Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
This is part of the involuntary bargain we make with the world just by being alive. We get to experiences the splendor of nature, the beauty of art, the balm of love and the sheer joy of existence, always with the knowledge that illness, injury, natural disaster, or pure evil can end it in an instant for ourselves or someone we love.
I was having problems with depression and anxiety disorder, and it felt like not blogging about it was creating a false history. When I did finally share the problems I was having, I was shocked - not only by the support that was given to me, but also by the incredible amount of people who admitted they struggled with the same thing.
The welfare state is institutionalized crime - 'organized plunder,' as the French economist Frederic Bastiat called it. It systematizes what is intrinsically wrong: forcing some people to support others. The Democrats favor the indefinite expansion of the welfare state, perpetually increasing the ratio of force to freedom in society.
Germany's hierarchical reverence for seniority may have something to do with the fact that everything here happens relatively late. Germans start school at six, graduate in their late 20s, and get their first proper jobs in their 30s. Adolescence can go on a long time. It is rare for anyone to achieve responsibility before their 50s.
My most recent novel didn't start out scaring me, but as I got deeper into writing it, it scared me. It's not so much where the story's going. It's where it came from. I always come out of it thinking, Okay, that got it all outta me. The next one's gonna be nice and simple, and it's not gonna scare me, and that never seems to happen.
Like many physical diseases, anti-Semitism is highly infectious, and can become endemic in certain localities and societies. Though a disease of the mind, it is by no means confined to weak, feeble, or commonplace intellects; as history sadly records, its carriers have included men and women of otherwise powerful and subtle thoughts.
Kind 'Guardian' readers have been forwarding me round robin Christmas newsletters for years now: lengthy missives full of perfect children, exotic holidays, talented pets and endless, tedious detail. The notes that accompanied them revealed they had inspired in the original recipients everything from mild irritation to absolute rage.
In 1984, as a college freshman, I spent a fall weekend at a friend's house in suburban Chicago. His father worked for Beatrice Foods, a sponsor of the Chicago Marathon, and we watched that race from the finish line as a Welshman named Steve Jones set a new world marathon record. I was bewitched by the race and, especially, the clock.
That's what Letterman did. He mocked everything and everyone in show business, even though he was at the top of show business. He was in it but not really of it, and that's one thing I came to love about him. I mean, you can't sit there and interview Cher and pretend you're not in show business, but he managed to pull it off somehow.
Right after the keynote in which Steve Jobs introduced the iPod Shuffle, I went backstage with one question in mind: What makes an iPod an iPod? By then - January 11, 2005 - I had staked my own claim to iPod expertise, having written a 'Newsweek' cover story about Apple's transformational music player, and I was writing a book on it.
When George W. Bush hit the campaign trail in 2000, the precious possession he brought with him from home was his personal feather pillow. The theme of the Bush years was obliviousness. He was famously unavailable for debate and dialogue. He was deaf to countervailing voices. He hit the sack early and always got a good night's sleep.
If humanity has any hope of effecting real change for the better, it will not come from the Madison Avenue false reality makers who've cast Barack Obama as the savior of the world. To alter our course from tyranny to liberty, to defeat the corrupt elite, we must get past the puppets and confront the real power structure of the planet.
Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a company is not allowed to provide a personal benefit to a decision maker in return for business. But hiring the sons and daughters of powerful executives and politicians is hardly just the province of banks doing business in China: it has been a time-tested practice here in the United States.
We humans are herd animals of the monkey tribe, not natural individuals as lions are. Our individuality is partial and restless; the stream of consciousness that we call 'I' is made of shifting elements that flow from our group and back to our group again. Always we seek to be ourselves and the herd together, not One against the herd.
To be fair, if we are having a mass extinction, we're in the early stages of it. I think it's knowing facts like that which has made me less fearful about the future. Mass extinction is a long, complicated process that we are just now beginning to understand - and likewise, we are just beginning to understand how we might prevent one.
Loners, if you catch them, are well worth the trouble. Not dulled by excess human contact, nor blasé or focused on your crotch while jabbering about themselves, loners are curious, vigilant, full of surprises. They do not cling. Separate wherever they go, awake or asleep, they shimmer with the iridescence of hidden things seldom seen.
vivisection is not the same thing as scientific progress. There is such a thing as scientific progress. But this wholesale dedication of scientists to vivisection, which is the easy and cheap way, actually prevents them from scientific progress, for true progress is difficult and requires genius and imagination in its devoted workers.
Absolutely. If a Muslim who has-who is-a practicing Muslim who believes the word of the Koran to be the word of Allah, who abides by Islam, who goes to mosque and prays every Friday, who prays five times a day-this practicing Muslim, who believes in the teachings of the Koran, cannot be a loyal citizen to the United States of America.
Moving on' is a concept invented by Housewives. Housewives who behave so appallingly all they can do is say they are moving on, preferably in a place where everyone can hear them. To stay put and acknowledge that their actions have consequences and to accept responsibility is simply too painful for this particular brand of narcissist.
To possess your soul in patience, with all the skin and some of the flesh burnt off your face and hands, is a job for a boy compared with the pains of a man who has lived pretty long in the exhilarating world that drugs or strong waters seem to create and is trying to live now in the first bald desolation created by knocking them off.
So, I mean, there's still vast swaths of the city that are suffering from a lack of jobs and poor housing and poor public schools, but they are building momentum - you know, techies, foodies, artists, musicians, all coming to Detroit. So there is this vibrancy. You see it in the newspapers every day - some story about the new Detroit.
Snowden has enough [sic] information to cause harm to the U.S. government in a single minute than any other person has ever had. The U.S. government should be on its knees every day begging that nothing happen to Snowden, because if something does happen to him, all the information will be revealed and it could be its worst nightmare.
["Where the Buffalo Roam" is] horrible pile of crap. [Bill] Murray did a good job. But it was a bad script. You can't beat a bad script. It was just a horrible movie. A cartoon. But Bill Murray did a good job. We actually wrote and shot several different endings and beginnings and they all got cut out in the end. It was disappointing.
Debt settlement companies work as a middleman between you and your creditor. If all goes well (and that's a big if), you should be able to settle your debts for cents on the dollar. You'll also pay a fee to the debt settlement company, usually either a percentage of the total debt you have or a percentage of the total amount forgiven.
If the court strikes down the Defense of Marriage Act, is that a 'liberal' result enabling gay couples married in states where gay marriage is legal to enjoy the same economic advantages that federal laws now grant to straight couples? Or is it a 'conservative' ruling, limiting the federal government's ability to override state power?
In early 1961 a new president, John F. Kennedy, was told by military leaders and civilian officials that the Kingdom of Laos - of no conceivable strategic importance to the U.S. - required the presence of American troops and perhaps even tactical nuclear weapons. Why? Because if Laos fell, Asia would go red from Thailand to Indonesia.
I believe that the far-right and the far-left can be equally insane - but there's no question that in the first years of the Obama administration, the far-right has been far crazier. In part, this comes from parties being out of power - without the responsibility of governing to ground them, the activists and the ideologues take over.
If European monetary policy is run according to German interests, huge structural imbalances will accumulate. The Germans will then either have to pay to correct those imbalances or agree that the euro should not be run primarily according to German interests. If they are unwilling to do either of those things, the euro can't survive.
If instituted, the TPP's IP regime would trample over individual rights and free expression, as well as ride roughshod over the intellectual and creative commons. If you read, write, publish, think, listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you're ill now or might one day be ill, the TPP has you in its crosshairs.
In all, 86 per cent of the increased life expectancy was due to decreases in infectious diseases. And the bulk of the decline in infectious disease deaths occurred prior to the age of antibiotics. Less than 4 per cent of the total improvement in life expectancy since 1700s can be credited to twentieth-century advances in medical care.
At our most elemental, we are not a chemical reaction, but an energetic charge. Human beings and all living things are a coalescence of energy in a field of energy connected to every other thing in the world. This pulsating energy field is the central engine of our being and our consciousness, the alpha and the omega of our existence.
The conventional wisdom is often wrong. Crime didn't keep soaring in the 1990s, money alone doesn't win elections, and - surprise - drinking eight glasses of water a day has never actually been shown to do a thing for your health. Conventional wisdom is often shoddily formed and devilishly difficult to see through, but it can be done.
On the other side, you have the conservative intelligentsia - magazines like National Review, which has a big anti-Trump issue; Weekly Standard editor, conservative talk show hosts - they're mounting a big anti-Trump effort, pro-Cruz effort because they think [Donald] Trump is dangerous and he's not qualified to be commander in chief.
Muslims know that Islam clashes with Western Civilization. They make no bones about choosing Islam over their new home country, like the Syrians in Germany, or the Somali at Ohio State University. They are very open and honest on polls, because they know they have nothing to fear from the governments that welcomed them with open arms.
In California, of course, they never break up couples at dinner for fear of what might happen if someone's husband were seated next to someone else's very young girlfriend. But dinners with couples seated next to one another are always deadly dull, which is why there are almost no good dinner parties in the entire state of California.
Tony Blair is a decent man who genuinely thinks what he is doing is justified. But when he sees men such as George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld smirking and boasting as they announce their Shock and Awe offensive, we hope he understands why we believe we have been dragged into something we should have been fighting tooth and nail to stop.
President Yeltsin's instincts were decent: he encouraged the marketplace, the press flourished, and everything started to open - even the KGB archives. Yeltsin reburied Nicholas II. Free from Soviet anti-semitism, he surrounded himself with Jewish capitalists and advisers who returned to public life for the first time since the 1920s.
Michel. In my dreams, you come and get me. You take me by the hand and you lead me away. This life is too much for me to bear. I look at the key and I long for you and for the past. For the innocent, easy days before the war. I know now my scars will never heal. I hope my son will forgive me. He will never know. No one will ever know.
I rarely use the internet for research, as I find the process cumbersome and detestable. The information gained is often untrustworthy and couched in execrable prose. It is unpleasant to sit in front of a twitching screen suffering assault by virus, power outage, sluggish searches, system crashes and the lack of direct human discourse.
I think, in a way, I've returned to who I used to be as a global correspondent whose life was devoted to really making a difference, illuminating what's happening in the world, always drawn toward the suffering of peoples and cultures and exposing exploitation and injustice; but now I'm the same person in a much, much softer iteration.
Music is important. It says things you heart can't say any other way, and in a language everyone speaks. Music crosses borders, turns smiles into frowns, and vice versa. These observations are shared with a hope: that, when schools cut back on music classes, they really think about what they're doing - and don't take music for granted.
It took me a long time to be able to write for the 'New Yorker,' and for me, that has been the best job. I live a very conventional life, but reporting for the magazine has allowed me to do things I would never otherwise do, such as investigating a criminal conspiracy in Guatemala or trekking through the Amazon looking for a lost city.
People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.
[ Donald Trump is] candidate who said he has more confidence in Vladimir Putin's strength than in Barack Obama's strength. His closeness to Putin is a very scary thing for the country and the fact that the news was dominated for 33 days I think it was by WikiLeaks stories, that had an impact on states that were decided by a knife-edge.
One of the fantastic things about Silicon Valley is that it's both the birthplace of technology and it was one of the birthplaces of the counterculture. The Internet and the personal computer were going to be like the communes, where we would all be networked together, and we would be able to achieve this state of global consciousness.
Let patriotism have its high days and freedom its monuments, and let the triumphs of navigators and generals be annually observed; but surely, beyond all these, a season that stands for as much to the race as Easter does may well be remembered each year with songs and flowers and with every mark of gratitude and of loftiest jubilation.
This idea of doing it all is the enemy of equality, not the path to do it. It's impossible to do two full-time jobs, and an impossible definition of success is just another way of making women feel like failures... Any definition of success has to include social policies that honor families and men who raise babies as much as women do.
You have to take the long view. First, when Moses came down from Mt. Sinai, man has already progressed to the point where a commandment against cannibalism was no longer necessary. And, second, it's like pissing on a boulder. For the first few thousand years, you don't see any effect. But after that, you start to see a definite impact.
I think the most remarkable thing about ice, in my opinion at least, is that it occurs in many, many, many different forms. Most solids occur in typically one or maybe two or three different forms, and ice has approximately 15 different crystal forms, as well as two forms that are called amorphous, which means without any shape at all.
Barack Obama was elected President in 2008 and re-elected in 2012. The natural thing would be to suggest money on the right [wing] doesn't really matter that much. The first thing you have to know is that the presidential elections are the ones where it's most difficult for money to hold sway, in that they're the most public elections.