Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out.
Christians, indeed, have a special obligation not to forget how great and how inextinguishable the human proclivity for violence is, or how many victims it has claimed, for they worship a God who does not merely take the part of those victims, but who was himself one of them, murdered by the combined authority and moral prudence of the political, religious, and legal powers of human society.
Does religious conviction provide a powerful reason for killing? Undeniably it often does. It also often provides the sole compelling reason for refusing to kill, or for being merciful, or for seeking peace; only the profoundest ignorance of history could prevent one from recognizing this. For the truth is that religion and irreligion are cultural variables, but killing is a human constant.
Deep in the meadow, under the willowa bed of grass, a soft green pillow lay down your head, and close your sleepy eyesand when again they open, the sun will rise.Hear it's safe, here it's warm hear the daisies guard you from every harm hear your dreams are sweet and tomorrow brings them true hear is the place where i love you.Deep in the meadow, hidden far away a clock of leaves, a moonbeam rayforget your woes and let your troubles lay and when again it's morning, they'll wash away.Hear it's safe, hears its' warm hear the daises guard you from every harm Hear your dreams are sweet and tomorrow bring them true hear is the place where i love you.
I've always resented Hermione, because I wanted to be her so badly and she never seemed to appreciate as much as I thought she should that she got be her. She got to live at Hogwarts and be friends with Harry and kiss Ron, which was supposed to happen to me.
I couldn't help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.
You also know you’re surrendered when you don’t react to criticism and rush to defend yourself. Surrendered hearts show up best in relationships. You don’t edge others out, you don’t demand your rights, and you aren’t self-serving when you’re surrendered.
All stories are true,” Skarpi said. “But this one really happened, if that’s what you mean.” He took another slow drink, then smiled again, his bright eyes dancing. “More or less. You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way. Too much truth confuses the facts. Too much honesty makes you sound insincere.
I felt no shame in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.
What do you know of poetry?” Ambrose said without bothering to turn around. “I know a limping verse when I hear it,” I said. “But this isn’t even limping. A limp has rhythm. This is more like someone falling down a set of stairs. Uneven stairs. With a midden at the bottom.” “It is a sprung rhythm,” he said, his voice stiff and offended. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.” “Sprung?” I burst out with an incredulous laugh. “I understand that if I saw a horse with a leg this badly ‘sprung,’ I’d kill it out of mercy, then burn its poor corpse for fear the local dogs might gnaw on it and die.
Isaac Asimov's remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: 'Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.' It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that 'X is comforting' does not imply 'X is true'.
I failed math twice, never fully grasping probability theory. I mean, first off, who cares if you pick a black ball or a white ball out of the bag? And second, if you’re bent over about the color, don’t leave it to chance. Look in the damn bag and pick the color you want.
Maybe he didn’t really encourage me to do things, but he didn’t prevent me from doing them either. But after a while, I didn’t do things because I didn’t want him to think different about me. But the thing is, I wasn’t being honest. So, why would I care whether or not he loved me when he didn’t really even know me?
For a split second longer she stood motionless. Then, somehow, she had caught at the front of his shirt and pulled him toward her. His arms went around her, lifting her almost out of her sandals, and then he was kissing her—or she was kissing him, she wasn’t sure, and it didn’t matter. The feel of his mouth on hers was electric; her hands gripped his arms, pulling him hard against her. The feel of his heart pounding through his shirt made her dizzy with joy. No one else’s heart beat like Jace’s did, or ever could.
I don’t know what boldness came over me, but the resolute heaviness of Dash’s demeanor threatened to crush my soul. My pinky finger crept over and nestled against his, for comfort. Like a magnet, his pinky finger latched onto and intertwined with mine. I like magnets a whole lot.
I noticed the plants growing around me. Tall with leaves like arrowheads. Blossoms with three white petals. I knelt down in the water, my fingers digging into the soft mud, and I pulled up handfuls of the roots. Small, bluish tubers that don’t look like much but boiled or baked are as good as any potato. “Katniss,” I said aloud. It’s the plant I was named for. And I heard my father’s voice joking, “As long as you can find yourself, you’ll never starve.
The feeling I have reminds me of New Year’s Eve, when the countdown is coming and I’m not quite sure whether to grab my camera or just live in the moment. Usually I grab the camera and later regret it when the picture doesn’t turn out. Then I feel enormously let down and think to myself that the night would have been more fun if it didn’t mean quite so much, if I weren’t forced to analyze where I’ve been and where I’m going.
Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out. And I, like a scientist unwittingly inhaling toxic fumes from the beaker I was boiling in my lab, had, through sheer physical proximity, been infected by that same delusion and in my drugged state had come to believe I was Excluded: condemned to stand shivering outside the public library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street forever and...
happened as I listened: I felt pain. Not in my head, not in my arm, not in my leg; everywhere at once. I told myself there was no difference between being “inside” and being “outside,” that it all came down to X’s and O’s that could be acquired in any number of different ways, but the pain increased to a point where I thought I might collapse, and I limped away.
The search for the purpose of life has puzzled people for thousands of years. That’s because we typically begin at the wrong starting point—ourselves. We ask self-centered questions like What do I want to be? What should I do with my life? What are my goals, my ambitions, my dreams for my future? But focusing on ourselves will never reveal our life’s purpose.
Confession is the act of inviting God to walk the acreage of our hearts. “There is a rock of greed over here, Father. I can’t budge it. And that tree of guilt near the fence? Its roots are long and deep. And may I show you some dry soil, too crusty for seed?” God’s seed grows better if the soil of the heart is cleared.
Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story. It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you never even dared to admit that you wanted—an emotional speedball, perhaps, of thunderous love and roiling excitement. Soon you start craving that intense attention, with the hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is withheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but who now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore—despite...
Never, never marry, my friend. Here’s my advice to you: don’t marry until you can tell yourself that you’ve done all you could, and until you’ve stopped loving the woman you’ve chosen, until you see her clearly, otherwise you’ll be cruelly and irremediably mistaken. Marry when you’re old and good for nothing…Otherwise all that’s good and lofty in you will be lost.
We’re miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character.
I’ve always resented Hermione, because I wanted to be her so badly and she never seemed to appreciate as much as I thought she should that she got to be her. She got to live at Hogwarts and be friends with Harry and kiss Ron, which was supposed to happen to me.
So, here’s what you do. You win, you go home. She can’t turn you down then, eh?” says Caesar encouragingly. “I don’t think it’s going to work out. Winning…won’t help in my case,” says Peeta. “Why ever not?” says Caesar, mystified. Peeta blushes beet red and stammers out. “Because…because…she came here with me.
The problem is that most people spend their lives looking but not truly seeing, or, as Sherlock Holmes, the meticulous English detective, declared to his partner, Dr. Watson, “You see, but you do not observe.
Looking back, I question whether I really loved Nate, or just the security of our relationship. I wonder if my feelings for him didn’t have a lot to do with hating my job. From the bar exam through that first hellish year as an associate, Nate was my escape. And sometimes that can feel an awful lot like love.
Everyone knew what he was thinking. Certainly there were demons in the world. But they were like Tehlu’s angels. They were like heroes and kings. They belonged in stories. They belonged out there. Taborlin the Great called up fire and lightning to destroy demons. Tehlu broke them in his hands and sent them howling into the nameless void. Your childhood friend didn’t stomp one to death on the road to Baedn-Bryt. It was ridiculous.
You come before the judgment seat of God full of rebellion and mistakes. Because of his justice he cannot dismiss your sin, but because of his love he cannot dismiss you. So, in an act which stunned the heavens, he punished himself on the cross for your sins. God’s justice and love are equally honored. And you, God’s creation, are forgiven.
She laughed out loud, a warm, knowing laughter that made me once again wonder about the secret ingredient in these women’s lives. Whatever it was, I was clearly missing it. It was so much more than just self-confidence; it seemed to be the ability to love oneself, enthusiastically and unsparingly, body and soul, naturally followed by the assumption that every man on the planet is dying to get in on the act.
Dear White Fella When I am born I’m black When I grow up I’m black When I am sick I’m black When I go out ina sun I’m black When I git cold I’m black When I git scared I’m black And when I die I’m still black. But you white fella When you’re born you’re pink When you grow up you’re white When you git sick you’re green When you go out ina sun you go red When you git cold you go blue When you git scared you’re yellow And when you die you’re grey And you got the cheek to call me coloured?
We hand the meat over to Greasy Sae in the kitchen. She likes District 13 well enough, even though she thinks the cooks are somewhat lacking in imagination. But a woman who came up with a palatable wild dog and rhubarb stew is bound to feel as if her hands are tied here.
We describe a person without compassion as “heartless,” and we urge him or her to “have a heart.” Our deepest hurts we call “heartaches.” Jilted lovers are “brokenhearted.” Courageous soldiers are “bravehearted.” The truly evil are “black-hearted” and saints have “hearts of gold.” If we need to speak at the most intimate level, we ask for a “heart-to-heart” talk. “Lighthearted” is how we feel on vacation. And when we love someone as truly as we may, we love “with all our heart.” But when we lose our passion for life, when a deadness sets in which we cannot...
The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.
The ultimate freedom for creative groups is the freedom to experiment with new ideas. Some skeptics insist that innovation is expensive. In the long run, innovation is cheap. Mediocrity is expensive—and autonomy can be the antidote.” TOM KELLEY General Manager, IDEO
I got out of the elevator and confronted Mr. Wexler. “Killing is wrong.” “We kill chickens,” Mr. Wexler said. “We kill cows. We kill trees. So big deal, we kill some drug dealers.”It was hard to argue with that kind of logic because I like cows and chickens and trees much better than drug dealers.
That’s how you tell what a man’s really made of. It’s one thing for a man to be big and brave and kill a spider. Any man could do that. Trailin’ after a woman when she’s shopping for thongs and push-up bras is a whole other category of man. And then if you want to see how far you can go with it, you ask him to carry one of those little pink bags they give you.
At least twice a week, I pause in the rush of work and have a meeting with myself. (If I were part of a team, I’d call a team meeting.) I ask myself, again, of the project: “What is this damn thing about?” Keep refining your understanding of the theme; keep narrowing it down.
Had you been lying all along? Mum gently stroked my hair. I whispered into her shoulder. “I can’t go back. Not yet. I can’t leave.” And she held my head tight to her chest and wrapped her arms around me. “You don’t have to,” she said, rocking me. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, not anymore.” And I cried.
Wouldn’t that be an incredibly stupid thing to do? To say ‘I never want to smoke again’, then spend the rest of your life saying ‘I’d love a cigarette.’ That’s what smokers who use the Willpower Method do. No wonder they feel so miserable. They spend the rest of their lives desperately moping for something that they desperately hope they will never have.
He’s called you, like, four times in the past week. And seriously, you should be embarrassed. I’ve never met anyone who has as much phone sex as you two.” My eyes narrowed on her. “How do you know about the phone sex?” “Duh. I pick up the phone and listen.” I gaped at her.
Live each day as if it’s your last’, that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that? What if it rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn’t practical. Better by far to simply try and be good and courageous and bold and to make a difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you. Go out there with your passion and your electric typewriter and work hard at … something. Change lives through art maybe. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever...
The brain is more than an assemblage of autonomous modules, each crucial for a specific mental function. Every one of these functionally specialized areas must interact with dozens or hundreds of others, their total integration creating something like a vastly complicated orchestra with thousands of instruments, an orchestra that conducts itself, with an ever-changing score and repertoire.
now look, she said, stretched out on the bed, I don’t want anything personal, let’s just do it, I don’t want to get involved, got it? she kicked off her high-heeled shoes… sure, he said, standing there, let’s just pretend that we’ve already done it, there’s nothing less involved than that, is there? what the hell do you mean? she asked. I mean, he said, I’d rather drink anyhow. and he poured himself one. it was a lousy night in Vegas and he walked to the window and looked out at the dumb lights. you a fag? she asked, you a god damned fag? no, he said. you don’t have to get shitty,...
D snorted. “Gotta be prepared.” He looked up at Jack’s face, frowning. “What?” Jack shrugged. “It’s just….” He sighed. “I’m starting to see words like ‘accessory’ and ‘accomplice’ floating around my head.” D barely reacted. “How about ‘dead on arrival’? Ya like that better?” Jack nodded, pressing his lips together. “Get more ammo. Ammo is good.
I pictured the two of them alone. Perhaps showering together, as Rome and I liked to do. My stomach clenched painfully, amusement forgotten. “Cody, will you take me to the nearest clinic? I need someone to dig the knife out of my back. Lexis might need it again. And the good doctor might want to give me a tetanus shot. I think she bled on me.” Stunned silence. I often had that effect.
For Leopardi, unhappy hedonist that he was, what is unknown is always more attractive than what is known; hope and imagination are the only consolations for the disappointments and sorrows of experience. Man therefore projects his desire into infinity and feels pleasure only when he is able to imagine that this pleasure has no end.
Principle 1: By setting limitations, we must choose the essential. So in everything you do, learn to set limitations. Principle 2: By choosing the essential, we create great impact with minimal resources. Always choose the essential to maximize your time and energy.
It is a curious fact, but nobody ever is sea-sick - on land. At sea, you come across plenty of people very bad indeed, whole boat-loads of them; but I never met a man yet, on land, who had ever known at all what it was to be sea-sick. Where the thousands upon thousands of bad sailors that swarm in every ship hide themselves when they are on land is a mystery.
Hobbits!’ he thought. ‘Well, what next? I have heard of strange doings in this land, but I have seldom heard of a hobbit sleeping out of doors under a tree. Three of them! There’s something mighty queer behind this.’ He was quite right, but he never found out any more about it.
I review my three boyfriends, the three men I slept with in my twenties, searching for a common thread. Nothing. No consistent features, coloring, stature, personality. But one theme does emerge: they all picked me. And then dumped me. I played the passive role. Waiting for Hunter and then settling for Joey. Waiting to feel more for Nate. Then waiting to feel less. Waiting for Alec to go away and leave me in peace. And now Dex. My number four. And I am still waiting. For all of this to blow over. For his September wedding. For someone who gives me that tingly feeling as I watch him sleeping in...
Kindle, isn’t it?” the waitress asked. “I got one for Christmas, and I love it. I’m reading my way through all of Jodi Picoult’s books.” “Oh, probably not all of them,” Wesley said. “Huh? Why not?” “She’s probably got another one done already. That’s all I meant.” “And James Patterson’s probably written one since he got up this morning!” she said, and went off chortling.
Not darkness, for that implies an understanding of light. Not silence, for that suggests a familiarity with sound. Not loneliness, for that requires knowledge of others. But still, faintly, so tenuous that if it were any less it wouldn’t exist at all: awareness. Nothing more than that. Just awareness—a vague, ethereal sense of being. Being . . . but not becoming. No marking of time, no past or future—only an endless, featureless now, and, just barely there in that boundless moment, inchoate and raw, the dawning of perception . . .
The coward’s fear of death stems in large part from his incapacity to love anything but his own body. The inability to participate in others’ lives stands in the way of his developing any inner resources sufficient to overcome the terror of death. — J. Glenn Gary, The Warriors
I fell, as they say. Into love. I practiced saying it, first to myself, in my head. I believed in it. I did. I thought love and I bought it completely. I was excited by my belief but was careful not to let this excitement influence or manipulate the belief in any way. The belief had to be pure. So I said it to her, I love you, and she said it back. And this was our contract. We treated the words seriously and respected that they came with implications.
They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.
In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself; you will see it, perhaps, often in this history; for, even if I could conceive that I had compleatly overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.
If you wish information and improvement from the knowledge of others, and yet at the same time express yourself as firmly fix'd in your present opinions, modest, sensible men, who do not love disputation, will probably leave you undisturbed in the possession of your error.
Let tears gather in your eyes. You haven’t tears enough for what you’ve done to me. Six more mortal years, seven, eight…I might have had that shape!’ Her pointed finger flew at Madeleine, whose hands had risen to her face, whose eyes were clouded over. Her moan was almost Claudia’s name. But Claudia did not hear her. ‘Yes, that shape, I might have known what it was to walk at your side.
At their best, religious and spiritual communities help us discover this pure and naked spiritual encounter. At their worst, they simply make us more ashamed, pressuring us to cover up more, pushing us to further enhance our image with the best designer labels and latest spiritual fads, weighing us down with layer upon layer of heavy, uncomfortable, pretentious, well-starched religiosity.
We’ve lost something vital, I tell you. When we lost it, we lost the ability to make good decisions. We fall upon decisions these days the way we fall upon an enemy—or wait and wait, which is a form of giving up, and we allow the decisions of others to move us. Have we forgotten that we were the ones who set this current flowing?
A child’s bond to her mother cannot be understated, and my bond with Helen was a ragged, baffling, disheartening, chaotic mess. I felt crazy, often, around my own mother. I grew up questioning what was normal, asking what reality was and wasn’t, and not trusting the outcome of different situations. She scared me and I couldn’t predict her behavior, so I was often off-kilter and worried.
God is in the business of strategically positioning us in the right place at the right time. A sense of destiny is our birthright as followers of Christ. God is awfully good at getting us where He wants us to go. But here’s the catch: The right place often seems like the wrong place, and the right time often seems like the wrong time.
The only real difference between a wise man and a fool, Moore knew, was that the wise man tended to make more serious mistakes—and only because no one trusted a fool with really crucial decisions; only the wise had the opportunity to lose battles, or nations.
You know that kind of quiver that trembles around through you when you are seeing something so strange and enchanting and wonderful that it is just a fearful joy to be alive and look at it; and you know how you gaze, and your lips turn dry and your breath comes short, but you wouldn't be anywhere but there, not for the world.
It doesn't promise to solve or erase suffering but to transform it, pledging that by loving one another, even through pain, we will find more life. And it insists that by opening ourselves to strangers, the despised or frightening or unintelligible other, we will see more and more of the holy, since, without exception, all people are one body: God's.
for God's sake, let's be done with the hypocrisy of claiming "I am a biblical literalist" when everyone is a selective literalist, especially those who swear by the antihomosexual laws in the Book of Leviticus and then feast on barbecued ribs and delight in Monday-night football, for it is toevali, an abomination, not only to eat pork but merely to touch the skin of a dead pig.
Harris said, however, that the river would suit him to a "T." I don't know what a "T" is (except a sixpenny one, which includes bread-and- butter and cake AD LIB., and is cheap at the price, if you haven't had any dinner). It seems to suit everybody, however, which is greatly to its credit.
In the new American ghetto, the nightmare engine is bubble economics, a kind of high-tech casino scam that kills neighborhoods just like dope does, only the product is credit, not crack or heroin. It concentrates the money of the population in just a few hands with brutal efficiency, just like narco-business, and just as in narco-business the product itself, debt, steadily demoralizes the customer to the point where he’s unable to prevent himself from being continually dominated.
Jack looked out the window as they passed the Mormon temple, just outside the beltway near Connecticut Avenue. A decidedly odd-looking building, it had grandeur with its marble columns and gilt spires. The beliefs represented by that impressive structure seemed curious to Ryan, a lifelong Catholic, but the people who held them were honest and hardworking, and fiercely loyal to their country, because they believed in what America stood for.
But, if one cuts more deeply, the lonesome dove is Newt, a lonely teenager who is the unacknowledged son of Captain Call and a kindly whore named Maggie, who is now dead. So the central theme of the novel is not the stocking of Montana but unacknowledged paternity. All of the Hat Creek Outfit, including particularly Augustus McCrae, want Call to accept the boy as his son.
Obedience to commandments is the way we build a foundation of truth. Here is the way that works, in words so simple that a child could understand: The truth of most worth is to know God our Heavenly Father, His Son, Jesus Christ, and Their plan for us to have eternal life with Them in families. When God communicates that priceless truth to us, He does it by the Spirit of Truth. We have to ask for it in prayer. Then He sends us a small part of that truth by the Spirit. It comes to our hearts and minds. It feels good, like the light from the sun shining through the clouds on a dark day. He sends...
He fell in love with a skinny stray cat that would skulk around the dining hall during meals. Every day, Jake would offer it sausage or egg from breakfast and pepperoni or hamburger from lunch. Every day, it ran away from him. But Jake didn’t give up. Even when he had the stomach flu, he snuck out of the infirmary to try to feed it. He was not going to let it down. He would watch it from classroom windows. He even made up a poem about it that he sent home to his mother in a letter. Three months later, the little cat was finally hungry enough to trust him. It never occurred to Jake that the cat...
Josey?” She heard her mother’s voice in the hall, then the thud of her cane as she came closer. “Please don’t tell her I’m here,” the woman in the closet said, with a strange sort of desperation. Despite the cold outside, she was wearing a cropped white shirt and tight dark blue jeans that sat low, revealing a tattoo of a broken heart on her hip. Her hair was bleached white-blond with about an inch of silver-sprinkled dark roots showing. Her mascara had run and there were black streaks on her cheeks. She looked drip-dried, like she’d been walking in the rain, though there hadn’t...
In fact the problem Leopardi is facing is speculative and metaphysical, a problem in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Descartes and Kant: the relationship between the idea of infinity as absolute space and absolute time, and our empirical knowledge of space and time.
For if you keep my commandments you shall receive of his fulness, and be glorified in me as I am in the Father; therefore, I say unto you, you shall receive grace for grace" (D&C 93:19–20). And then a few verses later the Lord says: And truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come; And whatsoever is more or less than this is the spirit of that wicked one who was a liar from the beginning. The Spirit of truth is of God. I am the Spirit of truth, and John bore record of me, saying: He received a fulness of truth, yea, even of all truth; And no man receiveth...
Tastykakes are just another of the many advantages of living in Jersey. They’re made in Philly and shipped to Trenton in all their fresh squishiness. I read once that 439,000 Butterscotch Krimpets are baked every day. And not a heck of a lot of them find their way to New Hampshire. All that snow and scenery and what good does it do you without Tastykakes?
When I was a junior, my school introduced badminton, which was clearly a P.E. department ploy to get me away from the wrestling room, and it worked, since the first time I played badminton was like the first time I tasted sushi or heard the Beatles or read Wordsworth. This was a sport? This counted for gym requirements?
Less abject but more shocking was the letter from the Founder of the Calvary Tabernacle Association in Oklahoma: Professor Einstein, I believe that every Christian in America will answer you, 'We will not give up our belief in our God and his son Jesus Christ, but we invite you, if you do not believe in the God of the people of this nation, to go back where you came from.' I have done everything in my power to be a blessing to Israel, and then you come along and with one statement from your blasphemous tongue, do more to hurt the cause of your people than all the efforts of the Christians who...
and vinegar that makes them sour—and camomile that makes them bitter—and—and barley-sugar and such things that make children sweet-tempered. I only wish people knew that: then they wouldn’t be so stingy about it, you know—
You might tell me that you have been engaging in some deep questioning and theological rethinking.1 You can no longer live with the faith you inherited from your parents or constructed earlier in your life. As you sort through your dogma and doctrine, you’ve found yourself praying less, less thrilled about worship, scripture, or church attendance. You’ve been so focused on sorting and purging your theological theories that you’ve lost track of the spiritual practices that sustain an actual relationship with God. You may even wonder if such a thing is possible for someone like you.
In the previous few minutes, I had seen the most beautiful thing that eyes can see: the glory of God shining in the radiance of creation. I had heard the most beautiful thing that ears can hear: friends telling friends that they love one another. And I had felt the most beautiful thing that any heart can ever feel: the love of God and the love of others.
Here’s another example of the difference in our worldviews. A family in my sister’s neighborhood was recently stricken with a double tragedy, when both the young mother and her three-year-old son were diagnosed with cancer. When Catherine told me about this, I could only say, shocked, “Dear God, that family needs grace.” She replied firmly, “That family needs casseroles,” and then proceeded to organize the entire neighborhood into bringing that family dinner, in shifts, every single night, for an entire year. I do not know if my sister fully recognizes that this is grace.
This is a book about getting naked—not physically, but spiritually. It’s about stripping away the symbols and status of public religion—the Sunday-dress version people often call “organized religion.” And it’s about attending to the well-being of the soul clothed only in naked human skin.
And now, I, Moroni, would speak somewhat concerning these things; I would show unto the world that faith is things which are hoped for and not seen; wherefore, dispute not because ye see not, for ye receive no witness until after the trial of your faith. (Ether 12:4–6.)
Every form of strength is also a form of weakness,” he once wrote. “Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them. I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.
Nesse’s research focuses on the evolutionary origins of depression. Why does depression exist at all? If it’s stayed in our gene pool for so long, he argues, there must be some evolutionary benefit. Nesse believes that depression may be an adaptive mechanism meant to prevent us from falling victim to blind optimism—and squandering resources on the wrong goals.11 It’s to our evolutionary advantage not to waste time and energy on goals we can’t realistically achieve. And so when we have no clear way to make productive progress, our neurological systems default to a state of low energy...
People have come to the erroneous conclusion that if they’re not willing to start something separate, world-changing, and risky, they have no business starting anything. Somehow, we’ve fooled ourselves into believing that the project has to have a name, a building, and a stock ticker symbol to matter.
ALL HE COULD SEE, IN EVERY DIRECTION, WAS WATER. It was June 23, 1943. Somewhere on the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean, Army Air Forces bombardier and Olympic runner Louie Zamperini lay across a small raft, drifting westward. Slumped alongside him was a sergeant, one of his plane’s gunners. On a separate raft, tethered to the first, lay another crewman, a gash zigzagging across his forehead. Their bodies, burned by the sun and stained yellow from the raft dye, had winnowed down to skeletons. Sharks glided in lazy loops around them, dragging their backs along the rafts, waiting.
But whenever I see it happen, I always want to say the same thing. Good luck. Because you still have a woman in front of you, my friend. And you are still a man. It’s still two human beings trying to get along, so it’s going to become complicated. And love is always complicated. But still humans must try to love each other, darling. We must get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.
I pulled the dress out of the bag and held it in front of me. Ella sat up straighter and squinted her eyes, while Michael and Paco made the noises men make when a woman says, “What do you think?” Fathers probably teach those noises to their sons when they’re young—“Stand up when you’re introduced to a lady, use your napkin instead of your sleeve, and make admiring noises when a woman shows you anything, no matter what it is, and asks you what you think about it. Never, never, never say you have no opinion.
Lawyers often face intense demands but have relatively little “decision latitude.” Behavioral scientists use this term to describe the choices, and perceived choices, a person has. In a sense, it’s another way of describing autonomy—and lawyers are glum and cranky because they don’t have much of it.
Most locals knew who Della Lee was. She waitressed at a greasy spoon called Eat and Run, which was tucked far enough outside the town limits that the ski-crowd tourists didn’t see it. She haunted bars at night. She was probably in her late thirties, maybe ten years older than Josey, and she was rough and flashy and did whatever she wanted—no reasonable explanation required. “Della Lee Baker, what are you doing in my closet?” “You shouldn’t leave your window unlocked. Who knows who could get in?” Della Lee said, single-handedly debunking the long-held belief that if you dotted your...
Lance told me his father didn’t think much of him. “He wishes I was better. More better. At everything. I don’t do anything right, you know, Stevie. Nothing.” He said this matter-of-factly. He believed it as truth. Polly told me her father never said anything nice to her, but she kept trying as hard as she could to make him pay her some attention. “He always says, ‘Don’t get fat as your mother has,’ but I don’t think Mom’s fat at all, but I try not to eat much, but he keeps saying it to me. Do you think I’m fat, Stevie? When my hair is messy do you think I look like a stray...
It was just so in the American Revolution, in 1776, the first delicacy the men threw overboard in Boston harbor was the tea, woman's favorite beverage. The tobacco and whiskey, though heavily taxed, they clung to with the tenacity of the devil-fish.
Men never fail to dwell on maternity as a disqualification for the possession of many civil and political rights. Suggest the idea of women having a voice in making laws and administering the Government in the halls of legislation, in Congress, or the British Parliament, and men will declaim at once on the disabilities of maternity in a sneering contemptuous way, as if the office of motherhood was undignified and did not comport with the highest public offices in church and state. It is vain that we point them to Queen Victoria, who has carefully reared a large family, while considering and signing...
I felt the presence of the night all about me: a living, breathing entity, whispering soft words against my flesh. I had never before felt the silken touch of the night caress me as I did now. It was a frightening, yet exhilarating experience. It was as if the night itself were attempting to seduce me.
I could feel the urgency in the driver’s voice as he prodded the horses to greater momentum. The rumble of thunder could be heard rolling through the mountains as foreboding dark clouds rolled overhead obscuring the starry sky. The sun vanished with one last glimmer through the pine trees, then night took possession of the earth.
How did I become this monster…this creature that feasts on the blood of innocents? I stare at my bloodstained dress and feel nothing but hatred for what I have done. To know how callously I killed before and felt no regret, now pains me. I killed before with no remorse. But tonight…tonight, what I have done is unbearable.
One of these people was a girl who exemplified everything I could ever come up with to want. We grew very close very quickly and revealed dreams and compared fears and mocked gently and occasionally told lies, but nothing bad. The sex, I’m sorry, Dad, but the sex was unlike anything I believed might someplace exist. I remember lying with her in bed and touching her thigh and thinking, My God. This is the reason I grew hands in the first place.
That’s right,” I said. “Grand and complex. You say love because people believe in the word, it has a shared meaning and demands respect. It makes the strength stronger. But the strength can be unpredictable, it can gain a life of its own and turn on itself enough to make love into something too strong, this massive force. Something horrifying, brief flashes, this same strength.
I suppose hobbits need some description nowadays, since they have become rare and shy of the Big People, as they call us. They are (or were) a little people, about half our height, and smaller than the bearded Dwarves. Hobbits have no beards. There is little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along, making a noise like elephants which they can hear a mile off. They are inclined to be fat in the stomach; they dress in bright colours (chiefly green and yellow); wear no...
And behold! Allah will say: "O Jesus the son of Mary! Didst thou say unto men, worship me and my mother as gods in derogation of Allah.?" He will say: "Glory to Thee! never could I say what I had no right (to say). Had I said such a thing, thou wouldst indeed have known it. Thou knowest what is in my heart, Thou I know not what is in Thine. For Thou knowest in full all that is hidden.
But Christian illiteracy is only the first part of the crisis. Even more seriously, even for those who think they speak “Christian” fluently, the faith itself is often misunderstood and distorted by many to whom it is seemingly very familiar. They think they are speaking the language as it has always been understood, but what they mean by the words and concepts is so different from what these things have meant historically, that they would have trouble communicating with the very authors of the past they honor.
Behold! Allah said: "O Jesus! I will take thee and raise thee to Myself and clear thee (of the falsehoods) of those who blaspheme; I will make those who follow thee superior to those who reject faith, to the Day of Resurrection: Then shall ye all return unto me, and I will judge between you of the matters wherein ye dispute.
An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing across her soul's summer day. It was strange and unfamiliar; it was a mood. She did not sit there inwardly upbraiding her husband, lamenting at Fate, which had directed her footsteps to the path which they had taken. She was just having a good cry all to herself.
We all knew there was a good deal of pointlessness to nearly all the meetings and in fact one meeting out of every three or four was nearly perfectly without gain or purpose but many meetings revealed the one thing that was necessary and so we attended them and afterward we thanked each other.
We no longer need companies, institutions, or government to organize us. We now have the tools to organize ourselves. We can find each other and coalesce around political causes or bad companies or talent or business or ideas.
So many people, if the truth were known, live their lives on two levels. The principles they fight about are often at odds with the complicated and often frustrated lives they live. This is why there is so much intensity.
one evangelical scientist who had felt his doubts falling away from him when he was hiking in the mountains and came upon a frozen waterfall—in fact a trinity of a frozen waterfall, with three parts to it. “At that moment, I felt my resistance leave me. And it was a great sense of relief.
This practically unlimited supply of advertisers in a fluid marketplace appears to be a new economic model that may insulate Google from some of the dynamics of an economy built on mass and scarcity. Google has its own economy.
This was the winter of 2008/9. Work was ongoing to reinstate a tram system in the city. A lot of people couldn’t see the point of trams and many more disliked the disruption. Streets were closed off. There was almost a sense of ‘apartheid’ as the roadworks made it difficult to move from New Town to Old Town and vice versa. Added to which, the weather was fairly grim. And the banks looked ready to implode.
Mark my words—you will come some day to a craggy pass in the channel, where the whole of life’s stream will be broken up into whirl and tumult, foam and noise: either you will be dashed to atoms on crag points, or lifted up and borne on by some master-wave into a calmer current—as I am now.
The standard argument is that civilian deaths in Afghanistan were the regrettable consequence of military action that was needed to destroy Al Qaida bases and thus prevent further terrorist attacks. But this is a spurious argument since it is obvious that Al Qaida is a decentralised network. The counterargument – that bombing Afghanistan has made it more likely that terrorists will attack – is equally plausible. Most of the September nth hijackers were from Saudi Arabia,
A Guardian investigation concluded that between 10,000 and 20,000 people died as an 'indirect' result of the US bombing, that is, through hunger, cold and disease as people were forced to flee the massive aerial assault. An estimate by Professor Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire, suggests that between 3,125 and 3,620 Afghan civilians were killed by US bombing up to July 2002.3
1. TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation. 2. SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation. 3. ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time. 4. RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve. 5. FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing. 6. INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions. 7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you...
The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim-for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives -is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.
Let me tell you something you haven’t learned yet, something you learn only by living awhile. As you get older, you find that life begins to wear you down. Doesn’t matter who you are or what you do, it happens. Experience, time, events—they all conspire against you to steal away your energy, to erode your confidence, to make you question things you wouldn’t have given a second thought to when you were young. It happens gradually, a chipping away that you don’t even notice at first, and then one day it’s there. You wake up and you just don’t have the fire anymore.” He smiled...
Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality—the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.
There’s a lot of dirty theology out there, the religious counterpart to dirty politics and dirty business, I suppose. You might call it spiritual pornography—a kind of for-profit exploitative nakedness. It’s found in many of the same places as physical pornography (the Internet and cable TV for starters), and it promises similar things: instant intimacy, fantasy and make-believe, private voyeurism and vicarious experience, communion without commitment. That’s certainly not what we’re after in these pages. No, we’re after a lost treasure as old as the story of the Garden of Eden: the...
All right,” he said. “Since you asked, Webmind is an emergent quantum-computational system based on a stable null-sigma condensate that resists decoherence thanks to constructive feedback loops.” He turned to the blackboard, scooped up a piece of chalk, and began writing rapidly. “See,” he said, “using Dirac notation, if we let Webmind’s default conscious state be represented by a bra of phi and a ket of psi, then this would be the einselected basis.” His chalk flew across the board again. “Now, we can get the vector basis of the total combined Webmind alpha-state consciousness...
The first symptom of the trouble appeared when Madison studied Hamilton’s proposal for the funding of the domestic debt. On the one hand, Hamilton’s recommendation looked straightforward: All citizens who owned government securities should be reimbursed at par—that is, the full value of the government’s original promise. But many original holders of the securities, mainly veterans of the American Revolution who had received them as pay for their service in the war, had then sold them at a fraction of their original value to speculators. What’s more, the release of Hamilton’s plan produced...
the Church of Rome, formerly the most holy of all Churches, has become the most lawless den of thieves, the most shameless of all brothels, the very kingdom of sin, death, and hell; so that not even antichrist, if he were to come, could devise any addition to its wickedness.
The Hopi Indians thought that the world’s religions each contained one spiritual thread, and that these threads are always seeking each other, wanting to join. When all the threads are finally woven together they will form a rope that will pull us out of this dark cycle of history and into the next realm.
I never changed after that. I sought for nothing in the one great source of change which is humanity. And even in my love and absorption with the beauty of the world, I sought to learn nothing that could be given back to humanity. I drank of the beauty of the world as a vampire drinks. I was satisfied. I was filled to the brim. But I was dead. And I was changeless.
Starting isn’t like that. Starting something is not an event; it’s a series of events. You decide to walk to Cleveland. So you take a first step in the right direction. That’s starting. You spend the rest of the day walking toward Cleveland, one step at a time, picking your feet up and putting them down. At the end of the day, twenty miles later, you stop at a hotel. And what happens the next morning? Either you quit the project or you start again, walking to Cleveland. In fact, every step is a new beginning. Sure, you’re closer than you were yesterday or last week, but you’re still...
There’s a reason you probably haven’t heard much about this aspect of the heartland. This kind of blight can’t be easily blamed on the usual suspects like government or counterculture or high-hat urban policy. The villain that did this to my home state wasn’t the Supreme Court or Lyndon Johnson, showering dollars on the poor or putting criminals back on the street. The culprit is the conservatives’ beloved free-market capitalism, a system that, at its most unrestrained, has little use for smalltown merchants or the agricultural system that supported the small towns in the first place....
Imperialism and exploitation,” he wrote, “spheres of influence, trade barriers, unequal distribution of the world's goods, starvation in the midst of plenty, slums with gold coasts next door, poverty supporting luxury: These are marks of an unChristian world.
Lobster-both-ways is popular tonight. The preparation is easy enough. Take a two-pound lobster. Kill it with a sharp chef’s knife straight between the eyes. Remove the claw and knuckle meat. Steam for five minutes, chop into salad with aioli, celery, and lots of shallots and chives. Chill. Reserve the tail until ordered. Paint with herb-infused oil, season with kosher salt and fresh ground pepper, grill for two or three minutes until it’s just cooked through. Serve with spicy organic greens.
Well, I don’t. Not absolutely. But adopting "making money’’ as the goal of a manufacturing organization looks like a pretty good assumption. Because, for one thing, there isn’t one item on that list that’s worth a damn if the company isn’t making money.
While they go get the others, I figure out the details. The system I’ve set up is intended to "process’’ matches. It does this by moving a quantity of match sticks out of their box, and through each of the bowls in succession. The dice determine how many matches can be moved from one bowl to the next. The dice represent the capacity of each resource, each bowl; the set of bowls are my dependent events, my stages of production. Each has exactly the same capacity as the others, but its actual yield will fluctuate somewhat.
There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost every attachment, that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all BEGIN freely--a slight preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement. In nine cases out of ten a women had better show MORE affection than she feels. Bingley likes your sister undoubtedly; but he may never do more than like her, if she does not help him on.
We are all powerless to heal ourselves. Research shows that self-help statements have been found to be ineffective and even harmful by making some people with low self-esteem feel even worse about themselves in the long term. As a matter of fact, positive self-statements frequently end up reinforcing and strengthening one’s original negative self-perception they were trying to change.
educational television had a dramatic effect on relational aggression. The more the kids watched, the crueler they’d be to their classmates. This correlation was 2.5 times higher than the correlation between violent media and physical aggression.
The real world just doesn’t offer up as easily the carefully designed pleasures, the thrilling challenges, and the powerful social bonding afforded by virtual environments. Reality doesn’t motivate us as effectively. Reality isn’t engineered to maximize our potential. Reality wasn’t designed from the bottom up to make us happy.
Every novel is brand-new. It’s never been written before in the history of the world. At the same time, it’s merely the latest in a long line of narratives—not just novels, but narratives generally—since humans began telling stories to themselves and each other.
I thought, Hey, maybe these people shouldn’t be making up holidays to drink more. Maybe if they drank less they might be able to title their newspaper articles more specifically. For example, I would title this last article “Drunk Driver Hits Drunk Walker Drunkety-Drunk I’m So Drunk.
But there is one more reason to protect other species. One seldom if ever mentioned. Perhaps we are the first to talk and think and build and aspire, but we may not be the last. Others may follow us in this adventure. Some day we may be judged by just how well we served, when alone we were Earth’s caretakers.
THE MALE JOURNEY t some point in time, a man needs to embark on a risky -journey. It's a necessary adventure that takes him into uncertainty, and it almost always involves some form of difficulty or failure. On this journey the man learns to trust God more than he trusts a sense of right and wrong or his own sense of self-worth.
It is an emotional and an enchanted place. If the study of the conscious mind highlights the importance of reason and analysis, study of the unconscious mind highlights the importance of passions and perception.
The Power of Less is perfect for achieving goals: Limit yourself to fewer goals, and you’ll achieve more. At the same time, we’ll look at ways to narrow your focus on your projects, so that you can complete them more effectively and move forward on your goals. We’ll apply limitations to our projects to increase our effectiveness.
As the wine went down in the bottles, patriotism arose in the three men. And when the wine was gone they went down the hill arm in arm for comradeship and safety, and they walked into Monterey. In front of an enlistment station they cheered loudly for America and dared Germany to do her worst. They howled menaces at the German Empire until the enlistment sergeant awakened and put on his uniform and came into the street to silence them. He remained to enlist them.
All around, grown men were getting out of cars and shoving at each other like fifteen-year-olds, the bunch of juiced-up, armchair quarterbacks ready to peanut-gallery it up: The closest they were going to get to the octagon was standing on the outside of the chicken wire looking in.
This book might also be seen as “a Christian primer.” A primer teaches us how to read. Reading is not just about learning to recognize and pronounce words, but also about how to hear and understand them. This book’s purpose is to help us to read, hear, and inwardly digest Christian language without preconceived understandings getting in the way.
What branch do you want to go in?” “I don’ give a god-damn,” said Pilon jauntily. “I guess we need men like you in the infantry.” And Pilon was written so. He turned then to Big Joe, and the Portagee was getting sober. “Where do you want to go?” “I want to go home,” Big Joe said miserably. The sergeant put him in the infantry too.
But I’m old now and Ward has made himself rich and powerful. He has the resources to ensure that one day he’ll perfect his standardising system and if that happens, instead of a thousand Wards there will be a hundred thousand, a million, a billion. He’ll grow exponentially until there’s nothing and no one else left. Just Ward, Ward, Ward in every house, in every town and every city, in every country in the world. Forever.
But this is not difficult, O Athenians! to escape death; but it is much more difficult to avoid depravity, for it runs swifter than death. And now I, being slow and aged, am overtaken by the slower of the two; but my accusers, being strong and active, have been overtaken by the swifter, wickedness. And now I depart, condemned by you to death; but they condemned by truth, as guilty of iniquity and injustice: and I abide my sentence, and so do they. These things, perhaps, ought so to be, and I think that they are for the best.
Image perception makes a big difference. That's one of the things I tell entrepreneurs today. Fine, focus on products, focus on customers and all that good stuff - that's necessary. But the image that you project is also key. Don't forget that.
with few apparent connections to Afghanistan as such, but there were no calls to bomb Riyadh (imagine if the hijackers had been Iraqi). Rather, Saudi Arabia is a favoured ally in the 'war against terrorism'. It is obvious that at stake here are US geopolitical interests (discussed further below), more than concerns to prevent future terrorism.
The usual fiction – that the war would involve precision targeting and the careful avoidance of civilian deaths – was stated by Tony Blair at the beginning of the war. After similar bombing campaigns against Yugoslavia and Iraq, Blair was by now acting as virtual White House spokesperson, providing the pretence of an 'international coalition' in what was clearly a US war. This role was more important than Britain's military contribution, which in the early days of the bombing campaign was token and probably of no military value. The British army did later prove useful, however, when it was...
Ah, Antonio, it IS the noblest sport that ever was. I would give a year of my life to see it. Is the bull always killed?" "Yes. Sometimes a bull is timid, finding himself in so strange a place, and he stands trembling, or tries to retreat. Then everybody despises him for his cowardice and wants him punished and made ridiculous; so they hough him from behind, and it is the funniest thing in the world to see him hobbling around on his severed legs; the whole vast house goes into hurricanes of laughter over it; I have laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks to see it. When he has furnished...
I believe that the truth is the only force that will set us free. I have hope, not in the tangible or in what I can personally accomplish, but in the faith that battling evil, cruelty, and injustice allows us to retain our identity, a sense of meaning and ultimately our freedom. Perhaps in our lifetimes we will not succeed. Perhaps things will only get worse. But this does not invalidate our efforts. Rebellion—which is different from revolution because it is perpetual alienation from power rather than the replacement of one power system with another—should be our natural state. And faith,...
Three years with Claudia had taught Ruso that when a woman said something did not matter and refused to tell you what it was, it usually mattered a great deal—to her, if not to you. Frequently her way of punishing you for not knowing what it was in the first place was to refuse to tell you until you gave up asking. This was her cue to accuse you of not caring about her, otherwise you would have known what she wanted you to know without having to be told. Finally, if you were lucky, she would explain the latest way in which you had failed her expectations. If you were not lucky, she would explain...
Patrick opens his arms about three feet wide and, with one finger pointing up on each hand, tries to show the scope of this thing. I notice that he doesn’t look at his hands as he does this, but at the wall behind me. It suddenly occurs to me that when people describe size this way, they’re relying on perspective to help them. He’s not saying ‘It’s this big.’ He’s saying ‘It would look this big from here if it was over there.
how irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience—so irrelevant that the emotional structure of religious experiences can be transplanted to completely godless contexts with little of the impact lost—and when he had also, almost as an afterthought, included as an appendix thirty-six arguments for the existence of God, with rebuttals, his claim being that the most thorough demolition of these arguments would make little difference to the felt qualities of religious experience,
However, you cannot force smokers to stop, and although all smokers secretly want to, until they are ready to do so a pact just creates additional pressure, which increases their desire to smoke. This turns them into secret smokers, which further increases the feeling of dependency.
I think people get excited about their perspective on sexuality because it gives them the feeling that, their failures notwithstanding, if they take a hard stand on what they consider to be godly, maybe God will be more merciful to them.
The polarization is such that the conservatives on this side have their prayer meeting and their choir meeting. And the liberals on this side have their prayer meeting and their choir meeting, and the two sides never get together and talk about it. The result is the tearing apart of the fabric of the body of Christ.
The practical consequence of both of the teachings noted is to encourage homosexual promiscuity. Church members can engage in many short-term liaisons without raising questions about their standing in the church. We tend not to pry into one another's private lives. But if a man brings another man to church with him regularly, if they give the same address and show signs of mutual affection, then there is likely to be a scandal. The dominant effect of church teaching is to encourage secret, temporary liaisons without commitment and to discourage long-term fidelity.
The moment you stop smoking, everything that goes wrong in your life is blamed on the fact that you’ve stopped smoking. Now when you have a mental block, instead of just getting on with it you start to say, ‘If only I could light up now, it would solve my problem.’ You then start to question your decision to quit smoking.
probation. Jesus Christ was and is Jehovah, the God of Adam and of Noah, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Israel, the God at whose instance the prophets of the ages have spoken, the God of all nations, and He who shall yet reign on earth as King of kings and Lord of lords.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints affirms her possession of divine authority for the use of the sacred name, Jesus Christ, as the essential part of her distinctive designation. In view of this exalted claim, it is pertinent to inquire as to what special or particular message the Church has to give to the world concerning the Redeemer and Savior of the race, and as to what she has to say in justification of her solemn affirmation, or in vindication of her exclusive name and title. As we proceed with our study, we shall find that among the specific teachings of the Church respecting...
I believe the message in the hymn “Rise Up, O Men of God” (Hymns, no. 324) is a plea, a call, a divine invitation for us to rise above the telestial tinsel of our time; to deny ourselves of ungodliness and clothe ourselves in the mantle of holiness; to reach and stretch and grasp for that spiritual direction and sacred empowerment promised to the Lord’s agents, to those charged to act in the name of our Principal, Jesus Christ; and to point the way to salvation and deliverance and peace in a world that finds itself enshrouded in darkness, a world that yearns for spiritual leadership.
Points to Ponder 1. What does it mean to “grow up unto the Lord” (Helaman 3:21)? 2. How often do I think about what kind of man I want to be? How often do I think about what others will remember most about me? What kind of priesthood legacy am I leaving? 3. The Prophet Lehi pleaded with his sons repeatedly to “Awake! and arise from the dust” (2 Nephi 1:14). In what ways do I need to wake up? How is it that I have been called to arise from the dust? (see D&C 113:7–10). 4. Peter was counseled by the Master at the Last Supper to become converted and then to strengthen his brethren (Luke...
Lehi’s message, given some six centuries before the coming of the Messiah, seems very applicable to our day and time: “O that ye would awake; awake from a deep sleep, yea, even from the sleep of hell, and shake off the awful chains by which ye are bound. . . . Awake! and arise from the dust, and hear the words of a trembling parent. . . . Arise from the dust, my sons, and be men, and be determined in one mind and in one heart, united in all things, that ye may not come down into captivity. . . . Awake, my sons; put on the armor of righteousness” (2 Nephi 1:13, 14, 21, 23; emphasis...
A man’s life was five dogs long, Cortland believed. The first was the one that taught you. The second was the one you taught. The third and fourth were the ones you worked. The last was the one that outlived you. That was the winter dog. Cortland’s winter dog had no name. He thought of it only as the scarecrow dog…
That the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.
When you can do that, little Wren, when you can accept the wearing down and the eroding, then you can do anything. How did I manage to keep going out nights? I just told myself I didn’t matter all that much—that those in here mattered more. You know something? It’s not so hard really. You just have to get past the fear.
He had a collection of science-fiction films on DVD and Blu-ray discs, and although he said he’d seen most of them before, Caitlin was surprised to discover how many of the cases were still shrink-wrapped. “Why’d you buy them if you weren’t going to watch them?” she asked. He looked at the tall, thin cabinets that contained the movies and seemed to ponder the question. “My childhood was on sale,” he said at last, “so I bought it.
One day Augustus asked Newt to ride along with him, much to Newt’s surprise. In the morning they saw a grizzly, but the bear was far upwind and didn’t scent them. It was a beautiful day—no clouds in the sky. Augustus rode with his big rifle propped across the saddle—he was in the highest of spirits. They rode ahead of the herd some fifteen miles or more, and yet when they stopped to look back they could still see the cattle, tiny black dots in the middle of the plain, with the southern horizon still far behind them.
and line of cases. Justice Byron R. "Whizzer" White, a JFK appointee, dissented, calling Doe an act of "raw judicial power," as it took these decisions from the states and enshrined their determination in the Supreme Court's reasoning.
Mr. Lockery—my biology teacher—says if dinosaurs were magically brought forward in time today, we’d have nothing to worry about. Dogs, wolves, and bears would make short work of tyrannosaurs.” She nodded at Schrödinger, who was now padding across the floor in the opposite direction. “Big cats, too. They’re faster, tougher, and brighter than anything that existed seventy million years ago. Everything is always ramping up, always escalating.
Eisenhower has been much criticized for his failure publicly to endorse the Court's decision. But he felt that doing so would set an undesirable precedent. If a president endorsed decisions he agreed with, might he feel compelled to oppose decisions he did not agree with? And what would that do to the rule of law? "The Supreme Court has spoken and I am sworn to uphold ... the constitutional processes.... I will obey."3
American soldiers were dying in frigid Korea. One of our greatest generals told us that the president and his team were not trying to win. And some strident voices were saying that that was because they didn't want to win,
long middle finger resembling a twig that it could use for probing for grubs. There is a telling example of convergent evolution when an unrelated species (the Long-Fingered Possum from Papua New Guinea) devised a similar strategy to address the same problem. (Douglas was very intrigued by the implications of convergence. What need is there to posit a designer if the operation of random forces, constrained by the reality of the world, produces the same elegant solution, as if there were no choice in the matter?) We monkeys have
It's at moments like these in a game that the essentials of his character are exposed: narrow, ineffectual, stupid—and morally so. The game becomes an extended metaphor of character defect. Every error he makes is so profoundly, so irritatingly typical of himself, instantly familiar, like a signature, like a tissue scar or some deformation in a private place.
Becoming drunk is a journey that generally elates him in the early stages—he's good company, expansive, mischievous and fun, the famous old poet, almost as happy listening as talking. But once the destination is met, once established up there on that unsunny plateau, a fully qualified drunk, the nastier muses, the goblins of aggression, paranoia, self-pity take control. The expectation now is that an evening with John will go bad somehow, unless everyone around is prepared to toil at humouring and flattering and hours of frozen-faced listening. No one will be.
They were not bound to regard with affection a thing that could not sympathise with one amongst them; a heterogeneous thing, opposed to them in temperament, in capacity, in propensities; a useless thing, incapable of serving their interest, or adding to their pleasure; a noxious thing, cherishing the germs of indignation at their treatment, of contempt of their judgment. I know that had I been a sanguine, brilliant, careless, exacting, handsome, romping child—though equally dependent and friendless—Mrs. Reed would have endured my presence more complacently; her children would have entertained...
Yet, when this cherished volume was now placed in my hand—when I turned over its leaves, and sought in its marvellous pictures the charm I had, till now, never failed to find—all was eerie and dreary; the giants were gaunt goblins, the pigmies malevolent and fearful imps, Gulliver a most desolate wanderer in most dread and dangerous regions. I closed the book, which I dared no longer peruse, and put it on the table, beside the untasted tart.
he saw in Populism the first glimmerings of some of the great intellectual upheavals of the twentieth century—naturalism, muckraking, and hard-hitting social satire—which would eventually topple the genteel tradition of the nineteenth century. In a peculiar way, Parrington seemed to think, Kansas was one of the birthplaces of literary modernism.
In 1991, though, began an uprising that would propel those reptilian Republicans from a tiny splinter group into the state’s dominant political faction, that would reduce Kansas Democrats to third-party status, and that would wreck what remained of the state’s progressive legacy. We are accustomed to thinking of the backlash as a phenomenon of the seventies (the busing riots, the tax revolt) or the eighties (the Reagan revolution); in Kansas the great move to the right was a story of the nineties, a story of the present.
I wanted to kiss her, she was beautiful again to me. But I dared not risk it. It wasn't only that I would have frightened her, it was that the desire to kill her was almost overpowering. Some fierce purely male instinct in me wanted to claim her now simply because I had claimed her in another way before.
I tried to be as inconspicuous as possible as I lay the sausage against my ear. Abruptly, my cell phone went dead. A drop of grease dribbled into the dead center of my ear, creeping like a worm down onto my neck and below the collar of my shirt. A group of men and women in business suits walked by, swerving to avoid me. Across the street, a homeless-looking guy was staring at me, curious. Yep, this was pretty much rock bottom. As I was about to reach for a napkin and at least get my money's worth by eating the bratwurst while still hot, I heard it. "Dave? Can you hear me?
That Crawford Tilinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was a mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action; despair, if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed.
I can wield any type of saw out there, and I have to do this, even if it takes me years. That I can even think in terms of a future, is a miracle. Why? Because two and a half years ago, when I was thirty-two years old, I had a heart attack. I used to be the size of a small, depressed cow. The heart attack led to my stomach strangling operation, and I lost 170 pounds. Now I am less than half myself, in more ways than one.
I sprinted into the conference room as my boss, and the owner of this law firm, Cherie Poitras, grabbed her client around the waist, a woman dressed to the nines in high heels and a cream suit. The woman had actually crawled up on the conference table and lunged for her husband. Cherie and I wrestled her off, but not before the husband’s attorney put him in a headlock to keep him from strangling his soon-to-be ex-wife. Even in a headlock, the husband, a local politician who stressed the sanctity of marriage and traditional values, struggled to get at his wife, his arms and legs flailing around...
There is an uncharacteristic radicalism to Lewis’s further suggestion that if we can find “even one reader to whom the cheap little book with its double columns and the lurid daub on its cover had been a lifelong delight, who had read and reread it, who would notice, and object, if a single word were changed, then, however little we could see in it ourselves and however it was despised by our friends and colleagues, we should not dare to put it beyond the pale.
Less than a decade after the Great Exhibition, iron as a structural material was finished—which makes it slightly odd that the most iconic structure of the entire century, about to rise over Paris, was made of that doomed material. I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time.
Soul ties. The thing that can make you hear an old-school slow jam and think of somebody you haven’t seen in years. Soul ties. The thing that makes old people who’ve been together for years finish each other’s sentences. Don’t you wish mama had told you when you were young that, when you lie with someone, you lie not just with her body but also with her soul? And whatever condition the other person’s soul is in, you are guaranteed to take a piece with you—whether you want to or not. Instead of being amazed at her booty, you should have focused on her mind.
FORGIVE FAILURE. The corollary to accountability is forgiveness. Things go wrong all the time in relationships, and the healthiest ones move on from them, leaving behind grudges and blame. This is not to say that failure is accepted; rather, that it is acknowledged and understood.
I stand and grab a hefty bottle of perfume from the bathroom shelf and return to the bedroom door. It’s not much of a weapon, I know, but it’s heavy and square, and hitting someone over the head with a glass brick has got to be better than bitch-slapping them.
Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies? The result was that once again nearly all (93 percent) agreed, even though no real reason, no new information, was added to justify their compliance. Just as the “cheep-cheep” sound of turkey chicks triggered an automatic mothering response from maternal turkeys—even when it emanated from a stuffed polecat—so, too, did the word “because” trigger an automatic compliance response
Stop doing stuff that doesn’t help you reach your goals. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? It’s a shame almost no one does it. The most common way we work more and do less is by working on the wrong stuff. We spend our time doing, doing, doing, even if the doing has nothing to do with our goals, business, or life.
little children never get frozen by their selfishness. Like the disciples, they come just as they are, totally self-absorbed. They seldom get it right. As parents or friends, we know all that. In fact, we are delighted (most of the time!) to find out what is on their little hearts. We don’t scold them for being self-absorbed or fearful. That is just who they are.
Okay, so there’s just you. Your goals, your career, your crew, your prospects, and your God. All together, chillin’. Before the house, the apartment, the kids, the boyfriend, the wedding, the night you crossed over with your frat brothers, there’s that pivotal point of asking your heart, “Who am I, really? What do I really like? Do I want to change for someone else? Is my soul mate right now, somewhere, finishing this sentence and completing my thoughts?
People who work in offices are crazy, they create an environment they hate, write rules they want to break, cast each other in roles they despise. It’s like they’re sixth formers in an end of term drama acting out the agony of everything they fear most in their life but they forget to end the play.
The mythology of Doctor Who has built into it the continuation, evolution, and longevity of the character’s mythical qualities through his regenerative process. I have to agree with Lou Anders, when he states: “Doctor Who is the truest expression of Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces ever conceived. The idea of an alien, come down to earth, repeatedly dying and resurrecting for the salvation of others is as close to the perpetual reenactment of the eternal Hero’s Journey as you can hope to find.”(6)
Jesus opens his arms to his needy children and says, “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28, NASB). The criteria for coming to Jesus is weariness. Come overwhelmed with life. Come with your wandering mind. Come messy. What does it feel like to be weary? You have trouble concentrating. The problems of the day are like claws in your brain. You feel pummeled by life. What does heavy-laden feel like? Same thing. You have so many problems you don’t even know where to start. You can’t do life on your own anymore. Jesus wants you to come to him...
But Marisa already knew the answer and it was too late for recrimination. The chance of even a rational discussion of the problem was forever shut out of Mama’s brain. A brutal bastard was steadily sucking the intelligence and the very life from the mother who had once been witty, wise and loving. The scourge had a name Marisa had come to equate with hell: Alzheimer’s Disease.
Even on especially hard days, I began to notice him everywhere, setting a table before me in the presence of my enemies, pursuing me with his love. Both the child and the cynic walk through the valley of the shadow of death. The cynic focuses on the darkness; the child focuses on the Shepherd.
I have missed more than nine thousand shots in my career. I have lost almost three hundred games. On twenty-six occasions, I have been entrusted to take the game-winning shot . . . and missed. And I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. —MICHAEL JORDAN
When I first learned to drive and I bought petrol I went to great lengths to trickle the final drops into the petrol tank so it cost a round amount of money like £10. Now I try and spend £19.87 or £20.04 or some other amount that I hope will disturb the cashier’s sense of neatness and uniformity.
I argue here and throughout this book that if we engage students in real writing tasks and we use technology in such a way that it complements their innate need to find purposes and audiences for their work, we can have them engaged in a digital writing process that focuses first on the writer, then on the writing, and lastly on the technology” (8).
researchers discovered that people who have just consumed caffeinated drinks were more likely to be swayed by arguments about various controversial topics.55 In short, good evidence that there really is no such thing as a free lunch or an innocent cup of coffee.
Blame yourself when things go wrong, and give credit to others when things go right. The process of giving other people credit is what it takes to build a team.” Sandberg, one of America’s great team builders, knows exactly what it takes to win.
Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task; it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction – purpose and dignity – that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion a year, but that Gross National Product … counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts...
Mawu felt her face where the still-fresh scar had just been opened up again. She examined the blood on her fingers as if it weren’t her own. Sir returned to the table and a servant slipped through the side door and passed him a wet cloth to wipe the blood from his hands.
Cabinet is a conscious, explicit attempt to portray the Doctor himself as myth. “He’s a mischief, a leprechaun, a boojum,” says one character, bookseller and collector of incunabula, Syme. “The Doctor is a myth. He’s straight out of Old English folklore, typical trickster figure really.”29 Neither part of an ongoing narrative, nor specifically located within the series’ past, Cabinet is in a position to challenge the portrayal of the Doctor.
When I look back on my life I come to one simple conclusion: there exists an intelligent, loving Presence in the Cosmos that will ultimately have its desire for relationship with us fulfilled; even our arrogant dismissal of its existence will not stop it in its tracks. The Enlightenment's god, the great idol of free will, lies smashed in pieces in its wake. The jealous Presence patiently draws us homeward like some gigantic electromagnetic beam. The Death Star in reverse. This divinity is, I believe, the 'Abba' of Jesus, a transcendence that will not be boxed in by religious misrepresentation...
The town stood witness to her fall As she crashed to the earth Exposed and utterly vulnerable Her secret lives, lies and truths Stained her skin and lay in mounds at her feet Her foes sat in judgment as a jury, But love came . . . with gentle hands Love dried her tears Love covered her shame Love sheltered her with compassion Love accepted her anyway Love embraced her Love welcomed her home.
Asking why you are doing something serves as a check and always moves your focus back to the big picture. Asking why helps you find out if your actions have come unglued from your goals. In theory, you could do this as often as every day, reviewing your to-do list to make sure it ties to your bigger goals. In my perfect fantasy world, I check my actions against my goals every day. In real life, once a week or once every other week is more realistic.
When you feel dissatisfied, or when you’re working too hard, the problem could be a mismatch between your goals and actions. Write out your goal ladder and make sure it all lines up. First start with your actions and ask “Why?” to find your subgoals. Keep asking why until you map up to your larger-level goals, at least two or three levels.
the automatic, fixed-action patterns of these animals work very well the great majority of the time. For example, because only healthy, normal turkey chicks make the peculiar sound of baby turkeys, it makes sense for mother turkeys to respond maternally to that single “cheep-cheep” noise.
Many of your opponents will put a great deal of emphasis on three low cards to a straight. These hands are very strong and they do scoop a lot of pots. However, they do best in multiway pots when the cards needed to fill the open ends are very live and when these hands
But here’s a critical point—more open decision making processes also typically require open information sharing. If you are going to involve more people in the process, they have to have the right information on which to base their decisions.
We know that to become a Christian we shouldn’t try to fix ourselves up, but when it comes to praying we completely forget that. We’ll sing the old gospel hymn, “Just as I Am,” but when it comes to praying, we don’t come just as we are. We try, like adults, to fix ourselves up. Private, personal prayer is one of the last great bastions of legalism. In order to pray like a child, you might need to unlearn the nonpersonal, nonreal praying that you’ve been taught.
We are all powerless to heal ourselves. Research shows that self-help statements have been found to be ineffective and even harmful by making some people with low self-esteem feel even worse about themselves in the long term.39 As a matter of fact, positive self-statements frequently end up reinforcing and strengthening one’s original negative self-perception they were trying to change.
The origins of Aragon's independent history, and of the fundamental characteristics which differentiated it so sharply from Castile, are to be found in the long struggle of medieval Spain against Islam. The Arabs had invaded the Iberian peninsula in 711, and conquered it within seven years. What was lost in seven years it took seven hundred to regain.
The parable about the Good Samaritan tells how a Samaritan rescues a man who is mugged and beaten by robbers on the Jericho—Jerusalem road, a notoriously dangerous stretch of highway. To understand how this story must have shocked the Jews, imagine someone telling a story about “The Good Nazi.” The Jews and Samaritans hated one another.
We are all powerless to heal ourselves. Research shows that self-help statements have been found to be ineffective and even harmful by making some people with low self-esteem feel even worse about themselves in the long term.39 As a matter of fact, positive self-statements frequently end up reinforcing and strengthening one’s original negative self-perception they were trying to change.40
They were the supreme representatives of the Catalan nation, acting as spokesmen for it in any conflict with the Crown, and seeing that the laws or ‘constitutions’ of the Principality were observed to the letter; and at times they were, in all but name, the Principality's government.
The kingdom of Aragon possessed an official known as the Justicia, for whom no exact equivalent is to be found in any country of western Europe. An Aragonese noble appointed by the Crown, the Justicia was appointed to see that the laws of the land were not infringed by royal or baronial officials, and that the subject was protected against any exercise of arbitrary power. The office of Justicia by no means worked perfectly, and by the late fifteenth century it was coming to be regarded as virtually hereditary in the family of Lanuza, which had close ties with the Crown; but none the less, the...
For invalid user name and password combinations, the service should return a 400 HTTP status code, which means that the server received a “bad request.” The service could also use the 401 (“unauthorized”) response code, but that code specifies that authentication credentials need to be in the request header, which is not quite what is required.
The next step in the process is to measure the impact that these increases in reach have on your number of new transacting customers. The secret to a company’s reach strategy lies in the program’s ability not only to acquire fans, followers, subscribers and connections, but to convert them through its use of social media into transacting customers.
You see, the thing about working with pirates is that they know what they are doing. They already know more than you do because they are sailing and raiding. They are the experts in your organization, and you need to get them on your side, not turn them against you. Here is how to deal with a pirate ship model in ten simple steps: 1. Respect the pirates. (They know how to execute.) 2. Invite the pirates to the table. Recognize their wins. 3. Ask the pirates to report on what they see and hear. 4. Ask the pirates to report on their wins and losses. 5. Ask the pirates how you can help them win more....
Ultimately, the purpose of a certification is to establish a particular level of proficiency in a discipline. Unfortunately, “social media” in and of itself, is not a discipline. Digital crisis management, on the other hand, is. So are digital customer service and online community management. This means that a certification program that focuses on social media without addressing each specific business function adapted to social media won’t end up certifying anyone in much of anything.
Myth Number 4: Social Media Is the Shiny New Thing. Two Years from Now, That Bubble Will Burst Yes, it is the shiny new thing. No, two years from now, that bubble will not burst. There is no bubble. What social media represents is an evolution in the field of communications, just as the Internet and mobility before it. The tools will change, the platforms will evolve, but the way in which people communicate with other people through digital networks and electronic devices has been fundamentally transformed through the development of social media. We did not grow tired of the telephone, of the...
Rome, on the other hand, lost—suffering on that one day more battle deaths than the United States during the entire course of the war in Vietnam, suffering more dead soldiers than any other army on any single day of combat in the entire course of Western military history.
The instant the old folks had entered their codes and the Harmony program had begun to sing, suicide disappeared from human society. Nearly all battles ceased. The individual was no longer a unit. The entire social system was the unit. By losing its sense of self and self-awareness, society had been freed from the pain it suffered because its systems had relied on imperfect humans, arriving for the first time at a perfect bliss. I am a part of the system, as you are part of the system. No one felt any pain about that any longer. There was no “me” to feel pain. I had been replaced by a single...
Listen. In every office you hear the threads of love and joy and fear and guilt, the cries for celebration and reassurance, and somehow you know that connecting those threads is what you are supposed to do and business takes care of itself.
The great differentiator going forward, the next frontier for exponential growth, the place where individuals and organizations will find a new and sustainable competitive edge, resides in the area of human connectivity.
Does doing something old with new technology mean that I’m teaching with technology and that I’m doing so in a way as to really improve the reading and writing skills of the students in my classroom?” (2007, 214). Her answer, as well as mine, would be no. When we simply bring a traditional mind-set to literacy practices, and not a mind-set that understands new literacies (an idea developed by Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, which I elaborate on later) into the process of digital writing, we cannot make the substantive changes to our teaching that need to happen in order to embrace the...
Inside the opponent’s 45-yard line, facing anything less than fourth and eight, teams are better off going for it than punting. Inside the opponent’s 33-yard line, they are better off going for it on anything less than fourth and 11.* Regardless of field position, on anything less than fourth and five, teams are always better off going for it.
Here are the facts. Coronary artery disease is the leading killer of men and women in Western civilization. In the United States alone, more than half a million people die of it every single year. Three times that number suffer known heart attacks. And approximately three million more have “silent” heart attacks, experiencing minimal symptoms and having no idea, until well after the damage is done, that they are in mortal danger. In the course of a lifetime, one out of every two American men and one out of every three American women will have some form of the disease.
There are two main reasons why this assumption is wrong. First, once basic material needs have been met, there is very little evidence that pursuing financial prosperity generates much extra happiness for individuals or for nations. Second, by blindly pursuing economic growth, we are creating a whole set of social and environmental issues that will undermine the potential happiness and well-being of future generations.
Try not to take it personally if the mother criticizes you or tells you to stop doing something that you expected to be helpful. Just say, “Sorry,” and stop doing it. Don’t try to explain why you did it or express frustration with her. She is really saying that labor is so difficult right now that nothing helps. You are the safest person for her to lash out at. Later, she will probably apologize.
THE TRUTH ABOUT PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION • American fifteen-year-olds rank thirty-fifth out of fifty-seven developed countries in math and literacy. • 30 percent of public school students don’t graduate from high school. • Every day, 7,000 kids drop out of high school. • Of the 50 million children currently in public school, 15 million of them will drop out. • 25 percent of all public school math teachers did not major in mathematics or a math-related subject at a college or university. • Less than two-thirds of high school graduates are accepted to college every year. • One half...
Winners know what makes people tick by effectively tapping into our fears and aspirations. By listening very carefully and then repeating almost word-for-word exactly what they’ve heard, winners know how to articulate compelling needs—and products to satisfy those needs—that people didn’t even know they wanted.
designer can inject the most artistic flair. The word “ampersand” didn’t come into being until the nineteenth century. At that time & was customarily taught as the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet and pronounced “and.” When schoolchildren recited their ABCs, they concluded with the words “and, per se [i.e., by itself ], ‘and.’” This eventually became corrupted to “ampersand.” The symbol is a favorite of law and
Zawinski: Sometimes. I end up doing all the sysadmin crap, which I can't stand-I've never liked it. I enjoy working on XScreenSaver because in some ways screen savers-the actual display modes rather than the XScreenSaver framework-are the perfect program because they almost always start from scratch and they do something pretty and there's never a version 2.0. There's very rarely a bug in a screen saver. It crashes-oh, there's a divide-by-zero and you fix that.
Fitzpatrick: Back when I was doing Perl-even for people that knew Perl really well-I would recommend MJD's Higher-Order Per!. The book is really fun in that it starts somewhat simple and you're like, "Yeah, yeah, I know what a closure is." And then it just continues to fuck with your head. By the end of the book, you're just blown away.
Sweet allowed her pregnancy to get the better of her and simply sat down. Reenie’s lips set into a straight, emotionless line. Mawu no longer talked back, the words she did speak taking on an air of vapidity. Philip was chained at night, no longer trusted. So it was no wonder that Lizzie sought out the white woman then.
A popular management term used to describe efficiency is called "working smart." We are told that if we work smart instead of hard, we will be more productive. But if we do work "smart" then we are likely to have idle time, and if we are idle we will likely be thought of as being lazy or worthless.
Bits have unique properties, then, that we can use to our advantage: they’re super-small, super-fast, easily acquired and created and copied and shared in near-infinite quantity, protected from the ravages of time, and free from the limitations of distance and space. In practice, though, bits reveal several paradoxes: they’re weightless, but they weigh us down; they don’t take up any space, but they always seem to pile up; they’re created in an instant, but they can last forever; they move quickly, but they can waste our time.
AN IMPERIALIST POWER THAT ACTS ON ITS OWN REGARDLESS OF WHAT THE REST OF THE WORLD THINKS. 18–29 30–49 50–64 65+ Improper/Somewhat improper 86% 73 69 67 Somewhat proper/Proper 3 13 20 17 No other group we studied—not Democrats generally, not self-described progressives or libertarians, not readers of The New York Times—had a greater spread between the two extremes.
nothing knee-jerk about their politics. Two out of three of them say that abortion is “always” or “usually” morally wrong. They are far more likely than voters age thirty and over to identify themselves as politically “strictly independent.” In fact, more than any other generation I’ve tracked in my polling, Globals seem determined to find a middle ground on the hot-button issues of the day and to decide each one on a case by case basis, not because their party leaders are urging them in one direction or the other. I like to tell audiences that while First Globals might not be more...
By the term cult I mean nothing derogatory to any group so classified. A cult, as I define it, is any religious group which differs significantly in one or more respects as to belief or practice from those religious groups which are regarded as the normative expressions of religion in our total culture.
Grady’s a man of action who craves excitement and needs plenty of activity, and he’s seen precious little of either in the ten or so years he’s been our sheriff. Well, let’s just say that since Candi Heart came to town, he’s had plenty to keep him busy, what with the stream of crimes that follows her around. And then there’s the mystery surrounding the woman herself. Suffice to say, Candi’s not quite what she appears and leave it at that.
Instinct caused a woman who had once been so attractive to still attempt makeup and hairdos, Marisa guessed, but more often than not, the effort came off with Mama looking like a clown. Seeing it broke Marisa’s heart, but she didn’t interfere. Her mother didn’t know the difference and these days, it was rare for anyone but Marisa to see her. What little family they had seldom came and Mama’s friends in Agua Dulce, out of respect, were reluctant to gawk at her decline.
A curiosity . . . no, a need for a different kind of communion. One with people not of the mountain, but rather the outsiders of the Ridge. She couldn’t explain the call of Angel Ridge. Women before her, like her mother, had experienced the same longing, had tried to assimilate with the people below the mountain and had been cruelly rejected, returning to the mountain to live a singular existence.
Jesus says, “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:5). You see these dynamics when David arrives at King Saul’s camp, bringing food for his older brothers. David is surprised to hear Goliath taunting the Israelites and their God. He is shocked that no one has the courage to challenge Goliath and blurts out, “Who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?” (1 Samuel 17:26). David reacts to the split between Israel’s public faith and its battlefield...