People From New Jersey

"They were sport gunners, too—a class spawned by wealth and leisure who carried their “sport” to tasteless Victorian excess. Both professional and the sport hunter approached the killing of “game” with zeal and the conviction that North America’s wildlife was infinite. The faith was ill-founded. Not only is a continent’s wildlife finite, but, to the shock of many, by the turn of the century much of it was gone and a lot more was going fast."

"Very few works of art, however skillfully crafted, can approach the splendor of a living bird."

"Since Benjamin Franklin’s eloquent bad-mouthing of the bird when the time came to select a national emblem, the Bald Eagle has been an unjust target for abuse. Its taste for winter-killed fish has made it a “carrion eater.” Its talent for close-range aerial pursuit has made it a “thief.” Its penchant for sitting for long periods and not expending energy without need has made it “lazy,” and this is not fair. Only humans seem to equate frenetic activity with success. Eagles can and do sit for extended periods precisely because they are successful predators who can find food at need. Energy wasted is just that. A waste."

"In the free-for-all age before conservation, scientists were not the only ones “collecting” birds. Great numbers of birds were killed for sport and for market, and the myth of America’s inexhaustible resources sustained the slaughter past the point of reason."

"The one thing you can’t do with binoculars is look back."

"Many condors were simply shot. No, they weren’t edible. No, their feathers weren’t prized adornments for ladies’ headgear. Despite their size, they posed no threat to humans or livestock. Yet there are nearly two hundred documented cases of condors that were killed for no better reason than to satisfy somebody’s perverted vanity."

"It’s hard to recall now that this environmental beacon was once a battlefield and that there was a time when people did not understand the important role birds of prey play in maintaining natural balance. It’s difficult to believe that people’s ignorance was so complete that they thought of hawks as vermin and shot them on sight."

"Hope is many things, but it throws itself against fact and shatters."

"So I came, in time, to disbelieve the Myth of Infinite because I know, now, that the resources of a continent are more finite than human greed. I discovered that freedom can be twisted, can mean that anything a person can grab is his and to hell with everyone else. I learned that the twisted freedom that allows people to destroy a place conflicts with my freedom to appreciate it and the freedom of other living things to survive."

"Dawn was just getting serious. One of the rarely spoken advantages to being a birder are the number of sunrises you get to appreciate in the course of a lifetime. Most people come onto a day full blown—to a sun already high in the sky, a world already in motion, and the impossible task of catching up. They rarely see the tentative side of morning or appreciate the great struggle between light and darkness played out on a world stage. Some mornings come raging over the horizon, angry and red. Some are so subtle that the transformation of night and day seems like an afterthought. All are different and all are priceless."

"The bird is a mouse. A frustrating, feathered mouse, no more inclined to be seen by mortal eyes than your average leprechaun."

"To a child, there is nothing in the world quite so important as growing up."

"Seasickness all comes down to a complicated and not terribly well thought-out balancing mechanism call the inner ear. Without a shred of supporting evidence, I believe that inner ears were eleventh-hour modifications installed in the human unit just before the model was released. It was faulty and we’re still waiting for the recall. (Knees fall into this category, too.)"

"She didn’t ask why I left, because that’s a silly question. I left for the same reason all people leave home. Because one day you realize that all the old habits have become too familiar. Because there is a world of discovery waiting and the first step toward the future is a step away from the past. So you leave. Go chasing rainbows, never thinking that maybe one end of a rainbow is just as good as another."

"Zero impact in a fragile land. The only ethic that should be tolerated in the Arctic."

"But since it was birders he was dealing with, there wasn’t any harm just letting us in on the honor system. There was no question in his mind (or ours) that we would ante up when departing. That’s just the way birders are."

"I use drum triggers on the kicks, but not on the other drums–otherwise you just sound unnatural, like a machine. [...] For the blast beats, timing is all important. Practice slowly and build up to full speed so you can insert fills and rolls. Keep your lower extremities loose, too. Kick back, breathe properly, and let the sticks do the work."

"If anything, moving your limbs as a drummer keeps them lubricated. Look at Buddy Rich: He was whaling the hell out of his drums until he was an old man. Although it wasn’t metal music, he was doing blasts on the snare–he was a blastmaster!"

"The whole point of Satanic music is to blaspheme against the Church. [...] I don't believe in or worship a devil. Life is short enough without having to waste it doing this whole organized praying, hoping, wishing-type thing on some superior being."

"We were just kind of writing the record, and we were going over the songs. Me and Glen, we were, like, 'We wanna redo the songs.' It's like we had completed them — about nine or twelve, whatever how many songs. They were all right, but we weren't really psyched about them. So we decided to rewrite them. And Jack didn't really like it. And he kind of left one day and just never came back. So that was that. He's not on [the new album]. I haven't talked to the guy in almost a year."

"I was always a metal head. [...] My influences back then were Clive Burr with Iron Maiden and Tommy Aldridge, who did amazing things with Ozzy Osbourne. And then when music started getting a little more extreme, I enjoyed Dan Beehler of Exciter, Gene Hoglan of Dark Angel, and, of course, Dave Lombardo of Slayer."

"Stuff [in the world] is just amazing. Whether somebody created it, I just don't know, maybe somebody did. Maybe it just worked out that way. Even if there is a God he don't give a shit. People think he's keeping track of everyone's individual lives but that's ridiculous. People have ideas implanted into their f---ing brains so early that, of course, they say, 'Oh, it's a lake of fire, it's eternal pain, it's being up to your neck in piss.' I personally think that when you're dead you're just moss in the ground. It's a sad reality but you're just a corpse and you're going to turn to dust."

"Religion is more than a set of individual experiences, important as they are. It is also a set of shared beliefs that make it possible for large numbers of people to work together, to endure the restraints and meet the demands imposed by organized society, to be willing to play a part in an intricate process that no one can fully understand, to find satisfaction in life without being flooded by material benefits."

"Strayer always claimed that medieval historians made terrific CIA operatives because they were especially good at drawing conclusions based on very fragmentary evidence."

"The Church makes so many mistakes, we're made up of human beings and so there are errors that are made in the administration of the of the Church, especially, and we recognize that harshly."

"You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss, A sigh is just a sigh; The fundamental things apply, As time goes by."

"I truly want us to live in a world 50 or 100 years from now where people are jumping in their rockets like the Jetsons and there are families bouncing around on the moon with their kid in a spacesuit. … I also think if we are going to live in that world, we better conquer childhood cancer along the way."

"Back at home, we all have a lot of work to do. But from here, Earth sure looks like a perfect world."

"Some people say this is a time of darkness for the Church and especially for bishops and priests. But as Archbishop Fulton Sheen once observed, if you want to get out of the darkness, walk into the light. When we pray, that is just what we do."

"I have found that this speech is routinely removed from high school anthologies because it associates religion with falsehood and violence, thus offending people who demand that religion must always be presented favorably."

"A few years ago, I taught a summer course in literary classics for high school English teachers. When the class began talking about Romeo and Juliet, two of the teachers had trouble following what the others were saying. These two teachers were using high school literature anthologies; the rest of the class had read paperback versions of Romeo and Juliet. We compared the high school anthologies with the paperbacks and found more than three hundred lines missing from the play in each anthology. Neither textbook mentioned that its presentation of Romeo and Juliet was definitely not Shakespeare's. In the anthologies, lines containing sexual material—even such mild words as bosom and maidenhood—were missing. Removing most of the love story shortened Romeo and Juliet considerably, but the publishers did not stop there; they also took out material that had nothing to do with sex. Both anthologies, for example, omitted Romeo's lines,"

"In more than three decades as an , I have seen the faculty express unwillingness to deal with pain-in-the-neck academic activities, such as repetitive low-level advising, course scheduling, fund-raising, alumni services, the running of some programs, and the preparation of dossiers and other reports. Over time, staff were hired to fill these roles, and — surprise! — started to make decisions and generally to run the place."

"For the first seven years that I worked full-time as an adult, I had no legal right to a credit card, , or other line of credit. Although no law barred unmarried women from obtaining credit, banks and other lending institutions could, and often did, reject our applications without even pretending that it was for some other reason. It wasn't until 1974 that the banned discrimination on the basis of marital status. Back then, that legislation was viewed as a matter of gender equity because credit had not been widely denied to unmarried men and because the new law also prohibited lending institutions from requiring married women to have their husbands' permission to obtain credit. If you've read or seen Margaret Atwood's , you may recall that the government subjugated women by preventing them from having access to money independent of men. That wasn't fantasy or imagination on Atwood's part. It was memory."

"It was a dark time: the RUF was abducting children from their villages, getting them high on poyo (homemade palm wine), marijuana and heroin, and training them to kill. I later heard from a Jesuit priest who tried to rehabilitate these child-soldiers that they made excellent killers because, under the age of nine, they had not yet developed a full moral conscience. The warlords exploited their innocence. The carnage they inflicted was unspeakable. In these raids on villages, according to interviews I did later, pieced together with testimonies from human rights investigators, soldiers forced parents to choose which of their children would be taken as fighters and which would be killed on the spot. Teenagers in gangsta-style baggy pants raped and plundered, taking girls as young as nine as their "bush wives.""

"After eight brutal years, it is hard to find anything shocking about the Syrian civil war. But somehow, the government forces under President Bashar al-Assad always find a way. On May 15, Syrian bombs destroyed the Tarmala Maternity and Children’s Hospital in Idlib, the 19th medical facility attacked since late April. Mr. al-Assad’s campaign against hospitals is not just inhumane — it represents one of the most repellent aspects of modern warfare. Hospitals were once off limits; even in conflicts where the international laws of war were routinely flouted, medical facilities were spared."

"I became a journalist partly because my mother was prevented from becoming one, and also because I inherited her insatiable curiosity. She read all of my stories, even the most brutal from war zones, although I would often lie about where I was to prevent her from worrying. Recently she read a personal essay that explained in detail how I almost lost my eyesight and spent three weeks in a hospital in Paris. This time she wept, saying: "Why didn't you tell me? I was only 95 when this happened. I could have flown to Paris and taken care of you.""

"[In the Abidjan cattle market during the First Ivorian Civil War in September 2002. A soldier] stood, soaked in sweat, boots too tight, pointing an AK47 at me and looking as if he had every intention of using it. There was an African man near my foot, groaning in pain, bullet wounds in his legs. A moment before, I'd squatted in the dirt and tried to drag him into my taxi. I wanted to get him to a hospital. The soldier said the man on the ground was a rebel, and I knew if I left him behind, he would kill him. The soldier raised his gun, the safety catch off, and pointed it at my heart. ... His impatience was turning to rage when Bruno [Girodon], who was on the other side of the cattle market, suddenly spotted me and pulled me roughly by the arm away. "This is Africa," he said. "Are you crazy?" He dragged me back to the car, silently fuming."

"[At the reception of the Holiday Inn, Sarajevo during the siege] "And please, madame, don't walk on this side of the building." He pointed to a wall, through which you could see the sky and buildings outside, that looked as though a truck had run into it. "And don’t go up on the seventh floor," he added cryptically. The seventh floor, I soon learned, was where the Bosnian snipers defending the city were positioned. And the forbidden side of the building faced the Serbian snipers and mortar emplacements. If you emerged from the hotel on that side and a sniper had you in his range, you got shot."

"[M]ost mainstream journalists have been refused visas to visit regime-held areas of Syria. At the start of the war, I was initially allowed into regime territory but was followed by minders from the Ministry of Information. In 2012, after I went undercover and reported a government-sponsored mass killing in the town of Daraya, which was later verified by Human Rights Watch and "characterized by the UN appointed Independent International Commission of Inquiry as a 'massacre,'" according to Amnesty International, my government visa was revoked and I was told I would be thrown in an "Assad prison" if I tried coming back."

"The Australian reporter John Pilger echoes the views of [[w:Eva Bartlett|[Eva] Bartlett]] and [[Vanessa Beeley|[Vanessa] Beeley]] in interviews. Pilger ... has a new platform on RT, which he uses to deny chemical weapons attacks such as the one at Khan Shaykhun. He, too, frequently attacks the White Helmets as Islamic extremists, and has cited Beeley's writing as if it were authoritative journalism."

"I am an anarchist, this is because I am moved by the suffering of hundreds of millions of workers and I struggle for a world in which such exploitation is no longer possible."

"I’ve been told, ‘you’re not a Muslim, you’re a disgrace to Pakistan, Pakistan won’t accept you,’ but I do come from a Middle Eastern background and I am Muslim, not the way my parents are, but by practice. My sister covers her head, she’s modest, married, and has kids. My mom covers her head and prays five times a day, I pray two times a day but I’m still a practicing Muslim."

"I am a practicing Muslim, so I kind of have an internal conflict sometimes. One of the biggest main sins it's hard to be forgiven for is adultery — having sex without marriage is a sin and doing it multiple times a day as an escort is one of the major sins that you will not be forgiven for, and I am fully aware of that, but yeah, I still pray."

"“If the man may preach, because the Savior died for him, why not the woman, seeing he died for her also? Is he not a whole Savior, instead of a half one, as those who hold it wrong for a woman to preach, would seem to make it appear?”"

"Well, I think it's time to get ready To realize just what I have found I have lived only half of what I am It's all clear to me now My heart is on fire My soul's like a wheel that's turnin' My love is alive My love is alive, yeah, girl, yeah"

"Ooh, dream weaver I believe you can get me through the night Ooh, dream weaver I believe we can reach the morning light"

"Fly me high through the starry skies Maybe to an astral plane Cross the highways of fantasy Help me to forget today's pain Ooh, dream weaver I believe you can get me through the night Ooh, dream weaver I believe we can reach the morning light Though the dawn may be coming soon There still may be some time Fly me away to the bright side of the moon Meet me on the other side"

"As an institution the Church cannot subject its authority to a certain social relation with society."

"My advice for writers? Just get it out. You can fix bad pages. You can't fix no pages."

"Trippe had been a continuous innovator, but the sad irony is that he failed to re-invent his company for the leaner, far more competitive age he had done so much to shape: the age of travel for Everyman. A decade after his death, his airline, substantially dismembered, finally expired in 1991. [...] Throughout his career, Juan Trippe had been driven by the great American instinct for seeing a market before it happened–and then making it happen. In a real sense, he fathered the international airline business. To do so, he took on the entire airline industry, and risked his company to see his vision through. You’ve just got to admire a guy like that."