Quotes by Columnists - Page 8

Go Slow to Go Fast in Growing a Stronger Bond With Others: When you see someone's interest rise in the conversation, you have a glimpse of the hook that can best connect you together. Ask follow-up questions, directly related to what that person just said. If you do just this much, recent research shows you are among the five percent of Americans in conversation. In so doing, you accomplish two things. You've increased their openness and warmth toward you, because you've demonstrated you care. And you've had a closer look at the hook that most matters to them in the conversation. Now you can speak to their hottest interest, in a way that can serve you both.
Kare Anderson
Now, it’s true that some of the protesters are oddly dressed or have silly-sounding slogans, which is inevitable given the open character of the events. But so what? I, at least, am a lot more offended by the sight of exquisitely tailored plutocrats, who owe their continued wealth to government guarantees, whining that President Obama has said mean things about them than I am by the sight of ragtag young people denouncing consumerism.
Paul Krugman
the Bible is only as good and decent as the person reading it.
Dan Savage
The only way that I could figure they could improve upon Coca-Cola, one of life's most delightful elixirs, which studies prove will heal the sick and occasionally raise the dead, is to put bourbon in it.
Lewis Grizzard
Enough anecdotes make a pattern.
George F. Will
there are so many unpunished crimes in the world; indeed, they cover an area so vast, so ancient, so broad and wide that, up to a point, what do we care if a millimetre more is added to it?
Javier Marías
For a moment we sit in silence. Eventually, I turn to him and say, "Do you believe in God?" His eyes narrow for a moment and he stares at me at me for a while. Stares in a rather intense way, like a doctor looking at a troubling X-ray. Then he looks out the and says in a voice like shattered glass, "Only in storms.
Rebecca Sparrow
if you do not share the universities' values, it could be a big mistake to send your children to college before they are intellectually and morally prepared for the indoctrination-rather-than-education they will receive there. Therefore, prepare them morally and intellectually and, if possible, do not send them to college right after high school. Let them work for a year, or perhaps travel (for example, given the antipathy to Israel on campuses, a trip to Israel would be both morally clarifying and maturing). The younger the student, the less life experience and maturity they have, the more they are likely to embrace the rejection of your values.
Dennis Prager
Stupid people go to college but"smart people own them"....
Chetan Bhagat
Gravity is a contributing factor in nearly 73 percent of all accidents involving falling objects.
Dave Barry
When you don’t know what to believe, when you’re not prepared to play the amateur detective, then you get tired and dismiss the entire business, you let it go, you stop thinking and wash your hands of the truth or of the whole tangled mess—which comes to the same thing. The truth is never clear, it’s always a tangled mess. Even when you get to the bottom of it. But in real life almost no one needs to find the truth or devote himself to investigating anything, that only happens in puerile novels.
Javier Marías
From visible habits we make inferences as to the invisible attributes of the soul. Therefore, statecraft is soulcraft.
George F. Will
(I should mention I attended a Christian elementary school where “my dad’s hermeneutic can beat up your dad’s hermeneutic” served as legit schoolyard banter.)
Rachel Held Evans
Marble flooring is to a Punjabi what a foreign degree is to a Tamilian
Chetan Bhagat
Coarseness occurs in a land where platitude inflames this sense of entitlement to more of almost everything, but less of manners and taste, with their irritating intimations of authority and hierarchy.
George F. Will
The problem is hedonism. The problem is the preening vanity and selfishness of 'coming out,' of parading private inclinations, of a kind that repel normal people, as if those inclinations were, all by themselves, marks of authenticity and virtue, of suffering and oppression.
John Derbyshire
He's an honest man - you could shoot craps with him over the telephone.
Earl Wilson
...and yet the idea is hard to accept, it's so hard to succeed in making something happen, even what's been decided on and planned out, not even the will of a god seems forceful enough to manage it, if our own will is made in its semblance. It may be, rather, that nothing is ever unmixed and the thirst for totality is never quenched, perhaps because it is a false yearning. Nothing is whole or of a single piece, everything is fractured and evenomed, veins of peace run through the body of war and hatred insinuates itself into love and compassion, there is truce amid the quagmire of bullets and a bullet amid the revelries, nothing can bear to be unique or prevail or be dominant and everything needs fissures and cracks, needs it negation at the same time as its existence. And nothing is known with certainty and everything is told figuratively.
Javier Marías
I have devoted much of my life to studying, writing, and lecturing about the subject of happiness. In particular, I have advocated that people act as happy as possible even when they do not feel happy. This is, I believe, both a moral obligation to all those who are in our lives—it is unfair to others to inflict our bad moods on them—and a particularly effective way to increase our own happiness, since acting happy elevates one’s mood. This is hardly controversial—in just about every area of life, human beings deeply influence how they feel by how they act. As a rule, those who object to this idea of acting contrary to how one feels are people on the Left—because on the Left, feelings are sacrosanct.
Dennis Prager
It is easier to act your way into a better feeling than to feel your way into a better way of acting. When certain feelings hinder you, look for other feelings to feel. Supplant your fear with a greater motivation. The more frequently we feel and do not act, the less often we will feel. Act genially in the face of rancor; you may be the only angel in that person’s life. What you practice projecting you are projecting and you become.
Kare Anderson
It is a tragic and agonizing irony that instructions once delivered for the purpose of avoiding needless offense are now invoked in ways that needlessly offend, that words once meant to help draw people to the gospel now repel them.
Rachel Held Evans
Only marriage combines all three forms of companionship - spouse is family, best friend, and permanent companion. This is why it is widely held that while the death of a child is the most painful loss, the death of a spouse is the most disorienting one.
Dennis Prager
The difference between communism and socialism is that under socialism central planning ends with a gun in your face, whereas under communism central planning begins with a gun in your face.
Kevin D. Williamson
A simple test to ascertain how much you enjoy and derive meaning from your work is to ask yourself whether you would continue doing it if you won the lottery.
Dennis Prager
A cardinal tenet of conservatism is that social inertia is – and ought to be – strong. It discourages and, if necessary, defeats the political grandiosity of those who would attempt to engineer the future by rupturing connections with the past.
George F. Will
According to the Talmud, loshon hara kills three people: the one who speaks it, the one who hears it, and the one about whom it is told. 'Kill' may strike the modern reader as a bit hyperbolic, but when you think of all the friendships lost, careers stunted, and opportunities thwarted as a result of gossip among women, violent language seems appropriate. We cause serious collateral damage to the advancement of our sex each time we perpetuate the stereotype that women can't get along.
Rachel Held Evans
Most people aren't appreciated enough, and the bravest things we do in our lives are usually known only to ourselves. No one throws ticker tape on the man who chose to be faithful to his wife, on the lawyer who didn't take the drug money
Peggy Noonan
Bring out others’ better side and they are more likely to see and support yours.
Kare Anderson
The missed call and call back drama between men and women deserves its own user mannual.
Chetan Bhagat
My interpretation can only be as inerrant as I am, and that's good to keep in mind.
Rachel Held Evans
In relationship there are always two types of person: one weaker and the other stronger one. It's never easier to live being as weaker one!
Chetan Bhagat
We turned an anthem into an assignment, a poem into a job description.
Rachel Held Evans
Al he knew was that he'd never met anyone who caused him to doubt and to hope as much as she did.
Catherine Bennett
I would not know how I am supposed to feel about many stories if not for the fact that the TV news personalities make sad faces for sad stories and happy faces for happy stories.
Dave Barry
Jehovah's Witness are welcomed into my home...You gotta respect anybody who gets all dressed up in Sunday clothes and goes door-to-door on days so hot their high heels sink a half-inch into the pavement.The trick is to do all the talking yourself. Pretty soon, they'll look at their watches and say, 'Speaking of end times, wouldja look at what time it is now!
Celia Rivenbark
Best of all are the decorations the grandchildren have made ~ fat little stars and rather crooked Santas, shaped out of dough and baked in the oven.
Gladys Taber
The day we didn't spend together, we will never spend together, what someone was going to say to us on the phone when they called and we didn't answer will never be said, at least not exactly the same thing said in exactly the same spirit; and everything will be slightly different or even completely different because of the lack of courage which dissuades us from talking to you.....none of that will ever be repeated and consequently a time will come when having been together will be the same as not having been together, and having picked up the phone the same as not having done so, and having dared to speak to you the same as if we'd remained silent
Javier Marías
You create what you speak. So, speak a better world.Speak a happier and more loving life. Speak yourdespair and let it lead you back to your truth.
Rachel C. Weingarten
Our hatred of government is not caused mainly by government's goals, whatever their wisdom, but by government's techniques." Philip Howard
George F. Will
Seems to me that for you, evangelicalism is like the boyfriend you broke up with two years ago, but whose Facebook page you still check compulsively.
Rachel Held Evans
Luckily, however, life doesn't always follow tradition, but craves out a path of its own.
Kader Abdolah
Natives of the Florida Keys often refer to themselves as Conchs, and for good reason: They have been drinking.
Dave Barry
Even if we can't be happy we must always be cheerful.
Irving Kristol
I don’t respect my husband because he is the man and I am the woman, and it’s my “place” to submit to him. I respect Dan because he is a good person, and because he has made me a better person too.
Rachel Held Evans
Politics is always driven by competing worries.
George F. Will
Ultimately, my love saved me, for my love gave me strength. At night, when sleep was sunwilling to rescue me, I gritted my teeth and devoured my fondest memories.
John Shors
Dogs feel very strongly that they should always go with you in the car, in case the need should arise for them to bark violently at nothing right in your ear.
Dave Barry
Traveling is all very well if you can get home at night. I would be willing to go around the world if I could be back in time to light the candles and set the table for dinner.” ♥ Gladys Taber.
Gladys Taber
Libraries are brothels for the mind. Which means that librarians are the madams, greeting punters, understanding their strange tastes and needs, and pimping their books.
Guy Browning
Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you're scared to death.
Earl Wilson
Dharma is precisely this 'discipline of ordered existence', a 'belief system that restrains and gives coherence to desires.
Gurcharan Das
To restrict or legalize abortion, to allow or forbid gay marriage, a legislator would need to write and pass a law, get it signed by the president or a governor, and perhaps override a veto. A Supreme Court justice need only persuade four other people. If he or she is not internally constrained by the authority of a text, he or she is not constrained.
Michael J. Gerson
You don't have to be old in America to say of a world you lived in: That world is gone.
Peggy Noonan
Law, rather than harnessing the passions, is increasingly pressed into their service.
George F. Will
People only get married when they've no other option, out of panic or desperation or so as not to lose someone they couldn't bear to lose. It's always the most conventional things that contain the largest measure of madness.
Javier Marías
Growing up is when you understand you get what you give, not what you're given.
Guy Browning
Catching something is purely a byproduct of our fishing. It is the act of fishing that wipes away all grief lightens all worry dissolves all fear and anxiety.
Gladys Taber
Hobbies of any kind are boring except to people who have the same hobby. This is also true of religion, although you will not find me saying so in print.
Dave Barry
Here you have learned the theories of life," continued the Headmaster, resuming the thread of his discourse, "but after all, life is not a matter of theories. Life is a matter of facts. It calls on the young and the old alike to face these facts, even though they are hard and sometimes unpleasant. Your problem, for example, is to slay dragons.
Heywood Broun
The way to achieve happiness is to have a high standard for yourself and a medium one for everyone else.
Marcelene Cox