Quotes by Authors - Page 394

If you wish for it, you can have it.

It is kind of ridiculous that a poet is expected to live in the real world.

I'm not meant to be part of the things that are wrong with the world, but neither am I meant to run from them. I'm meant to fight against them. I can't hold my own in the ring, but out in the world, I do know how to fight. With words. With truth.

since men are equal and thus have the same wish for happiness, and since there is not enough wealth to satisfy them all to the same extent, they necessarily fight against each other and want power to secure the future enjoyment of what they have at present.

You know, the heroes in my romance novels always say that. Scout's honor. But they all later admit to never being a Boy Scout.

When it comes to love, Princess, rules blur, and traditions fade,

this is a book about something

As far as our relation to the physical world, I doubt there will be much more improvement. Our basic survival needs have been met, and much of our current progress is superfluous or downright troublesome. Most advancement is performed out of comfort rather than necessity. What we are lacking, what the world so desperately needs now, is adjustments of the mind. We need to see the world again with fresh eyes, and come to an understanding of who we are as individuals, and what drives us.

To die old with a young mind is such a tragedy. Naiveness was never a blessing.

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.

Complex operations, in which agencies assume complementary roles and operate in close proximity-often with similar missions but conflicting mandates-accentuate these tensions. The tensions are evident in the processes of analyzing complex environments, planning for complex interventions, and implementing complex operations. Many reports and analyses forecast that these complex operations are precisely those that will demand our attention most in the indefinite future.As essayist Barton and O'Connell note, our intelligence and understanding of the root cause of conflict, multiplicity of motivations and grievances, and disposition of actors is often inadequate. Moreover, the problems that complex operations are intended and implemented to address are convoluted, and often inscrutable. They exhibit many if not all the characteristics of "wicked problems," as enumerated by Rittel and Webber in 1973: they defy definitive formulations; any proposed solution or intervention causes the problem to mutate, so there is no second chance at a solution; every situation is unique; each wicked problem can be considered a symptom of another problem. As a result, policy objectives are often compound and ambiguous. The requirements of stability, for example, in Afghanistan today, may conflict with the requirements for democratic governance. Efforts to establish an equitable social contract may well exacerbate inter-communal tensions that can lead to violence. The rule of law, as we understand it, may displace indigenous conflict management and stabilization systems. The law of unintended consequences may indeed be the only law of the land. The complexity of the challenges we face in the current global environment would suggest the obvious benefit of joint analysis - bringing to bear on any given problem the analytic tools of military, diplomatic and development analysts. Instead, efforts to analyze jointly are most often an afterthought, initiated long after a problem has escalated to a level of urgency that negates much of the utility of deliberate planning.

I profess not to know how women's hearts are wooed and won. To me they have always been matters of riddle and admiration.

I believe in love at first sight. I know it's real because I experienced it the moment I saw my wife for the first time.

Don't tell me I'm "too tall" just because my height happens to threaten your rather fragile sense of masculinity. The fact that men cannot physically look down upon women who are taller than them is the very reason that many men find tall women so intimidating.

A day’s brightness is determined by the light in our hearts.

His whole life was a sham, a fairy tale. The truth hidden behind a wall of lies, each lie another brick in the wall until he probably couldn't see the truth anymore.

Antiliberals endlessly berate their enemies for "instrumental thinking." But they do not clearly explain the evil of producing better goods at a lower cost.

When my children do wrong I ache to hear their stumbling requests for forgiveness. I'm sure our heavenly Father aches even more deeply to hear from us.

In the book (Savvy Stories) you see some very real, very personal moments. The first week of Savvy’s life was the longest week of ours. We spent five days in the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) worrying that our newborn daughter might die. It was touch and go for a while, and it was extremely difficult to write about. Chapter two gets a lot of people crying. But because we put that honesty out there, readers said “Okay, I can trust this guy.” Then they were better able to laugh with us, too.

Oho, now I know what you are. You are an advocate of Useful Knowledge.... Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine, equipped to work efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position.

Sometimes I wake up and lie still enough to hear a petal drop from the vase of flowers. Sometimes I lie awake and wish there was someone to hear my falling.

We all know that joy and sorrow are entirely matters of fate and have nothing whatsoever to do with planning.

But I want to give in to it sometimes, only because I'm tired and the feeling that I've had for a while-that something is haunting me down-becomes all consuming and I'm frightened that one morning there will be not enough to keep me going.

Your laughter is louder than my personal demons' whispers.

Is there any beauty like the bliss of being?

Cosmetic surgery processes the bodies of woman-made women, who make up the vast majority of its patient pool, into man-made women.

Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.

Faith moves mountains, intelligence goes over them, wisdom goes around them, but love levels them.

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.

Enjoy, smile... wild... peace.

A slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentality which said, “If you don’t whip me, I won’t work.” He didn’t get whipped. He didn’t work.

In the rough-and-tumble play of politics, dog-whistle messages are copiously dispatched over the heads of the grassroots people that cannot see the writing on the wall and have to remain in the cold, like dumb puppets on a string. ("What after bowling alone?" )

Alan McCluskey“Despair is an ugly thing when it refuses hope.

You don’t care what anyone thinks about you,’ he said.‘That’s crazy,’ she said. ‘I care what everyone thinks about me.’‘I can’t tell,’ he said. ‘You just seem like yourself, no matter what’s happening around you. My grandmother would say you’re comfortable in your own skin.

It is not a dreamlike state but the somehow insulated state that a great musician achieves in a great performance. He's aware of where he is and what he's doing but his mind is on the playing of his instrument with an internal sense of Tightness-it is not merely mechanical it is not only spiritual it is something of both on a different plane and a more remote one.

Man is so stupid that all his life slips through his hands while trying to understand what the life is!

He was perfectly astonished with the historical account gave him of our affairs during the last century; protesting “it was only a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition, could produce.”His majesty, in another audience, was at the pains to recapitulate the sum of all I had spoken; compared the questions he made with the answers I had given; then taking me into his hands, and stroking me gently, delivered himself in these words, which I shall never forget, nor the manner he spoke them in: “My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved, that ignorance, idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied, by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which, in its original, might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It does not appear, from all you have said, how any one perfection is required toward the procurement of any one station among you; much less, that men are ennobled on account of their virtue; that priests are advanced for their piety or learning; soldiers, for their conduct or valour; judges, for their integrity; senators, for the love of their country; or counsellors for their wisdom. As for yourself,” continued the king, “who have spent the greatest part of your life in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.

Where you travel to, I would love to receive a beautiful postcard.

It is a curious thing, but as one travels the world getting older and older, it appears that happiness is easier to get used to than despair. The second time you have a root beer float, for instance, your happiness at sipping the delicious concoction may not be quite as enormous as when you first had a root beer float, and the twelfth time your happiness may be still less enormous, until root beer floats begin to offer you very little happiness at all, because you have become used to the taste of vanilla ice cream and root beer mixed together. However, the second time you find a thumbtack in your root beer float, your despair is much greater than the first time, when you dismissed the thumbtack as a freak accident rather than part of the scheme of a soda jerk, a phrase which here means "ice cream shop employee who is trying to injure your tongue," and by the twelfth time you find a thumbtack, your despair is even greater still, until you can hardly utter the phrase "root beer float" without bursting into tears. It is almost as if happiness is an acquired taste, like coconut cordial or ceviche, to which you can eventually become accustomed, but despair is something surprising each time you encounter it.

Children have empty erasable white boards upon which big people write indelibly imprinted messages into their tender subconscious minds.

God is not an audiophile demanding the best possible stage sound.

I sound contemptuous, but I am not. I am interested--intrigued even--by the way time erases real lives, leaving only vague imprints. Blood and spirit fade away so that only names and dates remain.

The clue is not to ask in a miserly way-the key is to ask in a grand manner.

I've loved you for a long time, ' she said. 'But there was always something holding me back. Maybe it was that I was afraid of an emotion that was so consuming. It still frightens me,' she admitted in a whisper. Tamani chuckled. 'If it makes you feel any better, it scares the daylights out of me on a regular basis.

THE FEAR OF ITThey say that resistanceto something inevitable makes it seem worse than it is. Maybe the trickis to give in,try to increase the worry, bend like a tree in the storm, give pain its due,find the center of it and look at it plainly, turn it carefullyin the palm of your hand,and realize it can own only so much of you,unless you give it more.It is a balloonthat can get only so big.Anything more is just the fear of it.

Everyone should have a form of a diary it’s a great release Most people’s Diaries are called "My Diary" Mines called "Conversations with Me".

It takes big money to preach a big Gospel to a great big world. We have to have our own land. We have to pay electricity bills, water bills, generator bills, staff payment, security, the audit department needs money, and there are legalities that require money.

My heart is your home.

Focus on peace not on war.Love, live, share and care. Focus on kindness not on hate.Bliss will flow to open the gate.Focus on joy, not on hurt or fear.The earth will dance, peace to share.

Incestuous, homogeneous fiefdoms of self-proclaimed expertise are always rank-closing and mutually self-defending, above all else.

dear little baby of the folks I work for, I got a present for you .. my whole damn life! I'm handin' it over to you & your ma & pa. if you got no money to pay, I wanna stay anyhow, my pleasure is to wait on you forever. to hell with my children & hooray for you!.. you stayin' up all night fixin' up Character Parts for me! givin' 'em what you call dignity! dignity! you know what your dignity is? a black straw hat with a flower stickin' up in front, hands folded cross my stomach, sayin' the same damn fool things .. only nice & easy & proper!" --trouble in mind (1955)

Reading gives liberty to your mind.

Against the claims of a violent "human nature" there is enormous historical evidence that people, when free of a manufactured nationalist or religious hysteria, are more inclined to be compassionate than cruel. When citizens have an opportunity to learn of vicious acts committed by their own governments, they react with indignation and protest.So long as atrocities remain remote, abstract, they will be tolerated, even by decent people.

The comedy in our lives was those first few weeks we lived together in Paris: Our bodies desired one another, our souls opened for one another. We experienced all of the happiness and anguish of first love. Those first few weeks in Paris, we barely touched lips; yet the few times we did, it had the force of a collision of stars.

I have had it with these dumb cakes on this dumb spaceship!

For so must it be and help me do my part.

Placing the burden on the individual to break down doors in finding better education for a child is attractive to conservatives because it reaffirms their faith in individual ambition and autonomy. But to ask an individual to break down doors that we have chained and bolted in advance of his arrival is unfair.

Get out of your own way… stop the paralysis by analysis… decide what you want, create a simple plan, and get moving!

How little we know of what there is to know.

This senate was a place where good Representatives went when they died. Thomas Reed