people-from-cincinnati

"It is hard to think of any group of seven words that have aroused more newspaper controversy."

"All the News That's Fit to Print."

"God always provides. 125 years ago, there were people who came here to this parish new to the United States. Today is the same, people who are here, new to the United States. All of us created in God’s image and likeness, all of asked to follow Jesus' example of taking what we have, as little as it may seem, and using it in service to others."

"The first person to whom we are accountable is Christ, who is the good shepherd, and we're called to act in his place. That's a very serious responsibility to the Lord himself."

"We stumble around the massive solemnity of this temple mountain, which offers not so much solace or refuge as It does awe and even a shiver of atavistic fear at the omniscience of its precision. It is a place of power, once ruled by Hindu devarajas, under whose totality religious art and sculpture reflect Shiva and Vishnu ...."

"One huge bas relief in particular stuns us with its fluid elegance in depicting the Hindu creation myth, "churning the sea of milk" In a union between gods and demons, the giant serpent Vasuki is pulled back and forth between the monkey god, Hanuman, and a line of demons. Vasuki who has wrapped himself around Mount Mandara, is supported by a giant turtle in the Sea of Milk, the ocean of immortality. As Vishnu overseas this diville rhythm of opposites, the gods and demons rotate the mountain and chum the sea into foam, releasing a seminal fluid which creates a divine ambrosia, or amrita, the essence of elixir of life. Much of the bas-relief has faded from centuries of worshippers rubbing their hands over the figures, but overall it is still exquisitely defined."

"Angkor wat has overpowered as much as inspired me. It is as if I've trapped myself my wishing for relief, for a transcendent moment, or even, on a more banal level, a catalyst that would revive our sagging energies. The magnificence of the sheer mass of Angkor Wat, the weight and abundance of imagery has become oppressive. I am disoriented by so much visual grandeur."

"Ignorance always carries a price tag."

"One thing about a science: it works. If an engineer knows his business, his bridge does not fall down."

"He talked, and listened, and tried to do the hardest thing of all. He tried to understand."

"He has looked long at the stars, and that is the beginning of wisdom."

"His eyes told him the truth: Lake City was not precisely a ghost town, but the coffin was ready and the hole was dug."

"When workers recognise this, at least in a period of social upheaval, they have in the past sometimes attempted to take power in their unions and turn them into fighting organisations. Wildcat strikes then can become the source of energy that fuels rank-and-file movements, as has been the case in heavy industry for more than a century and among public employees for 75 years. The great advance of American workers in the 1930s that led to the founding of the and a vast expansion of the derived from just such wildcat strikes in the rubber plants, the auto industry, among electrical workers and many others. Workers walked out by the thousands, some occupied their plants, while others created mass picket lines, fought scabs and police. Wildcat strikes spread during the Depression decade like a virus through the United States, drawing in small industrial shops and retail workers. A similar thing happened in the 1960s and 1970s with teachers and public employees who walked out in illegal strikes to found their unions. Rank-and-file upheavals also transformed the in the 1970s and shook up other unions as well."

"What is most extraordinary about these actions is that union officials have not called them. In some cases, there is no union. In other cases, such as auto, there is a union and workers are forced to strike against it as well as the company. In certain cases, such as the Bath shipyard, it seems that union officials may have tacitly supported the workers’ walkouts, though the situation is unclear. Sometimes these unofficial strikes violate a union’s contractual non-strike provisions or in the case of public employees such s may also violate the law. Yet workers have organised themselves to carry them out with few resources beyond social media and traditional word-of-mouth, in order to protect their health and to save their jobs."

"Wildcat strikes can be looked upon from two sides. The wildcat strike usually erupts either because there is no union or the union’s leaders have failed to provide leadership to fight the boss. Leftists have sometimes romanticised the wildcat as the authentic expression of the workers’ will, an act that developed spontaneously out of the workers’ resistance to the boss. Some see it as the harbinger of the general strike that will overthrow capitalism and bring the workers to power. At the same time, one has to recognise that workers had to go on a wildcat strike because they hadn’t taken control of their union and couldn’t use the union as the expression of their power. The wildcat is both an expression of workers’ direct power at the point of production, but also a demonstration of their failure – because of the power of the bosses and the labour bureaucracy – to build a democratically controlled union that could express their will."

"Surely there must be other such strikes and sit-ins that haven’t been covered by the press, and we know there are many other protests by all sorts of workers, particularly important among them teachers and nurses, though we do not include those in this discussion, important as they are. The wildcat strike holds a particular place in the history and theory of the labour movement, as well as today reaction to the bosses and the government during the coronavirus pandemic. We notice that these strikes involve both highly skilled and highly paid workers – such as those at the ’ Bath shipyard – and also lower paid workers such as those at the Purdue chicken processing plant in Georgia and the bar and restaurant in Portland, Oregon. One can make the case that black workers – Pittsburgh sanitation, Kathleen, Georgia, Purdue chick, and Memphis Teamsters – play a leading role in the strikes. Yet workers at Bath shipyard are overwhelmingly white, while autoworkers are black, Arab, white and Latino, and GE’s Lynn jet engine plant also has a racially mixed workforce. No doubt workers of all genders can be found in these protest, and we hear both men and women giving voice to the workers’ concerns. While the central demands are about workers’ health, we can see that already they begin to raise demands about wages, benefits and working conditions, as well as job security."

"Across the United States, we are seeing workers walk off the job in wildcat strikes in response to the employers’ failure either to shut down the workplace or to make it safe. The strikes are too few to call them a strike wave, but we should be aware that on their own initiative workers are taking what practically is the most powerful action they can: withdrawing their labour. The strikes are taking place in both the private and , in both unionised and non-union s large and small."

"For 150 years, workers have struck over safety and health in myriad industries, most memorably in the twentieth century the miners’ strike over black lung. But we have not seen anything exactly like this before – wildcat strikes over health and safety in response to an epidemic, with workers making strong demands on the employers and sometimes winning. And these strikes are taking place in the midst of politicians’ ignorant and sometimes deceitful statements and government failures at all levels. Consequently, these strikes – even when only directed at a particular employer – have not only an economic but also a political character. We’re now seeing such strikes in a variety of industries in several states."

"I think levity and humor can be used to tackle larger themes that are darker. Loneliness can be damaging, but when you’re feeling lonely, you do some of your most productive thinking. I wanted to show the idea of loneliness in that light – that humor works in tandem with the joy to be found in self-examination."

"One thing that I came to learn about myself as a writer in working on this book is that my writing is often about who is happening moreso than what is happening. That is, I love creating characters who feel very true-to-life but who are almost so specific as to be mysteries to themselves as they are to other people."

"Grafting solitude onto a character who would live it on the page seemed to provide me with a sense of catharsis."

"In all my work, the things I’m invested in are empathy and compassion and trying to put human experiences on the page that I haven’t read before."

"Living creatures, sea gulls, soaring lazily and gracefully overhead. Living creatures, a group of girls, walking by, giggling and jiggling. The lazy rhythm of the waves, the sun’s warmth and the sky’s blueness. I waved my arm at it. “All this, M’bassi. All this and the stars too. Isn’t it enough without having to invent a religion and a God?”"

"Her life, except for reading, had been dull—but it had not been in vain."

"I want men who, like you, would not take orders even if I should give them. I do not want to be a god, Crag, even though I have some powers beyond mankind’s; I would not let my new world be colonized by people who might even be tempted to obey me."

"“Nuts,” said the Martian. “You people got rocks in your heads, that’s what accounts for your superstitions.”"

"“Are you interested in science?” “Of course I am. Who isn’t?”"

"I sought her in the grayness and she wasn’t there, she was dead and she wasn’t there, she wouldn’t be there ever again and I could never find comfort in her again. Ellen, beloved, you are dead and your voice is in my mind and only in my mind."

"“But do you believe they really teleported?” “I do. For instance, the guru with whom I spent time, under whom I studied this summer in Tibet, tells me he is certain that he has teleported twice. He is an honest man.” “Let’s grant that. Tell me why you think he isn’t a mistaken one.”"

"A new racket, probably. A depression breeds rackets as a swamp breeds mosquitoes."

"The cat didn’t answer, except possibly by not answering."

"Well, let’s call his age as pushing sixty and not mention from which direction he was pushing it."

"He knew that soon, perhaps even today, something important was going to happen. Whether good or bad he did not know, but he darkly suspected. And with reason: there are few good things that may unexpectedly happen to a man, things, that is, of lasting importance. Disaster can strike from innumerable directions, in amazingly diverse ways."

"Most intelligent people of the eighties had developed a type of radio deafness which enabled them not to hear a human voice coming from a loud-speaker, although they could hear and enjoy the then infrequent intervals of music between announcements. In an age when advertising competition was so keen that there was scarcely a bare wall or an unbillboarded lot within miles of a population center, discriminating people could retain normal outlooks on life only by carefully cultivated partial blindness and partial deafness which enabled them to ignore the bulk of that concerted assault upon their senses."

"Paranoia is a form of insanity which, Dr. Randoph told me, hasn’t any physical symptoms. It’s just a delusion supported by a systematic framework of rationalization. A paranoiac can be sane in every way except one."

"He could see now what a lot of his mistakes had been—laziness among them. And laziness is curable."

"It said, “Ask, what is man?” Mechanically, he asked it. “Man is a blind alley in evolution, who came too late to compete, who has always been controlled and played with by The Brightly Shining, which was old and wise before man walked erect. “Man is a parasite upon a planet populated before he came, populated by a Being that is one and many, a billion cells but a single mind, a single intelligence, a single will—as is true of every other populated planet in the universe. “Man is a joke, a clown, a parasite. He is nothing; he will be less.”"

"In twenty to thirty thousand years memories become legends and legends become superstitions and even the superstitions become lost. Metals rust and corrode back into earth while the wind, the rain and the jungle erode and cover stone. The contours of the very continents change—and glaciers come and go, and a city of twenty thousand years before is under miles of earth or miles of water."

"I hate funerals, think they’re pompous and silly and disgusting. I hate the thought of having one myself even though I won’t know about it while it’s happening. Since I’m a public figure I suppose there’ll have to be one, but I don’t want the only person I really love there sharing in it. If I die, I don’t want you to see me dead, even the outside of a coffin. I want your last memory of me to be as I am now, alive. I don’t want you even to think about a funeral or send flowers. Will you promise me those things, Max? “Yes, if you’ll quit talking about them.”"

"I wished that I could pray. Then I did pray, “God, I don’t believe that you exist, and I believe that if you do exist you’re an impersonal entity and that if you notice the fall of sparrows you don’t do anything about it, on request or otherwise, but if I’m wrong, I’m sorry. And in case I’m wrong I pray to you that...”"

"It’s indecent and inhuman to put full length mirrors in bathroom doors. They cause narcissism in the young and unhappiness in the old."

"Bad, I thought, looking around me, that I’d accumulated so much. A man should never own more stuff than he can carry in his hands at a dead run. It was bad, but it had happened."

"Escape, God how we all need escape from this tiny here. The need for it has motivated just about everything man has ever done in any direction other than that of the satisfaction of his physical appetites; it has led him along weird and wonderful pathways; it has led him into art and religion, ascetism and astrology, dancing and drinking, poetry and insanity. All of these have been escapes because he has known only recently the true direction of escape—outward, into infinity and eternity, away from this little flat if rounded surface we’re born on and die on. This mote in the solar system, this atom in the galaxy."

"I wish that I could believe not in mortality but in reincarnation or individual immortality; I wish that I could be living again in another body or, God help me, even watching from the edge of a fleecy cloud in Heaven or out through the dirty windowpane of a haunted house or through the dull eyes of a dung beetle or on any terms. On any terms I want to be watching, I want to be there, I want to be around, when we reach the stars, when we take over the universe and the universes, when we become the God in whom I do not believe as yet because I do not believe he exists as yet nor will exist until we become Him."

"I thought of the distant future and the things we’d have, and discounted my wildest guesses as inadequate. Immortality? Achieved in the nineteenth millennium X.R. and discarded in the twenty-third because it was no longer necessary. Reverse entropy to rewind the universe? Obsolete with the discovery of nolanism and the concurrent cognate in the quadrate decal. Sounds wild? How would the word quantum or the concept of a matter-energy transformation sound to a Neanderthaler? We’re Neanderthalers, to our descendants of a hundred thousand years from now. You’ll sell them short to make the wildest guess as to what they’ll do and what they’ll be. The stars? Hell, yes. They’ll have the stars."

"It was not the fashion for politicians who aspired to elective office to live ostentatiously, no matter how much money they had. If they loved luxury—and most of them did—they indulged that love in ways less publicly obvious than by living in mansions. The public believes what it thinks it sees."

"Strangely, he wasn’t scared at all. He was even more coldly calm, calmly analytical. And he knew that he would have to be if he was to stand a chance to win this war. If he was to win it, his mind would have to be his major weapon; firearms might win a battle, but never the war."

"A lot of my childhood playmates ended up behind bars and I don’t mean as bartenders."

"The ever-present possibility of making a big mistake worried him. He’d have worried about it more if he’d known that he already had."

"Still sitting there, still looking up in the tree. At something that isn’t there? Luke wondered. Or at something that isn’t there for me but is there for him, and which of us is right? And he thinks that I don’t exist and I think I do, and which of us is right about that? Well, I am, on that point if no other. I think, therefore I am. But how do I know he’s there? Why couldn’t he be a figment of my imagination? Silly solipsism, the type of wondering just about everybody goes through sometime during adolescence, and then recovers from. But it gives to wonder all over again when you and other people start seeing things differently or start seeing different things."