People From Michigan

"My goal is to work with my colleagues on the bench to help drive change to improve service to the public. These reforms include increasing efficiency and saving public resources, while making sure every person served by our court is treated with dignity and respect."

"When I began to really feel frightened at work was when it became evident no entity was going to intervene. The judicial system does not seem equipped to handle really bad behavior, so it inadvertently rewards bullying."

"A famous jazz musician walks into a studio while the engineers are listening back to a recent recording. The musician is awe struck by the drumming and asks, "Who's playing drums?!" The engineer responds, "It's Elvin Jones," to which the musician then asks, "Then who's playing the cymbals?" This corny jazz parable sums it up. Elvin's drumming is an avalanche of sound that is at times incomprehensible, yet mind-blowingly musical. Power and grace. Listen to John Coltrane's "Sunship" and have your face melted."

"Ron Carter has played on over 2,500 albums and secured a spot in jazz history as one of the world's finest bassists. Doing much more than merely helping anchor the rhythm, Carter is a melodic master. In his five-decade-long career, he's played with countless jazz legends, including a five-year stint in Miles Davis's quintet, an outfit that also included Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams. While his playing on most of the recordings he did with Davis are stellar, some of his albums as a leader, like Uptown Conversation, are excellent, as are his duo albums with guitarist Jim Hall, platters like Live at the Village West and Alone Together."

"What he did was enough. He didn't have to prove anything to anybody."

"In his older years, he was very mellow, very sweet. My dad would drive a hundred miles to pull a thorn out of a dog's paw... He was a very quiet man unless he was asked his opinion. He didn't impose on anybody, he didn't force his opinion on anybody."

"From the time he entered the Air Force he had been in some kind of trouble over one petty matter or another. 'Snuffy' was, in fact, known by the fourteen other inhabitants of his Nissen hut by an Army phrase for which there is no socially acceptable replacement. He was a real fuckup."

"The Medal of Honor opened doors then and it still does, from the Pentagon to the White House. I don't abuse it, but if it is necessary, I will use it."

"All I know is that it was a miracle that the ship didn't break in two in the air, and I wish I could shake hands personally with the people who built her. They sure did a wonderful job, and we owe our lives to them."

"I was plenty mad. I pissed on the fire and beat on it with my hands and feet until my clothes began to smoke. [...] Guns, ammunition, clothes, everything. I really had a time with the ammunition cases. They weigh ninety-eight pounds and I weigh one thirty."

"There was a fellow who was an apprentice seaman in the British Navy. A kid. He got torpedoed and his hands were horribly burned. Just the same, he somehow managed to get into a lifeboat and he took his regular place and rowed. In the morning, his shipmates discovered that the flesh had been burned off his fingers and that he was literally rowing with the bones of his hands. This was probably heroism. But I'm not sure that a bombardier who gets a terrific stomachache just as he's aiming his bombs and nevertheless gets them off isn't a greater hero. You never know. In either case, you can be sure there was plenty of adrenaline being pumped into the bloodstream."

"Sgt. Smith not only performed his duty, he carried on after others- more experienced than he- had given up. Through his presence of mind, determination and bravery, he saved the lives of six of his crewmates and the Fortress in which he flew."

"Thank you."

"For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action above and beyond the call of duty. The aircraft of which Sgt. Smith was a gunner was subjected to intense enemy antiaircraft fire and determined fighter airplane attacks while returning from a mission over enemy-occupied continental Europe on 1 May 1943. The airplane was hit several times by antiaircraft fire and cannon shells of the fighter airplanes, two of the crew were seriously wounded, the aircraft's oxygen system shot out, and several vital control cables severed when intense fires were ignited simultaneously in the radio compartment and waist sections. The situation became so acute that three of the crew bailed out into the comparative safety of the sea. Sgt. Smith, then on his first combat mission, elected to fight the fire by himself, administered first aid to the wounded tail gunner, manned the waist guns, and fought the intense flames alternately. The escaping oxygen fanned the fire to such intense heat that the ammunition in the radio compartment began to explode, the radio, gun mount, and camera were melted, and the compartment completely gutted. Sgt. Smith threw the exploding ammunition overboard, fought the fire until all the firefighting aids were exhausted, manned the workable guns until the enemy fighter were driven away, further administered first aid to his wounded comrade, and then by wrapping himself in protecting cloth, completely extinguished the fire by hand. This soldier's gallantry in action, undaunted bravery, and loyalty to his aircraft and fellow crewmembers, without regard for his own personal safety, is an inspiration to the U.S Armed Forces."

"I'm a firm believer that your ideas come from the writing itself. I never have any until I start to write. And my mind is on structure most of the time (and on linking). I used to say that kept my conscious mind busy so my subconscious mind could work on more important things."

"The first thing that Carol Emshwiller said to us when she began teaching in the final week of the 2000 Clarion West Writers Workshop was, "Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent." This was the first clue I had to the importance Carol places on precision and refinement."

"Don't put anything important in your stories you don't use all through. To me, this is what's fun for the writer and fun, too, in reading."

"I don't know where my "meanings" come from. I just try to write a good well formed story. I guess the meaning is just part of me and pops out by itself."

"Favorite SF author? Lots. Barry Malzburg, Fritz Leiber, Tom Disch, Damon Knight. . ."

"Emshwiller's readers know her to be a major fabulist, a marvelous magical realist, one of the strongest, most complex, most consistently feminist voices in fiction. But her books, mostly published by a good small press in San Francisco, Mercury House, don't get wide attention. Part of the problem may well be her calm originality. Most reviewers prefer pigeons that fit in holes and rabbits that redux. Emshwiller's like a wild mixture of Italo Calvino (intellectual games) and Grace Paley (perfect honesty) and Fay Weldon (outrageous wit) and Jorge Luis Borges (pure luminosity), but no—her voice is perfectly her own. She isn't like anybody. She's different."

"Vocational education is designed to equip students with the proper means for arriving at their selected goals. Adult education goes beyond the means and demands new sanctions, new vindications of ends."

"Intelligence is goodness in the sense that one cannot purposefully or positively experience the good unless conscious experimentation in the realm of values accompanies activity. Habitual goodness lacks dynamic qualities—is in fact not goodness in any real or living sense."

"In conventional education the student is required to adjust himself to an established curriculum; in adult education the curriculum is built around the student's needs and interests."

"Intelligence is not merely the capacity which enables us to profit by experience; it is the function of personality which gives experience its past, present and future meaning. Habits belong to existence, intelligence to living. Life becomes a creative venture in proportion to the amount and quality of intelligence which accompanies conduct."

"Education conceived as preparation for life locks the learning process within a vicious circle. Youth educated in terms of adult ideas and taught to think of learning as a process which ends when real life begins will make no better use of intelligence than the elders who prescribe the system. Brief and rebellious moments occur when youth sees this fallacy clearly, but alas, the pressure of adult civilization is too great; in the end young people fit into the pattern, succumb to the tradition of their elders—indeed, become elderly-minded before their time."

"Generally therefore those who have "completed" a standardized regimen of education promptly turn their faces in the opposite direction. Humor, but more of pathos lurks in the caricature of the college graduate standing in cap and gown, diploma in hand, shouting: "Educated, b'gosh!" Henceforth, while devoting himself to life, he will think of education as a necessary annoyance for succeeding youths. For him, this life for which he has suffered the affliction of learning will come to be a series of dull, uninteresting, degrading capitulations to the stereotyped pattern of his "set." Within a single decade he will be out of touch with the world of intelligence, or what is worse, he will still be using the intellectual coins of his college days; he will find difficulty in reading serious books; he will have become inured to the jargon of his particular profession and will affect derision for all "highbrows"; he will, in short, have become a typical adult who holds the bag of education—the game of learning having long since slipped by him."

"Education within the vicious circle becomes not a joyous enterprise but rather something to be endured because it leads to a satisfying end. But there can be no genuine joy in the end if means are irritating, painful."

"Too much of learning consists of vicarious substitution of some one else's experience and knowledge. Psychology is teaching us, however, that we learn what we do, and that therefore all genuine education will keep doing and thinking together."

"Adult education more accurately defined begins where vocational education leaves off. Its purpose is to put meaning into the whole of life."

"From many quarters comes the call to a new kind of education with its initial assumption affirming that education is life—not a mere preparation for an unknown kind of future living. Consequently all static concepts of education which relegate the learning process to the period of youth are abandoned. The whole of life is learning, therefore education can have no endings. This new venture is called adult education—not because it is confined to adults but because adulthood, maturity, defines its limits."

"Once the assumption is made that human nature is uniform, common and static—that all human beings will find meaning in identical goals, ends or aims—the standardizing process begins: teachers are trained according to orthodox and regulated methods; they teach prescribed subjects to large classes of children who must all pass the same examination; in short, if we accept the standard of uniformity, it follows that we expect, e.g., mathematics, to mean as much to one student as to another. Teaching methods which proceed from this assumption must necessarily become autocratic; if we assume that all values and meanings apply equally to all persons, we may then justify ourselves in using a forcing-method of teaching. On the other hand, if we take for granted that human nature is varied, changing and fluid, we will know that life's meanings are conditioned by the individual. We will then entertain a new respect for personality."

"The cross is the single greatest demonstration of love ever seen. Help them to understand it. Repeatedly call their attention to it. Help them to understand God doesn't simply tell us He loves us; He shows us."

"It is very important for the bishop to directly serve the people, without being removed two or three steps."

"I was always going to do this because I wanted to do this. I really wanted to become a priest, but that's not the way it works. You don't just nominate yourself. It's a matter of a calling."

"All of the many traditional Melanesian Cultures had something in common. Roles, duties, responsibilities, authority and disciplines were clearly defined. These were taught by the elders, and they were followed by the community, even by the young. That stability and authority no longer exists especially where Gospel values have not yet sufficiently penetrated the emerging modern culture."

"It is important that we not fall into a social activism which can become a type of neo-pelagianism. Our work is always the work of God. We maintain a balance between our work and the action of God's grace, above all, by prayer - not only liturgical prayer but also personal prayer. I do not think we can overemphasize the importance of personal prayer, especially in our world today."

"Who honestly believes that he or she is extravagant? Not one, believe me. We all have our little ways of saving string, of doing without something, from early strawberries to diamond tiaras, which lead us to believe we are in the saving class."

"Long ago, when the world was young for many of us, we believed in marriage as a great adventure, and if the world has been kind to us and has spared us our ideals, it is still the great adventure upon which some of us have embarked, while others still linger on the shore."

"Many able women in early middle life, having mastered the art of home-making in the finest school in the world--a busy and happy household--seek a wider sort of home-making. They have a vision of the city they know best, or the State or the nation, as a greater household, to be organized and made happier through the influence of a larger motherhood. It was so with Mrs. Park."

"It's perfectly useless to ask people why they get married, but I fancy I know the reason, just the same. They may think it is one reason or another, but the real reason, to my mind, is an old one: The Eternal Purpose is making use of them to carry on the business of the world."

"I'm not a video person at all, I prefer to let the listener have their own impressions."

"It's very important for Christians to be thinking Christians, not just partisan Christians."

"To undo the clarity of faith and morals of the Church would neither be fair nor honest, in fact, it could betray the very purpose explicitly stated by those preparing the synod"

"When you’re by yourself and you’re doing something that is physically quite demanding it might be almost more readily available to get to that space. People always call it out of body or you’re on autopilot, but none of those things are exactly true. You become the thing you’re making rather than the person making it. That’s a good place to be."

"We go through life being told by every story and bit of media that we can consume that for everybody there’s this corollary person or soulmate. And you’ll know each other and they’ll just get you and know what’s going on in your heart and mind. That terrible narrative that’s sold to us, prepackaged in every form, pretty much ruins every relationship—romantic, friendly and otherwise. The acknowledgement of the real rub of being conscious, to the degree that we are, is that no matter how much the company of others we seek, the underlying source of our discontent, and constantly looking for or describing different causes for it, is that ultimately you’re alone in your head. You’re the only thing that will ever think those thoughts. And there’s no amount of companionship, comradery or family that will ever penetrate that barrier. Your life and death, there’s a solitude to it."

"One intriguing thing about Eaton is that his own research of the medieval literatures on Indian Sufis for his Ph.D. thesis, published in Sufis of Bijapur 1300–1700, failed to find any trace of peace in the views and actions of Sufis and in their method of conversion. He found that all the revered Sufis, particularly the earlier ones to arrive at Bijapur, were fierce Jihadis and persecutor of Hindus.."

"According to the cover text on his book, Eaton is professor of History at the University of Arizona and “a leading historian of Islam”. Had he defended the thesis that iconoclasm is rooted in Islam itself, he would have done justice to the evidence from Islamic sources, yet he would have found it very hard to get published by Oxford University Press or reach the status of leading Islam scholar that he now enjoys. One can easily become an acclaimed scholar of Hinduism by lambasting and vilifying that religion, but Islam is somehow more demanding of respect."

"Regardless of this change in emphasis, it is important to note that not all Western Sufi scholarship of the last half century avoids discussing Sufi support of and active involvement in the martial jihad; in fact, there are some notable exceptions. In particular, Richard Eaton’s study of Sufi s in the Deccan region of India, The Sufi s of Bijapur: 1300–1700: Social Roles of Sufi s in Medieval India (Princeton, 1978) stands out in Western Sufi scholarship, in that it argues convincingly in the chapter “Sufi s as Warriors” that Sufi s were at the forefront of the conquest that brought Islam to the Deccan region of India. Eaton makes an important point in his book with regard to the methodology necessary for studying the social roles of Sufi s in that he critiques the “classical approach to Sufi studies.”... Eaton also points out the error of most Western scholarship in assum- ing that mysticism necessarily precludes martial endeavors. 10 Eaton’s book was the first significant Western study of Sufis to discuss at length the phenomenon of Sufis as warriors and to make use of sources from the popular tradition, such as vernacular hagiography; however, it concentrates solely on Sufi s in India and does not pretend to be a monograph on the history of Sufi jihad. Though Eaton’s book was well received, it was not without its critics."

"One Western author who has become very popular among India's history-rewriters is the American scholar Prof. Richard M. Eaton. Unlike his colleagues, he has done some original research pertinent to the issue of Islamic iconoclasm, though not of the Ayodhya case specifically. A selective reading of his work. focusing on his explanations but keeping most of his facts out of view, is made to serve the negationist position regarding temple destruction in the name of Islam. Yet, the numerically most important body of data presented by him concurs neatly with the classic (now dubbed “Hindutva”) account."

"This passage was cited by Thomas W. Arnold in his Preaching of Islam to support his contention that the most important agents in the spread of Islam in the Deccan were peaceful Muslim saints. While Arnold's general argument may have a good deal of valid- an argument that will be explored in greater depth in the present study, it would seem that in the case of Pir Ma‘bari he ‘chose the wrong example to illustrate it. For the question arises: why did Arnold cite a tradition, the 1884 Bombay Gazetteer, which presented only one side, the “peaceful missionary” side, ‘of Pir Marais life? One possibility is that the hagiographic traditions such a the one quoted above were unknown to Arnold and that he had available to him only the Gazetteer version. Another possibility is that Arnold was aware of the Sufi’ militancy in the hagiographic traditions but chose to ignore it, an interpretation that would accord with the general effort in his books to revise the simplistic nineteenth-century image of Islam as religion of the sword. But it does not suffice to correct one distorted view by presenting an equally distorted, if opposite, view. If the Sufis peaceful character can be supported by both ‘written and oral traditions, so can his militancy. In view of the tendency of both oral and written traditions to extol or even fabricate the pious qualities of Sufis, it is most likely that Pir ‘Matbari like Sufi Sarmast, was in reality a militant Sufi and only acquired the reputation of peaceful missionary through generations of oral transmission of his life story."