people-from-montana

"Scattered in the wind Earthboy calls me from my dreams: Dirt is where the dreams must end."

"I took to James Welch's poetry and novels to find the wryest of humor to counter dread and loss."

"(Do you remember the first Native writers you read?) LE: Yes. James Welch's Winter in the Blood came out in 1972...Winter in the Blood blew me away. That book told me about myself and my life. The portrait of his grandmother was unforgettable. I could never forget his description of her hands. Like the claws of a tiny crow. The writing was spare, bleak, comical. My world."

"It is only when one ascends the mountains that the grand panorama is unfolded, and the book of nature is spread out, as it were, where an invitation is extended to all who will read."

"With God there is always more! There is always room for more, and we have work to do. There is always room for those we have not yet invited inside and those not yet born. It is from this holy place that we are sent out into the world to be Christ to and for one another, Christ to the whole world. That is our mission; that is our identity."

"Let the air do the work."

"Big breath, chest up!"

"Lift fingers high, strike valves hard."

"Hit it hard, and wish it well."

"Rest as much as you play."

"The air does the work. The tongue channels the pitch."

"Don't stop where I have, but go further."

"Brass playing is no harder than deep breathing."

"Let the air save your lip."

"Watch the tongue."

"You could have a lip strong enough to lift that piano and still not be able to play a low C!"

"As Speaker of the House, it was my goal to uphold the integrity of the House. As a leader in my caucus it was my goal to foster unity not conformity. We can be united behind the primary ideals of our party without losing individuality. It has been an honor to be selected by my peers to fill this roll."

"I guess my preliminary take away is that China is running a brilliant foreign policy right now. They have convinced the Russians that they have a strategic relationship when in fact the most important bilateral relationship for them is with us, and that’s smart; that’s good diplomacy. I don’t know what will happen in the long run, but I think that’s a great position to be in. They fully understand that the management and deepening of their relationship with US is way more important than any other bilateral relationship, including with Russia. Just because trade levels, for economic and security reasons, the bilateral relationship is the most important for them. Russia is peripheral in that respect. Having said that, maintaining good relations with many countries is in the Chinese interest, and that’s what they’re doing."

"If both China and Russia were liberal democracies, I don’t think we would be having conversations about great power competition. So I believe that regime type does matter, and the ideological dimension that comes with that regime type also plays a role in great power competition."

"Today, however, Russia and China are united as autocracies. They do have this ideological connection. Both countries have tense relations with the United States and the liberal democratic world, and that brings them together."

"Correlation is not causation, as we like to say here at Stanford, and the fact that I arrived in the middle of that had to do with our long confirmation process in America. Nothing to do with Russian politics. But in Russia, that was not the way it was portrayed. In Russia, it was portrayed that I was sent deliberately by President Obama to lead the revolution. And given my background as an academic, I've written about the political transitions and democratization, that was a very easy story."

"The people working at the White House at the time are friends of mine, and they're friends of mine to this day. I don’t want to trivialize how difficult their decisions were. They did not have good choices."

"In rhetorical terms and broad strokes, in terms of ambition, I think the Biden administration has a fundamentally different approach to Putin than Trump did. I’m using my words very precisely — the Trump administration had a policy towards Russia, but Trump himself had a much more friendly relationship with Putin. There is little gap between President Biden and the Biden administration on that front."

"There is a big academic literature on under what conditions sanctions work and don’t work, on when they can change the behavior of targeted countries. And most times, they don’t work. That’s what the literature says."

"The last thing I would say is to remind people that there are some things that are very different in this era compared to the Cold War. We should just take them as being different and not shoehorn them into some Cold War battle. I think this is particularly true with China, because we are so much more integrated with the Chinese economy, with Chinese society, even with Chinese students — I assume you have as many Chinese students at Yale as we do here at Stanford. Those are dimensions of great power engagement that we didn’t have during the Cold War. Rather than thinking of them always as threats and feeling the need to disengage and untangle our partnerships, I hope that smart leaders — and it’s your generation that will have to do this, not mine — will think of those as potential assets for American power and American society."

"I speak in general. I think that Putin does not understand that criticizing power can help this power. How do we fight corruption in the United States? There are two forces - independent media and powerful opposition party."

"It’s incumbent upon all people to believe in the facts and to keep pushing it. You can’t constrain free speech, but you can speak more loudly about what is factual."

"We're not good at point predictions. But we are pretty good at some long-term trajectory things, over hundreds of years, right? Over hundreds of years, there's a pretty strong correlation between the more well-to-do a society is, the more educated it is, the more urban it is, the more income GDP per capita, the more likely there is to be demand for democracy."

"I'm 100 percent for lifting sanctions on Russia, provided they change their behavior for why the sanctions were put in place. It’s just that simple."

"I hope that from crisis and tragedy comes engagement. Don’t just complain about [an issue], do something about it! Don’t just lament about the current state of affairs, vote!"

"We got to get our democracy in order at home, but we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Two wrongs do not make a right."

"We should admit some of the ineffective practices of our past labors. This confrontation needs be embraced by all of us on a personal level, at the local parish and throughout the diocese. There are many ways in which we can do this and now move forward. The mission of Christ is being strengthened."

"I know Colorado to be a beautiful land of beautiful people and I look forward to serving the faithful of Pueblo as their shepherd in Christ. I eagerly anticipate our future together as we grow and build our local church."

"We've seen what Big Government looks like. No one would have thought that the IRS would turn against the American people, and yet here we are. We must always be vigilant and guarded against the overreach of power."

"I’m grateful that I have faith that provides perspective. This is important work, but I always have to remember that there is even a higher calling: serving God. We serve our country, but ultimately I serve God in what I do day to day. It would be difficult to serve here without being grounded in faith."

"We may be the first generation that instead of sacrificing for our kids, we’re sacrificing their future with an inheritance of debt."

"[The Gospel of Mary is an] intriguing glimpse into a kind of Christianity lost for almost fifteen hundred years...[it] presents a radical interpretation of Jesus' teachings as a path to inner spiritual knowledge; it rejects His suffering and death as the path to eternal life; it exposes the erroneous view that Mary of Magdala was a prostitute for what it is—a piece of theological fiction; it presents the most straightforward and convincing argument in any early Christian writing for the legitimacy of women's leadership; it offers a sharp critique of illegitimate power and a utopian vision of spiritual perfection; it challenges our rather romantic views about the harmony and unanimity of the first Christians; and it asks us to rethink the basis for church authority. All written in the name of a woman."

"Modern scholars understood Gnosticism to be a particular kind of heresy. They have generally divided the earliest varieties of Christianity into three categories: Jewish Christianity, Gnosticism, and orthodoxy. The first appropriated too much Judaism and took too positive an attitude toward it; the second appropriated too little and took too negative an attitude. ... Orthodoxy was just right, sailing between this Scylla and Charybdis, appropriately safe from both dangers."

"“I used to believe a lot of things. That doesn’t make them true,” Durzo said."

"Kylar woke two hours before dawn and briefly wondered if death would be too high a price to pay for a full night’s sleep."

"Its limbs were loose, graceless, lying in an uncomfortable position. Unmoving. Just like any corpse. In life, every man was unique. In death every man was meat."

"Agon wondered what god Cenaria had offended to deserve such a king."

"So he wasn’t dead. That was probably supposed to be a good thing."

"It may be beyond your comprehension, but I can hold power without using it."

"A solicitor is a man who does worse things within the law than most crooks do outside it."

"See, you get caught up in the past and you become useless to the present."

"You’re either being terrifically subtle or making no sense at all."

"Hope is the lies we tell ourselves about the future."

"“That pain you feel,” Master Blint said almost gently, “is the pain of abandoning a delusion. The delusion is meaning, Kylar. There is no higher purpose. There are no gods. No arbiters of right and wrong. I don’t ask you to like reality. I only ask you to be strong enough to face it. There is nothing beyond this."

"Cruelty walked the Warrens holding hands with poverty and rage."