Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It can be exalting to belong to a church that is five hundred years behind the times and sublimely indifferent to fashion; it is mortifying to belong to a church that is five minutes behind the times, huffing and puffing to catch up.
This has been one of the more comedic aspects of this 72 hours - watching a cavalcade of extremely wealthy pundits, editorialists and political operatives from New York and Washington tell me how rural Americans won't stand for this.
Our subjective experience of time is highly variable. We all know that days can pass like weeks and months can feel like years, and that the opposite can be just as true: A month or year can zoom by in what feels like no time at all.
In an intellectual revolution there must be ideas and advocates willing to challenge an entire profession, the establishment itself, willing to spend their reputations and careers in spreading the idea through deeds as well as words.
The dinner table is the center for the teaching and practicing not just of table manners but of conversation, consideration, tolerance, family feeling, and just about all the other accomplishments of polite society except the minuet.
Border security is a comprehensive issue and doesn't boil down to a 'wall' or even barriers. Trump knows and recognizes this, which is why he repeatedly talks about all of the aspects and challenges federal immigration officers face.
We can do a bit of blaming: the proliferation of devices means we're always at work, always on call, always available. Physically leaving the office isn't a declaration of being off work anymore; your office is in your bag or pocket.
I'm not surprised, but I am disappointed that Katharine Carr Esters claims that she was 'tricked' into divulging her true feelings about Oprah and that she now denies that she revealed to me the identity of Oprah's biological father.
Art can retain its value and even make you some money. If you have your iPhone on you - and you probably do - look for the artist's signature, and use that to look up the artist and get a sense of the piece's value before you buy it.
Anybody who was in the military or a military family has a certain sensitivity to the separation. Everyone knows military wives have the hardest jobs. I was born into one. When I think back to those days, I didn't appreciate it then.
The pediatrician must have thought me one of those neurotic mothers who craved distinction for her child but who in our civilization's latter-day degeneracy could only conceive of the exceptional in terms of deficiency or affliction.
No eleven-year-old has any real grasp of death. He doesn't have any real concept of other people--that they feel pain, even that they exist. And his own adult future isn't real to him, either. Makes it that much easier to throw away.
I think generally the heads of terrorist groups are very, very smart people. They're also great manipulators. I would presume that cult leaders are identical. These sort of individuals are very strong, they have very strong charisma.
Under the Assads, Kurds were forbidden from learning their own language at school, or even from speaking it in the military. The result is a generation of Syrian Kurds, many now in late middle age, who can't write their own language.
I speak not for myself but for those without voice... those who have fought for their rights... their right to live in peace, their right to be treated with dignity, their right to equality of opportunity, their right to be educated.
Once I had asked God for one or two extra inches in height, but instead, he made me as tall as the sky, so high that I could not measure myself... By giving me this height to reach people, he has also given me great responsibilities.
In many countries, they do not even keep track of how girls are doing in school, or if they are there at all. If we say, 'Girls count,' then we must count girls, so we can see if we are really making progress in educating every girl.
As a post-Holocaust kid, growing up in a neighborhood with a lot of Jewish refugees, I had got the idea there were no Jews left in Europe. But I found in my European wanderings that many of them had gone back and rebuilt their lives.
There has always been something less than wholesome about New Labour. But Blair for a long time had an easy ride. There was the whopping majority. There was the relief that the Tories were finally gone. There was the grand hyperbole.
The fact is that life has become a sweepstake. Millions of people who have lost the sense of being able to make anything of the collective effort of shaping their economic society, now expect fortune to descend like pie from the sky.
Henry Blodget does occasionally have a new idea. If you're making a point about aggregation or the emptiness of modern journalism, he's far from the best target. Try Huffpo - or Gawker writers whose souls have been corroded by irony.
When you're attracted to someone, it just means that your subconscious is attracted to their subconscious, subconsciously. So what we think of as fate is just two neuroses knowing that they are a perfect match. - Sleepless in Seattle
I joined the Labour Party not because it was Left Wing, but because it was definitely internationalists and would seem to be the group in the Labour Party which would serve my purpose best for propaganda along internationalist lines.
But from the moment George Bush decided to overthrow Saddam, the people who were going to benefit here were the Shia, who are 60 percent of the population. So if you were ever going to have an election, then the Shia would take over.
If you really want to show power in its larger aspects, you need to show the effects on the powerless, for good or ill - the human cost of public works. That's what I try to do, show not only how power works but its effect on people.
No writer besides Shakespeare has created more memorable characters attached to vices and virtues. In even their least sympathetic characters, one senses a kind of helplessness to passion quivering between the poles of good and evil.
AP promoted me to the White House beat because I knew Clinton, his family, friends, and staff better than anybody in the national press corps. Those contacts helped me break a few stories and get my career in Washington jump-started.
Diarrhea, 90 percent of which is caused by food and water contaminated by excrement, kills a child every fifteen seconds. That's more than AIDS, malaria, or measles, combined. Human feces are an impressive weapon of mass destruction.
I wanted to put a human face on anxiety disorders. I thought people who suffer from anxiety might recognize themselves and gain some comfort from my story and for those who don't suffer from anxiety disorders gain some understanding.
Now there are laws in many parts of the world which reflect the best of human nature. These laws treat people touched by HIV with compassion and acceptance. These laws respect universal human rights and they are grounded in evidence.
Election Day outside of big cities is different. For one thing, there are so few people in my town that each individual vote really does matter, and several local races have been decided by as many votes as you can count on one hand.
Government is, by its very nature, a destroyer of liberties; the Obama administration, specifically, is promising to interfere with the economy and the health care system so profoundly that Washington will soon have us all in chains.
No matter where I go - London, Beirut, Jerusalem, Washington, Beijing, or Bangalore - I'm always looking to rediscover that land of ten thousand lakes where politics actually worked to make people's lives better, not pull them apart.
The real essence of work is concentrated energy - people who really have that in a superior degree by nature are independent of the forms and habits and artifices by which less able and less active people are kept up to their labors.
I'm not the kind of writer who's able to block out the world around me. I'm mindful of our own haves and have-nots, how our culture often blames and punishes the have-nots. I worry about our precarious economic and political climate.
I did not believe that the public was sophisticated enough to understand that a newsman could wear several hats and that we had the ability to turn off - nearly, you can't say perfectly, but nearly - all of our prejudices and biases.
My temper is of a recluse and contemplative cast; had it been otherwise, I should, perhaps, on some former occasions, have entered into the active concerns of the world and not have been connected with it merely as a writer of books.
The war against ISIS will pose many new challenges for the next commander-in-chief. The last two presidents [George W. Bush and Barack Obama] pursued a Middle East policy that supported toppling dictators to try to promote democracy.
If you ask me, the hypothetical zenith of gaming technology is direct neural interface - no body to hamper you and your brain is in whatever you want it to be in. Plus it leads to existential uncertainty, which could be entertaining.
I don't believe that prayers actually change God's mind - if there is a God - but I liked praying for people in need. It was like moral weightlifting. I tend to be self-obsessed, and it was nice to get out of my brain once in a while.
The economy is a ponzi scheme. People are working harder than they ever have for less wages, but we have so many bobbles because manufacturing has come up so quickly over the past hundred years that people have the illusion of wealth.
TZETZE (or TSETSE) FLY, n. An African insect ("Glossina morsitans") whose bite is commonly regarded as nature's most efficacious remedy for insomnia, though some patients prefer that of the American novelist ("Mendax interminabilis").
QUIXOTIC, adj. Absurdly chivalric, like Don Quixote. An insight into the beauty and excellence of this incomparable adjective is unhappily denied to him who has the misfortune to know that the gentleman's name is pronounced Ke-ho-tay.
REVOLUTION, n. In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment. . . . the substitution of the rule of an Administration for that of a Ministry, whereby the welfare and happiness of the people were advanced a full half-inch.
In 2012, a five-year-old girl in Shandong province described to me how ten officials had chased her six-months-pregnant mother through the fields to prevent the birth of the family's second child, a boy. She died during the procedure.
If you write something and they all tell you it is bad - editors, critics, everybody - think it over and you may become convinced that they are right (though you are not to be ashamed or discouraged for a minute, but keep on writing).
In her inestimable audacity, Julia was the catalyst in my life for something beautiful. I hadn't anticipated her-hadn't even wanted her, truthfully-but there she was. A little something extra that made all the difference in the world.
Some Western states have collaborative water agreements with Indian tribes - Washington state, for instance, monitors a number of its rivers to protect spawning salmon, which are promised to native peoples under 19th-century treaties.
To live forever should not be an obligation. In fact, eternal life should only be for those who wish for it, because if we are depressed and unhappy with our lives, just the idea of living forever is an unbearable source of suffering.
The second assault on Fallujah was a monument to brutality and atrocity made in the United States of America. Like the Spanish city of Guernica during the 1930s, and Grozny in the 1990s Fallujah is our monument of excess and overkill.