Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish.
As George Bernard Shaw observed: "All great truths begin as blasphemies." Yet I have to say, the idea that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos does not seem terribly radical to me, nor does the notion that we could be receiving help from outside of our dimension.
Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
Also, in my bedroom, nobody minded if I kept the hall door half-open, allowing in enough light that I was not scared of the dark, and, just as important, allowing me to read secretly, after my bedtime, using the dim hallway light to read by, if I needed to. I always needed to.
Many phenomena - wars, plagues, sudden audits - have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for exhibit A.
Giving the kids a programming environment of any sort, whether it's a tool like Squeak or Scratch or Logo to write programs in a childish way - and I mean that in the most generous sense of the word, that is, playing with and building things - is one of the best ways to learn.
Companies cannot really see beyond their current customer base. They explicitly or implicitly do things to protect their current customers. And the last person to want real change is your customer. This is why most new ideas come from small companies that have nothing to lose.
Try asking for Nyx's help." "Nyx would not hear me." Kalona spoke so quietly that Shaunee almost didn't hear him. "she has not heard me for eons." "During those eons how many times did you ask for her help?" "Not once," he said "Then how do you know she's not listening to you?
I'm going to remember this, I told myself sternly. I'm going to remember how awful they made me feel today. So when I'm scared and alone and whatever else is going to happen to me starts to happen, I'm going to remember that nothing about be as bad as being stuck here.Nothing.
So we forgive each other?" The crooked smile climbs up one more time. "Again?" And I look right into his eyes, right into him as far as I can see, because I want him to hear me, I want him to hear me with everything I mean and feel and say. "Always," I say to him. "Every time.
You hear headlines from time to time about the Amazon rainforest disappearing at a greater or lesser rate.... The real story is that over time the rate has stayed just the same. Year after year, decade after decade, we have failed to stop or really even decrease deforestation.
What used to keep me up at night was the fact that I didn't know how I was going to pay the rent. Now that I can pay the rent, I'm worrying about people I care about, you know, the people I love. The little aches and pains of my children that I, my family. That's always first.
If you want physical peace, stop the struggle of life. Don't push the body beyond its fatigue point. Rest the body enough. Exercise it enough. Then let it be. ... If you want peace with others, don't fight them. Go your own way. Live your own life. If some walk with you, fine.
No matter what you do, no matter how stupid, dumb or damaging you judge it to be, there is a lesson to be learned from it. No matter what happens to you, no matter how unfair, inequitable or wrong, there's something you can take from the situation and use for your advancement.
Perhaps the most important reason to be skeptical of government inflation numbers is that the government, like a fox campaigning to guard a hen house, has many reasons to be disingenuous. As the world's largest debtor, the Federal Government is inflation's primary beneficiary.
The people who related to God best--Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah--treated him with startling familiarity. They talked to God as if he were sitting in a chair beside them, as one might talk to a counselor, a boss, a parent, or a lover. They treated him like a person.
I remeber asking a wise man, once . . . 'Why do Men fear the dark?' . . . 'Because darkness' he told me, 'is ignorance made visable.' 'And do Men despise ignorance?' I asked. 'No,' he said, 'they prize it above all things--all things!--but only so long as it remains invisible.
Parallel to our vast strides in technology, there is a dangerous rise in unemployment, foreclosures, and degrading education. Millions of people are stricken with hopelessness and strife. Sadly, in the name of progress we have polluted the air, water, soil and the food we eat.
I'd always had a hankering to write some old-school sword and sorcery. And there certainly are advantages to that particular form - for one thing, you're able to go all-out on the imaginative front, with a lot less concern for the usual unities of time and space and character.
Since the brain is unlike any other structure in the known universe, it seems reasonable to expect that our understanding of its functioning - if it can ever be achieved - will require approaches that are drastically different from the way we understand other physical systems.
"She was right about something else too," Dimitri said after a long pause. My back was to him, but there was a strange quality to his voice that made me turn around. "What's that?" I asked. "That I do still love you." With that one sentence, everything in the universe changed.
Really, it's my fault. It was there. A hundred times there. How often did I see it? I knew. It kept happening. Over and over, you'd say you were through with him...and over and over, I'd believe it...no matter what my eyes showed me. No matter what my heart told me. My. Fault.
Then it's settled," I said. "We'll do a dream conference call." That love and rapture faltered. "Wait. How is it settled? How did we go from me declaring my love for you to me being okay with a dream?" "It's Adrian Ivashkov logic. Don't try to understand it. Just roll with it.
I got into pastoring because of the art form. I started a church, but I felt the art form needed to be freed for all people. A particular religion over others was never interesting to me. I wanted to talk to people about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human.
It was no ape, neither was it a man. It was some shambling horror spawned in the mysterious, nameless jungles of the south, where strange life teemed in the reeking rot without the dominance of man, and drums thundered in temples that had never known the tread of a human foot.
Wherever you go in the galaxy, you can find a food business, a house-building business, a war business, a peace business, a governing business, and so forth. And, of course, a God business, which is called 'religion,' and which is a particularly reprehensible line of endeavor.
It's not the fledgling birds that are thrown out of the nest by their parents and made to fly; it's the parents who are made to get the hell out of cozy family nest by their teenage offspring. It's we who are made to be independent of them, crash-landing if we don't manage it.
With the enormous and steady increase in the volume of our literature, we must rely more and more upon sympathetic selection, judicious editing, and the indexer who knows where to exercise discretion. Any simpleton can write a book, but it requires high skill to make an index.
'Bless Me, Ultima' is quite autobiographical in the sense that I was writing a story about my childhood, my hometown where I grew up, Santa Rosa, New Mexico, on Old Highway 66 and the Pecos River. So a great deal of that environment, landscape, people, got thrown in the novel.
A lot of us have all sorts of ideas, and we select some rather than others and give expression to those... and some works of art are more successful than others. Some languish in obscurity and are never heard of again, while others form the foundation of a whole school of art.
I won't usually just sit down to write. I'd have done it in my head already. I visualise a story just like a film strip running in my head. I guess that is also a reason why my books have such a visual element to them. And it's what I tell young writers: plan your story ahead.
We have Christians against Muslims against Jews, and no matter how liberal your theology, merely identifying yourself as a Christian or a Jew lends tacit validity to this status quo. People have morally identified with a subset of humanity rather than with humanity as a whole.
I simply define glory as the beauty of God unveiled. Glory is the resplendent radiance of His power and His personality. Glory is all of God that makes God God, and shows Him to be worthy of our praise and our boasting and our trust and our hope and our confidence and our joy.
It was the best first kiss in the history of first kisses. It was as sweet as sugar. And it was warm, as warm as pie. The whole world opened up and I fell inside. I don't know where I was, but I didn't care. I didn't care because the only person who mattered was there with me.
And this prime hour of fragrance is the hour so many miss upon beds of sloth, never half knowing what a beautiful, marvellous world is around them. Not all the long hours of day can possibly bring back again the charm and blessedness of this, either to the body or to the soul.
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
War affected my family a lot, and I was quite curious about it. I first went off to war in the early 90's as a journalist, partly out of curiosity and partly because I needed a career. War reporting has been very glamorous and exciting, and everything else that young men like.
Stop trying to find the formula that will instantly make your idea into a winner. Instead of being scientists, the best marketers are artists. They realize that whatever is being sold is being purchased, because it creates an emotional want, not because it fills a simple need.
I'll confess that I don't watch the Olympics, but you'd have to be living under a rock to be unaware of the corruption and the expense. An amorphous organization with no transparency, unclear lines of responsibility, huge amounts of politics and a great deal of unearned power.
The more you look at the death penalty, that's where you see that we're actually not killing the worst of the worst. We're killing the poorest of the poor. Where actually one of the biggest determinants of who gets executed is how many resources they have to defend themselves.
I would argue further that Barack Obama's election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national exercise in seeing what was not there and a refusal to see what was there - all to escape the stigma not of stupidity but of racism.
Say something, Amy," Miranda insists. "Something positive. I'm sure it'll make you feel better." "Okay, Miranda. I've got it." I motion the girls to lean in close to hear my words. "At least I'm not dead." How's that for positivity? I have to admit it does make me feel better.
Say I have set my goal at 300 pounds, and I cannot do it. The very fact that I have been devotedly practising and practising gives me joy, and the tenacity or perseverance that I am showing is itself progress. Anything that we do devotedly and soulfully helps us make progress.
Whatever their relative valuation of the single and married states, most societies in history made sharp distinctions between those who married and those who remained single: They were seen as mutually exclusive ways of life, with different legal rights and social obligations.
The key to the 99 is the one. Or, put another way, the key to the group is the one individual. Think about the one, talk to the one, regard the one, serve the one. If you are sincere and constant, you will discover that gradually your influence with the many will be magnified.
The personal power that comes from principle-centered living is the power of a self-aware, knowledgeable, proactive individual, unrestricted by the attitudes, behaviors, and actions of others or by many of the circumstances and environmental influences that limit other people.
I don't want to sound like an ad, a public service ad on TV, but the fact is if you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you don't, then you've got, the Army, Iraq, I don't know, something like that. It's, it's not as bright. So, that's my little commercial for that.
American strategic doctrine suggests that Mexico is of second-level importance to the United States. It ranks below Japan and Indonesia, Brazil and India, Egypt and Israel, and European powers including Britain, France, and Germany. This is a grave geopolitical miscalculation.
I thought about how unlikely it was I would ever meet any guy,fall in love, get married, have babies. Especially since I was going to spend the rest of my life in the cellar, where, in the not too distant future, I'd turn into a toadstool. I hoped I'd be the poisonous variety.
If you chose a particular religion, you were siding with the government religion of whatever region you were in. That's never been true in America, but also, the United States also has so many more immigrant groups which also tends to imply more religious diversity right away.