All Quotes

"Islam has no mechanism for excommunication. Individuals can leave the ummah and be regarded as apostates (murtad). But no one who swears he is a Muslim can be excluded. Even very bad Muslims are still Muslims as long as they haven’t thrice publicly rejected the two testimonies. (The two testimonies are accepting the oneness of God and that Mohammed is His Prophet.) Thus, neither Obama nor anyone else is qualified to decide who is a Muslim — or what is “true Islam.”"

"(About Anthony de Mello) I must confess that I feel grateful for the banning, or the temporary withdrawal, of de Mello's books. I had heard of him, but never read his writings. Excommunication, somehow, has far more news value than beatification. So also the suppression of a book attracts greater publicity than its publication."

"The committee is gravely concerned that the Holy See has not acknowledged the extent of the crimes committed, has not taken the necessary measures to address cases of child sexual abuse and to protect children, and has adopted policies and practices which have led to the continuation of the abuse by, and the impunity of, the perpetrators. Due to a code of silence imposed on all members of the clergy under penalty of excommunication, cases of child sexual abuse have hardly ever been reported to the law enforcement authorities in the countries where such crimes occurred."

"The greatest right in the world is the right to be wrong. If the Government or majorities think an individual is right, no one will interfere with him; but when agitators talk against the things considered holy, or when radicals criticise, or satirize the political gods, or question the justice of our laws and institutions, or pacifists talk against war, how the old inquisition awakens, and ostracism, the excommunication of the church, the prison, the wheel, the torture-chamber, the mob, are called to suppress the free expression of thought."

"Within a few days I will go to the papal Legate [Pucci], and if he shall open a conversation on the subject as he did before, I will urge him to warn the Pope not to issue an excommunication [against Luther], for which I think would be greatly against him [the Pope]. For if it be issued I believe the Germans will equally despise the Pope and the excommunication. But do you be of good cheer, for our day will not lack those who will teach Christ faithfully, and who will give up their lives for Him willingly, even though among men their names shall not be in good repute after this life...So far as I am concerned I look for all evil from all of them: I mean both ecclesiastics and laymen. I beseech Christ for this one thing only, that He will enable me to endure all things courageously, and that He break me as a potter's vessel or make me strong, as it pleased Him. If I be excommunicated I shall think of the learned and holy Hilary, who was exiled from France to Africa, and of Lucius, who though driven from his seat at Rome returned again with great honour. Not that I compare myself with them: for as they were better than i so they suffered what was a greater ignominy. And yet if it were good to flory I would rejoice to suffer insult for the name of Christ. But let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall. Lately I have read scarcely any thing of Luther's; but what I have seen of his hitherto does not seem to me to stray from gospel teaching. You know - if you remember - that what I have always spoken of in terms of the highest commendation in him is that he supports his position with authoritative witness.""

"Great iniquities still exist in the world. Slavery has been holding her ground for the last eighty years in the United States, and was a stain upon the American Republic long before becoming the instrument of her ruin, or at least of a scandalous dissolution. In Sweden, civil liberty of conscience is still proscribed by laws of another age, and is only bought by exile or loss of property. Perfidy and violence are going hand in hand to destroy the nationality of Poland, and crush in her the last struggles of Catholic faith by the united force of schism and despotism. In fine, there is in the East of Europe an anti-Christian empire crumbling away visibly under the weight of its own corruption; whose protestations do not hinder indignant Europe from requiring an account of the thousands of victims butchered by Moslem fanaticism almost under our eyes, which empire is, nevertheless, protected by the mutual jealousy and distrust of western nations. All these facts are so many outrages upon justice, and so many insolent triumphs of might over right."

"Woman is the spiritual hub of the family."

"When you accept and experience the other as she or he is, that is the birth of love."

"Guilt is non-acceptance. Repentance is acceptance."

"Mind, breath and kundalini are connected; handle one, the other two gets affected automatically."

"Unless you learn to deal with your life in its entirety, there is no permanent solution for human problems."

"Heartfelt blessings of parents bring about victory and prosperity in the individual."

"Comprehensive books are very useful in the hands of those whose minds are already formed ; but experience has taught us that a judicious parsimony proves more successful in encouraging the mental efforts of young beginners, amid the many difficulties arising from the giddiness natural to their age, as well as from the number of their scholastic duties."

"Only the young men who sat under him could know his fascination as a teacher."

"We believe that it has been brought about by a special dispensation of Divine Providence, that the Frankish Princes should profess the orthodox faith; like the Roman Emperors, in order that they may help this city, whence it took its rise. Persuade them with all earnestness to keep from any friendship and alliance with our most unspeakable enemies, the Lombards."

"The Vaiśeṣika Sūtra (VS) is a central Indian text, but somehow it was ignored by scholars during the past century or so. I have seen books mention that Kaṇāda presented an atomic theory of matter independent and prior to the atomic doctrine of Democritus and leave it at that."

"As I began to study the VS I was astonished by the sophistication of the system. Concluding that Kaṇāda’s work is a masterpiece of world science, I decided to spend all the time I could get to do a new translation along with a commentary."

"The VS takes the world to be atomic, with atoms of four kinds. Each material substance is composed of these atoms, two (or perhaps three) of which have mass and the remaining do not. The ordinary molecules of matter have all the four basic atoms present in them for by heating a solid substance changes into liquid, and later into gas; with still further heating it burns, converting into heat and light."

"The intuition behind the theory is that one atom is indicative of solidity and this is the heaviest; the second atom makes the liquid state possible and therefore it should be lighter; the third atom represents decay and it has (probably) no mass (this is not expressly stated); and the fourth is the constituent of light and heat and it definitely has no mass. It is astonishing that these atoms have turned out to be similar to proton, electron, neutrino, and photon."

"The VS anticipates most of Newton’s laws of motion, including the one on how an object continues in its state of rest or motion unless impressed with forces and that each action has an equal and opposite reaction."

"The VS considers reality to have two aspects: physical and consciousness, with the two interacting when an observation is made. It anticipates the principle of psychophysical parallelism that lies at the basis of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum theory."

"The Vaiśeṣika system has categories not only for space-time-matter but also for attributes related to perception of matter. It starts with six categories (padārthas) that are nameable and knowable, asserting that nothing beyond these six is necessary."

"There are nine classes of substances (dravya), some of which are non-atomic, some atomic, and others all-pervasive. The non-atomic ground is provided by the three substances of ether (ākāśa), space (dik), and time (kāla), which are unitary and indestructible; earth (pṛthvī), water (āpas), fire (tejas), and air (vāyu) are atomic composed of indivisible, and indestructible atoms (aṇu); self (ātman), which is the eighth, is omnipresent and eternal; and, lastly, the ninth, is the mind (manas), which is also eternal but of atomic dimensions, that is, infinitely small."

"Frank Oz - Fozzie Bear, Miss Piggy, Bert, Grover, Cookie Monster and Animal"

"Jerry Nelson - Robin the Frog, Lew Zealand, Announcer, and Floyd Pepper"

"Richard Hunt - Scooter, Beaker and Janice"

"Dave Goelz - Gonzo the Great, Beauregard, Boober and Zoot"

"Steve Whitmire - Kermit the Frog, Rizzo the Rat, Bean Bunny, and Whoopie Cushion"

"Kevin Clash - Clifford and Elmo"

"Kathryn Mullen - Joy Buzzer and Mokey Fraggle"

"Caroll Spinney - Big Bird"

"Pam Arciero - Grundgetta"

"... I liked teaching math best because I don’t have a natural way with figures and therefore had sympathy with the children who didn’t either. And I greatly respected the ones who did possess that aptitude. My skill in art and English made me impatient, and I found those subjects rather dreary to teach as a result. “Why are the art room walls covered with pictures of such ugly women?” a headmaster asked me once. “And why have some of them got those horrible cigarette butts hanging out of their nostrils?” I explained that I had asked the children to paint the ugliest woman they could think of. Unfortunately, almost all of them had looked no further than the headmaster’s wife. I like that devilish thing in children."

"You have to walk to get to know a city; it was then — in the Dublin of the 1940s — that I first discovered that. was a staid row of unlicensed hotels, politely elbowing one another for attention; was famous for its sausage shop. The set the tone for , and Charlemont Street offered a display of s, extracted from the footsore: The Walker's Friend, a notice said. and Lad Lane and Lady Lane, Ebenezer Terrace and Morning Star Road: all of them had an echo of a lost significance."

"... The way I think I write is by creating the actual raw material of fiction first of all, rather rapidly, very quickly, and then this has to be turned into a story or novel. I get quite a lot of manuscripts that people send me, young people asking me what I think of them. And almost all of them are still raw material which hasn’t been pushed or stretched or chopped up in order to give it form. What they’ve done is just to start the job but they haven’t completed it. You have to start with a mess, which is rather like the mess we all live in in the world, you know. You start with that mess and you really have got to create for yourself in your fiction. And then, the next thing you do is to make that palatable for the reader. The reader is terribly, terribly important because without the reader, as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing. It’s a kind of relationship, sometimes almost a friendship."

"Trevor won many honors, including the of the for “Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories”; the Prize for literature and the for fiction in 1976; and the three times: in 1978 for “,” in 1983 for “Fools of Fortune” and in 1994 for “.” The latter was made into a 1999 film starring ."

"Trevor is not a benign . There has always been a frightening, uncomfortable, cruel side to his work, particularly in his sensationalist appetite (which he shares with one of his great predecessors, Elizabeth Bowen, who gets a mention here) for seedy criminals, s, and s. In this volume, some tame s have their necks wrung, a girl pushes her mother's lover down two flights of stairs, a maniac pursues his estranged wife with a fantasy of revenge, and a con man replies to a series of s to get himself a driver and a free meal."

"... He drew us into the lives of English and Irish s and s, priests and parishioners, and even those who, by dint of circumstance or carefully curated effort, ascended a rung or two on the hierarchy. And although his work very much reflected the prevailing political and religious mores of its settings, it did not focus on the large sweep of history. Instead, Trevor settled his gaze on private yearnings and small, wayward impulses: stories about siblings scuffling over small-bore inheritances, about lost love, about minor duplicities, and, always, about the press and passage of time."

"What if “philo-sophy” did not mean “love of wisdom” but “wisdom of love”, just as “theology” means discourse on God and not the word of God, or “metrology” means the science of measurement and not the measurement of science? Why this inversion in the sequence of words for philosophy? Why has philosophy in the West been structured as a logic that formalises reality, withdrawing from the world of life to shut itself away in universities where, among initiates, knowledge that has no impact on existence and how to live it is transmitted from master to disciple? Could this be why, from Plato, who describes philosophy as “the exercise of death”, to Heidegger, who insists so much on being-towards-death, philosophers have fallen more in love with knowing how to die than with knowing how to live? (12 April 2008)"

"Umberto Galimberti, La lampada di Psiche, a cura di Paolo Belli, Casagrande, Bellinzona, 2001. ISBN 88-7713-345-7."

"Perhaps there is nothing behind life as a couple, and this hidden nothingness arouses that infinite curiosity that makes each of us tireless seekers of love, almost always oblivious to the fact that every event of love is always decreed by heaven."

"Every love story lays bare the nature of our soul, which relies on language to express malice, envy, jealousy, kisses poisoned by hatred, tenderness feigned to the point of seeming real, the awareness of knowing each other's secrets: all links in that heavy chain that twists our soul into plots that only language can weave."

"And so each of us feels the thrill of zero growth, not knowing how to react, especially if we suspect that zero growth will increasingly be our future, not only because we cannot continue to think that four-fifths of humanity will continue to sacrifice themselves for our growth, but because when growth has no other purpose than to continue growing, it is the people of the privileged world themselves who become mere “functionary” of this fixed idea which, if it becomes the collective purpose of everyone's life, buries and destroys the “meaning” of life, its flavour, its significance for us."

"In fact, where production does not tolerate interruptions, goods “need” to be consumed, and if the need is not spontaneous, if there is no perceived need for these goods, then this need must be “produced”. In an opulent society like ours, where everyone's identity is increasingly tied to the objects they own, which are not only replaceable but “must” be replaced, we may begin to feel, beneath the sea of advertising that is poured over us every day, a sort of call for destruction, a form of nihilism due to the fact, as Gunther Anders writes, that: “Humanity that treats the world as a disposable world also treats itself as disposable humanity”.."

"Despite what advertising would have us believe, happiness does not come from the latest generation of mobile phones or computers, or more generally from “products”, but from a shred of “extra relationship”."

"All this will lead, as economists say, to a slowdown in growth, if not zero growth. And here we come to that insidious word: “growth”, which economists apply both to the dispossessed countries that account for four-fifths of humanity, and to the already developed countries that nevertheless “must grow”. How far? And at whose expense? And at what environmental cost? Here, the economy remains silent because the problem is not within its remit, and with the economy, the voices of the people who must bow to the laws of the economy also remain silent."

"And so, by giving nothingness a semantic power that radiates at a distance to mean anything, fashion cheaply solves identity problems that put an end to the agonising question: “Who am I?”."

"If old age no longer shows its vulnerability, where can we find the reasons for “pietas”, the need for sincerity, the demand for answers on which social cohesion is based?"

"Since we were born, we have been taught that appearing is more important than being. And to this terrible dogma we have sacrificed our bodies, charging them with representing what we are not, or even what we have avoided knowing."

"In this regard, I would like to recall that Thomas Aquinas, commenting on Paul of Tarsus, says that faith, unlike science expressed by human reason, leads in captivitatem omnem intellectum, that is, it makes the intellect a prisoner of content that is not evident, and therefore foreign to it (alienus), so that the intellect is restless (nondum est quietatus) in the face of science, towards which it feels in infirmitate et timore et tremore mult”. Where has this Thomistic prudence gone, which does not allow us to immediately identify faith with truth? And if Catholics already possess the truth, what is the point of studying and teaching philosophy if they already possess the truth that philosophy seeks to find? What do they say to Heidegger when he writes that when philosophy is accompanied by an adjective, as in the case of ‘Christian philosophy’, we are faced with a square circle or, as Heidegger puts it, a ‘wooden iron’? And finally, what kind of dialogue is possible with a Christian if he is already convinced that he possesses the truth?"