People From New Jersey

"“So—I’m a major. New pay grade.” She laughed. “My salary has just jumped from nothing to next-to-nothing. What will I spend it all on?”"

"Richard, we have fallen into the common trap of seeing ourselves at the center of the universe: all that goes on around us somehow has us as its subject and raison d’etre. But in reality, all the events, all the plans, all the acts we interpret as intentionally malign—or benign—to us may, in fact, have almost nothing to do with our species."

"I’m sure that’s quite witty, but I have no idea what you mean."

"Zkhee’ah Drur the Elder had once observed that while one is yet alive to complain of misfortune, the greatest of all misfortunes has not yet occurred. But this turn of affairs seemed very close to disproving that ancient axiom."

"You are impetuous. But then again, you are human."

"“You mean, control my instincts?” “No, most of your species can learn to do that. The true challenge is whether you can control your predisposition to assume moral equivalencies where none exist.”"

"Look: nations screw up like people do; sometimes they mean well, sometimes they’re selfish or delusional bitches on a spree, and sometimes they just plain make mistakes. But the megacorporations don’t make mistakes; if they do damage, it’s because they like the cost-to-benefit ratios, dead innocents notwithstanding. Nations are bulls in the global china shop; corporations are sharks."

"That’s one thing I’ve noticed about war, Richard: there’s always more than enough irony to go around."

"After all, an agent on the inside of a rival organization was always worth more, operationally speaking, than a loyal servitor in one’s own."

"“Your rabble’s one unifying cry will be that there must be retribution. Most will call this ‘justice.’ A few of the most intemperate will also be the most honest; they will call it ‘revenge.’”"

"“It seems to me that you counted on the idiom of speech to mislead the Ambassador, to invite him to presume that they were not interested in hearing your discourse.” Riordan shrugged. “Guilty as charged. But there is a big difference between lying and using language that will trick the incautious. More importantly though, if the Ktor are going to wholly ignore the rules of fair and honest communication, then I’d say we’re on pretty firm ethical ground if we simply decide to play by the letter, not the spirit, of those rules.”"

"He is young—well, younger—and idealistic. Which is to say, foolish."

"“Damn it, Dad. You make me crazy.” “That’s part of my job as a parent. If I read the manual correctly.”"

"These matters should incite more urgent investigation than the technology you arrogated from your attackers. But like most primitive cultures, your reflex is one of stimulus and response: to focus entirely on the issues and actions of the moment."

"And here are the wages you must pay in order to climb the political ladder, you foolish sod. You’ve got to do the dirty work that others have ordered. I’ve done it out of dubious patriotism. Let’s see if you’ll do it out of blind ambition."

"No matter which images of battle and carnage came to haunt him, no matter which specific terror rose up through them, the lessons they rehearsed were always the same: There’s no such thing as certainty. Control is an illusion. Death and destruction descend the moment you forget to watch for them. That was what two years of intermittent war had taught him. And once you learned those lessons, you didn’t just remember them: you lived them, moment to moment."

"It concerns not only the Catholic Church but all believing citizens (and even non-believers), adhering to any religious denomination present in the United States, because this governmental action could make it clear that, with the pretext of the implementation of legislation of social and health interest, it can act at any moment against the religious liberty of any citizen."

"I met him at his Silver Slipper Club in Atlantic City where I sometimes danced at special shows. I always found him to be a very nice and generous guy."

"He’s a windbag who a dumb broad has played for a sucker."

"If we only elected good men, we'd never have good leaders."

"When I live well, everybody lives well."

"We have whisky, wine, women, song and slot machines. I won't deny it and I won't apologize for it. If the majority of the people didn't want them they wouldn't be profitable and they would not exist. The fact that they do exist proves to me that the people want them."

"Ordinary [men] avoid troubles, extraordinary [men] turn 'em to their advantage."

"Johnson was born to rule: He had flair, flamboyance, was politically amoral and ruthless, and had an eidetic memory for faces and names, and a natural gift of command ... [Johnson] had the reputation of being a trencherman, a hard drinker, a Herculean lover, an epicure, a sybaritic fancier of luxuries and all good things in life."

"The majority of people that get involved in film music are kind of like me, who had a dream and fell in love with it and then pursued it on the base of their mad love for it. My advice to the young aspiring composer is that film composing is about the long journey, about developing over a period of time, of hopefully creating a career that is constantly rising."

"The sworn secret is out. Pope Francis named me auxiliary bishop and I am waking up to what it means. Put a few prayers in for me. I will need them and be grateful."

"During the Cold War, you could trot out communism or anti-imperialism as alternatives, but today few people will believe your obviously corrupt system is better than the rule of law and democracy championed by the West. So you appeal to cynicism rather than idealism. You say that the so-called democracies of the world are just as craven and corrupt as anyone, but less honest about it; that every country kills its enemies; that all media is propaganda; that morality is just a weapon some countries use to beat up others; that in this contest, there is no objective truth, just subjective opinion, no right or wrong, just winners and losers."

"I've never met anyone who told me they were angry at China or France or Russia for failing to help them. Where people are desperate, it is still America they count on, whether they love or scorn it, and America they blame when aid does not come. They know that the United States is the one country with both the power and predilection to stand up for them."

"I couldn't believe it, if it had just been a social event I could have understood, but this means peoples' lives, at least there are 4 people who have been won over, … it's pathetic, If a crisis arose, people would turn around and ask what C.D. was doing for them. We need something to wake people up. We want to win people over, If we save only one person it's all worthwhile."

"I really feel we have a big job to do to keep women from getting panicky if something happens; what will they do then, go out and get prepared when it's too late? If I have time with my three children plus the job, then I'm sure many others do too. Some one has to wake them up and I'm sure going to try."

"We can’t have two things at the same time. We can’t have businesses in China, and we can’t have a free marketplace of ideas in the United States. You can have one, but you can’t have both at the same time, and because we need to protect our democracy, I think we need to get our companies out of China."

"You are what your record says you are."

"Emmitt Smith is someone that I have great respect for - as a player, a competitor and a person. His contributions to the organization and the NFL speak for themselves."

"How do we interact with life delicately? Because we're entering a new age of exploration, where we have to take great care, and we have to set examples how we explore. So I've teamed up with roboticist Rob Wood at Harvard University, and we've been designing squishy underwater robot fingers, so we can delicately interact with the marine life down there. The idea is that most of our technologies to explore the deep ocean come from oil and gas and military, who, you know, they're not really caring to be gentle."

"Judges set the tone for a . Especially when it comes to sensitive matters like and , that tone must be dignified, solemn, and respectful, not demeaning or sophomoric."

"There’s a tax that you incur when you use the “N” word or the “F” word, and there are groups, whether it’s the NAACP or gay groups, who will make you pay it. But if you use the “R” word, you’ve picked the most vulnerable target, because people within the intellectual disabilities population are not going to return serve. They aren’t genetically designed to confront you the way other groups do."

"Whenever you think you’re better than the words, you’re dead meat. I know actors all the time want to rewrite this, or rewrite that. I guess maybe if you’re some really skilled writer, actor, maybe like Ed Burns or somebody, but most of us you got to hew to the words. You got to hew to what’s on the page. And if you sprinkle in some of your sensibilities, that’s great and all that, but I love being a soldier of the words. That’s my thing. It always has been."

"There are no words to express the devastation of the Nandimarg massacre and the sad history of the Kashmiri Pandits... The conflict in Kashmir cannot be separated from the global war against terrorism."

"Most explicit information on the eigenfunctions of a Laplace operator on a compact manifold comes from computations where a high degree of symmetry is present. In these cases, eigenspaces may be of large dimension, the zeros of the eigenfunctions are often critical points, and the eigenfunctions usually have degenerate critical points. However, these properties are all unstable under small perturbations of the metric, and are therefore rather misleading to one's intuition."

"In the last several years, the study of gauge theories in quantum field theory has led to some interesting problems in nonlinear elliptic differential equations. One such problem is the local behavior of Yang-Mills fields ... over Euclidean 4-space. Our main result is a local regularity theorem: A Yang-Mills field with finite energy over a 4-manifold cannot have isolated singularities. Apparent point singularities (including singularities in the bundle) can be removed by a gauge transformation. In particular, a Yang-Mills field for a bundle over R4 which has finite energy may be extended to a smooth field over R4 \cup {∞} = S4."

"How did gauge theory appear and become successful in mathematics in the space of a few years? The fundamental mathematical ingredients were in place. The basics of fibre and vector bundles and their connections were in daily use by geometers. Chern-Weil theory (and even Chern-Simons invariants) were studied in most graduate courses in differential geometry. De Rham cohomology and its realization via the Hodge theory of harmonic forms were standard items in differential topology. In hindsight, the Yang-Mills equations were waiting to be discovered. Yet mathematicians were in themselves unable to create them. Gauge field theory is an adopted child."

"On that small blue and white planet below is everything that means anything to you: all of history and music, poetry and art, death and birth, love, tears, joy and games... All on that little spot in the cosmos. National boundaries and human artifacts no longer seem real. Only the biosphere, whole and home of life."

"He’s an Orthodox Jew who pretends to embody authenticity while engaging in some of the most despicable behavior, all while using his familial history to deflect charges of collusion with Nazis."

"Now, in our hour of existential horror, Kushner is making life-or-death decisions for all Americans, showing all the wisdom we’ve come to expect from him. [...] It was apparently at Kushner’s urging that Trump announced, falsely, that Google was about to launch a website that would link Americans with coronavirus testing. [...] The president was reportedly furious over the website debacle, but Kushner’s authority hasn’t been curbed."

"Yet it’s hard not to feel that he’s making the same mistake that so many Trump voters did regarding wealth and entitlement — namely, confusing money for virtue and accomplishment — and the luck of birth for talent. If so, this might account for Mr. Kushner’s apparent confidence that he can act in whatever manner he sees fit."

"The idea that the Trump administration would condition its response to the pandemic based on its perception of who was bearing the brunt of it was a fevered symptom of a different affliction, Trump Derangement Syndrome. Subsequent reports vindicated my conclusions. In July, The Washington Post reported that desperate White House advisers had begun presenting Trump with maps and data showing spikes in coronavirus cases "among our people' in Republican states," as a way to convince the president to take the pandemic more seriously. That same month, Vanity Fair reported that advisers close to Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, believed that "because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically." Nonpolitical concerns, such as keeping people alive, were of negligible importance by comparison."

"That doesn’t mean there’s not still a lot of pain and there won’t be pain for a while, but that basically was, we’ve now put out rules to get back to work. Trump’s now back in charge. It’s not the doctors.”"

"And what they’ve done over the last 13 days has been really extraordinary. We’ve done things that the government has never done before, quicker than they’ve ever done it before. And what we’re seeing now is we found a lot of supplies in the country. We’ve been distributing them where we anticipate there will be needs, and also trying to make sure that we’re hitting places where there are needs. So I can tell you the people on the — in the task force, they’re working day and night. You’ve got a lot of people in the government. We recognize the challenge that America faces right now. We know what a lot of the people on the frontlines are facing, the fear that they have that they won’t have the supplies they need. And our goal is to work as hard as we can to make sure that we don’t let them down."

"I have all this data about ICU capacity. I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators."

"The President has been very, very hands on in this. He’s really instructed us to leave no stone unturned. Just this morning — very early this morning — I got a call from the President. He told me he was hearing from friends of his in New York that the New York public hospital system was running low on critical supply. He instructed me this morning. I called Dr. Katz, who runs the system, asked him which supply was the most supply he was nervous about. He told me it was the N95 masks. I asked what his daily burn was. And I basically got that number, called up Admiral Polowczyk, made sure we had the inventory. We went to the President today, and earlier today,the President called Mayor de Blasio to inform him that we were going to send a month of supply to the New York public hospital system, to make sure that the workers on the frontline can rest assured that they have the N95 masks that they need to get through the next month. We’ll be doing similar things with all the different public hospitals that are in the hotspot zones and making sure that we’re constantly in communications with the local communities."