our submarines are armed with mass murder, our silly, only way of deterring mass murder."
"A sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ."
"Oh, we can populate the dark with horrors, even we who think ourselves informed and sure, believing nothing we cannot measure or weigh. I know beyond all doubt that the dark things crowding in on me either did not exist or were not dangerous to me, and still I was afraid."
"The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index."
"The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the townlets wither a time and die. This is not offered in criticism but only as observation. And I am sure that, as all pendulums reverse their swing, so eventually will the swollen cities rupture like dehiscent wombs and disperse their children back to the countryside."
"Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother’s cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better."
"I am in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection, but with Montana it is love."
"I guess this is why I hate governments. It is always the rule, the fine print, carried out by the fine print men. There's nothing to fight, no wall to hammer with frustrated fists."
"This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me."
"The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one. It’s as though nature tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California."
"There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by. It was called the People. Find out where the People have gone. I don’t mean the square-eyed toothpaste-and-hair-dye people or the new-car-or-bust people, or the success-and-coronary people. Maybe they never existed, but if there ever were the People, that’s the commodity the Declaration was talking about, and Mr. Lincoln."
"He wasn't involved with a race that could build a thing it had to escape from."
"I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction."
"We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat."
"Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself."
"Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word. And there’s an opening covey of generalities. A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner."
"Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners."
"A question is a trap, and an answer your foot in it."
"He doesn't belong to a race clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live at peace with itself."
"When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing."
"For a while I was a vicious fighter but it wasn't to win. It was to get it over and get the hell out of there. And I never would have done it at all if other people hadn't put me in the ring. The only private fights I ever had were those I couldn't get away from."
"I have never even wondered about the comparative standing of writers. I don't understand that. Writing to me is a deeply personal, even a secret function and when the product is turned loose it is cut off from me and I have no sense of its being mine. Consequently criticism doesn't mean anything to me. As a disciplinary matter, it is too late."
"I can remember the horror which came over my parents when they became convinced that it was so with me [that I wanted to be a writer]—and properly so. What you have and they had to look forward to is life made intolerable by a mean, cantankerous, opinionated, moody, quarrelsome, unreasonable, nervous, flighty, irresponsible son. You will get no loyalty, little consideration and desperately little attention from him. In fact you will want to kill him. I'm sure my father and mother often must have considered poisoning me."
"In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable. And sometimes if he is very fortunate and if the time is right, a very little of what he is trying to do trickles through — not ever much. And if he is a writer wise enough to know it can't be done, then he is not a writer at all. A good writer always works at the impossible."
"I like a chapter to have design of tone, as well as of form. A chapter should be a perfect cell in the whole book and should be almost able to stand alone. If this is done then the breaks we call chapters are not arbitrary but rather articulations which allow the free movement of the story."
"I am glad that I can use the oldest story in the world to be the design of the newest story for me. The lack of change in the world is the thing which astonishes me. [...] And now I had set down in my own hand the 16 verses of Cain and Abel and the story changes with flashing lights when you write it down. And I think I have a title at last, a beautiful title, EAST OF EDEN. And read the 16th verse to find it. And the Salinas Valley is surely East Of Eden. [...] And [...] as I went into the story more deeply I began to realize that without this story — or rather a sense of it — psychiatrists would have nothing to do. In other words this one story is the basis of all human neurosis — and if you take the fall along with it, you have the total of the psychic troubles which can happen to a human."
"I believe that the great ones, Plato, Lao Tze, Buddha, Christ, Paul and the great Hebrew prophets are not remembered for negation or denial. Not that it is necessary to be remembered but there is one purpose in writing that I can see, beyond simply doing it interestingly. It is the duty of the writer to lift up, to extend, to encourage. If the written word has contributed anything at all to our developing species and our half developed culture, it is this: Great writing has been a staff to lean on, a mother to consult, a wisdom to pick up stumbling folly, a strength in weakness and a courage to support sick cowardice. And how any negative or despairing approach can pretend to be literature I do not know. It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would milleniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth, and a few remnants of fossilized jaw bones, a few teeth in strata of limestone would be the only mark our species would have left on the earth."
"... the writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true."
"I have noticed so many of the reviews of my work show a fear and hatred of ideas and speculations. It seems to be true that people can only take parables fully clothed with flesh. Any attempt to correlate in terms of thought is frightening. And if that is so, East of Eden is going to take a bad beating because it is full of such things."
"A book is like a man — clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun."
"Some people there are who, being grown, forget the horrible task of learning to read. It is perhaps the greatest single effort that the human undertakes, and he must do it as a child. An adult is rarely successful in the undertaking — the reduction of experience to a set of symbols. For a thousand thousand years these humans have existed and they have only learned this trick — this magic — in the final ten thousand of the thousand thousand."
"In the combat between wisdom and feeling, wisdom never wins."
"This is the law. The purpose of fighting is to win. There is no possible victory in defense. The sword is more important than the shield, and skill is more important than either. The final weapon is the brain, all else is supplementary."
"If lowborn men could stand up to those born to rule, religion, government, the whole world would fall to pieces." "So it would," she said. "So it will." "I don't believe you," Ewain said. "But for the sake of the discussion, what then, my lady?" "Why then — then the pieces would have to be put together again." "By such as these—?" "Who else? Who indeed else?"
"One of the greatest errors in the reconstruction of another era lies in our tendency to think of them as being like ourselves in feeling and attitudes. Actually, without considerable study on the part of a present-day man — if he were confronted by a fifteenth-century man — there would be no possible communication. I think it is possible through knowledge and discipline for a modern man to understand, and, to a certain extent, live into a fifteenth-century mind, but the reverse would be completely impossible."
"An artist should be open on all sides to every kind of light and darkness."
"Writers are a sorry lot. The best you can say of them is that they are better than actors and that's not much."
"Now back to Malory.[…] As I go along, I am constantly jiggled by the arrant nonsense of a great deal of the material. A great deal of it makes no sense at all. Two thirds of it is the vain dreaming of children talking in the dark. And then when you are about to throw it out in disgust, you remember the Congressional Record or the Sacco and Vanzetti case or 'preventive war' or our national political platforms, or racial problems that can't be settled reasonably or domestic relations, or beatniks, and it is borne in on you that the world operates on nonsense — that it is a large part of the pattern and that knight errantry is no more crazy than our present-day group thinking, and activity. That is the way humans are. If you inspected them and their activities in the glass of reason, you would drown the whole lot."
"I can tell you one thing I have finally faced through — the Arthurian cycle and practically all lasting and deep-seated folklore is a mixture of profundity and childish nonsense. If you keep the profundity and throw out the nonsense, some essence is lost. These are dream stories, fixed and universal dreams, and they have the inconsistency of dreams."
"Most people live in a half-dream all their lives and call it reality."
"[On writing:] It is properly called the lonesomest profession in the world."
"Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play."
"Time is the only critic without ambition."
"I have owed you this letter for a very long time — but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool."
"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
"I can't read ten pages of Steinbeck without throwing up. I couldn't read the proletarian crap that came out in the '30s; again you had sentimentalism — the poor oppressed workers."
"Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath and the subsequent John Ford movie promulgated a populist mythology about depression-era migrants to California who were dubbed "Okies," no matter what southwestern or midwestern state they hailed from. But most Californians regarded Okies as dirty, shifty, lazy, violent, and ignorant."
"There was one New Deal agency that proved helpful to us in the fields, and that was the Farm Security Administration. The FSA administered a system of migrant labor camps in California. When I read about the Joads arriving at the temporary safe haven of the "government camp" in The Grapes of Wrath, I knew exactly what they felt like."
"I read Cannery Row very carefully. I wanted to see how he did some things. At the end of Cannery Row there is a party and somebody recites a poem and it doesn't stop the dramatic action. I studied how he did that because I wanted to quote some songs and poems without stopping the drama."
"Steinbeck is extremely angry about the fact that the common man who is striving very hard, who wants so very little, is not even able to attain that little if it backs up against the interests of the banks and of the big landowners. You know, and that’s what The Grapes of Wrath, I think, is basically about, is about watching these people try to simply live who asking for little. They are not angry people. They are not revolutionaries. They are not sophisticated. They they simply want to farm a tenant farmers. They simply want to go out but their butts every day and get a small return and then pass that on to their children. And even that under certain circumstances is asking too much if you’re going to inopportune the banking interest. And that’s what made Steinbeck so furious...what he’s saying is that people it’s just not fair. That’s what he’s saying...he believes it is at this point that even people like the Joads can be moved to anger at the just at just the epitome of the unfairness of it all."
"When one thinks of California agriculture during the Depression, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath generally comes to mind. Steinbeck did not exaggerate. White and African American Dust Bowl migrants alongside Mexicanos and Filipinos endured great hardships."
"You can't avoid dealing with moral matters, because that's what life is about. But I think it is wrong when somebody like Steinbeck crusades in his fiction. That's why Steinbeck bores me so. The real crusader doesn't need to crusade; he writes about human beings in the sense Chekhov did. He tries to see a human being whole with all his wrong-headedness and all his right-headedness. To blind yourself to one thing for the sake of your prejudice is limiting. I think it is a mistake. There's so much room in the world for crusading, but it is for the editorial writer, the speech-maker, the politician, and the man in public life to do, not for the writer of fiction."
"I do not believe -- and I have never believed -- that the crack cocaine explosion was a conscious CIA conspiracy, or anybody's conspiracy, to decimate black America. I've never believed that South Central Los Angeles was targeted by the U.S. government to become the crack capitol of the world. But that isn't to say that the CIA's hands or the U.S. government's hands are clean in this matter. Actually, far from it. After spending three years of my life looking into this, I am more convinced than ever that the U.S. government's responsibility for the drug problems in South Central Los Angeles and other inner cities is greater than I ever wrote in the newspaper."
"If we had met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me … I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn't work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite? And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job … The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress."
"Do we have a free press today? Sure we do. It’s free to report all the sex scandals it wants, all the stock market news we can handle, every new health fad that comes down the pike, and every celebrity marriage or divorce that happens. But when it comes to the real down and dirty stuff—stories like Tailwind, the October Surprise, the El Mozote massacre, corporate corruption, or CIA involvement in drug trafficking—that’s where we begin to see the limits of our freedoms. In today’s media environment, sadly, such stories are not even open for discussion. Back in 1938, when fascism was sweeping Europe, legendary investigative reporter George Seldes observed that “it is possible to fool all the people all the time—when government and press cooperate.” Unfortunately, we have reached that point."
"No one can deny the talent and spark of energy that Burton left with Metallica and his inspiration and influence to bass players is still strong. His iconic style of speed picking the bass and convulsion like head movements are the essence and model of head banging. Though Metallica have gone on to become arguably the biggest band in heavy metal, the era of Cliff Burton cannot and should not be forgotten, the spirit, speed and musicianship be brought to the band can’t be matched, no offense to Newsted or Trujillo."
"When it comes to Cliff Burton, it's a tale of what could have been. A legend in the making with Metallica, Burton was only 24 when he was killed after the band's tour bus crashed on an icy road in rural Sweden in 1986. In the wake of that tragedy, Burton's legacy continued to live on even as Metallica became one of the biggest bands in the world. The hair-swinging, spaceship-sounding, bass-playing Burton was a major presence on the band's first three albums that remain metal masterpieces. For a true taste of Burton's greatness, listen to his work "(Anesthesia) – Pulling Teeth," "The Call of Ktulu," "For Whom the Bell Tolls," and "Orion.""
"Despite the fact that my weapons and armor are in desperate need of repair, I blow the entire reward on ale and whores."
"Can't hear you. I'm inside my protective blanket of fear."
"Men may control the free world, but women control the boobs."
"Yeah, humans are pretty cool, but if you hang out with them too long, they start treating you like a mascot."
"You're a corporate whore. Merry Christmas."
"I would, but I'm going to be busy all day converting beer into pee."
"Cole, would it be okay if I crapped myself right now?"
"My brain is hung like a horse!"
"It's like watching lemmings run off the cliff."
"Some he taught how to think, others how to see or hear... Children on the beach he taught how to look for and find beautiful animals in worlds they had not suspected were there at all."
"Ricketts was a remarkable scientist and a remarkable character who probably invented modern marine ecology."
"The first director of Hopkins didn’t get along with him so Ricketts would have to wait until he was out of town to sneak into the library with the help of some sympathetic professor."
"I think managers have realized that most software people are slightly brain damaged, that they're off on their own planets."
"As you get all this money out there, there’s a tendency for more conservatism and sequelization. So we’re doing ‘Madden 38,’ but now the shoelaces have shadows! And when you step on the turf, the grass is just pressed a little bit, and springs back in just a couple of seconds. Unfortunately, it’s kind of the death of creativity when you make a big deal about really trivial features."
"That game, just the brutal simplicity. It’s amazing as a game designer you want to have the latest graphics, and you want the Chicago Symphony playing your background music, and you want Harrison Ford and Matt Damon as your starring characters. But if you have an incredibly addictive game, you don’t need any of that crap. You just need blocks."
"I personally object to episodic games where you play one screen of Space Invaders and one screen of Breakout and one screen of Galaxians and one screen of this and one of that. To me, that's not a game. It's just taking five bad games, putting them together, and calling them one good game. I'm philosophically against that."
"Rock and roll outfits, commence!"
"I can count to four and repeat. I'm a drummer."
"Roll, roll, roll a joint, twist it at the ends [pause] Light it up and take a puff and pass it to your friends."
"Tré Cool plays the drums in Green Day, and he snorts [he sniffs] donut sprinkles, and [wipes his nose] . . . oh, that's a sweet drain."
"I get mad when people are against pot."
"No man can eat 50 eggs!"
"I don't want you to get the wrong idea. Not all liberals smoke lettuce!"
"I can suck my own!"
"Condoms are for sailors"
"Get it in ya! Chocolate milk, bitch!"
"You know, I'm just gonna take your microphone, and stick in the microwave, and turn it on.*"
"I'm the finger fucker."
"Although the mass of the people accepted the white man's God, either under physical duress or because he seemed more powerful than their own Gods, they never assimilated the ideas of Christianity."
"And many of the people who buy or found banks have had no experience in banking at all. If they can learn it, so can we."
"In contrast, traditional Catholic churches serve vast numbers of people who have little or nothing in common, and they are often impersonal supermarkets for the sacraments."
"At stake are two different visions of faith, the Church of Caesar, powerful and rich; and the Church of Christ - loving, poor and spiritually rich."
"Opus Dei is an efficient machine run to achieve world power."
"And the Third World will continue to beckon to the First, reminding it of the Galilean vision of Christian solidarity."
"Life's a tough proposition, and the first hundred years are the hardest."
"When you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research."
"Treat a whore like a lady and a lady like a whore."
"Faith is a wonderful thing, but doubt gets you an education."
"A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something."
"Be nice to people on the way up because you'll meet them on the way down."
"A fellow who is always declaring he's no fool usually has his suspicions."
"Harry Thaw shot the wrong architect."
"To my embarrassment I was born in bed with a lady."
"...a trip through a sewer in a glass-bottom boat."
"It's getting so people no longer count the silverware when I come to dinner."
"The amount of sleep required by the average person is five minutes more."
"Stop dying. Am trying to write a comedy."
"Tell 'em to count to ten over him and he'll get up."
"I want a priest, a rabbi and a Protestant minister. I want to hedge my bets."
"You can't be a rascal for 40 years and then cop a plea the last minute. God keeps better books than that."
"Florida was invented for Addison Mizner's little brother."
"America's most fascinating outlaw."
"That man was so much larger than life that there's no scale by which to measure him. Most of Wilson's dialogue, if put down on paper, seems either vulgar or obscene."
"hurts I have are my fault but I'm sure gonna learn from it and hopefully anyone reading this will too. the lesson: stay aware on a bicycle and look up the road in front of you at all times to make sure you can deal w/what's coming and the condition of the road you're gonna be rolling down!"
"Navy housing is like tract homes. … All the houses look the same. Everybody's pop was the same rank. There's a lot of negative to the military — like, most of it. But one good thing was I lived with all kinds of people, as far as ethnic background or whatever. Because the navy was integrated. That was kind of neat. And with everybody's pop being chiefs, you could see that no one was above or below anyone else. You know how neighborhoods get all caught up in different things? Well, in the military you're not like that. You're all together. So I will say that was one positive thing that came out of it."
"The 'minute' meant more like minute … Like we were small compared to a big arena rock band. And the other reason for the name — I had a bunch of names on a paper, and D. Boon picked that one. He liked it because there was some right-wing group who used the name. We thought, we'll call ourselves the same thing — there goes their power! It'll dilute it and confuse things."
"What's obvious to me isn't always obvious to other people."
"If it's some style, especially some shrink-wrapped thing hanging on a wall at Toys 'R' Us, then it won't live, it won't be dynamic … It becomes exactly what the marketing people want — a genre, something to make their job easier. But if it's something like, "Everybody's telling me the wall's over there, but I'm going to push against it and see if it's really there" — to me, that's what punk is. An idealistic attitude."
"Developing nanotechnology will be a major project -- just as developing nuclear weapons or lunar rockets were major projects. We must first focus our efforts on developing two things: the tools with which to build the first molecular machines, and the blueprints of what we are to build. This will require the cooperative efforts of researchers across a wide range of disciplines: scanning probe microscopy, supramolecular chemistry, protein engineering, self assembly, robotics, materials science, computational chemistry, self replicating systems, physics, computer science, and more. This work must focus on fundamentally new approaches and methods: incremental or evolutionary improvements will not be sufficient. Government funding is both appropriate and essential for several reasons: the benefits will be pervasive across companies and the economy; few if any companies will have the resources to pursue this alone; and development will take many years to a few decades (beyond the planning horizon of most private organizations). We know it's possible. We know it's valuable. We should do it."
"We have an autocracy which — which runs this university. It's managed. We were told the following: If President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the Regents in his telephone conversation, why didn't he make some public statement to that effect? And the answer we received — from a well-meaning liberal — was the following: He said, "Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his Board of Directors?" That's the answer.Well I ask you to consider — if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something — the faculty are a bunch of employees and we're the raw material! But we're a bunch of raw materials that don't mean to be — have any process upon us. Don't mean to be made into any product! Don't mean — Don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings!"
"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"
"The university is well structured, well tooled, to turn out people with all the sharp edges worn off, the well-rounded person. The university is well equipped to produce that sort of person, and this means that the best among the people who enter must for four years wander aimlessly much of the time questioning why they are on campus at all, doubting whether there is any point in what they are doing, and looking toward a very bleak existence afterward in a game in which all of the rules have been made up, which one cannot really amend."
""The "futures" and "careers" for which American students now prepare are for the most part intellectual and moral wastelands. This chrome-plated consumers' paradise would have us grow up to be well-behaved children. But an important minority of men and women coming to the front today have shown they will die rather than be standardized, replaceable, and irrelevant."
"The university is a vast public utility which turns out future workers in today's vineyard, the military-industrial complex. They've got to be processed in the most efficient way to see to it that they have the fewest dissenting opinions, that they have just those characteristics which are wholly incompatible with being an intellectual. This is a real internal psychological contradiction. People have to suppress the very questions which reading books raises."
"I am not a political person. My involvement in the Free Speech Movement is religious and moral... I don't know what made me get up and give that first speech. I only know I had to. What was it Kierkegaard said about free acts? They're the ones that, looking back, you realize you couldn't help doing."
"You can't disobey the rules every time you disapprove. However, when you're considering something that constitutes an extreme abridgement of your rights, conscience is the court of last resort."
"Freedom of speech is something that represents the very dignity of what a human being is. If you cannot speak... I mean, that's what marks us off. That's what marks us off from the stones and the stars. You can speak freely. It is almost impossible for me to describe. It is the thing that marks us as just below the angels. I don't want to push this beyond where it should be pushed, but I feel it."
"[1964 was] when I met him. He was a year older, a junior and a philosophy major, very brilliant. [There was] a thing about him that was so marvelous for me. I was the daughter of this very famous communist, so in these radical circles, that’s how I was always thought of. It was hard for me to establish a person who wasn’t the ‘daughter of’ [my father]. It was also a part of the sexism at the time and again, I wasn’t conscious of it, but I knew it made me uncomfortable. Mario didn’t care who I was the daughter of. What mattered to him was human to human connection. Of course, the movement was very very intense, and we were meeting all the time, often until the wee hours of the morning. There were 11 of us on the steering committee, [and] there was a larger executive committee that met. Also informally, we hung out together a great deal of the time. We would go to a movie, talk about a book, have a cup of coffee. It was never romantic, but the right-wing papers would say, this young (Jewish) communist is corrupting this blonde hair blue eyed fellow."
"Working together, we can put an end to this cycle that creates deep pain in the hearts of our mothers, our fathers, and our people, who have lost loved ones to this senseless violence."
"Once I was in solitary confinement, it provided me with the isolated moments to reflect on my past and to dwell upon something greater, something better than involving myself in thuggery and criminality. It had to be more to life than that. It had to be more than the madness that was disseminating throughout this entire prison."
"Between the years of 1988 to 1994, and it's a continuous — it's an incessant reality for me. My redemptive transition began in solitary confinement, and unlike other people who express their experiences of an epiphany or a satori, I never experienced anything of that ilk. Mine — that wouldn't have been enough. I often tell people that I didn't have a 360-degree turnaround; I had a 720-degree turnaround. It took me twice as much. Just one spin around wouldn't have done it. I was that messed up, that lost, that mentacided, brainwashed. So, I was able to gradually in a piecemeal fashion change my life slowly but surely through education, through edification, through spiritual cultivation, battling my demons. And eventually, that led to me embracing redemption."
"I’m talking to any youth who are considered to be or deemed to be at-risk or even hinting around being a thug or a criminal of any type of genre. I mostly propagate education and the need for it, because to me, that is the terra firma in which any human being must stand in order to survive in this country or to survive anywhere in the world, in dealing, you know, with every aspect of civilization, every aspect of surviving. Education is very important. It took me all of these years to discern that, and now I do."
"We started out — at least my intent was to, in a sense — address all of the so-called neighboring gangs in the area and to put, in a sense — I thought I can cleanse the neighborhood of all these, you know, marauding gangs. But I was totally wrong. And eventually, we morphed into the monster we were addressing."
"And when you maintain this sense of peace and you live by truth, by integrity, these things don't bother me. It doesn't. I have been experiencing moribund type experiences most of my life. I could have died many a times. I could have died when I was shot. I could have died when I was shot at by the police and rival gang members. There were many opportunities for me to die. Of course, I don't want to die. I mean, after my redemption I have what I consider to be a joie de vivre, so, you know, I have an enjoyment, a love for life. So that’s why I can calmly sit here and speak to you or anyone else with peace in my heart and peace in my mind. I don't get rattled. Nothing can rattle me. Nothing will ever rattle me. I have been rattled the majority of my life."
"Well, the fact that a person such as me, of my ilk, who deemed the opposing gang as an eternal enemy, it wasn't hard for people to believe me, because they knew where I stood. There were no clandestine or latent messages. Everybody knew where I stood. And for me to come out and say that what we were doing was wrong, it was believable. That's why people didn't – or at least the gang members didn't discredit my propensity and my alacrity for peace. That's why I was embraced with sincerity by those who I knew and those I didn't know on both sides of the fence."
"The death penalty, it's not a system of justice, it is a system of – a so-called system of justice that perpetuates a, shall I say, a vindictive type of response, a vigilante type of aura upon it. We’re talking about something that is barbaric. We’re talking about something that – it doesn't deter anything. I mean, if it did, then it wouldn't be so many – especially in California, we're talking about over 650 individuals on death row. And if it was a deterrent, this place wouldn't be filled like this. And it's an expensive ordeal that – the money, as you know, the monetary means comes out of the taxpayers' pocket."
"And for anyone to think that murder can be resolved by murdering, it's ridiculous. I mean, we look at all of the wars that we have throughout other countries and other nations, and all it does is – this violence, all it does is engender violence. There seems to be no end, but a continuous cycle, an incessant process of blood and gore that doesn't end. And through violence, you can't possibly obtain peace. You can, in a sense, occupy a belief of peace; in other words, through this mechanism of violence, you – it appears that because there is a standing army or standing police that is used in brutality or violence or a system that uses brutality or violence that that is going to totally eliminate or stop criminous behavior or criminous minds or killings or what have you, but it doesn't."
"What is certain is that since 1992, “Tookie” has been a voice reaching out to the voiceless. He has encouraged youth to lift themselves up so as not to end up locked up. His voice has reached impoverished and alienated youth in places police dare not tread. Through his personal transformation in prison, he has brought light to dark places because he knows where to look. He speaks truth to power with a sincere knowledge of what lies ahead for these youth and gives them a stark look at what their future could be if they don’t renounce gang life and all that it stands for. And they listen, because he was one of them."
"It's 9:15 on 12/13 and another black king will be taken from the scene."
"I'm Howard Stern with a vocabulary. I'm the man he wishes he could be. Yes, Howard Stern is a slut. He's a bastard, too. Worse--a Jew bastard! That's the worst kind. Put him in the oven."
"Charles: This is the Imus in the Morning radio program. Imus: I'm hearin' you baby. Charles: Yeah! Imus: Where we at? Charles: On WFAN New York. Imus: Hear that. Charles: You know what I'm sayin'? Imus Yeah. Charles: Seven o'clock Eastern Time, and time ImusWhy are we talking like fourteen year old black children? Charles Because we're racist? Imus: Yes. Yeah. Charles: Because we're stupid? Imus: Beyond stupid. Senile and stupid. And lame Charles: Oh, please. Good lord."
"...and on MSNBC all over the world. Now, uhh, because it's available all over the world, doesn't mean, by the way, that anybody's watchin' it. Am I right Charles?""
"Well, June is, uh, National Dairy Month, and I'll be milking Deirdre later... Ain't that right baby."
"This is the Imus in the Morning program, We're not happy 'till you're not happy."
"I would rather go to Baghdad than go to a professional basketball game."
"People of color have had to unlearn the assumption that racism is individual, that it is primarily a question of individual attitudes that can be dealt with through sensitivity training. You remember that Don Imus called the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed hoes" about five years ago? Five years later he's rehabilitated! But of course this doesn't compensate for the fact that Troy Davis is dead, his life claimed by the most racist of all of our institutions, capital punishment. No amount of psychological therapy or group training can effectively address racism in this country, unless we also begin to dismantle the structures of racism."
"My research leads me inescapably to the opinion that the major cause of the American Negro's intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racial genetic in origin and thus not remediable to a major degree by practical improvements in environment."
"I am overwhelmed by an irresistible temptation to do my climb by moonlight and unroped. This is contrary to all my rock climbing teaching & does not mean poor training, but only a strong-headedness."
"Nature has color-coded groups of individuals so that statistically reliable predictions of their adaptability to intellectual rewarding and effective lives can easily be made and profitably used by the pragmatic man-in-the street."
"I had one experience which gave me some slant on the way large organizations run. I was not allowed to take spherical trigonometry because I'd sprained my ankle. Because I'd sprained my ankle I had an incomplete in gym, phys ed. And the rule was that if you had an incomplete in anything, you were not allowed to take an overload. I argued with some clerical person in the administration office, and was stopped there. It's an experience which I've remembered since, and advised people not to be stopped at the first point."
"If you take a bale of hay and tie it to the tail of a mule and then strike a match and set the bale of hay on fire, and if you then compare the energy expended shortly thereafter by the mule with the energy expended by yourself in the striking of the match, you will understand the concept of amplification."
"What I'm continuing to do is cutting out the equation that wastes the most amount of time — and that is working within the system."
"I wish I could do it again, only I wish I could take all of the animals out of the environmental fur farm ... I have absolutely no regrets, and I hope the same thing continues to happen at MSU and every other college campus that does animal research."
"You know, those people - I think they should appreciate that we're only targeting their property. Because frankly I think it's time to start targeting them."
"I’m a member of the Pascua Yaqui Nation and as an indigenous person, the fur trade represents so much more to me than just animal abuse. It represents cultural genocide. They were the foot soldiers of an invasion and conquest in the “new world.” They were the ones who introduced disease. They were the ones who introduced alcoholism. They were the ones who introduced gunpowder and many, many things that led to our decimation."
"You're damn right when you say I've shown people how to make a firebomb, I've done my time for my crimes, and I should be able to talk about them."
"Don't ask me how to burn down a building. As me how to grow watermelons or how to explain nature to a child. that is what I want to grow old doing. Please afford me this."
"In my years past I have argued that economic sabotage was an appropriate tactic for our time. Like all strategists I have also been forced to recognize that times have changed and it is now my belief that the movements to protect earth and animals have achieved enough with this strategy to now consider an approach that does not compromise objectives, but increases the likelihood of real social change. Let our opposition who believe in violence carry the burden for its justification, but let those who believe in peace and love practice a way of life that our society sorely needs now more than ever."
"Nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean wouldn't cure."
"An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing."
"The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake."
"They had jerrybuilt the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed super-highways through mountains, cut down a thousand year of redwood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert. They couldn't touch the ocean. They poured their sewage into it, but it couldn't be tainted."
"Deep feeling sounded in her voice. I had no doubt that the feeling was partly sincere. Still, there was something unreal about it. I suspected that she'd been playing tricks with her emotions for a long time, until none of them was quite valid."
"You have a secret passion for justice. Why don't you admit it?" "I have a secret passion for mercy. But justice is what keeps happening to people."
"Money costs too much."
"The moral beatings that people took from their children, I was thinking, were the hardest to endure and the hardest to escape."
"When your income passes a certain point you lose touch. All of a sudden the other people look like geeks or gooks, expendables."
"I knew how it was with drunks. They ran out of generosity, even for themselves."
"Every witness has his own way of creeping up on the truth."
"We went inside and I kissed her. Not only my temperature rose."
"There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns — different states, if possible — and write each other letters once a year."
"Where there's a will, there's a law suit."
"Many are called, but few get up."
"The wages of gin is breath."
"Be held truthful that your lies may count."
"Misery loves company but company does not reciprocate."
"People who love in glass houses should pull down the blinds."
"...Louis Fourteenth Street furniture..."
"...teeth set out by a landscape gardener..."
"Two ideas in his head at once would constitute an unlawful assembly."
"A cow couldn't find its calf in this room."
"He has no manners—he just has customs."
"...talking as though the Standard Oil Company was the smallest thing he owned."
"The son-of-a-bitch would shoot me just to make book on which way I'd fall!"
"For the longest time, I didn't know the name of anyone in Led Zeppelin. I didn't care about what they looked like or ate. I wanted to listen, not read about them. I've always had that philosophy. I never started playing drums to get chicks or money or anything else. Long before I had concepts of those things, I wanted to be a drummer. That's the basic concept of what I do. I'm a drummer. I play drums. We are artists as drummers, and people should realize that. Not everyone can sit down and use all four of your limbs simultaneously to create something out of wood and plastic. We're creating something beautiful, and it may not sound pretty, but if you listen with the right ear, it sounds very pretty. If you try and listen to a song without drums, you haven't got anything."
"We never expected anything, actually. I think we still don't expect anything. We were proud of the album when we finished it, so whatever success it has we are just like, 'Wow, cool.' It's not going to change the way we work or think. I'm as proud of this record now as I was when we finished it."
"The term "cult" is always one of individual judgment. It has been variously applied to groups involved in beliefs and practices just off the beat of traditional religions; to groups making exploratory excursions into non-Western philosophical practices; and to groups involving intense relationships between followers and a powerful idea or leader. The people I have studied, however, come from groups in the last, narrow band of the spectrum: groups such as the Children of God, the Unification Church of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the Krishna Consciousness movement, the Divine Light Mission, and the Church of Scientology. I have not had occasion to meet with members of the People's Temple founded by the late Reverend Jim Jones, who practiced what he preached about being prepared to commit murder and suicide, if necessary, in defense of the faith."
"While everyone is influenced and persuaded daily in various ways, vulnerability to influence fluctuates. The ability to fend off persuaders is reduced when one is exhausted, rushed, stressed, uncertain, lonely, indifferent, uninformed, aged, very young, unsophisticated, ill, brain- damaged, drugged, drunk, distracted, fatigued, frightened, or very dependent."
"Thought reform is accomplished through the use of psychological and environmental control processes that do not depend on physical coercion. Today's thought reform programs are sophisticated, subtle, and insidious, creating a psychological bond that in many ways is far more powerful than gun-at-the-head methods of influence. The effects generally lose their potency when the control processes are lifted or neutralized in some way. That is why most Korean War POWs gave up the content of their prison camp indoctrination programs when they came home, and why many cultists leave their groups if they spend a substantial amount of time away from the group or have an opportunity to discuss their doubts with an intimate."
"An estimated 5,000 economic, political, and religious groups operate in the United States alone at any given time, with 2.5 million members. Over the last ten years, cults have used tactics of coercive mind control to negatively impact an estimated 20 million victims in the last ten years. Worldwide figures are even greater."
"Hundreds of other cult leaders have gathered far more followers than Jones by promising new psychological and spiritual utopias. They have succeeded by combining various ages-old psychological and social persuasion techniques in an atmosphere os Madison Avenue soft-sell approaches. Because most of the followers have been youthful or poor, little attention and credence has been given to reports from ex-members, families and friends who report the effects of the techniques of manipulation used by the groups."
"I do not endorse them [Landmark Education] - never have. The SOBs have already sued me once. I'm afraid to tell you what I really think about them because I'm not covered by any lawyers like I was when I wrote my book."
"Just look up to the sky and talk to God yourself. You don't need an organization to do that. …They're all the same, really, these groups — they prey on the most lonely, vulnerable people they can find, cage you with your own mind through guilt and fear, cut you off from everyone you knew before, and when they're done doing that, they don't need armed guards to keep you. You're afraid that if you leave, your parents will die, you will die, your life will be ruined. Flim-flam men, pimps, sharpsters — that's what they are. Liars. Tricksters. It's been the same ever since Eve got the apple, and I doubt it will ever change. A real religion is truthful, you can come or go from it if you wish. And most importantly, there is no one leader claiming he is a god. Big, big difference."
"I started hearing from families who had missing members, many of them young kids on our campus, and they all would describe the same sorts of things. A sudden change of personality, a new way of talking...and then they would disappear. And bingo, it was the same sort of thing as with the Korean War prisoners, the same sort of thought-reform and social controls. You find it again and again, any time people feel vulnerable. There are always sharpies around who want to hornswoggle people."
"The public takes care of their fear by thinking only crazies and stupid people wind up in cults. I've interviewed over 4000 ex-cult members. There's no one type of person who is vulnerable."
"Psychologist Margaret Singer, 69, an outspoken Scientology critic and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, now travels regularly under an assumed name to avoid harassment."
"Over the decades, cult operatives have fished through Singer's trash, sent her death threats and picketed her lectures. They've released dozens of live rats at her house, put dead ones on her doorstep (hearts skewered with lollipop sticks) and hacked into her computer so many times she doesn't use one any more. Once a cultist talked her way into working in Singer's campus office, then stole a sheaf of term papers and sent bizarre notes to the students."
"She is the most recognized expert in her field in the whole world, and that's why I sought her out. She's also a real doll, and a very decent human being, above and beyond everything else."
"She's one of a kind, the foremost authority on brainwashing in the entire world. She is a national treasure."
"She was a remarkable person -the only genius I ever met in our business. There are simply very few people anywhere who had the clinical skills that she had - period. In addition, she was a world-class researcher. She was twice nominated for a Nobel Prize for her work in schizophrenia. That work revealed that the best indicator of the disordered mind was the schizophrenic's odd and peculiar use of language."
"Margaret Thaler Singer stands alone in her extraordinary knowledge of the psychology of cults"
"In this era of clichés, the word “giant” is bandied about all too frequently. But Margaret was a genuine giant. She made enormous contributions to the psychological understanding of cults, including the Unification Church, Heaven's Gate, and the Branch Davidians; and cult therapies, including Synanon and Scientology."
"One of those groups went through my mom's mail and knew everything about us - my girlfriend's name, where we went, what we bought, all kinds of stuff. We all put up with a lot, but nobody more than her."
"In addition to her high-profile work on cults, Singer was also an authority on schizophrenia, and was nominated twice for a Nobel Prize for her research."
"Her testimony would help people understand the clinical impact of a cult's manipulation and exploitation. There was a constant stream of people who would go into these organizations and end up in psychiatric emergency rooms."
"But not everyone agreed with her views on the subject, and Singer paid a price for her work. Cult "operatives" dug through her trash, went through her mail, picketed her lectures and sent her death threats. They also hacked into her computer countless times, once released dozens of live rats in her house, and frequently left dead rats on her doorstep with threatening notes."
"I love to compete. That's the essence of who I am."
"I don't see myself as the Great Black Hope. I'm just a golfer who happens to be black and Asian. It doesn't matter whether they're white, black, brown or green."
"My goal is to remain healthy my entire career, and a healthy diet seems like a good start."
"I think the best thing is being able to play golf competitively for a living. Ever since I was a little boy, that's something I've always wanted to do, and now I get a chance to live out my dreams."
"I've done it before. It won't be the last time. You're going to go years where you just don't win. That's okay, as long as you keep trying to improve."
"I am pretty health-conscious, so when my girlfriend and/or I make dinner--no, I don't have a cook!--we choose the healthier options: lean meats, steamed veggies, fish, etc. Of course, there are always those cravings for the "bad foods" that I do give in to once in a while!"
"My body is a little bit sore from all of the practicing and playing and training, and your mind gets a little tired of it, too. It's nice to be able to recharge and come back fresh for the remainder of the year."
"We have a lot of fun every year, and I really enjoy being part of junior golf and the development of these players."
"I don't want to be the best black golfer, I want to be the best golfer, period."
"You can always become better"
"Buddhism teaches that a craving for things outside ourselves causes an unhappy and pointless search for security. It teaches me to stop following every impulse and to learn restraint. Obviously, I lost track of what I was taught."
"Life isn't all Golf."
"Tiger Woods was raised from infancy to be a great golfer and is not just intact but graceful and charming. The ranks of great golfers, swimmers and Dominican shortstops are not more noticeably skewed to the deranged than the general population."
"If you're paying any attention at all, you'll see that the first person who ever publicly got away with being mixed was Barack Obama. Tiger Woods came close, but he never got away with it. Both blacks and whites questioned Woods."
"He didn't seem concerned about his injuries at the time, which is not uncommon in traffic collisions. Many times people tend to be in shock. It's a traumatic experience. It's not uncommon for people to be focused on unimportant things or even if they are in pain, they may not feel it until much later"
"I remember Joe DiMaggio's last at-bat in the World Series in 1951; we knew it was going to be his last at-bat. He hit a ball — a double to right-centerfield and pulled up into second base in that elegant way he did. And, I think there were tears in my eyes, I was there that day. And I thought 'That's the last time I'll see him', but he was complete to the end."
"I believe Dom has a little edge. I think he can outfield and outrun Joe. Their throwing is about on a par. I think that if Dom and I could hit like Joe, he wouldn't have anything on us. But Joe really can hit the ball. Man, he sure can. I'd be satisfied to have just one year at bat like him. I call him a busher, but I'd like to be a busher like him."
"He knew what the press and the fans and the kids expected of him, and he was always trying to live up to that image. That's why he couldn't be silly in public like I could, or ever be caught without his shirt buttoned or his shoes shined. He knew he was Joe DiMaggio and he knew what that meant to the country."
"Joe DiMaggio is the best baseball player I ever saw."
"Although he was over the hill when I first saw him, I could visualize how good he must have been. Joe DiMaggio was the best all-around ballplayer I ever saw."
"I never, ever compared myself to him. I thought there never was a greater player in the history of baseball. For me just to be mentioned in the same breath, boy, I always felt like I was two steps below him. I thought I could hit with anybody, but he was in my opinion as good as any that ever played this game. There's only one guy I saw you could mention in the same breath, and that was Willie Mays. I felt that just to have my name mentioned with Joe, it elevated me. I never thought I was ever as good."
"A stylized version of our IKEA present. It is talking about very simple concepts. We're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of shopping. There's nothing to kill anymore, there's nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman is created."
"We wanted a title sequence that started in the fear center of the brain. [When you hear] the sound of a gun being cocked that's in your mouth, the part of you brain that gets everything going, that realizes that you are fucked - we see all the thought processes, we see the synapses firing, we see the chemical electrical impulses that are the call to arms. And we wanted to sort of follow that out. Because the movie is about thought, it's about how this guy thinks. And it's from his point of view, solely. So I liked the idea of starting a movie from thought, from the beginning of the first fear impulse that went, Oh shit, I'm fucked, how did I get here?"
"You want to be able to provide something, and you're pissing down a fucking well. It will suck you dry and take everything you have and, like being a parent, you can pour as much love as you want, and your kid still says, "Just let me right out here, you don't have to take me all the way." You're working to make yourself obsolete. I'm not going to make Persona - my movies are fairly obvious in what the people want and what it is that's happening; it;s not that internalized. What's internalized is how you process the information from the singular, subjective point of view. And that becomes the subtext of it."
"Film-making encompasses everything, from tricking people into investing in it, to putting on the show, to trying to distill down to moments in time, and ape reality but send this other message. It's got everything. When I was a kid I loved to draw, and I loved my electric football sets, and I painted little things and made sculptures and did matte painting and comic books and illustrated stuff, and took pictures, had a darkroom, loved to tape-record stuff. It's all of that. It's not having to grow up. It's four-dimensional chess, it's strategy, and it's being painfully honest, and unbelievably deceitful, and everything in between."
"The movie is not that violent. There are ideas in the movie that are scary, but the film isn't about violence, the glorification of violence or the embracing of violence. In the movie, violence is a metaphor for feeling. It's a film about the problems or requirements involved with being masculine in today's society."
"Violence shouldn't be presented as drama. I think people looking for an easy way out often write scenes where characters come into violent conflict as opposed to looking for the true drama in the situation. That's a shortcoming of a lot of films and television shows. I think certain presentations of violence are not immoral, but amoral."
"I find it amoral if you're making a movie where the problem is solved with a guy standing in the back of pickup truck firing a machine at the bad guys. The morality of it is questionable because the repercussions of violence are incredibly far-reaching."
"I do like movies that take a toll on the audience. I want to work the subconscious. I want to involve you in ways in which you might not necessarily want to get involved. I want to play off those things that you're expecting to get when the lights go down and the 20th Century Fox logo comes up. There's an audience expectation and I'm interested in how movies play with--and off--that expectation. That's what I'm interested in."
"I always feel ill-prepared for commentaries and it had been so long I was afraid I'd forget everything that happened on the film. But having everybody come together for it was really great. It was like a high school reunion. We all reminisced and just had a great time."
"Oh, yeah, I love DVD's. I don't have what you'd call an extensive collection, maybe a couple of hundred or so. But I have something on almost all the time."
"There are some movies I can watch over and over, never get sick of. I'll put one of those on and be puttering around the house. Then a certain scene will come on and I'll just have to go over and watch."
"You know, I don't think I've ever listened to someone's commentary. Ever."
"I tend to over-intellectualize things, to come at them from a structural point."
"I don't have the Tom Hanks fans. When you make the kind of movies I make, you get weird letters from people."
"You can do something that walks a line, and invariably, whatever that line is, it will be crossed by people who don't know any better and want to ape the success."
"I want to make a movie that has enough impact that it's going to do what it needs to do. But I don't want to make a film that serial killers masturbate to."
"For me, the scariest thing about a serial killer is that there's somebody who lives next door to you, running power tools late into the night, and you don't know he has a refrigerator full of penises."
"As much as people pretend 'I fit in, I understand, I get the rules,' there are always times spent away from that where you go, 'I thought I knew. It seemed so clear to me, and then...' That sense of loneliness, or the sense of not fitting in or being out of depth, is probably the most common denominator."
"Entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine. Some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything's okay. I don't make those kinds of movies. That, to me, is a lie. Everything's not okay."
"You have a responsibility for the way you make the audience feel, and I want them to feel uncomfortable."
"Hollywood is great. I also think it's stupid and small-minded and shortsighted. I'm sure there are people who get into movies so they can get nice tables at restaurants."
"You can either look at your career as the things you're going to leave behind, and they have to be executed flawlessly and you have to know exactly what it is that you're doing. Or you can be realistic about the fact that you're going to learn as you practice what you do."
"I thought it was so strange because I normally make these pitch-black studies of misanthropes or the occasional movie about serial killers, sowhat could the possibly see in this material for me."
"Thank you to the stellar collection of photographers, designers, editors, musicians, costumers, painters, researchers, electricians and craftspeople who without whom I'd just be a bitter man with a lot of opinions"
"He's just scary smart, sort of smarter than everyone else in the room. There's just a handful of these people who know absolutely everything about the process. They could do everyone's job brilliantly. Every aspect is under their control."
"Disagreements don't cause disunity, a lack of forgiveness does."
"It was a simple story, really. Yes, God had told us to get a ship, and repeatedly He had confirmed His guidance using all the ways we had learned for hearing His voice. He used the Wise Men Principle; He used Scriptures which He seemed to lift off the pages for us; He used provision of money and people, and that inner conviction -- but we had failed in the way we had carried out His guidance. We had subtly turned from the Giver to the gift."
"If you did not suffer from emotions, from feelings, you could be as powerful as we are."
"You have to be taught to leave us alone. Leave us alone."
"I sought a different path than that of my parents. I totally rejected meditation and all the spiritual shit they built their lives on. Looking at the once idealistic hippie generation who had long since cut their hair, left the commune, and bought into the system, we saw that peace and love had failed to make any real changes in the world. In response, we felt love and despair and hopelessness, out of which came the punk rock movement. Seeking to rebel against our parents' pacifism and society's fascist system of oppression and capitalist-driven propaganda, we responded in our own way, different from those before us, creating a new revolution for a new generation. Painfully aware of corruption in the government and inconsistencies in the power dynamics in our homes, we rebelled against our families and society in one loud and fast roar of teen angst. Unwilling to accept the dictates of the system, we did whatever we could to rebel. We wanted freedom and were willing to fight for it."
"It's easy to hate and point out everything that is wrong with the world; it is the hardest and most important work in one's life to free oneself from the bonds of fear and attachment."
"The truth is, going against the internal stream of ignorance is way more rebellious than trying to start some sort of cultural revolution."
"The inner revolution will not be televised or sold on the Internet. It must take place within one's own mind and heart."
"The body breathes by itself. The mind thinks by itself. Awareness simply observes the process without getting lost in the content."
"Everything is impermanent. Every physical and mental experience arises and passes. Everything in existence is endlessly arising out of causes and conditions. We all create suffering for ourselves through our resistance, through our desire to have things different than the way they are - that is, our clinging or aversion."
"Happiness is closer to the experience of acceptance and contentment than it is to pleasure. True happiness exists as the spacious and compassionate heart's willingness to feel whatever is present."
"The greatest satisfaction comes not from chasing pleasure and avoiding pain, but from the radical acceptance of life as it is, without fighting and clinging to passing desires."
"Spiritual revolutionaries must be committed not to what is easiest, but to what is most beneficial to themselves and the world."
"Renunciation is not about pushing something away, it is about letting go. It's facing the fact that certain things cause us pain, and they cause other people pain. Renunciation is a commitment to let go of things that create suffering. It is the intention to stop hurting ourselves and others."
"With mindfulness we have the choice of responding with compassion to the pain of craving, anger, fear and confusion. Without mindfulness we are stuck in the reactive pattern and identification that will inevitably create more suffering and confusion."
"The Dalai Lama is rumored to have said that being able to have sex without any attachment would take the level of attainment of being able to eat either chocolate cake or dog shit without any preference between the two."
"Those who understand the way it is, rather than the way they wish it were, are on the path to freedom."
"The most important thing to remember is that we must live in the present, and if in the present moment we are still holding on to old wounds and betrayals, it is in this moment that forgiveness is called for."
"Experience each moment as if it were the first sensation of its kind ever. Bring childlike interest and curiosity to your present-time experience."
"Sitting still is a pain in the ass."
"Forgiveness is not just a selfish pursuit of personal satisfaction or righteousness. It actually alleviates the amount of suffering in the world. As each one of us frees ourselves from clinging to resentments that cause suffering, we relieve our friends, family, and community of the burden of our unhappiness. This is not a philosophical proposal; it is a verifiable and practical truth. Through our suffering and lack of forgiveness, we tend to do all kinds of unskillful things that hurt others. We close ourselves off from love, for example, out of fear of further pains or betrayals. This alone—a lack of openness to the love shown to us—is a way that we cause harm to our loved ones. The closed heart lets no one in or out."
"The next step in the process of liberation is to break this chain reaction of suffering whenever life is unpleasant and feeling content only when life is pleasurable."
"If our definition of happiness is "experiencing that which is pleasurable," we are going to be disappointed a lot of the time."
"As we walk the path of Refuge Recovery, we gradually uncover a loving heart."
"While we are in recovery we need to be able to strike a balance between not allowing our ego to do all the talking and not letting our low self-esteem to only present what is wrong with us."
"The cause of our suffering has always been our reaction to the thoughts, feelings, cravings, and circumstances of our lives. The cause of our addictions has always been the indulgence in the behaviors or substances."
"Difficult personalities are a mirror for the places where we get stuck in judgment, fear, and confusion."
"We must do away with any shred of denial, minimization, justification, or rationalization. To recover, we must completely and totally understand and accept the truth that addiction creates suffering."
"We could search the whole world and never find another being more worthy of our love than ourselves."
"We would all say that deep down, all we want is to be happy. Yet we don’t have a realistic understanding of what happiness really is. Happiness is closer to the experience of acceptance and contentment than it is to pleasure."
"Recovery is also the ability to inhabit the conditions of the present reality, whether pleasant or unpleasant."
"Everything is impermanent—every pleasure, every pain, every body. But the survival instincts crave permanence and control. The body wants pleasure to stay forever and pain to go away forever."
"Mindfulness is defined as nonjudgmental, investigative, kind, and responsive awareness. This sort of awareness takes intentional training of the mind."
"There was another major phase of split-brain research where we studied the patients as a way of getting at the other questions very much alive in neuroscience, everything from questions about visual midline overlap to spatial attention and resource allocations. At this point the split-brain patients provided a way of examining cortical-subcortical relationships, and other matters."
"The next phase of the work was when Joseph LeDoux and I came up with the idea of the interpreter. Twenty-five years into studying these patients we finally got around to asking the patients, "Why did you do that?" after they had a response with the left hand that was being governed by the separated, silent, speechless right hemisphere. We began to understand that the left hemisphere "made up" a story as to why the patient did what he/she did, and in that moment we began to see the cardinal feature of the left hemisphere: the ability to interpret actions generated outside its realm of conscious awareness."
"The tension felt in the modern world between those who look at the confluence of neuroscientific data, historical data, and other information illuminating our past and those who simply accept received wisdom as their guide in life is real and profound. Yet it may not be as divisive as one would think. It appears that all of us share the same moral networks and systems, and we all respond in similar ways to similar issues. The only thing different, then, is not our behavior but our theories about why we respond the way we do. It seems to me that understanding that our theories are the source of all our conflicts would go a long way in helping people with different belief systems to get along."
"The real world will feel dull, flat, colorless, blurry compared to the experiences you'll be able to create in people's brains. ...People are going to decide for themselves if they want to do it"
"We're way closer to The Matrix than people realize, It's not going to be The Matrix—The Matrix is a movie and it misses all the interesting technical subtleties and just how weird the post-brain-computer interface world is going to be.It turns out that your brain has really good interfaces for some things and really badly designed, kludge-y interfaces for doing other things. And, the fact that your immune systems gets involved in your perceptions of temperature means there are all sorts of weird parts of your brain that participate in the sensation of being cold, whereas things like your motor cortex or your visual cortex are much more tractable problems. And that's what I mean. We're going to learn a lot as we proceed as to what things work and what things don't, what things are valuable to people and what things are party tricks that don't really matter in the long run ... I think that it's an extinction-level event for every entertainment form that's not thinking about this."
"George Lucas should have distributed the "source code" to Star Wars. Millions of fans would create their own movies and stories. Most of them would be terrible, but a few would be genius."
"The original Half-Life took two years to create and Half-Life 2 took six years. That means Half-Life 3 would ship in approximately 2022. By which time we'll all be retired. With episodic content we can answer everybody's questions about what happened at the end of Half-Life 2, and we can do it in 18 months rather than 18 years."
"The PS3 is a total disaster on so many levels, I think It’s really clear that Sony lost track of what customers and what developers wanted."
"This isn't working."
"C'mon, people, you can't show the player a really big bomb and not let them blow it up."
"I'd like to thank Sony for their gracious hospitality, and for not repeatedly punching me in the face. If I seem a little nervous, it's because Kevin Butler was introduced to me backstage as the VP of sharpening things."
"You have to stop thinking that you're in charge and start thinking that you're having a dance. We used to think we're smart [...] but nobody is smarter than the Internet. [...] One of the things we learned pretty early on is "Don't ever, ever try to lie to the Internet – because they will catch you. They will de-construct your spin. They will remember everything you ever say for eternity.""
"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable. Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customers use or by creating uncertainty."
"The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future."
"James is an ass, and we won't be working with him again."
"(on her DUI) I have a responsibility, and it's something that I did wrong, and if I could personally apologize to every single person that has lost a loved one from drunk driving I would. And unfortunately, I can't, but this is my way of paying my dues and taking responsibility and being an adult."
"When my dad divorced my mom it was kind of like him leaving me also. I just really didn't understand why he wasn't returning my phone calls, or why I couldn't see him whenever I wanted to. That was the most hurtful thing to me."
"I’m very happy with my life and I wouldn’t take back any mistake I’ve made because it’s made me who I am today. I don’t walk around pretending that I’m perfect, so I don’t think that anyone else should hold me to that and not expect me to fuck up occasionally. Because I do, and you do, too."
"I don’t trust valets, waiters — nobody. I don’t waste my time anymore trying to figure out who leaks things to the press."
"It’s not me that’s obsessed with my weight, it’s everyone else. I know that I’m healthy, so I don’t really feel the need to answer to anyone. I’ve never substituted a meal for a salad in my life."
"My plan was not to be a celebrity. My plan was to be a singer and an entertainer. I wanted to go to NYU, major in musical theater, do Broadway, and come out with an album. Unfortunately, I started fucking up when I was in my teens."
"I'm not going to lie and say I wasn't really thin at one point, because I was. But it had nothing to do with not eating. I'm not saying that I have more problems than everyone else, but people's weight fluctuates, and five or ten pounds is a lot on me."
"I'm bustier now, and I really don't like it. It doesn't really fit with my wardrobe, it's not who I am. I am not someone who is used to wearing a bra or having to wear a bra I really don't like it. I like wearing vintage hippy see-through shirts that aren't slutty on me because there's nothing to look at. Now I have boobs so I can't really wear it because it sends out a different message."
"Guys are so transparent most of the time. Unless, of course, they're dating you, in which case they are utter mysteries."
"When you grow up in Bel Air and shop only in expensive boutiques on Rodeo and Robertson, you develop a kind of allergy to anything unpretty -clothes, cars... even people... you start thinking that if you hang around unattractive people, their homeliness can be contagious."
"Oh my god. I just hung around with an unpretty person. Excuse me while I go home to scrub myself with expensive body wash and a pink loofah, to rid myself of the unpretty germs."
"... It sucked. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. I couldn't even shop. Actually that's not true. I had gotten this amazing Marni backless dress down at Barneys the day before-but I didn't go really crazy like normal."
"All the boys in rehab are totally available because their girlfriends have all given up on them. It's fantastic."
"She didn't want to know how much Ray had paid for it because that had nothing to do with its real value."
"They may signify wealth, but they can actually mean so much more-like committment, family, and love. And there's nothing like a perfect diamond to remind you that you'll never be perfect - the truth is, all you can do is try."
"I got the rebound and he tackled me. I know this is Sunday, but this is the wrong field."
"An unarmed people are slaves or are subject to slavery at any given moment."
"To die for the racists is lighter than a feather, but to die for the people is heavier than any mountain and deeper than any sea."
"My foes have called me bum, hoodlum, criminal. Some have even called me nigger. I imagine now they'll at least have to call me Dr. Nigger."
"When you deal with a man, deal with his most valuable possession, his life. There's play and there's the deep flow. I like to take things to the deep flow of play, because everything is a game, serious and nonserious at the same time. So play life like it's a game."
"You can kill my body, but you can't kill my soul. My soul will live forever!"
"To us power is, first of all, the ability to define phenomena, and secondly the ability to make these phenomena act in a desired manner."
"I do not think life will change for the better without an assault on the establishment, which goes on exploiting the wretched of the earth. This belief lies at the heart of the concept of revolutionary suicide. Thus it is better to oppose the forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure them. Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions."
"Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death."
"The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man. Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life."
"I have no doubt that the revolution will triumph. The people of the world will prevail, seize power, seize the means of production, wipe out racism, capitalism."
"The people will win a new world. Yet when I think of individuals in the revolution, I cannot predict their survival. Revolutionaries must accept this fact."
"Some see our struggle as a symbol of the trend toward suicide among Blacks. Scholars and academics, in particular, have been quick to make this accusation. They fail to perceive differences. Jumping off a bridge is not the same as moving to wipe out the overwhelming force of an oppressive army. When scholars call our actions suicidal, they should be logically consistent and describe all historical revolutionary movements in the same way. Thus the American colonialists, the French of the late eighteenth century, the Russians of 1917, the Jews of Warsaw, the Cubans, the NLF, the North Vietnamese—any people who struggle against a brutal and powerful force—are suicidal."
"My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning. I wanted my death to be something the people could relate to, a basis for further mobilization of the community."
"I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness."
"Men were not created in order to obey laws. Laws are created to obey men. They are established by men and should serve men. The laws and rules which officials inflict upon poor people prevent them from functioning harmoniously in society. There is no disagreements about this function of law in any circle-the disagreement arises from the question of which men laws are to serve. Such lawmakers ignore the fact that it is the duty of the poor and unrepresented to construct rules and laws that serve their interest better. Rewriting unjust laws is a basic human right and fundamental obligation."
"The oppressor must be harassed until his doom. He must have no peace by day or by night. The slaves have always outnumbered the slavemasters. The power of the oppressor rests upon the submission of the people."
"When a mechanic wants to fix a broken-down car engine, he must have the necessary tools to do the job. When the people move for liberation they must have the basic tool of liberation: the gun."
"The blood, sweat, tears, and suffering of Black people are the foundations of the wealth and power of the United States of America. We were forced to build America, and if forced to, we will tear it down. The immediate result of this destruction will be suffering and bloodshed. But the end result will be the perpetual peace for all mankind."
"Many times the poorest White person is the most racist because he is afraid that he might lose something, or discover something he does not have."
"We realized at a very early point in our development that revolution is a process. It is not a particular action, nor is it a conclusion. It is a process."
"In their quest for freedom and in their attempts to prevent the oppressor from striping them of all the things they need to exist, the people see things as moving from A to B to C; they do not see things as moving from A to Z."
"We must ally ourselves with the oppressed communities of the world. We cannot make our stand as nationalists, we cannot even make our stand as internationalists. We must place our future hopes upon the philosophy of intercommunalism, a philosophy which holds that the rise of imperialism in America transforms all other nations into oppressed communities. In revolutionary love we must make common cause with these oppressed communities."
"Always, the rulers of an order, consistent with their own interests and solely of their own design, have employed what to them seemed to be the most optimal and efficient means of maintaining unquestioned social and economic advantage. Clear-cut superiority in things social and economic—by whatever means—has been a scruples-free premise of American ruling class authority from the society's inception to the present. The initial socioeconomic advantage, begotten by chattel slavery, was enforced by undaunted violence and the constant threat of more violence."
"Direct and unconcealed brute force and violence—although clearly persisting in many quarters of society—are today less acceptable to an increasingly sophisticated public, a public significantly remote from the methods of social and economic control common to early America. This is not a statement, however, that there is such increased civility that Americans can no longer tolerate social control of the country's under classes by force of violence; rather, it is an observation that Americans today appear to be more inclined to issue endorsement to agents and agencies of control which carry out the task, while permitting the benefactors of such control to retain a semidignified, clean-hands image of themselves."
"It is a fundamental assertion of this study that the majority society, in its fear-provoked zeal to maintain and assure its inequitable position in American society, flirted with and came dangerously close to total abandonment of the particular freedom upon which all others are ultimately dependent, the right to disagree. Moreover, it is an ancillary claim of this study that the danger has not yet passed."
"The FBI was most disturbed by the Panthers' survival programs providing community service. The popular free breakfast program, in which the party provided free hot breakfasts to children in Black communities throughout the United States, was, as already noted, a particular thorn in the side of J. Edgar Hoover. Finding little to criticize about the program objectively, the Bureau decided to destroy it."
"Huey P. Newton is the baddest motherfucker ever to set foot inside of history. Huey has a very special meaning to black people, because for four hundred years black people have been wanting to do exactly what Huey Newton did, that is, to stand up in front of the most deadly tentacle of the white racist power structure, and to defy that deadly tentacle, and to tell that tentacle that he will not accept the aggression and the brutality, and that if he is moved against, he will retaliate in kind."
"I doubt he knew my name, but I loved him. Huey - self-taught, brilliant, taciturn, strong-willed - molded in righteous indignation and rage of an oppressed people into a national, militant, revolutionary nationalist organization."
"He admitted killing Officer John Frey. He said that before he killed Frey, the police and the power structure could just come down to the black community and do anything they wanted. But after he shot Frey, much of that changed."
"To say that I loved Huey, however, even at that moment would be to say too little I loved being loved by him. I loved the protection he offereed with his powerful arms and fearless dreams. I loved how beautiful he was, sinewy, and sultry at once. I loved his genius and his bold uses of it. I loved that he was the vicarious dream of a man that white men hid from themselves, except when he confronted them, their rules, their world. I loved his narrow buttocks and his broad shoulders and his clean skin. I loved being the queen of his world, for he had fashioned a new world for those who dared. Yet I had come to hate life with him. His madness had become as full-blown as his genius. The numerous swaggering "dicks" who had challenged the hero to prove his manhood had finally taken their toll. Now had had outdone them all, including himself."
"In January 1968, after an attack on seven hundred antiwar activists picketing Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s speech in San Francisco, one of the jailed victims, a Berkeley student, said of the attacking police, “They wanted to kill and would have if they could have gotten away with it. I know now that they were out to put Huey away, except Huey had the good sense to defend himself.” The reference was to Huey Newton, who founded the Black Panthers in California in 1966 and became the Peace and Freedom Party candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from the Berkeley-Oakland district in 1968 while in prison awaiting trial in connection with the death of one and wounding of another Oakland policeman in a 1966 shoot-out. The first trial, in the summer of 1968, ended in a mistrial, as did two subsequent ones. Almost all of the major trials of Black Panthers ended in mistrials, acquittals, or convictions overturned on appeal, further fueling the suspicion that they were being persecuted by the police. In the course of the trials, plausible evidence of police brutality turned up, including in one case, allegedly murdering two suspects in their beds. The Black Panthers were increasingly being seen as victims of violence, martyrs who courageously stood up to the police."
"If April showers Should come your way, They bring the flowers That bloom in May."
"The moon belongs to everyone; The best things in life are free. The stars belong to everyone; They gleam there for you and me."
"If you knew Susie like I know Susie, Oh, oh, oh what a girl! There's none so classy as this fair lassie, Oh, oh, Holy Moses, what a chassis!"
"You're sent from heaven And I know your worth. You made a heaven for me here on the earth. When I'm old and grey, dear, Promise you won't stray, dear, For I love you so, Sonny Boy."
"We are entering the dimension where we have control - the inside."
"Is it true? Can you absolutely know that it's true? How do you react when you believe that thought? Who would you be without the thought?"
"The Work is merely four questions; it's not even a thing. It has no motive, no strings. It's nothing without your answers. These four questions will join any program you've got and enhance it. Any religion you have - they'll enhance it. If you have no religion, they will bring you joy. And they'll burn up anything that isn't true for you. They'll burn through to the reality that has always been waiting."
"When I argue with reality, I lose—but only 100% of the time."
"You move totally away from reality when you believe that there is a legitimate reason to suffer."
"An unquestioned mind is the world of suffering."
"No one can hurt me—that’s my job."
"Sanity doesn’t suffer, ever."
"If I had a prayer, it would be this: “God spare me from the desire for love, approval, and appreciation. Amen.”"
"You either believe what you think or you question it. There’s no other choice."
"If I think you’re my problem, I’m insane."
"When I am perfectly clear, what is is what I want."
"Arguing with reality is like trying to teach a cat to bark—hopeless."
"How do I know that I don’t need what I want? I don’t have it."
"Forgiveness is realizing that what you thought happened, didn’t."
"Everything happens for me, not to me."
"Reality is always kinder than the story we tell about it."
"I don’t let go of concepts—I question them. Then they let go of me."
"Gratitude is what we are without a story."
"When I walk into a room, I know that everyone in it loves me. I just don’t expect them to realize it yet."
"For me, reality is God, because it rules."
"Personalities don’t love—they want something."
"You are what exists before all stories. You are what remains when the story is understood."
"I’m a lover of what is, not because I’m a spiritual person, but because it hurts when I argue with reality."
"Everyone is a mirror image of yourself—your own thinking coming back at you."
"“I don’t know” is my favorite position."
"What is is. You don’t get a vote. Haven’t you noticed?"
"Until you look forward to criticism, your Work’s not done."
"Thoughts aren’t personal. They just appear, like raindrops. Would you argue with a raindrop?"
"There are no new stressful thoughts. They’re all recycled."
"Stress is an alarm clock that lets you know you’ve attached to something not true for you."
"We do only three things in life: we sit, we stand, we lie horizontal. The rest is just a story."
"The teacher you need is the person you’re living with."
"Everyone and everything is doing its job perfectly—no mistake."
"Ultimately, I am all I can know."
"Until we know that death is equal to life, we live in fear."
"There are no physical problems—only mental ones."
"We never make a decision. When the time is right, the decision makes itself."
"The miracle of love comes to us in the presence of the uninterpreted moment."
"The last story: God is everything, God is good."
"When they attack you and you notice that you love them with all your heart, your Work is done."
"Seeking love keeps you from the awareness that you already have it—that you are it."
"Have you asked you?"
"We say to others only what we need to hear."
"Nothing you believe is true. To know this is freedom."
"If you want to see the love of your life, look in the mirror."
"Reality is always the story of a past, and what I love about the past is—it’s over."
"We suffer only until we realize that we can’t know anything."
"You can only see what you believe—nothing else is possible."
"I could find only three kinds of business in the world—mine, yours, and God’s. Whose business are you in?"
"No one has ever been angry at another human being—we’re only angry at our story of them."
"Just keep coming home to yourself. You are the one you’ve been waiting for."
"The perfect world is created when the mind is free to see it."
"Would you rather be right or free?"
"In my experience, it takes only one person to have a successful relationship, and that's me."
"Don't be careful. You could hurt yourself."
"Defense is the first act of war."
"To keep the five guys who hate you away from the other five guys who are undecided."
"I may not have been the greatest Yankee to put on the uniform, but I was the proudest."
"I didn't throw the first punch. I threw the second four."
"If he'd only known himself half as well as he knew his game, he might have been the best."
"Billy Martin proved what a powerful strategic tool paranoia is. He believed that everyone was against him. And so he spent every waking moment figuring out how imaginary enemies could be defeated in their nefarious plots. And sometimes he not only created strategies to defend against things that would never be done against him, but he realized that those attacks were in themselves novel and he would then try those attacks that he had already dreamed up a defense for. That's why he was so wonderful at suicide bunts and double steals and any way that you could humiliate or psychologically defeat the other team, he was sure that's how the world reacted to him. He was sure the world hated him. And so he turned that really raw, frightened paranoia into wonderful strategic intelligence."
"He's humorless, dedicated, relentless, fearless, tireless and reckless, as tightly wound as a power line, about as safe to cross as a mine field."
"Some people have a chip on their shoulder. Billy has a whole lumber-yard."
"Plant your lands and reap; these be your best gold fields, for all must eat while they live."
"It is the duty of the humor of any given nation in time of high crisis to attack the catastrophe that faces it in such a manner as to cause the people to laugh at it in such a way that they cannot die before they are killed."
""Austin's stompin' a mudhole and walkin' it dry!" (usually said when Professional Wrestler Steve Austin is stomping his opponent in the corner)"
""Business is about to pick up here!" (usually said when someone music/pyro hits)"
""He's not just trying to hurt the man - he's out to end his career!" (usually said when a heavyweight or superheavyweight is destroying his opponent)"
""Look at the Carnage!" (usually said when there are wrestlers all over the place and outside of the ring)"
""[...] is being "whipped like a government mule!" (usually said when someone is taking a beating, most of the time when somebody is getting whipped with a belt)"
"[...] is running like a scalded dog! (usually said when a heel wrestler flees from a fight)"
""It's gonna be a slobber knocker!" (said usually referring to the match)"
""Good God, almighty!" (said usually when someone or something unexpected happens during a match)"
"He's tougher than a two-dollar steak!"
""He's been left high and dry" (when someone has missed a top rope maneuver)"
""AS GOD AS MY WITNESS, HE IS BROKEN IN HALF!" (most famously uttered during the Undertaker Mankind match at King of the Ring 1998)"
""IF ANYONE DESERVED TO BE TAKEN INTO THE WOODS AND BEATEN LIKE A DOG, IT'S THAT YOUNG MAN RIGHT THERE" (Spoken about Christian during Wrestlemania after his attack on Trish Stratus."
""Great Athletes" and sometimes "Greatest Athletes in the world today!" (when talking about WWE Wrestlers)"
"It's that rabid wolverine, Chris Benoit!"
""It's the Game!" (when talking about Triple H)"
""Jezebel!" (when talking about a female heel (villain) wrestler)"
""The World's Angriest announcer" (when talking about Tazz in his blogs)"
"(A) "Walrus", a "Poor Excuse for a human being", "a hemorrhage on the buttcheek of life" and "no part human." (when talking about Paul Heyman)"
"It's the Great One, The People's Champion The Rock"
""He has earned his reputation as the toughest son of a bitch in the WWE!" (during the entrance of Stone Cold Steve Austin in Wrestlemania XIX, before his match with The Rock)"
""I'll sue you and the Sheriff's Department," he said, sounding more sulky than anything else. "Questioning me like a common criminal! And with an FBI agent standing over me in a threatening manner!" Since Bishop was across the room leaning rather negligently against the filing cabinet, that was such an obvious exaggeration that Miranda could only admire it for a moment in silence."
"I suppose that I should say a few words with respect to the possibility for future production and identification of additional transuranium elements, especially in view of the possibility of their production by heavy-ion bombardment of transuranium elements. As an aid to such a program the radioactive properties can be estimated, as I have already indicated, on the assumption of a smooth nuclear energy surface and the systematics of radioactivity. Again, I must emphasize that such considerations are negated in the event that a stable subshell of 148 neutrons should be found to exist, and this must be regarded as a definite possibility. It is interesting to note that our considerations on the systematics of spontaneous fission28 indicate that this method of decay will not compete seriously with radioactive decay until the region just beyond element 100. … These considerations illustrate clearly that one of the problems is that of conceiving means for producing nuclides of sufficiently high mass numbers with half-lives long enough for chemical identification. Thus, the serious problem is again the paucity of starting materials."
"There is a beauty in discovery. There is mathematics in music, a kinship of science and poetry in the description of nature, and exquisite form in a molecule. Attempts to place different disciplines in different camps are revealed as artificial in the face of the unity of knowledge. All literate men are sustained by the philosopher, the historian, the political analyst, the economist, the scientist, the poet, the artisan and the musician."
"To say that Seaborg had a high-profile career is an understatement. He is in the Guiness Book of World Records for having the longest entry in "Who's Who in America." … In 1944, Seaborg formulated the 'actinide concept' of heavy element electronic structure which predicted that the actinides – including the first eleven transuranium elements – would form a transition series analogous to the rare earth series of lanthanide elements. Called one of the most significant changes in the periodic table since Mendeleev's 19th century design, the actinide concept showed how the transuranium elements fit into the periodic table."
"The body of information assembled in Dr. Seaborg's laboratory has made it possible to predict the radioactive characteristics of many isotopes of elements still to be found. Under Dr. Seaborg's leadership, also, whole new bodies of methodology and instrumentation have been developed and have become a cornerstone of modern nuclear chemistry."
"Glenn Seaborg had a tremendous influence on me — both before and after I met him. Of course, as a nuclear chemist, I knew of his leadership in the legendary discovery of plutonium in 1941, the development of the actinide concept, his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1951, and the discovery of 8 more transplutonium elements by 1958. It was not until his tenure as chairman of the AEC (1961-71) that I actually began to learn first hand about the "real" person behind these awesome accomplishments. … The breadth of his interests, his skill in communicating with both scientists and the general public and press, and his energy in doing all this even while he was AEC chairman still boggles my mind! … I learned so many things from him just by observing how he ran the weekly brown bag lunches with his graduate students and later mine — listening with great interest as they described their research progress. He asked insightful and penetrating questions, but not in a threatening manner, made suggestions, and frequently went to visit the labs late in the day to see what was going on. He also hosted many undergraduate research students. He was devoted to education and student training and would prepare as carefully for lectures to freshman chemistry classes as for presentations to prestigious assemblages of scientists. Glenn was very concerned with history and had kept a diary or journal since he was eight years old. After his return to Berkeley from Washington in 1971, he continued the tremendous undertaking of putting them into book form, which occupied him and several helpers for many years. His journals also formed the basis for books on his years as chancellor at Berkeley, as chairman of the AEC, and many other topics. On the rare occasions that he did not remember something that one of us might ask about he would look it up in his journals. He had a fabulous memory and was able to synthesize and apply and keep track of what he knew so it could be applied to the situation at hand. One might almost say in the parlance of our time that he was a "parallel processor"! … In spite of his legendary accomplishments, Glenn Seaborg always had time for family members, colleagues, students, and even non-scientists who wanted to visit with him. We have lost a treasured advisor, colleague, mentor, resource, and friend. But he will live on through his prolific writings and in the cherished memories of the hosts of students, scientists, colleagues, and lay people that he influenced."
"Dr. Seaborg was a true giant of the 20th Century, a legend in the annals of scientific discovery. His daily commitment to matters of the laboratory, even in retirement as associate director-at-large and as an active researcher, was an inspiration to us all. … We who have been touched by his wisdom, his energy, and his tireless devotion to our profession will miss him."
"All the people who are hating me right now and are here waiting to see me die, when you wake up in the morning you aren't going to feel any different. You are going to hate me as much tomorrow as you do tonight. Reach out to God and he will hear you. Let him touch your hearts. Don't hate all your lives."
"In prison, I found out who God really was, who He is, and that too took some time. I had seen God as an arbitrary rule maker. He made His rules the same way my parents did. The reason was "Because I said so!". But that was a false image of God. The way Anton LaVey saw God also affected his view of Satan."
"Satanism to Anton LaVey was the celebration of that part of ourselves. His rituals were parodies of Catholic rituals. His philosophy was to embrace that "darkness" within ourselves, since it led to pleasure and pleasure was the real aim of life; after life there was nothing. No Heaven, no Hell, just the grave. We cease to exist."
"The fact is nearly everyone forces God to fit into his own perception. Even Christians serve a God they perceive rather than the God who truly is. They limit Him according to those special needs of their own psyche. It's actually hard not to do that, but every time we do, it has consequences. Seeing God for who He truly is takes effort and always has one inevitable result that many people cannot accept: our understanding will always fall short."
"It's so much easier to create our own gods; gods that are fully knowable. Those are the gods of atheism, occultism, religion and sometimes even Christianity. Then, of course, there are those prejudices that we demand of our gods. Women who take offense at a "male" God create for themselves a female or neuter god. There, we have all the racial gods, the black gods, white gods, and cultural gods, the Spanish gods, African gods, Indian gods and so on. All of them called god. And yet none of them are truly Him. Some may be tiny glimpses of Him. Maybe His big toe or little finger, but nothing more. Others are not even that. They’re only delusions from our prejudices."
"I've watched closely and I believe most people who turn from God do so for one of two basic reasons. One, they mistake some aspect of religion as God (like Anton LaVey did). Or two, they are unable to overcome their need to understand what can not be understood. I honestly don't think it's easy to turn from God if we see Him as He really is. Every Satanist I've ever encountered has fallen into one of those two categories. They either have a warped, distorted perception of God, based on what they were taught by some idiot, or they don’t believe in the goodness or even the existence of God because of the injustice of the world. The first is a problem of perception. The second is a problem of pride. Both are hard to get past."
"To be a Satanist is not to be liberated. It is to be bonded to death. The freedom it offers is an illusion. And this is something I know every Satanist knows, because I was there. In the dark and quiet, all alone, without the buzz of alcohol or drugs, or the rhythm of music to drown out the sounds, there is an empty echo inside us. A vacancy. A feeling of loss and cold and turmoil and hunger. That emptiness gnaws and hurts worse than anything else in life; we take up knives to carve our skin just to escape it, or run into the arms of a lover to smother it, but it doesn't go away. It grows. It is death at work, emptiness causing decay. No matter how much we feed it SIN, it will never fill up."
"I'm not in any way trying to pass blame to any other person. There are reasons why I did what I did, but I'm still the one who did it, and the responsibility, no matter the reasons, is still mine."
"I was not a cruel person. I didn't commit murder because I enjoyed causing pain. I had pets all my life and I wanted to be a veterinarian. I never was a bully, or provoked fights, or picked on people weaker than I was."
"I was mad at God, I didn’t LIKE God because of how I perceived Him, and the stuff I read on Satanism said two things that appealed to me. #1 — it offered freedom, and #2 — it promised power to control my life, and others. I’d been carted all around the state and Colorado all my life, slapped, smacked, hit, and had whatever I wanted ignored. I was mad and the idea of controlling my life to get what I wanted was like candy to me. Plus I looked at the way everyone around me lived and the stuff I read in the Satanic Bible in principle was lived out in lifestyle by Mom and Dad and everyone else I knew. No one was a real Christian. We didn’t go to church. We didn’t talk about God. … What was the point of pretending to serve God when we lived like Satanists? Satanism taught me that I should make my own rules to live by in life, and that’s just what everyone I’d grown up around did, so I got very involved in Satanism. I truly thought it was an honest way to live, and the rituals of it would enable me to control my life. Even then I didn’t want to kill anyone. That desire didn’t start until later."
"These are the ghosts I live with and I hate myself for all I became and did. I am not just sorry, I am haunted. I think of all the people I hurt, of all the moments I stole from your lives, and I know I deserve to die."
"Please, know that for as long as I live I will be haunted with the sorrow for what I did and when I die I will have counted it more mercy than I deserved to have lived the life I did. Until that day, I want you to also know, I will spend my life trying to do things that will touch the world in a good way, to give back for all I took from you. That’s the only thing I can offer with my hands and my heart. It’s simply all I have."
"He took his last dig at us. … It is very presumptuous that he would know how we would still feel."
"He was quite a thinker … I think if his life had been different, if he'd zigged instead of zagged, I could see him growing up to become a college professor — at a Christian college, probably, though the administration would no doubt have bitten their nails to the quick more than once over some of his ways. I have several letters from him where he expounded on the oddities of life. The joys and the quirks. He might have been a sociologist, even. People fascinated him. Life fascinated him, since he had squandered his chances of living a normal one. But he made the most of it, more so than anyone I've ever met."
"Let other dance styles inspire and influence your own and remember that there are no boundaries. Dare to be original."
"...it’s your work ethic that is going to get you far, no matter what you do."
"Enjoy the journey. Enjoy the journey, and the hard work and the sacrifices and opportunities it takes to get somewhere, because it will all make you better at what you do when you arrive."
"Be proud of what it is that you’re doing and you’ll do a better job."
"Ask yourself why you [dance]. Don't do it for the wrong reasons. You have to love it because it's a tough business and you're not always going to get to do the cool jobs and those things. So if your heart is in the right place, you will find happiness within the dance."
"If you fall out of love with what you’re doing, don’t be afraid to move on. And failing once doesn’t mean you’ll fail every time. You will fail, however, if you don’t learn from your mistakes. Fight for what’s important to you, but be conscious of your approach when speaking up. If you speak out of anger, odds are, your message won’t be heard as clearly. And never let the envy you might feel for another turn into jealousy or hatred. Instead, use that energy as motivation to work harder."
"Dance from your heart. If you dance from your heart, you'll always love it."
"I think they're all equally hard. They all have their own techniques and when you don't train in that technique then it's difficult. Y'know, especially for somebody in a ballroom who's use to stepping heal-to-toe and they get into a jazz routine and they're up on relevé the whole time. So everything has its own technique and when you get use to one way, it's difficult to switch."
"I think the future of dance is where we came from, where the dancers are the stars and I see in the next ten years dancers being these huge stars and the movie musical coming back."
"Dance is not an internal thing. You have to be able to give to somebody else visually watching or they won't care. If they don't leave with some type of emotional feeling—whether it be you cry, or you laugh, or you jump in the air for joy—then it becomes movement and we haven't done our job."
"We see people who dance really well and can't perform all the time. It's in our community, our dance community. It's like that because we've been doing back-up dancing for so long. We're always in the background of the movies and we're always behind the artist so our job is not to outshine the artist. Well now, with all these dance television shows, we're getting a chance to be the artist. We're on the forefront. We're the Gene Kellys and the Fred Astaires of this generation and it's our job to make people feel something and to really perform."
"This time in dance, this era, is probably one of the most entertaining times. It's got this whole new style of hip-hop which encompasses 20 different styles within it. There's no boundaries to it so people are taking it to the next level. And I think as an audience, everyone is saying Whoa, that is energetic. That is gymnastics, that is dancing, and that's entertainment combined in one. And that's a beautiful thing."
"Somewhere in the world of dance we started thinking about steps way too much: technique, steps, technique, steps. You can do all the technique you want, the regular public doesn't know. All they know is how you perform and what you tell them and what you make them feel; and when you make somebody feel something, it is undeniable."
"There's a life to dance that has to happen and it was seen years ago with Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and the life and the feeling they had in a performance. And when you watch them and you see them and you start to sway with them and you start to move with them and you miss that sometimes and that's what needs to happen with dance again."
"Why would you want to be back-up dancer when you could be the actual star? Let's show the world that we're stars. Let's perform like stars."
"When you can tell the story of the song through your movement, it's brilliant. It comes across as so honest and not fake."
"This is one of the great things about this show is that we've really explored a totally new thing which is lyrical hip-hop and [Tabitha and Napoleon] nail it... It shows you that hip-hop [has] completely become a really legitimate beautiful genre in and of its own and you can tell such beautiful and heart breaking stories."
"What better work can you ask for than to be with her?"
"I am crazier about him than ever... We have been working together for so long. We know how one another operate and have such a good rhythm. If we are apart, I miss him because I need his feedback. I welcome his input even if it is different than mine because it always gives us a better product."
"I guess it's the first season... where I've been effected emotionally by hip-hop routines."
"Usually their choreography's a bit cotton candy..."
"We work together so much; it's weird doing even an interview separately, … [a]nd when we teach we vibe off each other. I'll start a joke, and Tabitha will finish it. I'll start choreographing, and she'll continue. We don't plan it like that; it just happens."
"I love the So You Think You Can Dance show. I love it. I think it’s some of the best hours on TV. I think those dancers are extraordinary and, more so, I think those choreographers are uniformly amazing[...] And so I got two of who I think are the best choreographers on SYTYCD — Tabitha and Napoleon — to be involved in some movement elements. Because I think when dance is mediocre, it’s painful. But when dance is really impressive, it destroys."
"I don't know how they do it but [Tabitha and Napoleon] love each other so much. They're this husband and wife duo that work together all the time and yet I've never seen them have an argument. I've never seen them kind'of roll their eyes at each other. I've never seen anything like that. They are the perfect example of a fabulous marriage."
"Honestly, I thought of him as a good-looking jock kind of guy, and I didn’t think he was very artistic or very smart."
"Somehow Napoleon and Tabitha have this ability... to put emotion into hip-hop routines and it really is a real talent."
"One of the biggest complaints about season 4 is the time the judges spent heaping endless praise upon the choreographers rather than discussing the dancers, but in the case of hip-hop choreographers Napoleon and Tabitha Dumo [sic] (i.e., [NappyTabs], now and forever), that praise was well-deserved. The couple brought a lyrical storytelling sensibility to their routines that transformed hip-hop from hard-hitting abstract steps to something far more emotionally engaging."
"Maybe it's because Laurieann Gibson is my choreographer and I'm really close with her but it's the interpretation of hip-hop that I thought was a little bit contrived."
"Stop pathetically believing that you deserve Fame or Fame deserves you. It's yucky, and it's only making you miserable, so stop."
"The Volta is taken from a Federico Fellini book about his films, what he characterizes as a changing of scene, or a turnaround; a new scene to him is called Volta. Y'know, changing of time and the changeover. And Mars, we're just fascinated by science fiction so and it's something that ultimately looked as in anything I write, its meaning is always up to the listener. As the way we write songs and words, if it looks great on paper then to us it's like painting, so if it looks good meaning the second then people usually have a better interpretation than we ever would."
"Our comforting sense of the permanence of our natural world, our confidence that it will change gradually and imperceptibly if at all, is the result of a subtly warped perspective. Changes that can affect us can happen in our lifetime in our world—not just changes like wars but bigger and more sweeping events. I believe that without recognizing it we have already stepped over the threshold of such a change; that we are at the end of nature. By the end of nature I do not mean the end of the world. The rain will still fall and the sun shine, though differently than before. When I say 'nature,' I mean a certain set of human ideas about the world and our place in it."
"An idea, a relationship, can go extinct, just like an animal or a plant. The idea in this case is 'nature,' the separate and wild province, the world apart from man to which he adapted, under whose rules he was born and died. In the past, we spoiled and polluted parts of that nature, inflicted environmental 'damage.' But that was like stabbing a man with toothpicks: though it hurt, annoyed, degraded, it did not touch vital organs, block the path of lymph or blood. We never thought that we had wrecked nature. Deep down, we never really thought we could: it was too big and too old; its forces—the wind, the rain, the sun—were too strong, too elemental. But, quite by accident, it turned out that the carbon dioxide and other gases we were producing in our pursuit of a better life... could alter the power of the sun, could increase its heat. And that increase could change the patterns of moisture and dryness, breed storms in new places, breed deserts...We have produced the carbon dioxide—we are ending nature."
"The greenhouse effect is a more apt name than those who coined it imagined. The carbon dioxide and trace gases act like the panes of glass on a greenhouse—the analogy is accurate. But it's more than that. We have built a greenhouse, 'a human creation' where once there bloomed a sweet and wild garden."
"The expected effects of a sea-level rise typify the many consequences of a global warming. On the one hand, they are so big we literally can't understand them. If there is a significant polar melting, the Earth's center of gravity will shift, tipping the globe in such a way that the sea level might actually drop at Cape Horn and along the coast of Iceland—I read this in a recent EPA report and found that I didn't really understand what it meant to tip the Earth, through I was awed by the idea. On the other hand, the changes ultimately acquire a quite personal dimension: Should I put in a wall in front of my house? Does this taste salty to you? And, most telling of all, the human response to the problems, the utterly natural human attempt to preserve the old natural way of life in this postnatural world, creates entirely new consequences. The ocean rises; I build a wall; the marsh dies, and, with it, the fish."
"We believe that we live in the 'age of information,' that there has been an information 'explosion,' an information 'revolution.' While in a certain narrow sense that is the case, in many more important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An unenlightenment. An age of missing information."
"It worries me because it alters perception. TV, and the culture it anchors, and drowns out the subtle and vital information contact with the real world once provided."
"Human beings—any one of us, and our species as a whole—are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky."
"They'll lead us bit by bit toward the revolutionary idea that we've grown about as powerful as it's wise to grow; that the rush of technological innovation that's marked the last five hundred years can finally slow, and spread out to water the whole delta of human possibility. But those decisions will only emerge if people understand the time for what it is: the moment when we stand precariously on the sharp ridge between the human past and the posthuman future, the moment when meaning might evaporate in a tangle of genes or chips."
"These new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish. This is a fight not only for the meaning of our individual lives, but for the meaning of our life together."
"Right now, plenty of people feel the peacefulness of their lives degraded by sprawl, or worry about the way consumerism has eroded the quality of our communities. For them, the idea of enough is not completely alien or distasteful, though it remains difficult to embrace. We've been told that it's impossible – that some force like evolution drives us on to More and Faster and Bigger. 'You can't stop progress.' But that's not true. We could choose to mature. That could be the new trick we share with each other, a trick as revolutionary as fire. Or even the computer."
"The logic of divestment couldn't be simpler: if it's wrong to wreck the climate, it's wrong to profit from that wreckage."
"If it is wrong to wreck the planet, then it is wrong to profit from that wreckage."
"...as early as 1977, Exxon (now ExxonMobil, one of the world’s largest oil companies) knew that its main product would heat up the planet disastrously. This did not prevent the company from then spending decades helping to organize the campaigns of disinformation and denial that have slowed—perhaps fatally—the planet’s response to global warming....Exxon responded, instead, by helping to set up or fund extreme climate-denial campaigns....The company worked with veterans of the tobacco industry to try and infuse the climate debate with doubt."
"ExxonMobil, the world’s largest and most powerful oil company, knew everything there was to know about climate change by the mid-1980s, and then spent the next few decades systematically funding climate denial and lying about the state of the science.... But though we know now that behind the scenes Exxon understood precisely what was going on, in public they feigned ignorance or worse.... Thanks to Exxon’s willingness to sucker the world, that world is now a chaotic mess."
"Year after year throughout the last two decades they’ve made more money than any company in the history of money. But poor people around the world are already paying for those profits, and every generation that follows us now will pay as well, because the “Exxon position” has helped take us over one tipping point after another. Their sins of emission, like so many other firms and individuals, are bad. But their sins of omission are truly inexcusable."
"Consider this: as ice sheets melt, they take weight off land, and that can trigger earthquakes — seismic activity is already increasing in Greenland and Alaska. Meanwhile, the added weight of the new seawater starts to bend the Earth’s crust. “That will give you a massive increase in volcanic activity. It’ll activate faults to create earthquakes, submarine landslides, tsunamis, the whole lot,” explained the director of University College London’s Hazard Centre. Such a landslide happened in Scandinavia about eight thousand years ago, as the last Ice Age retreated and a Kentucky-size section of Norway’s continental shelf gave way, “plummeting down to the abyssal plain and creating a series of titanic waves that roared forth with a vengeance,” wiping all signs of life from coastal Norway to Greenland and “drowning the Wales-sized landmass that once connected Britain to the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany.” When the waves hit the Shetlands, they were sixty-five feet high."
"If we keep raising carbon dioxide levels, we may not be able to think straight anymore. At a thousand parts per million (which is within the realm of possibility for 2100), human cognitive ability falls 21 percent. “The largest effects were seen for Crisis Response, Information Usage, and Strategy,” a Harvard study reported, which is too bad, as those skills are what we seem to need most."
"A team of British researchers released a study demonstrating that even if you can grow plenty of food, the transportation system that distributes it runs through just fourteen major choke-points, and those are vulnerable to — you guessed it — massive disruption from climate change. For instance, U.S. rivers and canals carry a third of the world’s corn and soy, and they’ve been frequently shut down or crimped by flooding and drought in recent years... “It’s the glide path to a perfect storm,” said one of the report’s authors."
"But in August 2018, a massive new study found something just as frightening: crop pests were thriving in the new heat. “It gets better and better for them,” said one University of Colorado researcher. Even if we hit the UN target of limiting temperature rise to two degrees Celsius, pests should cut wheat yields by 46 percent, corn by 31 percent, and rice by 19 percent. “Warmer temperatures accelerate the metabolism of insect pests like aphids and corn borers at a predictable rate,” the researchers found. “That makes them hungrier[,] and warmer temperatures also speed up their reproduction.”"
"The dramatic uncertainty that lies ahead may be the most frightening development of all... the most likely scenarios...are more than disturbing enough. Long before we get to tidal waves or smallpox, long before we choke to death or stop thinking clearly, we will need to concentrate on the most mundane and basic facts: everyone needs to eat every day, and an awful lot of us live near the ocean... Where I live, it’s the seasons: winter doesn’t reliably mean winter anymore, and so the way we’ve always viscerally told time has begun to break down..."
"Single most important stat on the planet: CO2 rose 3.5 parts per million last year, 2nd-highest annual rise on record. This is legit scary"
"The longer I think about @DNC insisting no-one hold a climate debate, the sillier it seems. We've literally never talked about this issue in a presidential debate, and we literally have to deal with it immediately. I don't understand why we shouldn't devote a night to it."
"What do Ben and Jerry’s, an 800,000-member South African trade union, countless college professors, a big chunk of Amazon’s Seattle workforce, and more high school students than you can imagine have in common? They’re all joining in a massive climate strike this coming Friday, September 20 — a strike that will likely register as the biggest day of climate action in the planet’s history."
"On May 23, at the end of the last massive school strike, Thunberg and 46 other youth activists released an open letter to The Guardian urging adults to join in next time. Because, as they pointed out, there are limits to what young people can do on their own. If you can’t vote, and if you don’t own stocks, then your ability to pull the main levers of power is limited. They wrote: “Sorry if this is inconvenient for you. But this is not a single-generation job. It’s humanity’s job.”"
"So now we have some sense of what it’s like: a full-on global-scale crisis, one that disrupts everything. Normal life—shopping for food, holding a wedding, going to work, seeing your parents—shifts dramatically. The world feels different, with every assumption about safety and predictability upended. Will you have a job? Will you die? Will you ever ride a subway again, or take a plane? It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen. The upheaval that has been caused by Covid-19 is also very much a harbinger of global warming. Because humans have fundamentally altered the physical workings of planet Earth, this is going to be a century of crises, many of them more dangerous than what we’re living through now. The main question is whether we’ll be able to hold the rise in temperature to a point where we can, at great expense and suffering, deal with those crises coherently, or whether they will overwhelm the coping abilities of our civilization... The pandemic provides some useful sense of scale—some sense of how much we’re going to have to change to meet the climate challenge."
"Fair or not, boomers and the Silent Generation have about 70% of the country’s money, compared with about 5% for millennials. So if you want to push around Washington, or Wall Street, or your state capital, it helps to have some people with hairlines like mine."
"[D]ata from the World Meteorological Agency show that, as the U.N. Secretary-General, António Guterres, told the {COP28} global climate talks in Dubai last week, we can safely say, even with weeks to go, that 2023 will take the title {as the world's hottest year on record}. . . . And yet . . . [a]lmost simultaneous with the breakout in temperature, there was a breakout in the installation of renewable energy, especially solar power, around the world. . . . {T}he cost of clean energy has dropped so far that it is now possible that saving the planet might be a corollary of saving cash. This ongoing drop in price is more than a decade old, but sometime in the past few years it crossed an invisible line, making it cheaper than hydrocarbons, and this was the year when that reality finally translated into dramatic action on the ground. . . . There are plenty of other technologies we’re [currently] spending money on, including small nuclear reactors and giant carbon-sucking machines, that may or may not someday play a role in the climate fight, but, for all the furor they produce, they seem unlikely to make much difference anytime soon. In the next few years, while the planet’s climate system teeters on the edge of breaking, it’s sun, wind, and batteries that matter. They’re cheap, and they’re ready."
"Think about what your town is doing about environmental pollution before you go to Washington with radical environmentalist Bill McKibben to get arrested. I mean no lack of deference to McKibben or his followers. But there is plenty of work to go around, as all the movements that came after 1963 - women's, anti-war, and LGBTQ -- and gained power from the example that was set during the 1963 March on Washington, still show us."
"Bill McKibben wrote, ‘We live in a post-natural world.’ But did ‘Nature’ in this sense ever exist? Or was it rather the deification of the human that gave it an illusory apartness from ourselves? Now that non-human agencies have dispelled that illusion, we are confronted suddenly with a new task: that of finding other ways in which to imagine the unthinkable beings and events of this era."
""We had no money and no organization, so we figured we'd be doing well if we could organize a hundred of these things by April 14. And that would have been about a hundred more global warming rallies than there had been," he told Democracy Now! Instead, McKibben tapped a rich vein of discontent around the United States. "People were really eager to finally be able to take action about this," said the amazed activist, "and the thing has just kinda exploded." More than fourteen hundred Step It Up rallies took place in all fifty states in April 2007. McKibben followed with another Step It Up Day seven months later, which involved hundreds of thousands of people around the country, including eighty members of Congress."
"I also thank Bill McKibben and his 350.org colleagues for the most important work in the world, and the most unending."
"McKibben understands that a central goal of movement leadership is to create more leaders, not more followers."
"Bill McKibben, a leading champion in the fight against climate change"
"Bill McKibben has long said, when people ask him what's the most significant thing you can do for the climate, "Stop being an individual; join something.""
"He has no credibility left."
"The reminds me of the scene in Mel Brooks's ' where asks his hunch-backed servant, , how he lives with his hump, and Igor answers, "What hump?" ... The potential of overcoming the ultraviolet problem is also the deeper reason for the allure of string theory, a microscopic model for the vacuum that has failed to account for any measured thing."
"The reason we believe in relativity today is not because we had a great transition in our beliefs about what should be so. We believe in relativity because we have no choice. It's true — measured to be true."
"I like to talk about renormalization as an epistemological barrier. … Nature has been kind, and nature has been unkind. … for what it's worth, I don't tell people what kind of research to do. I have been wrong many, many times in anticipating what will happen. … I’ve learned the hard way that the art of good physics is to ask a question that’s just barely beyond where the technology can go, and then you place your bets. And if you’re right you win the bet, and if you’re wrong you lose."
"Real understanding of a thing comes from taking it apart oneself, not reading about it in a book or hearing about it in a classroom. To this day I always insist on working out a problem from the beginning without reading up on it first, a habit that sometimes gets me into trouble but just as often helps me see things my predecessors have missed."
"I realized that nature is filled with a limitless number of wonderful things which have causes and reasons like anything else but nonetheless cannot be forseen but must be discovered, for their subtlety and complexity transcends the present state of science. The questions worth asking, in other words, come not from other people but from nature, and are for the most part delicate things easily drowned out by the noise of everyday life."
"Oklahoma is laid back and rather beautiful, with rolling brown hills not unlike the ones in California. The Pershing missiles, on the other hand, were not beautiful. They were horrible weapons of war — solid-fuel rockets five feet in diameter at the base, long as a moving van, and capable of throwing a tactical nuclear warhead 500 miles. They were launched from trucks and required a team of 10 men to service and fire. The most interesting thing I learned during this time was how small a nuclear warhead was. The nose cone of a Pershing is only about 18 inches in diameter at the base. I had not been interested at all in nuclear weaponry as a student, and so I had never thought through carefully about their "efficiency". It is sobering thought that these missiles were actually deployed in continental Europe in those days and that on at least one occasion, namely the 1973 Arab-Israel war, there was an alert serious enough to leave the commanding officers trembling."
"The world is full of intelligent, well-meaning people who, for one reason or another, did not attend university but are nonetheless well-read and educated. Out there on the prairie lost opportunities of youth were the rule rather than the exception, and I slowly became disabused of the myth of the Bright Young Thing and have not believed in it since."
"I learned about X-ray diffraction, neutron scattering, raman scattering, infrared absorption spectroscopy, heat capacity, transport, time-dependent transport, magnetic resonance, electron diffraction, electron energy loss spectroscopy — all the experimental techniques that constitute the eyes and ears of modern solid state physics. As this occurred I slowly became disillusioned with the reductionist ideal of physics, for it was completely clear that the outcome of these experiments was almost always impossible to predict from first principles, yet was right and meaningful and certainly regulated by the same microscopic laws that work in atoms. Only many years later did I finally understand that this truth, which seems so natural to solid state physicists because they confront experiments so frequently, is actually quite alien to other branches of physics and is vigorously repudiated by many scientists on the grounds that things not amenable to reductionist thinking are not physics."
"Bell Labs had been a kind of holy place of solid state physics since the 1950's when it was built up by Shockley after the invention of the transistor. I had no idea at the time of the significance of this placement, but I did notice during my job talk that everybody understood what I was saying immediately — this had never happened before — and that the audience had an irresistible urge to interrupt, heckle, and argue about the subject matter loudly among themselves during the talk so as to lob hand grenades into it, just like back-benchers do in the House of Commons. Being a combative person I rather liked this and lobbed a few grenades of my own to maintain control of my seminar. I later came to understand that this heckling was a sign of respect from these people, that the ability to handle it was a test of a person's worth, and that polite silence from them was an extremely bad sign, amounting to Pauli's famous criticism that the speaker was "not even wrong.""
"My rule is simply to do for my students exactly what I hope someone else will do for my sons when the time comes: I teach them to have faith in themselves and in their own compass, to listen to nature to find truth, to love knowledge for the sake of itself, and to strive for greatness."
"It has been my experience that good theoretical physics is empowering, in that it enables thinking to take place that would otherwise not occur, and, in its highest form, facilitates experiments that would otherwise not be done."
"When a thing gets very, very small, you can't tell the difference between a solid and a liquid. (16:30 in video)"
"If you think, as a Western person, that you are not affected by religious traditions, you are sadly mistaken. (22:30 in video)"
"What we live in, unfortunately, is a time when we are infected by what I call quantum field theory idolatry. (39:30 in video)"
"Science is about measurement, dammit — it's not about ideas. (55:20 in video)"
"Newton would have been laughed out of the country if Kepler hadn't done the measurement. ... The facts speak for themselves. ... History has shown that you need a little luck — and if you don't have the luck, you're out of luck. (1:00:00 to 1:01:00 in video)"
"He spent considerable time at his clubs; his favorite was the Stuyvesant, because, as he explained to me, its membership was drawn largely from the political and commercial ranks, and he was never drawn into a discussion which required any mental effort"
"Anyway, you know full well I never wear boutonnieres. The decoration has fallen into disrepute. The only remaining devotees of the practice are roués and saxophone players."
"Circumstantial evidence, Markham, is the utt‘rest tommyrot imag‘nable. Its theory is not unlike that of our present-day democracy. The democratic theory is that if you accumulate enough ignorance at the polls, you produce intelligence; and the theory of circumst‘ntial evidence is that if you accumulate a sufficient number of weak links, you produce a strong chain."
"“Good God!” he mummered. “I don‘t know what to believe.” “In that respect,” returned Vance, “you‘re in the same disheartenin‘ predic‘ment as all the philosophers.”"
"As I understand it, your policemen are chosen by their height and weight; they must meet certain requirements as to heft—as thought the only crimes they had to cope with were riots and gang feuds. Bulk—the great American ideal, whether in art, architecture, table d‘hôte meals, or detectives. An entrancin‘ notion."
"A fairy tale in terms of blood—a world in anamorphosis—a perversion of all rationality.… It’s unthinkable, senseless, like black magic and sorcery and thaumaturgy. It’s downright demented."
"Only, as long as we‘re going insane we may as well go the whole way. A mere shred of sanity is of no value."
"I trust the clergy are not involved in this problem. They‘re notoriously unscientific. One can‘t attack them with mathematics."
"“Do you play chess, by the by?” asked Vance. “Used to. But no more. A beautiful game, though—if it wasn't for the players.”"
"“You’re probably right,” sighed Vance. “I haven’t any coruscatin’ arguments to combat you with. Only, I’m disappointed. I don’t like anticlimaxes, especially when they don’t jibe with my idea of the dramatist’s talent. Pardee’s death at this moment is too deuced neat—it clears things up too tidily. There’s too much utility in it, and too little imagination.”"
"“Oh, my dear fellow! I’m not indulgin’ in implications. I’m merely givin’ tongue to my youthful curiosity, don’t y’ know.”"
"Giving full rein to one‘s cynicism as one goes along produces a normal outlet and maintains an emotional equilibrium."
"I'm often asked why I make such a "big deal" about choosing conservative Christians, Messianic Jews, or Orthodox Jews for neighbors. The plain truth is that in a societal collapse there will be a veritable vacuum of law enforcement. In such times, with a few exceptions, it will only be the God fearing that will continue to be law abiding. Choose your neighborhood wisely."
"The three most important things to look for when searching for a church home are doctrine, doctrine, and doctrine. If your main criteria are 'programs' and 'outreach' to this or that niche group, then in my opinion you are starting your search the wrong way."
"Mary Gray: It's in our fallen, sinful nature for tyrants to rise up in every nation. And unfortunately, it's also in our nature that the vast majority in every nation is either too stupid or too apathetic to do anything about it until the tyrants have put up their barbed wire and spilled a lot of blood."
"With a few exceptions, lower population [density] means fewer problems [for survivalist retreats]. When the Schumer Hits the Fan, there will be a mass exodus from the cities. Think of it as an army that is spreading out across a battlefield: The wider they are spread, the less effective they are. The inverse-square law hasn’t been repealed."
"The modern world [of survivalism] is full of pundits, poseurs, and Mall Ninjas. Preparedness is not just about accumulating a pile of stuff. You need practical skills, and those come only with study, training, and practice. Any armchair survivalist with a credit card can buy a set of stylish camouflage fatigues and an “M4gery” carbine encrusted with umpteen accessories. Style points should not be mistaken for genuine skills and practicality."
"My father often told me, “It is better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it.” I urge readers to use less than lethal means when safe and practicable, but at times there is not a satisfactory substitute for well-aimed lead going down range at high velocity."
"The foundational morality of the civilized world is best summarized in the Ten Commandments. Moral relativism and secular humanism are slippery slopes. The terminal moraine at the base of these slopes is a rubble pile consisting of either despotism and pillage, or anarchy and the depths of depravity. I believe that it takes both faith and friends to survive perilous times."
"Tangibles trump conceptuals. Modern fiat currencies are generally accepted, but have essentially no backing. Because they are largely a by-product of interest-bearing debt, modern currencies are destined for inflation. In the long run, inflation dooms fiat currencies to collapse. The majority of your assets should be invested in productive farmland and other tangibles such as useful hand tools. After you have your key logistics squared away, anything extra should be invested in silver and gold."
"Governments tend to expand their power to the point that they do harm. In SurvivalBlog, I often warn of the insidious tyranny of the Nanny State... ...If the state where you live becomes oppressive, then don’t hesitate to relocate. Vote with your feet!"
"Owning a gun doesn’t make someone a “shooter” any more than owning a surfboard makes someone a surfer."
"As a Christian, I feel morally obligated to assist others who are less fortunate. Following the Old Testament laws of tzedakah (charity and tithing), I believe that my responsibility begins with my immediate family and expands in successive rings to supporting my immediate neighborhood and church, to my community, and beyond, as resources allow. My philosophy is to give until it hurts in times of disaster."
"There is no substitute for mass. Mass stops bullets. Mass stops gamma radiation. Mass stops (or at least slows down) bad guys from entering a home and depriving its residents of life and property. Sandbags are cheap, so buy plenty of them. When planning your retreat house, think: medieval castle."
"Some things are worth fighting for. I encourage my readers to avoid trouble, most importantly via relocation to safe areas where trouble is unlikely to visit. But there may come an unavoidable day when you have to make a stand to defend your own family or your neighbors. Furthermore, if you value your liberty, then be prepared to fight for it, both for yourself and for the sake of your progeny."
"Modern military planners often talk in terms of “threat spirals” when a given threat escalates and inspires a defensive countermeasure. Ideally you should anticipate your opponent’s next escalation and take countermeasures, insulating yourself from the future threat."
"If you are serious about preparedness, then it is time to get out of your armchair and start training and preparing. It will take time. It will take some sweat. It will take money. But once you’ve prepared, you can sleep well, knowing that you’ve done your best to protect and provide for your family, regardless of what the future brings. Don’t get stuck in the rut of simply *studying* preparedness. Unless the shelves in your pantry and garage are filling with supplies, and unless you are growing muscles and calluses, you are not preparing."
"It is one of the great ironies of our modern 'civilized' era that in most of the places where you don't feel the need to carry a firearm for self defense you can legally do so if you choose. But in most of places where you do indeed justifiably feel the immediate need to carry a gun, they are banned."
"Whenever someone must buy a license or pay a fee to exercise a right, then it is something less than a right. It is in fact a mere privilege, subject to the whim of petty bureaucrats. Fundamental rights are not abstract tokens that are given or sold by other men. They are in fact primary liberties bestowed upon us by God, our maker. Rights are not substantially secured by asking, "Mother may I?" of any government agency. Rights are more properly demanded or boldly seized and then conspicuously exercised regularly. This secures the liberties that have legitimately belonged to us since birth. If need be, lost rights can and must be restored through proscriptive use. If you live in a land where your rights have been marginalized into privileges, then it is either time to change your government, or to change your address. Much like a muscle that atrophies with disuse, any right that goes unexercised for many years devolves into a privilege, and eventually can even be redefined as a crime."
"A recurring theme in western journalism, academia, and collectivist politics is the quaint notion that firearms are intrinsically evil. That is, that they have a will of their own, that somehow inspires their owners to murder and mayhem. I liken this nonsensical belief to voodoo."
"Cartridge firearms are compact vehicles for change that have shaped modern history. The righteousness of their use is entirely up to their users, since like any other tool they can be used both for good or for ill. A firearm is just a tool with no volition. A rifle is no different than a claw hammer. To wit: A hammer can be used to build a house, or it can be used to bash in someone’s skull—the choice of uses is entirely up to the owner. A bulldozer can be used to build roads, or to destroy houses. A rifle can be used to drill holes in paper targets, or to dispatch a marauding bear, or to murder your fellow man. Again, the choice of uses is entirely up to the user."
"If a firearm is used by a criminal or psychopath with evil intentions, then it is a tool for evil. But if it is used for good (to defend life and property), then it is a tool for good. A firearm by itself has no sentience, no volition, no moral force, and no politics. The proper term for this is an adiaphorous object--something that is neither good nor evil. A firearm is simply a cleverly-designed construction of metal, wood, and plastic in the form of a precision tool."
"Here it is, in quintessence: You are either a man with a gun, or you are mere human cattle for the slaughter. The choice is yours. I prefer to be armed and vigilant rather than being at the mercy of some would-be slave master. There is no notch in my ear."
"Guns are like parachutes: if you don’t have one when you need it, then chances are that you won’t ever be in need of one again."
"The Second Amendment is about protecting your right to go deer hunting the same way that the First Amendment is about protecting your right to publish poetry."
"People should be judged as individuals. Anyone that makes blanket statements about other races is ignorant that there are both good and bad individuals in all groups. I have accepted The Great Commission with sincerity. "Go forth into all nations" means exactly that: all nations."
"The truth is that people should be judged as individuals. (That is one of my core Precepts.) Anyone that makes blanket statements about other races is ignorant that there are both good and bad individuals in all groups. There is no inherent superiority in any skin tone or facial feature, any more than there is in any particular hair color."
"As an Army officer, I learned that in order to be effective, an army must have three key abilities: To move, shoot, and communicate. Take away any one, and you are ineffective. But if you get all three right, you can absolutely devastate an opponent—even one that has vastly superior numbers. ... Just buying up modern-day slaves and giving them their freedom hasn't worked. The Islamic slavers simply go and kidnap more of them. The only way to effectively stop armed slaver kidnappers is to train and equip large numbers of armed free men in the border villages. In the modern context, you can "Just Say No" to slavery only with a battle rifle."
"In the past decade the distinction between connotation and denotation has been blurred by politics. The definitions of words should not change with every shift in the winds of public sentiment. Our society has already suffered from four decades of Situational Ethics. Heaven help us in this new era of Situational Definitions. A rocket scientist or military engineer can teach you about Sympathetic Detonations, but it is 21st Century television commentators who have introduced us to the era of Sympathetic Denotations. We now live in an Orwellian world where a semi-auto rifle is arbitrarily called an "assault rifle" if it has black plastic furniture, where a standard capacity magazine is called a "high capacity" magazine, where the confiscation and redistribution of wealth is dubbed "fairness." This also a new age when folks who are given free health care, HD televisions, free cell phones, and enough money to be able to afford air conditioning are deemed to be "living in poverty." The fluidity of our language is evidence that America is sliding into oblivion. Hold fast to the true meaning of words and phrases, or we are doomed."
"We must recognize that in our generation there might come a day with no remaining avenue of escape. State laws can be avoiding simply by moving, but what of unconstitutional Federal laws? At that point we will have no choice but to rebel against tyranny. (Since the alternative would be to live as little better than bleating sheep.) When we reach that juncture I doubt that I will advocate expatriation. Most foreign lands have less freedom than we enjoy here in these United States. I don't think that I will find some ideal "bolt hole" nation with more firearms freedom, better banking privacy, a more positive business climate, lower taxes, full religious freedom, unimpeded personal property rights, fair courts, and assured freedom of speech. If I must die, then I will do so here in America, fully armed and facing my oppressors. I won't die in some ditch, begging for mercy."
"Error is not a mere accident of an untrained intellect, but a necessary stage or feature or moment of the expression of the truth."
"We are all aware, if we have ever tried it, how empty and ghostly is a life lived for a long while in absolute solitude. Free me from my fellows, let me alone to work out the salvation of my own glorious self, and surely (so I may fancy) I shall now for the first time show who I am. No, not so; on the contrary I merely show in such a case who I am not. I am no longer friend, brother, companion, co-worker, servant, citizen, father, son; I exist for nobody; and ere-long, perhaps to my surprise, generally to my horror, I discover that I am nobody."
"“the real world is the Community of Interpretation… If the interpretation is a reality, and if it truly interprets the whole of reality, then the community reaches its goal [i.e., a complete representation of Being], and the real world includes its own interpreter”"
"Human life taken merely as it flows, viewed merely as it passes by in time and is gone, is indeed a lost river of experience that plunges down the mountains of youth and sinks in the deserts of age. Its significance comes solely through its relations to the air and the ocean and the great deeps of universal experience. For by such poor figures I may, in passing, symbolize that really rational relation of our personal experience to universal conscious experience…."
"I revelled in the keen analysis of William James, Josiah Royce and young George Santayana."
"He (William James) loved Him as a friend of his youth, a neighbour of thirty years and a high minded companion of arms in the moral struggle."
"Music is my religion."
"The rules were always there. There was always one rule; don't break the golden rule, which is if someone says that they love your music, so they love you and you're amazing; you're not amazing. You're not amazing. It's not you, they don't know you, you know? It's not that way. So don't believe that. I don't believe that about myself, and I don't believe when someone likes me too much or hates me too much. I don't believe they know what they're talking about."
"I am not a perfectionist at all. I love failure. I love mistakes. I love the bizarre. I love characters. I love missing teeth. I love beauty because your eyes are off-center. And how can you notice that in the buzz of the city? So I like the emptiness."
"I think now is the best thing that you’ll ever get, and that’s all you’ll ever get."
"Music is never wrong. You might not like it, but it’s never wrong. It's such a great way of explaining stuff."
"Whenever someone says, 'We're all one,' I've always been like 'No we're not, and that's what's great, so stop saying that or everyone's gonna start believing you.' But yeah, as we all look at the same projection on the wall, we do become one, and I started to realize the horror of that. And I make no attempt to try to alter it from being that; my thing is more about trying to apply some principles of magic—how to walk between the raindrops—and take advantage of a situation like that, because it’s the only choice you have."
"My years of reading P.T. Barnum is finally coming into play. [snaps fingers] This notion of saying nothing, of keeping a secret, and doing it in a way that's not elitist but that's like, You wanna come in here and hear? [whispers] We have a secret. That's all that I can tell you. But you're involved. You know?"
"Music is the best way that I know to say the things that are difficult to say in English. Words get in the way sometimes."
"I get scared all the time. I try not to let it have any impact on the decision of whether to do it or not. I think you can separate yourself from your fears. You know what you should do, and it’s just scary to do it. But I’d hate to let the fact that I’m scared to do it make me not do it. It ends up defining you."
"Well, I come from a long, long line of smartasses. Smartass is allergic to dumbass. It’s actually a physical allergy, as in you’re repulsed by dumbasses."
"Yeah, I can make all the tequila in a bottle disappear. It’s a talent. Nothing comes easy and talent is something you get but, if you don’t develop it, it becomes like an apple; you keep taking bites of it until it’s gone. So you have to plant the seeds. Then you have the orchard. And then you have Jonestown.’"
"My favorite music is hooky, quirky, arty, dark, surprising, heavy, groovy, soft, emotional but not emo. It wears a sweater because it’s cold, not because it's stylistically there."
"I THINK OF INTERSCOPE AND ALL THESE LABELS AS THE BIGGEST FUCKING IDIOTS ON THE PLANET. And print that in capitals, because they can’t do anything to me."
"And the fact of the matter is that everyone should play music because it's such a beautiful gift. It's my religion. But maybe not everyone should play it in front of me. It's okay to play music in your rocking chair or whatever."
"I'm also beyond pissed, as in not pissed, because I kinda figure they just don’t know better by now. It’s like when a dog shits in the house, you can hit 'em with a paper but they really don’t know what the fuck happened. How can retarded kids know to not throw a Frisbee at the forehead of another retarded kid?"
"I think that provided us to do it this time, because it's like okay, we've cleared that air, you know, we're friends and we respect that he's the best rock drummer in the world, you know. You can be as good, but you’re not better than Dave Grohl."
"...but I'm also a father, a husband and a raging alcoholic..."
"It's like catching a fish, you know what I mean? It's the fish that's beautiful, not the fisherman. And I think whoever hasn't understood that attitude in Queens is not here any more. And if I ever think the fisherman's better than the fish, I hope someone fuckin' fires me too."
"In Kyuss and Queens, we allow people to tape our shows, whether it's audio, video or both. You're doing that tonight, but you're no different than someone who buys the ticket. Because the exchanging of music is what should happen. It's one of the only things I like about The Grateful Dead, it's "do you want a tape from '67 on June 2nd? You can get one". I probably wouldn't like the music on the tape, but it's still possible. My problem is that people sell our live shows for too much money. They should be the cost of the video and shipping. And in turn, MP3 take a record that I've spent money and time and put so much love into, take it, and just give it away. But they make the money. MP3 and Napster, they make tons of money, but they say "Oh, it's about free exchange!", but that just sounds like just another jack-off thief in the dark, that doesn't have guts enough to admit what they're doing. I had someone say something interesting to me in Canada, "Well, would you rather have the label fuck you over, or the fans fuck you over?". And I just said, "Neither!". And when it gets posed to me in such a way I sit there and think, "You know, what am I doing? Maybe I should skip through the countryside, playing flute (?)". Because MP3 certainly is like [stabbing sound and motion]. If you're an unsigned band, then it really helps, but then, you know? I don't wanna censor anyone, and I'm no one's daddy, I'm not going to monitor the internet, but I think there's a moral side to it too; I don't steal from you, you don't steal from me. Seems fair, you know?"
"But the truth is, I don't have ADD. I have OKHY: OK, hell yeah."
"Risk nothing, get nothing. If you wanna be famous, then it's OK if the music is fake, because fame isn't real."
"But I like to be a real man because I have a son and a daughter and they should know what that's like. It's OK to not be macho. But it's not OK to be a pussy."
"You can't upstroke yourself into toughness."
"(In response to the question; "What are you going to tell a ten year old who wants to play guitar?") For me that's easy; when you expect anything from music, you expect too much. So you play for yourself, you play to enjoy it and you make the most of it for you, period. You don't - I never thought I would be doing this now. I feel so lucky to be doing this now - I can't believe this is what I do all the time. I know I'm not the greatest guitar player in the world, but I just love it. And I hope that's the only reason I'm here, you know? Because I think - I honestly think that that's enough."
"[In response to the question "This record will probably be bigger than the last one, which was bigger than the one before, and so on. How big do you want to be?"] Man, I don't really give a shit. I mean... you know, let me just break it down; I love to play, I'm from a small town in the desert, I never thought I would be here and I just wanna play, man. I don't care if it's big or small, you know? Like, Nick is gone and that affects me the most, because I didn't want it to be that way. And some people are going to be like "Well, I don't like it now!" and to them I say fucking goodbye. This is goodbye. Let me be the first to say it, goodbye. Because all I'm doing is just wanting to just play. I just love to play music, and I like people, you know. And there's all kinds of things that get... shoved into that along the way, but that's not alright with me, you know? So, I want to say most of all, like, I'm just going to just show up and play. I'll let everyone else deal with that because I've already dealt with the hard part, you go ahead and deal with the easy part, whether you want to listen or not. And either way; I understand. Because, when it comes to the Queens, whatever everyone else is dealing with, I've dealt with it already, man. So I'll either be drinking with people after the show or not and it's going to be five, five thousand, five million, or five - I don't give a shit. Because I'm really proud of this record and I put a lot into it, I put what I am into it and after that I can't control it. It's not up to me, it's up to you, you know? And I'm okay with that because when I left the studio I knew I loved this stuff and I got to save my friendship, and both of that is a victory, you know? And the rest is up to you, and I'm okay with that too. So let's get it on."
"[On "grunge"] Music's music, and the weird thing is Brant [Bjork] has said this before; Soundgarden and those bands and Nirvana, those are great bands, but they did not create rock and roll. This whole "grunge" bullshit that everyone's talking about. "Oh my gosh, it's amazing!", they did not create rock and roll! It is rock and roll music. It's good rock and roll, that's all it is. They did not start something, they don't corner the market on anything. [...] I think it's a shame, because it's a great media tool and it worked. Like, whoever thought of the word "grunge" should be rich by now because it's a great media trip, you know? But it's just all good rock and roll; Soundgarden, Nirvana, all these bands are just good rock and roll bands. People spend too much time categorizing what everything is. Just throw it on your turntable, throw it on you CD player or whatever you have and listen to it. Don't worry about what it is - no one cares, it doesn't matter anymore, you know? That's what should have happened, it shouldn't matter anymore what you are. There's so many, like, "fusion" everything and whatever that it shouldn't matter anymore, you know?"
""Punk fusion"… "metal", "alternative"… "grindcore". What the hell is all that stuff?"
"New Zealand interviewer: What's it like for you guys, has it been "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll", that stuff?"
"Never heckle Joshua Michael Homme III."
"Hey you, with the stupid fuckin' tattoo. This ain't a place to fight, you dipshit. You wanna fight, go to a gay bar. Go to a fuckin' gay bar if you wanna fight, you understand? 'Cause I will fuck you in the ass. Ik pak je klootzak, ik pak je vieze lul! Got me? You better, or you'll get me. Alright, this song goes out that that asshole. Everybody party and have a good time, fuck that dick. Let's do this."
"(in response to someone shouting "I miss Nick (Oliveri)") Well, if you miss Nick, you can go out to the parking lot and go fuck yourself. Maybe you should get started immediately. And maybe if you're really lucky, he'll beat the shit out of you too. Because that's what he likes to do to girls, so maybe you can go miss him, I dunno... Do you feel satisfied about making you comment now? Are you happy that everyone looked at you and know what you look like? See that, Jesus Christ. Yeah, I remember my first beer too."
"This is my fuckin' stage!"
"(during "Feel Good Hit of the Summer") I wanna tell you something. I'm never gonna give you up, I'm never gonna let you down. I'm never gonna run around and desert you."
"(during "Feel Good Hit of the Summer") They tried to put me in rehab too, but that shit didn't work. Nicotine, valium, vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol. Nicotine, valium, vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol. Nicotine, valium, vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol. (song pauses) I cannot be killed by anything."
"'Frayed not. (in response to a question on whether he considers The Fray an influence after they listed him as an influence)"
"Dave (Catching) played lap steel, a little guitar, keys and did a lot of drinking."
"This song is actually about when I got arrested for about 30 minutes in Mexico, and as we were just about to cross into Tijuana, we were just about to cross the "Bridge of Freedom", which I always thought was an ironic name for the bridge into Tijuana, or the one coming back for that matter. And this woman was selling these crucifixes before you got to the bridge, and she looked at me and said "You're in for trouble", and I just scoffed and laughed and was like "You don't live forever" and I thought "Jeez, what's up with the weird old woman?". And then later that night I was sitting in this police car in Tijuana and they just beat the crap out of this other guy, not that I was with, and I was like "Am I next?". I had bought this fake gold chain because my dad had said "If you go to Tijuana, have some fake jewellery to barter with". I traded with them - they just wanted cash. But I felt so sick in the back of the police car that I was like "If I throw up in here I'm dead"."
"Josh (footage): Y'all ready to see Foo Fighters?"
"Alain Johannes: How come everything's red though? Is it a red light or..."
"You're solid gold, I'll see you in hell."
"The more you've found, the less you've been around."
"There's no one here And people everywhere You're on you're own."
"Laughing is easy, I would if I could."
"You live 'till you die."
"It's all my head, I know Or so they tell me so."
"Close your eyes, and see the skies are falling."
"I want a new mistake, lose is more than hesitate."
"You don't find your way, the way finds you."
"Open up your mouth, touch your lips to mine, That we may make a kiss that can pierce through death and survive."
"From the moment you said, "Why haven't you kissed me yet" I knew I'd wipe that paint from your lips."
"You say bigger's better, but bigger's bigger."
"It's just like diamonds in shit."
"Never again will I repeat myself Enough is never enough Never again will I repeat myself."
"It's truly a lie, I counterfeit myself."
"If ignorance is bliss, then I'm in heaven now."
"I don't care if it hurts, just so long as it's real."
"I'm gonna suture up my future."
"If life but a dream, then WAKE ME!'"
"Silence is closer We're passing ships in the night."
"Time wounds all the heals, as we fade out of view."
"I want God to come and take me home, 'cause I'm all alone in this crowd."
"Does anyone ever get this right? I feel no love."
"I survived I speak, I breathe I'm incomplete I'm alive, hooray! You're wrong again, 'cause I feel no love."
"I blow my load over the status-quo, here we go."
"Pieces were stolen from me Or dare I say, given away."
"It's only falling in love because you've hit the ground."
"With my toes on the edge, it's such a lovely view."
"Not everything that goes around comes back around, you know."
"Holding on too long is just a fear of letting go."
"One thing that is clear, it's all downhill from here."
"People say it is inappropriate for me to get arrested in uniform, but to me it is the validation of all that I signed up to do. I say what I had to go through is what tarnishes the uniform more than anything."
"(T)he idealized world Ayn Rand has created to facilitate her wishful theorizing has no more logical connection to our real one than a world in which an author has imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt. This is most obviously revealed by the fact that in Ayn Rand’s world, a man who self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably killing millions if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messiah figure rather than as a genocidal prick, which is what he’d be anywhere else."
"The failure mode of clever is “asshole.”"
"Many people believe geekdom is defined by a love of a thing, but I think - and my experience of geekdom bears on this thinking - that the true sign of a geek is a delight in sharing a thing. It's the major difference between a geek and a hipster, you know: When a hipster sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say "Oh, crap, now the wrong people like the thing I love." When a geek sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say "ZOMG YOU LOVE WHAT I LOVE COME WITH ME AND LET US LOVE IT TOGETHER.""
"The problem with aging is not that it’s one damn thing after another—it’s every damn thing, all at once, all the time. You can’t stop aging. Gene therapies and replacement organs and plastic surgery give it a good fight. But it catches up with you anyway. Get a new lung, and your heart blows a valve. Get a new heart, and your liver swells up to the size of an inflatable kiddie pool. Change out your liver, a stroke gives you a whack. That’s aging’s trump card; they still can’t replace brains."
"I had never seen so many old people in one place at one time. Neither had Harry. “It’s like Wednesday morning at the world’s biggest Denny’s,” he said."
"What’s the point of being in charge if you can’t indulge in pointless favoritism."
"The recruit was Sam McCain; in one of our lunch sessions I recalled Sarah O’Connell describing him as more mouth than brain. Unsurprisingly, he’d been in sales most of his life."
"In this universe, experience counts."
"I’m not sure I like their plan for converting us to their religion, seeing as it involves dying and all."
"“Obviously, the Rraey have some way to predict, with a high degree of accuracy, where our ships are going to skip. How do they do that?” “I don’t think you’re supposed to be able to,” I said. “That’s exactly right. But they do anyway. So, quite obviously, our model of how skipping works is wrong. Theory gets thrown out the window when observation proves it isn’t so. The question now is what is really going on.”"
"“I’m not insane, sir,” I said. “I have a finely calibrated sense of acceptable risk.”"
"“It’s Charlie’s soul,” he repeated. “Or more accurately, it’s a holographic representation of the dynamic electrical system that embodies the consciousness of Charles Boutin.”"
"Human technology was good, and weapon to weapon humans were as well-equipped as the vast majority of their adversaries. But the weapon that ultimately matters is the one behind the trigger."
"Those people you saw—the realborn—are born without a plan. They’re born because biology tells humans to make more humans; but it doesn’t consider what to do with them after that. Realborn go for years without the slightest clue what they’re going to do with themselves. From what I understand, some of them never actually figure it out. They just walk through life in a daze and then fall into their graves at the end of it. Sad. And inefficient."
"Rationality is not one of humanity’s strong points."
"Jared, allow me to share with you my philosophy of human beings. It can be summed up in four words: I like good people."
"“I didn’t say that,” Szilard said, in a tone that implied that perhaps he had."
"When power is within reach, few will wait patiently for it."
"No, it's not fair. You're in the wrong universe for fair."
"That’s physicists for you. Not exactly brimming over with poetry."
"“Harry!” Boutin said. “Nice guy. Didn’t know he was that smart. He hid it well.”"
"You are sufficiently like me to officially be interesting."
"“Every creature has fear,” Jared said. “Even the non-conscious ones.” “No,” Boutin said. “Every creature has a survival instinct. It looks like fear but it’s not the same thing. Fear isn’t the desire to avoid death or pain. Fear is rooted in the knowledge that what you recognize as yourself can cease to exist. Fear is existential."
"Imagine if every species named itself after its greatest flaw. We could name our species arrogance."
"She was temptable—which, if you believe in an all-powerful God, means God intentionally put temptation into Eve. Which seems like a dirty trick, if you ask me."
"Harvey was not especially introspective, but this didn’t mean he was stupid. He was moral, within his lights; he understood the value of subtlety even if he wasn’t much for it himself, and one of the reasons he could get away with being loud and obnoxious was that he was a fair stick at strategy and logistics. Give him a job and he’d do it, usually in the most entropy-producing way possible, yes, but also in a way that achieved exactly the aim it was supposed to. One of Harvey’s guiding lights in terms of strategies was simplicity; all things being equal, Harvey preferred the course of action that let him get into the middle of things and then just buckle down. When asked about it, Harvey called it his Occam’s razor theory of combat: The simplest way of kicking someone’s ass was usually the correct one."
"“Speaking of secrets, how are your negotiations with the Obin going?” Both Mattson and Robbins looked at Szilard warily. “There are no negotiations with the Obin,” Robbins said. “Of course not,” Szilard said. “You’re not negotiating with the Obin to continue Boutin’s consciousness program for them. And the Obin are not negotiating with us to knock down whichever of the Rraey or Eneshans is still left standing after their upcoming little war. No one’s negotiating with anyone about anything. And how are these non-negotiations not going?” Robbins looked at Mattson, who nodded. “They’re not going surprisingly well,” Robbins said. “We probably won’t reach an agreement in the next couple of days.” “How not wonderful,” Szilard said."
"“You and I don’t actually need to be here for this,” I said to the goat. The goat didn’t respond, but I could tell she agreed with me."
"Some people are just no good at not being in charge."
"Teenagers can be idiotic and stupid, but teenagers also model their behavior from the signals they get from adults."
"When you control communication, you can hide anything you want."
"“I don’t appreciate the suggestion that I’m acting irrationally,” he said. “Then don’t act irrationally,” Jane said, “because there will be consequences.”"
"Empires of conquest don’t last, Administrator Perry. They hollow out from within, from the greed of rulers and the endless appetite for war."
"“That’s a nice speech, Trujillo,” Rybicki said. “It doesn’t make it true.” “General, at the moment, I wouldn’t place you as an authority on truth.”"
"“Look,” I said. “Something that needs your attention. Over there. Away from here.”"
"“This is Major Perry’s house?” “I hope so,” I said. “All his stuff is here.”"
"When you’re a kid, a rural, agriculturally-based colony town is a lot of fun to grow up in. It’s life on a farm, with goats and chickens and fields of wheat and sorghum, harvest celebrations and winter festivals. There’s not an eight- or nine-year-old kid who’s been invented who doesn’t find all of that unspeakably fun. But then you become a teenager and you start thinking about everything you might possibly want to do with your life, and you look at the options available to you. And then all farms, goats and chickens—and all the same people you’ve known all your life and will know all your life—begin to look a little less than optimal for a total life experience. It’s all the same, of course. That’s the point. It’s you who’s changed."
"Eight-year-olds can switch into acquisition mode pretty quickly."
"Sometimes I don’t know if my life is complicated, or if it’s that I just think too much about things."
"I guess I was just hoping there might be a way to do things other than the way that ends up with everyone getting killed."
"“I have drinks,” Hanson said, coming up behind Duvall. “Why, Jimmy,” Duvall said. “That makes you my new favorite person.”"
"Who are you and what medications aren’t you taking?"
"“I have no idea what that means, Nick,” Paulson said. “Talk normal human to me.”"
"“I don’t think it would actually make you happier to be told you were right about this,” he said finally. “I don’t want to be happy,” Dahl said. “I just want to know.”"
"You don’t win by getting through all your life not having done anything."
"“Why ‘threep’? Why ‘clank’? Slang happens.”"
"Unlike Agents Vann and Shane here, who are being wholly disingenuous, you might be speaking out of genuine ignorance and not just your usual levels of casual obstructionism."
"“Do you believe that?” I asked. “It doesn’t matter whether I believe it or not,” Redhouse said."
"I was pretty certain my dad was not up to no good, running for senator notwithstanding."
"“I don’t know,” Davidson said. “Maybe it’s not about politics. Maybe these guys are just assholes.” “Seems the simplest explanation,” I said."
"You are better at small talk than I am. That is not always a compliment."
"He’s almost certainly planned for the contingency of being caught. He’s rich and he’s got more lawyers than some countries have people."
"That’s the difference between the old Scientology and the new: the brave new Scientology is all these beautiful buildings and real estate and no people."
"I had the No. 2 position from 1998 until I left. I answered to no one but David Miscavige, who was chairman of the board. I was the personal counselor for Tom Cruise, Lisa Marie Presley, John Travolta and Kirstie Alley."
"I did a lot of soul-searching before going public. I was concerned there might be some type of Waco or Jonestown event."
"I love Scientology. But there needs to be a differentiation between the Church of Scientology and the philosophy."
"I never doubt the gains that I got from Scientolog. I've never doubted the effectiveness of auditing. But I believe there's a real problem with the Church. The core poison is greed. I look at Scientology, and I think it's being destroyed by this quest for the buck."
"Marty Rathbun and Mike Rinder, the highest-ranking executives to leave the church, are speaking out for the first time."
"That Rathbun and Rinder are speaking out is a stunning reversal because they were among Miscavige's closest associates, Haldeman and Ehrlichman to his Nixon. Now they provide an unprecedented look inside the upper reaches of the tightly controlled organization."
"Marty Rathbun, who was once Mr. Miscavige’s top lieutenant, is now one of the church’s top detractors."
"Rathbun, a 55-year-old from California who spent 27 years in the church and rose to the rank of inspector general of the Religious Technology Center—a position directly under Miscavige—before leaving in 2004."
"Many aspects of Marty's story are disputed by the Church, which calls him a liar, a criminal, and an apostate. But the verifiable facts are as follows: he was a fully-paid-up Scientologist for 27 years, before quitting in 2004. For much of this time, he was a high-ranking executive in the Church, helping steer some of its most sensitive legal campaigns. He was also acquainted with many celebrity members, including Kirstie Alley, John Travolta, and Tom Cruise."
"Marty has become one of the Church's most public detractors, and has appeared in that guise on virtually every major US news network."
"He speaks their language. He's not abandoned Hubbard. He's not given up on the faith. He's just worn down. And the people he's speaking to are also worn down. They are exhausted with requests for donations. Because of that, he reaches deep inside the organisation."
"Marty presents himself as a true believer. He still believes in the faith, but he's trying to reform it. He sees himself as a Martin Luther figure."
"Leaving felt like jumping out of an aeroplane with no parachute. But after two weeks at Marty's place I got my feet back under me. He put me in touch with a community of former Church members. One even offered me a job. It's been two years since then; I've now got a home, a wife, and a wonderful six-month-old daughter."
"When I left Scientology, I lost every friend I ha. Then I went to see Marty. He gave me certainty, gave me hope, and made me realise I wasn't alone. He picked up the broken pieces of my life and put them back together."
"Reading it [Rathbun's blog] had a therapeutic effect. It made me realise that I wasn't the only one with doubts. He reflected exactly what I was thinking."
"Marty's blog is a forum for information. That's what makes it such a threat. He's not trying to be a leader of men, or take over the Church, or storm the castle walls. He's just a guy on the outside who wants to speak his mind."
"We have an economy where we steal the future, sell it in the present, and call it GDP [gross domestic product]."
"The application of planned obsolescence to thought itself has the same merit as its application to consumer goods; the new is not only shoddier than the old, it fuels an obsolete social system that staves off its replacement by manufacturing the illusion that it is perpetually new."
"The free market in ideas has never been free, but always a market. To undo this necessitates not commissars and censors but critical intelligence loyal to an objective notion of truth. If there is a repressive tolerance, then there is also a liberating intolerance."
"Today's banalities apparently gain in profundity if one states that the wisdom of the past, for all its virtues, belongs to the past. The arrogance of those who come later preens itself with the notion that the past is dead and gone. … The modern mind can no longer think thought, only can locate it in time and space. The activity of thinking decays to the passivity of classifying."
"In the name of a new theory past theory is declared honorable but feeble; one can lay aside Freud and Marx—or appreciate their limitations—and pick up the latest at the drive-in window of thought."
"Society has lost its memory, and with it, its mind. The inability or refusal to think back takes its toll in the inability to think."
"The general loss of memory is not to be explained solely psychologically; it is not simply childhood amnesia. Rather it is social amnesia—memory driven out of mind by the social and economic dynamic of this society."
"Exactly because the past is forgotten, it rules unchallenged; to be transcended it must first be remembered."
"The original Marxist notion of ideology was conveniently forgotten because it inconveniently did not exempt common sense and empiricism from the charge of ideology."
"The sundering of a scientific from a poetic truth is the primal mark of the administrative mind."
"In accepting the bourgeois form of reason as Reason itself, Roszak does his bit to perpetuate its reign."
"Freud’s link to a Hegelian tradition—with which he otherwise shares little—is in the deliberate renunciation of common sense. “A person who professes to believe in commonsense psychology,” Freud is reported saying once, “and who thinks psychoanalysis is ‘far-fetched’ can certainly have no understanding of it, for it is common sense which produces all the ills we have to cure.”"
"The Adlerians, in the name of “individual psychology,” take the side of society against the individual. … Adler’s later thought succumbs to the worst of his earlier banalization. It is conventional, practical, and moralistic. “Our science … is based on common sense.” Common sense, the half-truths of a deceitful society, is honored as the honest truths of a frank world."
"[Freud’s] concepts are radical in their pursuit of society where it allegedly does not exist: in the privacy of the individual. Freud undid the primal bourgeois distinction between private and public, the individual and society. … Freud exposed the lie that subject was inviolate; he showed that at every point is was violated."
"No matter how heretical the neo- and post-Freudians imagined they were in theorizing about the “values,” “insecurities,” “goals” of the individual, they were safely following the official ideology of the private and autonomous individual and consumer."
"Critical theory … values Freud as a non-ideological thinker and theoretician of contradictions—contradictions which his successors sought to escape and mask. … "The greatness of Freud,” wrote Adorno, "consists in that, like all great bourgeois thinkers, he left standing undissolved such contradictions and disdained the assertion of pretended harmony where the thing itself is contradictory. He revealed the antagonistic character of the social reality." … A parallel can be established between Marx’s judgment on Ricardo and the post-Ricardians. To Marx, Ricardo was the classic and best representative of bourgeois economics since he articulated the contradictions of bourgeois society without glossing them over."
"Freudian concepts exposed the fraud of the existence of the “individual.” To be absolutely clear here: the Freudian concepts expose the fraud, not so as to perpetuate it, but undo it. That is, unlike the mechanical behaviorists, the point was not to prove that the individual was an illusion; rather it was to show to what extent the individual did not yet exist. To critical theory, psychoanalysis demonstrates the degree to which the individual is de-individualized by society."
"Civilization is a scar tissue from a past of violence and destruction."
"The individual, before it can determine itself, is determined by the relations in which it is enmeshed. “It is a fellow-being before it is a being.”"
"The story of the rise, fall, and forgetting of the individual is the tale of the rise, fall, and repression of psychoanalysis."
"The child ego, once nurtured and scarred by the family is no longer nurtured but simply integrated."
"As Adorno wrote of Anna Freud’s book, it evinces “the reduction of psychoanalysis to a conformist interpretation of the reality principle.”"
"“When material needs are largely satisfied,” writes Carl Rogers, “as they tend to be for many people in this affluent society, individuals are turning to the psychological world, groping for a greater degree of authenticity and fulfillment.” The clear distinction between material and psychic needs is already the mystification; it capitulates to the ideology of the affluent society which affirms the material structure is sound, conceding only that some psychic and spiritual values might be lacking. Exactly this distinction sets up “authenticity” and “fulfillment” as so many more commodities for the shopper. Rather it is the fissure itself which is the source of the ills—between work and “free” time, material structure and psychological “world,” producers and consumers."
"“Rebelling acts as a substitute for the more difficult process of struggling through to one’s own autonomy, to new beliefs,” writes Rollo May, as if one could struggle through to one’s own identity without rebelling."
"The post-Freudians … have fallen victim to the ravages of the intellectual division of labor."
"The professional philosopher in keen competition with the natural scientist resolves to be more certain about less."
"To fasten on the facts while forgetting the social content is to fall prey to a mystifying immediacy. In an antagonistic society, appearance and essence, immediacy and mediacy, diverge; things are not what they seem to be."
"Dialectical logic is loyal to the contradictions, not by the reasoning of “on the one hand and the other” but by tracing the contradictions to their fractured source."
"As Comte wrote, the task of positivism was to “imbue the people with the feeling that … no political change is of real importance.” … As Marx wrote, to it “everything that exists is an authority.”"
"The inner connection between a positivism of numbers and quantities and one of human values and qualities is the excision of a critical distance and theory. Both surrender to different faces of reality—its facts or its ideology—and both stay clear and clean of antagonisms and contradictions."
"The concept of “human existence” suggests an abstract human condition; “class existence” indicts bad conditions. The former suggests a nonexistent egalitarianism, as if master and slave, owner and worker, bomber and bombed all participate in the same universal abstraction. … The human condition for the rich is the inhuman one for the impoverished."
"What must be acknowledged, for example the prevalence of anxiety, is grafted onto man’s essence as if it grew there. Such is the tried and tested method of the apologist: what is social in origin is presented as natural."
"Existentialism is bourgeois ideology in the hour of its defeat."
"The laws of social development are not identical with the laws in the natural sciences. The content of the social laws is not nature but second nature: coagulated history. They are manmade, but they also make men; they are dialectical, at once subject and object."
"[Carl] Rogers’s Encounter Groups … is copy for the campaign of self-manipulation in an age of mass manipulation. … The notion here is simple: the real person is locked within the artificial, the role, and needs a little encouragement to step out into the fresh air. As with the neo-Freudians, society is conceived as an external factor, an outside force acting on the individual, but not decisively casting the individual from without and from within. The mechanical conception, severing within and without, and presupposing that only the outside is prey to social forces, is assumed or stated throughout the post-Freudian writings."
"The neat division between roles and real selves reduces society to a masquerade party. Yet not even plastic surgery can heal the psychic disfigurements. The social evil reaches into the living fibers; people not only assume roles, they are roles."
"Rat and behavioral psychology … mirror the actual inhumanity of reality. Rat psychology is human psychology where a total society has trained human beings to be creatures of stimulus and response, i.e. rats. “Insofar as the hardening of society has reduced men more and more to objects,” wrote Adorno, “methods which convey this are no sacrilege. … The method serves freedom in that it wordlessly testifies to the prevailing unfreedom.” Or, as Adorno and Horkheimer wrote in another context: “The usual objection that empirical social research is too mechanical, too crude, and too unspiritual [ungeistig] shifts the responsibility from that which science is investigating to science itself.” … The idealistic misconception of … behavioral methods … shifts the evil from the social conditions that coerce men and women into standardized roles onto the social science that is merely registering these conditions."
"Skinner … decrees … the abolition of freedom by way of behavior modification and a souped-up environment, in the name of a new “scientific” value—survival. The irony is that freedom and individuality have only existed in their mangled bourgeois form; to propose junking them in the name of survival is to propose the very society we now have, one that subsists exactly by an ethos of survival, paying lip service to freedom and the individual while rewarding the victors and punishing the victims. Freedom and individuality have never been more than adornments for an ugly environment of survival of the fittest."
"Instead of ideologically synchronizing contradictions, or assigning them to separate halls of the academy, critical theory seeks to articulate them."
"Those seeking to work out the relationship between Marxism and psychoanalysis have not been immune to the intellectual division of labor that severs the life nerve of dialectical thought."
"The left once dismissed the market as exploitative; it now honors the market as rational and humane. The left once disdained mass culture as exploitative; now it celebrates it as rebellious. The left once honored independent intellectuals as courageous; now it sneers at them as elitist."
"Once upon a time leftists and radicals talked of liberation or the abolition of work. Now the talk is about full employment."
"Though the ancient world understood that work was a curse, modern industrial society spreads its gospel. The working class, Lafargue hopelessly hoped, must reject the work fetish."
"Over the years and against conventional wisdom, utopians sustained a vision of life beyond the market. … Georg Lukács set forth a theory of the “old and new culture” in which he argued that the socialist economy was not the goal; it was simply a precondition for humanity to advance to a new and humane culture. Most radicals do not understand that political power and economic reorganization is not the end-all, stated Lukács. The goal is not a new economic order, but freedom from an obsession with economics."
"The disdain for culture expressed by Johst and Fanon is not identical, however. Both despise the deceit of culture, but for opposite reasons. For Johst, culture is in itself a fraud, the cheap talk of weaklings; for Fanon, culture deceives by reneging on its promises. Johst and the Nazis hated culture itself; Fanon hated its hypocrisy, a very different notion."
"Multiculturalism relies on an intellectual rout, the refusal or inability to address what makes up a culture."
"What does cultural pluralism signify in the absence of economic pluralism? Perhaps the question seems meaningless. Yet the apparent lack of meaning signals the intellectual retreat. The economic structure of society—call it advanced industrial society or capitalism or the market economy—stands as the invariant; few can imagine a different economic project. The silent agreement says much about multiculturalism. No divergent political or economic vision animates cultural diversity. From the most militant Afrocentrism to the most ardent feminists, all quarters subscribe to very similar beliefs about work, equality and success. The secret of cultural diversity is its political and economic uniformity. The future looks like the present with more options. Multiculturalism spells the end of utopia."
"David Bromwich has wondered whether intellectuals today would oppose an economic slavery if it lacked any racial or cultural dimension."
"Endless discussions of multiculturalism proceed from the unsubstantiated assumption that numerous distinct “cultures” constitute American society. Only a few historians or observers even consider the possibility that the opposite may be true: that the world and the United States are relentlessly becoming more culturally uniform, not diverse."
"No group is able, and few are willing, to stand up to the potent homogenizing forces of advanced industrial society. All Americans, from African Americans to Greek Americans, buy the same goods, look at the same movies and television, pursue the same activities and have—more or less—the same desires for success."
"Multiculturalism is not the opposite of assimilation, but its product."
"After a while the other students in class began to notice I had become Ms. Burnett's favorite, but no one resented me for it. I was the shy, quiet kid in the back who had arrived from México a few years before and who turned out to be an accomplished speller. I became the school Spelling Bee champion, beating out the eighth graders as well, with the word “lapidary.”"
"Most memorable was the day before the mass, at confession."
"Their beloved priest must now wander for all eternity chained to this earthly purgatory—a warning to all that God forgives only that which is confessed to Him through true repentance and atonement. I walked down the church steps, keeping my secret stitched to my tongue. After the ceremony I would have no one to answer for my yearnings but myself, even if after my death I would have to lag behind that priest until the end of days, a pair of branded souls dragging the heavy burdens of their sins, like cows roaming the foggiest dawns, the first guiding the second with its dangling rosary of a tail."
"My four years of high school were spent locked up inside “el campo.” I became a voracious reader and television-watcher, keeping to myself at such alarming extremes that I became invisible. My invisibility provided the perfect protection against harm of any sort. I walked to and from school past the gangsters as silently as a breeze, so disassociated from their tattoos and lingo that even they couldn't find a place for me in their lines of vision."
"I sought out clandestine affairs of my own, which wasn't hard in a Mexican community, where it's possible to be a fag and not a fag. Men satisfy their urges secretly, confident that their public sexuality displaces any suspicion or speculation about their private one."
"I had flings with married men or men with girlfriends, with men who had children, sometimes as old as I was. They went to church on Sunday, drank beer, and eyed the teenage girls in gym shorts. They appreciated a good woman-on-woman porno. They showed me photographs of their fiancées and sent me wedding invitations."
"In high school the approaching graduation was stirring up excitement among the seniors. I didn't care much for any of it since I couldn't afford any of the mementoes or activities offered for completing the four years. I had not attended the prom or the senior trip, had not purchased a class ring or letterman's jacket or the yearbook—had not even taken my senior portrait—and I wasn't about to attend the ceremony we had been rehearsing all week."
"I know what he means: the taste of language that is only spoken and never written because the speaker most likely doesn't read or write. My father has it, too."
"Funerals in México are also about drowning sorrow with liquor. The coffee is spiked with tequila"
"I think, How clever time works, overlapping people's lives at certain stages, and as some eyes are waking up, others are already closing, securing the continuity of the world. My mother and I were connected for twelve years. She also lived during a time I didn't exist. And I, in turn, must now keep living when she does not. And yet my father, who still shares the same wheel of time, is more like my parallel line."
"This is not for wimps. You have to keep a sense of humor. You have to develop stamina because there's going to be tough days."
"In my view there can be no affirmative action without segregation-nor any end to the segregation if our names must be kept on separate lists. I'd like to propose instead a simple scenario: a fair job market where employment is commensurate with ability regardless of gender, racial or ethnic background. I make a pitch, they like my story, I get the job. Why not ?"
"My wife is a painter, and a very good one... and we’ve been working together for, oh, twelve years now, I guess...and at first I used to help and criticize things she was doing, and then she would help and criticize things I was doing, and we would... pitch in and do all the jiggering for each other and get it as people do... and then, gradually, things begin to sort of, you know, entropy... things began to get shuffled, and pretty soon you didn’t know, sort of, where one started and the other ended, and anything that we’ve looked at or talked about here, you know, I say that I’m doing it, but actually, she’s doing it just as much as I am, only she sort of goes under the same corporate type name..."
"I have never been forced to accept compromises but I have willingly accepted constraints."
"Eventually everything connects - people, ideas, objects... the quality of the connections is the key to quality per se."
"The details are not the details. These make the design."
"One could describe Design as a plan for arranging elements to accomplish a particular purpose."
"[Design is] an expression of purpose. It may, if it is good enough, later be judged as art."
"Design may be a solution to some industrial problems."
"Q: Does the creation of Design admit constraint? Design depends largely on constraints. Q: What constraints? The sum of all constraints. Here is one of the few effective keys to the Design problem: the ability of the Designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible; his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints. Constraints of price, of size, of strength, of balance, of surface, of time, and so forth. Each problem has its own peculiar list."
"Choose your corner, pick away at it carefully, intensely and to the best of your ability and that way you might change the world."
"Designers should only innovate as a last resort."
"When I used my real name, all of a sudden there was a lot of commentary. 'Oh, you're a woman' or 'You can't really be a woman' or 'You don't write like a woman.' Or all of a sudden my arguments were not taken as seriously or were judged as hysterical or emotional.... So I got much more interested in why this was happening."
"Wikipedia needs to recruit women, yes, but, more importantly, it needs to recruit feminists. And feminists can be of any gender."
"When professors teach, they teach what they love. What they are experts in. What it is easy for them to learn. Thus, it is easy to forget what it is like to be the student who struggles in the classroom."
"Teachers frequently talk about moments in which they became students again and how much that made them better teachers. For me, there has been no better way to improve my teaching, specifically my teaching in the composition classroom, than to take up a subject at which I am abysmal."
"For me, one of the most empowering outcomes of my year of climbing has been the new narrative I can tell about myself. I am no longer “Adrianne: scholar, book lover, pianist, and Wikipedian”. I am now “Adrianne: scholar, book lover, pianist, Wikipedian, and rock climber”."
"Suddenly I realized, I used to be the person saying how crazy or impossible such feats were and now I was the one doing them. I had radically switched subject positions in a way I did not think possible for myself. That, I realized, is what I want my students to experience - that radical switch and growth"
"If a piece of information is wrong or misrepresented on Wikipedia, it affects the way the entire world sees that topic."
"We definitely wanna increase the number of women. But just increasing the number of women isn’t necessarily going to– improve the– the fact that content on Wikipedia itself is skewed."
"So I think one thing that Wikipedia has to do as a culture is ask itself, 'Are we willing– to be this– this self-selecting– and– and be this small?' We can have many more people if we’re willing to be a more welcoming community."
"So in one respect, I would say that we need to add the voice of feminists to Wikipedia who are going to talk about– women as underrepresented groups."
"I know something about how the first encyclopedias were developed in the 18th century. And those encyclopedias almost completely excluded the history of women. And it’s one argument that we make all the time."
"When we’re talking both to Wikipedians and people outside of Wikipedia, we say, 'Look, if we want to include all of these other narratives besides the typical narrative that we usually tell of dead white men, we’ve gotta get it in there now.'"
"We brought in an innovative group of young digital humanists led by Adrianne Wadewitz."
"When Wadewitz showed Wikipedia's main page to her class one day, she found that the women featured were largely sexualised or portrayed as victims of a crime, while people of colour were represented as perpetrators of a crime."
"Adrianne Wadewitz exemplifies the early-career professional HASTAC Scholars is designed to mentor . . . because she represents the best of academe."
"Adrianne Wadewitz is a model of the future we all want for our profession, for our students, for our society."
"It is a huge loss for Wikipedia. She may have been our single biggest contributor on these topics — female authors, women’s history."
"Ms. Wadewitz’s interest in rock climbing played out on Wikipedia. Her last editing was to improve an article about Steph Davis, a prominent female climber and wingsuit flier. In Ms. Wadewitz’s hands, the article became filled with personal details, spectacular photos, a highlighted quotation and 25 footnotes."
"Wadewitz was probably best known as a longtime Wikipedia editor. She edited her first entry in 2004, and went on to create pages for female writers, scholars, and their works, editing nearly 50,000 posts in total"
"If you've ever used the crowd-sourced encyclopedia to find information on female writers (especially those from Dr. Wadewitz's area of expertise), it's likely that you've run into her work."
"Wadewitz used Wikipedia as a way to spread and improve knowledge on the period she focused, adding to biographies of women writers and thinkers. Wadewitz made her first edit on July 18, 2004, and over the course of her career made approximately 49,000 edits."
"Unlike the Wikipedia editor stereotype, Wadewitz was not a young male who was tech-obsessed. Still she found Wikipedia appealing as a way to spread her academic knowledge, which was sometimes seen by few, whereas her encyclopedic entries might be read by millions."
"While nearly all of us use the Internet to fact check, learn about topics and read the news, some of us contribute more than others to the knowledge pool. Adrianne Wadewitz was one such woman."
"Wadewitz was an educator who did not live to make money from her knowledge. Instead, she chose to spread her knowledge as freely as possible for the good of readers everywhere."
"One of the things about Adrianne I was always grateful for was that she always wanted to learn and experience more things in the world. She was very thoughtful and interested. She loved literature and reading."
"She really was a person who cared very much about others. She worked for justice and inclusion and making sure that women's voices were heard. She wasn't willing to just accept the world as we were told it was, but worked to help make it more beautiful. I am very grateful for her bringing that into my life."
"Dr. Wadewitz wrote and edited extensively on Wikipedia during the final 10 years of her life, contributing 36 featured articles and more than 49,000 edits."
"Legendary in the Wikipedia world, Wadewitz had more than 50,000 'edits' or contributions to her credit. She also was the author of 36 'featured' articles, the highest distinction bestowed by other Wikipedians based on accuracy, fairness, style and comprehensiveness."
"Wadewitz eventually came out as a Wikipedian, the term the encyclopedia uses to describe the tens of thousands of volunteers who write and edit its pages. A rarity as a woman in the male-centric Wikipedia universe, she became one of its most valued and prolific contributors as well as a force for diversifying its ranks and demystifying its inner workings."
"She was one of the top 10 editors in terms of producing a lot of high-quality content. Wikipedia is full of brilliant, talented people. She really stood out."
"Archivists take Wikipedia with a grain of salt. You think there's a troll behind the screen and don't know what's going on, what's the accountability. She walked us through this great unknown, Wikipedia land. She put us at ease."
"The 37-year-old was remarkable not just for Wadewitz’ Wikipedia contributions, but for her focus on chronicling the overwhelmingly under-researched roles played by women in history and present-day life."
"Wadewitz, a US academic, became one of the most prolific and influential editors of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia."
"Wadewitz said to attract more women editors, attitudes within the Wikipedia community need to change. This became clear when she revealed her gender, after writing anonymously for several years."
"Girl, you can tell everybody Yeah, you can tell everybody Go ahead and tell everybody Reveal the man, I'm the man, I'm the man Yes, I am, yes, I am, yes, I am Reveal the man, I'm the man, I'm the man"
"I believe every lie that I ever told Paid for every heart that I ever stoll I paid my cause and I didn't fold Well, it ain't that hard when you got soul (This is my world) Somewhere I heard that life is a test I been though the worst but still I give my best yeah"
"The brain has this wonderful property — you can go through and shoot out every tenth neuron and never miss them."
"Listen to the technology; find out what it's telling you."
"The quantum world is a world of waves, not particles. So we have to think of electron waves and proton waves and so on. Matter is 'incoherent' when all its waves have a different wavelength, implying a different momentum. On the other hand, if you take a pure quantum system – the electrons in a superconducting magnet, or the atoms in a laser – they are all in phase with one another, and they demonstrate the wave nature of matter on a large scale. Then you can see quite visibly what matter is down at its heart."
"If I'm elected, I may have to sign your death warrants."
"This is Claude Kirk, Governor of Florida. Do you read my press? Then you know that I'm a tree-shakin' son of a bitch"
"Now, therefore, I Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, in consideration of the premises, do hereby release the State of California, from any and all claims for relief or damages against said State, founded upon or growing out of anything connected with the location or removal of the Seat of Government at or from the city of Vallejo. hey world"
"I compare that old relic with myself... ruins and dilapidation. What a difference between then and now. Then, youth, strength and riches; now age, weakness and poverty."
"The running up of this queer flag caused much fear to the families of the Californians established in the neighborhood of Sonoma, Petaluma, and San Rafael, for they realized that the instigators of the uprising that had disturbed the tranquility of the frontier had made up their minds to rule, come what might, and, as the rumor had been spread far and wide that Ide and his associates had raised the bear flag in order to enjoy complete liberty and not be obliged to any civilized governments, the ranchers, who would have remained unperturbed should the American flag have been run up in Sonoma and who would have considered it as the harbinger of a period of progress and enlightenment, seized their machetes and guns and fled to the woods, determined to await a propitious moment for getting rid of the disturbers of the peace. Strange to relate, the first victim that the ranchers sacrificed was the painter of the "Bear Flag," young Thomas Cowie..."
"Some years ago (in 1868) when I was in Monterey, my friend, David Spence, showed me a book entitled “History of California,” written by an author of recognized merit by the name of Franklin Tuthill, and called my attention to that part of the gentlemans narrative where he expresses the assurance that the guerrilla men whom Captain Fremont sent in pursuit of the Californian, Joaquin de la Torre, took nine field pieces from the latter. I could not help but be surprised when I read such a story, for I know for a fact that Captain de la Torre had only thirty cavalrymen under his command who as their only weapons carried a lance, carbine, saber and pistol. I think that Mr. Tuthill would have done better if, instead of inventing the capture of nine cannon, he had devoted a few lines to describing the vandal-like manner in which the “Bear” soldiers sacked the Olompalí Rancho and maltreated the eighty year old Damaso Rodriguez... whom they beat so badly as to cause his death in the presence of his daughters and granddaughters. Filled with dismay, they gathered into their arms the body of the venerable old man who had fallen as a victim of the thirst for blood that was the prime mover of the guerrilla men headed by Mr. Ford."
"I have spared no effort to establish upon a solid and enduring basis those sentiments of union and concord which are so indispensible for the progress and advancement of all those who dwell in my native land, and, so long as I live, I propose to use all the means at my command to see to it that both races cast a stigma upon the disagreeable events that took place on the Sonoma frontier in 1846. If before I pass on to render an account of my acts to the Supreme Creator, I succeed in being a witness to a reconciliation between victor and vanquished, conquerors and conquered, I shall die with the conviction of not having striven in vain. In bringing this chapter to a close, I will remark that, if the men who hoisted the “Bear Flag” had raised the flag that Washington sanctified by his abnegation and patriotism, there would have been no war on the Sonoma frontier, for all our minds were prepared to give a brotherly embrace to the sons of the Great Republic, whose enterprising spirit had filled us with admiration. Ill-advisedly, however, as some say, or dominated by a desire to rule without let or hindrance, as others say, they placed themselves under the shelter of a flag that pictured a bear, an animal that we took as the emblem of rapine and force. This mistake was the cause of all the trouble, for when the Californians saw parties of men running over their plains and forests under the “Bear Flag,” they thought that they were dealing with robbers and took the steps they thought most effective for the protection of their lives and property."
"I cannot, gentlemen, coincide with the military and civil functionaries who have advocated the cession of our country to France or England. It is most true that to rely longer upon Mexico to govern and defend us would be idle and absurd. To this extent I fully agree with my colleagues. It is also true that we possess a noble country, every way calculated, from position and resources, to become great and powerful. For that very reason I would not have her a mere dependency on a foreign monarchy, naturally alien, or at least indifferent to our interests and our welfare. It is not to be denied that feeble nations have in former times thrown themselves upon the protection of their powerful neighbors. The Britons invoked the aid of the warlike Saxons and fell an easy prey to their protectors, who seized their lands and treated them like slaves. Long before that time, feeble and distracted provinces had appealed for aid to the all-conquering arms of imperial Rome, and they were at the time protected and subjugated by their grasping ally. Even could we tolerate the idea of dependence, ought we to go to distant Europe for a master? What possible sympathy could exist between us and a nation separated from us by two vast oceans? But waiving this insuperable objection, how could we endure to come under the dominion of a monarchy? For although others speak lightly of a form of government, as a freeman I cannot do so. We are republicans—badly governed and badly situated as we are—still we are all, in sentiment, republicans. So far as we are governed at all, we at least do profess to be self-governed. Who, then, that possesses true patriotism will consent to subject himself and his children to the caprices of a foreign king and his official minions? But, it is asked, if we do not throw ourselves upon the protection of France and England, what shall we do? I do not come here to support the existing order of things, but I come prepared to propose instant and effective action to extricate our country from her present forlorn condition. My opinion is made up that we must persevere in throwing off the galling yoke of Mexico, and proclaim our independence of her forever. We have endured her official cormorants and her villainous soldiery until we can endure no longer. All will probably agree with me that we ought at once to rid ourselves of what may remain of Mexican domination. But some profess to doubt our ability to maintain our position. To my mind there comes no doubt. Look at Texas and see how long she withstood the power of united Mexico. The resources of Texas were not to be compared with ours, and she was much nearer to her enemy than we are. Our position is so remote, either by land or sea, that we are in no danger from Mexican invasion. Why then should we hesitate to assert our independence? We have indeed taken the first step by electing our own governor, but another remains to be taken. I will mention it plainly and distinctly—it is annexation to the United States. In contemplating this consummation of our destiny, I feel nothing but pleasure, and I ask you to share it. Discard old prejudices, discard old customs, and prepare for the glorious change that awaits our country. Why should we shrink from incorporating ourselves with the happiest and freest nation in the world, destined soon to be the most wealthy and powerful? Why should we go abroad for protection when this great nation is our adjoining neighbor? When we join our fortunes to hers, we shall not become subjects, but fellow citizens possessing all the rights of the people of the United States, and choosing our own federal and local rulers. We shall have a stable government and just laws. California will grow strong and flourish, and her people will be prosperous, happy and free. Look not, therefore, with jealousy upon the hardy pioneers who scale our mountains and cultivate our unoccupied plains, but rather welcome them as brothers, who come to share with us a common destiny."
"[December, 1839:] We had now finished all our business at this port, and it being Sunday, we unmoored ship and got under way, firing a salute to the Russian brig, and another to the presidio, which were both answered. The commandante of the presidio, Don Guadalupe Vallejo, a young man, and the most popular, among the Americans and English, of any man in California, was on board when we got under way. He spoke English very well, and was suspected of being favorably inclined to foreigners."
"[December, 1859:] On board the steamer, found Mr. Edward Stanley, formerly member of Congress from North Carolina, who became my companion for the greater part of my trip. I also met—a revival on the spot of an acquaintance of twenty years ago—Don Guadalupe Vallejo; I may say acquaintance, for although I was then before the mast, he knew my story, and, as he spoke English well, used to hold many conversations with me, when in the boat or on shore. He received me with true earnestness, and would not hear of my passing his estate without visiting him. He reminded me of a remark I made to him once, when pulling him ashore in the boat, when he was commandante at the Presidio. I learned that the two Vallejos, Guadalupe and Salvador, owned, at an early time, nearly all Napa and Sonoma, having princely estates. But they have not much left. They were nearly ruined by their bargain with the State, that they would put up the public buildings if the Capital should be placed at Vallejo, then a town of some promise. They spent $l00,000, the Capital was moved there, and in two years removed to San José on another contract. The town fell to pieces, and the houses, chiefly wooden, were taken down and removed. I accepted the old gentleman's invitation so far as to stop at Vallejo to breakfast."
"By the mid-1840s... 3,000 American settlers had filed... into California's Sacramento Valley. The commander of all Mexican troops in northern California, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, begged Mexico City for the soldiers he knew would be necessary to keep the Americans out."
"No one had been more accommodating to the Americans than Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo."
"Even Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo was betrayed by his American friends: law suits and an invasion of squatters reduced his sprawling estate from a quarter of a million acres to fewer than 300."
"During his long life, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo had fought California Indians on behalf of Spain, commanded Californio troops for Mexico, and welcomed the Americans to the Pacific Coast."
"During the 1830s. Vallejo was a leader in the movement to break from Mexico and make California a separate republic. ...Ironically, he was the first man arrested during the semi-staged Bear Flag Revolt. Vallejo's account of that escapade comes from a massive history he began to compose during the 1860s.... completing his Historical and Personal Memories Relating to Alta California in 1875."
"On June 14, 1846 when the California Republic was created, the Mexican military fort at Sonoma was taken by surprise. Among those secured as prisoners were three of the highest officers in the Mexican army,—General Guadalupe Mariano Vallejo, Colonel Victor Prudon (Prudhomme), and Captain Salvador Vallejo. Others taken prisoners were Jacob P. Leese, an American then acting private secretary to General Vallejo, all the lesser military officers, and a few soldiers. The military supplies captured included eight field pieces, two hundred stands of arms, a great quantity of grapeshot, and less than one hundred pounds of powder. General Vallejo requested to be taken into the presence of Colonel John C. Frémont, of the American Army, but the latter declined to receive the prisoners, there being no suitable accommodations, so they were taken to Sutter Fort at Sacramento. General Manuel Castro, of the Mexican army, who was a conspicuous character, was appreciably affected by the loss of General Vallejo, Colonel Prudon and Captain Vallejo, as well as the arms and ammunition taken at Sonoma."
"Mexico, rent with internal strife, with a navy worthy of the name, was impotent to defend its distant provinces from foreign seizure. Therefore, it became evident to clear-thinking Californians that it was wise to forestall a possible conquest to some formidable maritime power. For this purpose a meeting was held at Monterey just before the Mexican War, to consider the problem. Most Californians present favored an alliance with England, two or three advocated Russia, while General Vallejo spoke eloquently in favor of union with the United States."
"Whereas, the Legislature of the State of California, on the 4th of February, 1853, passed an Act to remove the Seat of Government from the city of Vallejo to the city of Benicia, by the second section whereof, the said Mariano G. Vallejo was released from the performance of his said bond, upon condition of his releasing, by good and sufficient release, to be approved by the Attorney General of said State, any and all claims for relief and damages against the State of California, founded upon or growing out of anything connected with the location or removal of the Seat of Government at or from Vallejo."
"In 1835, the party at whose head was Santa Anna determined to remodel the Mexican republic, and centralize the government, thereby destroying, in a great measure, the federal constitution of 1824. But no time was allowed him to make the necessary changes and their exact nature therefore was never known; for in the following year, 1836, by one of the usual coups d' état, and while he himself had been defeated and taken prisoner by the Texans, another party opposed to his general views of policy came into power. This party, however, agreed with the previous administration on the necessity or propriety of remodelling the federal system. The old constitution was therefore abolished, and a new one adopted. By this change, the separate states were deprived of many of their former prerogatives, and nearly the whole rights and duties of government were confined to the general Congress and executive. This sweeping alteration of the federal constitution was opposed in many parts of the republic, and in no quarter more vigorously than in California. The people of Monterey rose en masse, and at once declared themselves independent until the federal constitution was re-adopted... Those of the northern districts were determined henceforward, and for ever, to sever the connection with the other States and to stand alone free and independent of Mexican domination. ...California and Mexico—the local and general governments—each party appealed to the patriotism of the people in support of their cause. Señor Don Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo... was appointed commandante-general on the part of the Californians, and forthwith the whole train of congressional officials was forcibly expelled from office and the government troops disbanded, and before long transported to the Mexican territories. The Mexicans threatened an expedition to chastise the rebels, and recall them to repentance and duty; while the Californians defied their menaces, and resolved to abide the consequences of their first steps to freedom. ... the rebels were so far away, and the opposite factions in Mexico had so many more pressing matters to settle among themselves at home, somehow all about California appeared to be forgotten, and it was left, for a time, to any constitution, or none at all, and anarchy, just as its people pleased. About the end of July, 1837, the excitement among the Californians had subsided so far, that they then quietly accepted the new Mexican constitution without a murmur, and voluntarily swore allegiance to it."
"On the 6th of November, 1836, the Californians, assisted by foreigners under Captain Graham, an American, and Captain [John] Coppinger, an Englishman, revolted against Gutierrez; and the latter was forced to leave the country, with all his officers, except those who took part in favor of the natives, and wished to remain. Don Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo played an important rôle in this revolution, and became commander of the forces; while his nephew, Don Juan Bautista Alvarado, was made civil governor. These positions they held until the arrival of Micheltorena in 1842. Early in 1845, Micheltorena was sent away by the Californians, after forming a sort of treaty with them (he being desirous to proceed to Mexico), leaving José Castro with the military command. Pío Pico, who was again the senior member of the Junta department, then became governor. These two continued in power, as military and civil heads respectively, until the Americans took possession of the country."
"The undersigned, Constitutional Governor of the Department of the Californias, has the deep mortification to make known to Mr. Thomas 0. Larkin, Consul of the United States of North America, that he has been greatly surprised in being notified by official communications of the General Commandancia of this Department and the Prefecture of the Second District, that a multitude of foreigners of the United States of America have invaded that frontier, taken possession of the fortified town of Sonoma, treacherously making prisoners of the military Commandante, Don Mariano G. Vallejo. Lieut. Colonel Victor Pruden, Captain Salvador Vallejo, and Mr. Jacob P. Leese, and likewise have stolen the property of these individuals. ...So base management as observed on this occasion highly compromises the honor of the United States, and if it shall have such a stain upon itself, there is no doubt that it will be graven eternally in the remembrance of all nations, and will cause it to be despised."
"General M.G. Vallejo was born in Monterey upper California, July, 1808, being the eighth of thirteen children. He was educated at the college there, and entered the military service at the age of sixteen, as a cadet and private secretary to Governor Arguello. Being rapidly promoted, he reached the rank of Brigadier-General in 1840."
"In 1829, as Lieutenant commanding, he was placed in charge of the Northern Department, which included all the country to the north of Santa Cruz, having his headquarters at the Presidio of San Francisco; in which capacity he remained until 1837, exercising until 1835, both civil and military functions for the section north of San José."
"In 1838, the supreme government of Mexico confirmed these revolutionary acts of the jealous, belligerant, and semi-independant Californians; and sent out as Governor, Micheltoreno, clothed with extraordinary prerogatives—being invested with the full powers of the central government. In the exercise of these, he appointed Vallejo military commander of all the territory lying north of the Santa Inez mountain, who now had fixed his headquarters at Sonoma, where he has ever since resided."
"Under the new regime, and especially after the beginning of the great influx of gold-seekers to the Pacific shore, in 1849, Vallejo... was appointed by Commodore Stockton, in January, 1847, a member of a civil body titled the Assembly, designed to frame a code of laws for the temporary governance of the territory. But the grand imbroglio between Commodores Stockton and Shubrick, General Kearney, and Colonels Mason and Fremont... prevented the meeting of such body."
"Vallejo received three communications dated upon the same day, from Stockton, Kearney, and Fremont, respectively, each signing himself Governor and Commander in Chief of California."
"Vallejo... acted for a time as Indian Agent north of the Bay, by appointment of General Kearney."
"Early in the year 1849 were inaugurated those "District Legislatures" for affording... temporary civil governments for the country. Ex-Governor Boggs from Missouri and General Vallejo took the leading part in organizing this movement for the Sonoma section, when... the Missouri statutes were adopted entire, so far as applicable... But Governor-General Riley's proclamation soon upset these independent movements, and called a general convention for the territory. Vallejo was elected a member of the body, which... resolved to form a State Constitution. The following year, he was elected a State Senator, and whilst a member, his magnificently liberal propositions with reference to locating the permanent seat of government upon his Suscol Rancho, at the site of the present city of Vallejo, were accepted by the Legislature and confirmed by a vote of the people. In compliance with the terms of the agreement, he erected a State House or Capitol and various other public buildings, as well as expending large sums otherwise in connection therewith... The Legislature twice met there, but... certain very strong influences being brought to bear to induce adjournment to Sacramento, the place was finally abandoned as a capital, and Vallejo induced to cancel... the contract made with the State, at a loss, as he alleges, of several hundreds of thousands of dollars. And to this heavy damage and the unexpected rejection by the Supreme Court of the United States of his title to that most valuable rancho, may be chiefly ascribed the downfall of his fortunes."
"The General possesses a handsome residence—"Lachrymœ Montis"—situated in the edge of the town of Sonoma, built after the plan of Bonaparte's villa at Bordentown N.J., but is unable to preserve it in proper repair for the lack of sufficient income."
"Sonoma being selected as the headquarters of the United States army in the fall of 1849, his commodious mansion upon the Plaza, fashioned in the old Hispano-Mexican style, was long the almost homelike resort of all its officers, and where many, besides, met with that open-hearted and frank entertainment characteristic of its hospitable proprietor. Being, during that period, a gentleman of ample fortune—possessing near thirty leagues of choice land lying immediately around the northern border of the bay of San Francisco, and many thousands of horses and horned cattle—he dispensed his hospitality, as well as rendered much assistance to the newcomers, with a prodigal and generous hand."
"In 1865, he made his first visit to the East, and was received with great consideration in Washington by his old army and navy acquaintances, whom he met there, as also by the leading officials of the government."
"As Mayor and also a Councilman of his home-town, he sought to have its public grounds properly ornamented and improved, proffering to bear the larger portion of the expense; but such not being responded to by the new citizens, his plan was only partially carried out. He expended, however, large sums in setting out vineyards and fruit-trees in the immediate vicinity, being the first to start vine-culture and wine-making on the north side of the bay. For several years, his wines and brandies took the first premium at the State Fairs, and at the Mechanics' Fairs in San Francisco."
"The General (now over sixty) preserves in a remarkable manner his youthful appearance and activity. This may be attributed, in part, to a well developed physique, and active, outdoor exercise all his days, and to the strictly temperate habits he has constantly adhered to, rarely partaking of wine or spirits, and being a moderate and fastidious eater."
"In character he is not alone a pure-blooded Spaniard of the Hidalgo class, but true to many of the leading traits and likenesses of that grandly historic race; being generous, hospitable, high-spirited, of courtly address and distinguished presence, and possessed with a happy admixture mixture of dignified pride and condescending affability. Like them, in general, his mind dwells much in the regions of romance; is somewhat addicted to idealistic fancies—air- castle building, or the concoction of magnificent schemes and projects, difficult of being, or never to be, realized. ...And to these amiable qualities, and the more materialistic natures of that throng of "practically minded," greedy, grabbing gold-seekers flocking to the Pacific shore, who have so greatly wronged the larger portion of the unsophisticated stock found here, by despoiling them of their heritage, may be attributed the passing away from his possession of that vast estate once held by him."
"Proud of the past glories by past glories and still prominent position of the Spanish race, the General—who is a fine scholar, especially as an historian—loves to dwell upon their close relationship with ancient Rome, and the undeniable fact that Spain, more than any nation of Europe, transmitted the wisdom and the virtues of that august civilization down to and connects herself with the modern."
"237, 423, N. D. Mayor and common of Sonoma, claimants for Pueblo of Sonoma, 4 square leagues, granted June 24th, 1835, by M. G. Vallejo to Pueblo of Sonoma; claim May 21st, 1852 and confirmed by the commission January 22d. 1856."
"249, 140, N. D. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, claimant for Yulupa, 3 square leagues, in Sonoma county, granted November 23d, 1844, by Manuel Micheltorena to Miguel Alvarado; claim filed May 31st, 1852, rejected by the commission May 10th, 1854, confirmed by the district court January 21st, 1857, decree reversed by the U. S. supreme court and cause remanded for further evidence, in 22 Howard [63 U. S.] 416."
"250, 321, N. D., 306. Mariano Vallejo, claimant for Petaluma, 10 square leagues, in Sonoma county, granted October 22d, 1843, by Manuel Micheltorena to M. G. Vallejo, (grant) and 5 square leagues, June 22d, 1844, Manuel Micheltorena to M. G. Vallejo (sale the government); claim filed May 31st, 1852, confirmed by the commission May 22d, 1855, by the district court March I6th, 1857, and dismissed July 3d, 1857; containing 66,622.17 acres."
"Though a Californian, and sharing with other Spanish-born natives a natural distrust of strangers, Vallejo possessed an admiration and sincere friendship for the Americans, and received them kindly, even when his superiors demanded the expulsion of the dangerous foreigners."
"Though his patriotism was never doubted, he counseled annexation to the United States when he saw that Mexico had no government nor protection for California."
"His appointment in 1835 as military comandante and civil commissionado of the northern district proved to be a selection so wise that it stands out in relief from among the official errors of early California history, and during his ten years of almost autocratic rule at Sonoma, it is seen that he governed with rare justice and practical common sense."
"During his youth he was a cadet in the territorial army and a friend and comrade of General Castro and Governor Arguello. He was an earnest student and early acquired a fund of knowledge that fitted him to take a prominent part in and to a considerable extent shape political affairs of the territory, especially during the critical times just prior to the American occupation."
"When the red, white and blue of America took the place of the red, white and green of Mexico, he was still of the best of the California citizenry. Tall and erect, with a distinguished military bearing, and with grace of gesture and manner inherent from birth and breeding, an easy and fluent speaker in English, though learned late in life, charming with the strength of purpose and the seriousness of diction, filled with the chivalry of the past day when Spanish knighthood was in flower was General Vallejo."
"While at Sonoma 1840 and 1845 large companies of American immigrants came through the country, and though he was constantly "nagged" by his government to drive the foreigners out of the country, the comandante disobeyed orders and humanely treated the strangers."
"There is no doubt that Vallejo's gentle methods in dealing with the... Indians surrounding him, his rare discretion in the management of his military affairs and his practical statesmanship making for the much-needed change of flags, proved him to be a greater man, a man more deserving of appreciation than any other within the limits of the territory, and it may be said in truth, deserving of more appreciation than he received."
"Three times he took part in revolution against Mexico, in 1832-36-45, and the revolutionists won each time, but the successive governors they recognized always managed to get themselves in turn recognized by the Mexican government, in consequence of which matters would drop back into the old rut.There is little wonder that Vallejo at Sonoma found his grandiloquent title of Military Comandante and Director of Colonization on the Northern Frontier burdensome, and occasionally asked to be relieved. And when the Bear Flag people did relieve him of further participancy in Mexican affairs, it was likely to him a relief indeed."
"Sutter and Vallejo were Mexican citizens—one native and the other naturalized—but they failed in their first duty to the southern republic when they failed to keep the gringos out of the territory."
"Sem-Yeto's capital city, seat of government, was a populous rancheria in what is now Suisun valley, though the tribes of his dominion were scattered over the great plain from Sonoma eastward to the Sacramento. The chief seems to have been an amiable aborigine and early fell in love with the mission fare and faith. After the padre had baptized him into the bosom of the church, Vallejo suggested for the convert the name of the Mission, so he was christened Francisco Solano. The comandante found the new churchman quite useful and quite faithful to the white settlers. "Solano was a king among the Indians," writes Vallejo in his annals. "All the tribes of Solano, Napa and Sonoma valleys were under tribute to him," and through this the comandante was enabled to keep peace in his great territory, covering much of what is now Napa, Solano and Yolo. As Solano fell into the ways of the palefaces—became more civilized—he lost much of the saintly character received at his mission christening, and frequently Vallejo would have to take his red friend in hand. But a night in the guard house away from the wine-cup would prepare the chief for the headache and repentance of the morrow."
"Three families and Vallejo early owned all of what is now Solano, but now, of those big ranchos, only the memories remain. Even the names have dwindled. Vallejo is used to designate a city; Vaca (the gringos called it Barker) marks the limits of a valley; Armijo is a schoolhouse, and Peña was changed to a creek, as enchanted persons in classic days were turned to fountains. Others of the early settlers have passed quite away, bag and baggage, date and name, leaving nothing for remembrance. But these improvident Españols lived well during their short residence in Las Californias, and in their big adobes a rugged splendor was maintained."
"Aside from Yugoslavia, experiments with decentralization did not extend to planning innovation, the greatest weakness of the socialist economies. Even where markets were allowed to exert more influence over current production, the state was still responsible for planning the future. And state socialism provided only weak incentives for innovation. The Schumpeterian pressure that forced capitalist firms to innovate or die was not present in the planned economy."
"Both the existence of these parallels and their tragic nature would not have escaped Charles Kindleberger, whose World in Depression, 1929-1939 was published exactly 40 years ago, in 1973. Where Kindleberger’s canvas was the world, his focus was Europe. While much of the earlier literature, often authored by Americans, focused on the Great Depression in the US, Kindleberger emphasised that the Depression had a prominent international and, in particular, European dimension. It was in Europe where many of the Depression’s worst effects, political as well as economic, played out. And it was in Europe where the absence of a public policy authority at the level of the continent and the inability of any individual national government or central bank to exercise adequate leadership had the most calamitous economic and financial effects."
"This history of the international monetary system is short in two senses of the word. First, I concentrate on a short period: the century and a half from 1850 to today. Many of the developments I describe have roots in earlier eras, but to draw out their implications I need only consider this relatively short time span. Second, I have sought to write a short book emphasizing thematic material rather than describing international monetary arrangements in exhaustive detail."
"Progress in economics is said to take place through a cumulative process in which scholars build on the work of their predecessors. In an age when graduate syllabi contain few references to books and articles written as many as ten years ago, this is too infrequently the case."
"The international monetary system is the glue that binds national economies together."
"Any account of the development of the international monetary system is also necessarily an account of the development of international capital markets."
"What was critical for the maintenance of pegged exchange rates, I argue in this book, was protection for governments from pressure to trade exchange rate stability for other goals."
"Writing in 1944, the year of the Bretton Woods Conference, Polanyi suggested that the extension of the institutions of the market over the course of the nineteenth century aroused a political reaction in the form of associations and lobbies that ultimately undermined the stability of the market system. He gave the gold standard a place of prominence among the institutions of laissez faire in response to which this reaction had taken place. And he suggested that the opening of national economic decision making to parties representing working-class interests had contributed to the downfall of that international monetary system. In a sense, this book asks whether Polanyi’s thesis stands the test of time. Can the international monetary history of the second half of the twentieth century be understood as the further unfolding of Polanyian dynamics, in which democratization again came into conflict with economic liberalization in the form of free capital mobility and fixed exchange rates? Or do recent trends toward floating rates and monetary unification point to ways of reconciling freedom and stability in the two domains?"
"Given the network-externality characteristic of international monetary arrangements, reforming them is necessarily a collective endeavor. But the multiplicity of countries creates negotiating costs."
"Neither the current state nor the future prospects of this evolving order can be understood without an appreciation of its history."
"I was, yes. Ed was—is! I don’t see him very often—a very close friend and colleague. I had been interested in economic theory and ideas even as an undergraduate, and had come to the conclusion that we in political science didn’t pay enough attention to the importance of economics to politics and political science, so I spent a lot of my time trying to bring that together, including, as I’ve said, collaborating with Ed Lindblom—"
"I often tell people to make no mistake about it—enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being more or less happy. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true."
"The main purpose of the illusion of me is to keep you at all costs from realizing your own nothingness."
"The unknown, our own true nature, has the capacity to wake itself up when you start to fall in love with letting go of all the mental structures you hold onto. Contemplate this: there is no such thing as a true belief."
"It is the basics that are most important. Never leave this foundation. From this, an incredible depth is to be found - an ongoing revelation of the truth of existence."
"Perhaps the most important element of any spiritual teaching is what we bring to it, because this dictates what the teaching will reveal within ourselves."
"Sy Safransky: Didn’t taking the name “Adyashanti” reinforce a certain sense that you are an enlightened holy man? Adyashanti: Oh, absolutely it did. It’s sort of a ridiculous-sounding Eastern name. (...) I always tell people to call me “Adya,” and leave the “shanti” part off."
"True love is not all bliss. As my teacher said, true love is bittersweet, like dark chocolate. It almost hurts a little bit. Ultimately all emotions contain their opposite."
"Luc Saunders: What do you think happens to individual consciousness after the death of a body? Adyashanti: The question presumes that there is such a thing as individual consciousness. Awakening shows you that there isn’t. The mind creates the illusion of individual consciousness to convince us that this awareness is ours, that it belongs to us. I imagine that, after the death of the body, it’s very difficult to maintain the illusion of individual consciousness. But who knows? We’ll see. I’ll give you a phone call if I can. [Laughs.]"
"Over time I found that one of the most important things in any spiritual teaching for anybody is to have a really basic and simple understanding of that teaching. And the reason for that is because as one gets involved in a spiritual teaching, it's really easy to lose sight of the basics, or the foundations."
"Suffering is caused by identification with egoic consciousness. When we identify with egoic consciousness, we go unconscious or become unaware of our true nature as conscious spirit."
"Egoic consciousness is something that the vast majority of people live in almost all the time. Humanity is by and large caught in this realm of egoic consciousness, and therefore manifests it in the way that we, human beings, live our lives - both individually and collectively."
"Ego itself is a fiction created in the mind by circular patterns of thinking based on separation. So, 'the ego is the fiction in the mind' - what does that mean? [It means] that ego is basically our sense of self, and the thoughts, ideas and beliefs that circle around that sense of self that go into deriving a bigger, more conceptualized version of ourself. In other words: who we think and imagine ourselves to be."
"Our egos are always trying to find happiness where [it] can't be found. One can't find true, lasting happiness outside of themselves. Whatever happiness you find outside of yourself, can be taken away. And in time, it will be taken away, because the nature of everything that exists, everything you can observe, everything that is around you, is that it is impermanent."
"Who you think you are is just that - it is who you think you are. It is who you have been taught to believe that you are. It's a conglomeration of beliefs about yourself, ideas, opinions, judgements, all the ways that mind keeps thinking about a self - thinking a separate self into existence."
"To have enough curiosity to start to question your deepest identity is absolutely vital and essential to spiritual awakening, and to the realization of peace and freedom."
"You can't get rid of thoughts, and you can't get rid of thinking. To battle your mind is one of the most deceptive ways that the mind keeps you in its own domain."
"The cause of suffering is not thinking, it's identification with thinking. This is very, very important to understand, because if you don't understand that it's identification with thinking that's really at the heart of the matter, and you assume that it's thinking itself that's the problem, then you can waste immense amounts of time and energy trying to stop your mind from thinking, trying to better your mind."
"The mind is something that happens within you. Thinking is something that happens within what you are. Thinking does not define what you are. Thinking doesn't define anything."
"Our true nature is something that is ineffable. In other words, it's not something you can grasp, it's not something you can really think about, it's not something you can touch, taste, or feel. (...) Because it has no shape, because it has no form, that is the reason that I call it spirit. Spirit is that which exists, but it doesn't have a particular shape or a particular form."
"When we come to the realization that we are not this identity that the mind has created, but we're actually spirit, at that moment spirit has become conscious of itself. It's become conscious of itself as spirit, as ineffable being, as a sort of conscious presence."
"Awakened values are not really based in morality. They're not based in should or shouldn'ts. Awakened values are values that are inherent within conscious spirit."
"Every human being... the way they move in live, how they act, is completely dictated by what they value."
"Unity is a truth. The truth is, there's only ultimately one. All this diversity we see - and there's great diversity and great uniqueness! But underlying it, the essence of all of it is conscious spirit. Conscious spirit is what everything is. Spirit is what everything is. Spirit is what's expressing itself. When you look around you, what you're really seeing is the expressions of ineffable spirit. That's what you're seeing. No matter what you see, no matter what you experience, it's really a manifestation of spirit."
"The good news is that at the essence of who and what we are there is a deep and fundamental goodness. Not the goodness that we've been taught, not like morally good, as opposed to morally bad, but something deeper - a goodness which is inherent in what we are."
"All the ideas we have about the awakening actually are distortions about what it really is. So we really need to let go of not only all of our ideas of ourself, but all of our ideas about spiritual realization, enlightenment, spiritual awakening. All of those need to be let go of as well, so that we can find out what's the truth, what's the reality of what we are."
"It is impossible to know what words like liberation or enlightenment mean until you realize them for yourself. This being so, it is of no use to speculate about what enlightenment is; in fact, doing so is a major hindrance to its unfolding. As a guiding principle, to progressively realize what is not absolutely True is of infinitely more value than speculating about what is."
"No spiritual teaching is a direct path to enlightenment. In fact, there is no such thing as a path to enlightenment, simply because enlightenment is ever present in all places and at all times. What you can do is to remove any and all illusions, especially the ones you value most and find the most security in, that cloud your perception of Reality. Let go of clinging to your illusions and resisting what is, and Reality will suddenly come into view."
"I think one of the hallmarks of a spiritual maturity (or even a human maturity) is the ability to shift perspective. (...) We often use these words that give this... impression, which I think is a false impression ultimately, that there's some ultimate perspective that is the right and correct perspective, as if unity consciousness or something is the correct perspective. But, you know, if I'm a 3-year-old kid and someone's threatening my life, and my mother's next to me, I want her to be in a fierce perspective, right? I don't want her to kinda just go "it's all one, so it really doesn't matter if you're harmed". It does matter. And so... yeah, I think the ability to shift perspective is really vital to our functionality."
"The beautiful thing is that anybody has the potential for a massive shift in perspective... even if they're a complete mess."
"One of the exciting things about today is [that] people are not, for the most part (...) even in their spiritual domain, they're not satisfied necessarily with just an internal revelatory spiritual experience anymore. Most people that I meet are hooked up in such a way that it only is really deeply meaningful to them unless it actually starts to transform how they move and experience... their contribution to life."
"Sometimes, you know, when we meet people, it seems to me (...) [that] it's hard to gain access to a real conversation. It's almost like it takes one of us to just be real, even if it's to say "you know, I don't really know what to say to you." Or to say no. Sometimes you have to say no, or to set a boundary."
"Every single word that you write resonates. (...) I was first exposed to your work with Spontaneous Awakening, and I was excited because you... I was struck by (and this is my projection onto you) how integrated you were, you seemed (...) very psychologically aware, spiritually aware, energetically aware, intuitively aware, somatically aware (...). It just felt like home when I would read, so thank you."
"Adyashanti’s talks are unscripted and draw largely from examples in his own life."
"A sought-after gifted spiritual thinker, author and teacher. His message is simple: grace has the power to transform lives."
"In 1973, the United States Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade. In the sweep of a pen, the Supreme Court promised all American women that there would never again be another Jane Roe, beginning distant courts for the basic human right to decide for herself whether to terminate a pernancy. Never again, the Court promised, may the State presume to intrude on a decision so intimate and significant that it may well determine the remainder of a young woman's life."
"As attorneys, as lawmakers, and as judges, our first questions should be the effect of our decisions on real human lives."
"Women know that only a judge with a keener sense of the importance of women's rights to decide their own destinies, a judge that has demonstrated a commitment to women's right to choose, is entitled to the highest privilege of occupying that pivotal Supreme Court seat."
"What happened to Ms. Fluke’s free speech? Since when has it been okay to target people who testify before policy makers with vicious, unwarranted and defamatory attacks? You may think that all of your misconduct disappears because you label yourself an entertainer. Well, we are not entertained – we are disgusted. You think that your non-apology apology coming on the heels of advertisers abandoning your show will make them come back? I guess even some of your advertisers do not find you all that entertaining. We hope that your advertisers continue to show the good sense and judgment that you lack by abandoning your show in droves."
"Women see you for who you are. I have received countless emails from women across the country who are outraged and want to do something about you. You may have thought that women would be silenced by your attacks, but just the opposite is true. Women are rallying because we see that your attack on Ms. Fluke is an attack on all of us and on our right to speak out publicly and to stand up for contraception and our reproductive rights."
"The battle to end sexual assault on college campuses is one of the most important civil rights movements of our time. It is a movement for change."
"It is exciting and inspiring to see young women stand up and say 'we know that we have rights, and we intend to assert them.'"
"Some say 'the women’s movement is all about older women,' but this is a movement about younger women asserting their rights that women before them fought for and won."
"It could be advantageous for Mr. Cosby to give up the statute of limitations because there is a huge cloud on his reputation and legacy."
"The public deserves to know if Mr Cosby is a saint or a sexual predator."
"Gloria Allred is a feminist attorney who has tried numerous cases to advance women's rights."
"The lawyer Gloria Allred, a longtime master of the press conference."
"Gloria Allred is a feminist lawyer and partner in the Los Angeles Law Firm of Allred, Maroko & Goldberg. She is well known for representing victims in women’s rights, sexual harassment, and Title IX cases."
"It began with one pig at a British slaughterhouse. Somewhere along the production line it was observed that the animal had blisters in his mouth and was salivating. The worst suspicions were confirmed, and within days borders had been sealed and a course of action determined. Soon all of England and the world watched as hundreds, and then hundreds of thousands, of pigs, cows, and sheep and their newborn lambs were taken outdoors, shot, thrown into burning pyres, and bulldozed into muddy graves. Reports described terrified cattle being chased by sharpshooters, clambering over one another to escape. Some were still stirring and blinking a day after being shot."
"Foot-and-mouth disease is a form of flu, treatable by proper veterinary care, preventable by vaccination, lethal neither to humans nor to animals. These animals, millions of them not even infected, were all killed only because their market value had been diminished and because trade policies required it—because, in short, under the circumstances it was the quick and convenient thing to do. By the one measure we now apply to these creatures, they had all become worthless. For them, the difference between what happened and what awaited them anyway was one of timing. And for us the difference was visibility. This time, we had to watch."
"Animals are so easily overlooked, their interests so easily brushed aside. Whenever we humans enter their world, from our farms to the local animal shelter to the African savanna, we enter as lords of the earth bearing strange powers of terror and mercy alike. Dominion, as we call this power in the Western tradition, today requires our concentrated moral consideration …"
"Standing outside a factory farm, the first question that comes to mind is not a moral but a practical one: Where is everybody? Where are the owners, the farmers, the livestock managers, the extra hands, anybody? I have been driving around the North Carolina countryside on a Thursday afternoon in January 2001, pulling in at random to six hog farms, and have yet to find a single farmer or any other living soul. … There are so many factory farms around here that they are easy to miss. I doubt that the average visitor just passing through even knows what they are …"
"How we treat our fellow creatures is only one more way in which each one of us, every day, writes our own epitaph—bearing into the world a message of light and life or just more darkness and death, adding to the world's joy or to its despair."
"The best part of the book, which is written from an expressly Christian and conservative way of looking at the world, is his contention that the morality of the humane treatment of animals rests not—as the “animal rights” theorists such as Peter Singer would have it—on animals being equal to human beings but precisely on their being unequal and therefore so very dependent and vulnerable. That’s why the subtitle speaks of “the call to mercy” rather than “the call to justice,” although Scully does, against his better instincts, end up entangling himself in some of the esoterica of the animal rights theorizing. Most pertinent to public policy is his polemic against industrial, or containment, farming. He visited some huge pig plants in North Carolina and what he reports is unpleasant in the extreme."
"Not many people have been able to get inside one of the factory hog farms that blight the Midwestern and Southern United States today. Matthew Scully did, though, and he has written one of the most scathing yet compassionate books about animals in the entire literature: Dominion. I cannot recommend it highly enough."
"By far the most difficult skill I learned as a C.E.O. was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared with keeping my mind in check."
"In life, everybody faces choices between doing what's popular, easy, and wrong vs. doing what's lonely, difficult, and right. These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful."
"It helps to have founded and run a company if you're going to help somebody run a company who is a founder."
"The important thing about mobile is, everybody has a computer in their pocket. The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible."
"Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company."
"Note to self: It's a good idea to ask, 'What am I not doing?'"
"Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all."
"I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been."
"What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run."
"Why doesn't she feel more somber about Richard's perversely simultaneous good fortune ("an anguished, prophetic voice in American letters") and his decline ("You have no T-cells at all, none that we can detect")? What is wrong with her? She loves Richard, she thinks of him constantly, but she perhaps loves the day slightly more."
"The woman's head quickly withdraws, the door to the trailer closes again, but she leaves behind her an unmistakable sense of watchful remonstrance, as if an angel had briefly touched the surface of the world with one sandaled foot, asked if there was any trouble and, being told all was well, had resumed her place in the ether with skeptical gravity, having reminded the children of earth that they are just barely trusted to manage their own business, and that further carelessness will not go unremarked."
"He makes her think sometimes of a mouse singing amorous ballads under the window of a giantess."
"...the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June."
"It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book...What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other."
"...Virginia lingers another moment beside the dead bird in its circle of roses. It could be a kind of hat. It could be the missing link between millinery and death."
"We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep. It's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out windows, or drown themselves, or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds & expectations, to burst open & give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) know these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so."
"A celestial light appeared to Barrett Meeks in the sky over Central Park, four days after Barrett had been mauled, once again, by love. It was by no means his first romantic dropkick, but it was the first to have been conveyed by way of a five-line text, the fifth line of which was a crushingly corporate wish for good luck in the future, followed by three lowercase xxx’s."
"I think what I really learned in all of this, was to be true to myself, to be true to my inner voice. And I began to see, that we really do have the power, our own lives really do make a difference, just by being more conscious of the food that we eat. We can heal ourselves, we can heal the environment, we can heal this planet."
"I was born in the heart of the Great American Food Machine. From childhood on it was expected that I would someday take over and run what has become the world's largest ice cream company—Baskin-Robbins. Year after year I was groomed and prepared for the task, given an opportunity to live the Great American Dream… There is a sweeter and deeper American dream than the one I turned down. It is the dream of a success in which all beings share because it is founded on a reverence for life. A dream of a society at peace with its conscience because it respects and lives in harmony with all life forms. A dream of a people living in accord with the laws of Creation, cherishing and caring for the natural environment, conserving nature instead of destroying it. A dream of a society that is truly healthy, practicing a wise and compassionate stewardship of a balanced ecosystem."
"We live in a crazy time, when people who make food choices that are healthy and compassionate are often considered weird, while people are considered normal whose eating habits promote disease and are dependent on enormous suffering."
"We don’t realize that in the sizzle of our steaks there is the suffering of animals, the mining of our topsoil, the slashing of our forests, the harming of our economy, and the eroding of our health. We don’t hear in the sizzle the cry of the hungry millions who might otherwise be fed. We don’t see the toxic poisons accumulating in the food chains, poisoning our children and our earth for generations to come. But once we become aware of the impact of our food choices, we can never really forget… All things are deeply connected, and so the choices we make in our daily lives have enormous influence, not only on our own health and vitality, but also on the lives of other beings, and indeed on the destiny of life on earth. Thankfully, we have cause to be grateful—what’s best for us personally is also best for other forms of life, and for the life support systems on which we all depend."
"When we first started, we were able to take our undercover video to ' or 20/20, and they would fight over it and do these thought-provoking exposés. Now that society has become less interested in these programs and more interested in sensationalism and the tabloids, we have to reinvent ourselves to keep our issues on the front burner; we have had to do a lot of theatrical things. … Much of what we do is geared toward kids, who have a great sense of justice. This is the first generation in which kids have grown up with this issue. Twenty-five years ago, parents were petrified when their kids went vegetarian — some still are."
"Marching into the woods in the darkness I'm Robin Hood breaking your fortress Light it up start the fire, gonna strike you Step aside cause I’m on my way to Rome, yeah I'm made of stone I walk the road alone Fighting for my throne Woah oh"
"Hear the beat of the drums Woah oh You better run run Woah oh Hear the beat of the drums Woah oh Cause I'm a warrior, I'm a warrior Cause I'm a warrior"
"Will you remember my name or at the end of the night is it all a game Or will you hold on to my hand together forever we will stand Or the sun will rise and you’ve had your prize And you don’t even know the color of my eyes"
"Tonight I’m gonna make you mine Oh wait, that’s not supposed to be my line I’m waiting on you to make your move Boy I know that you think your smooth Show me what you got cause I got a lot Come on set your trap I want to get caught"
"You’re falling all over me I’m losing myself in your mystery I’m afraid of loving you, I’m afraid of losing me I’m over my head and I’m seeing red But I’m waiting right here for you in my bed"
"You know what’s the real fight, the real money fight. It’s me"
"Fuck that! Conor McGregor, you're taking everything I've worked for, motherfucker! I'm going to fight your fucking ass!"
"When we fight we're going to fight fight, for real fight. He thinks he's the ninja, I'm the ninja— Ninja Gaiden, American ninja, real motherfucking ninja. This ninja martial artist right here—I started that shit."
"You're playing touch-butt with that dork in park, the pony tail."
"No one knows what a gazelle is anyway. This is America motherfucker, get it right."
"I'm not surprised, motherfuckers."
"Jon Anik better get a motherfucking 209 tattoo or I'm whoop is little ass."
"People are jumping on [veganism] slowly but surely, but I think it’s cool. I think you’re a smarter and more intelligent fighter. Me and my brother are at the top of the game and have been for a long time. We’re obviously doing something right. Besides knowing how to kick somebody in the head, you should know how to feel good tomorrow. … I like to promote the vegan industry. I hear a lot of criticism from people saying you need meat to be strong and for recovery, and it’s a bunch of bullshit, because I train harder than everybody. It’s so easy to argue with these people. I’m like, ‘Dude, have you done a tenth of what I’ve done?’"
"Conor got his ass beat."
"Hey. On my worst day, I'll train for two hours. You know what I'm saying? Like, I don't have hobbies. I don't have too many hobbies. I'm always working, I'm always training."
"I'll wake up and I'll train the next day. It's been like that since I started. I think I train harder, harder than the hardest workers in the off-season."
"I believe that as a martial artist even if you can't win a fight, you should be able to not be able to die or lose."
"I have everything. Everything I have, I've worked for."
"I've worked for everything I have, but I want have everything that I worked for. I want to have what I can get."
"He's a good fighter and everything, but he's where he's at because of the push he's getting. I had to put in a lot of work and there ain't no push."
"It's been a long road and I'm still going strong."
"You don't have shit to say now, do you?"
"You and me know, this is a wrap."
"Oh you're a wrestler now? Remember I'm the black belt in ju-jitsu."
"“Everyone who lives in border areas of the country knows that illegal immigration is a major source of crime and assorted social mayhem.”"
"“It is the gay lobby that is attempting to impose its will on bourgeois America by robbing them of their schools, their taxes, and their rights in order to subsidize a sexual preference. And they wonder why they are disliked by ordinary Americans!”"
"“The leftist producer may have intended young viewers to prefer the sweaty ethnics on the lower parts of the ship. But the kids evidently did not get the message.”"
"“In the dynamic of today’s campus life, anti-racist codes are not really about enforcing a kind of social etiquette, universally applied. They are about power exercised by some over others.”"
"“If you are deemed a racist, you must have been one forever; your racism has been unearthed and revealed, not merely spotted in a single incident. Neither is there any hope of rehabilitating you. Your whole life, your whole existence, is stained. It is a Maoist tactic to dehumanize and destroy your opponents.”"
"“And then a feminist rose to complain about the marginalization of women in liturgy and leadership in the Catholic church today. The speaker collapsed in fear, and answered her by mouthing a litany of cliches about sexual equality and decrying past Church practices for being insufficiently open to the contributions of women to the faith. His cowering was embarrassing.”"
"“Mises believed that feminism was an assertion of equality, a revolt against nature, and therefore akin to socialism; that the family and marital fidelity were essential to civilization; that it was possible to make broad generalizations and perhaps scientific statements about races and ethnic groups; that apparent racial inequalities ought to be studied, although not used to influence state policy; that "Eurocentrism" was the proper outlook; and that one need not be sympathetic to mass culture or the counterculture, as Mises emphatically was not, to support the free market.”"
"“A former high school principal accused of being impolite to a mixed-race girl was hired for an administrative job by the school district, over the objections of outsiders demanding ever more minority “rights.””"
"“Entering through the double doors, I had to make my way through room after room of African masks and voodoo dolls dating from no particular time, as well as clay pots and things crafted by all sorts of third-world people. I'm happy for these people that they have their ways, though some of it gave me the creeps. But I want to know: why is all this primitive nonsense in a prestigious museum? Even more absurdly, why does it take up the first three rooms in a place that surely lacks sufficient space for exhibits? Clearly the nutty multiculturalists had prevailed here.”"
"“Nobody in the Republican Party so unashamedly advocates high and higher government spending, open immigration, monetary inflation, welfare redistribution, quotas, foreign military interventionism, foreign aid, presidential abuse of power, centrally directed demographic reshuffling, global trade treaties, and above all, racial pandering and civil-rights egalitarianism.”"
"“Why should conservatives care? We have every interest in seeing rock culture destroyed and crushed.”"
"“He lends credibility to the leftist tale about race in America, and gets positively angry if anyone voices complaints about racial social engineering, or even suggests, as Alan Keyes did, that poor blacks need better values.”"
"“It’s true that to play the part, to become real swing kids, men must become hypermasculine (“cats”) and the ladies ultrafeminine “dames”). Whereas every development in popular culture for five decades has been an attack on sexual differentiation, and, for that matter, on life and virtue and goodness, the return of swing represents an embrace of the old sexual roles and thereby the beginnings of the old cultural values.”"
"“It represents a conscious rejection of the failed experience of the entire boomer generation, one that exalted tackiness above beauty, and sexual freedom above the liturgy of courtship.”"
"“There’s a final motive for having a huge family: revenge. Revenge against the family haters, against the environmentalists, against the abortion lobby, against modernity’s corruption.”"
"“These trends have given rise to a despairing attitude among those who see the political implications of demographic trends. The best and brightest families-those who will never be on welfare, who are owners and bequestors of capital, who have the willingness to be risk takers and who serve as the political backbone of the ‘free society have been outbred by people who exhibit fewer of these traits. Making matters worse, immigration law has been biased in favor of the latter, not the former, group.”"
"“District lines assure that the student population is somewhat homogeneous, and that there can be some schools that create an actual learning environment.”"
"“Today’s HUD head Henry Cisneros, whom Kemp praised and endorsed in Senate confirmation hearings in 1993, has used this program to great effect in Baltimore and Dallas, threatening to wreck whole suburbs with an immigration of crime and poverty.”"
"“That experiment prefigured today’s rap “artists,” who are entirely dependent on promoters, arrangers, and sound technicians, and create no music themselves.”"
"“For any true man of the right, or anyone who would like to see an end to the welfare-warfare state, Kemp should be the last straw.”"
"“If the GOP’s “big tent” is destined to collapse, there’s no one better to be standing under it than Kemp. If the party does not collapse-and it elites continue to ignore the views of its grass roots-it will be too left-wing for any true freedom lover to support.”"
"““Eleanor Rigby” is typical of rocks degeneracy, even if the corruption is more buried here than in later efforts.””"
"“Churches should be led by men, specifically the leading men who pay the bills.”"
"“With any luck, Slipknot will go the way of Cobain.”"
"The primary contribution of government to this world is to elicit, entrench, enable, and finally to codify the most destructive aspects of the human personality."
"Someone asked me the other day if I believe in conspiracies. Well, sure. Here's one. It is called the political system. It is nothing if not a giant conspiracy to rob, trick and subjugate the population."
"Anarchy is all around us. Without it, our world would fall apart. All progress is due to it. All order extends from it. All blessed things that rise above the state of nature are owned to it. The human race thrives only because of the lack of control, not because of it. I’m saying that we need ever more absence of control to make the world a more beautiful place. It is a paradox that we must forever explain."
"Politics is a dirty business, a ruse, an ideological cul-de-sac, a vast looter of intellectual and financial resources, a lie that corrupts, a deceiver, a means of unleashing vast evil in the world of the most unexpected and undetected sort and the greatest diverter of human productivity ever concocted by those who do not believe in authentic social and economic progress."
"I'm not for pretending that bad stuff doesn't exist, and a passion for justice and truth is a libertarian trait. But the idea of liberty should also reveal new forms of beauty in the world, astonishing evidence of order without dictate, lovely examples of innovation without planning, and other magical things. Surely these deserve some attention too."
"Liberty is not about class war, income war, race war, national war, a war between the sexes, or any other conflict apart from the core conflict between individuals and those who would seek power and control over the human spirit. Liberty is the dream that we can all work together, in ways of our choosing and of our own human volition, to realize a better life."
"We really don’t get all the government we pay for, and thank goodness. Lord protect us on the day that we do."
"Here we have the heart of the difference between Hayek and Keynes: one knew that markets work to give us the best of all possible worlds, while governments create and exacerbate malfunctions; the other imagined that governments were somehow capable of both perceiving and correcting malfunctions by means of the printing press, provided the right technocrats are in charge."
"Here is a principle to use in all aspects of economics and policy. When you find a good or service that is in huge demand but the supply is so limited to the point that the price goes up and up, look for the regulation that is causing it. This applies regardless of the sector, whether transportation, gas, education, food, beer, or daycare. There is something in the way that is preventing the market from working as it should. If you look carefully enough, you will find the hand of the state making the mess in question."
"The goal of intellectual life should be to see and understand what is true, not merely to adhere to a prevailing orthodoxy."
"Free markets are the real people's revolution."
"Freedom is the foundation for all wonderful things in life."
"Morals do not come from the state and society. Morality deals with weightier matters that measure our thoughts, words, and deeds against universals that are true regardless of time and place."
"Now, I’m not saying that we don’t need rules in society. But the question of who makes the rules and on what basis becomes supremely important. Will the rule-making flow from the matrix of voluntary exchange based on the ethic of serving others through private enterprise? Or will the rules be made and enforced by people wearing guns and bulletproof vests with a license to shock or kill based on minor annoyances?"
"More than 30 years ago, ... I wrote, and Foreign Affairs published, an article now being circulated in the blogosphere as evidence of an alleged anti-Israel point of view. Some commentators reach farther, suggesting that since I have been an active supporter of Barack Obama's presidential bid he, too, is anti-Israel. Both these assertions fall flat after any objective reading of the historical record."
"I am a long-time admirer (and think myself a friend) of Israel. In the early 1970s, I played a key role in getting advanced weaponry released to the Israeli Air Force - capabilities it later put to active use. During that period, I made many official visits to Israel and established close relationships there. These contacts turned out to be useful during Operation Desert Storm, when, as chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, I worked with my Israeli counterparts to help defend Israel from Iraqi Scud missile attacks."
"I was a vocal opponent of the George W. Bush Administration's decision to invade Iraq, a strategic blunder made worse by slapdash execution. As we have seen, this star-crossed action took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan, breathed new life into a moribund al Qaeda, and enhanced Iranian influence in this critical region - all outcomes which damaged both the United States and our ally Israel."
"It is my view and hope that Israel will have our continued support. I wish it every success. Of course, what Israel regards as success is up to it to decide. But for friends like me, "success" means a secure Israel at peace with neighbors who recognize and respect its existence. Even so, we should maintain our special relationship and help Israel keep its qualitative military edge."
"As for the article, much has changed in 32 years and much has not. The essential argument holds: no set of realistically achievable geographic borders produces safety for Israel. Rather, the security requirement is that any of the territory taken in the Six-Day War and given back as part of a peace settlement should be effectively demilitarized. Of course, the Sinai Peninsula was returned to Egypt long ago in exactly this way, resulting in relative quiet along Israel's southern border and creating a fundamental shift in the regional balance of forces. This opportunity was not skillfully exploited, so the result has been a "cold peace." But it is nevertheless peace and has served the interests of both sides."
"Trump is unexpectedly increasing my enthusiasm for Hillary. What he is saying is not based on facts: it's based on immaturity, bad judgment and ignorance, and I think it's going to be hard for people in uniform who are thoughtful about this, to vote for him."
"I have used this vegan] diet since 2008. I first tried it when I was preparing for my challenge of WBC super lightweight champion Junior Wittier -- my first world title fight -- and after seeing the results it gave me I have tried to stay as loyal to it as possible. It helps keep my body clean and it provides me with a tremendous amount of energy due to my body spending less energy breaking down foods like meats. This is a big key factor in my fitness. … The energy is always there. I feel so alive. My senses and reflexes are so acute. … With a vegan diet you always have energy, so much that sometimes I have trouble sleeping at night. You feel light. You don't feel bulky or heavy. This would benefit any athlete in any sport."
"The new industrial methods have greatly accelerated certain tendencies that had already manifested themselves in the old domestic factories and some of these deserve more than passing notice as they are affecting not only productive processes but our social organization as well. Perhaps the most important of these influences are those that tend toward"
"The underlying principle of specialization is division of labor; but the term division of labor has become associated with the individual worker, whereas specialization is, in general, far reaching in its effects, and influences industrial enterprises of all kinds."
"Specialization, as has been noted, is the confining of human activity to a limited field. In industrial work this means the limitation of an enterprise to a portion of the field and to the production of a limited line of products. But even when the line of products is limited, there are usually many types that are possible in that line and an infinite number of sizes of any one type. Thus suppose a manufacturer specializes in the manufacture of men's shoes. Here there is no limit to the types that may be produced and no limit to the number of sizes of any type since no two feet are exactly alike. Again a manufacturer may specialize on the production of motors between the sizes, say, of one-half horse-power and twenty horse-power. Here again many types are possible and an infinite number of sizes for each type. But it has been shown that one of the essentials of cheap production is quantity, and for a given total output the greatest number of each element entering into the product is secured when the numbers of types and sizes are a minimum."
"By standardization is meant the reduction of any one line to fixed types and sizes. Thus in the case of the manufacturer of shoes he selects a few types that, in his opinion, will find favor in the market. But each foot is not measured and a shoe of the required type made to these measurements. A limited number of sizes of each type is manufactured, these sizes being selected, by previous experience, so that any average man can find a pair that will fit him. The same holds true for the case of electric motors discussed above, and in fact for the entire field of manufactured products."
"There is another and very important ground for standardization and that is the desirability of having parts interchangeable. Standards of exchange have long been in general use, and these have, most usually, been fixed with a view to convenient use rather than on a scientific basis. The units of weight and measure are examples of this form of standard. They may not even be the most logical, or most convenient, but once established they can, in general, be changed only by slow degrees, if at all."
"It is human experience that as a man concentrates his efforts, either mental or manual, his skill in his chosen specialty, and the quantity of his product increase. It was shown... that specialization in machinery had a powerful influence in specializing the workman and thereby extending the principle of division of labor. But division of labor may be furthered by other influences. The very growth of all lines of human knowledge and activity makes it increasingly difficult for one man to retain a grasp of any one entire field. He must be content to cultivate a small portion of it."
"The term division of labor has, from long usage, become associated in the public mind with manual processes. But productive labor is, in general, both manual and mental and just as there may be division of manual labor so there may be division of mental labor or division of thought. Modern productive methods tend constantly to separate mental labor from manual labor and then to subdivide each into smaller and smaller parts. The subdivision of manual labor is greatly furthered, as has been seen, by the extended use of tools. Subdivision of mental labor on the other hand is hastened by an increase in the amount of knowledge and mental development necessary to successfully perform the work in hand. Thus the mental labor of designing machinery is performed largely apart from the actual production; and this mental labor has become very closely specialized as the scientific basis of engineering has grown. This process of subdivision is greatly hastened in both manual and mental operations by increased quantity since this, of itself, enables the manager to avail himself of the inherent advantages of division of labor already discussed."
"We are proud of Dean Kimball’s national fame as an engineer and leader in engineering education: we are mindful of his outstanding professional achievements which have contributed to the prestige of our College. Yet, in the intimacy of this Cornell group, our main desire is to record our respect and affection for one who in the discharge of his duties has evinced qualities of gentle humanity and gracious friendship adorning his technical skill and attainments."
"A full account of his life would read like a typical American success story of a career during the post-war years of rapid industrialization and mechanization."
"Organization is the arrangement of personnel for facilitating the accomplishment of some agreed purpose through the allocation of functions and responsibilities. It is the relating of efforts and capacities of individuals and groups engaged upon a common task in such a way as to secure the desired objective with the least friction and the most satisfaction to those for whom the task is done and those engaged in the enterprise."
"It is now fifty years since Woodrow Wilson wrote his brilliant essay on public administration.' It is a good essay to reread every so often; there is so much in it that sounds modern, so much that will hold permanently true... Political scientists owe Woodrow Wilson a debt of gratitude for opening their eyes to the broader importance and implications of administration. His keen mind also discerned the task which would occupy the attention of administrative theorists long after he was gone."
"Public administration is a process or a theory, not merely an accumulation of detailed facts. It is Verwaltungslehre. The object of administrative study should be to discover, first, what government can properly and successfully do, and secondly, how it can do these proper things with the utmost possible efficiency and at the least possible cost both of money and of energy."
"Administration is generic. It is a social science concept which applies to all organized group activity. Administration arises whenever organization occurs. There are common problems and processes in the household, the school, the church, the business corporation, and the vast modern state. After deciding upon objectives, means must be devised for carrying out the program. This latter process is administration. Anyone who is responsible for directing the work of others thereby becomes an administrator"
"Administration is both social engineering and applied psychology. It is apparatus and mechanics, incentives and human nature. Let no one think it is merely the former. Nowhere is the need for psychology greater than in the organization, direction, and inspiration of men working in large groups. Outstanding administrative results are produced by spirit, morale, atmosphere; these, in turn, are the product of psychological mainsprings and invigorating incentives. As Benjamin Lippincott has recognized, both governmental and business administration resolve fundamentally into the role played by effective incentives."
"The executive in every walk of life, whether he knows it or not, directs social forces and determines the destiny of countless people, not only those who work in his immediate organization but among the larger public as well. He should comprehend this and recognize his responsibility. The role of statesman is thrust upon him by the nature and demands of the position he occupies. To fulfill it he mnst be a philosopher. But he cannot be a successful philosopher unless he understands the inherent life of institutions, the reasons why people in institutional situations behave as they do. This knowledge is the philosophy and technique of management."
"Management is not a matter of pressing a button, pulling a lever, issuing orders, scanning profit and loss statements, promulgating rules and regulations. Rather, management is the power to determine what shall happen to the personalities and to the happiness of entire peoples, the power to shape the destiny of a nation and of all the nations which make up the world. Executive work, therefore, is statesmanship and the techniques which the executive employs are only incidental to the forces which he sets in motion and helps to direct. It is no exaggeration, therefore, to say that the management of the nation's large institutions, both in business and in government, determines the fate of millions of individual lives as well as the lives of generations unborn."
"The opposition of some executives to formalized organizational analysis stems in part from a reaction against the too zealous advocacy of organization as the universal panacea of all management ills. These executives correctly understand that organization is not the whole of management any more than personnel or budgeting or public relation. Organization analysis, therefore, is not properly the periodic pursuit of the expert; rather, it is the continuous responsibility of the executive. His clue is found in mal-functionings; not in the blind following of preconceived stereotypes."
"Management experts can do much harm simply by being doctrinaire when, because of some customarily accepted formula, they tear apart established ways of doing things even though the existing structure is producing satisfactory results. They evidence a form of professional conceit-not confined to them by any means-which contributes invariably to the bad opinion which many successful executives hold of the management expert. It is a serious thing to operate on a going concern, because an institution is made up of people with established ways of doing things; people who, in consequence, develop certain institutional attachments which are an important part of institutional success. They are like the traditions of a family. Men take pride in them."
"The wise executive never looks upon organizational lines as being settled once and for all. He knows that a vital organization must keep growing and changing with the result that its structure must remain malleable. Get the best organization structure you can devise, but do not be afraid to change it for good reason: This seems to be the sound rule. On the other hand, beware of needless change, which will only result in upsetting and frustrating your employees until they become uncertain as to what their lines of authority actually are."
"The staff officer must be kept in his place. But this does not mean that he must be kept down, that he must be discouraged, that his initiative and imagination must be checked. On the contrary, all these characteristics should be encouraged. The important question is, through what channel are they to be directed? They should, of course, Bow through the responsible operating executive, not around him."
"Just as the chief executive is aided by staff officials in the carrying out of his program, so also do subordinate line executives establish normal and continuous relationships with staff officials in the development of their work. If the line official cannot satisfy the staff assistant as to the necessity of his proposal, then the door of the executive's office must be open to him and he should be free to state his recommendation, explain any points of difference he has with the staff assistant, and leave the decision to his superior. As a general proposition also, if the decision is close, the chief executive should decide in favor of the line official, since presumably he knows his own needs better than any staff assistant because he is closer to them and is responsible for results. If the chief executive fails to back him up then he is bound to feel that his judgment is in question. This injures his initiative and self-confidence-as well as his confidence in his superior-and is to be avoided if possible. Ordinarily, however, if both line and staff men are competent, they will be able to reach an agreement and make a unified recommendation. Close decisions are rare when all the facts are known."
"In some organizations where staff assistance is overemphasized, from the standpoint of both the influence and the number of staff officials, the chief executive is likely to be cut off from his department heads. An executive should never lose sight of the fact that his closest contacts must be with the heads of the operating departments, and that it is upon them more than any others that the success of the program depends. If he permits himself to become cloistered because of the more favored position of the staff officials, the morale and driving force of the program will be impaired."
"Dimock makes the generalization that 90 percent of the characteristics of public government executive management are identical with those of private executive management. In spite of large areas of similarity, I strongly dissent. I would place the percentage very much lower - whether 30 per cent or SO per cent lower, I shall not attempt to say."
"I find from experience both with government agencies and with private business that there are striking differences. One of those differences is that, in government, there is more continuity and definition in the mandate. The limits of action are often clearly defined. in many cases by Congress. No such situation exists in large private business. Dimock says bureaucracies are related, for example, to size. Yet he points out some bearings on bureaucracies of the inadequacies in our federal civil service system and the conflict of loyalties which arises out of it. This, he states, he succeeded in overcoming."
"Marshall Dimock, emphasizing the importance of the line rather than the staff agencies, here presents a formula for the reconciliation of both... Dimock's advice, not to overemphasize staff against line, represents an emerging pattern of thought in both government and business. The chief danger in preferring staff is not merely one of neglecting the line's crucial operating experience, but the related possibility of falling into the habit of channelizing decisions and activities from all agencies through some selected staff agency, which becomes virtually the "boss's pet.""
"When I was president of the American Society for Public Administration, I grappled with questions of where that field was going, how it could make itself relevant to those who must steer the business of government on a daily basis, to those who must respond to citizens 24/7... Now I find myself asking a similar question, but this time in terms of political science. Happily, I see glimmers of light, giving hope that the field is returning to that which made it relevant in the first place: a search for guidance and truths about what it takes, as first Woodrow Wilson (1887), then Marshall Dimock (1937), and more recently John Rohr (1986) remind us, to "run a constitution.""
"Before condemning violence (physical force) as a means of social control, note that its threatened or actual use is widely practiced and respected—at least when applied successfully on a national scale. Julius Caesar conquered Gaul and was honored by the Romans; had he simply roughed up the local residents, he would have been damned as a gangster. Alexander the Great, who conquered the Near East, was not regarded by the Greeks as a ruffian, nor was Charlemagne after he conquered Europe. Europeans acquired and divided—and redivided—America by force. Lenin is not regarded in Russia as a subversive. Nor is Spain’s Franco, Cuba’s Castro, Nigeria’s Gowon, Uganda’s Amin, China’s Mao, our George Washington."
"It is a general prevalence of double coincidence of information rather than wants by both parties that would avoid the use of money."
"Where foresight is uncertain, “profit maximization” is meaningless as a guide to specifiable action."
"The greater the uncertainties of the world, the greater is the possibility that profits would go to venturesome and lucky rather than to logical, careful, fact-gathering individuals."
"Neither perfect knowledge of the past nor complete awareness of the current state of the arts gives sufficient foresight to indicate profitable action. Even for this more restricted objective, the pervasive effects of uncertainty prevent the ascertainment of actions which are supposed to be optimal in achieving profits. Now the consequence of this is that modes of behavior replace optimum equilibrium conditions as guiding rules of action. Therefore, in the following sections two forms of conscious adaptive behavior are emphasized."
"Like the biologist, the economist predicts the effects of environmental changes on the surviving class of living organisms; the economist need not assume that each participant is aware of, or acts according to, his cost and demand situation."
"The mark of a capitalistic society is that resources are owned and allocated by such nongovernmental organizations as firms, households, and markets. Resource owners increase productivity through cooperative specialization and this leads to the demand for economic organizations which facilitate cooperation. When a lumber mill employs a cabinetmaker, cooperation between specialists is achieved within a firm, and when a cabinetmaker purchases wood from a lumberman, the cooperation takes place across markets (or between firms). Two important problems face a theory of economic organization—to explain the conditions that determine whether the gains from specialization and cooperative production can better be obtained within an organization like the firm, or across markets, and to explain the structure of the organization."
"The rights of individuals to the use of resources (i.e., property rights) in any society are to be construed as supported by the force of etiquette, social custom, ostracism, and formal legally enacted laws supported by the states' power of violence of punishment. Many of the constraints on the use of what we call private property involve the force of etiquette and social ostracism. The level of noise, the kind of clothes we wear, our intrusion on other people's privacy are restricted not merely by laws backed by police force, but by social acceptance, reciprocity, and voluntary social ostracism for violators of accepted codes of conduct."
"By this I refer to the fact that at the same time several people may each possess some portion of the rights to use the land. A may possess the right to grow wheat on it. B may possess the right to walk across it. C may possess the right to dump ashes and smoke on it. D may possess the right to fly an airplane over it. E may have the right to subject it to vibrations consequent to the use of some neighboring equipment. And each of these rights may be transferable. In sum, private property rights to various partitioned uses of land are "owned" by different persons."
"Alchian: Two things you [Hayek] wrote that had a personal influence on me, after your Prices and Production, were 'Individualism and Economic Order' [sic — Alchian certainly has in mind Hayek's 'Economics and Knowledge'] and 'The Use of Knowledge in Society.' These I would regard as your two best articles, best in terms of their influence on me. Hayek: 'Economics and Knowledge' — the '37 one — which is reprinted in the volume, is the one which marks the new look at things in my way. Alchian: It was new to you, too, then? Was it a change in your own thinking? Hayek: Yes, it was really the beginning of my looking at things in a new light. … I was aware that I was putting down things which were fairly well known in a new form, and perhaps it was the most exciting moment in my career when I saw it [i.e. 'Economics and Knowledge'] in print. Alchian: Well, I'm delighted to hear you say that, because I had that copy typed up to mimeograph for my students in the first course I gave here [i.e. UCLA]. And Allan Wallace … came through town one day, and I said, 'Allan, I've got a great article!" He looked at it, started to laugh, and said, "I've seen it too; it's just phenomenal!' I'm just delighted to hear you say that it was exciting, because it was to me, too … that was a very influential article, I must say."
"Alchian: Perhaps it might have been more appropriate for the Nobel Prize to have gone to you and Hicks together, and [Kenneth] Arrow and [[Gunnar Myrdal|[Gunnar] Myrdal]] together. Hayek: Oh, surely. [laughter]"
"I was a colleague of Armen's, at the Rand Corporation "think tank," during the 1950s, and hold no economist in higher regard. When I sat down at my keyboard just now it was to find out what happened to Armen's works. One Google response was someone saying that Armen should get a Nobel Prize. I concur. My own Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded in 1990 along with the prize for Wm. Sharpe. I see in Wikipedia that Armen "influenced" Bill, and that Armen is still alive and is 96 years old."
"I personally believe that economics is fun and valuable. People who say they found it a nightmare in college just didn't have a good teacher-professor. I became a good teacher-professor as a result of tenacious mentors during my graduate study at UCLA. Professor Armen Alchian, a very distinguished economist, used to give me a hard time in class. But one day, we were having a friendly chat during our department's weekly faculty/graduate student coffee hour, and he said, "Williams, the true test of whether someone understands his subject is whether he can explain it to someone who doesn't know a darn thing about it." That's a challenge I love: making economics fun and understandable."
"Emily’s chestnut-colored hair was thick and shiny as silk floss—an extraordinary female endowment. But like most female endowments, it was generally more trouble than it was worth."
"“Ever mind the Rule of Three...Three times what thou givest returns to thee.”"
"Zombies are soulless creatures, and being soulless has been empirically proven to result in an unpleasant disposition."
"“Still feeling guilty, are we? I’d have thought you’d be over that by now.” “I have a nettlesome little thing called a conscience,” Emily hissed. “Ever hear of it?” “They’re out of fashion in New York,” Stanton said, and though she guessed she was joking, he didn’t sound humorous."
"The sight of Oakland sprawling on the horizon gave Emily’s spirits an additional boost. Oakland was by no means lovely, but it meant they were almost to San Francisco."
"In New Bethel, we take the word serious. We whip whores, we hang thieves, and we burn sorcerers."
"He’s lying. I have no doubt he’s excellent at it."
"“They say that they’re a punishment on godly people for allowing sin to walk the earth unanswered—” “Who is this ‘they’ you’re always referring to?” Stanton glared at Rose, his eyes gleaming with unhidden malice. “Your mongoloid Aunt Kindy? Your drunken Uncle Sal? Or are you talking about the slack-jawed hacks who bang out those dime novels for a bottle of whiskey and the price of a flophouse?” Rose stared at him, her mouth open in astonishment. But Stanton pressed on, his voice flat and awful. “Or maybe you’re just using the word ‘they’ as so many pea-brained idiots use it, as a cowardly rhetorical device, an excuse to say the things you really believe without giving anyone the chance to judge you for the narrow-minded, stupid creature you are.”"
"Before the sun went down again, she realized, she would be in New York. The thought sent a nervous thrill through her entire body. Her throat was tight, her heart suddenly racing."
"Emily looked at him for a long time. There were so many things she wanted to know—but she wanted not to know them even more. She didn’t want any more answers. He had been the one thing she could trust, the one person she could rely on. She wanted to beg him to be that way again. But it wasn’t him who had changed. It was her. It was her own credulity she really wanted back. And credulity, like virtue, could be lost only once."
"“Dignity is like morality,” Mirabilis barked. “Too much is as bad as too little.”"
"I’d ask you to forego the jingoistic claptrap, but it’s terrifyingly obvious you truly believe it."
"Senator Stanton? The man who’s sold his own soul so many times that no one can figure out who actually owns it?"
"She wanted to crawl into his arms and be soothed, and soothe him in return, and forget all the grand ideas she’d ever had about true love, and the necessity for it. Because true love was a load of baloney. Finding a good friend...a good friend who trusted you...was more than enough."
"Emily stared into the middle distance, trying to ignore the fact that the men were looking at her like a cupcake on a plate."
"“I’ll do everything I can to help, I promise.” “You always have,” Emily murmured. Except tell me the truth about anything."
"You know, there’s one thing about you that always astonishes me. The longer you talk, the wronger you get."
"Sadly, there is a fine line between patriotism and paranoia."
"But it was impossible to remain so long in the company of a female, even a divine one, without suffering some form of disillusionment."
"In his idle hours, Heusler sometimes amused himself by trying to conceive of a crime a mortal man could commit that was more monstrous than making a goddess fall in love with him. He had never succeeded."
"Love. Such a lot of damn fuss."
"Could one die from boredom, she wondered? From complete, oppressive, crushing, unmitigated boredom, the likes of which made all other boredom seem like ecstasy’s sweet thrilling embrace? And in such a case, if one happened to have a life insurance policy, would it pay?"
"It was her own evil assumptions that had done her in. She hadn’t even considered the third possible explanation for his strange behavior—that he was a perfectly nice man, without an ounce of guile, just trying to be helpful. People helped people in California. Why hadn’t she thought of that? She’d only been in New York a few weeks, and already she was turning hard and suspicious."
"She was painfully aware that doing one’s best was never assurance that it wasn’t the wrong choice anyway."
"It was disappointing, as if a wish she didn’t know she’d made hadn’t come true."
"Emily already knew there was going to be hell to pay, and she supposed there was no use allowing it to accrue interest."
"“Was your mother furious?” “She’ll get over it,” Stanton said. “Perhaps not in this lifetime, but I happen to believe in reincarnation, so there’s still hope.”"
"“I’m sorry Mr. Stanton, really I am. I didn’t mean to miss it. Things...happened.” “Oh, well. Things happened. How nice to have that cleared up.”"
"The obsessive rules of etiquette struck Emily as mean-spirited, like the old trick of tying someone’s shoelaces under the table. It was only fun if you liked watching people fall down."
"The shortness of the woman’s replies indicated that Emily was asking questions Miss Jesczenka didn’t particularly want to answer, but those were usually the questions that most needed to be asked."
"“What kind of idiot do you think I am?” ”I have no idea what kind of idiot you are,” Miss Jesczenka said. “That’s why I’m asking.”"
"Spread out before the pyramid, as far as the eye could see, stretched a frozen ocean of blackness—stinking oily blackness that bubbled and churned. Voider than void, colder than cold, deader than dead. It is your world. It is the world we will make for you."
"“Your frontier ethics are so rawboned, Miss Edwards, as rough-hewn and clumsy as the log cabin in which you must have been raised.” Mrs. Stanton’s face was like marble as she spoke; only her lips moved with ugly precision. “Decency is striving for perfection in a world in which every other hoglike creature satisfies himself with sloppiness and indulgence. Decency is not in failing to murder someone. It’s in murdering the right person, and sparing your family the indignity of getting caught.”"
"There is a difference between not understanding and being willfully obtuse."
"“It is a great weakness of credomancers, Miss Edwards. They often believe their own press.” ”You’re a credomancer, too,” Emily said. “I’m also a woman. Failure, struggle, and doubt are my constant companions. They are not always pleasant, but they inoculate me against overconfidence. As such, I would not trade them for all the arrogant bravado in the world.”"
"I don’t think that’s the answer he was looking for. It’s not the answer I was looking for. But maybe it’s the right one."
"“Credomancy may seek to exploit the human desire for a tidy narrative where an unblemished romantic hero vanquishes all obstacles, but such ideals have very little to do with reality. Reality requires pragmatism and compromise. Men fail. Women fail. There are no heroes, only human beings who somehow find the strength to behave heroically, no matter how many times they have been unable to do so in the past. If you understand that, Miss Edwards—if you truly and deeply understand that, then you will understand the most powerful thing anyone with a heart can understand.” “And what’s that?” Emily said softly. “That love is not enough. But it’s a start.”"
"“Don’t lie,” he said. “That’s my job.”"
"Nothing is ever what you want it to be. The harder you grab for it, the more deeply it cuts. And it mocks you for being foolish enough to reach for it at all. You come to fear touching anything at all, because you know that if you do, it will become terrible."
"Emily pounded on the door, assuming it would do no good, but finding the act of pounding very satisfying indeed."
"“I wasn’t sure if we were still engaged.” “After everything we’ve been through? After true love conquered all?” Emily shook her head. “Being dead had done nothing to alleviate your obtuseness, Mr. Stanton.” “Being dead allowed me to learn the heart’s deepest secret,” he said. “That sometimes love—even true love—isn’t enough.” ”But it’s a start,” Emily said."
"Having engaged in vigorous and passionate debate while on their honeymoon trip from New York, they had arrived at the startling—and rather liberating—conclusion that the marriage itself was not at all necessary. Stanton no longer had a name to give, and taking Emily’s would have involved all the tedium of authority and nonsense they’d hoped to avoid. So, in the end, he had returned to her the simple gold band she had worn for so long, sliding it onto the ring finger of her new right hand. And she had given him a soft slow kiss. They were the only vows required."
"They were crying, begging for mercy and praying for their dying children. It’s one thing to think about abortion in the abstract, but when you see a baby at seven-months gestation, it’s a baby — truly one of us. It was as if the pit of hell opened up before me. All of the rationalizations were swept away by the brute facts — the humanity of these babies and their killing. I instantly realized that an abortion was the taking of a human life, and I became pro-life."
"The Founders would be uniformly horrified to think that their treasured Constitution has been used to justify abortion. It is a great irony that leftwing justices, arguing that the Constitution is a “living document,” have turned it into a writ to kill."
"He is a visionary leader who has built a tremendously successful business over the decades by hiring talented people, developing a shared plan, and then unleashing them to carry it out. That’s what real leaders do, and I believe that he will do the same thing as president."
"The system of constraints that governs the projections and transformations of... bodies in space must long ago have become internalized as a powerful, though largely unconscious, part of our perceptual machinery."
"In spite of some unresolved issues, the close match we have found between mental rotation and their counterparts in the physical world leads inevitably to speculations about the functions and origin of human spatial imagination. It may not be premature to propose that spatial imagination has evolved as a reflection of the physics and geometry of the external world. The rules that govern structures and motions in the physical world may, over evolutionary history, have been incorporated into human perceptual machinery, giving rise to demonstrable correspondences between mental imagery and its physical analogues."
"The universality, invariance, and elegance of principles governing the universe may be reflected in principles of the minds that have evolved in that universe - provided that the mental principles are formulated with respect to the abstract spaces appropriate for the representation of biologically significant objects and their properties. (1) Positions and motions of objects conserve their shapes in the geometrically fullest and simplest way when represented as points and connecting geodesic paths in the six-dimensional manifold jointly determined by the Euclidean group of three· dimensional space and the symmetry group of each object. (2) Colors of objects attain constancy when represented as points in a three-dimensional vector space in which each variation in natural illumination is cancelled by application of its inverse from the three-dimensional linear group of terrestrial transformations of the invariant solar source. (3) Kinds of objects support optimal generalization and categorization when represented, in an evolutionarily shaped space of possible objects, as connected regions with associated weights determined by Bayesian revision of maximum entropy priors"
"Students of the human mind have long noted its ability to mimic internally the positive notions and transformations of objects in the external world. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the British empiricist David Hume wrote that to "join incongruous shapes and appearances costs the imagination no more trouble than to conceive the most natural and familiar objects" and that "this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience.""
"The subject detects the presence and interrelationships of the basic components of one of the two-dimensional drawings - particularly, the variously oriented straight lines, the several types of vertices by which they are connected and, presumably, something of the structural relationships among these components within the two-dimensional pattern. Then, on the basis of some higher-level processing of these extracted features and their interrelationships, an internal representation, code, or verbal description is generated for each picture separately that captures the intrinsic structure of the three-dimensional object in a form that is independent of the particular orientation in which that object happens to be displayed."
"Nor do such theories provide a ready account for the equivalence of the slopes of the reaction-time functions for the picture-plane and depth pairs. For, in order to explain the dependence of reaction time on angular difference, we must suppose that the features that are being compared are the features of the two-dimensional drawings, which differ more and more with angular departure, and not the features of the three-dimensional objects, which are the same regardless of orientation."
"Most studies employing three-dimensional objects as stimuli have used simultaneous presentation whereas most studies employing two-dimensional objects have used comparison of a single visual stimulus with a memory presentation. We suspect that it is this procedural difference rather than the difference in dimensionality that is the principal determiner of rate of mental rotation."
"A psychological space is established for any set of stimuli by determining metric distances between the stimuli such that the probability that a response learned to any stimulus will generalize to any other is an invariant monotonic function of the distance between them. To a good approximation, this probability of generalization (i) decays exponentially with this distance, and (ii) does so in accordance with one of two metrics, depending on the relation between the dimensions along which the stimuli vary. These empirical regularities are mathematically derivable from universal principles of natural kinds and probabilistic geometry that may, through evolutionary internalization, tend to govern the behaviors of all sentient organisms."
"I suggest that the psychophysical function that maps physical parameter space into a species' psychological space has been shaped over evolutionary history so that consequential regions for that species, although variously shaped, are not consistently elongated or flattened in particular directions."
"We generalize from one situation to another not because we cannot tell the difference between the two situations but because we judge that they are likely to belong to a set of situations having the same consequence."
"R. N. Shepard [1978] has argued that a number of highly original and significant creations of the human mind have been produced by a mode of thinking which was essentially nonverbal, involving internal representations which could best be described as images of a largely spatial, and often visual character. Shepard provides an impressive list of creative scholars whose most outstanding achievements have been the result of highly visual thinking: Einstein, James Clerk Maxwell, Michael Faraday, Hermann von Helmholtz, Francis Galton, and Friedrich A. Kekule are on the list as is the mathematician ."
"The one good thing about being forced to read The Great Gatsby was that I discovered Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft afterwards because I figured that not everybody from that time frame could have been that incredibly annoying."
"Gun Free Zones are hunting preserves for innocent people. Period."
"My personal philosophy is that all writers need to put GET PAID in their mission statement. All that artistic creative stuff is nice too, but make sure GET PAID is in there (in all caps)."
"When presented with a few options for how to accomplish something, pick the awesome one. Pick the one that makes your story more entertaining. Pick the one that you are the most excited to write about, because when an author is having fun writing it, that’ll come through the page and the readers will feel that excitement. It’s all about contagious enthusiasm."
"I'm not sure what this means and if it can be replicated, but we did something very unique and none of it was planned. There wasn't a $20 million marketing budget designed to make this; it just happened. The audience took the movie for its own and decided to make it an event, and that's pretty awesome. And by the way, there were people who liked the movie so much they were defending the film against people who were thrashing it. Completely mind-blowing. I've never had that happen, either."
"We do these movies in six months so there’s going to be some stuff that misses the bar in terms of looking super polished. We take what we’re doing seriously as if we’re doing one of those things. Also, we just go, “Look, we’re just going to be outlandish and crazy because that’s what these movies are.” They’re intended to be fun. However anybody wants to construe them is up to them. If they want to think that they’re bad and campy, that’s fine. What I’ve found in general though is the true fans that love these movies, they love them because they are what they are."
"Beautiful Destruction"
"I know this doesn't last forever, so I'm cherishing every moment of it"
"People are more dangerous when they're calm. When they're loud and aggressive that's usually an act and usually trying to compensate."
"Artem called me out, I will knock him out"
"That little fucker hit me with a Hadukan or something"
"Don't be scared, homie"
"Where I come from, people like that get slapped"
"I got nothing against that guy, except that he is kind of a piece of shit"
"A gentleman never tells"
"Training and smoking pot like I should, instead of paying attention to other bullshit"
"My fight career has gotten in the way of my marijuana smoking"
"This is fucking gangster fucking warfare. I don't give a fuck"
"I will never sell you a handful of wolftickets"
"I've never paid taxes in my life, I'm probably going to jail"
"They're a bunch of dorks"
"Turkeys are intelligent, social, curious, and sometimes even funny. I wish people were more like turkeys sometimes. … We're going to have a special celebration for turkeys this November, where we're going to hang out with turkeys, we're not going to eat them, we're just going to kind of chill, hang out, talk with the turkeys, eat a little veggies."
"Many iconic features of Twitter have been created over the years by listening and watching what people who use Twitter do with it and then working to make it easier and better for them—we still do this today."
"If I don't get a chance to play with my son in the morning, I feel like I missed something that I'll never get back. It's such a joy to wake up and be in the mindset of a five-year-old before transitioning into the role of "executive.""
"Google was not a normal place at all. There was just all kinds of weird stuff going on. I would just walk around and check stuff out like the kid in Willy Wonka going around the chocolate factory."
"We didn’t win the World Series. How are we satisfied with that? That’s what we want. That’s why we work, that’s why we train, that’s why we do everything in the offseason, the cage work. Everything is to get an opportunity to win a World Series. We came up short."
"Getting my first chance to play in front of crowds like that, situations like that, is going to be huge for us going on. We have a lot of young guys on this team, and getting as far as we did is going to be beneficial down the road for us."
"It was fun. It was fun coming to the ballpark and competing with these guys. If we were down, if we were up, it didn’t matter. We were always having fun. It was a joy."
"Christian. Faith, Family, then Baseball. If what you did yesterday still seems big today, then you haven't done anything today!"
"I was checking out all the bats he had and kind of rubbing a couple of them on me to get a little bit of luck. It’s pretty impressive what he swung, for someone his size, too. You see the pictures of him, I’m thinking this guys’ 6-5, 6-6 but you hear he was maybe 5-11, 5-10. It’s pretty impressive he was able to swing something like this and produce the numbers he did."
"I think his future is extremely bright. I think he had an unbelievable season. I don’t think I would have predicted that he would be an MVP candidate . . . That’s a lot to ask from a rookie to be an MVP type of candidate. I think the sky’s the limit for this kid. And again, he’s a natural-born leader. And that doesn’t happen at an age where he’s at, where people look to him, and it’s already happening."
"He is putting on the most amazing display I think I have ever seen!"
"If you come up with a big new idea in our world and everyone says "Hey, that's great, definitely go ahead with that," then you know it's not a big new idea at all. Anything really new brings out all the reasons why it can't possibly work, and why it's crazy to even think about it."
"Exploring is fundamentally human; we've done it for thousands of years. It's an expression of something that's the best in us."
"As the French say, aimer est souffrir, to love is to suffer, and therefore, to say that love is essential to the Being of God is to say that in one way or another suffering is essential to his nature. That is to say something our forefathers would have declined to accept. They would have retorted that God, as Father, must be above or beyond suffering. If, however, we take seriously the declaration "God is love," how can we avoid the entailment that suffering is essential to the divine Being?"
"We have an independent life, but we're so intertwined as a creative entity that.... I can't imagine creating without her... It would be like trying to play piano and not having a piano. We have a special hidden language with each other."
"In fashion, I don't even think you know what you've made until the lineup backstage."
"Fashion should be wherever it can be."
"They're always telling me I'm too angry"
"I’m too tired to be angry enough"
"I'm angry that I can't sleep that I hate myself"
"Gloria Anzaldúa, an old friend, and Chrystos, a new one, gave me courage to write honestly about violence."
"We are role models to a lot of young people, not just African Americans and soldiers."
"People can see the achievement and how hard work leads to it."
"From a 2011 blog post, quoted at Openmatt.org"
"All throughout high school and college everyone told me I couldn’t be an athlete [as a vegetarian], so I wanted to prove them wrong. … Being a vegetarian is great. I have always grown up this way, so it’s not even something I really think about too much. I think a lot of people have to make the decision whether they want to do it or not, but for me it’s been easy; I never even really thought about eating meat, it’s something that always seemed a little gross to me, especially with the way animals are treated and what not. The older I got, the more I started doing a little research, and started realizing all the health benefits as well."
"[Vegetarian lifestyle] made me feel great. I still feel young, totally healthy. I’ve fought in the sport for many years and I feel like it’s something that’s helped me tremendously. But I’ve never eaten meat, so I can’t compare the two and say, ‘This is what it does better.’ But all the people I know who have gone from eating meat to not eating meat say they feel much better."
"Would you support public executions of anyone who helps a child transition? This would include doctors, therapists, teachers, guidance counselors, etc"
"Thailand’s entire economy is based off of sex tourism The men are so demoralized and emasculated many even become women The youth need a nationalist party to expel foreigners and shut down whore houses How can the men sit back and allow the world to come to abuse their women"
"Barack Obama was a writer before he became a politician, and he saw his Presidency as a struggle over narrative."
"Barack Obama was always better at explaining the meaning of democracy than at fighting its opponents."
"After Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, the burden of proof is on anyone who would make the case for military action as a force for good."
"It’s hard to build a narrative around actions not taken, disasters possibly averted, hard realities accommodated. The story of what didn’t happen isn’t an easy one to tell."
"More than any modern President, Barack Obama had a keen sense of the limits of American power—and of his own."
"At the heart of Obama’s narrative was a belief that progress, in the larger scheme of things, was inevitable, and this belief underscored his position on every issue from marriage equality to climate change. His idea of progress was neither the rigid millennial faith of Woodrow Wilson nor Bush’s shallow God-blessed optimism. It was human-scale and incremental."
"Progressives find it hard to imagine that there are others who in good faith don’t want the better world they’re offering and will fiercely resist it."
"America under Trump became less free, less equal, more divided, more alone, deeper in debt, swampier, dirtier, meaner, sicker, and deader."
"Trump’s lies will linger for years, poisoning the atmosphere like radioactive dust."
"In a sense, Americans expected a degree of fabrication from their leaders. After Jimmy Carter, in his 1976 campaign, promised, 'I’ll never lie to you,' and then pretty much kept his word, voters sent him back to Georgia. Ronald Reagan’s gauzy fictions were far more popular."
"Trump’s barrage of falsehoods—as many as 50 daily in the last fevered months of the 2020 campaign—complemented his unconcealed brutality. Lying was another variety of shamelessness. Just as he said aloud what he was supposed to keep to himself, he lied again and again about matters of settled fact—the more brazen and frequent the lie, the better."
"Monopoly of public policy by experts—trade negotiators, government bureaucrats, think tankers, professors, journalists—helped create the populist backlash that empowered Trump."
"Trump’s legacy includes an extremist Republican Party that tries to hold on to power by flagrantly undemocratic means, and an opposition pushed toward its own version of extremism."
"The beginning of the end of Trump’s presidency arrived on March 11, 2020, when he addressed the nation for the first time on the subject of the pandemic and showed himself to be completely out of his depth. The virus was a fact that Trump couldn’t lie into oblivion or forge into a political weapon—it was too personal and frightening, too real."
"I believe that what we get out of our bodies is a direct result of what we put in. I (mostly) follow a plant-based diet of whole foods that helps my body stay in balance and limits additional inflammation. I try to surround myself with positive people, and I work to minimize distractions whenever possible. My lifestyle has helped me stay physically and mentally fit."
"I have always believed the sport of football is an 'all-in' proposition — if a 100% competitive commitment isn't there, you won't succeed, and success is what I love so much about our game. There is a physical, mental and emotional challenge EVERY single day that has allowed me to maximize my highest potential. And I have tried my very best these past 22 years. There are no shortcuts to success on the field or in life. This is difficult for me to write, but here it goes: I am not going to make that competitive commitment anymore. I have loved my NFL career, and now it is time to focus my time and energy on other things that require my attention. I've done a lot of reflecting the past week and have asked myself difficult questions. And I am so proud of what we have achieved. My teammates, coaches, fellow competitors, and fans deserve 100% of me, but right now, it's best I leave the field of play to the next generation of dedicated and committed athletes."
"When things don't go your way—or, rather, what you don't think of as your way—there can be a variety of opportunities that may not be obvious in the moment but that through hard work, preparation, and persistence can present themselves over time and make you better."
"Why do i continue getting daily pliability? Because I want to play football for as long as possible. I love my sport. I love my teammates. I love what i do... to me, sustained peak performance means doing what i want to do, and what I love to do, for as long as I can."
"You can make life a lot harder for yourself by focusing on negative things in your path or making excuses for why things didn't go your way. Or, you can refuse to take things personally, let them go, learn from them, and become the best version of yourself. It's a choice. It's actually your choice. If I throw an interception or have a bad day or make a bad business decision, by staying in that place I will just make things worse."
"Wisdom, someone said, is about knowing the difference between the things you can control and the things you can't. Today, if things go my way, great; and if they don't, that's okay, too, since I always have the chance to overcome them in the future. Whenever my team loses a game, it's an opportunity to learn something. A game is always an experiment."
"Do you know how many NFL players are switching over to plant-based diets? I see it all the time! Look no further than the very best, Tom Brady."
"To be honest, Tom Brady is an influencer there because of the stuff he talks about, and how healthy he is."
"New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady is the most prominent athlete to embrace veganism, crediting his mostly plant-based diet for allowing him to play at an MVP level into his 40s. He made the change starting in 2014, and detailed his approach in his 2017 book, The TB12 Method ."
"It is difficult to determine whether Georgians hated Sherman and his army as much as the Spartans despised Epaminondas and the Thebans. Both men had wrecked their centuries-old practice of apartheid in a matter of weeks. It is a dangerous and foolhardy thing for a slaveholding society to arouse a democracy of such men."
"I don’t see enough people standing up to defend the West. We don’t realize how tenuous its legacy is and how it has to be transmitted from generation to generation. The nature of man doesn’t change, and that’s reassuring, since we know the necessary conditions that can save him from himself. The legacy of the West is a guidance system through the natural perils of human nature and behavior."
"Twenty-six days after 9/11, Americans were in Afghanistan; 40 hours after a similar al Qaeda attack, the Spanish electorate voted in Socialists on the promise that they would get out of Iraq pronto. Our population may seem soft and flabby on university campuses and think tanks, but the sort of Americans I see out here in rural central California like to fight, work to exhaustion and, for the most part, worry more about what we are going to do to our enemies in the Middle East, rather than they to us."
"War itself is not a mere science but a more fickle sort of thing, often subject to fate or chance, being an entirely human enterprise..."
"[W]ar can have utility and solve problems, and it often follows a grim logic of sorts; but once it starts, it may well last twenty-seven years over the entire Greek world rather than an anticipated thirty days in Attica and kill thousands at its end who were not born in its beginning. Such recognition is not necessarily cause for pacifism; rather... it calls for acceptance that thousands will end up rotten in little-known places... the logic that follows from decisions made far away in the hallowed assemblies..."
"Between emotion and logic resides the fate of thousands of the mostly unknown... who will surely then and now be asked to settle through violence what words alone cannot. Remember them, for the Peloponnesian War was theirs alone."
"We understand the notions of both ethnic pride and hyphenated Americanism, but many of us are still bewildered about contradictory impulses: the emotional need to display Mexican decals on cars and hang Mexican flags on houses and businesses — or boo an American team at a soccer match — coupled with equally heated expressions of outrage that anyone might suggest that those who broke American law in coming to the United States would ever have to return where their hearts would “always be.” That paradox is the most disturbing — and ignored — aspect of the immigration debate: the contradictory impulse to fault the United States for a litany of sins (exploitation, racism, xenophobia, nativism) without commensurate attention to why any newcomer would wish to reside in a place that is so clearly culpable..."
"America was born as an immigrant nation. It went through many periods of nearly unlimited immigration, coupled with xenophobic backlashes when particular groups — Germans, Jews, Irish, Mexicans, or Poles — came in such numbers and so abruptly that the traditional powers of assimilation were for a time overwhelmed. But the eras of ethnic ghettoes and tribal separatism were usually brief, given the inclusive popular culture and official government efforts to overwhelm identification with the home country."
"If we were to take a newly arrived illegal alien, and enroll him in a typical Chicano Studies course, he would logically wish to return across the border as soon as possible."
"Those regions that Putin has already bullied into compliance — Georgia, Crimea, and eastern Ukraine — serve as a warning to others of what might be their fate should they resist, and why it is thus wiser to make the necessary adjustments. Should Vladimir Putin suddenly discover persecuted Russian speakers in Estonia, we know the script. He will give speeches about the historical ties of Estonia to Russia; he will list his worries about the supposed maltreatment of Russian speakers; he will warn the world that his Russia is a nuclear, and sometimes unpredictable, power and therefore the world should butt out."
"[T]he Confederacy was so entwined with the idea of preserving slavery that the flag, even today, can evoke racial polarization..."
"In a racially diverse society, it makes sense to phase out state sanction for the battle flag — as South Carolina governor Nikki Haley advocated yesterday, in calling on the state legislature to vote for the removal of the battle flag that has been flying over the grounds of the state capitol..."
"The postmodern rationale is either that groups that have suffered past disfranchisement and discrimination should not be subject to current anti-discriminatory protocols..."
"We should pause to appreciate that the American democratic experiment in ethnic and racial diversity is nearly unique. Indeed, the very idea of racial diversity and nationhood does not have much of a record of success in history. Few countries have been able to transcend their ethnic origins and sustain a racially pluralistic society. Rome was an exception and pulled it off for nearly 500 years, as the Roman Empire grew to encompass non-Italian peoples from the Euphrates to Scotland before unwinding into tribal chaos. The Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires worked for long periods, though they relied on the use of autocratic force and imperial coercion to suppress minorities, in ways antithetical to modern notions of governance."
"In more recent times, religious and racial diversity — in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, or contemporary Nigeria — has resulted in chaos and, occasionally, genocide. True, some nations have been able to incorporate different tribes, as in the United Kingdom’s unification of the various peoples of the British Isles, but usually after hundreds of years of fighting and only when there were underlying racial and cultural affinities that could trump tribal differences."
"[T]he United States is history’s exception, not its rule. America is a great, evolving experiment of a constitutional republic in which peoples of all different races, religions, and ethnic backgrounds are equal under the law and see themselves as Americans first and members of tribes second — appearance and religion being incidental rather than essential to the American body politic."
"[A] Juan Lopez from Oaxaca is freely accepted as a U.S. citizen in a way that a white Bob Jones would never fully be embraced as a citizen of Mexico, a country whose constitution still expressly sets out racially chauvinistic guidelines that govern immigration law. Someone who appears African or European would have a hard time fully integrating as a citizen in Chinese, Korean, or Japanese society, in a way not true of Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese in America. The world assumes that in America a president, attorney general, secretary of state, or Supreme Court justice can be black; but it would be as surprised to find whites as high public officials in Zimbabwe as to find a black as prime minister or foreign minister in Sweden..."
"In the last half-century, Americans have increasingly tended to emphasize race and tribe in promoting “diversity,” rather than seeking to strengthen the more tenuous notion of unity with their fellow citizens. We have forgotten that human nature is fond of division and must work at setting aside superficial tribal affinities to unite on the basis of core values and ideas."
"[R]acial difference and ethnic pride are no longer just fossilized notions from the 1960s; they are growing fissures in the American mosaic that now threaten to split the country apart — fueling the suspicion of less liberal and more homogeneous nations that the great American experiment will finally unwind as expected. That would be a great tragedy, but a catastrophe entirely predictable if citizens seek symbolic solidarity with their tribe rather than in the common idea of just being American."
"The reason liberals despise Clarence Thomas or caricature a Ben Carson, more so than they do white conservative justices or public figures, is the threat that they pose to the entire engine of liberal condescension — and Democratic politics. When successful blacks prove that they easily compete in the marketplace of talent and ideas without liberal racial policies and their political henchmen, then the entire architecture of liberal racial politics collapses. The disdain shown a Thomas or Carson suggests that liberal racial politics serve as private medieval penance in the abstract, and at little personal cost for assuaging guilt over liberal apartheid."
"[A] France or a Belgium is not quite a sovereign nation any more, and thus does not have complete control over its national destiny or foreign relations."
"Europe's immigration policy is a disaster — and for reasons that transcend the idiocy of allowing the free influx of young male Muslims from a premodern, war-torn Middle East into a postmodern, pacifist, and post-Christian Europe. Europe has not been a continent of immigrants since the Middle Ages. It lacks the ingredients necessary to assimilate, integrate, and intermarry large numbers of newcomers each year: There is no dynamic and fluid economy, no confidence in its own values, no belief that class and race are incidental, not essential, to one's persona, no courage to assume that an immigrant made a choice to leave a worse place for a better one. And all this is in the context of a class-bound hierarchy masked and excused by boutique leftism."
"Europeans are unable to understand why a young Libyan came to Europe in the first place, and why apparently under no circumstances does he wish to return home. Specifically, Europeans — for a variety of 20th-century historical and cultural reasons — often are either ignorant of who they are or terrified about expressing their identities in any concrete and positive fashion. The result is that Europe cannot impose on a would-be newcomer any notion that consensual government is superior to the anarchy and theocracy of the Middle East, that having individual rights trumps being subjects of a dictator, that personal freedom is a better choice than statist tyranny, that protection of private property is a key to economic growth whereas law by fiat is not, and that independent judiciaries do not run like Sharia courts. It most certainly cannot ask of immigrants upon arrival that they either follow the laws of a society that originally made Europe attractive to them, or return home to live under a system that they apparently rejected. I omit for obvious reasons that few present-day Europeans believe that Christianity is much different from Islam, and apparently thus assume that terrorists might just as well be Christians."
"Europeans are not having children for lots of reasons. A static and fossilized economy without much growth gives little hope to a 20-something European that he or she can get a good job, buy a home, have three children, and provide for those offspring lives with unlimited choices. Instead, the young European bides his time, satisfying his appetites, as a perpetual adolescent who lives in his parents’ flat, seeks to milk the system, and waits for someone to die at the tribal government bureau. After a lost decade, one hopes to hook up with some like soul in her or his late thirties."
"As a general rule, whatever Europe is now doing, we should do the opposite — for our very survival in an increasingly scary world."
"America is history's exception. It began as a republic founded by European migrants. Like the homogenous citizens of most other nations, they were likely on a trajectory to incorporate racial sameness as the mark of citizenship. But the ultimate logic of America's unique Constitution was different. So the United States steadily evolved to define Americans by their shared values, not by their superficial appearance. Eventually, anyone who was willing to give up his prior identity and assume a new American persona became American. The United States has always cherished its "melting pot" ethos of e pluribus unum — of blending diverse peoples into one through assimilation, integration, and intermarriage..."
"So far, America has beaten the odds and remained multiracial rather than multicultural, thereby becoming the most powerful nation in the world. We should remember that diversity is an ornament, but unity is our strength."
"Every problem has a resolution — but often not a good one."
"For some reason, contemporary America believes that it can reject its uniquely successful melting pot to embrace a historically dangerous and discredited salad-bowl separatism. Is there any evidence from the past that institutionalizing sects and ethnic grievances would ensure a nation’s security, prosperity, and freedom? America’s melting pot is history’s sole exception of e pluribus unum inclusivity: a successful multiracial society bound by a common culture, language, and values. But this is a historic aberration with a future that is now in doubt..."
"It is time to step back from the apartheid brink..."
"A Latino-American undergraduate who is a student of Shakespeare is not "culturally appropriating" anyone’s white-European legacy, but instead seeking transcendence of ideas and a common humanity. Asian-Americans are not “overrepresented” at premier campuses. Their high-profile presence should be praised as a model, not punished as aberrant by number-crunching bureaucrats. African-Americans who excel in physics and engineering are not “acting white” but finding the proper pathways for their natural talents. Being one-half Southeast Asian or three-quarters white is not the touchstone to one’s essence and is irrelevant to one’s character and conduct. No one is impinging on anyone’s culture when blacks dye their hair blond, or when blondes prefer to wear cornrow braids. Campuses desperately need unity czars, not diversity czars. Otherwise, we will end up as 50 separate and rival nations — just like other failed states in history whose diverse tribes and races destroyed themselves in a Hobbesian dog-eat-dog war with one another."
"Vladimir Putin is a thug and a killer who in the grand tradition of Russian autocracy has no intention ever of holding free elections."
"The masters of the universe of Silicon Valley did not, as promised, bring us new-age tranquility, but rather only greater speed and intensity to do what we always do. Trolling, doxing, and phishing were just new versions of what Jesus warned about in the Sermon on the Mount. Spiritual transcendence is the timeless water of life; technology is simply the delivery pump. We confused the two. That water can be delivered ever more rapidly does not mean it ever changes its essence. High tech has become the great delusion."
"[W]e need to develop a new racial sense that we are so intermarried and assimilated that cardboard racial cutouts are irrelevant. Our new racialism must be seen as a reactionary and dangerous return to 19th-century norm of judging our appearance on the outside as more valuable than who we are on the inside."
"In the summer of 1864, pessimists warned that the North could not win the Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln faced opposition for the Republican-party nomination, and even if he won it, he was considered likely to lose the November election to Union general George McClellan. General Grant’s Army of the Potomac was being bled white in Virginia in vain attempts to dislodge Robert E. Lee’s defenders from their entrenchments around the Confederate capital of Richmond. Gruesome encounters such as the Battle of Cold Harbor and the Battle of the Wilderness had given the depressed Northern public nightmares. Then, suddenly, fantasy became reality. The maverick General William Tecumseh Sherman unexpectedly took Atlanta on September 2, 1864. Euphoria swept the North. McClellan’s sure-thing candidacy crashed. The mercurial Sherman then headed off with his huge army on the famous “March to the Sea” through Georgia. He next plowed through the Carolinas to the rear of Lee’s army in Virginia. In less than nine months the entire Confederate cause collapsed. The supposedly endless Civil War ended with a sudden and absolute Union victory that no one had foreseen."
"[O]ur top schools are obsessed with race, class, and gender but apparently not rigorous in cross-examining the fables and pop fads of their students."
"It is growing harder and harder to equate elite university branding with proof of knowledge. Barack Obama, another Harvard Law graduate, proved this depressing fact a number of times when he asserted that the Maldives were the Falklands, "corpsmen" was pronounced with a hard p, Austrians spoke a language called Austrian, there were 57 states, and Hawaii was in Asia."
"[O]n most of the major issues of the last 40 years, what we were told by economists, foreign-policy experts, pundits, and the media has proven wrong — and doubly wrong given the emphases placed on such assertions by the supposedly better-educated professional classes."
"Free-market economics and tolerance for Chinese violations of trade and commercial protocols did not result in either the liberalization or the democratization of China. Over the past two decades, we have been told that the Japanese, the European Union, and the Chinese successively would eclipse America with their respective superior paradigms."
"In truth, elite education has become a cattle brand. It signifies lots of things other than knowledge: for some, politically correct certification; for others, good test scores and grades that got them in; for a few, later entry into the alumni ranks of high business, law, academia, government, and the media."
"Old-boy networks, alumni giving, affirmative action, sports, and diversity have pretty much put an end to classical meritocratic admissions. That decline of standards in admissions is perversely ironic, because at about the same time, a new campus ethos of grade inflation was predicated on the self-important notion that if you were smart enough to get into Princeton or Harvard, then Harvard and Princeton would make the necessary adjustments and concessions to make sure you graduated. The result of self-congratulation is that a Stanford graduate now usually knows less history than his Hillsdale counterpart. A successful self-made businessman can know a lot more about the economy than does a Harvard M.B.A."
"[W]hat bothers the New York Times is not racism per se, but who is the racist and who are her targets."
"My @HooverInst colleague @SWAtlasHoover has consistently warned that government must follow science, not politics, in doing the least amount of harm to its people. It's ironic that criticism directed at him has been done so in an unscientific fashion."
"There is no end of history. Instead, civilization is a constant fight to embrace what has worked for the common good through the ages—and to reject what in the past has failed abysmally."
"Communists sentenced my father's father to ten years hard labor for having a small American flag in his possession (by that time he had been a leader of the social democrats for some years). At his "trial" he was asked why he had the flag. Was he a spy? He replied that it represented freedom better than any other symbol he knew, and that he had a right to have it."
"America represented to my father, as Lincoln put it, "the last, best hope of earth." I would like to be able to say that this made my father a remarkable man for his time and his circumstances. For, in many ways, he truly was a wonder. But this is not one of those ways. Among the Hungarians I knew—aside from those who were true believers in the Communists—this was the common sense of the subject. It was self-evident to them."
"[I]n America human beings could prove to the world that they have the capacity to govern themselves. I came to understand what Lincoln meant when he said that the ideas of the Declaration of Independence were the "electric cord" that linked all Americans together, as though we were "blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that Declaration." This is what it meant to be an American, and it wasn't all that far from what it meant to be a man."
"I'm in the ironic position of teaching native Americans (I mean native-born Americans) how to think about their country. How odd it seems, and yet how perfectly American, that I, a Hungarian immigrant, should teach them."
"[T]he United States of America, is not only the most powerful and the most prosperous country on earth, but the most free and the most just. Then I do my best to tell them how and why this is so. And I teach them about the principles from which those blessings of liberty flow. I invite them to consider whether they can have any greater honor than to pass undiminished to their children and grandchildren this great inheritance of freedom."
"It is never easy to give honor where great honor is due."
"The United States started out in 1776 throwing off the accident and force that ruled by hereditary right in the old world, inviting mankind to respect the equal rights of human nature and the revolutionary choice of government by consent."
"[D]escribed the worship of power as "the new religion in Europe." Anti-Americanism, predicated in part on fascism's mirror image, the revilement of power–especially when that power is somebody else's–answers many of the fundamental needs once filled by the Church. There is a transcendant and common goal."
"[F]ury is an emotion that I pride myself on *controlling.* Civilization depends upon the control of our instincts--aggression foremost among them. May I suggest rolling back the conversation a bit..."
"I do not like the Democrats. At all. After the year-long sex panic and the Kavanaugh spectacle, frankly, I loathe them."
"I'll be voting for the Democrats again in the coming election, however much I don't think they deserve my vote. And I'll pray that someone in America has the courage and the ability to form a new political party. This should not be beyond us. We're an accomplished nation."
"Washington is the most intensely parochial city in the world."
"I connected with the 'older' generation's music and I find that hard to be seen as extraordinary, because the music is so good!" he explains. I think what all those artists have in common is that their music Is timeless. A Neil Young song or a Bob Dyian song, whether or not they are singing it, can transiate to any generation.""
"I'm really into this kid Brett Dermen, who I heard at the Hotel Cafe in Hollywood. He may get lumped in with the Jack Johnson feel-good/barefoot thing, but he's so much different than that. He's timeless — he's probably twenty-five, but he seems like he's twenty-five in 1972. He paints these gorgeous pictures, musically, where you think, "I want to hear his voice, I want to hear that guitar, and I want to hear those melodies." I put him on as a head clearer."
"Making or writing a movie, to me, is like building a watch because a watch is so small and you only can fit so many things inside it that all the pieces really do need to work together."
"I also got exposed to the poets that were being read at the colleges at that time. The only poetry I had remembered before that time were those horrible, long Longfellow-type things que nos hacían leer in high school [that they made us read in high school]. So I was turned off. But . . . one vato [guy] that I read was doing something that was exciting to me because he seemed to do it with a facility that I could relate to somehow . . . that was Walt Whitman. Me caiba su poesía [I dug his poetry] so I went with his trip for a long time. By then I was also starting to read T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and the Welshman Dylan Thomas. Y me fui prendiendo con esos vatos [and I got attached to those guys]. And the other vato that I really dug a lot around that same time was William Carlos Williams. I also thought he was getting away with something. And I thought all these guys were getting away with something I was being told not to do. Por eso los veía como rebels a ellos. [That's why I saw them as rebels.] How could they get away with it and I get put down for trying it."
"I remember Richard broke a wooden box to use one of the pieces as a ruler and he was trying to figure out how to best create the image of the eagle…He noticed the detailed work of the eagle on the American dollar bill and the one on the Mexican flag and he wanted something similar but nothing was coming out right. So, he created a simple black one that was still powerful in its own right. I never thought it would still be around today in its true and original form."
"Here are three meaningful actions we can all take on water: Use less. Pollute less. And from our backyards to our cities, make places that leave room for water in nature..."
"“I try to think about ways to draw the public to the story of the planet, and seashells are something we’ve always wanted to listen to. It’s sort of irresistible to pick a shell up to the ear and listen to what it’s trying to tell us — and they are telling us a profound story about what we’re doing to the ocean. The tiniest shells are beginning to disintegrate in the acidifying sea. It really is a metaphor for something much bigger.”"
"“We know on issues such as climate change, there’s a core group of deniers who are never going to change the way they think, and that’s ok, because that’s only 7 to 10 percent of the population. There’s a core group of super-worried people who know exactly what’s happening. Then there’s a really large group in the middle, and those are the people science tells us we need to reach to be able to make a difference.”"
"Nationally, water consumption peaked in 1980 and has dropped steadily, even as the economy and population have grown. That shift, in waterworks and minds, affirms Americans’ willingness to live differently once we understand how painless the better path is."
"The Globe calls Barnett’s voice “part journalist, part mom, part historian, and part optimist.”"
"Part of me wonders if I should’ve labelled by characters according to contemporary definitions of gender and sexuality so there’d be no doubt in anyone’s mind. To me, all of these labels are context dependent and therefore it does not feel authentic or organic to use words that have developed out of our contemporary discourse to describe my characters…"
"Once upon a time I wrote the way a very young child draws, with absolute confidence that the work is genius. A splotch of colour there. A smear. Spirals and zigzags. Exploration and process are at the heart of art when we are only beginning. My writing has always been intentional. Both intensity of feeling and lushness of language have been primary goals of mine from the get go, but it did not always involve this level of anxiousness, of desperation…"
"It probably won’t surprise anyone to hear me say that boundaries between genres are not borders to be respected so much as walls to tear down. I can’t imagine being a writer of only one genre, and I find that most of the time, even works that I’m writing to fit a particular genre are influenced by my experience of other genres. I think that everything I write is “literary,” but we also have to understand that these terms have marketing implications and so on…"
"I’ve been really intrigued by the idea of the end of the world — how it’s never really real, though it may feel like it is to us living in the midst of climate change as we are. Except on the scale of billions of years, according to the kind of timeline where suns birth and die and so on, worlds are quite adaptive creatures. Earth has had five or so ice ages. Dinosaurs have come and gone, many dying, others living on as birds. Mass extinction is par for the planet’s course…"
"When I started investigating my relationship to my identity and what my identity means, it was in the context of artists doing identity-based art. I envy and have a love for people who research in great detail history or some moment in history (say, feminist history), and then present it in a way that’s somewhat didactic and matter-of-fact—and, really, with an effort, a sincere effort to throw meaning out to an audience that, maybe, isn’t conscious of this aspect of history. But I’m incredibly suspicious of that impulse, too. I think that it’s all going to be filtered through one’s subjectivity. And my subjectivity—as a young person, as a person at the end of the twentieth century—my subjectivity is of a sexual woman, as a person who makes sometimes really bad decisions. There was no nobility in trying to do research like that, and in trying to filter my sense of self through the lens of a larger history. It was going to get complicated, and I liked the complications that I was finding. "Kara Walker Projecting Fictions: 'Insurrection! Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On'" in Art21 (interview originally published on PBS in September 2003, and later republished by Art21 in November 2011)"
"There is I suppose, historically, this seminal moment in the lives of African Americans where one becomes black. Frantz Fanon and everyone talks about it. There is a moment when you go from subject to object and I guess that was my moment…"
"I think there are many open-ended questions that artists can pose and we can ask communities to feel empowered enough to reply, respond, rebel, and feel amazed by the relentless spiraling of thought and image and action that is the artist's profession."
"Expectations on the performance of race and gender are simultaneously high and low, depending on who is looking or asking. I prefer to keep all the options in the air, to try and better understand the conundrum that inequality creates---not just in culture, but internally."
"There’s no diploma in the world that declares you as an artist. It’s not like becoming a doctor or something. You can declare yourself an artist and then figure out how to be an artist."
"I wrote this book for my teenage self, so it’s all about themes that were important to my young self: questioning your identity and gender, but also your creative aspirations and the person you want to be."
"Frances and Sebastian accept each other right from the get go, and the world the characters live in is one that is willing to change. I think you buy it because it’s wrapped in this fairy tale theme and playing off these Disney Princess movie tropes. It would be a lot harder if I went for a strict historical theme."
"I come up with a concept and might doodle a little bit to get some ideas flowing, but I mostly write and take notes. I write an outline. In a way, I feel like I can make the art fit the story that needs to be told, so I start with the story first."
"By the time I get to coloring it’s usually the last step and I’m a little creatively tapped out. So I don’t spend a ton of time building a concept for the coloring, but I do love seeing things take final form. A lot of it is thinking about the scene, what the mood is, and how to light it. By that point I’ve spent enough time with the book I already know what I want to achieve when I get to it."
"I would want a dreaming machine that dreams up the most beautiful dreams and then show me exactly how to make them a reality…This is the eternal conundrum: the visualization of desires (dreams), and then the dissonance between that and reality."
"The ambiguity when the performance of self becomes self-destructive, or when performance of self becomes pathological. That gray area interests me as a poet because it’s so wrapped up in everyday life now that it’s almost mundane. So much of this performance is tied to feelings of worth and value; in essence, it becomes ongoing, an entire existence all on its own…"
"History books are necessary in order for us to know and perceive the truth, and there’s always a question of perspective and who gets to tell the story…"
"Visibility is not enough—we need actual complexity. Visibility can quickly turn into invisibility when the stories that make us visible actually reduce our humanity and complexity. This is especially true if we prop up token stories—tokenism is a big problem when it comes to the film industry—or any industry…"
"…Truth is, my colleagues are my heroes, my fellow Latinx playwrights and directors. We’ve created this landscape together. We’ve elbowed a space for ourselves, and each other, in the American theatre. I think only we know what it was like when we could barely get a crumb, and honestly, we had to just keep going…"
"…universities are worried about diversifying and are wondering how. Playwrights want students exposed to their work and wondering how. The educator in me fights with the playwright in me. Should universities who do not have students of color still be able to do my plays? The educator says yes and the playwright says no. If universities produce ethnically specific plays with any of the available swap-out options, what are we teaching the next generation of theatre artists? Experience has taught me that artists will duplicate whatever they have learned in school…"
"…As curanderas say when a patient suffers from susto (the separation of the soul from the body), “Vente. No te quedes allí. Come back. Don't stay over there.” As playwrights we have no choice but to raise our dead."
"I think the “young adult” age is such a critical period of our lives. Young adults are still young enough to dream of magic and possibility, yet old enough to think for themselves and to begin to make real change in the world."
"It might feel safer to stay hidden away, but safer is not always better. We all have things to say. Learning how to speak up helps us feel valued and a part of the community. And by honing our voices, we can change the world."
"I just did not feel like there were any Asian women out there who I could identify with…I thought it was our role to be quiet and that people would look down on me if I ever spoke out."
"My parents never overtly pushed us to marry Chinese (in fact, my dad was an equal opportunity dater in his time). However, they always encouraged us to value our Chinese-ness. It was never something to be ashamed of. I grew up in a very Chinese American household; Mom cooked Chinese food almost every night, yet she loved her French cooking classes. We all played multiple classical instruments, but were also avid Broadway fans."
"…When I was a kid, I didn’t know what I was going to do. Even when I started playing music, I had no idea that I would get to this point in my professional life…"
"That did it for me, the applause, the vibe…I said, “that’s it man, that’s what I want to do. Forget the art.”"
"Family is very important to me because my own family was so disruptive ... Me and my brothers and sister were like ping pong balls, we didn’t know where we would end up."
"If you can strum the guitar a little, hit the drums — it’s always fun and a good way to release tensions…You can have a hard day at work, pick up your instrument and just feel better. You also can appreciate why a performer is up on stage and see how they have spent their life learning their craft."
"There is no one else," I said. "In this universe, there's just you and me." You stared blankly at me. "But all the people on earth…" "All you. Different incarnations of you." "Wait. I'm everyone!?" "Now you're getting it," I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back. "I'm every human being who ever lived?" "Or who will ever live, yes." "I'm Abraham Lincoln?" "And you're John Wilkes Booth, too," I added. "I'm Hitler?" You said, appalled. "And you're the millions he killed." "I'm Jesus?" "And you're everyone who followed him." You fell silent. "Every time you victimized someone," I said, "you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you've done, you've done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you."
"As you can see, this plan provides many opportunities for me to die in a fiery explosion."
"You started my training by buying me a beer. For breakfast. Germans are awesome."
"Amazingly, some of the bacteria survived. The population is strong and growing. That’s pretty impressive, when you consider it was exposed to near-vacuum and subarctic temperatures for over twenty-four hours. My guess is pockets of ice formed around some of the bacteria, leaving a bubble of survivable pressure inside, and the cold wasn’t quite enough to kill them. With hundreds of millions of bacteria, it only takes one survivor to stave off extinction. Life is amazingly tenacious. They don’t want to die any more than I do."
"“It just goes to show,” Teddy said. “Love of science is universal across all cultures.”"
"“But seeing his status doesn’t help,” Mindy said. “It’s not like we can do anything about it if he falls behind. This is a pointless task.” “How long have you worked for the government?” Venkat sighed."
"Then I sat for a moment, dumbstruck that my plan had actually worked."
"I started the day with some nothin’ tea. Nothin’ tea is easy to make. First, get some hot water, then add nothin’."
"As a chemist, Vogel knew how to make a bomb. In fact, much of his training was to avoid making them by mistake."
"This allowed me to do what writers treasure more than anything else: catch the reader off-guard. There’s nothing better than knowing you’re going to outwit with the reader. And the type of people who read sci-fi are very difficult to outwit."
"What's your name?" The computer asks. I look down at my sheet toga. "I am the great philosopher Pendulus!" "Incorrect."
"This is my charge to everyone: We have to be better, we have to love more and hate less. It is our responsibility to make this world a better place."
"If you reduce the amount of , the level in the atmosphere goes down fairly quickly, within decades, as opposed to CO2, if you reduce the emissions to the atmosphere, you don’t really see a signal in the atmosphere for a hundred years or so. […] I had an invite to a meeting with Al Gore, some years ago now, and made these methane arguments, and he was really pushback. That’s just his argument, “It’s hard enough to get people to think about CO2. Don’t confuse them.” […] Some people say, “Well, let’s fix CO2, and then we can worry about methane.” Well, that’s the wrong. It’s the other way around that actually makes sense. Do something about methane, because you’ll get a response right away."
"“Our investment in prevention and research is an investment in our nations … it all depends on healthy people, the result of our knowledge must be prevention. If we trust treatment without an investment in prevention, then we have failed.”"
"He epitomizedeverything a Berkeley professor should be: visionary and innovative, but always focusing onhelping those who were poor and disenfranchised."
"Our dating of the Indo-Aryan element in the Mitanni texts is based purely and simply on written documents offering datable contexts. While we cannot with certainty push these dates prior to the fifteenth century BC. It should not be forgotten that the Indic elements seem to be little more than the residue of a dead language in Hurrian, and that the symbiosis that produced the Mitanni may have taken place centuries earlier."
"Mallory ended his overview of the “IE problem” (1973: 60) with this perceptive statement: “a solution to the problem will more than likely be as dependent on a re-examination of the methodology and terminology involved as much as on the actual data themselves.”"
"In his earlier works, Mallory himself, acknowledged that theories pertaining to an Asian homeland had long fallen out of repute, "but one wonders if this is not just partly due to the ridicule heaped upon them by their opponents rather than reasoned dismissal" ... "all too often has one discredited line of argument been used to ridicule another theory which came to the same conclusion" (Mallory 1975, 56)."
"For the present it will be better to hold all of these mutually conflicting theories in the backs of our minds and preclude no solution to the homeland problem."
"The westward expansion of the Kurgan culture has been mapped with some degree of accuracy: “If an archaeologist is set the problem of examining the archaeological record for a cultural horizon that is both suitably early and of reasonable uniformity to postulate as the common prehistoric ancestor of the later Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, and possibly some of the Indo-European languages of Italy, then the history of research indicates that the candidate will normally be the Corded Ware culture. At about 3200-2300 BC this Corded Ware horizon is sufficiently early to predate the emergence of any of the specific proto-languages. In addition, it is universally accepted as the common component if not the very basis of the later Bronze Age cultures that are specifically identified with the different proto-languages. Furthermore, its geographical distribution from Holland and Switzerland on the west across northern and central Europe to the upper Volga and middle Dniepr encompasses all those areas which [have been] assigned as the “homelands” of these European proto-languages.”"
"It is not easy to make a simple appeal to the Andronovo culture to resolve all the issues of Indo-Iranian origins... When the archaeological evidence becomes so opaque then our only refuge... is probability and a little intuition."
"Although [the domestic horse] has occasionally been recovered from Harappan sites, for example Surkotada and Kalibangan, no one would credit the earlier Harappan culture as exemplifying the horse-centred culture of the Vedic Aryans."
"Nonetheless, those who do find die aforementioned linguistic exigencies compelling must find some way of getting the Indo-Aryans speakers into the subcontinent by some means or another. Mallory (1998) feels comfortable enough ascribing some form of Indo-Iranian identity to the Andronovo culture but admits that, "on the other hand, we find it extraordinarily difficult to make a case for expansions from this northern region to northern India . . . where we would presume Indo-Aryans had settled by the mid-second millennium BCE" (191). Referring to the attempts at connecting the Indo-Aryans to such sites as the Bishkent and Vakhsh cultures, he remarks that "this type of explanation only gets the Indo-Iranian to Central Asia, but not as far as the seats of the Medes, Persians or Indo-Aryans" (192). He points out that suggesting an Indo-Aryan identity for the BMAC requires a presumption that this culture was dominated by steppe tribes. However, "while there is no doubt that there was a steppe presence on BMAC sites, . . . this is very far from demonstrating the adoption of an Indo-Iranian language by the Central Asia urban population" (192)."
"While a good case can be made for an expansion of Pontic-Caspian pastoralists onto the Asiatic steppe, and perhaps also into the belt of central Asian urban centres (Parpola 1988), it is still difficult to demonstrate movements from the steppe into the historical seats of the Indo-Aryans and the Iranians of Iran itself."
"Will the 'real' linguist please stand up? It should be obvious that linguists have as much difficulty in establishing the chronological relationships between loanwords as any other 'historical science'" (98)."
""as the IE homeland problem involves a spatial definition of a prehistoric linguistic construct, the utility of any other discipline, such as archaeology, depends on whether a linguistic entity can be translated into something discernable in the archaeological record. In short, any solution not purely linguistic must involve some form of indirect inference whose own premises are usually, if not invariably, far from demonstrated" (Mallory 1997, 94)."
"Mallory (1997) agrees that there is solid evidence in both European and Asiatic stocks for Proto-Indo-European cereals, as well as the agricultural terminology required to process them. He notes that "while the economic emphasis of the immediate ancestors of the Indo-Iranians may have been towards pastoralism there is good evidence that they too are derived from a mixed agricultural population" (236-237)"
"Mallory (1998) offers a Kulturkugel (culture bullet) as a possible explanatory model for the Indo-Aryan incursions, although remarking that "German is employed here to enhance the respectability of an already shaky model" (192). This conceptual pro- jectile is envisioned as an Indo-Iranian linguistic bullet propelled by the social organization of the steppes outlined previously and tipped with a nose of malleable Andronovo material culture. After impacting the BMAC culture, the projectile continues on its trajectory, but now as an Indo-Aryan linguistic bullet with a BMAC cultural tip. In other words, the steppe tribes entered the BMAC, shed the trappings of their Andronovo heritage, and then, reacculturated, continued on their way toward India after having adopted the cultural baggage of the BMAC and undergone the linguistic transformations separating the language of the Indo-Iranians from that of the Indo- Aryans. Mallory is too good of a scholar not to immediately include an addendum, stating that "the introduction of the kulturkugel emphasizes the tendentious nature of any arguments for the dispersals of the Indo-Iranians into their historic seats south of Central Asia" (193). He is also candid enough to point out that "it is ... difficult to imagine how such a concept could be verified in the archaeological record or, to continue the metaphor, could be traced back to the original 'smoking gun'" (194). Mallory's Kulturkugel is the type of gymnastics incumbent on anyone attempting to find archaeological evidence of the Indo-Aryans all the way across Asia and into the subcontinent."
"Elsewhere, Mallory (1997) complains that the "argument of archaeological continuity could probably be supported for every IE-speaking region of Eurasia where any archaeologist can effortlessly pen such statements as 'while there may be some evidence for the diffusion of ideas, there is no evidence for the diffusion of population movement'" (104)."
"The problem here, of course, is that over time we have come to know more and more and that our earlier, simpler and more alluring narratives of Indo-European origins and dispersals are all falling victim to our increasing knowledge. We have obviously moved on from the time when Nikolai Merpert first published his analyses of the role of the steppelands within the context of the Indo-European homeland but it is evident that we still have a very long way to go."
"If there are any lessons to be learned, it is that every model of Indo-European origins can be found to reveal serious deficiencies as we increase our scrutiny."
"In any event, all three models [Anatolian Neolithic, Near Eastern, Pontic-Caspian] require some form of major language shift despite there being no credible archaeological evidence to demonstrate, through elite dominance or any other mechanism, the type of language shift required to explain, for example, the arrival and dominance of the Indo-Aryans in India."
"‘The temptation to read every cline on a map of genetic features as a migration and tie it to a putative linguistic movement has led to ostensibly circular reasoning. … [T]here is an assumed correlation between language and human physical type. … [But] there is no requirement whatsoever that the trail of language shift should also leave a clearly defined genetic trail as well. Nor for that matter can we assume that if we do find a genetic trail, this necessarily resulted in a language shift favourable for those carrying the gene rather than their absorption by local populations’"
"One linguist’s Indo-European names become another’s proto-Basque, or Caucasian or anything else."
"it’s so important to understand why these creatures went extinct. What mistakes we as humans made to drive them to extinction and learn from that and implement techniques to avoid that for other species. So, for me, every expedition is a learning process because there’s such an important biological takeaway that we as humans have made. And the best way to learn from them is to experience them."
"There is no cure-all. Every species needs its own management, its own policies, and everything needs its own strategy. There’s no magic button. I take that back. There is a magic button, right? There is one magic button and that is to cease all habitat destruction and hunting practices immediately. But there’s a very big difference between being an optimist and being a realist. And that “magic button” is unrealistic. There’s absolutely no way the entire world stops encroaching on wildlife habitat and taking wildlife. So without that being a possibility, and it’s not, the thing that makes wildlife sciences so difficult is that each animal, whether it’s an insect or a rhinoceros, needs its own management plan."
"There is fission then fusion of thought and feeling, as forgiveness for all blasts heavenward. Dissolute chaos renders to absolute certainty; wrenching ignominy and confusion transmute to clarity and peace. The tranquil vales of Elysium are welcoming us."
"I dress, act, and speak quite conservatively, striving to be forgettable, to leave no memory. One must be a gray man, perhaps a mild accountant of little means, to hide without a trace personal responsibility for the ecstacies, the orgasmic religiosities in millions of minds."
"Remember not to let your head get too far from your heart."
"It would be naïve to conclude there are no unknown extra-dimensional fields. Writing his equations by a whale oil lamp, Maxwell characterized electromagnetism. Newton's gravity was discarded by Leibnitz as occult."
"We bent to our task, the relentless assessment of our minds. There was only ink and haste, ghostly recall, hopeful conjecture, and the rare minor certainty."
"To leave this region with a rupee may be immoral."
"She was gone into the mass of thousands of worshipers painting white tilaks on their foreheads and purifying themselves with Puja as they recited sutras over candles and milk with coconut shells. I walked on, with a sorrow that time has never extinguished."
"We feel society would best be served, not so much by a pill for intellect or sexuality, but by one for compassion. A medicine for altruism. Perhaps we have one."
"We have found noble action is not elitist or affluent, but conferred by the democratic vision; our duty is to everyone. Ultimately, our effort is for the smallest of things, for the children."
"She is a reminder of why we risk our lives for medicines. Much of the world is like this precious one, locked in a cruel room. We wish to be, if you will, the firemen."
"Normally death don't really bother me, I'm from southside Stockton. I’m all too familiar with how some family reunions only ever take place on graveyard grass, and a hole can be a safe haven for a soul in this mortal game of hide and go seek. But, there is something so different about Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Jacob Blake, and the countless others."
"When you get to do a one-shot, the whole world is open to you. It’s almost harder to decide what story to tell when you have the freedom to do anything you want!"
"For me, the story always comes from character whether they're ponies or robots or aliens."
"I think if anything is malicious… when somebody can look at harvesting and selling the little heart… of a baby who has been freshly killed — if someone can look at trading that body part for money — if anything is malicious, I think that’s malicious: treating people like things."
"I had not realized myself that it’s actually gotten worse. The Chinese treatment of the United States has gotten more unfair, if I can put it that way, than was the case three years ago when I wrote my book trying to sound the alarm."
"Until the Chinese are more cooperative with us in specific areas, maybe we’ve made a mistake in growing China into a great power when its hostility towards us is higher than we realized."
"You can’t take the parish priest out of this bishop. I certainly admire those in specialized ministry, but all I wanted to be was a parish priest. I saw growing up in Oxnard these wonderful young priests, reaching out—they used to come and take us out of school, we would be spread-eagled over a U-Haul with food for the poor. That really attracted us. So many of us feel we were called to follow the example of many of those priests who really lived their ministry."
"Holiness isn’t something that just happens. It’s something that is nurtured, something that grows, something that is benefited by things like rhythm, stability — if you're always rushing and never quite can fit in your nightly prayers, well, then you wind up not praying a lot of times."
"In the past, some media has tried to portray this effort as inimical to the ecumenical effort, and that cannot be further from the truth. For one thing, Anglicanorum coetibus was a generous, pastoral response by Pope Benedict XVI to groups of people who were making a direct request of the Holy See. It is also ecumenically significant in that it demonstrates, perhaps for the first time, that corporate, Eucharistic unity is possible in a way that does not simply assimilate. The ecumenical principle that informs Anglicanorum coetibus is that unity in the profession of Catholic faith allows for a vibrant diversity in the expression of that same faith. That is, to my mind, exactly what ecumenical dialogues have been building towards."
"In all of German Occupied Europe, there resided 2.4 million Jews before the war, according to the world Jewish encyclopedia. After the war, 3.8 million Jewish ‘Holocaust survivors’ were receiving pensions from the German government … Tragically, the remaining 6 million were lost."
"Surface tension is commonly thought of as a fluid phenomenon; the mere mention of the term brings to mind bugs skimming over water, liquids rising or falling in capillary tubes—and soap films and soap bubbles. But there is in fact a notion of surface tension (which is surface energy per unit surface area) for the interface between any two substances, or even between one substance and a vacuum. This surface energy arises from the fact that atoms (or molecules, or ions) of a given substance have a different environment at the interface between that substance and another than those in the bulk of the substance. (Sometimes even the composition of the surface is different from the bulk; this occurs for instance in soapy water having an interface with air.)"
"Grain boundaries and surfaces of crystalline materials have a surface free energy which in general depends on the normal direction of the interface relative to the crystal lattice(s). Determining the surface energy minimizing configurations of such interfaces, for a given surface free energy function, is an interesting mathematical problem; it reduces in the case of isotropic (i.e. constant) surface energy to the minimal surface problem. A first step is to classify minimizing cones, since they can arise as tangent cones to minimizing or asymptotically minimizing surfaces. In the isotropic case for two-dimensional surfaces in R^3, the only minimizing cones are planes. For anisotropic surface energy functions, we give here a catalog of 12 types of embedded minimizing cones, and prove that it is a complete catalog among embedded minimizing crystalline cones ..."
"Item: Retirement party for Joanne Elliott. One of my (male) colleagues reminisced about seeing Joanne as an attractive young woman in the common room at Princeton surrounded by young men eager to be near her. The comment made me very uncomfortable, since it placed emphasis on her attractiveness in a setting where conversations are often mathematical. If only the men had been clustered around her because they were eager to hear her theorems and conjectures! But at least as the story was related, that was not the case."
"The subject of motion by crystalline curvature is of interest for three quite distinct reasons. One is that some physical surface energies and physical models of crystal growth simply do give rise to such motion. Another is its use as a way to approximate motion of curves by curvature, both for computation and possibly for proving theorems. The third is that this motion simply is interesting and beautiful in its own right, having results that sometimes parallel those for ordinary curvature and sometimes are strikingly different."
"A surface free energy function is defined to be crystalline if its Wulff shape (the equilibrium crystal shape) is a polyhedron. All the questions that one considers for the area functional, where the surface free energy per unit area is 1 for all normal directions, can be considered for crystalline surface free energies. Such questions are interesting for both mathematical and physical reasons. Methods from the geometric calculus of variations are useful for studying a number of such questions; a survey of some of the results is given."
"It had three real purposes. One purpose was to give the folks at home the first good news that we'd had in World War II. It caused the Japanese to question their warlords. And from a tactical point of view, it caused the retention of aircraft in Japan for the defense of the home islands when we had no intention of hitting them again, seriously in the near future. Those airplanes would have been much more effective in the South Pacific where the war was going on."
"[T]here has never been a time, when I’ve been completely satisfied with myself. . . . I’ve very much appreciated the respect that my peers have given me throughout a fairly long life. Nowadays I try to spend at least half my time continuing to be useful, still making a contribution, while getting whatever rest, recreation, and diversification I believe is essential if one is to go on living a happy and useful life."
"I will not be able to do anything until the air fields are captured and supplied with fuel, oil, ammunition, bombs, spare parts, and all the necessary ground personnel."
"One of the things that we considered was being apprehended before we got to Japan. And the plan was that if we were within range of Japan, we would go ahead and bomb our targets, fly out to sea and hope, rather futilely, to be picked up by one of the two submarines that were in the area. If we were within range of the Hawaiian Islands—say, Midway—we would immediately clear their decks and proceed to Midway so they could utilize the task force properly."
"It was a dangerous area, for certain. There were saloons, prostitutes, everything. The real Wild West. There was no law to speak of; everyone carried weapons, and they used them. Gambling was rampant, and crime increased with the growing population."
"When the wreckage was cleared, Mr. Todd [the instructor] looked at me carefully and said we should get on with our business. I was shaken up by what I had seen but nodded in agreement, and we went up for the first lesson. If there is such a thing as love at first sight, my love for flying began on that day during that hour."
"I felt lower than a frog’s posterior. This was my first combat mission. I planned it from the beginning and led it. I was sure it was my last. As far as I was concerned, it was a failure, and I felt there was no future for me in uniform now. Even if we successfully accomplished the first half of our mission, the second half had been to deliver the B-25s to our units in the China-Burma-India theater of operations."
"That was perhaps the greatest tragedy of our mission. All of that horror was retribution against the Chinese for helping us…. They also exacted their revenge against our captured men, which I learned of later… The loss of those men has always stayed with me. When people ask about the atomic bombs and their justification, they come to mind."
"Well, I have always been highly competitive, and that is useful no matter what sport you go into. And in those days flying was to a considerable degree a sport, yes. But what really helped me in aviation was to have fast reactions and a good sense of balance. I think I got those from my tumbling, not my boxing."
"From the time I was a very young fellow, I knew I wanted to do two things. I wanted to build things, and I wanted to see the world. It seemed to me that the best way to build things was to be an engineer, and the best way to see the world was to be the kind of engineer that went to different parts of the world. In those days that meant either a civil or a mining engineer. I decided to become a mining engineer."
"You look for a chap who has good eyesight, who has fast reactions, who has a good sense of balance, but most important, you look for someone who really loves to fly. It would be very difficult to make a good pilot out of a chap who hated it. We always incline to do best those things that we enjoy doing. Another thing you look for is a pilot who can learn his limitations. A poor pilot is not necessarily a dangerous pilot as long as he remains within his limitations. And you find your limits in the air, by getting closer and closer and closer and sometimes going beyond them and still getting out of it. If you go beyond and don’t get out of it, you haven’t learned your limitations, because you are dead."
"I will say that in those days the pilot was very important, and his skill in manipulating the airplanes, which were not as reliable as they are today, was very important indeed. The airplanes today are mechanized to such a degree that the pilot no longer depends on the seat of his pants to the extent that he did in the early days. What has happened to aviation has happened to almost everything else. The day of the rugged individualist, the day of the inventor, is almost over. The Ben Franklins and Henry Fords are pretty much a thing of the past. It has just become too complicated. Everything now is a team operation, and if a truly new concept is developed, it means that there will be a large number of people knowledgeable in various scientific disciplines involved. And this requires a different philosophical outlook. I cannot see, for instance, how we could ever have another Lindbergh. Things have changed too much for that sort of competence to be rewarded the way it justifiably was. Still, I think that aviation will continue to develop, and each era will be interesting. But interesting in different ways."
"I keep up on the news, and there's all this noise out there, with all of the media and people on their phones all the time. I think we've become a schizophrenic culture primarily as a result of the genie getting out of the bottle with all this media stuff."
"We spent three trillion dollars in the Middle East, right now, where that money could have been used to take care of our veterans, first and foremost, who've been over there fighting, but also take care of the people that need help here in the United States instead of wasting it overseas."
"It's like watching Mario Andretti park a car."
"It's going, going, going — to be caught."
"He was a jewel. He loved the game of baseball. He loved to see it played correctly and smartly. He loved to talk baseball. He deeply understood the game, especially hitting."
"Many of these farmworkers...lived along with all farmworkers at labor camps and when growers were asked to raise the wages of farmworkers to 75 cents an hour, they said they could not afford the camps anymore, so they tore them down after we asked them to please repair them so ewe could live as human beings, one of these growers bring Mr. Russell Giffen, the other being Mr. Anderson Crayton, and all of the big growers around in Fresno County."
"When we asked for land, they tell us, why? Why should farmworkers want land? They are not farmers. But the true farmer is the one that works the land, and this is the farmworker, if it was not for the farmworker, there would not be any vegetables of fruits or anything on your table without the farmworkers."
"when the canals were built out there, we were looking at it as a future for the farmworkers to form our family farms, but the big growers would look at the water and instead of seeing people and family farms, they were looking at dollar signs."
"Many of the farmworking families are living in the most miserable places available for human beings. It is not fit for human beings. They live out in the slums in crowded houses, a small house for too large families. They sleep on the floor. During the day they are forced outdoors because there is no room in those houses, so they are left free to roam the streets. So, where does the crime come from if not young adults out in the streets until about the middle of the night because they cannot come home because it is to crowded, and it is too noisy."
"what some agencies are doing, they are hiring people to investigate crime while they should be using this money to put there families to work where they can support their families"
"The people that are rich, that have the money, get more money without doing anything. They do not work at all."
"we need a change. We need a change for social justice"
"when I got to thinking about how I was forced to live, it is a sad thing, but now I am working for a brighter future for my children and myself."
"Out in the fields there were never any restrooms. We had to go eight or ten hours without relief. If there wasn't brush or a little ditch, we were forced to wait until we got home!"
"These big growers have a lot of money because we earned all that money for them. Because of our sweat and our labor that we put on the land."
"[L]ate one night in 1962, there was a knock at the door and there were three men. One of them was Cesar Chavez. And the next thing I knew, they were sitting around our table talking about a union...Cesar said, "The women have to be involved. They're the ones working out in the fields with their husbands. If you can take the women out to the fields, you can certainly take them to meetings." So I sat up straight and said to myself, "That's what I want!""
"When I became involved with the union, I felt I had to get other women involved. Women have been behind men all the time, always. Just waiting to see what the men decide to do, and tell us what to do. In my sister-in-law and brother-in-law's families, the women do a lot of shouting and cussing and they get slapped around. But that's not standing up for what you believe in. It's just trying to boss and not knowing how. I'd hear them scolding their kids and fighting their husbands and I'd say, "Gosh! Why don't you go after the people that have you living like this? Why don't you go after the growers that have you tired from working out in the fields at low wages and keep us poor all the time? Let's go after them! They're the cause of our misery!" Then I would say we had to take part in the things going on around us. "Women can no longer be taken for granted-that we're just going to stay home and do the cooking and cleaning. It's way past the time when our husbands could say, 'You stay home! You have to take care of the children! You have to do as I say!"" Then some women I spoke to started attending the union meetings, and later they were out on the picket lines."
"I said, "Well! Do you think we should be putting up with this in this modern age? You know, we're not back in the twenties. We can stand up! We can talk back! It's not like when I was a little kid and my grandmother used to say, 'You have to especially respect the Anglos,' 'Yessir,' 'Yes, Ma'am!' That's over. This country is very rich, and we want a share of the money these growers make of our sweat and our work by exploiting us and our children!""
"It was very hard being a woman organizer. Many of our people my age and older were raised with the old customs in Mexico: where the husband rules, he is king of his house. The wife obeys, and the children, too. So when we first started it was very, very hard. Men gave us the most trouble-neighbors there in Parlier! They were for the union but they were not taking orders from women, they said."
"At another place, in Kern County, we were sprayed with pesticides. They would come out there with their sprayers and spray us on the picket lines."
"Our demands were met, but it was hard bargaining. At one point, one of the Christian Brothers' lawyers said, "Well, sister, it sounds to me like you're asking for the moon for these people." Dolores Huerta came back, "Brother, I'm not asking for the moon for the farmworkers. All we want is just a little ray of sunshine for them!" Oh, that sounded beautiful!"
"I became involved in many of the activities in the community-school board meetings, city council meetings, everything that I could get into. For example, I began fighting for bilingual education in Parlier, went to a lot of meetings about it and spoke about it."
"Being a migrant worker I changed schools about every three to four weeks. As soon as one crop was picked, we went on to the next one. I'd go to school for about a week or two, then I was transferred. Every time we transferred I had a pain in my stomach, I was shaking, scared to go to school. This is why I began fighting for bilingual education. I didn't want what happened to me to happen to the little children in Parlier whose parents couldn't speak English."
"Parlier is over eighty-five percent Chicano, yet during that time there were no Chicanos on the school board, on the police force, nowhere. Now it's changed; we fought to get a Chicano mayor and officials."
"We had Senate hearings at the Convention Center in Fresno. There were hundreds of people listening. A man I know comes to me and says, "Jessie, you're next." He'd been going to speak, but he said we wanted me to speak in his place. I started in Spanish, and the senators were looking at each other, you know, saying, "What's going on?" So then I said, "Now, for the benefit of those who can't speak Spanish, I'll translate. They tell us there's no money for food stamps for poor people. But if there is enough to fight a war in Vietnam, and if there is money enough for Governor Reagan's wife to buy a three-thousand-dollar dress for the Inauguration Ball, there should be money enough to feed these people. The nutrition experts say surplus food is full of vitamins. I've taken a look at that food, this cornmeal, and I've seen them come up and down. But you know, we don't call them vitamins, we call them weevils!" Everybody began laughing and whistling and shouting. In the end, we finally got food stamps for the people in Fresno County."
"Sometimes I'd just stop to think: what if our parents had done what we were doing now? My grandparents were poor. They were humble. They never learned to speak English. They felt God meant them to be poor. It was against their religion to fight. I remember there was a huge policeman named Marcos, when I was a child, who used to go around on a horse. My grandmother would say, "Here comes Marcos," and we just grew up thinking, "He's law and order." But during the strikes I stood up to them. They'd come up to arrest me and I'd say, "O.K., here I come if you want. Arrest me!""
"... when I was a political reporter in Philadelphia in the '80s and '90s, Lopez was the star columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He was known for crafting compelling human interest stories, shining a light on unfairness and inequality, and skewering politicians with clever nicknames that stuck to them for years."
"Good luck when you wake up / And realize all that you've lost / Shining lies are what you're made of / I hope it's worth the price that it cost"
"So cherry chaotic, the taste of losing control / I'm chasing down the drip sip down the rabbit hole / Now I'm staring down the metal barrel of your gun / I surrender on a bender, you're the drug."
"As I enter this new moment, I wanted to explore the vulnerability I've felt in finding balance with submission, dominance, and sexuality. I've had to dive into my own body to feel the deeply powerful but also dangerous feelings of relinquishing control."
"As my closest friends and I have now begun to really grow into ourselves, it can feel heart-wrenching to witness people you love fall for a moment, or lose sight of the goodness they have within themselves when they're struggling. As a friend we just want to pick them up and show them who we really know them to be — to try to cheer so hard on the sidelines over how incredible they are, and how much they mean to us, but at the end of the day of course it's only them who can discover their own light on their own."
"Feeling pretty cute until I ran into you/ Chewed me up and spit me out like gum on your shoe/ And if you’re free and you’ve got nothing better to do/ Go ahead, destroy me, destroy me."
"Parents tell me about their children and say, "Basketball is his life," or "Skiing is her life" but at a deeper level as Catholics we say, "Christ is my life," and so the athletes and every Catholic need to be integrating that relationship into their activities — sports or otherwise."
"I do feel guilt for the crime. It was a crime. I wasted a lot of time of the North Koreans' and the Americans', of all of the officials who spent time with my case."
"When you're hurt, how do you feel? You lay down, right? You take a second, you take your vitamins, you do your thing. When I'm hurt, I love it. I love that feeling, because it's real. That's the realest feeling that you could ever have; is being in pain because, everything else — happiness could be fake, crying could be fake, but pain? Shit, that's real. I got kicked in the leg, it hurt a little bit, but I walked it off. When I got kicked in the leg, and I smiled, that was real. It did not hurt."
"Imma fight until the wheels fall off. Fuck retiring."
"Being elevated to associate head coach further solidifies my presence in the program,"
"Having the support of the athletics department to continue to be. Part of the tradition and legacy of UCLA means a lot to me. UCLA is a special place, and I'm looking forward to the future."
"Lisa Fernandez is an icon in our sport, and she's been a big part of continuing the tradition of excellence of UCLA softball as both a student-athlete and coach"
"She oversees all aspects of the program with her main focus on recruiting. We have had several No. 1 recruiting classes because of her. I am fortunate to have her loyalty to our Bruin family and am thrilled to name her associate head coach: Kelly Inouye-Perez,Shelly Carlin UCLA Head Softball Coach"
"But what I realized was, I don’t really care about selling books,”"
"“What does interest me is trying to help save the lives of people who might not have the tools, the money, the skills, or the contacts themselves.”"
"As someone who was always attracted to oncology, to be able to take my field, my research, and my connections to help save lives — that was extremely gratifying,”"
"In my own burnout and depression after this — because it was soul-crushing — Amit was showing me that there is power in humor, there is power in levity,” Aaker says. “I was seeing that if you don’t have enough humor and levity, you will burn out. That put me on a new research journey around understanding the behavioral science of humor — when and why it works.”"
"That was not a surprise to me, personally,” Aaker says, “because I think subconsciously or not, I did try to create these different eras in my life and also in my research.”"
"I saw parents that said, ‘I just want my kid to be happy,’” Aaker says. “Or I saw people getting depressed when they realized they were low and thought they should be happy, and then were doubly depressed because they weren’t. That got me thinking about whether there might be a difference between short-run happiness and what’s truly meaningful.”"
"The result is clickbait rather than substance; life hacks rather than holistic solutions; echo-chambers than generate radicalism rather than understanding,” she said in a talk she gave to Stanford HAI in 2020. “And we are more susceptible than ever to short-term design serving up a stream of addictive content. Like junk food, technology serves up a sugar rush but fails to nourish us.”"
"The way I learn is by teaching a new class,” she says. “That’s why I shift.”"
"What we’re doing with this beautiful mindset research is diving more deeply into people’s subjective experience,” Aaker says. “Now, think about how interesting that is relative to AI — AI is not going to be able to have subjective experiences, at least for a while. This idea of what defines the human subjective experience is going to be a blossoming topic for the next decade or so. And I’m hoping this window of research will be able to add to that conversation — in a way that anyone could feel connected to.”"
"To be able to take my research and my connections to help save lives — that was extremely gratifying."
"Let us never forget, especially as we find ourselves in this present environment of uncertainty: a nation, a people, who repent and embrace the grace and mercy of God will have hope and a future. But a nation, a people, who deny God and reject the gift of grace and mercy, and who remain immersed in their sin, unrepentant, will experience a hopeless future. We don’t know the future, but we do know life, and world conditions, can "turn on a dime.""
"Hating America may still be fashionable, particularly in Europe. But it is also fundamentally shortsighted, unless one wants to side with Putin’s Russia, the Chinese Communist Party, or the Islamist fanatics of the Middle East."
"I came to the conclusion that not only was the Gospel I was given as a child objectively true in reality, but that the Christian worldview was the best explanation for the way the world actually is."
"From the Hindu perspective, all oflife is sacred, and performing our duty is dhanna. Dhanna is a rich tenn that means "way of righteousness, religion and fulfillment of duty." From this lofty view, every deed is a part of our religious practice. Everything we do is an act of worship and faith."
"is a currency that is involved in generating movement that's not coincidental and is involved in motivation and pursuit of particular rewards."
"I think the education system should start, in my opinion, with teaching kids how to understand themselves, what to do in difficult scenarios that's really anchored in the real pillars of biology and psychology, and trying to take some of the mystery out of trying to navigate the tough business of growing up."
"The other is that dog breeds w/different shaped heads are predictive of their demeanor and intelligence. And while I don’t! believe in Phrenology I now do pay some attention to how the shapes of peoples heads relates to their intellect and steadiness, or lack thereof."
"[The] ark was to be the central sanctity in the ritual worship of the Hebrews, during their wanderings in the wilderness. You may ask, "What have we to do to-day with that structure designed for barbarous fugitives in the Arabian desert three thousand years ago? Why lead us back from the fresh light of this morning to the misty dawn of history for a theme of meditation?" We have this to do with it, — that your new pulpit is in the direct line of descent from the first mercy-seat that consecrated the Jewish tent near Horeb. Those ten commandments, which are at the basis of our modern religion, were folded up and deposited beneath the lids of the ark in the first tabernacle that was built after the revelation from Sinai, more than thirty centuries ago. The Jews are our religious grandfathers... The first Christian churches were modelled after the synagogues; still keeping their reading-desks for the Old Testament, and adding the manuscript biographies of Jesus and the fresh letters of the apostles. When the Roman Catholic form was perfected, the simple reading-desk was supplanted by the more stately and imposing altar for the celebration of the mass. But the Protestant Reformation, appealing more directly to the reason and conscience, made the pulpit most prominent in the furniture of the church, and restored the Old and New Testaments as the basis of instruction and the sole authority. Thus this pulpit, in a young Protestant church in Boston, is connected by subtle historic ties, that reach across the ocean from the New World to the Old."
"We could not keep in mind that it was celestial fire we were looking at, — fire cool as the water-drops out of which it was born, and on which it reclined. It lay apparently upon the trees, diffused itself among them, from the valley to the crown of the ridge, as gently as the glory in the bush upon Horeb, when "the angel of the Lord appeared unto Moses in a flame of fire, out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and behold the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.""
"It is of the very essence of true patriotism to be earnest and truthful, to scorn the flatterer’s tongue, and strive to keep its native land in harmony with the laws of national thrift and power. It will tell a land of its faults, as a friend will counsel a companion; it will speak as honestly as the physician advises a patient; and if occasion requires, an indignation will flame out of its love, like that which burst from the lips of Moses when he returned from the mountain, and found the people to whom he had revealed the holy and austere Jehovah, and for whom he would cheerfully have sacrificed his life, worshipping a calf."
"The great question which should determine the essential truth of any religion is the practical one, — What can it do for man? Does it provide for his weakness? does it meet his needs? does it educate and satisfy his spiritual nature? If it does all these perfectly, it must have been made for man, and it must be true, unless God is a deceiver, and the soul itself an organized cheat."
"Never would I have dreamed that I would be walking through the halls of Sacramento and talking with the various levels of government . . . and learning about all these issues and laws and policies, it was a graced place to be."
"We, as Catholics, must do what we can to promote peace and respect and restore the trust and security upon which healthy human relationships depend."
"From the top of the ocean From the bottom of the sky Well, I get claustrophobic"
"I didn't move to the city The city moved to me And I want out desperately."
"I was in heaven I was in Hell Believe in neither But fear them as well."
"Brock has a knack for spinning the bleakness of late-stage capitalism into postmodern poetry, finding romance in trailer parks and truck stop bathrooms."
"My parents were academics and not thrilled about me joining a thrash metal band. They were older than most of my friends’ parents so didn’t even have that rock’n’roll background. Their wishes for me were to get a PhD, just like them. There were a few points that convinced them I hadn’t made a terrible choice, though. The first was when Testament supported Judas Priest at the Oakland Coliseum [in 1990], which showed that this was more than just a neighbourhood band. They were also happy when I started writing columns for guitar magazines, because they always respected writing."
"In the ’80s, Peter Buck’s clean, chime-y arpeggios defined the sound of alt-rock to come."
"At its crux, R.E.M. was a cavernous blend of sweeping desire, with its Rickenbacker-toting guitarist, Peter Buck, at its epicenter. While Buck is a capable songwriter and master crafter of memorable melodies, his approach to the guitar has always been simple. Through the idiosyncratic use of open strings and delicate chording to create chiming effects, Buck made a name for himself."
"Leo Fender was to modern musical instruments what Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison were to electrical engineering. As a true pioneer, he reimagined the electric guitar with models like the Telecaster, Stratocaster, and Precision Bass, created the Fender Rhodes electric piano, and put his name to some of the best guitar amplifiers ever invented."
"The speed and aggression [in Slayer's music] came from Hanneman’s love for hardcore punk such as Minor Threat, TSOL, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, the Germs and more. This influence had an impact on [the band's] primitive sound which was the blueprint for all thrash metal bands to follow. Hanneman played and wrote music on every single Slayer album and is responsible for so many classic hits."
"It’s fun to watch these guys live and see their virtually identical soloing styles. Jeff Hanneman, with atonal runs going up and down the neck, finished with a whammy bar dump! Kerry King, with atonal runs going up and down the neck, finished with a whammy bar dump! These guys were made to be in a band together – because they would sound terrible in any other band."
"Even though [Hanneman] was at the heart of the [Slayer's] creative force musically and lyrically, he shed away from the public eye mostly and usually avoided interviews, leaving the talking to Kerry King of Tom Araya."
"Jam bands live or die by the drummer, and Kreutzmann established the archetype. He did a lot more than provide the structure for those long Grateful Dead grooves; he subtly shifted tempo and volume, transforming the listening experience so that an open field could feel as intimate as a block box or as vast as outer space. With apologies to Mickey Hart, who was more of a percussionist, Kreutzmann's drumming brought the Grateful Dead to life and established a blueprint for every jam percussionist that followed."
"In April of 2011, almost a year after arriving back in the States, I ended my military career, moved my family from Colorado to North Dakota, and tried to put the Army behind me by taking a job as a safety supervisor in the oil fields just outside the town of Minot. It was there, in the autumn of 2012, that I found myself sitting in the cab of a pickup truck next to an oil rig when a call arrived from a colonel who was stationed at the Pentagon. He was phoning to ask if I'd be willing to hop on a plane to DC and drop y his office. I had n idea what this might be about, but I'd already used up my vacation time for the year, so it was another month before I could comply with the request. When I was finally able to make the trip, I was brought into a conference room and invited to join a group of colonels and generals who were sitting at a long table. It was at this point that I requested and explanation for why I was there. "You don't know?" someone asked. When I shook my head, they explained that after conducting an extensive review of my actions during the Battle for Keating, I was slated to receive the Medal of Honor, the highest military award the country can bestow."
"It would be an understatement to say that I found this news confusing. In fact, it made no sense whatsoever. Singling me out for such a superlative commendation struck me as both inappropriate and wrong. In my view, nothing that I'd done that day was any different from what my comrades had accomplished. What's more, I could easily have picked half a dozen men- especially Gallegos, Kirk, Hardt, Mace, and Griffin- who truly deserved selection because they had given their lives in an effort to save others. But me? No way. The idea seemed to violate my sense of what was most important- and what deserved to be commemorated- about that day. Although I didn't know it at the time, it turns out that most Medal of Honor recipients feel exactly the same way. It also turns out this fact has had very little impact on the way that I feel about the honor that I was selected to receive- and everything else that would later unfold from it. They picked the wrong guy."
"As for the medal itself, when I got back home, a question arise for which I really didn't have an answer: What exactly do I do with this thing? I don't know what most of the other recipients do, although I've asked a handful of them. A few have ordered up replacements so that they have something to wear and to show folks when they ask to see it, while they store the original in a safe-deposit box. Others keep the medal in a sock drawer or on their nightstand. As for me, I never bothered to ge a duplicate and I eventually took to carrying the original around in my front pocket. As a result, it's taken several accidental trips through the washing machine, so the gilded surface is a bit tarnished, and the blue ribbon has begun to fade. But that doesn't bother me a bit. In fact, I kind of like it that way, perhaps- in part- because I don't truly regard it as mine. Like it or not, there are eight other guys with whom I served to whom that medal rightly belongs, because heroes- true heroes, the men whose spirit the medal embodies- don't ever come home. By that definition, I'm not a true hero. Instead, I'm a custodian and a caretaker. I hold the medal, and everything it represents, on behalf of those who are its rightful owners. That, more than anything, is the truth that now sustains me- along with one other thing too, which is a belief I hold in my heart. I know, without a shred of doubt, that I would instantly trade the medal and everything attached to it if it would bring back even one of my missing comrades in arms."
"If there are soldiers who miss the fury of combat, who find themselves tortured by the desire to return to its flames, I cannot number myself in their company. I have no wish ever to return to Keating or to Afghanistan, and most of my men feel the same. However, the bond that kept us together as a unit, a team, is something that I long for and continue to cherish. It is also something that is very much alive."
"Although I entered into this project with some reluctance and hesitation, my sense of conviction burgeoned with each passing month. Eventually, I came to believe that telling this story- our story- was the only way to properly honor what we had done. Odd as it may sound, I also came to believe that this might enable me to fulfill the final part of my duty to those of my comrades from Keating who did not survive. It was the only way for me to bring them home."
"For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while serving as a Section Leader with Bravo Troop, 3d Squadron, 61st Cavalry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, during combat operations against an armed enemy at Combat Outpost Keating, Kamdesh District, Nuristan Province, Afghanistan on 3 October 2009. On that morning, Staff Sergeant Romesha and his comrades awakened to an attack by an estimated 300 enemy fighters occupying the high ground on all four sides of the complex, employing concentrated fire from recoilless rifles, rocket propelled grenades, anti-aircraft machine guns, mortars and small arms fire. Staff Sergeant Romesha moved uncovered under intense enemy fire to conduct a reconnaissance of the battlefield and seek reinforcements from the barracks before returning to action with the support of an assistant gunner. Staff Sergeant Romesha took out an enemy machine gun team and, while engaging a second, the generator he was using for cover was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade, inflicting him with shrapnel wounds. Undeterred by his injuries, Staff Sergeant Romesha continued to fight and upon the arrival of another soldier to aid him and the assistant gunner, he again rushed through the exposed avenue to assemble additional soldiers. Staff Sergeant Romesha then mobilized a five-man team and returned to the fight equipped with a sniper rifle. With complete disregard for his own safety, Staff Sergeant Romesha continually exposed himself to heavy enemy fire, as he moved confidently about the battlefield engaging and destroying multiple enemy targets, including three Taliban fighters who had breached the combat outpost’s perimeter. While orchestrating a successful plan to secure and reinforce key points of the battlefield, Staff Sergeant Romesha maintained radio communication with the tactical operations center. As the enemy forces attacked with even greater ferocity, unleashing a barrage of rocket-propelled grenades and recoilless rifle rounds, Staff Sergeant Romesha identified the point of attack and directed air support to destroy over 30 enemy fighters. After receiving reports that seriously injured soldiers were at a distant battle position, Staff Sergeant Romesha and his team provided covering fire to allow the injured soldiers to safely reach the aid station. Upon receipt of orders to proceed to the next objective, his team pushed forward 100 meters under overwhelming enemy fire to recover and prevent the enemy fighters from taking the bodies of the fallen comrades. Staff Sergeant Romesha’s heroic actions throughout the day-long battle were critical in suppressing an enemy that had far greater numbers. His extraordinary efforts gave Bravo Troop the opportunity to regroup, reorganize and prepare for the counterattack that allowed the Troop to account for its personnel and secure Combat Post Keating. Staff Sergeant Romesha’s discipline and extraordinary heroism above and beyond the call of duty reflect great credit upon himself, Bravo Troop, 3d Squadron, 61st Cavalry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division and the United States Army."
"I fired at the Japs for the next two hours and a half. All I did was shoot at every one I could find. You dont knock 'em down out of the air. That plane is doing close to two hundred knots, just a flick, and he's gone. You might not get fifteen or twenty seconds- that's a long blast. I kept firing till the last Jap left, but I did lots of things in between. There were lulls. I said to Sully when he showed up, 'Get those God damn things, those bomb-handling carts, out of here!' And he said a stupid thing: 'Where shall I take 'em?' I said, 'Take 'em out and disperse 'em in the brush. Whatever you do, don't put 'em all in one place. And immediately I went back out and fired some machine gun again. Next time, I come back, there were those God damn things all in the corner. They hadn't been moved. Well, I made up my mind I was gonna kill Sullivan. I thought he lost his nerve and ran out and hid someplace, because there was one or two cases where guys hid in the bushes. Well, what happened, he had gone off to find the squadron truck. He was doin' exactly what I told him. I didn't have to shoot him. And you could never find that fuckin' truck. Always somebody's got it off somewhere else. He finally traced the truck and come back to the hangar with it, but now he needed the tractor to get the squadron door open. It was a brand-new hangar, and you needed the tractor or all three hundred men in the squadron to open that door.'"
"I got the Medal at one PM on September fifteenth, nineteen forty-two, on board the USS Enterprise in Pearl Harbor. It was awarded by Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz. He made a good speech. I still remember his words. He said, 'Do not think for an instant that we have the enemy on the run. He is a tough, sagacious, brave, determined enemy.' Then he said, 'But we are making progress,' so that made me happy. Then he come up, praised me, said laudatory remarks about my 'magnificent courage,' one thing and another. I've got a copy of that. But I wasn't courageous. All I was doing, I was pissed off and mad, and I was doing exactly what I thought I would do if there ever come a war. But I never dreamed that I might fight in a war. You didn't think of that. But anyway, he came up to me, and he had kind of a little bit of an old farmer way of talking- you know, he was born and raised in Texas- and he said, 'Finn, it gives me great pleasure to pin, or, ah, hang, this medal around your neck.' I was standing there, of course, I was naturally at attention, here was my admiral. The ship was under repair and there was more racket around there with air hoses and crap all over the deck and banging and hammering everywhere. But during that ceremony, they stopped all the noise. Nimitz gave out twenty-five awards. I was number one in line. I think there were two Navy Crosses, and other awards."
"[They have] whatever it takes to go out and do what they did to get the Medal of Honor, whatever it is- the guts, the courage, or whatever. They had the guts, and stupidity too. I didn't have enough sense to come in out of the rain. But I was mad a lot of the time, pissed off. I can truthfully say that I don't remember being scared to death. But I was God damn mad. Anger, hunger, and sex; those are the greatest instincts that we've got. Those are things we are born with. What else is there?"
"For extraordinary heroism distinguished service, and devotion above and beyond the call of duty. During the first attack by Japanese airplanes on the Naval Air Station, Kaneohe Bay, on 7 December 1941, Lt. (then A.C.O.M.) Finn promptly secured and manned a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on an instruction stand in a completely exposed section of the parking ramp, which was under heavy enemy machine-gun strafing fire. Although painfully wounded many times, he continued to man this gun and to return the enemy's fire vigorously and with telling effect throughout the enemy strafing and bombing attacks and with complete disregard for his own personal safety. It was only by specific orders that he was persuaded to leave his post to seek medical attention. Following first-aid treatment, although obviously suffering much pain and moving with great difficulty, he returned to the squadron area and actively supervised the rearming of returning planes. His extraordinary heroism and conduct in this action were in keeping with the highest traditions of the U.S. Naval Service."
"Today, the oldest living recipient of the Medal of Honor is John Finn, who was decorated for action on Pearl Harbor Day. Born in 1909, John joined the Navy in 1926, and, loquacious as we all tend to be when we findally grasp that we have too many stories and not enough time, he will transfix anyone who cares to listen with tales of what it was like to grow up before the First World War and to ply the Yangtze River as a young sailor aboard an American gunboat. In 1941, he was stationed in Kaneohe Bay, with a squadron of Navy patrol planes. Rudely rousted from bed by the cacaphony of the Japanese bombs destroying the fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor, John raced from his quarters, sped to the hangars that housed his aircraft, and manned a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on an exposed section of a parking ramp. For the next two hours, Finn, in the open and suffering from more than twenty shrapnel wounds in his back and stomach, blasted at the attacking enemy planes, hitting many of them and not relinquishing his post until the attack was over. Even when we were young, those of us who were raised on stirring John Wayne war movies assumed there was more than a little hyperbole and cinematic license in them. But for forty years I have known a man whose real-life exploits render the movies limp, pallid, and ineffectual in contrast. Art can often approximate life, but it has a hard time doing it justice."
"Not long ago, I asked John what he was doing at the precise moment when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. "Truth be told, my boy," John said, "I was in bed with a good-looking gal." I asked if he ever saw her again. "See her again?" said John. "She was my wife for sixty years!" Then he slapped his knee and bellowed with laughter."
"Adams' legacy nonetheless broke barriers for women in the legal profession and established a precedent for women achieving high political office."
"It is no secret that Republicans face a challenging political environment in California. Republicans embrace taxpayers who want a more efficient government, parents who want better schools and safer streets, and citizens who want their constitutional freedoms protected. ... I will do everything I can as the next leader to spread that message in every part of the state."
"Her career in social work helping our most vulnerable communities, and her leadership at local, county, and state levels will prove essential."
"You feel like you’ve left your footprint and that you’ve made some difference in people’s lives, being helpful. … Sometimes you just have to believe that you can do it."
"Throughout California, Bergeson was known as a trailblazer for female politicians, initiating a wave of women successfully running for public office."
"An inspiration because she came from grass roots, which is where a lot of the women politicians from Orange County come from."
"We all started on local community councils and committees and worked our ways up, and so did Marian. That was her legacy for us – that you start there and achieve your goals all the way to Congress."
"made a difference for the citizens of California that will not soon be forgotten."
"There was never a problem that she didn’t think could be solved with people sitting down and talking it through. And that’s a throwback to a day that isn’t prevalent anymore."
"She also was really influential in not pulling up the ladder once she achieved what she did but instead reaching down and helping other women get elected."
"Throughout her political career, Bergeson kept a passion for improving education and citizens’ access to it."
"She was a pioneer who gave of herself without reservation, devoting her life to improving the lives of others, especially those with the greatest needs. In doing so, she raised the bar for public service in Orange County and beyond."
"While I believe government should be as transparent as possible, I also believe people deserve to live free of fear or harassment."
"We cannot prepare for the future unless we invest in our education system and make it a national priority."
"I believe good environmental policy and good economic policy go hand-in-hand."
"I have always believed that transparency is critical to a functioning democracy."
"Social Security and Medicare are not just the cornerstones of the social safety net. They are promises that must be kept."
"I support full marriage equality and have done so very publicly and very vocally for more than a decade."
"As a member of Congress, I will make creating jobs priority number one."
"A pioneer in open government reform, election integrity, and personal privacy rights."
"I had complete control over what I worked on, It speaks very strongly to the power of just following what your interests are and doing something that interests you. I think that roads into a career path come up that you just wouldn’t see if you had it all mapped out."
"Democracy doesn’t work if people can’t trust the system that they use to cast ballots."
"I do take the Jeffersonian principles very solemnly, and particularly the Jeffersonian idea that if you don’t believe that people have adequate knowledge to make decisions then the remedy is not to take the decision-making away from them, but to inform their discretion."
"We were pretty sure there was market manipulation going on, but you have to be able to prove it."
"I did observe that you almost never had emergencies if you were doing pension law. I concluded that you could actually make a very good living doing pension law, but what you traded it for was being pretty bored most of the time."
"I never thought I would be in politics. My plan was just to work in government– doing the work, making things and places more beautiful, bringing programs to kids. I always loved young people, and I hit a wall when I realized that you can have the most wonderful data-backed strategies and even bring opportunities, but if policymakers don’t have a vision or they don’t want to implement it, then they’ll never make it to the hands of people. That’s how I started looking at politics, as a way to impact change."
"As I transitioned into mayor, I anticipated what I would experience. But I think the biggest surprise for me was, in many ways, how I was resisted from my peers in that space, and in large part because I was a woman, and I was young. While it was very interesting to the outside world, the reality of what I faced every day was just significant resistance and definitely a big shift from what the previous mayors had experienced, in terms of people getting on board with the vision and moving forward."
"In her extensive 20-year career in government administration, Aja is a trusted and respected innovator and impact driver, effectively modeling trusted and human-centered leadership."
"Aja Brown is a trusted leader in the realm of government technology solutions, celebrated for her ability to bring transformative change to communities and governments alike"
""" as quoted by Annie Zaleski of ' (May 17, 2017)"
"We won’t know the full impact of a band like Avenged Sevenfold and a player like Synyster Gates for several years, but this is a band that moves the needle with young people in a way most of the players on the list just don’t have the ability to do. No other band on Rock radio is as unafraid as A7X to flex their chops. They helped open doors that huge gateway bands like Black Veil Brides and Asking Alexandria continue to expand. They are one of the biggest metal bands around the globe, and their image may turn you off, but Synyster is a world-class musician who has trained in Classical and Jazz. His style is somewhere between other list selections John Petrucci, Slash, and Marty Friedman, but he does have a special commodity that is truly his own. Slash inspired me to pick up a guitar, and without a doubt, thousands of kids decide to pick one up everyday because of Avenged Sevenfold and Synyster Gates. That should be commended and respected."
"To whatever extent the science of the past may have contributed to a mechanistic and economic image of man and a technocratic image of the good society, the new science of subjective experience may provide a counteracting force toward the ennobling of the image of the individual's possibilities, of the educational and socializing processes, and of the future. And since we have come to understand that science is not a description of "reality" but a metaphorical ordering of experience, the new science does not impugn the old. It is not a question of which view is "true" in some ultimate sense. Rather, it is a matter of which picture is more useful in guiding human affairs. Among the possible images that are reasonably in ac-cord with accumulated human experience, since the image held is that most likely to come into being, it is prudent to choose the noblest."
"Society gives legitimacy and society can take it away."
"Perhaps the only limits to the human mind are those we believe in."
"Throughout history, the really fundamental changes in societies have come about not from the dictates of governments and the results of battles, but through vast numbers of people changing their minds — sometimes only a little bit."
"By deliberately changing the internal image of reality, people can change the world."
"Here is iPhone 10. Now, unlocking it is as easy as looking at it and swiping up."
"At Apple Pay, we believe privacy is a fundamental human right, we don't think you should have to make a tradeoff between great features and privacy. We believe you deserve both."
"We delivered this while taking an extraordinary step forward for privacy and AI with private cloud compute, which extends the privacy of your iPhone into the cloud so no one else can access your data, not even Apple. We also introduced enhancements that make Siri more natural and more helpful, and as we've shared, we're continuing our work to deliver the features that make Siri even more personal. This work needed more time to reach our high quality bar, and we look forward to sharing more about it in the coming year."
"It wouldn't meet our customer expectations or Apple standards."
"A really strong woman accepts the war she went through and is ennobles by her scars."
"Have no fear of perfection; you'll never reach it."
"When my aunt informed me that we lived in the famous Latin Quarter, I experienced a little shock of surprise. When I discovered the size of the Latin Quarter, there was another surprise, and an even greater one when I realized that in this awful Quartier Latin were the great universities and Art Schools of France; the lovely old Luxembourg garden with the Medici Palace now used as the Senate Chamber; the Pantheon, the Westminster Abbey of France; the old Cluny Palace with its hoary relics and ruined walls; and on through a long list of less celebrated but equally interesting places. It is the Student Quarter of Paris, more foreign than French, alive with Russians, Poles, English and Americans. [...] Here you will find living side by side, the girl whose father has made a fortune in oil and has sent his daughter abroad to finish her education and the little girl from Australia who has saved up her pennies for years that she might come and study painting in Paris and who lives in a bare little room, hardly knowing where her next meal will come from, but trusting the God of the Quarter, "Luck." There is a more democratic spirit here in the midst of this undemocratic people than we find in America itself. E veryone meets on the common ground for work, the only aristocracy is that of ability and success. Each one is here for a purpose; the air throbs with industry, enthusiasm and genius. Iris most inspiring; you meet so many who are so much more advanced than you that their attainments are something to look forward to, so many whose work is so far below your standard that you feel you have something to start with and are not discouraged (Burk, 90-91)."
"I cannot say that I was very enthusiastic upon my first visit to the market. As an insight into a certain phase of French life it was most interesting, but I did not relish the idea of buying there, even if the vegetables were much fresher and more reasonable than in the stores. The European custom of displaying all manner of eatables on the street, unprotected from the dirt and dust, and even handling by the passers-by, was new and not at all pleasing to me. I had a feeling that everything was dirty, especially the people. Since then I have become acclimated and resigned to the fact that France and dirt are inseparable (April 18, 1909, 17)."
"I remember reading not long ago in a San Francisco paper how the girls of this [...] American Girls' Art Club had astonished all Paris by taking long tramps and sketching expeditions into the woods of France unchaperoned. Astonished all Paris! Why Paris never even raises an eyebrow when we bold artists brave the dangers of her forests and suburbs all alone. As is a favorite custom of girls here, I have even sketched down along the Seine among the roughest class of workmen and tramps and was never more courteously treated anywhere (Burk 2008, 89-90)."
"The Salon of French Artists is recognized as the most difficult in which to gain entrance of any of the several held there each year. That two Fresno girls and no less than eleven native Californians have presented specimens which the discriminating French critics considered worthy of acceptance, is a recognition of the highest standard of art in California never before accorded in Paris (3)."
"Since pictures such as mine are so different from the pictures people are used to framing, it isn’t really strange that they should require different treatment. White not being a color (as is gold) forms the best frames for pictures high in key and in pure color, as it does not destroy the balance of color in the picture and brings out each color in its fuller intensity. Black is next best, I think."
"Although some members of the public misunderstood and even ridiculed her work, Marguerite seemed unaffected. She was brave and clear about who she was and what she believed. She also had William's full support, and they continued to paint in the same studio, helping each other with canvases, with ideas, with promoting their paintings. Although they struggled financially, these were rich, exciting years, and their collaboration nurtured them both. They exhibited paintings in their studio as well as at galleries, and they were at the center of the avant-garde community of American artists in New York (Kennedy 97)."
"I have no artistic creed or formula. I have no fixed aim to which I am bending every energy. I have made no wonderful or new artistic discovery. Perhaps I have not even a new vision…In so far as my life is rich in emotional and intellectual experiences, actual or in imagination, in so far as I seek for a deeper and more comprehensive grasp of things, in so far I shall have material from which to create."
"We survived these years by never spending a cent on anything that was not essential...we saw that there was always money for materials...we made our own canvases...used the stretchers over and over, rolling up the finished pictures. When desperate we painted on both sides of the canvas (cited in Colleary 24)."
"So far I’ve only played characters who aren’t the nicest and are always the “mean girl” in some way, but I would really love to switch it up, take on more challenging roles and you know, throw in a splash of kindness here and there"
"Being placed in front of that camera, even as a little girl, I knew THIS is what I wanted to do. It was so familiar and comfortable to me"
"My advice for newer actors is to know your worth"
"Be who you are and don’t change how you see yourself just to fit in this business"
"The best advice i’ve ever been given was by my grandmother who told me, “The empowered woman is powerful beyond measure and beautiful beyond description.” And by my father who told me “Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world would do this, it would change the world” he was reciting William Faulkner"
"My definition of happiness isn’t about what I do, or where I am. It’s all inside. It’s when I feel content, or I know who I am and what i’m about."
"when things get rocky or stuff falls through, it doesn’t change me, or my morals"
"Social Media is very important to me because with a growing fan base becomes a platform. A platform to reach out to people and touch on subjects that aren’t talked about as much as they should be. I feel it gives me a responsibility to speak for others and for myself"
"I learned most about my own voice on this set and the power it holds"
"And I'ma bend it down, then I'ma lick her up and then dick her down. She gon' turn around then I'ma kick her out."
"And her pussy tastes like Skittles, what? Yeah, ayy. You can really taste the rainbow, what? Hah, no."
"I wake up, I throw up, I feel like I'm dead."
"She said she gay, but still into me."
"Xans don't make you. Xans gon' take you. Xans gon' fake you (yeah). And Xans gon' betray you."
"I'm proud to be an American where at least I know I'm free, And I won't forget the men who died who gave that right to me, And I gladly stand up next to you And defend her still today, 'Cause there ain't no doubt I love this land"