70 Quotes

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ما يصيب المسلم من نصب ولا وصب ولا همّ ولا حزن ولا أذى ولا غمّ - حتى الشوكة يشاكها - إلا كفّر الله بها مِن خطاياه No fatigue, disease, sorrow, sadness, hurt or distress befalls a Muslim - not even the prick he receives from a thorn - except that Allah expiates some of his sins because of it. (Sahih al-Bukhari, Book 70, #545)
Anonymous
On the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi's 70th birthday. "Generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth.
Albert Einstein
No matter how old you are now. You are never too young or too old for success or going after what you want. Here’s a short list of people who accomplished great things at different ages 1) Helen Keller, at the age of 19 months, became deaf and blind. But that didn’t stop her. She was the first deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. 2) Mozart was already competent on keyboard and violin; he composed from the age of 5. 3) Shirley Temple was 6 when she became a movie star on “Bright Eyes.” 4) Anne Frank was 12 when she wrote the diary of Anne Frank. 5) Magnus Carlsen became a chess Grandmaster at the age of 13. 6) Nadia Comăneci was a gymnast from Romania that scored seven perfect 10.0 and won three gold medals at the Olympics at age 14. 7) Tenzin Gyatso was formally recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama in November 1950, at the age of 15. 8) Pele, a soccer superstar, was 17 years old when he won the world cup in 1958 with Brazil. 9) Elvis was a superstar by age 19. 10) John Lennon was 20 years and Paul Mcartney was 18 when the Beatles had their first concert in 1961. 11) Jesse Owens was 22 when he won 4 gold medals in Berlin 1936. 12) Beethoven was a piano virtuoso by age 23 13) Issac Newton wrote Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica at age 24 14) Roger Bannister was 25 when he broke the 4 minute mile record 15) Albert Einstein was 26 when he wrote the theory of relativity 16) Lance E. Armstrong was 27 when he won the tour de France 17) Michelangelo created two of the greatest sculptures “David” and “Pieta” by age 28 18) Alexander the Great, by age 29, had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world 19) J.K. Rowling was 30 years old when she finished the first manuscript of Harry Potter 20) Amelia Earhart was 31 years old when she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean 21) Oprah was 32 when she started her talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind 22) Edmund Hillary was 33 when he became the first man to reach Mount Everest 23) Martin Luther King Jr. was 34 when he wrote the speech “I Have a Dream." 24) Marie Curie was 35 years old when she got nominated for a Nobel Prize in Physics 25) The Wright brothers, Orville (32) and Wilbur (36) invented and built the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight 26) Vincent Van Gogh was 37 when he died virtually unknown, yet his paintings today are worth millions. 27) Neil Armstrong was 38 when he became the first man to set foot on the moon. 28) Mark Twain was 40 when he wrote "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", and 49 years old when he wrote "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" 29) Christopher Columbus was 41 when he discovered the Americas 30) Rosa Parks was 42 when she refused to obey the bus driver’s order to give up her seat to make room for a white passenger 31) John F. Kennedy was 43 years old when he became President of the United States 32) Henry Ford Was 45 when the Ford T came out. 33) Suzanne Collins was 46 when she wrote "The Hunger Games" 34) Charles Darwin was 50 years old when his book On the Origin of Species came out. 35) Leonardo Da Vinci was 51 years old when he painted the Mona Lisa. 36) Abraham Lincoln was 52 when he became president. 37) Ray Kroc Was 53 when he bought the McDonalds Franchise and took it to unprecedented levels. 38) Dr. Seuss was 54 when he wrote "The Cat in the Hat". 40) Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger III was 57 years old when he successfully ditched US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009. All of the 155 passengers aboard the aircraft survived 41) Colonel Harland Sanders was 61 when he started the KFC Franchise 42) J.R.R Tolkien was 62 when the Lord of the Ring books came out 43) Ronald Reagan was 69 when he became President of the US 44) Jack Lalane at age 70 handcuffed, shackled, towed 70 rowboats 45) Nelson Mandela was 76 when he became President
Pablo
My proceeds from the PayPal acquisition were $180 million. I put $100 million in SpaceX, $70m in Tesla, and $10m in Solar City. I had to borrow money for rent.
Elon Musk
The second thing you have to do to be a writer is to keep on writing. Don't listen to people who tell you that very few people get published and you won't be one of them. Don't listen to your friend who says you are better that Tolkien and don't have to try any more. Keep writing, keep faith in the idea that you have unique stories to tell, and tell them. I meet far too many people who are going to be writers 'someday.' When they are out of high school, when they've finished college, after the wedding, when the kids are older, after I retire . . . That is such a trap You will never have any more free time than you do right now. So, whether you are 12 or 70, you should sit down today and start being a writer if that is what you want to do. You might have to write on a notebook while your kids are playing on the swings or write in your car on your coffee break. That's okay. I think we've all 'been there, done that.' It all starts with the writing.
Robin Hobb
Don’t misunderstand me; I don’t want to die alone, but spending quality time with myself 60 to 70 percent of the day is my idea of mecca.
Issa Rae (The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl)
Every mystery novel I ever read, the great detective was such an arrogant fuck you could replace 70% of his dialogue with 'Are you stupid?' and the conversation would still make sense.
NisiOisiN (Zaregoto, Book 1: The Kubikiri Cycle)
The task is to learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people's chances to enjoy theirs.
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi
In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.
Jeff Bezos
Reading list (1972 edition)[edit] 1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey 2. The Old Testament 3. Aeschylus – Tragedies 4. Sophocles – Tragedies 5. Herodotus – Histories 6. Euripides – Tragedies 7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War 8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings 9. Aristophanes – Comedies 10. Plato – Dialogues 11. Aristotle – Works 12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus 13. Euclid – Elements 14. Archimedes – Works 15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections 16. Cicero – Works 17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things 18. Virgil – Works 19. Horace – Works 20. Livy – History of Rome 21. Ovid – Works 22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia 23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania 24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic 25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion 26. Ptolemy – Almagest 27. Lucian – Works 28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations 29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties 30. The New Testament 31. Plotinus – The Enneads 32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine 33. The Song of Roland 34. The Nibelungenlied 35. The Saga of Burnt Njál 36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica 37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy 38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales 39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks 40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy 41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly 42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres 43. Thomas More – Utopia 44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises 45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel 46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion 47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays 48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies 49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote 50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene 51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis 52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays 53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences 54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World 55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals 56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan 57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy 58. John Milton – Works 59. Molière – Comedies 60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises 61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light 62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics 63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education 64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies 65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics 66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology 67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe 68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal 69. William Congreve – The Way of the World 70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge 71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man 72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws 73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary 74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones 75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets
Mortimer J. Adler (How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading)
Imagine the earth’s population of six billion people reduced to just one hundred representatives. Statistically, that makes 30 white, 70 non-white. It means 6 people own 59% of the wealth and they all live in North America. 80 are in substandard housing. One has an education. One owns a computer. Don’t blame me if it all sounds crazy.
Grant Morrison
a life can change in a tenth of a second. or sometimes it can take 70 years.
Charles Bukowski (Betting on the Muse: Poems & Stories)
Ang payapang pampang ay para lang sa mga pangahas na sasalunga sa alimpuyo ng mga alon sa panahon ng unos. (Tranquil shores are only for those who boldly oppose raging waves during storms.)
Lualhati Bautista (Dekada '70 (Ang Orihinal at Kumpletong Edisyon))
There, pride, avarice, and envy are the tongues men know and heed, a Babel of depsair
Dante Alighieri (The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso)
I was in '78 recently," he announced. "I brought you this." He handed me a single by the Beatles. I didn't recognize the title. "Didn't they split in '70?" "Not always. How are things?
Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next, #1))
When we are young... we often experience things in the present with a nostalgia-in-advance, but we seldom guess what we will truly prize years from now.
Edmund White (City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and 70s)
But there’s something more important we need to discuss: What is it with you and disco? I can understand the ’70s TV because everyone loves hairy people with huge collars. But disco? Disco!?
Andy Weir (The Martian)
We were born in the '70s, back when twins were rare, a bit magical: cousins of the unicorn, siblings of the elves.
Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl)
A human being weighing 70 kilograms contains among other things: -45 litres of water -Enough chalk to whiten a chicken pen -Enough phosphorus for 2,200 matches -Enough fat to make approximately 70 bars of soap -Enough iron to make a two inch nail -Enough carbon for 9,000 pencil points -A spoonful of magnesium I weigh more than 70 kilograms. And I remember a TV series called Cosmos. Carl Sagan would walk around on a set that was meant to look like space, speaking in large numbers. On one of the shows he sat in front of a tank full of all the substances human beings are made of. He stirred the tank with a stick wondering if he would be able to create life. He didn’t succeed.
Erlend Loe (Naïve. Super)
At 20 a man is a peacock, at 30 a lion, at 40 a camel, at 50 a serpent, at 60 a dog, at 70 an ape, and at 80 nothing
Baltasar Gracián
How short lived knowledge is. When I was 20 I knew it all: now at 70 I can’t understand a thing
Macedonio Fernández
the concept of the B seat, where one had to sit between two other passengers, had been eliminated along with other unpleasant things, like disease and government.
Neal Shusterman (Scythe (Arc of a Scythe, #1))
Maxim 70: Failure is not an option. It is mandatory. The option is whether or not to let failure be the last thing you do. -The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries
Howard Tayler
From the age of 6 I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was 50 I had published a universe of designs. But all I have done before the the age of 70 is not worth bothering with. At 75 I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am 80 you will see real progress. At 90 I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At 100, I shall be a marvelous artist. At 110, everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokusai, but today I sign my self 'The Old Man Mad About Drawing.
Katsushika Hokusai
As Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas, “If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” [Gospel of Thomas 70]
Adyashanti (Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic)
My kids are around pit bulls every day. In the ’70s they blamed Dobermans, in the ’80s they blamed German Shepherds, in the ’90s they blamed the Rottweiler. Now they blame the Pit Bull.
Cesar Millan
70.—There is no disguise which can long hide love where it exists, nor feign it where it does not.
François de La Rochefoucauld (Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims)
I can also be kind of an asshole. (“Kind of” = in the 70 percent–80 percent range.)
Martha Wells (Network Effect (The Murderbot Diaries, #5))
Live. And Live Well. BREATHE. Breathe in and Breathe deeply. Be PRESENT. Do not be past. Do not be future. Be now. On a crystal clear, breezy 70 degree day, roll down the windows and FEEL the wind against your skin. Feel the warmth of the sun. If you run, then allow those first few breaths on a cool Autumn day to FREEZE your lungs and do not just be alarmed, be ALIVE. Get knee-deep in a novel and LOSE track of time. If you bike, pedal HARDER and if you crash then crash well. Feel the SATISFACTION of a job well done-a paper well-written, a project thoroughly completed, a play well-performed. If you must wipe the snot from your 3-year old's nose, don't be disgusted if the Kleenex didn't catch it all because soon he'll be wiping his own. If you've recently experienced loss, then GRIEVE. And Grieve well. At the table with friends and family, LAUGH. If you're eating and laughing at the same time, then might as well laugh until you puke. And if you eat, then SMELL. The aromas are not impediments to your day. Steak on the grill, coffee beans freshly ground, cookies in the oven. And TASTE. Taste every ounce of flavor. Taste every ounce of friendship. Taste every ounce of Life. Because-it-is-most-definitely-a-Gift.
Kyle Lake
إذا عيرك أحد بأن نسبة الأمية بلغت 70%بين أحفاد قدماء المصريين أول من اخترعوا الكتابة في التاريخ ،فرد قائلاً بأننا أيضاً ابتدعنا كتابة تصويرية كالهيروغليفية ،فالهلال معناه الحزب الوطني والنخلة معناها الوفد ..
أحمد رجب (أي كلام)
Honest Facts I Have Learned About People   We are all 65-70% water. We are all stardust. We all suffer, but we do not have to suffer alone.
Nikita Gill (Dragonhearts)
As Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, says: “In the old world, you devoted 30 percent of your time to building a great service and 70 percent of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.
Eric Schmidt (How Google Works)
The complex human eye harvests light. It perceives seven to ten million colors through a synaptic flash: one-tenth of a second from retina to brain. Homo sapiens gangs up to 70 percent of its sense receptors solely for vision, to anticipate danger and recognize reward, but also—more so—for beauty.
Ellen Meloy (The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky (Pulitzer Prize Finalist))
Improve by 1% a day, and in just 70 days, you’re twice as good.
Josh Kaufman (The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business)
To become virtually heart-attack proof, you need to get your LDL cholesterol at least under 70 mg/dL.
Michael Greger (How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease)
Although quantum mechanics has been around for nearly 70 years, it is still not generally understood or appreciated, even by those that use it to do calculations.
Stephen Hawking
Several studies indicate that nearly 70 percent of kids who experience childhood gender dysphoria—and are not affirmed or socially transitioned—eventually outgrow it.23
Abigail Shrier (Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters)
If climate drives business results, what drives climate? 50-70% of how employees perceive their organization’s climate corresponds to the actions of one person: their manager.
Raymond Wheeler (Lift: Five Practices Great Managers Do Consistently: Raise Performance and Morale - See Your Employees Thrive)
To me the Zionists, who want to go back to the Jewish state of A.D. 70 (destruction of Jerusalem by Titus) are just as offensive as the Nazis. With their nosing after blood, their ancient "cultural roots," their partly canting, partly obtuse winding back of the world they are altogether a match for the National Socialists. That is the fantastic thing about the National Socialists, that they simultaneously share in a community of ideas with Soviet Russia and with Zion.
Victor Klemperer (I Will Bear Witness 1933-41: A Diary of the Nazi Years)
Chi non legge, a 70 anni avrà vissuto una sola vita: la propria. Chi legge avrà vissuto 5000 anni: c’era quando Caino uccise Abele, quando Renzo sposò Lucia, quando Leopardi ammirava l’infinito… perché la lettura è una immortalità all’indietro.
Umberto Eco
There is no such sense of solitude as that which we experience upon the silent and vast elevations of great mountains. Lifted high above the level of human sounds and habitations, among the wild expanses and colossal features of Nature, we are thrilled in our loneliness with a strange fear and elation – an ascent above the reach of life's expectations or companionship, and the tremblings of a wild and undefined misgivings.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu (The Haunted Baronet and Others: Ghost Stories 1861-70)
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” p.71 “Affection is taken as the image when God is represented as our Father; Eros, when Christ is represented as the Bridegroom of the Church.” p.78 “The little pockets of early Christians survived because they cared exclusively for the love of “the brethren” and stopped their ears to the opinion of the Pagan society all around them.” p.70 “Friendship is even, if you like, angelic. But man needs to be triply protected by humility if he is to eat the bread of angels without risk.” p.87
C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)
We are creatures of habit. We think somewhere between 60,000 to 70,000 thoughts in one day,1 and 90 percent of those thoughts are exactly the same ones we had the day before.
Joe Dispenza (You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter)
Things I will never like: 1. Drying off with a cold, damp towel. 2. The feeling of seaweed wrapping around my legs. 3. Anything that was popular in the 70's. 4. Licorice, yam, or raisins. 5. That high-pitched screech that babies make. 6. Writhing maggots.
Bill Watterson (It's a Magical World (Calvin and Hobbes, #11))
Msichana wa miaka 18 miaka ya 70 ni sawa na msichana wa miaka 8 leo. Msichana wa miaka 8 leo anayajua maisha kuliko msichana wa miaka 18 miaka ya 70. Tuwape watoto wetu haki yao ya msingi ya kuwa watoto katika siku za ujana wao, kabla hawajawa watoto tena watakapokuwa wakubwa.
Enock Maregesi
You might come here Sunday on a whim. Say your life broke down. The last good kiss you had was years ago. You walk these streets laid out by the insane, past hotels that didn't last, bars that did, the tortured try of local drivers to accelerate their lives. Only churches are kept up. The jail turned 70 this year. The only prisoner is always in, not knowing what he's done.
Richard Hugo
I had a dream about you. You were on a bike going 70 miles an hour, I could see you approaching my car in the mirror. You were trying to say something so, I jumped on the brakes as hard as I could, I guess I forgot I had tied your bike on my bumper.
Georgia Saratsioti (Dreaming is for lovers)
My twin, Go. I've said this phrase so many times, it has become a reassuring mantra instead of actual words: Mytwingo. We were born in the '70s, back when twins were rare, a bit magical: cousins of the unicorn, siblings of the elves. We even have a dash of twin telepathy. Go is truly the one person in the entire world I am totally myself with. I don't feel the need to explain my actions to her. I don't clarify, I don't doubt, I don't worry. I don't tell her everything, not anymore, but I tell her more than anyone else, by far. I tell her as much as I can. We spent nine months back to back, covering each other. It became a lifelong habit. It never mattered to me that she was a girl, strange for a deeply self-conscious kid. What can I say? She was always just cool.
Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl)
A book is an attempt to make through permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past. […] The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation. (70)
Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business)
I have a good friend in the East, who comes to my shows and says, you sing a lot about the past, you can't live in the past, you know. I say to him, I can go outside and pick up a rock that's older than the oldest song you know, and bring it back in here and drop it on your foot. Now the past didn't go anywhere, did it? It's right here, right now. I always thought that anybody who told me I couldn't live in the past was trying to get me to forget something that if I remembered it it would get them serious trouble. No, that 50s, 60s, 70s, 90s stuff, that whole idea of decade packaging, things don't happen that way. The Vietnam War heated up in 1965 and ended in 1975-- what's that got to do with decades? No, that packaging of time is a journalist convenience that they use to trivialize and to dismiss important events and important ideas. I defy that.
Utah Phillips
وفي عمان يحكم الملك حسين شعباً من الفلسطينيين يعلمون علم اليقين أن الأردن سوف تكون لهم.. فهم 70% من الشعب، ويعلمون أن الملك حسين ضد استقلال الضفة الغربية لأنه يريدها!، ولأنه يحلم بالمملكة الأردنية المتحدة التى تضم ضفتى نهر الأردن، وقد وصفهما جده الملك عبدالله : بأن الضفتين جناحان لطائر واحد هو مملكتى !
أنيس منصور (إنتهى زمن الفرص الضائعة)
The way I see it: Why get out of bed when you can read about people who got out of bed?
-Eric Foreman That 70's Show
After almost 70 years of being paralysed into silence by the Zionist venom — the accusation of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial — the world in general and the West in particular, have continued to tolerate Israel’s unrelenting arrogance, barbarity, and contemptuous disregard for international law including the UDHR. That venom has prevented condemnation of incalculable cheating, lying, stealing, murdering, and ruthless violation of the legal and natural human rights of the Palestinian people by a nation devoid of conscience, humanity, or any of the noble principles claimed by the religion which it claims to represent.
William Hanna (The Grim Reaper)
Thou shalt not commit adultry is a command which makes no distinction between the following persons. They are all required to obey it: children at birth. Children in the cradle. School children. Youths and maidens. Fresh adults. Older ones. Men and women of 40. Of 50. Of 60. Of 70. Of 80. Of 100. The command does not distribute its burden equally, and cannot. It is not hard upon the three sets of children.
Mark Twain (Letters From The Earth: Uncensored Writings By Mark Twain)
Over the last 25 years, the major popular movements that have had significant impact on the general society and have changed it, that have had a major civilizing effect – the feminist movement, the environmental movement, and so on – these are mostly developments of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Their roots might be in the activism of the ‘60s, but the movements themselves developed and extended later. The same is true of the changes in respect for other cultures, rights of oppressed people, and so on. These are quite significant changes. If you compare the United States now to what it was, say, 35 years ago, the changes are quite dramatic. These are changes in popular consciousness that are quite deeply embedded.
Noam Chomsky
God, the three of you. When I wake up on Saturday mornings--late you always let me sleep in--I come looking for you, and you're in the backyard with dirt on your knees and two little girls spinning around you in perfect orbit. And you put their hair in pigtails, and you let them wear whatever madness they want, and Alice planted a fruit cocktail tree, and Noomi ate a butterfly, and they look like me because they're round and golden, but the glow for you. And you built us a picnic table. And you learned to bake bread. And you've painted a mural on ever west-facing wall. And it isn't all bad, I promise. I swear to you. You might not be actively, thoughtfully happy 70 to 80 percent of the time, but maybe you wouldn't be anyway. And even when you're sad, Neal--even when you're falling asleep at the other side of the bed--I think you're happy, too. About some things. About a few things.
Rainbow Rowell (Landline)
I’ve seen a greater share of wonders, vast And small, than most have done. My peace is made; My breathing slows. I could not ask for more. To reach beyond the stuff of day-to-day Is worth this life of mine. Our kind is meant To search and seek among the outer bounds, And when we land upon a distant shore, To seek another yet farther still. Enough. The silence grows. My strength has fled, and Sol Become a faded gleam, and now I wait, A Viking laid to rest atop his ship. Though fire won’t send me off, but cold and ice, And forever shall I drift alone. No king of old had such a stately bier, Adorned with metals dark and grey, nor such A hoard of gems to grace his somber tomb. I check my straps; I cross my arms, prepare Myself to once again venture into the Unknown, content to face my end and pass Beyond this mortal realm, content to hold And wait and here to sleep— To sleep in a sea of stars. —THE FARTHEST SHORE 48–70 HARROW GLANTZER
Christopher Paolini (To Sleep in a Sea of Stars (Fractalverse, #1))
I know that imprisonment will be harder for me than it has ever been for anyone, filled with cowardly threats and hideous cruelty. But I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives of 70 of my comrades. Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.
Fidel Castro (History Will Absolve Me (English and Spanish Edition))
It's hazy but she remembers Jane telling her about drag shows she used to go to in the '70s, the balls, how queens would go hungry for weeks to buy gowns, the shimmering nightclubs that sometimes felt like the only safe places. She lets Jane's memories transpose over here, now, like double exposed film, two different generations of messy, loud, brave and scared and brave again people stomping their feet and waving hands with bitten nails, all the things they share and all the things they don't, the things she has that people like Jane smashed windows and spat blood for.
Casey McQuiston (One Last Stop)
If I've learned anything in twenty-nine years, it's that every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar. My gift - bad choice of words - is that I can look at you, him, her, them, whoever, and tell right away what is keeping them awake at night: money; feelings of insignificance; overwhelming boredom; evil children; job troubles; or perhaps death, in one of its many costumes, perched in the wings. What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives.
Douglas Coupland (Hey Nostradamus!)
The mental health system is filled with survivors of prolonged, repeated childhood trauma. This is true even though most people who have been abused in childhood never come to psychiatric attention. To the extent that these people recover, they do so on their own.[21] While only a small minority of survivors, usually those with the most severe abuse histories, eventually become psychiatric patients, many or even most psychiatric patients are survivors of childhood abuse.[22] The data on this point are beyond contention. On careful questioning, 50-60 percent of psychiatric inpatients and 40-60 percent of outpatients report childhood histories of physical or sexual abuse or both.[23] In one study of psychiatric emergency room patients, 70 percent had abuse histories.[24] Thus abuse in childhood appears to be one of the main factors that lead a person to seek psychiatric treatment as an adult.[25]
Judith Lewis Herman (Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror)
For over 70 years economics has been fixated on GDP, or national output, as its primary measure of progress. That fixation has been used to justify extreme inequalities of income and wealth coupled with unprecedented destruction of the living world. For the twenty-first century a far bigger goal is needed: meeting the human rights of every person within the means of our life-giving planet.
Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
People in the West like to shoot things. When they first got to the West they shot buffalo. Once there were 70 million buffalo on the plains and then the people of the West started blasting away at them. Buffalo are just cows with big heads. If you've ever looked a cow in the face and seen the unutterable depths of trust and stupidity that lie within, you will be able to guess how difficult it must have been for people in the West to track down buffalo and shoot them to pieces. By 1895, there were only 800 buffalo left, mostly in zoos and touring Wild West shows. With no buffalo left to kill, Westerners started shooting Indians. Between 1850 and 1890 they reduced the number of Indians in America from two million to 90,000. Nowadays, thank goodness, both have made a recovery. Today there are 30,000 buffalo and 300,000 Indiands, and of course you are not allowed to shoot either, so all the Westerners have left to shoot at are road signs and each other, both of which they do rather a lot. There you have a capsule history of the West.
Bill Bryson
Their violence (the jungle wars of the '70s), and all violence for that matter, reflects the neutral exploration of sensation that is taking place, within sex as elsewhere and the sense that the perversions are valuable precisely because they provide a readily accessible anthology of exploratory techniques.
J.G. Ballard (The Atrocity Exhibition)
It turns out, however, that how much life satisfaction people report is itself determined by how good we feel at the very moment we are asked the question. Averaged over many people, the mood you are in determines more than 70 percent of how much life satisfaction you report and how well you judge your life to be going at that moment determines less than 30 percent.
Martin E.P. Seligman (Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being)
The tragic irony of modern anti-fascism is that the more successful it is, the more its raison d'etre is called into question. Its greatest successes lie in hypothetical limbo: How many murderous fascist movements have been nipped in the bud over the past 70 years by antifa groups before their violence could metastasize? We will never know--and that's a very good thing indeed.
Mark Bray (Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook)
In English class, someone flung a folded-up square of notebook paper onto the floor next to my right foot. I picked it up and opened it. It read, Bitch! Nobody had ever called me that before, and though I was automatically furious, deep down i was also flattered that I had elicited enough emotion to be worthy of the name.
Gayle Forman (If I Stay (If I Stay, #1))
Three important revolutions shaped the course of history: the Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different. This book tells the story of how these three revolutions have affected humans and their fellow organisms.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as he is believed to have done in former days. When I hear such questions, it always makes me think of the rabbi who was asked how it could be that God often showed himself to people in the olden days while nowadays nobody ever sees him. The rabbi replied: "Nowadays there is now longer anybody who can bow low enough." This answer hits the nail on the head. We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. The Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as useless illusions; the Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious; and the rational intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not his total psyche. This ignorance persists today in spite of the fact that for more than 70 years the unconscious has been a basic scientific concept that is indispensable to any serious psychological investigation.
C.G. Jung (Man and His Symbols)
I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to young, penniless artists. That was the era of "coffee shops" as they were defined in New York—cheap restaurants open round the clock where you could eat for less than it would cost to cook at home. That was the era of ripped jeans and dirty T-shirts, when the kind of people who are impressed by material signs of success were not the people you wanted to know.
Edmund White (City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and 70s)
Although I respect the Judeo-Christian ethic, as well as the Eastern philosophies, and of course the teachings of Muhammad, I find that organized religion has corrupted those beliefs to justify countless atrocities throughout the ages. Were I to go to church, I'd be a hypocrite.
Danny Masterson
How’s this for fascinating: Heritability of various aspects of cognitive development is very high (e.g., around 70 percent for IQ) in kids from high–socioeconomic status (SES) families but is only around 10 percent in low-SES kids. Thus, higher SES allows the full range of genetic influences on cognition to flourish, whereas lower-SES settings restrict them. In other words, genes are nearly irrelevant to cognitive development if you’re growing up in awful poverty—poverty’s adverse effects trump the genetics.fn24 Similarly, heritability of alcohol use is lower among religious than nonreligious subjects—i.e., your genes don’t matter much if you’re in a religious environment that condemns drinking. Domains like these showcase the potential power of classical behavior genetics.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
I think it is effective to constrict your anus 100 times, dent your navel 100 times in succession everyday. You can do so at a boring meeting or in a subway without being noticed for you to do so. I have known 70 year old man who has practiced it for 20 years. As a result, he has good complexion and has grown 20 years younger. His eyes sparkle. He is full of vigor, happiness, and joy. He has neither complained nor born a grudge under any circumstance.
Hiroyuki Nishigaki (How to Good-Bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way?)
The same philantropists who give millions for AIDS or education in tolerance have ruined the lives of thousands through financial speculation and thus created the conditions for the rise of the very intolerance that is being fought. In the 1960s and '70s it was possible to buy soft-porn postcards of a girl clad in a bikini or wearing an evening gown; however, when one moved the postcard a little bit or looked at it from a slightly different perspective, her clothes magically disappeared to reveal the girl's naked body. When we are bombarded by the heartwarming news of a debt cancellation or a big humanitarian campaign to eradicate a dangerous epidemic, just move the postcard a little to catch a glimpse of the obscene figure of the liberal communist at work beneath.
Slavoj Žižek (Violence: Six Sideways Reflections)
Equally arresting are British pub names. Other people are content to dub their drinking establishment with pedestrian names like Harry’s Bar and the Greenwood Lounge. But a Briton, when he wants to sup ale, must find his way to the Dog and Duck, the Goose and Firkin, the Flying Spoon, or the Spotted Dog. The names of Britain’s 70,000 or so pubs cover a broad range, running from the inspired to the improbable, from the deft to the daft. Almost any name will do so long as it is at least faintly absurd, unconnected with the name of the owner, and entirely lacking in any suggestion of drinking, conversing, and enjoying oneself. At a minimum the name should puzzle foreigners-this is a basic requirement of most British institutions-and ideally it should excite long and inconclusive debate, defy all logical explanation, and evoke images that border on the surreal.
Bill Bryson (The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way)
Why not eliminate schooling between age 12-16? It’s biologically + psychologically too turbulent a time to be cooped up inside, made to sit all the time. During these years, kids would live communally – doing some work, anyway being physically active, in the countryside(...) This simple change in the age specificity of schooling would a) reduce adolescent discontent, anomie, boredom, neurosis; b) radically modify the almost inevitable process by which people at 50 are psychologically and intellectually ossified (...) After all, since most people from now on are going to live to be 70, 75, 80, why should all their schooling be bunched together in the first 1/3 or 1/4 of their lives – so that it’s downhill all the way
Susan Sontag
70% of the world global deaths are attributable to modifial behavioural risk factors like smoking, physical inactivity and diet. The leading global risks for mortality are high blood pressure 13%, tobacco use 9%, high blood sugar 6%, physical inactivity 6% and obesity 5%. In 2013, an estimated 2.1 billion adults were overweight, compared with 857 million in 1980. There are now more people world-wide, except in sub-Saharan parts of Africa and Asia who are obese, than who are underweight.
Anna Lembke (Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence)
عند ال 30 ستبدا مرحلة اخرى برصيد يجب ان يكون كبيرا فى محبة الحياة يقول الصينيون : ( فى ال 20 بداية الرحلة ,,, وفى ال 30 المعرفة ,,, وفى ال 40 المال ,, وفى ال 50 الفخر ,, وفى ال 60 الرضا ,,, وفى ال 70 السعادة )) لابد ان تعيش حياتك باقصى طاقة حتى تدخل ال 30 مُحملاً بالمعرفة كما قال الصينيون وفى ال 30 ستختلف الامور فى ال 30 اصبح السيد المسح مُعلماً وبدأ الوعظ والتعليم وفى ال 30 عُين احمد زويل استاذاً للفيزياء الكيميائية فى كاليفورنيا قال صموئيل بيكيت :( فى ال 30 شعرت كأننى امتلكت فجأة عينين ) سن ال 30 هى سن بداية ممارسة الحياة السياسية بمجلس الشيوخ الامريكى يقول الروائى ميلان كونديرا :(ظللت حتى ال 30 اكتب شعرا وموسيقى ومسرحا وأُمثل واُغنى ,,,,,, كنت ابحث عن ذاتى حتى كتبت الرواية ) فى سن ال 30 كان عبد الناصر يُخطط لثورة ويقول الطبيب الانجليزى دايان يانكس :(كلما كانت حياتك مُشعة ومليئة بالخيرات قبل ال 30 زادت لديك قوة مقاومة عوامل الاكتئاب ) اذن فأنت شاب حتى تصل ال30 واسمعها من شخص فى منتصف ال 30 عش حياتك ولا تخف ولا تؤجل ولا تتردد لانك ستكتشف فجأة بعد ان تتجاوز ال 30 انك ((نصف شاب ,,, يسير فى صحرا الربع الخالى وبوصلتة التى تدله على الطريق هى كل ما عاشه وعرفه من قبل )) كتاب ) زمن الغم الجميل )
عمر طاهر (سلسلة المقالات الساخرة)
On me personally what has been the most important was to understand the value of time -- and this is something that has come from observing him, learning his story and that time compounds. What you do when you are young (and as you use time over your life) can have an exponential effect so that if you are thoughtful about it, you can really have powerful results later, if you want to. Also, that is a reason to be hopeful, because compounding is something that happens pretty quickly. If you are 50 or 60, it is not too late. He said to me one time, if there is something you really want to do, don't put it off until you are 70 years old. ... Do it now. Don't worry about how much it costs or things like that, because you are going to enjoy it now. You don't even know what your health will be like then. On the other hand, if you are investing in your education and you are learning, you should do that as early as you possibly can, because then it will have time to compound over the longest period. And that the things you do learn and invest in should be knowledge that is cumulative, so that the knowledge builds on itself. So instead of learning something that might become obsolete tomorrow, like some particular type of software [that no one even uses two years later], choose things that will make you smarter in 10 or 20 years. That lesson is something I use all the time now.
Alice Schroeder (The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life)
Readers will recall that the little evidence collected seemed to point to the strange and confusing figure of an unidentified Air Force pilot whose body was washed ashore on a beach near Dieppe three months later. Other traces of his ‘mortal remains’ were found in a number of unexpected places: in a footnote to a paper on some unusual aspects of schizophrenia published thirty years earlier in a since defunct psychiatric journal; in the pilot for an unpurchased TV thriller, ‘Lieutenant 70’; and on the record labels of a pop singer known as The Him — to instance only a few. Whether in fact this man was a returning astronaut suffering from amnesia, the figment of an ill-organized advertising campaign, or, as some have suggested, the second coming of Christ, is anyone’s guess.
J.G. Ballard (The Atrocity Exhibition)
The human brain comprises 70% water, which means it's a similar consistency to tofu. Picture that for a second - a blob of tofu the size and shape of a brain. Now imagine taking that piece of tofu, and forcing your thumbs into it hard. It would burst wouldn't it? Okay, now imagine those thumbs weren't thumbs but thumb-shaped pieces of bad news. And there weren't two of them, they were about half a dozen. Imagine you were forcing all six pieces of bad news - a divorce, multiple career snubs, accusations from the family of a dead celebrity, estranged kids, borderline homelessness, that kind of thing - into a piece of tofu. With me? Good. Now imagine it's not tofu, but a human brain. And they're not pieces of bad news but six human thumbs. That's what happened to me. In 2001, my brain had half a dozen thumbs pushed into it.
Alan Partridge (I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan)
Remember you future counselors and bringers of relief: there will never be a cure for life's problems because so many of tomorrow's problems will be new. Good words, like good work and good thinking, help, even if good words are a lot like highway paint. They can keep plenty of heavy things moving at 70 MPH from going the wrong way. But that doesn't mean life won't cross over if it has to. Learn to avoid the collisions. Find other directions. Often a new yes is the best no. Life lived well doesn't get easier but it does get better. Learn to let things go by. And don't be reluctant: life is al[l]ways surpassing us by. Enjoy it.
Mark Z. Danielewski (Honeysuckle & Pain (The Familiar, #3))
The official record for the fastest manmade object is the Helios 2 probe, which reached about 70 km/s in a close swing around the Sun. But it’s possible the actual holder of that title is a two-ton metal manhole cover. The cover sat atop a shaft at an underground nuclear test site operated by Los Alamos as part of Operation Plumbbob. When the 1-kiloton nuke went off below, the facility effectively became a nuclear potato cannon, giving the cap a gigantic kick. A high-speed camera trained on the lid caught only one frame of it moving upward before it vanished—which means it was moving at a minimum of 66 km/s. The cap was never found.
Randall Munroe (What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions)
An indisputable law of physics, water always finds the lowest level in an incredibly efficient manner. It penetrates any crevice or path that will facilitate its downward flow, steadily meandering and descending in search of lower planes. In our physical world, water is as efficient as gravity is unforgiving. Human beings are mostly water. The body is comprised of more than 70% water and it is always tragic when human beings, true to their chemical composition, emulate the efficiency of water during dark, difficult periods in their lives, allowing one misstep or transgression to lead to lower and lower descent. Water can be beautiful to watch as it cascades downward in its transparent and fluid simplicity, but some human beings also have a tendency to fall and sink, like water without the beauty.
Michael Bowe (Skyscraper of a Man)
It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down. None of this is true. But let’s begin with the speed of change. The earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a wiping of the fossil record that it functioned as an evolutionary reset, the planet’s phylogenetic tree first expanding, then collapsing, at intervals, like a lung: 86 percent of all species dead, 450 million years ago; 70 million years later, 75 percent; 125 million years later, 96 percent; 50 million years later, 80 percent; 135 million years after that, 75 percent again. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs involved climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 250 million years ago; it began when carbon dioxide warmed the planet by five degrees Celsius, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane, another greenhouse gas, and ended with all but a sliver of life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is one hundred times faster than at any point in human history before the beginning of industrialization. And there is already, right now, fully a third more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 800,000 years—perhaps in as long as 15 million years. There were no humans then. The oceans were more than a hundred feet higher.
David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
Love is a source of anxiety until it is source of boredom; only friendship feeds the spirit. Love raises great expectations in us that it never satisfies; the hopes based on friendship are milder and in the present, and they exist only because they've already been rewarded. Love is a script about just a few repeated themes we have a hard time following, though we make every effort to conform to its tone. Friendship is a permis de séjour that enables us to go anywhere and do anything exactly as our whims dictate.
Edmund White (City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and 70s)
And so, because business leadership is still so dominated by men, modern workplaces are riddled with these kind of gaps, from doors that are too heavy for the average woman to open with ease, to glass stairs and lobby floors that mean anyone below can see up your skirt, to paving that’s exactly the right size to catch your heels. Small, niggling issues that aren’t the end of the world, granted, but that nevertheless irritate. Then there’s the standard office temperature. The formula to determine standard office temperature was developed in the 1960s around the metabolic resting rate of the average forty-year-old, 70 kg man.1 But a recent study found that ‘the metabolic rate of young adult females performing light office work is significantly lower’ than the standard values for men doing the same type of activity. In fact, the formula may overestimate female metabolic rate by as much as 35%, meaning that current offices are on average five degrees too cold for women. Which leads to the odd sight of female office workers wrapped up in blankets in the New York summer while their male colleagues wander around in summer clothes.
Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
أين الـ70 مليار دولار أموال الرئيس مبارك؟ وأين أموال مترو الأنفاق الذي كان يستطيع إيراده أن يكفى المصريين؟ وأين ذهب منجم السكري الذي كان يسرقه الرئيس مبارك؟ وأين إيراد قناة السويس الذي كان كفيل بأن يجعل مصر من أغنى دول العالم فى عهد مبارك؟ وأين ثروة مبارك من القصور والسيارات والذهب والياقوت والمرجان كما ادعوا؟ وأين أموال المعونة الأمريكية التي كان يسرقها مبارك؟ وأين أموال دول الخليج التي كان يسرقها الرئيس مبارك؟ وأين موارد مصر التي كان ينهبها الرئيس مبارك؟ وأين المشروعات والاستثمارات التي كان يسرقها الرئيس مبارك؟ وأين مصر الغنية التي كان ينهبها الرئيس مبارك؟ وأين مشروع النهضة ؟ وأين الحرية؟ وأين العدالة؟ وأين العيش؟ وأين الاستثمار الإخوانى؟ وأين العلاقات الخارجية؟ وأين حقوق الإنسان "السحل"؟ وأين حقوق المعارضة "التكفير"؟ أين الثورة؟؟؟
بلال فضل Belal Fadl
The main substantive achievement of neoliberalization, however, has been to redistribute, rather than to generate, wealth and income. …[T]his was achieved under the rubric of ‘accumulation by dispossession’. By this I mean the continuation and proliferation of accumulation practices which Marx had treated of as ‘primitive’ or ‘original’ during the rise of capitalism. These include the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations (compare the cases, described above, of Mexico and of China, where 70 million peasants are thought to have been displaced in recent times); conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive private property rights (most spectacularly represented by China); suppression of rights to the commons; commodification of labour power and the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption; colonial, neocolonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); monetization of exchange and taxation, particularly of land; the slave trade (which continues particularly in the sex industry); and usury, the national debt and, most devastating of all, the use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession.
David Harvey (A Brief History of Neoliberalism)
The system can be paralyzed in yet another way. Every feedback system needs a margin of “lag” or error. If we try to make a thermostat absolutely accurate–that is, if we bring the upper and lower limits of temperature very close together in an attempt to hold the temperature at a constant 70 degrees–the whole system will break down. For to the extent that the upper and lower limits coincide, the signals for switching off and switching on will coincide! If 70 degrees is both the lower and upper limit the “go” sign will also be the “stop” sign; “yes” will imply “no” and “no” will imply “yes.” Whereupon the mechanism will start “trembling,” going on and off, on and off, until it shakes itself to pieces. The system is too sensitive and shows symptoms which are startlingly like human anxiety. For when a human being is so self-conscious, so self-controlled that he cannot let go of himself, he dithers or wobbles between opposites. This is precisely what is meant in Zen by going round and round on “the wheel of birth-and-death,” for the Buddhist samsara is the prototype of all vicious circles. We saw that when the furnace responds too closely to the thermostat, it cannot go ahead without also trying to stop, or stop without also trying to go ahead. This is just what happens to the human being, to the mind, when the desire for certainty and security prompts identification between the mind and its own image of itself. It cannot let go of itself. It feels that it should not do what it is doing, and that it should do what it is not doing. It feels that it should not be what it is, and be what it isn’t. Furthermore, the effort to remain always “good” or “happy” is like trying to hold the thermostat to a constant 70 degrees by making the lower limit the same as the upper.
Alan W. Watts (The Way of Zen)
New Rule: Stop pretending your drugs are morally superior to my drugs because you get yours at a store. This week, they released the autopsy report on Anna Nicole Smith, and the cause of death was what I always thought it was: mad cow. No, it turns out she had nine different prescription drugs in her—which, in the medical field, is known as the “full Limbaugh.” They opened her up, and a Walgreens jumped out. Antidepressants, anti-anxiety pills, sleeping pills, sedatives, Valium, methadone—this woman was killed by her doctor, who is a glorified bartender. I’m not going to say his name, but only because (a) I don’t want to get sued, and (b) my back is killing me. This month marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of a famous government report. I was sixteen in 1972, and I remember how excited we were when Nixon’s much ballyhooed National Commission on Drug Abuse came out and said pot should be legalized. It was a moment of great hope for common sense—and then, just like Bush did with the Iraq Study Group, Nixon took the report and threw it in the garbage, and from there the ’70s went right into disco and colored underpants. This week in American Scientist, a magazine George Bush wouldn’t read if he got food poisoning in Mexico and it was the only thing he could reach from the toilet, described a study done in England that measured the lethality of various drugs, and found tobacco and alcohol far worse than pot, LSD, or Ecstasy—which pretty much mirrors my own experiments in this same area. The Beatles took LSD and wrote Sgt. Pepper—Anna Nicole Smith took legal drugs and couldn’t remember the number for nine-one-one. I wish I had more time to go into the fact that the drug war has always been about keeping black men from voting by finding out what they’re addicted to and making it illegal—it’s a miracle our government hasn’t outlawed fat white women yet—but I leave with one request: Would someone please just make a bumper sticker that says, “I’m a stoner, and I vote.
Bill Maher (The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass)
No country was ever easier to spy on, Tom, no nation so open-hearted with its secrets, so quick to air them, confide them, or consign them too early to the junk heap of planned American obsolescence. I am too young to know whether there was a time when Americans were able to restrain their admirable passion to communicate, but I doubt it. Certainly the path has been downhill since 1945, for it was quickly apparent that information which ten years ago would have cost Axl's service thousands of dollars in precious hard currency could by the mid-70s be had for a few coppers from the Washington Post. We could have resented this sometimes, if we had smaller natures, for there are few things more vexing in the spy world than landing a scoop for Prague and London one week, only to read the same material in Aviation Weekly the next. But we did not complain. In the great fruit garden of American technology, there were pickings enough for everyone and none of us need ever want for anything again.
John Le Carré
لو الواحد عايز يجدد حياته و يخلي أيامه كلها فريش كده و جااامده آخر ثينج .. يسمع نصيحتي .. الحل هو إن الواحد يصفي نفسويته كل شويه مع نفسه .. هتقولي إزاي !! .. بص يا سيدي هات ورقه و قلم و إكتب اللي جوه نفسويتك .. إكتب و إكتب .. و بعدين قطع الورق .. إكتب و قطع .. مفيش أي مشكله .. هتتعب فـ حاجه!!!! .. وربنا هترتاح .. يا سيدي لو معندكش كشاكيل أو قلم .. إديها كمبيوتر ع الوورد باد ........ أقولك !!! بلاش كل دوووول .. روووح ع أقرب مرايه ف بيتكو .. طبعاً كل واحد فينا عنده مرايه ف بيتهم .. روح ع أقرب مرايه .. بص فيها .. كلم نفسك .. معلش ياعم أنا مجنون إستحملني .. أيون كلم نفسك .. ساعات الواحد بيبقي جواه العلاج بتاعه نفسه .. إسال نفسك ياتري انا ممكن اعيش عمر أكتر من اللي عشته ده ؟؟ يعني الحزن اللي أنا فيه و الغضب ده بسبب الروتين هيخلوني اعيش عمر تاني؟! زمانك بتقول دلوقتي ((ياعم دا أنا حاسس إني كبرت 70 سنه و كمان حبه هودع)) عارف ده ليه؟؟؟ عشانك مش فاهم أي ثينج .. أيوه انت مش فاهم أي ثينج لإنك لازم تعرف إن الايام اللي جايه هتعيشها يعني هتعيشها .. بحلوها .. و بمرها .. غصب عنك هتعيشها .. الأقدار هتحاول تغير ف حياتك و حاجات كتير أوووي هتبقي ضدك .. بس حاجه واحده بس هتخليك قادر تواجه كل التحديات و المطبات دي .. الإراده .. كل واحد منزوع الإراده يقول روتين روتين روتين و نفسي أجدد حياتي بس مش عارف .. إعمل كا حاجه .. متحرمش نفسك من أي حاجه .. إكتشف نفسك .. إكتشف كل حاااجه .. الإرداه هي الطريقه اللي هتخليك تجدد حياتك و تبقي إنسان جديد كل فتره و متتحبطش و تبقي كووووول بشكل مش معقووووول .. الهدف :: مصيبه ليكون أساساً معندكش هدف .. من أهم طرق تحقيق النجاح .. و ده مش كلامي .. ده كلام د/ إبراهيم الفقي .. يعني مش بتبقلظ عليكو و بتفلحس ----------------------------------------- 1- القرارات :أن تقرر أنك ستفعل 2- الرغبة 3- الهدف 4- الأسباب 5- اعتقادك أنك تستحق ذلك وأن تعتقد في قدراتك وتنميها.. 6- أن يكون لديك قيم عليا تحافظ عليها. ----------------------------------------- كل ده هيديك تحدي للواقع و هيخليك من إنسان محبط كئيب خارج من فيلم أبيض و إسود لواحد بالألوان كده و آخر نعنشه و مستعد يعمل أي ثينج و مقبل ع الحياه و متفائل حتي لو حصل إيه .. شديد فـ أزمته .. الحل هو الإراده اللي هتدينا التحدي .. و الهدف الأهم من كل شئ
Musad Elorbany
To begin with, we have to be more clear about what we mean by patriotic feelings. For a time when I was in high school, I cheered for the school athletic teams. That's a form of patriotism — group loyalty. It can take pernicious forms, but in itself it can be quite harmless, maybe even positive. At the national level, what "patriotism" means depends on how we view the society. Those with deep totalitarian commitments identify the state with the society, its people, and its culture. Therefore those who criticized the policies of the Kremlin under Stalin were condemned as "anti-Soviet" or "hating Russia". For their counterparts in the West, those who criticize the policies of the US government are "anti-American" and "hate America"; those are the standard terms used by intellectual opinion, including left-liberal segments, so deeply committed to their totalitarian instincts that they cannot even recognize them, let alone understand their disgraceful history, tracing to the origins of recorded history in interesting ways. For the totalitarian, "patriotism" means support for the state and its policies, perhaps with twitters of protest on grounds that they might fail or cost us too much. For those whose instincts are democratic rather than totalitarian, "patriotism" means commitment to the welfare and improvement of the society, its people, its culture. That's a natural sentiment and one that can be quite positive. It's one all serious activists share, I presume; otherwise why take the trouble to do what we do? But the kind of "patriotism" fostered by totalitarian societies and military dictatorships, and internalized as second nature by much of intellectual opinion in more free societies, is one of the worst maladies of human history, and will probably do us all in before too long. With regard to the US, I think we find a mix. Every effort is made by power and doctrinal systems to stir up the more dangerous and destructive forms of "patriotism"; every effort is made by people committed to peace and justice to organize and encourage the beneficial kinds. It's a constant struggle. When people are frightened, the more dangerous kinds tend to emerge, and people huddle under the wings of power. Whatever the reasons may be, by comparative standards the US has been a very frightened country for a long time, on many dimensions. Quite commonly in history, such fears have been fanned by unscrupulous leaders, seeking to implement their own agendas. These are commonly harmful to the general population, which has to be disciplined in some manner: the classic device is to stimulate fear of awesome enemies concocted for the purpose, usually with some shreds of realism, required even for the most vulgar forms of propaganda. Germany was the pride of Western civilization 70 years ago, but most Germans were whipped to presumably genuine fear of the Czech dagger pointed at the heart of Germany (is that crazier than the Nicaraguan or Grenadan dagger pointed at the heart of the US, conjured up by the people now playing the same game today?), the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy aimed at destroying the Aryan race and the civilization that Germany had inherited from Greece, etc. That's only the beginning. A lot is at stake.
Noam Chomsky
I write for you, for me, for the 70% of us who make up the fabric of society: ordinary people with extraordinary lives, who play the roles of parents, siblings, children, neighbors and friends. We are those who work and study with tenacity, those who with effort and dedication bring sustenance to our homes, my novels and stories of horror, suspense and mystery are designed for the emerging generations, for those readers who seek freshness in literature and who feel distant from traditional literature, with its labyrinth of ostentatious and complex words that often alienate the average citizen..., I write for the marginalized, for those who have felt that literature does not offer them a mirror in which to reflect themselves, for those who seek in the pages a refuge or an acknowledgement of their existence, I write for the free and critical spirits, for the innate rebels who question the structures and narratives of our civilization, I write for the dreamers who imagine a world beyond the reach of politics and corporations, for those who resist being molded by the great machines of entertainment that seek to numb our minds and wills; It is my voice, through writing, that seeks to resonate with yours, inviting you on a literary journey where together we explore the confines of our reality and the abysses of our imagination.
Marcos Orowitz (Talent for Horror: Homage to Edgard Allan Poe ("Talent for Horror" Series book revelation 2022))
A person has all sorts of lags built into him, Kesey is saying. One, the most basic, is the sensory lag, the lag between the time your senses receive something and you are able to react. One-thirtieth of a second is the time it takes, if you are the most alert person alive, and most people are a lot slower than that. Now Cassady is right up against that 1/30th of a second barrier. He is going as fast as a human can go, but even he can't overcome it. He is a living example of how close you can come, but it can't be done. You can't go any faster than that. You can't through sheer speed overcome the lag. We are all of us doomed to spend the rest of our lives watching a movie of our lives - we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we are in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past, and we will really never be able to control the present through ordinary means. That lag has to be overcome some other way, through some kind of total breakthrough.
Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)
A vida inteira ele viveu perambulando, mandado embora de um lugar, assim que a "gente fina" comprava toda a maconha ou haxixe que quisesse, assim que houvesse perdido na roda da fortuna todas as moedas que queria. A vida inteira ele se ouviu sendo chamado de cigano sujo. A "gente fina" cria raízes; ele não tem nenhuma. Esse sujeito, Halleck, viu tendas de lona serem incendiadas por brincadeira, nos anos 30 e 40, e talvez houvesse bebês e velhos incendiados em algumas daquelas tendas. Ele viu suas filhas ou as filhas dos amigos serem atacadas, talvez violentadas, porque toda aquela "gente fina" sabe que ciganos trepam como coelhos e que um pouco mais não fará diferença — mas mesmo que faça, quem se importa? Ele talvez tenha visto seus filhos ou os filhos dos amigos serem surrados até quase a morte... e por quê? Porque os pais dos garotos que os surraram perderam algum dinheiro nos jogos de azar. É sempre a mesma coisa: você chega na cidade, a "gente fina" fica com o que quer e depois o manda embora. Às vezes, essa "gente fina" o condena a uma semana de trabalho na fazenda local de ervilhas ou um mês entre os trabalhadores da estrada local, como medida de ensinamento. E então, Halleck, para o cúmulo das coisas, vem o estalo final do chicote. O importante advogado de três queixos e bochechas de buldogue atropela e mata sua esposa na rua. Ela tem 70, 75 anos, é meio cega, talvez apenas se aventure no meio da rua depressa demais por querer voltar para sua gente antes de se mijar nas roupas — e ossos velhos quebram fácil, ossos velhos são como vidro, e você fica por ali, pensando que desta vez, apenas desta vez, haverá um pouco de justiça... um instante de justiça, como indenização por toda uma vida de miséria e...
Richard Bachman (Thinner)
Adalah garis panjang di mana kita terbiasa menghitung hari. Bagaimana sebatang buluh bertambah panjang dari waktu ke waktu dan ia jadi semakin bertambah tinggi. Saat hari berganti, umurnya kian bertambah. Tanpa ia sadari ia pun semakin menua. Demikianlah, kita menemukan betapa berharganya hidup sebagai sebuah paradoks. Ia seperti sebatang lilin yang kita nyalakan di atas sepiring kue, kian memendek sebelum akhirnya padam. Sebab hidup bukan cuma sebatas cerita sukacita atau kisah roman yang membahagiakan. Ia kadang tak punya makna apa apa. Seperti rutinitas yang kita jalani sehari hari dan tak menjadikannya istimewa. Lalu Nak, apa yang bisa kau pelajari dari hidupmu? Dari hari hari yang telah engkau lalui? Tak selamanya akan kau temukan pohon rindang yang teduh, atau tempat singgah yang menyenangkan. Tak akan kau temukan teman teman yang baik dan ramah atau rengkuh tangan Bunda yang akan selalu menghangatkan tubuhmu. Jadi janganlah engkau sia siakan waktu, hanya untuk membuang buang waktumu dengan percuma. Sibuk menghitung hari  hanya demi untuk  mengulang ragu dan juga kejemuan. Sebab kebahagiaan tidak datang dari tempat yang jauh, ia tidak bersembunyi di tempat yang engkau cari. Ia ada di dalam lipatan sakumu. Ia ada di dalam genggaman tanganmu. Ia ada di dalam dirimu sendiri. Tepatnya di dalam hatimu. Karena itu, jadikanlah dirimu bahagia karena kau tahu bagaimana memberi arti pada hari hari yang engkau lewati. Buatlah hidupmu bermakna, karena kau meniatkannya demikian. Sebab kita tidak dilahirkan untuk melihat waktu berlalu. Masa hidup kita terlalu singkat kalau cuma untuk disesali. Sekiranya kau diberi kesempatan untuk mendapat sebuah penilaian, mungkin kau akan cukup beruntung mendapat nilai 70. Tapi bila kau tahu arti kata bersyukur, maka mungkin saja kau akan dapat 80 atau bahkan 90. Tapi kebanggaan apa yang engkau peroleh setelah lewat semua penderitaan dan kesulitan? Bukankah pada ujungnya semuanya akan berakhir, dan pada waktunya nanti, kita semua akan berpulang?
Titon Rahmawan
*One clue that there’s something not quite real about sequential time the way you experience it is the various paradoxes of time supposedly passing and of a so-called ‘present’ that’s always unrolling into the future and creating more and more past behind it. As if the present were this car—nice car by the way—and the past is the road we’ve just gone over, and the future is the headlit road up ahead we haven’t yet gotten to, and time is the car’s forward movement, and the precise present is the car’s front bumper as it cuts through the fog of the future, so that it’s now and then a tiny bit later a whole different now, etc. Except if time is really passing, how fast does it go? At what rate does the present change? See? Meaning if we use time to measure motion or rate—which we do, it’s the only way you can—95 miles per hour, 70 heartbeats a minute, etc.—how are you supposed to measure the rate at which time moves? One second per second? It makes no sense. You can’t even talk about time flowing or moving without hitting up against paradox right away. So think for a second: What if there’s really no movement at all? What if this is all unfolding in the one flash you call the present, this first, infinitely tiny split-second of impact when the speeding car’s front bumper’s just starting to touch the abutment, just before the bumper crumples and displaces the front end and you go violently forward and the steering column comes back at your chest as if shot out of something enormous? Meaning that what if in fact this now is infinite and never really passes in the way your mind is supposedly wired to understand pass, so that not only your whole life but every single humanly conceivable way to describe and account for that life has time to flash like neon shaped into those connected cursive letters that businesses’ signs and windows love so much to use through your mind all at once in the literally immeasurable instant between impact and death, just as you start forward to meet the wheel at a rate no belt ever made could restrain—THE END." footnote ("Good Old Neon")
David Foster Wallace (Oblivion)
The history of black workers in the United States illustrates the point. As already noted, from the late nineteenth-century on through the middle of the twentieth century, the labor force participation rate of American blacks was slightly higher than that of American whites. In other words, blacks were just as employable at the wages they received as whites were at their very different wages. The minimum wage law changed that. Before federal minimum wage laws were instituted in the 1930s, the black unemployment rate was slightly lower than the white unemployment rate in 1930. But then followed the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938—all of which imposed government-mandated minimum wages, either on a particular sector or more broadly. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which promoted unionization, also tended to price black workers out of jobs, in addition to union rules that kept blacks from jobs by barring them from union membership. The National Industrial Recovery Act raised wage rates in the Southern textile industry by 70 percent in just five months and its impact nationwide was estimated to have cost blacks half a million jobs. While this Act was later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was upheld by the High Court and became the major force establishing a national minimum wage. As already noted, the inflation of the 1940s largely nullified the effect of the Fair Labor Standards Act, until it was amended in 1950 to raise minimum wages to a level that would have some actual effect on current wages. By 1954, black unemployment rates were double those of whites and have continued to be at that level or higher. Those particularly hard hit by the resulting unemployment have been black teenage males. Even though 1949—the year before a series of minimum wage escalations began—was a recession year, black teenage male unemployment that year was lower than it was to be at any time during the later boom years of the 1960s. The wide gap between the unemployment rates of black and white teenagers dates from the escalation of the minimum wage and the spread of its coverage in the 1950s. The usual explanations of high unemployment among black teenagers—inexperience, less education, lack of skills, racism—cannot explain their rising unemployment, since all these things were worse during the earlier period when black teenage unemployment was much lower. Taking the more normal year of 1948 as a basis for comparison, black male teenage unemployment then was less than half of what it would be at any time during the decade of the 1960s and less than one-third of what it would be in the 1970s. Unemployment among 16 and 17-year-old black males was no higher than among white males of the same age in 1948. It was only after a series of minimum wage escalations began that black male teenage unemployment not only skyrocketed but became more than double the unemployment rates among white male teenagers. In the early twenty-first century, the unemployment rate for black teenagers exceeded 30 percent. After the American economy turned down in the wake of the housing and financial crises, unemployment among black teenagers reached 40 percent.
Thomas Sowell (Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy)