People from Louisiana

"[P]ain is a marvelous purifier. . . It is not necessary to beat the child into submission; a little bit of pain goes a long way for a young child. However, the spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely."

"Some strong-willed children absolutely demand to be spanked, and their wishes should be granted. . . [T]wo or three stinging strokes on the legs or buttocks with a switch are usually sufficient to emphasize the point, 'You must obey me.'"

"KING: You're an outspoken supporter of Israel. You and Bill Bennett co-authored an op-ed piece on the subject, responding to a letter from a group of prominent Evangelical Christians who urged George W. Bush to employ an even handed policy toward Israel and Palestine. You don't want an even handed policy?"

"DOBSON: Well, I do. It depends on what you mean by that. I feel very strongly about Israel. You know it is surrounded by its enemies. And it exists primarily because God has willed it to exist, I think, according to scripture, but also, because America has stood with Israel. If we ever abandon it, it's gone. There are six million Jews in Israel. There are 400 million Muslims around them that hate them and want many of them -- hate them and want to drive them into the sea. And that is a major concern to me. It's the only democracy in the Middle East. Why wouldn't we support them?"

"KING: And the Palestinian people are the only people without a state..."

"DOBSON: Yes."

"KING: … of any kind. Should they have a state? Do you agree with the president there? There should be a Palestinian state?"

"KING: Franklin Graham called Islam a very wicked and evil religion. More recently, he said that Muslim leaders haven't done enough to show their sorrow over 9/11. Do you agree with that?"

"DOBSON: Well, I certainly agree that many factions within Islam are very, very violent. I mean, how can we deny that? The war against the west and against Israel certainly didn't start with 9/11. For us, it began really in 1979 when the Iranians, you know, invaded the embassy there. And from that point on, they've been doing things like this, so there's a lot of violence within the Islamic faith."

"KING: But you don't think the faith is violent? You don't think American Muslims are, by nature, violent, or Muslims are by nature violent or do you?"

"DOBSON: I think some Muslims are, but certainly..."

"KING: Well, some Christians are."

"DOBSON: Yes, but that..."

"KING: There's a lot of killing in the name of Christ in history."

"DOBSON: Yes, there has been down through the years, but I don't think that's the predominant factor. I mean, if you look at the teachings of Christ, the centerpiece is love. That's been the essence of what He has thought."

"KING: Not Mohammed — Mohammed did not teach love?"

"DOBSON: Not to that degree, no. There's a lot — you know I'm not an expert on this subject. I told you that last time we were here, and so I can just give you my impressions about it. And there are very, very violent people within the Islamic faith. There are also some that are not violent."

"Homosexuals are not monogamous. They want to destroy the institution of marriage. It will destroy marriage. It will destroy the Earth."

"GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Dr. Dobson, ...in the Daily Oklahoman, [you were] quoted saying, "Patrick Leahy is a God's people hater. I don't know if he hates God, but he hates God's people." Now, Dr. Dobson, that doesn't sound like a particularly Christian thing to say. Do you think you owe Senator Leahy an apology?"

"DR JAMES DOBSON: George, you think you ought to lecture me on what a Christian is all about? You know, I think -I think I'll stand by the things I have said. Patrick Leahy has been in opposition to most of the things that I believe. He is the one that took the reference to God out of the oath."

"GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: But Dr. Dobson, excuse me for a second. You use the word hate. You said that he's a "God's people hater." How do you back that up?"

"DR JAMES DOBSON: Well, there's been an awful lot of hate expressed in this election. And most of it has been aimed at those who hold to conservative Christian views. He is certainly not the only one to take a position like that. But I think that that is -that's where he's coming from. He has certainly opposed most of the things that conservative Christians stand for."

"GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: So no apology?"

"DR JAMES DOBSON: No apology."

"By learning to yield to the loving authority... of his parents, a child learns to submit to other forms of authority which will confront him later in his life — his teachers, school principal, police, neighbors and employers."

"Into that world comes a young William Wilberforce — a young Parliamentarian — who saw this and said this is evil, this is wrong, I will do what I can to fight it. In some ways, it's very similar to our situation here with regard to abortion because that's a multi-million dollar industry. You know the money that even our own Congress gives to Planned Parenthood is reminiscent of the evil that was expressed in that day because other Parliament members didn't want to touch that very lucrative business. And so here you've got Wilberforce standing up and saying "this is wrong" and he was vilified and attacked and discredited and marginalized. It sounds kind of familiar to what happens to pro-life people today."

"...and Britain was saved, because of a national day of prayer. Ladies and gentlemen, we desperately need our own Miracle of Dunkirk today."

"And a lot of these things are happening around us, and somebody is going to get mad at me for saying what I am about to say right now, but I am going to give you my honest opinion: I think we have turned our back on the Scripture and on God Almighty and I think he has allowed judgment to fall upon us. I think that's what's going on."

"The "child-centered" proselytizers were met by a "parent-centered" corps of self-proclaimed "Judeo-Christian" experts loudly condemning the decadent state of American culture. Dr. James Dobson, psychologist and the author in 1970 of the popular Dare to Discipline, had long been active in the cause. The founder of the Focus on the Family, a right-wing Christian radio "ministry" with a following in the millions, he emerged as a prime mover in the conservative family values crusade that crested as the century ended."

"For a long time I've been walking down life's road with my two pals, Bad Luck and Bad Choices. Fortunately I'm a big believer in new beginnings, new friends, and running from my problems. So one day I decided to head for the island. Aloha, my name is Jack."

"If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."

"I leave out the parts that people skip."

"What do you tell a man with two black eyes? Nothing, he's already been told twice."

"My grandson, Max, who is an all state lacrosse player, once gave me some lacrosse advice: A limp pass is like a limp dick; it doesn't get the job done. I think the same can be said about limp writing."

"After 58 years you'd think writing would get easier. It doesn't. If you're lucky, you become harder to please. That's all right, it's still a pleasure."

"Well, the man don't just have to die, Foley. I mean, he could accidentally hurt himself falling down on something real hard, you know? Like a shiv, or my dick?"

"It's like seeing someone for the first time, and you look at each other for a few seconds, and there's this kind of recognition like you both know something. Next moment the person's gone, and it's too late to do anything about it."

"I know a guy who walks into a bank with a little glass bottle. He tells everyone it's nitroglycerin. He scores some money off the teller, walks out. On his way out, the bottle breaks, he slips on it and knocks himself out. The "nitro" was Canola oil. I know more fucked-up bank robbers than ones who know what they're doing. I doubt if one in twenty could tell you where the dye pack is. Most bank robbers are fucking morons."

"I work not only for the O.J.s, but also the No Js."

"If it doesn't fit, you must acquit."

"You could kill your wife and there's no such thing as 25 to life as long as you've got the cash to pay for Cochran."

"I loved him as a good Christian man; I look at Johnnie as a great Christian. I knew him as that. He was a great guy."

"She got more niggas off than Cochran."

"Stay focused. Talk about things that’ll matter to the people, you know? It’s the economy, stupid."

"Let me buy a [security] pass … so that they can scan me and and search me and measure my penis, then let me get on the plane."

"John McCain, if you liked the last eight, you are going to love the next four."

"You can call the dogs in, wet the fire, and leave the house. The hunt's over."

"[On Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama] If she gave him one of her cojones, they'd both have two."

"Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic."

"Whenever I hear a campaign talk about a need to energize the base, that's a campaign that's going down the toilet. It's a pretty good indication that they're not eating up any territory, they can't get anybody in the center to support them, they're getting shelled back into their own bunker."

"[Hollywood] hates America."

"Who cares? Sometimes you need rebirth. (On the destruction of America)"

"Washington is a dirty diaper. It's time for a change."

"Hurricane [Katrina] hit the Gulf Coast and destroyed much of the Gulf Coast — that was an act of God … Now what happened to New Orleans, that was a complete failure of the federal government. Complete negligence by the feds."

"I didn’t just experiment with marijuana — if you know what I mean."

"Yeah, I graduated with a 4.0... blood alcohol level."

"Back in 2000 a Republican friend warned me that if I voted for Al Gore and he won, the stock market would tank, we'd lose millions of jobs, and our military would be totally overstretched. You know what? I did vote for Al Gore, he did win, and I'll be damned if all those things didn't come true!"

"Republicans want smaller government for the same reason crooks want fewer cops: it's easier to get away with murder."

"Between Paoli and Penn Hills, Pennsylvania is Alabama without the blacks. They didn't film The Deer Hunter there for nothing -- the state has the second-highest concentration of NRA members, behind Texas."

"Look, if George W. Bush and his Republican cronies walked on water, I'd be the guy out there yelling that they couldn't swim. But don't take it from me: we've now heard it from the military commanders and our intelligence community: George Bush's actions in Iraq have not made us safer. They've done the opposite."

"What I'm suggesting is, stand for yourself, be for something, and the hell with it. Because the hand-wringers and the editorialists and the sigh-and-pontificate crowd will be against you, whatever you do."

"Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you'll find."

"Elections are about fucking your enemies. Winning is about fucking your friends."

"At the beginning of the Clinton administration in the early 1990s, adviser James Carville was stunned at the power the bond market had over the government. If he came back, Carville said: I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody."

"When your opponent is drowning, throw the son of a bitch an anvil."

"Why does a dog lick his dick? Because he can. Why does Congress spend money like that? Because it can."

"Sign on the wall in the 1992 Clinton campaign headquarters : The economy, stupid."

"James Carville was one person I was certain I’d dislike when I sat down to interview him in the early spring of 1996. Carville was a famous partisan. He ran Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign and shamelessly shilled for the Democratic Party. Watching him from afar, Carville struck me as a transparent fraud. What I discovered in talking to him was that James Carville was indeed a fraud, but openly so, in the most honest and genuine way. Over time, Carville wound up one of my favorite people in the world, one of the few friends I’ve gone to repeatedly for serious life advice. I haven’t taken a new job in twenty years without calling him first. James Carville is a genuinely wise man. What a shock that was to discover. Life is full of happy surprises like that, thank God. They more than compensate for the rest."

"It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn’t wait to leave."

"An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular."

"The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait."

"A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall."

"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."

"Somebody asked me what I thought next generation meant and what about the PlayStation 3 was next generation. The only next gen system I've seen is the Wii - the PS3 and the Xbox 360 feel like better versions of the last, but pretty much the same game with incremental improvement."

"It almost feels like a zombie at this point; it's the walking dead. It's such an abrupt end to what was E3, which had been this huge escalating arms race....Right now we're in this kind of dicey, do we have an event, what event is it, which one do we go to? I think we're in an uncomfortable transition zone when really the real E3 died a couple of years ago.""

"In a movie, one can always pull back and condemn the character or the artist when they cross certain social boundaries. But in playing a game, we choose what happens to the characters. In the right circumstances, we can be encouraged to examine our own values by seeing how we behave within virtual space."

"Love doesn’t go away because we want it to, but remains even when it becomes a searing pain, leaving the heart a desert of bitter remorse and grief for joy, a happiness that once has been and now never could return. There had been a time when simply to touch this little bit of linen he held now so casually brought every aching moment of that love back. The sense of desolate pain-drenched loss traveled up his arm, enclosing his heart like a set of icy fingers. A time when to look upon what it held was unbearable"

"Have I your word?” “yes, you have my word. But, you don’t believe me.” “no, men’s promises to women are easily made and even more easily broken.”"

"He knew he should be furious, but he couldn’t sustain a decent rage around her. She had too much about her of the ferocious kitten. Something small and fuzzy, just learning it had claws and how to use them"

"She knew he was telling his soul what it needed to hear so that he could gather his courage to go and go what he must"

"Do you hate me so much?” “no, I can’t hate you. I wish I could, but I can’t”"

"Elin wondered, sitting in the sweat bath, what that had to do with passion or desire, and decided – nothing. It was justification. They had murdered the men and must prove, on the helpless bodies of the women, that they were truly stronger. Prove it to exhaustion… not even pleasure was in it for them"

"I like a man willing to pay the price of his pleasures"

"I was angry with you about him, furious that he so much as set eyes on you. I would rather kill you than see you lie in his arms.” “is that love then? A thing that leads to murder?” “I don’t know. In all honesty, I don’t know. You’re mine. What’s mine I keep, I rule, and give my body over to defend. I offer you my honor, and my life. That’s not an easy thing. Its within your power to break my pride, and take that life, insignificant though it is.” “you put it very simply.” “its not. Such a gift rouses strange passions, fears of treachery, and deep distrust. I’m not immune to them.” “no one told me it would be like this. Perhaps it won't go into words, what I feel for you. Its not desire, yet I love your touch, the warm softness of your flesh against mine.”"

"So easily can we destroy those things we love. Had his moment of wounded pride, his stupid frenzy, snuffed out that fragile courage? Would the strong spirit that survived so much anguish be ended as easily as this?"

"The eyes were too intense, tortured almost. He was tall, but the body was wiry rather than powerful. Nature had gifted him with a cat’s grace and lethal swiftness, rather than the raw power of a bull"

"There’s no sense crying over what can’t be changed” “that’s what people cry over, things they can’t change”"

"Women are weak, easily swayed by passion, driven by desire, lust. He lit a fire in her body, a fire that still burned, even in his absence"

"Its easier to forget a thing without a name. I’ve learned to guard my affections.” “I know, you’ve never asked mine.”"

"Know you, boy, women are like cats and must explore any new place until they are satisfied. If they don’t they become weak and vain, fretful and ill"

"One who forced another was beneath contempt. One who needed to was despised"

"Some of the captured women killed themselves. I didn’t. others yielded and learned to love their captors. I wouldn’t do either one. I knew I would escape. Death is forever; to learn to love the hand that crushes you is a shame not to be borne. Pain and slavery will pass. I believed this and it kept me alive"

"You should leave that place, my girl” “you know me better than that.” “yes, I do. Too brave for your own good. Too brave now, I think.” “would you have me any less?” “I’m sorry. No, I wouldn’t have you less.”"

"Pleasure wouldn’t exist without the sharp bite of pain. Even the brief flash of orgasm is too intense to be absolutely pleasurable"

"A hint of ‘I’m so pleased that you strong, handsome, stalwart men are going to stand between my flower-like beauty and danger,’ wouldn’t hurt either"

"I know love is eternal, so also are folly, lies and roses."

"You’re frightening me” “be frightened. Sometimes its very intelligent to be afraid”"

"Desire was only another weapon, like hunger, loneliness, and cold arrayed against him by his tormentors"

"For when women take revenge, it is with all their hearts and souls, not to mention considerable inventiveness and ingenuity"

"He is tremendously strong, she thought, and liked the idea, even as she had feared that strength when she first met him"

"He smiled at her, and she felt uncomfortable as she always did when he showed her affection as opposed to lust. Lust she expected from a man but not affection. The men in her life, her brothers and father, had not been affectionate; and lust would have been inappropriate, though she saw them direct that at other women, usually women of low rank, ripe to be used and cast aside"

"He was magnificent, and I will never forget that in that moment, I first loved him. And I never stopped loving him. I do now and always will. No one ever brought me more sorrow or pain or joy than he did. No, nothing, not even my sons, has ever outweighed the love I feel and still feel for him. And I believe – had I known what the future held for us: all the trouble, torment, battle, and grief of our lives – I still believe that I would have yielded my heart into his keeping as I did then"

"Love is important, and woman being shrewd bargainers probably know fame is not worth much. I’d much rather have something I can spend, eat, or love, thank you very much"

"She was afraid of men, with good reason, but she need not fear all of them. Cai loved her and somehow always would. But above all, she could trust him, because dishonesty wasn’t in him. Not always a good trait but a part of his nature. He kept faith without thinking about it at all. He couldn’t imagine not doing so"

"Then he turned and walked away, and I gazed after him in sorrow. “Don’t look so, girl. He’s the first to fall at your feet; he will not be the last”"

"And then he remembered that the other function of sex is punishment – men use it to humiliate women. And since turnabout is fair play, women often use it to humiliate men"

"I am no ordinary woman, and born to a different fate. I would not go whimpering."

"It is human, I think, when we encounter the marvelous to try and bring away some of it with us"

"You, why do you let me say such things when and where I shouldn’t?” “the problem is not ordering the course of your speech. Its shutting you up in the first place”"

"Good practical intelligence. Why screech when there is no one to comfort you?"

"One day she would be a formidable female, a creature to be reckoned with"

"Don’t flaunt your ignorance or try to insult me. I don’t suffer fools gladly and insults irritate me"

"I apologize.” “you aren’t sorry and don’t apologize.”"

"I wish. I don’t know what I wish. That you were less I were more, perhaps. Yes, just possibly that’s it"

"You are very lovely now and soon you will be beautiful. Ant not in an ordinary way. Youth is always beautiful, but you are like some creatures of fairy born to bring ill to mortals. Only trouble can follow such gifts"

"I saw he was now and always would be his own man"

"[he] was handsome. Just the sight of him stirred strange longings in me"

"Till we meet again, my heart awaits you.” “till we meet again, you will trouble my dreams”"

"Some men know from birth that they are expendable… they fought to won. If you did not win, you did not run either"

"the little death. What would or could be left of a human being after such an experience?"

"God, to breathe. Air. You don’t know what it means until you cannot take a breath"

"For what is a flower but life’s expressed passion for itself. Sudden and brief, but certain and eternal at the same time"

"At worst, they were vile creatures who needed to be wiped from the face of the earth. At best, such behavior shows a dangerous lack of self-control. The first business of a warrior is self-restraint"

"He said truth has a taste, and this had the taste of truth. A wolf would put it that way, but I agree it does. Some things just don’t hang together, but others do. And a lot of times when you encounter it, you say, “I don’t want this to be right, but it probably is, even though it brings me to grief.”"

"Shes direct enough"

"He was conscious that something in [his] personality bolstered his confidence and allowed him to rest, to seek peace and find it. He never game a name to it, and never spoke of it. And never, never would he have allowed himself or anyone to call it – love"

"Remember this central truth. Your enemy is there because he, too, has weighed the consequences of failure and accepts them. Play always to win, because nothing else matters"

"Thats the trouble. all i wanted was a tumble in the hay. oh, boy, i said. ill bet that cute thing is fun and games. what he doesn't know about the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees, i can sure teach him"

"He was, she thought, as beautiful as a young god, lying on his side among the grass and flowers"

"Everybody always knows where they stand with you, don't they?"

"Hard work and training. There's no secret formula. I lift heavy, work hard and aim to be the best."

"I used to think that my career was to be a police officer, and that is what I was put here to do. But I always kept the faith and always worked hard on my goals and I finally found out on Sept. 25, 1998, why I was put here - (God) called me here to be Mr. Olympia."

"I just take it year by year. So much time is dedicated to doing this [winning championships] that I can't see having too much time for much else."

"You can't do this if you're not dedicated and determined, and have a strong faith. Because it's extremely hard, especially trying to work a job and do it."

"It's so overwhelming. It's almost better than winning the lottery, because you worked for it. It's like something you want all your life, but you never thought it would happen, and all of a sudden it did."

"I wasn't given the genetics for football. This is my gift right here. I was always well-built. You can't do certain sports without the genetics, and talent, too, of course."

"I want to help the up-and-coming kids. A lot of times, kids don't have much to do in the summer time. When I was a kid I didn't do nothing. I want to get body building out there and it will start with the younger generation."

"He told me he couldn't wait for the basketball season to end, so he could go back to baseball and get out of shape."

"What do you think of the Chicago Bulls winning three in a row?" -- Russell: "Not much."

"I'm a pretty direct man. You say something I like, I'll tell you so; you say something I don't like, I'll tell you also. A diplomat I'm not. So I'll tell you right out that there are no secret or hidden or financial or philosophical reasons behind this. I just don't feel like playing anymore. As for coaching — that prime incubator of ulcers — no, thank you. I don't want to coach anymore, either. I never considered myself primarily a coach, anyway. Anytime I was ever around a group of coaches I'd feel nervous — all that nonsense about how to "handle" kids, how to "motivate" them! I was a player. Now I'm not a player or a coach anymore."

"If you're really looking for a reason why I feel I've played enough, I'll tell you this. There are professionals and there are mercenaries in sports. The difference between them is that the professional is involved. I was never a mercenary. If I continued to play, I'd become a mercenary because I'm not involved anymore. I have a year to go on my contract with the Celtics. It's one of the most lucrative in sports, and I was very happy with it. A couple of my friends think I should at least stick out that year because of the money. Believe me, I wouldn't mind having all that money. But I'm not going to play basketball for money. I've been paid to play, of course, but I played for a lot of other reasons, too."

"I played because I enjoyed it — but there's more to it than that. I played because I was dedicated to being the best. I was part of a team, and I dedicated myself to making that team the best. To me, one of the most beautiful things to see is a group of men coordinating their efforts toward a common goal — alternately subordinating and asserting themselves to achieve real teamwork in action. I tried to do that — we all tried to do that — on the Celtics. I think we succeeded. Often, in my mind's eye, I stood off and watched that effort. I found it beautiful to watch. It's just as beautiful to watch in things other than sports. Being part of that effort on the Celtics was very important to me. It helped me develop and grow, and I think it has helped prepare me for something other than playing basketball. But so far as the game is concerned, I've lost my competitive urges. If I went out to play now, the other guys would know I didn't really care. That's no way to play — it's no way to do anything."

"People didn't give us credit for being as good as we were last season. Personally, I think we won because we had the best team in the league. Some guys talked about all the stars on the other teams, and they quote statistics to show other teams were better. Let's talk about statistics. The important statistics in basketball are supposed to be points scored, rebounds and assists. But nobody keeps statistics on other important things — the good fake you make that helps your teammate score; the bad pass you force the other team to make; the good long pass you make that sets up another pass that sets up another pass that leads to a score; the way you recognize when one of your teammates has a hot hand that night and you give up your own shot so he can take it. All of those things. Those were some of the things we excelled in that you won't find in the statistics. There was only one statistic that was important to us — won and lost."

"Something everybody else but Bill Russell excelled in was giving the coach good advice. I made the decisions, but I listened an awful lot. Sometimes in practice the other guys would talk for half an hour and I wouldn't say a word. I encouraged them to tell me what they thought."

"Nobody can write a story about the Celtics and not talk about Red Auerbach. Much of my success as a professional is a result of the way he first approached me. A lot of guys said I'd never make it because I couldn't shoot. My first day with Red he told me right out that he didn't care if I never scored a point. He said they had the guys on the Celtics who could score. What he wanted from me was defense and rebounding. That suited me fine. He and I had one big thing in common — the will to win. When he appointed me coach he just said. "The job is yours." He never put pressure on me. He never even came to practice unless I invited him. Of course, I did — often. I would have been crazy not to take advantage of one of the smartest guys the game has seen. In moments of weakness, I almost like Red — a little."

"How much does that guy make a year? It would be to our advantage if we paid him off for five years to get away from us in the rest of this series."

"[The sound of Russell throwing up] is a welcome sound, too, because it means he's keyed up for the game, and around the locker room we grin and say, 'Man, we're going to be all right tonight.'"

"Tony DiNozzo: William Felton Russell, 5-time MVP, greatest basketball champion ever. He used to get so nervous, so pumped, he had to throw up before every game... One night, the Celtics take the court. It's a big game, huge. Red's watching them warm up from the sidelines, but something's not right. He can tell, not clicking. He clears the floor, takes them all back down to the locker room. Why? Because Russell didn't throw up. You know what Red says next? Leroy Jethro Gibbs: "Get in there and puke, we've got a game to win.""

"Proportion is all; and, in sports at school, I lost it by surrendering to the awful significance of my self-consciousness. Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people."

"Travel by air is not travel at all, but simply a change of location; so my wife and daughter and I went to San Francisco by train, leaving Boston on a Wednesday morning in June and, then after lunch in New York, boarding Amtrak’s Broadway to Chicago."

"These women, like writers, have no time clocks to punch, no waiting boss. I write in the morning before teaching, and neither these women nor I care about the morning commuter traffic. There is no place we have to be. We already are where we have to be, facing ourselves. Both of us, without the prodding of a paycheck or the loss of a job, face only time itself, and our responsibility to use it as best we can."

"Very early, I understood that women were required to be other than what they were."

"...and I believed that everyone but those kneeling in front of me saw, and that was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me."

"...my belief in the sacrament of the Eucharist is simple: without touch, God is a monologue, an idea, a philosophy; he must touch and be touched, the tongue on flesh, and that touch is the result of the monologues, the idea, the philosophies which led to faith; but in the instant of the touch there is no place for thinking, for talking; the silent touch affirms all that, and goes deeper: it affirms the mysteries of love and mortality."

"Short story writers simply do what human beings have always done. They write stories because they have to; because they cannot rest until they have tried as hard as they can to write the stories. They cannot rest because they are human, and all of us need to speak into the silence of mortality, to interrupt and ever so briefly stop that quiet flow, and with stories try to understand at least some of it."

"Living in the world as a cripple allows you to see more clearly the crippled hearts of some people whose bodies are whole and sound. All of us, from time to time, suffer this crippling. Some suffer it daily and nightly; and while most of us, nearly all of us, have compassion and love in our hearts, we cannot of will not see these barely visible wounds of other human beings, and so cannot or will not pick up the telephone or travel to someone’s house or write a note or make some other seemingly trifling gesture to give to someone what only we, and God, can give: an hour’s respite, or a day’s, or a night’s; and sometimes more than respite: sometimes joy."

"For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love."

"We are the fed up grass roots movement of goose flesh, hell bent on living this one life by the way we feel our spines, saying what we mean, refusing to allow the few to preach to the many when it is the many who need to be hearing eachother."

"This poem may have meant nothing to you but I am confident that tonight my taking the time to actually write out my anger instead of acting on it has saved the life of at least eleven people in parking enforcement."

"A waste is a nine-year-old boy playing catch with the roof of his garage who already understands that his existence makes for the perfect insult- gay. "You're so gay" a.k.a. stupid a.k.a. dumb a.k.a. wrong. Do you have any idea how gross it feels to hide inside the pile of lies it takes to make you, Sweet Angel, comfortable?"

"If you think being dysfuncted and damaged, strapped to your baggage, dirty, ruined and hurt like critical, cynical, scathing, if you're lost or have come up missing, scarred and scared (or pretending you aren't), when you think that's all you've got, it's not. The sadness you wear around like a trophy is intriguing at most, but it's miserable, and about as original as a frat boy with a visor cap. So step up."

"Jordan tattoos the words "forgive me" in thick black letters down the inside of his arm so that when he looks at his wrist he will remember not to hate himself so much. What he keeps forgetting is that there is life after survival."

"But my father he didn’t read moon, he didn’t speak moon, and he didn’t write moon. So there was no letter found next to his body in the garage when he chose to leave this place on purpose without saying where he was goin’ or why. There are still days you can catch me tape-recording eternal silence and playing it backwards for an empty room just so I can listen to his dying wish. Shh."

"If we could all rephrase the question from "What was your most embarrassing moment?" to "What was your most embarrassing year?" Then I might be able to give you an honest answer."

"The truth is I am a perfect part of the exact point at which all individual human beings meet and the spectrum of voices weaving themselves in between and screaming 'every sick thought you've ever had and every twisted feeling you've ever felt are what make this painting complete.'"

"Dear Angry Older People, over 21-ish, anyone who considers themselves an adult, still bitter: Next time you're wondering what wrong with kids today, you might wanna check the examples you've been giving us to work with."

"All these kids you can't seem to make any sense of would stop holding you so far off the edge of your seats if you'd start holding yourselves to the promises you make. We know you're not perfect because we're not. And I know I ain't perfect. But I believe I was meant to be."

"Listen, if you're from Arizona I'm not making fun of your home. I'm making fun of you for gathering there and building a community in an oven. Smooth move."

"He's got a lead brain. It's a battle magnet. He carries it around by the guilt straps...don't laugh, you didn't see the size of the blizzard that birthed him."

"I keep forgetting to put focus on my to-do list. I keep forgetting to wander and have fun. I know I’m transparent but my insecurities are in all the right places, so go ahead, have a look."

"Theses moments – as in a quote I read about life somewhere – are not a puzzle to be solved, but a moment to be lived. Just savor them when they happen. Call them coincidence. Call the synchronicity. Call them anything you want but, at the very least, savor them."

"There are moments of clarity daily. They open me up with a breath and keep me calm. They feed me the answers. And they hold me lovingly. They are gospelstiches. My childish ass has got to let them heal. This feud I’m having with myself isn’t even original. But it is thick and rooted. Here’s to today, slowing down, suspending judgment, and breast strokes through chaos."

"If we were created in God's image, then when God was a child he smushed fire ants with his fingertips and avoided tough questions."

"Forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past."

"It was not my intention to make such a production of the emptiness between us, playing tuba on the tombstone of a soprano to try to keep some dead singer's perspective alive. It's just that I could have swore you had sung me a love song back there; and that you meant it."

"Forgiveness is for anyone who needs safe passage through my mind."

"We were never tragedies, we were emergencies. You call 911. Tell 'em I'm having a fantastic time."

"I have sinned against you, my Lord, and I would ask that your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God's forgetfulness, never to be remembered against me anymore."

"First of all, if it's on your mind, your mind isn't clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind, or what I call a collection bucket, that you know you'll come back to regularly and sort through."

"Most often, the reason something is "on your mind" is that you want it to be different than it currently is, and yet: • you haven't clarified exactly what the intended outcomes is; • you haven't decided what the very next physical action step is; • and/or you haven't put reminders of the outcome and the action required in a system you trust. That's why it's on your mind."

"Here's how I define "stuff": anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn't belong where it is, but for which you haven't yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step."

"Before you can achieve... you'll need to get in the habit of keeping nothing on your mind... not by managing time, managing information, or managing priorities. ...Instead, the key ...is managing your actions. ...[T]he real problem is a lack of clarity and definition about what a project really is, and what the associated next-action steps required are."

"The short-term-memory part of your mind—the part that tends to hold all of the incomplete, undecided, and unorganized “stuff”—functions much like RAM on a personal computer. Your conscious mind, like the computer screen, is a focusing tool, not a storage place. You can think about only two or three things at once. But the incomplete items are still being stored in the short-term-memory space. And as with RAM, there’s limited capacity; there’s only so much “stuff” you can store in there and still have that part of your brain function at a high level. Most people walk around with their RAM bursting at the seams. They’re constantly distracted, their focus disturbed by their own internal mental overload."

"The big problem is that your mind keeps reminding you of things when you can't do anything about them. It has no sense of past or future."

"If you're waiting to have good ideas before you have any ideas, you won't have many ideas."

"[I]f it's just you, attempting to come up with a "good idea" before defining your purpose, creating a vision, and collecting lots of bad ideas is likely to give you a case of creative constipation."

"The goal is to get projects and situations off your mind, but not to lose any potentially useful ideas."

"[Y]ou must have a clear picture in your mind of what success would look, sound, and feel like."

"How much of this planning model do you really need..? [A]s much as you need to get the project off your mind."

"In order to... have nothing on your mind, you've got to know where all your actionable items are located, what they are, and that they will wait. ...[I]n a few seconds, not days."

"The organizing system merely provides placeholders for all your oprn loops and options so your mind can... make the necessary intuitive, moment-to-moment strategic decisions."

"It's great to clear your psychic decks so you can go into the weekend ready for refreshment and recreation, with nothing on your mind."

"Ask any psychologist how much of a sense of past and future that part of your psyche has, the part that was storing the list that you dumped: zero. It's all present tense in there. ...[A]s soon as you tell yourself that you should do something, if you file it... in your short-term memory... part of you... thinks that you should be doing it all the time. ...[Y]ou've created instant and automatic stress and failure ..."

"[A]nything that is held only in "psychic RAM" will take up either more or less attention than it actually deserves. The reason to collect everything is not that everything is equally important, it's that it's not. Incompletions, uncollected, take on a dull sameness in the sense of the pressure they create and the attention they tie up."

"I suggest that you use your mind to think about things, rather than to think of them. You want to be adding value... not simply reminding yourself they exist."

"When you "have to get organized," you're probably not appropriately invested yet in what you need to get organized for."

"What people call an "Interruption" is simply new input inappropriately managed."

"Freedom to create a mess is proportional to your ability to know what "no mess" is and how to get there."

"Does something have your attention because you want it to, or because you're avoiding it?"

"Your attention will continue to be grabbed by anything until you give it the appropriate attention."

"A big surprise is coming toward you. How clear do you want to be about all your current commitments, when it hits?"

"Your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them."

"Valuable thought occurred today to share. Obvious in the moment. Can't retrieve now. Didn't capture. I teach this. Damn."

"GTD essence: attention cleared of residue & distraction, pointed at the right thing."

"The coolest things I do usually aren't on my lists, but because of them."

"There is never enough time to do what you really don't want to do. Time managemet is really value management."

"Good ideas are infinitely available. We've just limited our availablitly to them. The music's not in the radio."

"Your mind receives, remembers, & reminds, & sucks at all 3, compared to an objective external system a la GTD."

"Secret to finding, quickly, the corner pieces, then the outside edges, to the jigsaw puzzle of life: GTD"

"Over-prepare. Then go with the flow."

"Defaulting to ur psyche as ur system instead of an objective one makes maintaining the system too much trouble."

"I've never had to go very far to learn everything I have learned. I just had to care about something & pay attention."

"Get things under control first, then get focused. If your ship is sinking, you don't care where it's pointed."

"Trying to ignore secondarily meaningful things gives them more meaning than they deserve."

"Making decisions requires energy, but not deciding about whether to decide requires even more energy."

"Every thought deserves its own place in the universe. How & where do you capture yours?"

"Eternal #GTD paradox: when you get the principle, the tool doesn't matter. But simultaneosly it matters so much more."

"Clearing the deck is great, but sailing adventurous waters is the real game. (Just can't do it w/out a clear deck.)"

"Great news about lots of email is how consistently it forces you to get clear what's really meaningful to your work/life."

"GTD gives freedom to the right, structure to the left (brains, that is!)"

"Organizations' problems can all be traced to someone not telling the right someone what had their attention, when it did."

"If you figured out why making a list reduces overwhelm & confusion, you'd keep nothing in your head the rest of your life."

"GTD supplies the reset button for all parts of life & work."

"If you admit your wildest dream & uncover why you want it, you have a big key to make tomorrow a better day."

"Simply ask & answer: if we were being wildly successful in fulfilling our purpose, what would it look, sound, & feel like? #SmallBizChat"

"You talk to yourself 50,000 times a day. What's 300 emails? #SmallBizChat"

"If u can't see everything you've committed to, at all levels, you'll be driven by latest and loudest. #SmallBizChat"

"A commitment kept only in your head will be given too much or too little attention."

"Your system is not your tech - it's the nature of the content & the behavior w/which you engage with it."

"Resistance to deciding the next action (before we have to) stems from how it exposes the vulnerability of our intelligence."

"The nature of creative thinking runs counter to the nature of dealing w/its output. Ability & system to do both is freedom. GTD."

"Being in control isn't forceful manipulation but rather highly cooperative engagement w/ what's really going on."

"Making decisions when you can vs. when you have to makes for better decisions."

"Not stopping to really catch up (Weekly Review, GTDers!) means trying to catch up constantly & never getting there."

"You don't have to like your life to get it off your mind. You DO have to renegotiate your agreements w/yourself about it."

"Your ability to deal w/surprise is in inverse relation to the amount of your backlog of "stuff"."

"Whether you know what you're doing or not, efficiency & style are your only improvement opportunities."

"Maximizing is not optimizing. Sustainable engagement wins, in the end."

"Top need for top professionals: psychic space. Fewer distractions & more contexts for thinking. Not more time."

"Is what you're about to do more likely to expand or limit your ability to get what you really want? Executive intelligence."

"How much attention have I given what really deserves my attention today?"

"The less you are driven by what goes on in this material world, the more you will pay attention to its details."

"You'll be motivated to exercise the #GTD method to the degree you really care about what you're doing."

"Perfection is graciously dealing with imperfection."

"Living life in "emergency scan" mode self-perpetuates instead of self-corrects. Deal w/a non-emergency before it is one."

"If you could stop thinking, letting go of trying control your world w/your mind, where would your attention go?"

"#GTD 2.0 = what to do with your head, once it's clear."

""Organization" for most people is simply an incomplete list, or amorphous piles, of still-unclear commitments."

"What do you want to have true? Pick something between total fantasy & 51% believable, get going, & readjust as you learn."

"Point of in-box empty: having a complete, current inventory of what matters, so you deal clearly with what's new & what's now."

"How, and how often, you relate to your system is an essential part of your system."

"Am working as hard as I can to find out what it's OK I'm NOT going to be dong, this weekend!"

"When "this isn't right" changes to "this isn't optimal" in your vocabulary, you've moved up the food chain."

"Cool how many layers of my mind there are to clear, each time I do it...& how different my world is then."

"Only issues in life: u know what u want, but not how to get it; or u don't know what u want. Solution: #GTD"

"An overwhelming amount of potential work to do is cool. Otherwise people would never go to a gym."

"You've really done your job when what's true? (Challenging question for all of us!)"

"If your backlog of stuff isn't zero'd regularly, you're hostage to your own incessant angst that you should."

"Productivity requires expansiveness & spontaneity as much as structure & control."

"If you're already in a mess, you're not free to make one."

"To be free to be spontaneously & creatively shallow requires depth of character & a disciplined focus."

"It takes a healthy sense of self to feel OK with nothing happening in your head."

"Things hold your attention hostage until you give them the appropriate attention."

"Hold still enough to grapple w/the simple questions, & the complexities become clear."

"How can you justify keeping a calendar & still keep most of your other commitments w/yourself in your head?"

"It's hard to say no when you're not aware of everything you've said yes to."

"If u magically had 0 emails, in 10 days you'd be back to what you had. Issue is not volume, but tolerance of backlog."

"The latest & loudest thing in your psyche is seldom the most important thing that should take up residence there."

"Being organized simply means that where something is matches what it means to you. No more, no less."

"Your mind doesn't have one. If it did, it would only remind you of something when you could do something about it."

"Pay appropriate attention to what has your attention, so you can pay attention to what really has your attention."

"Outcome/next-action thinking, before you must, prepares you for when you must. And that time will come."

"The balance you have between drive & patience may be your master key to success."

"Engaging in complexity is a key to simplicity. Fear of it will haunt your inner recesses."

"Your tools are only as good as they serve your intention. What do you want to have true? What Do you need to have viewable re: that?"

"When you know you'll get email to zero, you're free to deal with the ones you choose, when you choose. Most productive."

"Even the smallest knoll to climb, to see a little more than the machine guns firing at me, is salvation."

"Changing what you want to get done takes a second. Recalibrating & getting the new thing to happen is a martial art."

"When you know how, any time, to get to the place where it's all sort of funny, you've mastered GTD."

"Freedom to give full attention to what you want (vs. It being held hostage by unmanaged stuff) is the GTD promise."

"Rivers of creative flow are log jammed w/ heads holding on to incompletions, old business, & avoided decisions."

"What would you do w/more space, if you had it? Without a good answer, you'll not have the juice to really do #GTD."

"Keys to getting things done: know what "done" means & what "doing" looks like."

"Meetings handled well reduce email. Email handled well reduces meetings."

"Organizing without first capturing & clarifying what needs organizing is simply rearranging your angst."

"The greater your confidence w/how to achieve control & focus, as needed, the wilder & crazier you can be."

"Are you overwhelmed pulling weeds, when you really just need to replant the garden?"

"Collect, process, organize & review what has your attention, so you can stop half-trying to be doing all that, constantly."

"My daily meta-map lists: events coming up; major projects for me; emerging interests; my accountabilities."

"The purpose of a purpose? Tunes you to meaningful things you wouldn't be aware of, otherwise."

"Staying in control daily, weekly, & yearly requires different things for each. Handling one doesn't handle the others."

"What would your ideal exec ass't let you know - & when - & where? That should inform your best #GTD system."

"Great question to ask, to relax: What should I consider right now, decide what, and let go?"

"Using your head to manage your life = creativity constipation."

"The present-ness demanded by a crisis is possible w/out crisis. Understand the keys to appropriate engagement. GTD."

"If you're appropriately engaged w/your life, you don't need more time. If you're not, more time won't help."

"What maps do you need to review, to see where you are & what to do next? Core to self-management systems."

"Appropriate focus on the right stuff gives the freedom to not have to focus on anything, on a regular basis."

"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."

"This is a serious storm that has caused serious damage in our state … We're pleased we haven't seen breaches in the levees. We're pleased we haven't seen major flooding in New Orleans or the places that flooded before. But there are serious challenges."

"To succeed, we have to be the party of change, we have to root out corruption in our own ranks and we have to be the party of solutions."

"You know, Republicans went to Washington to change the culture, to change the city. Instead, they became changed by Washington. Now, it doesn't do any good for us to look backwards or to fight amongst ourselves. We need to be looking forward."

"Whether you voted for him or not, whether you supported the new leaders of Congress or not, they're our president, they're our Congress, they need our prayers, they need our support."

"When the Republican Party is no longer the party of fiscal conservatism then clearly I would argue that we've lost our way."

"I’m not worried about where Barack Obama is from. I’m worried about where he’s going."

"Immigration without assimilation is an invasion."

"I don't have an enemy in this state I hope, except rascals like Bill Dodd, Ray Knight and deLesseps Morrison. I'm proud of them! I'll be back. Keep your eye on the indicators. I thought I owed it to you to come look you in the eye and let as many of you see me and see I'm living and I'm not nuts. If I'm nuts, I've been nuts all my life. Thank ya, and God bless ya."

"Is it the part of the police department to harass me when this city is a flagrant vice capital of the civilized world?" Ignatius bellowed over the crowd in front of the store. "This city is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, anti-Christs, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs, and lesbians, all of whom are only too well protected by graft."

""With the breakdown of the Medieval system, the gods of Chaos, Lunacy, and Bad Taste gained ascendancy."

"When Fortuna spins you downward, go out to a movie and get more out of life."

"The human desire for food and sex is relatively equal. If there are armed rapes, why should there not be armed hot dog thefts?"

"You can always tell employees of the government by the total vacancy which occupies the space where most other people have faces."

""The war had been on for quite a while now when Poppa got his notice from the draft. He didn't have to go, but he more or less enlisted. Mother and I and Aunt Mae went down to the train to see him off, and when he left he kissed Mother and he cried, and I'd never seen a man cry before. The train pulled away, and we stood there and watched it go, and Mother kept looking long after it had passed around the hill."

"I began to compromise my Christian values — partying and dating guys who weren't Christians."

"I just think it’s the world we live in and there is no real metric to measure us by because CNN is the only one that is still doing journalism."

"The earth’s atmosphere is an imperfect window on the universe. Electromagnetic waves in the optical part of the spectrum (that is waves longer than X rays and shorter than radio waves) penetrate to the surface of the earth only in a few narrow spectral bands The widest of the transmitted bands corresponds roughly to the colors of visible light waves in the flanking ultraviolet and infrared regions of the optical spectrum are almost totally absorbed by the atmosphere. In addition atmospheric turbulence blurs the images of celestial objects even when they are viewed through the most powerful ground-based telescopes in an article promoting the construction of the Hubble Space Telescope."

"Every time we get slapped down, we can say, Thank you Mother Nature, because it means we're about to learn something important."

"We often frame our understanding of what the space telescope will do in terms of what we expect to find, and actually it would be terribly anticlimactic if in fact we find what we expect to find. … The most important discoveries will provide answers to questions that we do not yet know how to ask and will concern objects we have not yet imagined."

"The most important discoveries will provide answers to questions that we do not yet know how to ask and will concern objects that we can not yet imagine."

"John Bahcall, an astronomer on the Institute of Advanced Study faculty since 1970 likes to tell the story of his first faculty dinner when he found himself seated across from Kurt Gödel a man dedicated to logic and the clean certainties of mathematical abstraction Bahcall introduced himself and mentioned that he was a physicist Gödel replied“I don’t believe in natural science."

""I keep a gat cuz niggaz murder gott a badd habit"

""Thug Life thats all we know so we grow into some beasts when we get let off them leashes we go and get it, get ya weight up, and when that camera phone flash you aint never have to ask is that Boosie Baddazz straight up, i aint runnin my mouth, i aint runnin the south, spade for spade im the realist nigga out, know what im talkin bout, my niggaz let chalk out, jealous cuz we fresha then the rest of dem fellas that stick togetha, I gotta have alarms now, I aint cant trust no body, I gotta keep a Desert Eagle, nigga know I got it, heart full of fuckin pain cuz im tired of gettin stabbed n grabbed by all these motha fuckin crabs, I laugh but maintain, dont switch the game plan and its FUCK THE POLICE they bring us no peace, its the mind of me Boosie Boo, so much shit goin on where I rome how am I gonna find some peace, they say I'm a role model but I'm not a role model gotta smile when i aint gotta, tired and still holla, I'm a boss so I go off, know i like to Show Off, on the road to riches gotta murda these niggaz" - Boosie"

"I know the game i know the streetz i got the raps you got the beatz we gonna lay it down real sweet so yall can ride to, head bobbin from side to side I dont want shit from my fans but this, feel a real nigga's vibe"

"Smokin on Purple"

""They said im on Ex. I sipp syrup i flip birds but nigga i be chillin wit my Lil girls in a whole notha world."

""Boosie this, Boosie that, well Boosie keep a 30 strapp, my dog he shot the murder gat but Boosie took the murder rap"

""They Holla Young Gunz and Young Bloodz, but Boosie he bust gunz and spit it to his loved ones."

"What About Me?/They Holla"

""They call me Boosie Baddazz and I Zoom right by ya, 760 partna crispy cream on the tires, I smoke that fire purple kush by the pound, ask my dog Webbie this is how it goes down, from my hood to yo hood, man we makin money" - Boosie"

"Head Busta"

"Beef Wit Me"

"Cold Blooded"

"My Nigga Then"

""Now show me where them pussy niggas at who playin wit my son, you gonna walk ova there and knock out his lungs, n tell that boy somethin gangsta when you Hit Em Up, like what... o you playin nowww BLUHH BLUHH, now we scrathcin off the scene in the Elcamino, straight to That River where them niggas throw them black ninas, now you official nigga, My Nigga One Love anybody play wit you they get they issue nigga, We got 35's n 38's 22's n 25's n 12 gauges that come from lock wit a 100 buck shots BlUHHH" - Boosie"

"Bank Rollz"

"4 kids to feed it aint a game partna, all of them eatin good ask they baby mommas."

"OG told me how it would unfold, if i eva got the money the cars n clothes, these niggas hoes just like hoes, a lot of rappas in My Ghetto need to be exposed, strate up, i know some Boulevard Niggaz who bout they business, some uptown gorillaz, some bottom boy killaz"

"Touch Down to Cause hell"

"Streetz Is Mine"

"You Gon' go crazy nigga tryin to count my money"

"The bitch been good to me"

"Niggas who've tried, I bust they sides"

"I'm a young hot street flame they call me Sweet James or call me Sir Jones"

"I don't wanna do this no mo', but this the only thing that I know."

"The champions causes such as gay rights (including gay marriage), equality for women (suffrage, the right to work, etc.), and religious freedom (usually in the form of freedom from religion). Yet, fundamentalist Islam opposes nearly everything the American Left stands for. In many Islamic countries, homosexuality is punishable by death. In Iran, a top government official recently said that torture followed by death is the appropriate punishment for being gay. In Saudi Arabia, women can’t vote, run for public office, or drive cars. Women are routinely jailed and beaten for merely being in the presence of a man not related to them. The Saudi version of Dr. Phil provides televised lessons to men on how to properly beat their wives. In many Islamic countries, women are forced into s and held as property by their husbands, something not exactly in line with progressive Western thinking. In some Muslim countries, women aren’t even allowed to decide what clothes to wear. To reveal even the smallest patch of skin is a crime. Religious freedom is often nonexistent under Islamic rule. In countries like Afghanistan and Iran, people who convert from Islam to another religion face public execution. So why does the American Left hate Christianity yet love Islam?"

"In unambiguous terms, fundamentalist Islam has announced again and again that it despises the values, culture, and traditions of America. The American Left does too. Consistent with the Arabic proverb that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the American Left has formed an alliance with fundamentalist Islam to transform this country into something far removed from its Judeo-Christian origins and ideals. The mistake the Left is making is that its so-called progressive goals have nothing in common with the medieval tenants of fundamentalist Islam. Militant Muslims have no respect for American progressives, any more than they respect the very existence of Israel. Fundamentalist Islam is using the American Left to advance its own agenda."

"Militant Muslims want Islam and sharia law to dominate the West. Their goal is to subvert the U.S. Constitution and our way of life to the will of Allah. The word Islam means submission. What members of the American Left seem blind to is the fact that in countries where Islam dominates, their progressive ideas would be crushed and many of them would be thrown in jail simply because of their lifestyle choices. Yet, the American Left continues to serve as apologist-in-chief for fundamentalist Islam. Why? Because deep down American Leftists are terrified of Islamic fundamentali"

"The American Left’s affair with fundamentalist Islam is essentially a love-fear relationship. The Left loves Islam’s hatred of America and its desire to radically change this country, but the Left also fears what militant Muslims are capable of, especially if they turn their murderous rage on their so-called friends. So the Left, like Neville Chamberlain with the Nazis, walks a tightrope, appeasing Muslims at every turn, offering excuses for Islamic violence, and hoping Muslim fundamentalists won’t bite the hand that feeds them their excuses."

"A government which cannot protect its humblest citizens from outrage and injury is unworthy of the name and ought not to command the support of a free people."

"For we are not enemies, but brethren."

"America will not die. As the time demands them, great men will appear, and by their combined efforts render liberty and happiness more secure. The people will be ready and answer in every emergency that may arise."

"To the masculine mind there appears to be something strangely exhilarating in the thought of a woman being abruptly torn from her home without sufficient time to put her wardrobe in order, and to all the men responsible for this voyage the most delightful feature apparently of the whole affair was the fact that I should be forced to get ready in five hours for a seventy-five days' voyage around the world."

"Even in my childhood my sympathy for the heroes in the fairy tales was always keenest at the moment when they waved their hands in farewell and turned their faces at last towards the magical adventures that stalked about impatiently awaiting their advent in the strange countries where their havens lay."

"It was well to have thus once really lived."

"The record of the race, hitherto accepted as the truth about ourselves, has been the story of facts and conditions as the male saw them – or wished to see them... No secret has been so well-kept as the secret of what women have thought about life."

"[Perhaps] the potency of fever, of drugs, of alcohol, or of mania may open up deeps of memory, of primordial memory, that are closed to the milder magic of sleep. The subtle poison in the grape may gnaw through the walls of Time and give the memory sight of those terrible days when we wallowed — nameless shapes — in the primaeval slime."

"No ruler is ever really dethroned by his subjects. No hand but his own ever takes the crown from his head... When he ceases to lead... the revolt which casts him from power is only the outward manifestation of his previous abdication."

"Firstly, because one suffers from being forced to dwell in a house steadily falling to decay; a trial to the housekeeper, arousing a sense of some innate incompetence that the beams of the building should sag, doors open difficultly, windows dim with the dust of time, the outer complexion of the house grow streaked and grey with the weathering of many seasons. There is a certain desperation in the realization that no repairs are possible... one braces one’s self to accept courageously the wrongs of time; to wear the lichens and mosses with silent gallantry."

"Much of the objection against Western Civ. is Whiggish Western Civ. - the glorious progress of Western civilization against Asiatic barbarism. I think that that is dead, except as a rhetorical device. The important issue is that, for good and for ill, the world in every corner has been very, very profoundly affected and transformed by certain kinds of cultural attitudes and institutions, which need to be understood, and which developed in, and then out, of western Eurasia. Whether one likes them or not, we have to understand them. If the largest country in the world, China, adopts a philosophy which is at least theoretically developed by a German Jew in the nineteenth century... (1998)"

"The second model of ethnogenesis drew on Central Asian steppe peoples for the charismatic leadership and organization necessary to create a people from a diverse following. . . . these polyethnic confederations were if anything more inclusive than the first model [in which ethnic formation followed the identity of a leading or royal family], being able to draw together groups which maintained much of their traditional linguistic, cultural, and even political organization under the generalship of a small body of steppe commanders. The economic bases of these confederations was semi-nomadic rather than sedentary. Territory and distance played little role in defining their boundaries, although elements of the confederation might practice traditional forms of agriculture and social organization quite different from those of the steppe leadership."

"For most of the Goths defeated by the Huns, entering the confederation was an obvious choice . Although a Hunnic core of Central Asians provided central leadership to the Hunnic armies, the peoples they conquered were assimilated with ease . Good warriors, whether of Gothic, Vandal, Frankish, or even Roman origins, could rise rapidly within the Hunnic hierarchy Even among the central leadership, this polyethnicity was obvious. The Hunnic leader Edika was simultaneously a Hun and a Scirian, and ruled the short-lived Scirian kingdom as king. The greatest of the Hunnic leaders, Attila, bore a Gothic name (or title): Attila means "little father:" Gothic, Greek, and Latin were used alongside Hunnic in his court, and among his advisers were not only leaders of various barbarian peoples but even former Greek merchants. For a time the Italian aristocrat Orestes, father of the last Roman emperor in the west, Romulus Augustulus, served the Hunnic king."

"As Frankish, Longobard, Anglo-Saxon, and Visigothic kingdoms assimilated surviving Roman political and cultural traditions, they became the center of post-Roman Europe, while new barbarian peoples, most notably the Saxons, Slavs, and Avars, replaced them on the periphery, Ethnic labels remained significant designations within the Romano-barbarian kingdoms, but they designated multiple and at times even contradictory aspects of social and political identity"

"Modern history was born in the nineteenth century, conceived and developed as an instrument of European nationalism. As a tool of nationalist ideology, the history of Europe's nations was a great success, but it has turned our understanding of the past into a toxic waste dump, filled with the poison of ethnic nationalism, and the poison has seeped deep into popular consciousness."

"The peoples of Europe are a work in progress and always must be... The history of the people of Europe has not ended -- it never will. Ethnogenesis is a process of the present and future as much as it is the past. No efforts of romantics, politicians, or social scientists can preserve once and for all some essential soul of a people or nation. Nor can any effort ensure that nations, ethnic groups, and communities of today will not vanish utterly in the future. The past may have set the parameters within which one can build the future, but it cannot determine what that future must be."

"I actually tried to find some other analogy around the world in modern history that provided an example of any country that had killed this many animals in a short period of time of only a hundred years, and came to the conclusion that in American history between 1800 and about 1920 we engaged in the largest destruction of animal life discoverable anywhere in world history. We take out 30 million , 15 million s, probably between a half-million and a million gray wolves, a hundred thousand grizzly bears once ranged across the west. They were down to fewer than 500 by the end of the 19th century. I mean, and this story happens over and over again with every animal you can think of. We drove grizzlies into the mountains, drove off the plains into the mountains, wiped out all the bighorn sheep that were in the bad lands and canyons of the great plains, all gone by 1906. And so it's this slaughterhouse that takes place. And it takes place, interestingly enough, at the same time that the conservation movement is creating these big game parks in Africa, in Kenya, in what becomes Tanzania, in South Africa. And yet, on our own great plains we don't do it... because the great plains becomes the part of the west that we privatize with homesteads and with ranches, and everyone who settles on the great plains basically regards all these animals as an annoyance that we need to get rid of..."

"I write this sitting in my hand-built adobe-style home looking out on the ... It's a place where the "Old" West and the "New" confront one another daily in often bazarre ways. ...I'm sort of a New Westerner myself. Because of relatively recent inventions like solar panels, satellites, cell phones, composting toilets, and four-wheel drive vehicles, I'm able to live where no one has since the Salish had the valley. ...perhaps it all just seems new because the prism through which we're accustomed to view the history of the region has only recently been polished sufficiently to gain the deep view."

"But the conventional narrative is lumpy, a story that glosses what passes for quiescence to focus on "events": the appearance of Lewis and Clark and [Father Jean Pierre] DeSmut, the removal of the native Salish people, the arrival of the railroads, irrigation and logging and town-building, booms in sheep, busts in apples. Settlement, local politics, participation in the nation's wars, schemes to make money. And now the resources are tourism and real estate based on scenery and an amenity lifestyle in a mountain paradise. These seem to be what we think of as history."

"I've spent most of the last few days looking at information to help me reimagine... a history... that digs into the stratum below the ones that carry wars or political affairs... many of the questions are new. ...they have to do with our interaction with our ecological landscape, with what we might call the "natural West," as both idea in the mind and as tangible rock, grass, and flesh..."

"Whose natural West has this been all along? Is it evolution's superorganism? Or did the United States inherit a natural stage actually shaped by the very long human inhabitation? ...Why do places like Hispanic New Mexico, Mormon Utah, and Montana seem so different when nature would seem so similar in all three? Or are they actually all that different? ...[I]s there something else more universal that our richly layered cultures disguise, perhaps something as essential as an evolutionarily derived "human nature" that influences the way that we—all of us—see and interact with the flux we call the natural world?"

"[T]he human past... belongs not only to (say) the Blackfeet or the Mormons, but to all of us. ...[W]e humans cannot be considered as separate from the earth of our evolution. We, too, are "natural.""

"The humanities have usually left evolutionary nature to the biologists. But some of the other questions here are... posed by the multidisciplinary field known as ."

"[M]any of us came... through a tradition in Western writing that harkens back to ... ... and James Malin (who pioneered in systematic ecological history). All these pioneers in the field wrote between the 1890s and the 1950s. Brilliant contemporary writers like and Richard White may have made environmental history "the coolest history around"... but they didn't invent it. ...For many writers in the twentieth century, from Webb to the 1937 Committee on the Future of the Great Plains to Frank and Deborah Popper, the Great Plains are the ultimate proving ground of environmentalism's doomsday predictions for the Modernist experiment in a massively altered landscape."

"Optimal Foraging Strategy models... have asserted that what appears to be "conservation" among hunting peoples was (and is) actually a by-product of attempting to maximize hunting efficiency and use of time. Thus hunter-gatherers ignored depleted habitats and placed taboos on certain species not to achieve conservation but in search of maximum yield for minimum effort. As wildlife populations shrank, this hypothesis argues, hunters actually hunted more, and they range farther afield."

"Like Wilson and a slew of other authors working on what was once called "sociobiology" but is now usually called "evolutionary behavior" or "evolutionary psychology," I am convinced that there is a biological and universal human nature, and that it appears manifest in the human record.The question is, how might that insight... be folded into the narratives that give our immediate history meaning and power?"

"In one of the myriad ways humans and coyotes eerily mimic each one another, like us coyotes are cosmopolitan species, able to live in a remarkable range of habitats."

"The ancestral canids that would eventually produce coyotes sprang from North American stock, a line of animals that evolved in the American Southwest. That ancient coyote line spawned animals that migrated to Eurasia and eventually to Africa to become Old World s. In North America, archeological sites from the late Pleistocene have yielded coyote remains from as far east as Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and genetic evidence indicates that coyotes thronged eastward out of their core range in the American West in at least two swarms, roughly between three hundred and nine hundred years ago. The truth is, roaming coyotes have probably been swimming the Mississippi River to eastern America during most decades since there have been coyotes."

"Across the history of life on Earth, animals and birds of many species have routinely colonized new country. That's enough a marker of adaptive success that biologists apply the term "cosmopolitan" to species that are especially flexible regarding... habitats... Evolving in America, the ancestors of horses spread across Asia, Europe, and Africa, where they became zebras and s. Bovine evolution in Southeast Asia eventually brought bison to North America... But the range expansion of a wild animal [i.e., the coyote] for thousands of miles in every direction, often through dense settlements of humans who in recent history have been committed to that animal's eradication, is truly remarkable. A suite of factors must be involved."

"Southwestern Hispanos... have long said that the only thing smarter than a coyote is God."

"Their colonization of our cities, from the small burgs... to the biggest, loudest, and most frenetic of our metropolises, has become the wildlife story of our time. It deserves some explanation."

"[T]he truth is that coyotes have never been solely wilderness creatures. ...for the 15,000 years since we humans have been in North America, coyotes have always been capable of living among us. ...A coyote's primary prey happens to be... the mice and rats that flourish around and among us... By the time Europeans got to America, coyotes had long since sought out the major Indian cities of Mesoamerica."

"A thousand years later we still use a form of the original Aztec name... coyotl, pronounced COY-yoht, accent of the first syllable... Their rich mythology produced numerous coyote gods... , or "Venerable Old Coyote"... sounds so much like the widespread North American god-avatar... that the empire-minded Aztecs may have borrowed him from tribes far northward..."

"Chaco unquestionably had coyotes in town; coyote bones are common in the archeological sites of the inner city."

"[C]oyotes have now become the most common large wild predators most Americans have ever seen... The tawny, tail-swishing, sharp-nosed wild dog of the American deserts is now our furtive alley predator everywhere from Miami to Anchorage, San Diego to Maine, and the stories are piling up."

"Rape isn't fatal. So imagine my indignation when I saw a chatroom called "Rape Survivors." Is this supposed to impress me? Someone fucked you when you didn't want to be fucked and you're amazed that you survived? Unless he used a chainsaw instead of his banana, what's the big deal? I don't mean to be horrendously offensive and insensitive here, but everyone survives rape. Some women are killed afterwards, but that's murder, not rape. To say that you're a rape survivor is as meaningless as saying you're a jury duty survivor or a divorce survivor. Lots of things in life suck—that doesn't mean we survived them. The word survivor applies to people who are alive after being stabbed 73 times with an ice pick or mauled by rabid wolverines, not to a woman who gets banana when she doesn't want it. Just because you got raped, you have to rape the English language? You vindictive bitch! Also, don't you ever get tired of being the victim? How many failed relationships are you going to blame on a single violation of your personal space?"

"A poll has shown that 63% of Americans, in their contemptible complacency, refuse to accept the theory of Evolution to this day. 150 years after this theory was put forward by Charles Darwin, Americans still have trouble accepting it in this puritanical, damn-near theocracy that we call home."

"After Sarah Palin, you guys are running Mitt Romney. And I've got to say, I saw the appeal of George W. Bush, I saw the appeal of Sarah Palin – I do not see the fucking appeal of Mitt Romney! I mean, you guys can't say that he's some kind of down-home folksy motherfucker, 'cause he's not; he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a golden fork up his ass! [...] You can't say that you like him because he's a true conservative, because he's not; when he was governor of Massachusetts, he governed as a liberal. In most states, he would've been considered a Democrat based on the way he governed. He was a Massachusetts Republican. The thing about Mitt Romney is, he's not a conservative, he's not a liberal, he's just a businessman."

"Justin Bieber is just the latest giant leap forward in the pussification of the American male. If he went to my school looking like this, we wouldn't have called him JB, we would've called him PB – for Punching Bag!"

"[...] I was thinking about the fact that we're coming up on the 18th anniversary of September 11th, right? So, that means we're now gonna have adults that were not born when the attacks happened. And that's crazy to me. And that just means there's people who have grown entirely in the post-9/11 world. That sucks, you didn't even get to see how much better things were before Osama bin Laden came and kicked us in the shin and then we fucking slit our own throats afterwards."

"I'm passionate about animals. … I think animal protection is so important because they need love, too, just like we do. They’re with us through thick and thin, and it’s very important to protect them."

"Imagine being left out in the freezing cold, without shelter and bedding for warmth or a friend to ease your loneliness. … Be your dog's biggest defender and keep them indoors with you, and give them the love and companionship they deserve."

"[Martial arts training]'s given me a foundation for conditioning, flexibility, patience, focus, dedication. And those carry over to my basketball career. Off the court, I'm more focused, patient, and understanding."

"Meadowlark inspired me to play for a long time. I thought, 'If he could do it, I can do it.' The legacy that Meadowlark leaves is something that every child and adult can benefit from."

"Robert Parish and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar are the two reasons I became a vegetarian fully in the first place. They where the first ones I saw and I was 27 at the time and there was an article about Robert Parish and one of his martial art forms and I remember playing against this guy and asking him how he was running up and down the court with me and I was in my twenties. He said, "you have to learn to pace yourself young fella". … Then I would go, "well then your car has no gas" and I thought about that. So at 27 I made the change. … I had a good career but Robert Parish had a view to look at stats and a better career. If I would have known how to take care of my body … then I would have played until I was 40 as well."

"Superstring theory has been studied intensively since 1984, when the discovery of Green and Schwarz of anomaly cancellation convinced many physicists that it provides a consisten theory of perturbative quantum gravity, gauge interactions and chiral matter. The basic difficulties in quantizing general relativity and supergravity (non-renormalizability or at least strong coupling at the Planck scale) are visible at low order in the loop expanison, while superstring theory was shown to be well-defined and finite to all orders."

"We believe string theory has a set of solutions, some of which might describe our world. Even leaving aside the question of few vacua or many, and organizing principles, perhaps the most basic question about the landscape is whether it will turn out to be more like mathematics, or more like chemistry."

"... I am going to go out on a limb, and argue that"

"We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them. There is no travel ban on them. There is no ban on -- you know, they had the Muslim ban. There is no white guy ban. So, what do we do about that?"

"Earlier this week, I made some comments about that in a conversation with Chris, I said that the biggest terror threat in this country comes from radicals on the far right, primarily white men. That angered some people. But let’s put emotion aside and look at the cold hard facts. The evidence is overwhelming."

"This whole talk about age makes me uncomfortable. I think it’s the wrong road to go down. She says people, you know, politicians or something are not in their prime. [...] Nikki Haley isn't in her prime, sorry. A woman is considered to be in their prime in 20s and 30s and maybe 40s."

"Amazing. I thought this was some sort of joke quote taken out of context but no... it’s just Don Lemon being a moron. Unfortunately this is how so many leftists actually think. Disgusting! Imagine the outrage if you changed “white men” with any other demographic?"

"Just because somebody or something doesn’t look at the world the way you do doesn’t mean it’s stupid. It’s just different—"

"The psychology of the religious experience has been well-researched and taped. There are many paths up the mountain—sensory deprivation or sensory overload—emotional response to stimuli or the lack thereof is common. Drugs, of course, from psychoactives to the more mundane depressants. Electropophy can bring it about, as can organic brain damage, lack or excess of oxygen, even sex can trigger it. And what it is, according to the science of man and mue, is a subjective mental state, somewhere to the left of hypnosis. A trick the mind plays on itself. A delusion, void of reality."

"We of the Shroud tend to believe in teaching those things we know we can teach, and in affairs of the heart—or gonads—there are no real experts. Love, like zen, cannot be learned, only felt."

"Older doesn’t necessarily mean wiser, Emile, but it does mean older. More...experienced. More adept at dealing with the galaxy, at...taking care of oneself."

"Khadaji only nodded. It didn’t matter to him if he passed the test or not. He wasn’t here to get a degree; he was here to learn."

"“People, this is your weapon, not your gun.” He waved the Parker in the air. “This is for work.” He dropped one hand to touch himself on the crotch. “This is for fun. Don’t mistake one for the other. Those of you not male or electively equipped as such might remember that easier.”"

"The beast has long since stopped serving to become the master. The Confed did what governments were famed for: it made more government. To oppose it was treason, and worth death. Even a monster has fear."

"He thought about the killing he’d seen, about his final participation in the slaughter on Maro. It still made him want to vomit, the thought of all those people ceasing to exist. Many religions had it that there was another life, another existence following the one known, but Khadaji held no faith in that idea. Maybe so, maybe not. It would be nice, but until it was proven, a person should make the best of his or her time on the physical plane."

"Any type of violence initiated by one intelligent being against another was wrong. Killing violence was worse than any other kind. How could it be condoned? In his brief moment of cosmic bliss, Khadaji had seen the value of intelligent life. Man and his self-created mues were alone in the galaxy as evolved intelligence. Certainly, there were artificials—computers and genetically altered animals—but no aliens had been discovered above the level of an unaltered dog. It was a big galaxy, plenty of room for every human or neo-human, it wasn’t necessary to kill any of them!"

"Could he use the same excuse as the Confed—the end justified the means? Sometimes it did, of course, but could one ethically justify using the same methods as a deplored enemy, in order to get it to stop?"

"What other paths were there? His studies had shown him that revolution and evolution were the only ways that societies ever truly changed. Revolution and evolution, built of a mix of education and violence and politics and compromise and self-interest and self-preservation. Certainly, history showed that rigid societies, like ancient dinosaurs, always died. The Confed was the biggest dinosaur ever, and while it was already dying and had been doing so for a long time, it would take many years before it finally fell. Any empire which had to hold its citizens in check with military force was far down the road to destruction. Which brought up another thought: what would replace the dead beast when it began to rot? What parasite would emerge from the corpse to try and breed itself into superiority?"

"Of course, laws weren’t always just. Some rules outlawed a thing because it was intrinsically bad: child molestation, say. Other rules made harmless activities crimes only because someone wished them to be so. Take cohabitation on a religious holiday. On some worlds, it was legal on one day, illegal the next, and on the third, okay once again. Khadaji could see no moral dilemma there."

"Honor was in surviving, not fair play."

"A woman did what a woman had to, the best way she knew how. To do more was impossible, to do less, unthinkable."

"He was a frustrated romantic, a thing often mistaken for skepticism."

"“I mean, look, I just broke into your private files. If I were you, I’d be more than a little upset.” Pen crinkled. “I’m not. It shows initiative.”"

"She didn’t have to play Pen’s game, she didn’t want to. The problem, as always with Pen, lay in figuring out what his game was."

"“Confounders aren’t allowed in holding cells, Envoy—” “And if snakes had legs, they’d be lizards,” Massey said. “Let’s not discuss things that don’t apply to our situation, Lojtnant.”"

"The end, in this case, would justify the means. It did that, sometimes. But somewhere along the way he had lost his godlike surety; he had had to think instead of feel, and the monkey brain was never as quiet as the zen mind."

"The mark of a civilized man was to know when to leave the party."

"The end did justify the means sometimes, otherwise nothing would ever be accomplished."

"Life is more important than glory."

"Never hide from the consequences of your orders."

"Everybody’s got secrets, and some of the worst ones belong to those with the most power."

"Who you are comes from who you were. You can’t escape your past; it follows you like a shadow."

"“What’s wrong with me?” “Have you got a few hours for a basic list?”"

"“You’re a genius, you know that?” “I’ve always thought so, myself.”"

"As it had always done, money talked, and what it said was, “Leave me alone and I’ll pay you well.”"

"A man can only stay down so long before he rises or loses everything that he is."

"There were, in Ferret’s experience, two kinds of law: one law ruled the poor, an altogether different one more gently guided the rich."

"Eventually, you will learn for the right reasons; to begin with, it is only necessary that you learn at all."

"Perhaps the voice stilled. Perhaps not. Either way, he lost the sound of it in the surging wave that crested and carried him to new places with this new woman. For a few moments, at least, the sound went away, along with the darkness, the worry, the memories. He and Moon danced the oldest man and woman dance, yin and yang, and all else was less than a shadow. For a few moments."

"“A priest.” Pen nodded. “A title. Our order concerns itself more with the redemption of man then the seeking of his Creator. Assuming there is such a thing.” “Doubts are good,” Vaughn said. “If a belief can’t stand questioning, it isn’t apt to be much.”"

"It would be foolish to deny something that worked simply because one did not know how it worked. One did not need an advanced degree in physics to push a button."

"That, of course, was the problem with zen. Mountains were mountains, streams were streams, and forests were forests, except when they were not. And then were again. To someone who knew zen, on the proper intuitive level, it all made perfect sense. To someone who did not know zen, it made no sense at all."

"Odd how such major changes in a man’s life could come about so quickly, based on such flimsy things as feelings."

"The gnat had bitten the dinosaur. The revolution had begun!"

"What had Von told him, so long ago? He might not be able to control what he felt or thought, but he could control what he did. That was the important thing, that was the crux of free will."

"He did not have to have all the answers. Hell, he didn’t have to have any of them. All he could do was the best he could. Nothing else much mattered worth a damn."

"He had not found God, but he had found something much more important. He had found himself."

"All great truths are simple, and that was both great and true itself."

"He had put it all behind him, the danger and intrigue, and he had never regretted it. He had done a lifetime’s work in a decade and a half, and walked away without a backward look. He had done what he had been driven to do by a mystical battlefield revelation that he could not ignore, but he was long past that. It seemed sometimes when he thought about it as if it had all happened to another man, in another life, one he knew only slightly, if at all."

"When wheels turned, those on top sometimes found themselves buried in the mud after things rolled to a stop."

"The matadors didn't hold with killing, but the way Sleel figured it, when someone tried to take you out, they lost their breathing rights. He'd worry about his conscience later. At least he'd be alive to worry about it."

"Causing the union trouble was easy enough, since unions were almost always paranoid by nature."

"But her first reaction was from fear. Her very best, most potent trick suddenly didn't work anymore. Her first thought probably was that something was wrong with you. But her second thought would have been that something was wrong with her. Had to be pretty scary."

"“Thanks,” he said. She beamed at him. “Sure. What are friends for, if not to point out when you do stupid shit?”"

"“We live in an age where such things are inseparably entwined with our lives,” he said. “There have been more than a few other unnatural disasters around the galaxy of late, most of which are connected to major computer systems.”"

"“You should know that there is great personal danger involved, Emile.” Khadaji chuckled. “So, what else is new? You skate the edge, sometimes you get cut.”"

"Veate said, “You said ‘used to be.’ Not a mystic any more?” “No. I burned too many bridges. I saw too much grief to believe in a benevolent cosmos any longer. I caused much of that grief myself.”"

"Wall knew what made the man work; he had studied every scrap of information available on him, including his own brief meeting before it all fell apart. Khadaji was a hero; he wore the psychologically flawed psyche like a cape, he was a slave to fair play and he believed that the universe was an innately good place. Khadaji made it a point not to kill during his revolution, not with his own hands. He could have snuffed Wall like a flickstick when first they’d met. But he had not; he had given Wall a chance to consider the error of his ways. What a fool."

"Well, said his little interior voice, a second is as good as an eon, if you succeed. Yeah, and as good as forever if you fail."

"Rich people seldom run amok; They hire somebody to do that for them."

"Young soldiers had a lot of expectations and fantasies about how it would be and what they would do and feel. Invariably wrong, those expectations."

"It wasn’t a death wish. It was a see-how-close-you-can-get-and-live wish."

"Truth is the first casualty in war, but communications is the second."

"If it ain’t broke, don’t break it."

"There are a lot of promises in the recycle bins of history."

"Nobody is a born killer. And nobody ever forgets the first time they get laid, nor the first time they spike somebody."

"“Everybody knows that.” “Assume for a moment that everybody is wrong.”"

"In the land of the unarmed, the man with a rock was king."

"Civilization didn’t like surprises..."

"“One who searches for the definition ‘devious’ can find it listed under ‘human.’”"

"“You cheated!” “Hell yes, I did. I learned a long time ago, better you learn to fight smarter, not harder.” “If you had not had the pistol—” “Then I’d have used some other tool. Knife, stick, a chair, whatever. Fighting fair gets you killed unless the other guy also fights fair and you are better than him and lucky. First rule: Don’t do it."

"Shoot at us, we will nuke you all and let God sort out your radioactive dust."

"“You ready to fly, Nancy?” Jo asked. “Honey, I’m always ready to fly.” “Might get shot at.” “I been shot at. Not a problem if they don’t hit me. I am allowed to dodge, right?”"

"Never felt so alive as you did after you came out of a battle in one piece. And if you were dead? You wouldn’t feel that..."

"“Why would he do that?” “Because he is insane, a fool, a man so devious they will have to guard his corpse after he dies, or he’ll steal it himself!”"

"Droc was not particularly religious himself. If the gods responded to entreaties, they had never demonstrated it to him. Better his time was spent doing something that might work."

"Death came for all, and it was never a matter of “if,” only “when.”"

"When he saw me look her over, he hinted that she might be willing to, ah, stay behind and work out details of the contract with me personally, no matter how long it might take.” Jo nodded. No surprise there. Sex had sold stuff ever since stuff had been around."

"But was it not you who used to tell me that the more you knew, the better? That knowledge was the sharpest fang?"

"The good old days always seemed better in distant memory than they had actually been at the time."

"Desire, she realized, was a thick fog that could completely obscure reality."

"You’re not an ape, use a tool!"

"Well. You were allowed to be young and stupid, when you were young and stupid, and if it didn’t do you in, you might get older and wiser."

"“The rules are different for rich men,” he said. “Always have been.”"

"He understood the phenomenon, of how almost dying made you appreciate what life had to offer. And it was a potent drug, that feeling. Battle was not glorious. But surviving it? That was."

"A large bomb obscures a lot of evidence."

"“We aren’t looking for trouble.” “Doesn’t mean you won’t find it.”"

"“So here we have the basic ingredients in the art of distraction,” Gunny said to Singh, as they walked toward the rendezvous point. “When in doubt, wait until dark, turn off the lights, and blow shit up.”"

"What they don’t know won’t hurt us..."

"The loudest sound on a battle field was click! when you were expecting bang! It was a never-ending wonder: What was going to go wrong next?"

"“How interesting,” Kay said. “The human capacity for denial sometimes seems to be quite large.” “Ain’t that the truth.”"

"Old enough to look as if he knew what to do, young enough to look as if he could do it."

"He had thought about it. Mostly, after the fantasies, he had let it go. It was done, history. No point in bumping into the furniture while looking back over your shoulder."

"Jo nodded. The Vastalimi were stoic about many things, death notwithstanding. People came and went, that was the way of it, and there was no need to be overly disturbed; nothing could be done to change the general pattern, only the individual ones. Everybody got onto the hoverbus, and eventually, everybody got off; the questions were, how long was the ride, and how did you leave?"

"When you worked in a profession whose tools included guns and bombs, death was always on the menu; only a matter of time until the order you placed arrived..."

"“Man proposes, God disposes,” Singh said. Both fems looked at him. He shrugged. “Whenever you run into a situation that you cannot control, we on Ananda often find it convenient to blame it on God.”"

"War had a way of making carpe diem seem valid no matter what you wanted to seize..."

"“You’ve never struck me as a...reflective person. More of a doer than a be-er.” “True enough. Still, when one is in a profession that deals in the possibility of sudden and maybe unexpected violent death, the questions arise now and then for examination.” “The questions being...?” “What does it all mean? Why are we here? Where are we going?” Zhe laughed. “A warrior philosopher!” “Not your bent, to muse on such things?” “Oh, I used to ask myself those questions. Then one day, I realized that, as brilliant as I am, I couldn’t divine the answers. That, unbelievable as it was, there had been many people smarter than I who had broken themselves of the rock of why-are-we-here? And, even if I happened upon The Answer, how would I know? Who would be able to verify it for me? “Given my upbringing and experience, religion wasn’t an option, the notion of Somebody-in-Charge-Who-Pays-Attention didn’t work for me: Either zhe was unspeakably cruel, or unbelievably inept, no other possibility. So I let it go. Can’t know the answer, no point in asking the question, is there? That way lies complete frustration. Better to concentrate one’s energy on something useful.” “I suppose. I think even the remote possibility of a come-to-understand moment, wherein the scales fall from my eyes, and I can see the whole flow of the universe, the why and wheretofor, is still there. It seems to have happened to others.” Zhe shrugged. “I can do that. I can crank up the god-gene, ramp it into reality for a patient so they feel that cosmic consciousness, the oneness with it all with an absolute certainty beyond question. Since I can do it? Makes it harder to believe it’s anything other than an accident of neurochem; a stray cosmic ray flipping an on switch. Would that be something you’d want? A fake epiphany?” “No.” “I didn’t think so. If you got there on your own, you might buy it, but knowing it was artificially induced? Not your way. A lot of people would take the offer, but you aren’t one of them, are you?” “So we believe because we want to believe?” “Need, more than want, I think. It’s built into the operating soft- and hardware,” zhe said. “Some kind of survival characteristic, maybe, a sustaining comfort when great stress arises. Our bodies are full of chemical tides that ebb and flow to balance us physically and mentally. Why not one that does it spiritually? Such yearning seems to be common among most intelligent species, certainly humans. We need something beyond what we can see and touch and smell.” He looked at hir, impressed that zhe had considered such things. He nodded again. “Well. I will leave you to your snack and philosophy. I have augs to balance and programs to write. Good luck finding the answer.” Zhe smiled, stood, then headed for the door."

"Jo’s desire was to take a long, hot shower when she got back to the base. The crawlers had outdoor showerheads, but the noodle-pinching hardware designers had been given keep-it-cheap design orders, and had apparently achieved them. Crawler showers came with absolutely unalterable timers that gave you a maximum two minutes of piss-poor pressure before they shut off; then they made you wait two more minutes before they would restart. Standing there wet and soapy waiting for more slow-flow rinse water was not the most soothing experience when you were scrubbing mud and blood off yourself. More than a few soldiers over the years must have entertained the fantasy of hunting down the people who came up with shower timers and murdering them. Or at least dipping them in a latrine trench, then restricting them to a crawler shower to wash it off..."

"Gunny squatted to look at the dead creature. “Looks like a rat snake,” she said. “It’s harmless, not poisonous.” Gramps said, “I don’t care. I don’t like snakes. I don’t like poisonous snakes; I don’t like nonpoisonous snakes; I don’t like sticks on the ground that look like snakes.” “Ah think maybe somebody had a traumatic event with snakes along the way. What, you had a run-in with the serpent that bedeviled Eve back in the Garden?” Singh raised an eyebrow. “A Jewish/Christian story,” Jo said. “The reason mankind lost direct contact with God and was banished from Paradise. A snake talked the first woman into trying fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, after God had warned them not to eat it.” “Sah, I understand this god is supposedly much more powerful than our gods. I wonder, if he created all things and was all-knowing and omnipotent, why would he put such a tree there? Would he not know in advance that Eve would succumb to the temptation?” “The tale doesn’t bear too close an inspection,” Gramps said. “Believers view these stories as allegories, metaphors, rather than as literal happenings.” Gunny jumped in quickly to amend Gramps’s response: “Some of ’em,” she said. “Some of ’em are literalists, and crazy as space-station roaches when the hatch opens to blow them into vac. They think the Earth is six thousand years old and that every word of the Bible is absolutely true. You can have a field day pointing out inconsistencies in those stories, doesn’t bother them, just bounces right off their self-righteous armor.”"

"Why is it people like us have to be the galaxy’s conscience?” “If you can see a problem, and you have the ability to fix it, it becomes your responsibility. It’s always been that way.”"

"“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it sucks.” “You didn’t create it, you just pointed it out. If I thought shooting the messenger would fix it, you’d already be bleeding out.”"

"Okay, I need to go places and shoot people."

"A poem should go beyond what you already know, and if it’s going to go beyond what you already know, a poem might say something that begins to have you question what side you’re on, which, in turn, might begin to have an audience question what side you’re on…"

"What happens at the beginning of your poem has to—because it’s a poem—be transformed by the end of your poem. So if the triggering moment for the beginning of your poem is a known political moment, I am fine with that, that’s great. But as I’m reading, I expect it to change because that was just the trigger…"

"It is the hardest thing to take chaos and make order of it. Poetry is a veil in front of a heart beating at a very fast pace."

"A metaphor is a sign of desperation when we need another world to describe what we are feeling. Metaphors are about desperation and safety. We call out to metaphor because a metaphor makes us feel safe."

"take Jericho Brown, telling too much necessary truth in all his work, but especially "Bullet Points," on the violence black men and women experience at the hands of cops. "I promise that if you hear/Of me dead anywhere near / A cop, then that cop killed me." I heard Jericho read this live and found myself on the edge of my seat, my fingers curled into tight, sweaty fists as I tried to absorb the pain wrapped in the intense beauty of his words."

"Without carrying out these actions, without standing behind our military men and women in combat, you really dissuade, I think, the recruiting of new members of our military if they’re sitting here thinking, ‘Gosh, I can actually be convicted of murder in a war scenario, this is crazy. Certainly we need to take all efforts to protect lives, but I think there were some imperfections in these three cases and the president courageously and boldly did the right thing."

"We live in a nation that does everything to induce our rage while simultaneously doing everything to deny that we have a right to feel it. American democracy is as much a project of suppressing Black rage as it is of leigimizing and elevating white rage. American democracy uses calls for civility, equality, liberty and justice as smoke screens to obscure all the ways in which Black folks are treated uncivilly, unequally, illiberally, and unjustly as a matter of course."

"Treating Black feminism as primarily an anti-racist intervention within feminism continues to render it as a disruptive and temporary event, to be addressed, responded to, and moved on from, back to the regularly scheduled course of things."

"So one of the questions I think Jesus is going to ask us on judgment day is not have we lived a good life, and not just have we lived the Gospel, he's going to ask us "Who have you made a disciple of in My name?" So that becomes the question for me and for you, who am I discipling right now?"

"You actually start the job on your knees, pray, because that's where the job puts you, instantly, on your knees, pray, because so many things are really to be put in God's hands, and to let God lead us, guide us, shape us, form us as we need to be."

"The work of the liturgy transcends us because it is Christ’s work, and it is our privilege to participate. This work is an art, sanctioned by the Church, which is Christ’s Body. In the liturgy we present what He has intended to make lasting for the salvation of mankind until all is consummated."

"We have a legislative branch that creates the law and the executive carries it out. When it works in that fashion, America works."

"Mr. President, Mr. Secretary-General, my fellow delegates, to all those who dedicate themselves to the noble mission of this institution: Today, we call on Russia to stop its unprovoked, unjustified, unconscionable war. We call on Russia to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine. We call on another neighbor of Ukraine, Belarus, who you just heard from, to stop supporting the war and stop allowing its territory to be used to facilitate this aggression. And today, we stand together in holding Russia accountable for its violations of international law, and to address the horrific human rights and humanitarian crisis unfolding before our very eyes."

"This is an extraordinary moment. For the first time in 40 years, the Security Council has convened an Emergency Special Session of the General Assembly. Forty years. Most of the men and women fighting in Ukraine were not even born the last time the United Nations came together in this way to unite for peace. And I would venture, that many of the people in this room were not born when that happened. But a few of the eldest Ukrainians and Russians might recall a moment like this. A moment when one aggressive European nation invaded another, without provocation, to claim the territory of its neighbor. A moment when a European dictator declared he would return his empire to its former glory. An invasion that caused a war so horrific that it spurred this organization into existence."

"Now, at more than any other point in recent history, the United Nations is being challenged. If the United Nations has any purpose, it is to prevent war, it is to condemn war, to stop war. That is our job here today. It is the job you were sent here to do – not just by your capitals, but by all of humanity."

"A lot has happened very quickly to bring us to this unique moment. It was barely a week ago when, in the dead of night, President Putin launched a full-scale invasion of our fellow UN Member State at the very moment – at the very moment – the Security Council was holding an urgent meeting attempting to foster diplomacy and de-escalation. As the Security Council discussed peace, Putin declared war. Ukraine has defended itself with great courage and vigor. As President Biden said in his State of the Union address last night, President Putin “met a wall of strength he never imagined. He met the Ukrainian people.” But the brazen and indiscriminate nature of Russia’s attacks has had devastating, horrific consequences for the entire country. Russia has bombed residential apartment buildings. It has bombed sacred burial grounds. It has shelled kindergartens and orphanages and hospitals. Russia has spurred mass hunger and caused so many to flee their homes – the latest UN estimates are marching toward a million people."

"People across the world have already united together in exactly the way this General Assembly must do today. Protests and vigils against Russia’s war, and in solidarity with Ukraine, marked with blue and yellow, have sprung up across the globe. These are protests for peace. From Bangkok to Budapest. From Berlin to Buenos Aires. From Sydney to Seoul. From Calgary to Cape Town. And even in Moscow and Minsk. People everywhere are standing up to call for President Putin to stop this attack."

"The Russian people are themselves asking how many lives Putin will sacrifice for his cynical ambitions. And they are appalled at the answer. To the Russian protesters, I say thank you – thank you – for your bravery. To the Russian soldiers sent to the front lines of an unjust, unnecessary war, I say: your leaders are lying to you. Do not commit war crimes. Do everything you can to put down your weapons and leave Ukraine. The truth is that this war was one man’s choice and one man alone: President Putin. It was his choice to force hundreds of thousands of people to stuff their lives into backpacks and flee the country. To send newborn babies into makeshift bomb shelters. To make children with cancer huddle in hospital basements, interrupting their treatment, essentially sentencing them to death. Those were President Putin’s choices. Now it’s time for us to make ours."

"It's not a grudge, really. It's not even a rivalry. It's a prickling, unsettling annoyance. It makes his palms sweat. The tabloids- the world- decided to cast Alex as the American equivalent of Prince Henry from day one, since the White House Trio is the closest thing America has to royalty. It has never seemed fair. Alex's image is all charisma and genius and smirking wit, thoughtful interviews and the cover of GQ at eighteen; Henry's is placid smiles and gentle chivalry and generic charity appearances, a perfectly blank Prince Charming canvas. Henry's role, Alex thinks, is much easier to play. Maybe it is technically a rivalry. Whatever."

"She tosses the magazine aside, folding her arms on the table. "Please, tell me another joke," Ellen says. "I want so badly for you to explain to me how this is funny." Alex opens his mouth and closes it a couple of times. "He started it," he says finally. "I barely touched him- and he's the one who pushed me, and I only grabbed him to try and catch my balance and-" "Sugar, I cannot express to you how much the press does not give a fuck about who started what," Ellen says. "As your mother, I can appreciate that maybe this isn't your fault, but as the president, all I want is to have the CIA fake your death and ride the dead-kid sympathy into a second term.""

"Alex clenches his jaw. He's used to doing things that piss his mother off- in his teens, he had a penchant for confronting his mother's cilleagues with their voting discrepancies at friendly DC fundraisers- and he's been in the tabloids for things more embarrassing than this. But never in quite such a cataclysmically, internationally terrible way. "I don't have time to deal with this right now, so here's what we're gonna do," Ellen says, pulling a folder out of her padfolio. It's filtered with some official-looking documents punctuated with different colors of sticky tabs, and the first one says: AGREEMENT OF TERMS. "Um," Alex says. "You," Ellen says, "are going to make nice with Henry." You're leaving Saturday and spending Sunday in England." Alex blinks. "Is it too late to take the faking-my-death option?" "Zahra can brief you on the rest," Ellen goes on, ignoring him. "I have about five hundred meetings right now." She gets up and heads for the door, stopping to kiss her hand and press it to the top of her head. "You're a dumbass. Love you.""

"Outside Kensington Palace, Alex takes Henry's phone out of his hand and swiftly opens a blank contact page before he can protest or sic a PPO on him for violating royal property. The car is waiting to take him back to the royals' private airstrip. "Here," Alex says. "That's my number. If we're gonna keep this up, it's going to get annoying to keep going through handlers. Just text me. We'll figure it out." Henry stares at him, expression blankly bewildered, and Alex wonders how this guy has any friends. "Right," Henry says. "Thank you." "No booty calls," Alex tells him, and Henry chokes on a laugh."

"Alex wouldn't say he likes Henry, but he does enjoy the quick rhythm of arguments they fall into. He knows he talks too much, hopeless at moderating his feelings, which he usually hides under ten layers of charm, but he ultimately doesn't care what Henry thinks of him, so he doesn't bother. Instead, he's as weird and manic as he wants to be, and Henry jabs back in sharp flashes of startling wit."

""That's not your emails-from-Zahra face," Nora says, nosing her way over his shoulder. He elbows her away. "You keep doing that stupid smile every time you look at your phone. Who are you texting?" "I don't know what you're talking about, and literally no one," Alex tells her. From the screen in his hand, Henry's message reads, In world's most boring meeting with Philip. Don't let the papers print lies about me after I've garroted myself with my tie."

"Alex rolls his eyes and sends back, the harrowing struggle of managing the empire's blood money. Henry's response comes a minute later. That was actually the crux of the meeting- I've tried to refuse my share of the crown's money. Dad left us each with more than enough, and I'd rather cover my expenses with that than the spoils of, you know, centuries of genocide. Philip thinks I'm being ridiculous. Alex scans the message twice to make sure he's read it correctly. i am low-key impressed. He stares at the screen, at his own message, for a few seconds too long, suddenly afraid it was a stupid thing to say. He shakes his head and puts the phone down. Locks it. Changes his mind, picks it up again. Unlocks it. Sees the little typing bubble on Henry's side of the conversation. Puts the phone down. Looks away. Looks back. One does not foster a lifelong love of Star Wars without knowing an "empire" isn't a good thing. He would really appreciate it if Henry would stop proving him wrong."

""It's public knowledge. It's not my problem you just found out," his mother is saying, pacing double-time down a West Wing corridor. "You mean to tell me," Alex half shouts, jogging to keep up, "every Thanksgiving, those stupid turkeys have been staying in a luxury suite at the Willard on the taxpayers' dime?" "Yes, Alex, they do-" "Gross government waste!" "-and there are two forty-pound turkeys named Cornbread and Stuffing in a motorcade on Pennsylvania Avenue right now. There is no time to reallocate the turkeys." Without missing a beat, he blurts out, "Bring them to the house." "Where? Are you hiding a turkey habitat up your ass, son? Where, in our historically protected house, am I going to put a couple of turkeys until I pardon them tomorrow?" "Put them in my room. I don't care." She outright laughs. "No." "How is it different from a hotel room? Put the turkeys in my room, Mom." "I'm not putting turkeys in your room." "Put the turkeys in my room." "No." "Put them in my room, put them in my room, put them in my room, put them in my room-" That night, as Alex stares into the cold, pitiless eyes of a prehistoric beast of prey, he has a few regrets."

"Even before Alex's parents split, they both had a habit of calling him by the other's last name when he exhibited particular traits. They still do. When he runs his mouth off to the press, his mom calls him into her office and says, "Get your shit together, Diaz." When his hard-headedness gets him stuck, his dad texts him, "Let it go, Claremont.""

"I was hoping you two would start talking dirty," Pez says. "Please, do go on." "I don't think you could keep up, Pez," Alex tells him. "Oh really?" The picture returns to Pez. "What if I put my co-" "Pez," comes the sound of Henry's voice, and a hand with a signet ring on the smallest finger covers Pez's mouth. "I beg of you. Alex, what part of 'nothing he cannot do' did you think was worth testing? Honestly, you are going to get us all killed." "That's the goal," Alex says happily. "So what are y'all gonna do today?" Pez frees himself by licking Henry's palm and continues talking. "Frolic naked in the hills, frighten the sheep, return to the house for the usual: tea, biscuits, casting ourselves upon the Thighmaster of love to moan about Claremont-Diaz siblings, which has become tragically one-sided since Henry took up with you. It used to be all bottles of cognac and shared malaise and 'When will they notice us'-" "Don't tell him that!" "-and now I just ask Henry, 'What is your secret?' And he says, 'I insult Alex all the time and that seems to work.'" "I will turn this car around."

"All in all, finals come and go with much less fanfare than Alex imagined. It's a week of cramming and presentations and the usual amount of all-nighters, and it's over. The whole college thing in general went by like that. He didn't really have the experiences everyone else has, always isolated by fame or harangued by security. He never got a stamp on his forehead on his twenty-first birthday at the Tombs, never jumped in Dahlgren Fountain. Sometimes it's like he barely went to Georgetown, merely powered through a series of lectures that happened to be in the same geographical area."

"So, as I've warned you," Henry says as they approach the doors to the Royal Box, "Philip will be there. And assorted other nobility with whom you may have to make conversation. People named Basil." "I think I've proven that I can handle royals." Henry looks doubtful. "You're brave. I could use some of that."

""Just so we're clear," Alex says, "I'm about to have sex with you in this storage closet to spite your family. Like, that's what's happening?" Henry, who has apparently been carrying his travel-size lube with him this entire time in his jacket, says, "Right," and tosses it over his shoulder. "Awesome, fuckin' love doing things out of spite," he says without a hint of sarcasm, and he kicks Henry's feet apart. And it should be- it should be funny. It should be hot, stupid, ridiculous, obscene, another wild sexual adventure to add to the list. And it is, but... it shouldn't also feel like last time, like Alex might die if it ever stops. There's a laugh in his mouth, but it won't get past his tongue, because he knows this is him helping Henry get through something. Rebellion. You're brave. I could use some of that."

"Someone else's choice doesn't change who you are."

"Alex groans. "Please, for the love of God, do not ask me. I'm on vacation. I want to get drunk and eat barbecue in peace." His dad laughs ruefully. "You know, in a lot of ways, your mom and me were a stupid idea. I think we both knew it wouldn't be forever. We're both too fucking proud. But God, that woman. Your mother is, without question, the love of my life. I'll never love anyone else like her. It was wildfire. And I got you and June out of it, best things that ever happened to an old asshole lke me. That kind of love is rare, even if it was a complete disaster." He sucks his teeth, considering. "Sometimes you just jump and hope it's not a cliff.""

"Well. It will matter, you know. It will always matter."

"Get some shoes, we're running," Zahra tells him. "Priority one is damage control, not feelings. He grabs a pair of sneakers, and they take off while he's still pulling them on, running west. His brain is struggling to keep up, running through about five thousand possible ways this could go, imagining himself ten years down the road being frozen out of Congress, plummeting approval ratings, Henry's name being scratched off the line of succession, his mother losing reelection on a swing state's disapproval of him. He's so screwed, and he can't even decide who to be the angriest with, himself or the Mail or the monarchy or the whole stupid country. He nearly crashes into Zahra's back as she skids to a stop in front of a door. He pushes the door open, and the whole room goes silent. His mother stares at him from the head of the table and says flatly, "Out." At first he thinks she's talking to him, but she cuts her eyes down to the people around the table with her. "Was I not clear? Everyone, out, now," she says. "I need to talk to my son."

"You listen to me," she says. Her jaw is set, ironclad. It's the game face he's seen her use to stare down Congress, to cow autocrats. Her grip on his hand is steady and strong. He wonders, half-hysterically, if this is how it felt to charge into war under Washington. "I am your mother. I was your mother before I was ever the president, and I'll be your mother long after, to the day they put me in the ground and beyond this earth. You are my child. So, if you're serious about this, I'll back your play." Alex is silent. But the debates, he thinks. But the general. Her gaze is hard. He knows better than to say either of those things. She'll handle it. "So," she says, "Do you feel forever about him?" And there's no room left to agonize over it, nothing left to do but say the thing he's known all along. "Yeah," he says, "I do." Ellen Claremont exhales slowly, and she grins a small, secret grin, the crooked, flattering one she never uses in public, the one he knows best from when he was a kid around her knees in a small kitchen in Travis County. "Then, fuck it."

"Shaan lookes like he hasn't slept in thirty-six hours. Well, he looks perfectly composed and groomed, but the tag is sticking out of his sweater and the strong smell of whiskey is emanating from his tea. Next to him, in the back of the incognito van they're taking to Buckingham Palace, Zahra has her arms folded resolutely. The engagement ring on her left hand glints in the muted London morning. "So, uh," Alex attempts. "Are you two in a fight now?" Zahra looks at him. "No. Why would you think that?" "Oh. I just thought because-" "It's fine," Shaan says, still typing on his iPhone. "This is why we set rules about the personal-slash-professional lines at the outset of this relationship. It works for us." "If you want a fight, you should have seen it when I found out he had known about you two all along," Zahra says. "Why do you think I got a rock this big?" "It usually works for us," Shaan amends. "Yep," Zahra agrees. "Plus, we banged it out last night." Without looking up, Shaan meets her hand in a high five."

"Today, Henry goes back to London. Today, Alex goes back to the campaign trail. They have to figure out how to do this for real now, how to love each other in plain sight. Alex thinks they're up for it."

"There are no fireworks out here, no music, no confetti. Just sleeping, single-family homes, TVs switched off. Just a house where Alex grew up, where he saw Henry's picture in a magazine and felt a flicker of something, a start. "Hey," Alex says. Henry turns back to him, his eyes silver in the wash of the streetlight. "We won." Henry takes his hand, one corner of his mouth tugging gently upward. "Yeah. We won." Alex reaches down into the front of his dress shirt and finds the chain with his fingers, pulls it out carefully. The ring, the key. Under winter clouds, victorious, he unlocks the door."

"Go outside, stay safe, be gay. Have a Shiner on me."

"Chloe Green is going to put her first through a window. Usually when she has a thought like that, it means she's spiritually on the brink. But right now, squared up to the back door of the Wheeler house, she's actually physically ready to do it. Her phone flashes the time: 11:27 a.m. Thirty-three minutes until the end of the late service at Willowgrove Christian Church, where the Wheelers are spending their morning pretending to be nice, normal folks whose nice, normal daughter didn't stage a disappearing act at prom twelve hours ago. It has to be an act, is the thing. Obviously, Shara Wheeler is fine. Shara Wheeler is not missing. Shara Wheeler is doing what she does: a doe-eyed performance of blank innocence that makes everyone think she must be so deep and complex and enchanting when really, she's the most boring bore in this entire unbearably boring town. Chloe is going to prove it. Because she's the only one smart enough to see it."

"I always try to remember who I am."

"People, of course, who maybe put their hope their pursuits in material things are very soon disappointed — "OK, what happens next?" It doesn't really answer the true happiness of the deepest part of the human heart. Only God answers that. And we try to get that message across."

"You millennial leftists who never lived one day under nuclear threat can now reflect upon your woke sky. You made quite a non-binary fuss to save the world from intercontinental ballistic tweets"

"These Haitians are wild. Eating pets, vudu (voodoo), nastiest country in the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters. But damned if they don’t feel all sophisticated now, filing charges against our President and VP. All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th."

"I have been a principled "NO" on this bill from the beginning. What was wrong with the bill three months ago is still wrong today. It abandons 250 years of criminal justice procedure in America. As written, this bill reveals and injures thousands of innocent people – witnesses, people who provided alibis, family members, etc. If enacted in its current form, this type of broad reveal of criminal investigative files, released to a rabid media, will absolutely result in innocent people being hurt. Not by my vote. The Oversight Committee is conducting a thorough investigation that has already released well over 60,000 pages of documents from the Epstein case. That effort will continue in a manner that provides all due protections for innocent Americans. If the Senate amends the bill to properly address privacy of victims and other Americans, who are named but not criminally implicated, then I will vote for that bill when it comes back to the House."

"If you have understanding, then you can build trust. If you have trust, you can build community and have respect for people's dignity."

"I don’t think there’s any prohibition against anyone working, and I didn’t hire anyone."

"I tried to help with so many different things that would help elevate people in New Orleans and this state. It’s kind of hard to remember one project."

"If you can plug your guitar into an amp and make it sound good, that’s what it’s all about. The amp I really enjoy playing, especially when I’m traveling, is the Fender ’65 Twin Reverb. It’s got everything you need for live playing and it has great tone. That amp just works for me and it’s real trustworthy. When I travel on the road, I do use a little digital delay and maybe a little chorus, but I just like the sound of the guitar and playing something that I think people will appreciate and understand."

"Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and original-era Telecaster elder statesman James Burton boasts a straight, no-nonsense tone and impeccable phrasing as one of the first practitioners of the electric guitar solo. Telecaster chicken pickin’ basically starts with Burton, who lent his considerable Tele talent to artists including Emmylou Harris, Gram Parsons, John Denver, Elvis Costello and, most famously, Elvis Presley."

"There has been no more potent embodiment of that spirit than the singer Huddie Ledbetter, known as ‘Leadbelly’. Ordinary he wasn’t: born in rural Texas in c.1888, regal in bearing and strong as an ox, he claimed to be the world’s greatest cotton picker, railroad track layer, lover, drinker and guitar player. His pride was matched by a temper and disposition to violence, resulting in spells in prison for assault and murder. And it was in 1933, in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, that he was discovered by folksong collectors John and Alan Lomax. Under the sponsorship of the Lomaxes, Leadbelly began his rise to stardom, benefiting from the gathering vogue for trad jazz and rugged authenticity. He gave concerts across the US and Europe, dying in New York in 1949. Though the strictest arbiters exclude his work from the jazz canon, it’s hard not to recognise his vital link to the essential force of the music."

"I have observed that, in jazz, all roads lead back to Louis Armstrong. But Louis’s road began with the man he honoured as his inspiration, idol and mentor, Joe ‘King’ Oliver. During World War I, Oliver was the cornet king of New Orleans, and in 1919 he went north to Chicago, where he won similar renown with his Creole Jazz Band, dazzling dancers, listeners and musicians with the sound of Crescent City jazz. Oliver had been a father figure to young Armstrong, and in 1922 he invited his protégé to join his group in Chicago. Armstrong’s brilliance was already evident, and his arrival transformed the Oliver band from a classic ensemble to a legend. It’s our supreme good fortune that the next year the group put much of its repertoire on disc – 37 sides which constitute the first unequivocal demonstration of the expresssive potency of jazz, in all its variety and fire. While it’s easy to marvel at the immensity of Armstrong’s burgeoning talent, the overwhelming effect of these records is the power of the Creole Jazz Band as a whole. With King Oliver firmly at the helm, the group achieves a level of focused energy and invention that is simply irresistible. In accord with New Orleans practice, theirs is largely an ensemble music – solos tend to be short, adding colour to the overall texture. But the definition of the individual voices is a constant delight, as is the unflagging, pulsating swing."

"The sons of New Orleans were prudent in council, brave and gallant in warfare, generous in hospitality, and deeply attached to the pure pleasures of a home life, where urbanity, grace and good taste made their homes a rendezvous for the cultured and refined, — and so brilliant were the assemblies which grouped together the elite of the city, that a European might easily fancy the beautiful women in their silks and laces and jewels, and the gallant men so distinguished and noble."

"A silver-scaled dragon with jaws flaming red Sits at my elbow and toasts my bread. I hand him fat slices, and then, one by one, He hands them back when he sees they are done."

"The long-haired Yak has long black hair, He lets it grow — he doesn't care. He lets it grow and grow and grow, He lets it trail along the stair. Does he ever go to the barbershop? NO! How wild and woolly and devil-may-care A long-haired Yak with long black hair Would look when perched in a barber chair!"

"He hangs in the hall by his black cravat, The ladies faint, and the children holler: Only my Daddy could look like that, And I love my Daddy like he loves his Dollar."

"Now touch the air softly, Step gently. One, two... I’ll love you till roses Are robin’s-egg blue; I’ll love you till gravel Is eaten for bread, And lemons are orange, And lavender’s red."

"And I’ll love you as long As the furrow the plow, As However is Ever, And Ever is Now."

"I know a place all fennel-green and fine Far from the white ice cap, the glacial flaw, Where shy mud hen and dainty porcupine Dance in delight by a quivering pawpaw;"

"The lariat snaps; the cowboy rolls His pack, and mounts and rides away. Back to the land the cowboy goes."

"Thinking of you this evening, I think of mystery; I think of umbrellas of crystal Shading a cinnamon sea;"

"And life is a rain-swept mirror Through which perpetually A girl with bright hair flowing, Dappled dark coat blowing, Into the unknown, knowing, Walks with me."

"Not ringed but rare, not gilled but polyp-like, having sprung up overnight— These mushrooms of the gods, resembling human organs uprooted, rooted only on the air,"

"Tasting of the sweet damp woods and of the rain one inch above the meadow: It was like feasting upon air."

"Impartiality does not preclude interest in events and warmth in relating them. History is not a mere chronicle of facts. It deals with the inner life of men, with their customs and manners, as well as with their political and warlike deeds."