Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Whether permitted to live to witness the abolition of slavery or not, I felt assured that, as I demanded nothing that was not clearly in accordance with justice and humanity, some time or other, if remembered at all, I should stand vindicated in the eyes of my countrymen.
When I really discovered who God was and had a firm relationship with him my junior year of college, I journaled constantly. All day long. I had boxes of journals. They were really just love letters to God, just thanking him and praying out loud and telling him my desires.
Damn it, if just 5% of people got motivated in some direction, and it doesn't necessarily have to be what I believe in, but if they just got motivated and stopped getting their political ideologies from the mainstream media, they would go out and figure out what they want.
On TV at night, I DVR lots of programs - I use it more like a magazine rack flipping through shows than actually watching them in full. 'Charlie Rose,' 'Meet the Press,' '60 Minutes' are musts for me. I also DVR 'NBC's Nightly News' and 'The Chris Matthews Show' on Sunday.
Eventually, humans invented agriculture, which could be understood as a way of turning the natural world into a tool for our use. There's evidence that we have been domesticating crops and animals for at least 15,000 years, adapting ecosystems to our preferred way of life.
Trump has learned how to function in a world in which people now live in very separate realities, where they get their news from Facebook recommendations and believe in a particular set of facts. Others, who live in a different reality, know quite a different set of facts.
It's the perpetually unfinished quality of housework that makes it oppressive - it never ends, like bad psychoanalysis, or a dream interrupted. It is paradoxically true that it is exactly this daily re-creation of the world that lends housekeeping its nobility and romance.
The government of Sudan, employing a back channel direct from its president to the Central Intelligence Agency, offered in the early spring of 1996 to arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in Saudi custody, according to officials and former officials in all three countries.
The cliche was always that 'everybody's a critic,' but it becomes truer every day. Long before reviews appear in the traditional outlets, you can now usually discover - somewhere in the thickets of the Internet - reactions to shows from people who've seen them in previews.
But here's the deal: If I were smart, I could figure out curling. If I were even smarter, I could figure out why people would actually watch other people doing it. I have tried. I can't. I can't even figure out the object of the game. Is it like darts? I just don't get it.
Don't always be appraising yourself, wondering if you are better or worse than other writers. "I will not Reason and Compare," said Blake; "my business is to Create." Besides, since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of Time, you are incomparable.
My number one goal was not getting 'A's' - and I proved it. I was a 'C' student. You have to be ready to learn. If you're not interesting in learning, it doesn't work. As I grew older and wanted to learn and desperately wanted inside information, learning was a lot easier.
They still talk about the night that Augie Pabst, a fresh-faced heir to the brewing fortune, drove a rented Falcon into the swimming pool of the Mark Thomas Inn in Monterey, California. His reviews were so good that he repeated the act at a Howard Johnson's outside Denver.
To me, Slow parenting is about bringing balance into the home. Children need to strive and struggle and stretch themselves, but that does not mean childhood should be a race. Slow parents give their children plenty of time and space to explore the world on their own terms.
Farmers can't plant much more land because almost every accessible acre of arable soil is already in use. Nor can the use of fertilizer be increased: it is already being overused everywhere except some parts of Africa, and the runoff is polluting rivers, lakes, and oceans.
Conservatism is rooted in preservation; progressivism advances alteration. These are different love languages. These languages turn on your view of change itself: When you think of America, do you see a country struggling to be maintained or one striving to be made better?
Tonight, savagery in the streets of Iraq. Ten Americans die in a single day, four of them civilians murdered, mutilated and dragged through the streets....What drives American civilians to risk death in Iraq? In this economy it may be, for some, the only job they can find.
I wanted people to kind of take a peek to see that the pain, even though you may see them out at the Democratic National Convention or at Essence [Festival] or any of these other places, that the pain is still very real for these women [from the "Mothers of the Movement"].
At first glance, the story of the Lusitania doesn't seem like the sort of thing I would take on. I usually like ideas that are a little bit more complex, things that people don't know about - or maybe they once did, but now you bring it to life for them for the first time.
I collect things called 'samplers' which are Victorian pieces of needlework usually done by children in a workhouse to show that they have a skill which can be used in service, stitching household linen or that kind of thing. I think they're very humble and very beautiful.
I was doing the Black Issue in 2006 and then went to Africa for Uomo Vogue. I've worked with Gucci and Fendi, committed to create jobs. Fifty percent of those ads went to non-government organizations in Africa. [Nelson] Mandela was on the cover, it helped create attention.
Overpopulation in the United States will become THE single greatest issue facing Americans in the 21st century. We either solve it proactively or nature will solve it brutally for us via water shortages, energy crisis, air pollution, gridlock, species extinction and worse.
The way things are supposed to work is that we're supposed to know virtually everything about what they [the government] do: that's why they're called public servants. They're supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that's why we're called private individuals.
What I've learned is that unless it's an emergency, like a fire or brain surgery, hierarchy is not necessary and may be damaging. If you have a hierarchy, you're repeating the strengths and weaknesses of one person without allowing for the accumulative strength of a group.
No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man. In the highest confidence there is always a flavor of doubt--a feeling, half instinctive and half logical, that, after all, the scoundrel may have something up his sleeve.
That it should still be necessary, at this late stage in the senility of the human race to argue that women have a fine and fluent intelligence is surely an eloquent proof of the defective observation, incurable prejudice, and general imbecility of their lords and masters.
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose - for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics.
If Rupert Murdoch wants to charge for content online, he will succeed in so far, but no further than what he provides that is unique and can't be found anywhere. It doesn't seem to me that if he wants to charge it will be a blow to universal freedom and liberty of mankind.
I think I'm one of the most patriotic people that I've ever encountered in America. I consider myself a bedrock patriot. I participate very actively in local politics, because my voice might be worthwhile. I participate in a meaningful way - not by donations; I work at it.
I really found this campaign odious. I couldn't get up for it. The quality of the candidates and the campaign, I just found the whole thing second-rate. I didn't know how to explain to my granddaughter that I was spending my dotage writing about Al Gore and George W. Bush.
Since I'm a fan of collections and anthologies, believe that the best writing often shines in shards and galloping stretches, I never find myself lobbying for a writer I enjoy reading regularly to hole up in Heidegger's hut for four or five years to bring forth a mountain.
I understand that one of the purposes of bipartisanship is to cram something difficult and necessary down the American people's gullets for which neither party has the fortitude to assume full responsibility. It's a way of turning a possible gangplank into a teeter-totter.
When someone shuts down on you... There were a couple of times of somebody that was just unpleasant, and you can't get them to loosen up. It's this horrible spiral when it's on camera, because you're trying to get them to like you, to trust you, to give you decent answers.
A faithfully kept program of savings and conservative investments can give you more money and a better life than that of your neighbors who spend everything they get. This is probably the oldest financial advice in the world, but there are some things you can't improve on.
In money, and in life, you are very often your own worst enemy. You promise yourself you're going to diet, then eat not one or two French fries but a whole plate. You decide to really commit to saving for retirement, only to wind up with a new pair of shoes in your closet.
Books did not need to be beautiful back in the Fifties, because nothing else was beautiful back then. Books were simply there: you read them because they were diverting or illuminating or in some way useful but not because the books themselves were aesthetically appealing.
I owe my dogs much - more than I can say - but they are not my 'companions' - as if we voluntarily chose to hang out together but none of us has authority over the others. I bought and/or acquired them. I own them. I am profoundly responsible for their care and well being.
'Moonwalking with Einstein' refers to a memory device I used when I memorized a deck of playing cards at the U.S. Memory Championship. When I competed in 2006, I set a new U.S. record by memorizing a deck of cards in one minute and 40 seconds. That record has since fallen.
As we've gotten more successful, there's a gap between the speed of our publishing pipeline and the speed of our receiving submissions pipeline. Our pipeline of leaks has been increasing exponentially as our profile rises, and our ability to publish is increasing linearly.
As a kid, I lived almost entirely inside books, and eventually the books started returning the favor. A lot of my internal world feels like an anthology, or a library. It's eclectic and disorganized, but I can browse in it, and that hugely shapes both what and how I write.
Anyone who has ever scanned the bookshelves of a new girlfriend or boyfriend- or peeked inside his or her medicine cabinet- understands this implicitly; you can learn as much - or more - from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face.
The Soviet system of propaganda and censorship existed not so much for the purpose of spreading a particular message as for the purpose of making learning impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.
Until the Saudi authorities who administer the holy sites take concrete steps to protect female pilgrims, we must protect each other. Men must stop assaulting us, yes. But women the world over, regardless of faith, know that until that happens, we are each other's keepers.
Look, we'll have to confront the pathologies of poverty at some point. We can deal with them cheaply at the front end, in infancy. Or we can wait and jail a troubled adolescent at the tail end. To some extent, we face a choice between investing in preschools or in prisons.
It's harder now for journalists to do stories about billionaires, like Peter Thiel, without having at the back of their minds the fear that maybe somebody deep-pocketed, you know, with limited resources is going to come after us and can my organization afford to defend me?
If you look back in history of the women who are most memorable and most stylish, they were never the followers of fashion. They were the ones who were unique in their style, breakers of the rules. They were authentic, genuine, original. They were not following the trends.
The worst country I ever lived in, the old U.S.S.R., was crammed with privileges for the political elite. They had their own hospital, their own shops, country houses, and blocks of flats, special lanes on the streets so they could bypass the traffic in their special cars.
There used to be this feeling under Eisenhower and Kennedy and Roosevelt and Truman that government was a solution. Trust in the presidency fell precipitously under Johnson - real lows. And it's never come back. It's a trend that, if you're liberal, is really discouraging.
George W. Bush is a person who is totally disinterested in the world, uneducated. I'm not saying he's stupid. I don't think he's stupid. He's crafty as hell, but he projects well on television. And that's the real big problem. He is the perfect "what, me worry?" president.
I've had countless jihadis shut me down straightaway and say, "I'm not allowed to speak to any woman who is not my relative." But among the few I'm able to get through to, I think that being female makes me more approachable, soft, all the stereotypes of what female means.