Afford Related Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Afford Related. Here they are! All 100 of them:

If life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
Douglas Adams
Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
Alain de Botton (Status Anxiety)
Being wealthy isn't just a question of having lots of money. It's a question of what we want. Wealth isn't an absolute, it's relative to desire. Every time we seek something that we can't afford, we can be counted as poor, how much money we may actually have.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The essence of the conception of righteousness, therefore, is to afford an outlet for sadism by cloaking cruelty as justice.
Bertrand Russell (Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects)
You can't imagine fame. You can only ever see it from an outsider and comment on it with the rueful wisdom of a non participant. When it happens to you, it doesn't matter what age or how, it is a very steep learning curve. The imprtanot thing to realize in all of it is that life is short, to protect the ones you love, and not expose yourself to too much abuse or narcissistic reflection gazing and move on. If fame affords me the type of ability to do the kind of work I'm being offered, who am I to complain about the downsides. It's all relative. And this are obviously very high class problems. The way privacy becomes an every shrinking island is inevitable but also manageable and it doesn't necessary have to get that way...
Benedict Cumberbatch
She could afford anything, she could give anything, but she could not share a moment of her life with anybody. She was a beautiful and a glamorous diamond with an astronomical price tag, but to a crude reality — she was still a stone, a living stone. Nothing else but a stone in an aesthetic sense.
Ravindra Shukla (A Maverick Heart: Between Love and Life)
The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine.
Henry David Thoreau (Walden or, Life in the Woods)
Only when we get sufficiently rich can we afford the relative luxury of caring about the environment.
Bjørn Lomborg
Often it is the poor who recognize emptiness before the rest of us—and for obvious reasons. While I am not suggesting that poverty predisposes people to some form of righteousness, I have seen how their circumstances often free them from much of the pretense that our relative privilege affords us. So while the poor are not godlier on the basis of their poverty, they are often at least more authentic in their brokenness, and thus, perhaps, closer to honestly recognizing what true emptiness is.
Jamie Arpin-Ricci (Vulnerable Faith: Missional Living in the Radical Way of St. Patrick)
morality is just a rule of behaviour relative to the level of danger in which individuals live. If you’re living in dangerous times, you can’t afford to live according to moral structures the way someone who lives in safety and peace can. So it’s not actually some universal natural ting, you get me, and the professor says did everyone just get that?
Gabriel Krauze (Who They Was)
Especially when we are afraid, angry, or confused, we may be tempted to give away bits of our freedom—or, less painfully, somebody else’s freedom—in the quest for direction and order. Bill Clinton observed that when people are uncertain, they’d rather have leaders who are strong and wrong than right and weak. Throughout history, demagogues have often outperformed democrats in generating popular fervor, and it is almost always because they are perceived to be more decisive and sure in their judgments. In times of relative tranquility, we feel we can afford to be patient. We understand that policy questions are complicated and merit careful thought. We want our leaders to consult experts, gather as much information as possible, test assumptions, and give us a chance to voice our opinions on the available options. We see long-term planning as necessary and deliberation as a virtue, but when we decide that action is urgently needed, our tolerance for delay disappears. In those moments, many of us no longer want to be asked, “What do you think?” We want to be told where to march. That is when Fascism gets its start: other options don’t seem enough.
Madeleine K. Albright (Fascism: A Warning)
Be careful in your relations with those in power; they draw you close or allow you to approach them only when they need you. They are your friends when your friendship is useful to them and affords them pleasure, but they forget you when you are in trouble. Elie Wiesel quoting Rabban Gamliel
Elie Wiesel (All Rivers Run to the Sea)
Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine.
Henry David Thoreau (Walden)
The relations one has with a woman one loves (and that can apply also to love for a youth) can remain platonic for other reasons than the chastity of the woman or the unsensual nature of the love she inspires. The reason may be that the lover is too impatient and by the very excess of his love is unable to await the moment when he will obtain his desires by sufficient pretence of indifference. Continually, he returns to the charge, he never ceases writing to her whom he loves, he is always trying to see her, she refuses herself, he becomes desperate. From that time she knows, if she grants him her company, her friendship, that these benefits will seem so considerable to one who believed he was going to be deprived of them, that she need grant nothing more and that she can take advantage of the moment when he can no longer bear being unable to see her and when, at all costs, he must put an end to the struggle by accepting a truce which will impose upon him a platonic relationship as its preliminary condition. Moreover, during all the time that preceded this truce, the lover, in a constant state of anxiety, ceaselessly hoping for a letter, a glance, has long ceased thinking of the physical desire which at first tormented him but which has been exhausted by waiting and has been replaced by another order of longings more painful still if left unsatisfied. The pleasure formerly anticipated from caresses will later be accorded but transmuted into friendly words and promises of intercourse which brings delicious moments after the strain of uncertainty or after a look impregnated with such coldness that it seemed to remove the loved one beyond hope of his ever seeing her again. Women divine all this and know they can afford the luxury of never yielding to those who, from the first, have betrayed their inextinguishable desire. A woman is enchanted if, without giving anything, she can receive more than she generally gets when she does give herself.
Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7])
War is always the first object of a powerful government which wishes to increase its power. I shall not speak to you of the opportunity that a war affords for a government to exhaust the people and to dissipate its treasure and to cover with an impenetrable veil its depredations and its errors . . . It is in time of war that the executive power displays the most redoubtable energy and that it wields a sort of dictatorship most ominous to a nascent liberty . . . [trans. G. Rudé; pg. 33].
Maximilien Robespierre (Robespierre (Great Lives Observed))
The relation between conscious and unconscious is compensatory. This fact, which is easily verifiable, affords a rule for dream interpretation. It is always helpful, when we set out to interpret a dream, to ask: What conscious attitude does it compensate?
C.G. Jung (Modern Man in Search of a Soul)
Our whole culture is based on the appetite for buying, on the idea of a mutually favorable exchange. Modern man's happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments. He (or she) looks at people in a similar way. For the man an attractive girl—and for the woman an attractive man—are the prizes they are after. 'Attractive' usually means a nice package of qualities which are popular and sought after on the personality market. What specifically makes a person attractive depends on the fashion of the time, physically as well as mentally. During the twenties, a drinking and smoking girl, tough and sexy, was attractive; today the fashion demands more domesticity and coyness. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of this century, a man had to be aggressive and ambitious—today he has to be social and tolerant—in order to be an attractive 'package'. At any rate, the sense of falling in love develops usually only with regard to such human commodities as are within reach of one's own possibilities for exchange. I am out for a bargain; the object should be desirable from the standpoint of its social value, and at the same time should want me, considering my overt and hidden assets and potentialities. Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values. Often, as in buying real estate, the hidden potentialities which can be developed play a considerable role in this bargain. In a culture in which the marketing orientation prevails, and in which material success is the outstanding value, there is little reason to be surprised that human love relations follow the same pattern of exchange which governs the commodity and the labor market.
Erich Fromm (The Art of Loving)
We have the money. We’ve just made choices about how to spend it. Over the years, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have restricted housing aid to the poor but expanded it to the affluent in the form of tax benefits for homeowners. 57 Today, housing-related tax expenditures far outpace those for housing assistance. In 2008, the year Arleen was evicted from Thirteenth Street, federal expenditures for direct housing assistance totaled less than $40.2 billion, but homeowner tax benefits exceeded $171 billion. That number, $171 billion, was equivalent to the 2008 budgets for the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Agriculture combined. 58 Each year, we spend three times what a universal housing voucher program is estimated to cost (in total ) on homeowner benefits, like the mortgage-interest deduction and the capital-gains exclusion. Most federal housing subsidies benefit families with six-figure incomes. 59 If we are going to spend the bulk of our public dollars on the affluent—at least when it comes to housing—we should own up to that decision and stop repeating the politicians’ canard about one of the richest countries on the planet being unable to afford doing more. If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources.
Matthew Desmond (Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City)
So the second thing to remember is, never be in search of a perfect man or a perfect woman. That idea too has been put into your mind—that unless you find a perfect man or a perfect woman you will not be happy. So you go on looking for the perfect, and you don’t find it, so you are unhappy. To flow and grow in love needs no perfection. Love has nothing to do with the other. A loving person simply loves, just as an alive person breathes and drinks and eats and sleeps. Exactly like that, a really alive person, a loving person, loves. You don’t say, “Unless there is perfect air, unpolluted, I am not going to breathe.” You go on breathing even in Los Angeles; you go on breathing in Mumbai. You go on breathing everywhere, even when the air is polluted, poisoned. You go on breathing! You cannot afford not to breathe just because the air is not as it should be. If
Osho (Being in Love: How to Love with Awareness and Relate Without Fear)
Learning to listen relationally, listen with cool heads and clear boundaries, listen with the quietness of the heart and the gentleness of the body, means having a self so developed it can afford to yield.
Terrence Real (How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women)
The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses. To explain — since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake. The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife. Trin Tragula — for that was his name — was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake. “Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day. And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex — just to show her. And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it. To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy omnibus 2: Tot ziens en bedankt voor de vis / Grotendeels ongevaarlijk / En dan nog iets… (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #4-6))
There could be something wrong with me because I see Negroes neither better nor worse than any other race. Race pride is a luxury I cannot afford. There are too many implications bend the term. Now, suppose a Negro does something really magnificent, and I glory, not in the benefit to mankind, but the fact that the doer was a Negro. Must I not also go hang my head in shame when a member of my race does something execrable? If I glory, then the obligation is laid upon me to blush also. I do glory when a Negro does something fine, I gloat because he or she has done a fine thing, but not because he was a Negro. That is incidental and accidental. It is the human achievement which I honor. I execrate a foul act of a Negro but again not on the grounds that the doer was a Negro, but because it was foul. A member of my race just happened to be the fouler of humanity. In other words, I know that I cannot accept responsibility for thirteen million people. Every tub must sit on its own bottom regardless. So 'Race Pride' in me had to go. And anyway, why should I be proud to be Negro? Why should anyone be proud to be white? Or yellow? Or red? After all, the word 'race' is a loose classification of physical characteristics. I tells nothing about the insides of people. Pointing a achievements tells nothing either. Races have never done anything. What seems race achievement is the work of individuals. The white race did not go into a laboratory and invent incandescent light. That was Edison. The Jews did not work out Relativity. That was Einstein. The Negros did not find out the inner secrets of peanuts and sweet potatoes, nor the secret of the development of the egg. That wad Carver and Just. If you are under the impression that every white man is Edison, just look around a bit. If you have the idea that every Negro is a Carver, you had better take off plenty of time to do your searching.
Zora Neale Hurston (Dust Tracks on a Road)
Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his honor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine.
Henry David Thoreau (Walden or, Life in the Woods)
Wherever sufficiently numerous series of the remains of any given group, which has endured for a long space of time, are carefully examined, their morphological relations are never in discordance with the requirements of the doctrine of evolution, and often afford convincing evidence of it. At the same time, it has been shown that certain forms persist with very little change, from the oldest to the newest fossiliferous formations; and thus show that progressive development is a contingent, and not a necessary result, of the nature of living matter.
Thomas Henry Huxley (Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century, The)
When theories of values do not afford intellectual assistance in framing ideas and beliefs about values that are adequate to direct action, the gap must be filled by other means. If intelligent method is lacking, prejudice, the pressure of immediate circumstance, self-interest and class-interest, traditional customs, institutions of accidental historic origin, are not lacking, and they tend to take the place of intelligence.
John Dewey (The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action)
Publicity is effective precisely because it feeds upon the real. Clothes, food, cars, cosmetics, baths, sunshine are real things to be enjoyed in themselves. Publicity begins by working on a natural appetite for pleasure. But it cannot offer the real object of pleasure and there is no convincing substitute for a pleasure in that pleasure's own terms. The more convincingly publicity conveys the pleasure of bathing in a warm, distant sea, the more the spectator-buyer will become aware that he is hundreds of miles away from that sea and the more remote the chance of bathing in it will seem to him. This is why publicity can never really afford to be about the product or opportunity it is proposing to the buyer who is not yet enjoying it. Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure-in-itself. Publicity is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be. Yet what makes this self-which-he-might-be enviable? The envy of others. Publicity is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness : happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, you will become less enviable. ... ... The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way : the publicity images steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product. (P. 128)
John Berger (Ways of Seeing)
It should be noted that when we speak of relative improvements in the status of women in a given society, this frequently means only that we are seeing improvements in the degree in which their situation affords them opportunities to exert some leverage within the system of patriarchy. Where women have relatively more economic power, they are able to have somewhat more control over their lives than in societies where they have no economic power. Similarly, the existence of women’s groups, associations, or economic networks serves to increase the ability of women to counteract the dictates of their particular patriarchal system. Some anthropologists and historians have called this relative improvement women’s “freedom.” Such a designation is illusory and unwarranted. Reforms and legal changes, while ameliorating the condition of women and an essential part of the process of emancipating them, will not basically change patriarchy. Such reforms need to be integrated within a vast cultural revolution in order to transform patriarchy and thus abolish it.
Gerda Lerner (The Creation of Patriarchy)
Dresden,” she said, “I cannot stress to you enough how vital it is that we avoid general hostilities, even with a relatively small power.” Translation: Don’t start another war, Harry. “But,” she continued, “we can afford to lose the paths through Winter even less.” Translation: Unless you really have to.
Jim Butcher (Small Favor (The Dresden Files, #10))
The ceremonial differentiation of the dietary is best seen in the use of intoxicating beverages and narcotics. If these articles of consumption are costly, they are felt to be noble and honorific. Therefore the base classes, primarily the women, practice an enforced continence with respect to these stimulants, except in countries where they are obtainable at a very low cost. From archaic times down through all the length of the patriarchal regime it has been the office of the women to prepare and administer these luxuries, and it has been the perquisite of the men of gentle birth and breeding to consume them. Drunkenness and the other pathological consequences of the free use of stimulants therefore tend in their turn to become honorific, as being a mark, at the second remove, of the superior status of those who are able to afford the indulgence. Infirmities induced by over-indulgence are among some peoples freely recognised as manly attributes. It has even happened that the name for certain diseased conditions of the body arising from such an origin has passed into everyday speech as a synonym for "noble" or "gentle". It is only at a relatively early stage of culture that the symptoms of expensive vice are conventionally accepted as marks of a superior status, and so tend to become virtues and command the deference of the community; but the reputability that attaches to certain expensive vices long retains so much of its force as to appreciably lesson the disapprobation visited upon the men of the wealthy or noble class for any excessive indulgence. The same invidious distinction adds force to the current disapproval of any indulgence of this kind on the part of women, minors, and inferiors. This invidious traditional distinction has not lost its force even among the more advanced peoples of today. Where the example set by the leisure class retains its imperative force in the regulation of the conventionalities, it is observable that the women still in great measure practise the same traditional continence with regard to stimulants.
Thorstein Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class)
According to our textbook rhetoric, Americans abhor the notion of a social order in which economic privilege and political power are determined by hereditary class. Officially, we have a more enlightened goal in sight: namely, a society in which a family’s wealth has no relation to the probability of future educational attainment and the wealth and station it affords. By this standard, education offered to poor children should be at least as good as that which is provided to the children of the upper-middle class.
Jonathan Kozol (Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools)
Most people believed, correctly, that most normal North Africans tended to be relatively poor and therefore unlikely to be able to afford a new car, and on the basis of that statistical association their presumption was that the individual North African driver of a nice car was a criminal. Now they assume he is an Uber driver, which is clear progress.
Abhijit V. Banerjee (Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems)
I'm not doing my philanthropic work, out of any kind of guilt, or any need to create good public relations. I'm doing it because I can afford to do it, and I believe in it.
George Soros
There are two basic military functions: waging war and preparing for war. Any military activities that do not contribute to the conduct of a present war are justifiable only if they contribute to preparedness for a possible future one. Clearly, we cannot afford to separate conduct and preparation. They must be intimately related because failure in preparation leads to disaster on the battlefield.
U.S. Marine Corps (Warfighting (Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1))
Disgust’ is a modern concept: only when food is relatively abundant can people afford to overlook certain forms of nutrition on the grounds of nastiness. In lean, mean times no one found any type of food disgusting.
Lucy Worsley (If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home)
To orient oneself in relation to this kind of equivocation as it exists in the West—where a genocide is a conflict of equals, and really who’s to say what a sufficient number of dead civilians is, and it’s all so complicated anyway—is to temporarily forget that most of the world sees this for what it is right now. This mandatory waiting period, in which the rest of the planet politely pleads with the West’s power centers to bridge the gap between its lofty ideals and its bloodstained reality, to do anything at all, is not some natural phenomenon, but the defining feature of neoliberalism. What purer expression of power than to say: I know. I know but will do nothing so long as this benefits me. Only later, when it ceases to benefit me, will I proclaim in great heaving sobs my grief that such a thing was ever allowed to happen. And you, all of you, even the dead in their graves, will indulge my obliviousness now and my repentance later because what affords me both is in the end not some finely honed argument of logic or moral primacy but the blunt barrel of a gun.
Omar El Akkad (One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This)
In the realm of international relations, the dilemma with 'State Morality' is that the rich countries choose to be immoral to maintain their dominance, whereas the poor countries can't afford to be moral in order to just survive.
Mamur Mustapha
Institutional managers care not only about investment risk but also, perhaps more acutely, about career risk. Many managers cannot afford to follow a winning strategy if it involves enduring long stretches of relative underperformance.
John Mihaljevic (The Manual of Ideas: The Proven Framework for Finding the Best Value Investments)
For the Europeans there really is a peace dividend, because we provide the peace. They can afford social democracy without the capacity to defend themselves because they can always depend on the United States. So why not us as well? Because what for Europe is decadence--decline, in both comfort and relative safety--is for us mere denial. Europe can eat, drink and be merry for America protects her. But for America it's different. If we choose the life of ease, who stands guard for us?
Charles Krauthammer (Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics)
They said “globalization”!!; my reply then was and still is that the only way for "globalization" to cherish and succeed is through a “lifestyle” and not through a “culture” driven societies; and gentlemen, that is not what the world can afford !!
Hisham Fawzi
Thus the esthetically sensitive man stands in the same relation to the reality of dreams as the philosopher does to the reality of existence; he is a close and willing observer, for these pictures afford him an interpretation of life, and it is by these processes that he trains himself for life. And it is not only the agreeable and friendly picture that he experiences in himself with such perfect understanding: but the serious, the troubled, the sad, the gloomy, the sudden restraints, the tricks of fate, the uneasy presentiments, in short, the whole DIVINE COMEDY of life, and the inferno, also pass before him, not like mere shadows in the wall - for in these scenes he lives and suffers - and yet without that fleeting sensation of appearance.
Friedrich Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy)
What gives us word-users the right to make life-and-death decisions concerning other living creatures that have no words? Why do we find ourselves in positions of such anguish (at least for some of us)? In the final analysis, it is simply because might makes right, and we humans, thanks to the intelligence afforded us by the complexity of our brains and our embeddedness in rich languages and cultures, are indeed high and mighty, relative to the “lower” animals (and vegetables). By virtue of our might, we are forced to establish some sort of ranking of creatures, whether we do so as a result of long and careful personal reflections or simply go along with the compelling flow of the masses. Are cows just as comfortably killable as mosquitoes? Would you feel any less troubled by swatting a fly preening on a wall than by beheading a chicken quivering on a block?
Douglas R. Hofstadter (I Am a Strange Loop)
Trust of others is in short supply for many adult survivors, as complex trauma generally involves major relational betrayal. It is, therefore, expectable (although paradoxical) that clients with these histories are predisposed to be mistrustful at the outset of therapy, precisely because of (and in proportion to) the actual trustworthiness of the therapist. When past experiences have thought hard lessons, namely, that one can least afford to trust the people who should be most trustworthy, it stands to reason that confusion about trust results. The therapist must understand and not take offense either personally or professionally and not react judgmentally or defensively. Practically speaking, this involves the therapist being prepared to patiently and empathically respond to active or passive tests or challenges to trustworthiness as legitimate and meaningful communication that deserves a respectful reply in action as well as in words.
Christine A. Courtois (Treatment of Complex Trauma: A Sequenced, Relationship-Based Approach)
But Rousseau — to what did he really want to return? Rousseau, this first modern man, idealist and rabble in one person — one who needed moral "dignity" to be able to stand his own sight, sick with unbridled vanity and unbridled self-contempt. This miscarriage, couched on the threshold of modern times, also wanted a "return to nature"; to ask this once more, to what did Rousseau want to return? I still hate Rousseau in the French Revolution: it is the world-historical expression of this duality of idealist and rabble. The bloody farce which became an aspect of the Revolution, its "immorality," is of little concern to me: what I hate is its Rousseauan morality — the so-called "truths" of the Revolution through which it still works and attracts everything shallow and mediocre. The doctrine of equality! There is no more poisonous poison anywhere: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, whereas it really is the termination of justice. "Equal to the equal, unequal to the unequal" — that would be the true slogan of justice; and also its corollary: "Never make equal what is unequal." That this doctrine of equality was surrounded by such gruesome and bloody events, that has given this "modern idea" par excellence a kind of glory and fiery aura so that the Revolution as a spectacle has seduced even the noblest spirits. In the end, that is no reason for respecting it any more. I see only one man who experienced it as it must be experienced, with nausea — Goethe. Goethe — not a German event, but a European one: a magnificent attempt to overcome the eighteenth century by a return to nature, by an ascent to the naturalness of the Renaissance — a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century. He bore its strongest instincts within himself: the sensibility, the idolatry of nature, the anti-historic, the idealistic, the unreal and revolutionary (the latter being merely a form of the unreal). He sought help from history, natural science, antiquity, and also Spinoza, but, above all, from practical activity; he surrounded himself with limited horizons; he did not retire from life but put himself into the midst of it; he if was not fainthearted but took as much as possible upon himself, over himself, into himself. What he wanted was totality; he fought the mutual extraneousness of reason, senses, feeling, and will (preached with the most abhorrent scholasticism by Kant, the antipode of Goethe); he disciplined himself to wholeness, he created himself. In the middle of an age with an unreal outlook, Goethe was a convinced realist: he said Yes to everything that was related to him in this respect — and he had no greater experience than that ens realissimum [most real being] called Napoleon. Goethe conceived a human being who would be strong, highly educated, skillful in all bodily matters, self-controlled, reverent toward himself, and who might dare to afford the whole range and wealth of being natural, being strong enough for such freedom; the man of tolerance, not from weakness but from strength, because he knows how to use to his advantage even that from which the average nature would perish; the man for whom there is no longer anything that is forbidden — unless it be weakness, whether called vice or virtue. Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the particular is loathesome, and that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole — he does not negate anymore. Such a faith, however, is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of Dionysus. 50 One might say that in a certain sense the nineteenth century also strove for all that which Goethe as a person had striven for: universality in understanding and in welcoming, letting everything come close to oneself, an audacious realism, a reverence for everything factual.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Here the bewildering antithesis of play and seriousness presents itself once more. We have gradually become convinced that civilization is rooted in noble play and that, if it is to unfold in full dignity and style, it cannot afford to neglect the play-element. The observance of play-rules is nowhere more imperative than in the relations between countries and States. Once they are broken, society falls into barbarism and chaos. On the other hand we cannot deny that modern warfare has lapsed into the old agonistic attitude of playing at war for the sake of prestige and glory. Now this is our difficulty: modern warfare has, on the face of it, lost all contact with play.
Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture)
The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor. But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary … You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals. You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs. My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species.
Matt Ridley (The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves)
The cost-effectiveness of energy has four dimensions: Affordability: How much money does it cost relative to how much money people have? Reliability: To what extent can it be produced “on demand”—when needed, in as large a quantity as needed? Versatility: How wide a variety of machines can it power? Scalability: How many people can it produce energy for and in how many places?
Alex Epstein (Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less)
The importance of experimental proof, on the other hand, does not mean that without new experimental data we cannot make advances. It is often said that science takes steps forward only when there is new experimental data. If this were true, we would have little hope of finding the theory of quantum gravity before measuring something new, but this is patently not the case. Which new data were available to Copernicus? None. He had the same data as Ptolemy. Which new data did Newton have? Almost none. His real ingredients were Kepler's laws and Galileo's results. What new data did Einstein have to discover general relativity? None. His ingredients were special relativity and Newton's theory. It simply isn't true that physics only advances when it is afforded new data.
Carlo Rovelli (La realtà non è come ci appare: La struttura elementare delle cose)
Far from being a national crisis of affordable housing, outrageous rents and astronomical home prices are largely confined to a relatively few places along the east and west coasts. Rent per square foot of apartment space in San Francisco is more than double what it is in Denver, Dallas, or Kansas City, and nearly three times as high as in Memphis. Home prices show even greater disparities.
Thomas Sowell (Ever Wonder Why? and Other Controversial Essays)
The reciprocal relationship of epistemology and science is of noteworthy kind. They are dependent upon each other. Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is—insofar as it is thinkable at all—primitive and muddled. However, no sooner has the epistemologist, who is seeking a clear system, fought his way through to such a system, than he is inclined to interpret the thought-content of science in the sense of his system and to reject whatever does not fit into his system. The scientist, however, cannot afford to carry his striving for epistemological systematic that far. He accepts gratefully the epistemological conceptual analysis; but the external conditions, which are set for him by the facts of experience, do not permit him to let himself be too much restricted in the construction of his conceptual world by the adherence to an epistemological system. He therefore must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist: he appears as realist insofar as he seeks to describe a world independent of the acts of perception; as idealist insofar as he looks upon the concepts and theories as free inventions of the human spirit (not logically derivable from what is empirically given); as positivist insofar as he considers his concepts and theories justified only to the extent to which they furnish a logical representation of relations among sensory experiences. He may even appear as Platonist or Pythagorean insofar as he considers the viewpoint of logical simplicity as an indispensable and effective tool of his research. (Einstein 1949, 683–684)
Albert Einstein (Autobiographical Notes)
Maybe 99.99% of our lives will be spent stuck trudging down the narrow sidewalks afforded to us by capitalism. Roads have taken away our land, our right to roam and play. Artificial scarcity forces us to work ourselves sick at shitty, soul-crushing jobs or we risk death from starvation, homelessness, or medical neglect. Environmental destruction has severed us from our nurturing nonhuman relatives. Colonization has erased our ancestors and histories. Step out of line, raise your voice against the state, make a mistake, and you’ll be crushed with swift and brutal violence. But once in a while, for a brief bubble in time, enough of us get together to defy the ruling classes. To step out in the street and carve our own path. And even if I get to experience that for less than 0.01% of my time on this earth, I’ll take it.
Sim Kern (The Free People's Village)
Themes of descent often turn on the struggle between the titanic and the demonic within the same person or group. In Moby Dick, Ahab’s quest for the whale may be mad and “monomaniacal,” as it is frequently called, or even evil so far as he sacrifices his crew and ship to it, but evil or revenge are not the point of the quest. The whale itself may be only a “dumb brute,” as the mate says, and even if it were malignantly determined to kill Ahab, such an attitude, in a whale hunted to the death, would certainly be understandable if it were there. What obsesses Ahab is in a dimension of reality much further down than any whale, in an amoral and alienating world that nothing normal in the human psyche can directly confront. The professed quest is to kill Moby Dick, but as the portents of disaster pile up it becomes clear that a will to identify with (not adjust to) what Conrad calls the destructive element is what is really driving Ahab. Ahab has, Melville says, become a “Prometheus” with a vulture feeding on him. The axis image appears in the maelstrom or descending spiral (“vortex”) of the last few pages, and perhaps in a remark by one of Ahab’s crew: “The skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world.” But the descent is not purely demonic, or simply destructive: like other creative descents, it is partly a quest for wisdom, however fatal the attaining of such wisdom may be. A relation reminiscent of Lear and the fool develops at the end between Ahab and the little black cabin boy Pip, who has been left so long to swim in the sea that he has gone insane. Of him it is said that he has been “carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro . . . and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps.” Moby Dick is as profound a treatment as modern literature affords of the leviathan symbolism of the Bible, the titanic-demonic force that raises Egypt and Babylon to greatness and then hurls them into nothingness; that is both an enemy of God outside the creation, and, as notably in Job, a creature within it of whom God is rather proud. The leviathan is revealed to Job as the ultimate mystery of God’s ways, the “king over all the children of pride” (41:34), of whom Satan himself is merely an instrument. What this power looks like depends on how it is approached. Approached by Conrad’s Kurtz through his Antichrist psychosis, it is an unimaginable horror: but it may also be a source of energy that man can put to his own use. There are naturally considerable risks in trying to do so: risks that Rimbaud spoke of in his celebrated lettre du voyant as a “dérèglement de tous les sens.” The phrase indicates the close connection between the titanic and the demonic that Verlaine expressed in his phrase poète maudit, the attitude of poets who feel, like Ahab, that the right worship of the powers they invoke is defiance.
Northrop Frye (Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature)
The final way to respond to the difficulty of lending against intangibles is the most radical. It is for businesses to change their finance mix: specifically, to rely more on equity and less on debt. Should a business fail, equity owners have no recourse - they get nothing - so can afford to be relatively insouciant about the liquidation value of a business's assets. This makes equity a better way of funding businesses with few tangible assets.
Jonathan Haskel (Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy)
The absurdity of believing that the decisions about who we love, and who we bind ourselves to, could be arrived at rationally? Or of assuming that we would be afforded a fair or natural death? Or did she mean the absurdity of having once believed in the possibility of dedicating one's life to anything beyond tomorrow, beyond just surviving? Or just the simple, long-standing absurdity of having lived a beginning that bore so little relation to the end?
Nicole Krauss (To Be a Man)
How to Buy Verified Chime Bank Accounts Securely in 2025 ⇔Contact For More Information ✅Telegram:@bestitsmm ✅WhatsApp:+1 (939) 328-6215 ✅Email:bestitsmm@gmail.com As a neobank—a digital-first financial institution without physical branches—Chime provides a full suite of banking services directly through its user-friendly mobile app. This model eliminates the need for costly overhead associated with brick-and-mortar locations, allowing Chime to offer exceptionally low fees and streamline the banking experience for users. Unlike traditional banks that may charge a variety of fees for maintaining accounts, overdrafts, or even monthly maintenance, Chime operates with zero monthly fees and no minimum balance requirements. This focus on affordability makes it a perfect choice for individuals seeking to simplify their financial lives without the typical bank-related headaches. Chime also offers a significant advantage in terms of convenience. In 2025, speed and accessibility are critical, and Chime excels by offering early direct deposit. This feature enables users to receive their paychecks up to two days earlier than they would with a traditional bank, which can make a significant difference in managing cash flow, especially for those living paycheck to paycheck. Another key reason why Chime is growing rapidly in popularity is its commitment to security. Partnering with FDIC-insured banks, Chime ensures that your money is protected up to $250,000, just like it would be in a conventional bank. This adds an additional layer of trust, knowing that your funds are safely stored in a secure, regulated environment. In 2025, as digital finance continues to rise, Chime’s seamless integration of technology and banking is positioning it as a forward-thinking solution for Americans who want a smarter, simpler way to manage money—whether it's avoiding fees, tracking spending, or ensuring that funds are available as quickly as possible. By choosing Chime, users are embracing a modern approach to banking that aligns with the fast-paced, tech-centric world of today’s economy. Benefits of a Chime Account Choosing to open a Chime account means stepping into a world where convenience, security, and financial freedom are the top priorities. Unlike traditional banks that often come with hidden fees and cumbersome processes, Chime redefines what banking can be, offering benefits that truly work for the modern user. Let’s explore the key advantages of a Chime account in 2025: ✅ No Monthly Fees or Overdraft Fees One of the most striking features of Chime is its zero-fee structure. Traditional banks often charge monthly maintenance fees, overdraft fees, or even fees for not maintaining a minimum balance. With Chime, you don’t have to worry about any of these. No monthly maintenance fees means more of your money stays in your pocket, and no overdraft fees gives you peace of mind, knowing that you won’t be penalized for accidental overspending. This commitment to transparency and affordability ensures that every dollar you earn goes further. ⇔Contact For More Information ✅Telegram:@bestitsmm ✅WhatsApp:+1 (939) 328-6215 ✅Email:bestitsmm@gmail.com ✅ Get Paid Up to 2 Days Early with Direct Deposit Imagine receiving your paycheck two days earlier than your usual payday—Chime makes that a reality. With early direct deposit, you get access to your money as soon as your employer releases it, which can be a game-changer for managing day-to-day expenses and avoiding late payment fees. In 2025, when financial flexibility is more important than ever, this benefit provides a valuable edge for people looking to keep their cash flow smooth and uninterrupted.
How to Buy Verified Chime Bank Accounts Securely in 2025
How to Buy Verified Chime Bank Accounts Securely in 2025 ⇔Contact For More Information ✅Telegram:@bestitsmm ✅WhatsApp:+1 (939) 328-6215 ✅Email:bestitsmm@gmail.com As a neobank—a digital-first financial institution without physical branches—Chime provides a full suite of banking services directly through its user-friendly mobile app. This model eliminates the need for costly overhead associated with brick-and-mortar locations, allowing Chime to offer exceptionally low fees and streamline the banking experience for users. Unlike traditional banks that may charge a variety of fees for maintaining accounts, overdrafts, or even monthly maintenance, Chime operates with zero monthly fees and no minimum balance requirements. This focus on affordability makes it a perfect choice for individuals seeking to simplify their financial lives without the typical bank-related headaches. Chime also offers a significant advantage in terms of convenience. In 2025, speed and accessibility are critical, and Chime excels by offering early direct deposit. This feature enables users to receive their paychecks up to two days earlier than they would with a traditional bank, which can make a significant difference in managing cash flow, especially for those living paycheck to paycheck. Another key reason why Chime is growing rapidly in popularity is its commitment to security. Partnering with FDIC-insured banks, Chime ensures that your money is protected up to $250,000, just like it would be in a conventional bank. This adds an additional layer of trust, knowing that your funds are safely stored in a secure, regulated environment. In 2025, as digital finance continues to rise, Chime’s seamless integration of technology and banking is positioning it as a forward-thinking solution for Americans who want a smarter, simpler way to manage money—whether it's avoiding fees, tracking spending, or ensuring that funds are available as quickly as possible. By choosing Chime, users are embracing a modern approach to banking that aligns with the fast-paced, tech-centric world of today’s economy. Benefits of a Chime Account Choosing to open a Chime account means stepping into a world where convenience, security, and financial freedom are the top priorities. Unlike traditional banks that often come with hidden fees and cumbersome processes, Chime redefines what banking can be, offering benefits that truly work for the modern user. Let’s explore the key advantages of a Chime account in 2025: ✅ No Monthly Fees or Overdraft Fees One of the most striking features of Chime is its zero-fee structure. Traditional banks often charge monthly maintenance fees, overdraft fees, or even fees for not maintaining a minimum balance. With Chime, you don’t have to worry about any of these. No monthly maintenance fees means more of your money stays in your pocket, and no overdraft fees gives you peace of mind, knowing that you won’t be penalized for accidental overspending. This commitment to transparency and affordability ensures that every dollar you earn goes further. ⇔Contact For More Information ✅Telegram:@bestitsmm ✅WhatsApp:+1 (939) 328-6215 ✅Email:bestitsmm@gmail.com ✅ Get Paid Up to 2 Days Early with Direct Deposit Imagine receiving your paycheck two days earlier than your usual payday—Chime makes that a reality. With early direct deposit, you get access to your money as soon as your employer releases it, which can be a game-changer for managing day-to-day expenses and avoiding late payment fees. In 2025, when financial flexibility is more important than ever, this benefit provides a valuable edge for people looking to keep their cash flow smooth and uninterrupted.
Verified Chime Bank Accounts
Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market.
Henry David Thoreau (Walden)
The “noble” person has a completely naïve and non-reflective awareness of his own value and of his fullness of being, an obscure conviction which enriches every conscious moment of his existence, as if he were autonomously rooted in the universe. This should not be mistaken for “pride.” Quite on the contrary, pride results from an experienced diminution of this “naive” self-confidence. It is a way of “holding on” to one’s value, of seizing and “preserving” it deliberately. The noble man’s naive self-confidence, which is as natural to him as tension is to the muscles, permits him calmly to assimilate the merits of others in all the fullness of their substance and configuration. He never “grudges” them their merits. On the contrary: he rejoices in their virtues and feels that they make the world more worthy of love. His naive self-confidence is by no means “compounded” of a series of positive valuations based on specific qualities, talents, and virtues: it is originally directed at his very essence and being. Therefore he can afford to admit that another person has certain “qualities” superior to his own or is more “gifted” in some respects—indeed in all respects. Such a conclusion does not diminish his naïve awareness of his own value, which needs no justification or proof by achievements or abilities. Achievements merely serve to confirm it. On the other hand, the “common” man (in the exact acceptation of the term) can only experience his value and that of another if he relates the two, and he clearly perceives only those qualities which constitute possible differences. The noble man experiences value prior to any comparison, the common man in and through a comparison. For the latter, the relation is the selective precondition for apprehending any value. Every value is a relative thing, “higher” or “lower,” “more” or “less” than his own. He arrives at value judgments by comparing himself to others and others to himself
Max Scheler (Ressentiment (Marquette Studies in Philosophy))
We can judge the inestimable value of concepts, and consequently of the faculty of reason, if we glance at the endless multitude and variety of things and conditions coexisting and succeeding one another, and then reflect that language and writing (the signs of concepts) are nevertheless able to afford us accurate information about everything and every relation, whenever and wherever it may have been, in that comparatively few concepts concern and represent an infinite number of things and conditions.
Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2)
While women suffer from our relative lack of power in the world and often resent it, certain dimensions of this powerlessness may seem abstract and remote. We know, for example, that we rarely get to make the laws or direct the major financial institutions. But Wall Street and the U.S. Congress seem very far away. The power a woman feels in herself to heal and sustain, on the other hand--"the power of love"--is, once again, concrete and very near: It is like a field of force emanating from within herself, a great river flowing outward from her very person. Thus, a complex and contradictory female subjectivity is constructed within the relations of caregiving. Here, as elsewhere, women are affirmed in some way and diminished in others, this within the unity of a single act. The woman who provides a man with largely unreciprocated emotional sustenance accords him status and pays him homage; she agrees to the unspoken proposition that his doings are important enough to deserve substantially more attention than her own. But even as the man's supremacy in the relationship is tacitly assumed by both parties to the transaction, the man reveals himself to his caregiver as vulnerable and insecure. And while she may well be ethically and epistemically disempowered by the care she gives, this caregiving affords her a feeling that a mighty power resides within her being. The situation of those men in the hierarchy of gender who avail themselves of female tenderness is not thereby altered: Their superordinate position is neither abandoned, nor their male privilege relinquished. The vulnerability these men exhibit is not a prelude in any way to their loss of male privilege or to an elevation in the status of women. Similarly, the feeling that one's love is a mighty force for the good in the life of the beloved doesn't make it so, as Milena Jesenka found, to her sorrow. The feeling of out-flowing personal power so characteristic of the caregiving woman is quite different from the having of any actual power in the world. There is no doubt that this sense of personal efficacy provides some compensation for the extra-domestic power women are typically denied: If one cannot be a king oneself, being a confidante of kings may be the next best thing. But just as we make a bad bargain in accepting an occasional Valentine in lieu of the sustained attention we deserve, we are ill advised to settle for a mere feeling of power, however heady and intoxicating it may be, in place of the effective power we have every right to exercise in the world.
Sandra Lee Bartky (Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (Thinking Gender))
We see, then, that even from the zoological point of view, which is the least interesting and—note this—not decisive, a being in such condition can never achieve a genuine equilibrium; we also see something that differs from the idea of challenge-response in Toynbee and, in my judgement, effectively constitutes human life: namely, that no surroundings or change of surroundings can in itself be described as an obstacle, a difficulty, and a challenge for man, but that the difficulty is always relative to the projects which man creates in his imagination, to what he customarily calls his ideals; in short, relative to what man wants to be. This affords us an idea of challenge-and-response which is much deeper and more decisive than the merely anecdotal, adventitious, and accidental idea which Toynbee proposes. In its light, all of human life appears to us as what it is permanently: a dramatic confrontation and struggle of man with the world and not a mere occasional maladjustment which is produced at certain moments.
José Ortega y Gasset (An Interpretation of Universal History)
And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it. To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion
Douglas Adams (The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine.
Henry David Thoreau (Walden)
Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be any thing but a machine.
Henry David Thoreau (Walden; Or, Life in the Woods)
August 29th WANT NOTHING = HAVE EVERYTHING “No person has the power to have everything they want, but it is in their power not to want what they don’t have, and to cheerfully put to good use what they do have.” —SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 123.3 Is there a person so rich that there is literally nothing they can’t afford? Surely there isn’t. Even the richest people regularly fail in their attempts to buy elections, to purchase respect, class, love, and any number of other things that are not for sale. If obscene wealth will never get you everything you want, is that the end of it? Or is there another way to solve for that equation? To the Stoics, there is: by changing what it is that you want. By changing how you think, you’ll manage to get it. John D. Rockefeller, who was as rich as they come, believed that “a man’s wealth must be determined by the relation of his desires and expenditures to his income. If he feels rich on $10 and has everything he desires, he really is rich.” Today, you could try to increase your wealth, or you could take a shortcut and just want less.
Ryan Holiday (The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living)
Since anything that accords with one’s nature is pleasant and being of the same kind is a natural relationship, then things that are of the same kind and resemble one another also usually please one another. So a human being pleases another human being, a horse a horse, a young man a young man. Hence the proverbs: ‘Youth delights in youth’, ‘Ever like to like’, ‘Beast knows beast’, ‘Birds of a feather flock together’, and so on. Since things that resemble oneself and are of the same kind as oneself are bound to afford one pleasure, and since every individual experiences these things above all in relation to himself, then we are all inevitably to a greater or lesser degree lovers of ourselves, seeing that we stand in these relationships primarily to ourselves. Since we are all lovers of ourselves, we are all bound to find pleasure in things that are our own — our own achievements and words, for instance. That is also why we are usually fond of flatterers, lovers, honour, and our children (who are our own achievements). And it is also pleasant to complete something unfinished, since then it immediately becomes one’s own achievement.
Aristotle (The Art of Rhetoric)
Moody was not unaware of the advantage his inscrutable grace afforded him. Like most excessively beautiful persons, he had studied his own reflection minutely and, in a way, knew himself from the outside best; he was always in some chamber of his mind perceiving himself from the exterior. He had passed a great many hours in the alcove of his private dressing room, where the mirror tripled his image into profile, half-profile, and square: Van Dyck's Charles, though a good deal more striking. It was a private practice, and one he would likely have denied--for how roundly self-examination is condemned, by the moral prophets of our age! As if the self had no relation to the self, and one only looked in mirrors to have one's arrogance confirmed; as if the act of self-regarding was not as subtle, fraught, and ever-changing as any bond between twin souls. In his fascination Moody sought less to praise his own beauty than to master it. Certainly whenever he caught his own reflection, in a window box, or in a pane of glass after nightfall, he felt a thrill of satisfaction--but as an engineer might feel, chancing upon a mechanism of his own devising and finding it splendid, flashing, properly oiled and performing exactly as he had predicted it should.
Eleanor Catton (The Luminaries)
Symbolic interactionists stress that to understand poverty we must focus on what poverty means to people. When people evaluate where they are in life, they compare themselves with others. In some rural areas, simple marginal living is the norm, and people living in these circumstances don’t feel poor. But in Leslie’s cosmopolitan circle, people can feel deprived if they cannot afford the latest upscale designer clothing from their favorite boutique. The meaning of poverty, then, is relative: What poverty is differs from group to group within the same society, as well as from culture to culture and from one era to the next.
James M. Henslin (Social Problems: A Down-to-Earth Approach)
New power meant a new relation to time. The lending of money against interest was considered "against nature" by the Church: money naturally was a means of exchange to buy necessities, not a capital that could work or bear fruits. During the seventeenth century even the Church abandoned this view-though reluctantly--to accept the fact that Christians had become capitalist merchants. Time became like money: I now can have a few hours before lunch; how shall I spend time? . . I am short of time so I can't afford to spend that much time on a committee; it's not worth the time . . . It world be a waste of time; I'd rather save an hour
Ivan Illich (Tools for Conviviality)
But the bull-dog ant of Australia affords us the most extraordinary example of this kind; for if it is cut in two, a battle begins between the head and the tail. The head seizes the tail with its teeth, and the tail defends itself bravely by stinging the head; the battle may last for half an hour, until they die or are dragged away by the other ants. This contest takes place every time the experiment is tried . . . . Yunghahn relates that he saw in Java a plain, as far as the eye could reach, entirely covered with skeletons, and took it for a battle-field; they were, however, merely the skeletons of large turtles, . . . which come this way out of the sea to lay their eggs, and are then attacked by wild dogs who with their united strength lay them on their backs, strip off the small shell from the stomach, and devour them alive. But often then a tiger pounces upon the dogs . . . . For this these turtles are born . . . . Thus the will to live everywhere preys upon itself, and in different forms is its own nourishment, till finally the human race, because it subdues all the others, regards nature as a manufactory for its own use. Yet even the human race . . . reveals in itself with most terrible distinctness this conflict, this variance of the will with itself; and we find homo homini lupus.
Will Durant (The Story of Philosophy)
Gaudium is what I dream of: to enjoy a lifelong pleasure. But being unable to accede to Gaudium, from which I am separated by a thousand obstacles, I dream of falling back on Laetitia: if I could manage to confine myself to the lively pleasures the other affords me, without contaminating them, mortifying them by the anxiety which serves as their hinge? If I could take an anthological view of the amorous relation? If I were to understand, initially, that a great preoccupation does not include moments of pure pleasure, and then, if I managed systematically to forget the zones of alarm which separate these moments of pleasure? If I could be dazed, inconsistent?
Roland Barthes (A Lover's Discourse: Fragments)
We couldn't afford to go inside. On other days, we would visit art museums. There was only enough money for one ticket, so one of us would go in, look at the exhibits, and report back to the other. On one such occasion, we went to the relatively new Whitney Museum on the Upper East Side. It was my turn to go in, and I reluctantly entered without him. I no longer remember the exhibit, but I do recall peering through on of the museum's unique trapezoidal windows, seeing Robert across the street, leaning against a parking meter, smoking a cigarette. He waited for me, and as we headed toward the subway he said, "One day we'll go in together, and the work will be ours.
Patti Smith (Just Kids)
When we penetrate the smokescreen of controversies regarding false accusations, ‘recovered memories’, ‘recanters’, references to ‘satanic ritual abuse’ and the incorporation of elements of cultural myths into some accounts, we are left with the reality that in the vast majority of cases it is not the over-reporting or exaggeration of trauma that is the principal problem. Rather it is society’s unwillingness to know, the perpetrators’ strongly motivated efforts to hide their criminal acts, and the relative ease they are often afforded by societal institutions and practices in doing so. - The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (Viewpoint)
Warwick Middleton
What we forget, if we ever knew, is that what we know now about status and wealth creation and sacrifice are predicated on who we are — that is, not poor. If you change the conditions of your not-poor status, you change everything you know as a result of being a not-poor. You have no idea what you would do if you were poor until you are poor. And not intermittently poor or formerly not-poor, but born poor, expected to be poor, and treated by bureaucracies, gatekeepers, and well-meaning respectability authorities as inherently poor. Then, and only then, will you understand the relative value of a ridiculous status symbol to someone who intuits that they cannot afford to not have it.
Tressie McMillan Cottom (Thick: And Other Essays)
A definition is a dictionary's explanation of the meaning of an English word using other English words, intended to be read by a whole person, applying the entirety of his or her intelligence and language skills. A semantic representation is a person's knowledge of the meaning of an English word in a conceptual structure (the language of thought), processed by a system of the brain that manipulates chunks of conceptual structure and relates them to the senses. Definitions can afford to be incomplete because they can leave a lot to the imagination of a speaker of the language. Semantic representations have to be more explicit because they are the imagination of the speaker of the language.
Steven Pinker (The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature)
One can even imagine that inflation tends to improve the relative position of the wealthiest individuals compared to the least wealthy, in that it enhances the importance of financial managers and intermediaries. A person with 10 or 50 million euros cannot afford the money managers that Harvard has but can nevertheless pay financial advisors and stockbrokers to mitigate the effects of inflation. By contrast, a person with only 10 or 50 thousand euros to invest will not be offered the same choices by her broker (if she has one): contacts with financial advisors are briefer, and many people in this category keep most of their savings in checking accounts that pay little or nothing and/or savings accounts that pay little more than the rate of inflation.
Thomas Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century)
So much of what my generation had been promised disintegrated at our touch. Consider the friend, a painter of seascapes, who dreamed of affording waterfront property. On the day the levees broke, the Gulf flooded her studio and painted her walls with costly oils. Consider the friend who worked for six years at a company he hated on the promise of a sabbatical, only to be let go. The friend who complained about family reunions and lost every relative over the age of fifty to a virus. The friend who saved up to invest in a fund and saw her money dissolve like sugar on the tongues of bankers who barely got a scolding from the SEC. The life we'd been promised was a scam, the world a scam, the whole goddamn play a scam and there seemed nothing to do but burn it down as rioters did in Paris, New York, Nairobi—and then creep back through the embers because what other choice did we have?
C Pam Zhang (Land of Milk and Honey)
Sexual conflict occurs when one mating partner has an opportunity to increase its fitness at a cost to the other partner. On a genetic level, most sexual conflicts are interlocus conflicts that mainly concern the outcome of male-female interactions about the mating rate, fertility efficiency, relative parental effort, remating behavior, and female reproductive rate. In sexually antagonistic evolution, a trait that affords advantage to one sex is disadvantageous to the other. An example is the sexual arms race that evolves when resistance in one sex drives the evolution of coercive traits in the other sex. Without the restrictions of natural selection, this process may lead to a runaway amplification of male and female traits. The coevolutionary arms races between adaptations in one sex and counteradaptations in the other sex can be made visible by experimentally arresting evolution in one sex.
Todd K. Shackelford and Aaron T. Goetz
Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance — which his growth requires — who has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.
Henry David Thoreau (The Essential Henry David Thoreau Collection: 4 Books in 1 | Walden | Civil Disobedience | A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers | Walking)
The theory of the ally in this sense examines and expands upon issues relating to the role of men with respect to feminist struggle, white people with respect to anti-racist struggle, etc. Much of the discussion and debate within this discourse turns on the question of the "good" ally, of how a person of privilege committed to ally work must acknowledge and reflect upon their privileges and do the intellectual and practical work to divest themselves of the illegitimate power such privilege affords. These discussions may be directed at a generalized concept of, e.g., the white anti-racist ally as well as questions of what it means to develop specific and personal relations of trust between individuals and groups involved in anti-oppression work. This conception of the ally calls to attention the place of power within relationships, structures, practices and processes, not simply the content of particular demands or objectives.
xBorder Collective
How to Buy Verified Chime Bank Accounts Securely in 2025 In 2025, Chime stands out as one of the most innovative players in the world of personal finance. ------ If you want to more information just knock us – Contact US ➥24 Hours Reply/Contact ➤Telegram: @vrtwallet ➤Skype: vrtwallet ➤WhatsApp: +1 (929) 289-4746 ▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰ As a neobank—a digital-first financial institution without physical branches—Chime provides a full suite of banking services directly through its user-friendly mobile app. This model eliminates the need for costly overhead associated with brick-and-mortar locations, allowing Chime to offer exceptionally low fees and streamline the banking experience for users. Unlike traditional banks that may charge a variety of fees for maintaining accounts, overdrafts, or even monthly maintenance, Chime operates with zero monthly fees and no minimum balance requirements. This focus on affordability makes it a perfect choice for individuals seeking to simplify their financial lives without the typical bank-related headaches. Chime also offers a significant advantage in terms of convenience. In 2025, speed and accessibility are critical, and Chime excels by offering early direct deposit. This feature enables users to receive their paychecks up to two days earlier than they would with a traditional bank, which can make a significant difference in managing cash flow, especially for those living paycheck to paycheck. Another key reason why Chime is growing rapidly in popularity is its commitment to security. Partnering with FDIC-insured banks, Chime ensures that your money is protected up to $250,000, just like it would be in a conventional bank. This adds an additional layer of trust, knowing that your funds are safely stored in a secure, regulated environment. In 2025, as digital finance continues to rise, Chime’s seamless integration of technology and banking is positioning it as a forward-thinking solution for Americans who want a smarter, simpler way to manage money—whether it's avoiding fees, tracking spending, or ensuring that funds are available as quickly as possible. By choosing Chime, users are embracing a modern approach to banking that aligns with the fast-paced, tech-centric world of today’s economy. Benefits of a Chime Account Choosing to open a Chime account means stepping into a world where convenience, security, and financial freedom are the top priorities. Unlike traditional banks that often come with hidden fees and cumbersome processes, Chime redefines what banking can be, offering benefits that truly work for the modern user. Let’s explore the key advantages of a Chime account in 2025: ✅ No Monthly Fees or Overdraft Fees One of the most striking features of Chime is its zero-fee structure. Traditional banks often charge monthly maintenance fees, overdraft fees, or even fees for not maintaining a minimum balance. With Chime, you don’t have to worry about any of these. No monthly maintenance fees means more of your money stays in your pocket, and no overdraft fees gives you peace of mind, knowing that you won’t be penalized for accidental overspending. This commitment to transparency and affordability ensures that every dollar you earn goes further. ▣ If you want to more information just knock us – Contact US 24 Hours Reply/Contact Telegram: @eglobalaccountss Skype: eglobalaccounts WhatsApp: +1 (620) 869-1326 ▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰ ✅ Get Paid Up to 2 Days Early with Direct Deposit Imagine receiving your paycheck two days earlier than your usual payday—Chime makes that a reality. With early direct deposit, you get access to your money as soon as your employer releases it, which can be a game-changer for managing day-to-day expenses and avoiding late payment fees. In 2025, when financial flexibility is more important than ever, this benefit provides a valuable edge for people looking to keep their cash flow smooth and uninterrupted. ✅ FDIC-I
Verified Chime Bank Accounts
The fashionable person is regarded with mingled feelings of approval and envy; we envy him as an individual, but approve him as a member of a set or group. [...] The moment we envy an object or a person, we are no longer absolutely excluded from it; some relation or other has been established — between both the same psychic content now exists — although in entirely different categories and forms of sensations. This quiet personal usurpation of the envied property contains a kind of antidote, which occasionally counter-acts the evil effects of this feeling of envy. The contents of fashion afford an especially good chance for the development of this conciliatory shade of envy, which also gives to the envied person a better conscience because of his satisfaction over his good fortune. [...] From all this we see that fashion furnishes an ideal field for individuals with dependent natures, whose self-consciousness, however, requires a certain amount of prominence, attention, and singularity.
Georg Simmel (La moda)
It is important here not to confuse publicity with the pleasure or benefits to be enjoyed from the things it advertises. Publicity is effective precisely because it feeds upon the real. Clothes, food, cars, cosmetics, baths, sunshine are real things to be enjoyed in themselves. Publicity begins by working on a natural appetite for pleasure. But it cannot offer the real object of pleasure and there is no convincing substitute for a pleasure in that pleasure's own terms. The more convincingly publicity conveys the pleasure of bathing in a warm, distant sea, the more the spectator-buyer will become aware that he is hundreds of miles away from that sea and the more remote the chance of bathing in it will seem to him. This is why publicity can never really afford to be about the product or opportunity it is proposing to the buyer who is not yet enjoying it. Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure-in-itself. Publicity is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be. Yet what makes this self-which-he-might-be enviable? The envy of others. Publicity is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness : happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, you will become less enviable. ....... The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way : the publicity images steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
John Berger (Ways of Seeing)
There’s a story about legendary copywriter Gary Halbert, who once asked a room of aspiring writers, “Imagine you’re opening a hamburger stand on the beach—what do you need most to succeed?” Answers included, “secret sauce,” and “great location” and “quality meat.” Halbert replied, “You missed the most important thing—A STARVING CROWD.” Your job is to find that “starving crowd” who can’t live without what it is you have to offer. What we want to do in terms of targeting is to find good, prospective customers for our business that can be reached affordably, that are likely to buy, that are able to buy, and preferably who already know of us, or are likely to trust us. Once you get this down, and you nail exactly who your slam-dunk customer truly is—the person you absolutely want to do business with over and again—then you’ll be able to make your marketing “magnetic” because you’ll be using words and phrases that’ll attract your target audience. This makes your job much easier, because you can talk to them using language they relate to about what it is they really want.
Dan Kennedy (Magnetic Marketing: How To Attract A Flood Of New Customers That Pay, Stay, and Refer)
Nonconformity is an affront to those in the mainstream. Our impulse is to dismiss this lifestyle, create reasons why it can’t work, why it doesn’t even warrant consideration. Why not? Living outdoors is cheap and can be afforded by a half year of marginal employment. They can’t buy things that most of us have, but what they lose in possessions, they gain in freedom. In Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, lead character Larry returns from the First World War and declares that he would like to “loaf.”23 The term “loafing” inadequately describes the life he would spend traveling, studying, searching for meaning, and even laboring. Larry meets with the disapproval of peers and would-be mentors: “Common sense assured…that if you wanted to get on in this world, you must accept its conventions, and not to do what everybody else did clearly pointed to instability.” Larry had an inheritance that enabled him to live modestly and pursue his dreams. Larry’s acquaintances didn’t fear the consequences of his failure; they feared his failure to conform. I’m no maverick. Upon leaving college I dove into the workforce, eager to have my own stuff and a job to pay for it. Parents approved, bosses gave raises, and my friends could relate. The approval, the comforts, the commitments wound themselves around me like invisible threads. When my life stayed the course, I wouldn’t even feel them binding. Then I would waiver enough to sense the growing entrapment, the taming of my life in which I had been complicit. Working a nine-to-five job took more energy than I had expected, leaving less time to pursue diverse interests. I grew to detest the statement “I am a…” with the sentence completed by an occupational title. Self-help books emphasize “defining priorities” and “staying focused,” euphemisms for specialization and stifling spontaneity. Our vision becomes so narrow that risk is trying a new brand of cereal, and adventure is watching a new sitcom. Over time I have elevated my opinion of nonconformity nearly to the level of an obligation. We should have a bias toward doing activities that we don’t normally do to keep loose the moorings of society. Hiking the AT is “pointless.” What life is not “pointless”? Is it not pointless to work paycheck to paycheck just to conform? Hiking the AT before joining the workforce was an opportunity not taken. Doing it in retirement would be sensible; doing it at this time in my life is abnormal, and therein lay the appeal. I want to make my life less ordinary.
David Miller (AWOL on the Appalachian Trail)
I lift my voice against these audacious practices and these infamous fashions, and I pray that you who have daughters in Zion will save them, if you can, from following these obscene fashions, that if followed, will destroy the last vestige of true womanly modesty, and reduce them to the level of the courtesans on the streets of Paris, from whence these debasing fashions come. They are the lowest and most degraded specimens of womankind, who have yielded their bodies to crime and their souls to death, if not to perdition, and are devoid of modesty and the sense of shame. We cannot afford to let our women follow such as these or to adopt the cursed fashions they set. . . . I suppose I shall incur the censure and displeasure of many in saying these things, but I do not care what the world has to say, what men say, nor what women say, in relation to these things. In my sight the present day fashions are abominable, suggestive of evil, calculated to arouse base passion and lust, and to engender lasciviousness, in the hearts of those who follow the fashions, and of those who tolerate them. Why? Because women are imitating the very customs of a class of women who have resorted to that means to aid them to sell their souls. It is infamous, and I hope the daughters of Zion will not descend to these pernicious ways, customs and fashions, for they are demoralizing and damnable in their effect.
Joseph F. Smith
Hamilton argued that the security of liberty and property were inseparable and that governments should honor their debts because contracts formed the basis of public and private morality: “States, like individuals, who observe their engagements are respected and trusted, while the reverse is the fate of those who pursue an opposite conduct.”The proper handling of government debt would permit America to borrow at affordable interest rates and would also act as a tonic to the economy. Used as loan collateral, government bonds could function as money—and it was the scarcity of money, Hamilton observed, that had crippled the economy and resulted in severe deflation in the value of land. America was a young country rich in opportunity. It lacked only liquid capital, and government debt could supply that gaping deficiency. The secret of managing government debt was to fund it properly by setting aside revenues at regular intervals to service interest and pay off principal. Hamilton refuted charges that his funding scheme would feed speculation. Quite the contrary: if investors knew for sure that government bonds would be paid off, the prices would not fluctuate wildly, depriving speculators of opportunities to exploit. What mattered was that people trusted the government to make good on repayment: “In nothing are appearances of greater moment than in whatever regards credit. Opinion is the soul of it and this is affected by appearances as well as realities.” Hamilton intuited that public relations and confidence building were to be the special burdens of every future treasury secretary.
Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton)
A second element in the creation of commercial value is scarcity, the separation of people from whatever they might want or need. In artificial environments, where humans are separated from the sources of their survival, everything obtains a condition of relative scarcity and therefore value. There is the old story of the native living on a Pacific island, relaxing in a house on the beach, picking fruit from the tree and spearing fish in the water. A businessman arrives on the island, buys all the land, cuts down the trees and builds a factory. Then he hires the native to work in it for money so that someday the native can afford canned fruit and fish from the mainland, a nice little cinder-block house near the beach with a view of the water, and weekends off to enjoy it. The moment people move off land which has directly supported them, the necessities of life are removed from individual control. The things people could formerly produce for their survival must now be paid for. You may be living on the exact spot where a fruit tree once fed people. Now the fruit comes from five hundred miles away and costs thirty-five cents apiece. It is in the separation that the opportunity for profit resides. When the basic necessities are not scarce—in those places where food is still wild and abundant, for example—economic value can only be applied to new items. Candy bars, bottled or chemical milk, canned tuna, electrical appliances and CocaCola have all been intensively marketed in countries new to the market system. Because these products hadn’t existed in those places before, they are automatically relatively scarce and potentially valuable.
Jerry Mander (Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television)
History favors the bold. Compensation favors the meek. As a Fortune 500 company CEO, you’re better off taking the path often traveled and staying the course. Big companies may have more assets to innovate with, but they rarely take big risks or innovate at the cost of cannibalizing a current business. Neither would they chance alienating suppliers or investors. They play not to lose, and shareholders reward them for it—until those shareholders walk and buy Amazon stock. Most boards ask management: “How can we build the greatest advantage for the least amount of capital/investment?” Amazon reverses the question: “What can we do that gives us an advantage that’s hugely expensive, and that no one else can afford?” Why? Because Amazon has access to capital with lower return expectations than peers. Reducing shipping times from two days to one day? That will require billions. Amazon will have to build smart warehouses near cities, where real estate and labor are expensive. By any conventional measure, it would be a huge investment for a marginal return. But for Amazon, it’s all kinds of perfect. Why? Because Macy’s, Sears, and Walmart can’t afford to spend billions getting the delivery times of their relatively small online businesses down from two days to one. Consumers love it, and competitors stand flaccid on the sidelines. In 2015, Amazon spent $7 billion on shipping fees, a net shipping loss of $5 billion, and overall profits of $2.4 billion. Crazy, no? No. Amazon is going underwater with the world’s largest oxygen tank, forcing other retailers to follow it, match its prices, and deal with changed customer delivery expectations. The difference is other retailers have just the air in their lungs and are drowning. Amazon will surface and have the ocean of retail largely to itself.
Scott Galloway (The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google)
The traditional reluctance in this country to confront the real nature of racism is once again illustrated by the manner in which the majority of American whites interpreted what the Kerner Commission had to say about white racism. It seems that they have taken the Kerner Report as a call merely to examine their individual attitudes. The examination of individual attitudes is, of course, an indispensable requirement if the influence of racism is to be neutralized, but it is neither the only nor the basic requirement. The Kerner Report took great pains to make a distinction between racist attitudes and racist behavior. In doing so, it was trying to point out that the fundamental problem lies in the racist behavior of American institutions toward Negroes, and that the behavior of these institutions is influenced more by overt racist actions of people than by their private attitudes. If so, then the basic requirement is for white Americans, while not ignoring the necessity for a revision of their private beliefs, to concentrate on actions that can lead to the ultimate democratization of American institutions. By focusing upon private attitudes alone, white Americans may come to rely on token individual gestures as a way of absolving themselves personally of racism, while ignoring the work that needs to be done within public institutions to eradicate social and economic problems and redistribute wealth and opportunity. I mean by this that there are many whites sitting around in drawing rooms and board rooms discussing their consciences and even donating a few dollars to honor the memory of Dr. King. But they are not prepared to fight politically for the kind of liberal Congress the country needs to eradicate some of the evils of racism, or for the massive programs needed for the social and economic reconstruction of the black and white poor, or for a revision of the tax structure whereby the real burden will be lifted from the shoulders of those who don't have it and placed on the shoulders of those who can afford it. Our time offers enough evidence to show that racism and intolerance are not unique American phenomena. The relationship between the upper and lower classes in India is in some ways more brutal than the operation of racism in America. And in Nigeria black tribes have recently been killing other black tribes in behalf of social and political privilege. But it is the nature of the society which determines whether such conflicts will last, whether racism and intolerance will remain as proper issues to be socially and politically organized. If the society is a just society, if it is one which places a premium on social justice and human rights, then racism and intolerance cannot survive —will, at least, be reduced to a minimum. While working with the NAACP some years ago to integrate the University of Texas, I was assailed with a battery of arguments as to why Negroes should not be let in. They would be raping white girls as soon as they came in; they were dirty and did not wash; they were dumb and could not learn; they were uncouth and ate with their fingers. These attitudes were not destroyed because the NAACP psychoanalyzed white students or held seminars to teach them about black people. They were destroyed because Thurgood Marshall got the Supreme Court to rule against and destroy the institution of segregated education. At that point, the private views of white students became irrelevant. So while there can be no argument that progress depends both on the revision of private attitudes and a change in institutions, the onus must be placed on institutional change. If the institutions of this society are altered to work for black people, to respond to their needs and legitimate aspirations, then it will ultimately be a matter of supreme indifference to them whether white people like them, or what white people whisper about them in the privacy of their drawing rooms.
Bayard Rustin (Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin)
We would like to go and see the field that Millet…shows us in his Springtime, we would like Claude Monet to take us to Giverny, on the banks of the Seine, to that bend of the river which he hardly lets us distinguish through the morning mist. Yet in actual fact, it was the mere chance of a connection or family relation that give…Millet or Monet occasion to pass or to stay nearby, and to choose to paint that road, that garden, that field, that bend in the river, rather than some other. What makes them appear other and more beautiful than the rest of the world is that they carry on them, like some elusive reflection, the impression they afforded to a genius, and which we might see wandering just as singularly and despotically across the submissive, indifferent face of all the landscapes he may have painted.’ It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes. To forget this may sadden us unduly. When we feel interest to be so dependent on the exact locations where certain great artists found it, a thousand landscapes and areas of experience will be deprived of possible interest, for Monet only looked at a few stretches of the earth, and Proust’s novel, though long, could not comprise more than a fraction of human experience. Rather than learn the general lesson of art’s attentiveness, we might seek instead the mere objects of its gaze, and would then be unable to do justice to parts of the world which artists had not considered. As a Proustian idolater, we would have little time for desserts which Proust never tasted, for dresses he never described, nuances of love he didn’t cover and cities he didn’t visit, suffering instead from an awareness of a gap between our existence and the realm of artistic truth and interest. The moral? There is no great homage we could pay Proust than to end up passing the same verdict on him as he passed on Ruskin, namely, that for all its qualities, his work must eventually also prove silly, maniacal, constraining, false and ridiculous to those who spend too long on it. ‘To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.
Alain de Botton (How Proust Can Change Your Life)
By pointing to the captain’s foolhardy departure from standard procedure, the officials shielded themselves from the disturbing image of slaves overpowering their captors and relieved themselves of the uncomfortable obligation to explain how and why the events had deviated from the prescribed pattern. But assigning blame to the captain for his carelessness afforded only partial comfort, for by seizing their opportunity, the Africans aboard the Cape Coast had done more than liberate themselves (temporarily at least) from the slave ship. Their action reminded any European who heard news of the event of what all preferred not to contemplate too closely; that their ‘accountable’ history was only as real as the violence and racial fiction at its foundation. Only by ceaseless replication of the system’s violence did African sellers and European buyers render captives in the distorted guise of human commodities to market. Only by imagining that whiteness could render seven men more powerful than a group of twice their number did European investors produce an account naturalizing social relations that had as their starting point an act of violence. Successful African uprisings against European captors were of course moments at which the undeniable free agency of the captives most disturbed Europeans—for it was in these moments that African captives invalidated the vision of the history being written in this corner of the Atlantic world and articulated their own version of a history that was ‘accountable.’ Other moments in which the agency and irrepressible humanity of the captives manifested themselves were more tragic than heroic: instances of illness and death, thwarted efforts to escape from the various settings of saltwater slavery, removal of slaves from the market by reason of ‘madness.’ In negotiating the narrow isthmus between illness and recovery, death and survival, mental coherence and insanity, captives provided the answers the slave traders needed: the Africans revealed the boundaries of the middle ground between life and death where human commodification was possible. Turning people into slaves entailed more than the completion of a market transaction. In addition, the economic exchange had to transform independent beings into human commodities whose most ‘socially relevant feature’ was their ‘exchangeability’ . . . The shore was the stage for a range of activities and practices designed to promote the pretense that human beings could convincingly play the part of their antithesis—bodies animated only by others’ calculated investment in their physical capacities.
Stephanie E. Smallwood (Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora)
This is the trait constituting the soulful, inner, higher ideal which enters here in place of the quiet grandeur and independence of the figures of antiquity. The gods of the classical ideal too do not lack a trait of mourning, of a fateful negative, present in the cold necessity imprinted on these serene figures, but still, in their independent divinity and freedom, they retain an assurance of their simple grandeur and power. But their freedom is not the freedom of that love which is soulful and deeply felt because this depends on a relation of soul to soul, spirit to spirit. This depth of feeling kindles the ray of bliss present in the heart, that ray of a love which in sorrow and its supreme loss does not feel sang-froid or any sort of comfort, but the deeper it suffers yet in suffering still finds the sense and certainty of love and shows in grief that it has overcome itself within and by itself. It is only the religious love of romanticism which has an expression of bliss and freedom. This oneness and satisfaction is in its nature spiritually concrete because it is what is felt by the spirit which knows itself in another as at one with itself. Here therefore if the subject-matter portrayed is to be complete, it must have two aspects because love necessarily implies a double character in the spiritual personality. It rests on two independent persons who yet have a sense of their unity; but there is always linked with this unity at the same time the factor of the negative. Love is a matter of subjective feeling, but the subject which feels is this self-subsistent heart which, in order to love, must desist from itself, abandon itself, and sacrifice the inflexible focus of its own private personality. This sacrifice is what is moving in the love that lives and feels only in this self-surrender. Yet on this account a person in this sacrifice still retains his own self and in the very cancelling of his independence acquires a precisely affirmative independence. Nevertheless, in the sense of this oneness and its supreme happiness there still remains left the negative factor, the moving sense not so much of sacrifice as rather of the undeserved bliss of feeling independent and at unity with self in spite of all the self-surrender. The moving emotion is the sense of the dialectical contradiction of having sacrificed one’s personality and yet of being independent at the same time; this contradiction is ever present in love and ever resolved in it. So far as concerns the particular human individual personality in this depth of feeling, the unique love which affords bliss and an enjoyment of heaven rises above time and the particular individuality of that character which becomes a matter of indifference. in the pure ray of bliss which has just been described, particular individuality is superseded: in the sight of God all men are equal, or piety, rather, makes them all actually equal so that the only thing of importance is the expression of that concentration of love which needs neither happiness nor any particular single object. It is true that religious love too cannot exist without specific individuals who have some other sphere of existence apart from this feeling. But here the strictly ideal content is provided by the soulful depth of spiritual feeling which does not have its expression and actuality in the particular difference of a character with its talent, relationships, and fates, but is rather raised above these.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor. But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary ... You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals. You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs. My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species.
Matt Ridley (The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves)
Buy TextNow Accounts TextNow is a free calling and messaging app that allows users to make calls and send texts to any phone number in the US and Canada for free. It also offers affordable international calling and texting rates. What are Text Now Accounts? TextNow accounts are innovative virtual communication tools that allow users to send free texts and make calls using Wi-Fi. Think of them as your personal phone service without the hefty monthly fees. Buy TextNow Accounts When you create a TextNow account, you receive a unique number that can be used just like any traditional phone number. This means you can connect with friends, family, or clients easily, regardless of where they are located. The service is particularly popular among those who need additional numbers for various purposes—be it privacy concerns or business needs. With its user-friendly in TextNow is a free calling and messaging app that allows users to make calls and send texts to any phone number in the US and Canada for free. It also offers affordable international calling and texting rates. What are Text Now Accounts? TextNow accounts are innovative virtual communication tools that allow users to send free texts and make calls using Wi-Fi. Think of them as your personal phone service without the hefty monthly fees. Buy TextNow Accounts When you create a TextNow account, you receive a unique number that can be used just like any traditional phone number. This means you can connect with friends, family, or clients easily, regardless of where they are located. The service is particularly popular among those who need additional numbers for various purposes—be it privacy concerns or business needs. With its user-friendly interface and flexibility, managing communications has never been easier. You can access TextNow on multiple devices, including smartphones and computers. This versatility makes it an appealing choice for anyone looking to enhance their connectivity options effortlessly. How to buy textnow USA numbers from us? Purchasing a TextNow USA number from us is straightforward and hassle-free. First, visit our website and navigate to the section dedicated to TextNow accounts. Buy TextNow Accounts Once there, you’ll find various packages tailored to your needs. Select the one that suits you best. We offer options based on volume and duration, ensuring flexibility for every user. After making your selection, proceed to checkout. You’ll be prompted to provide basic information necessary for account setup. This step ensures we can deliver your new number quickly and securely. Payment methods are diverse, allowing convenience in transactions. Following payment confirmation, expect an email containing your new TextNow USA number along with instructions for activation. Activation is quick; just follow the steps provided in the email. Within minutes, you’ll have access to your new communication tool! Why should you buy Text Now Accounts? Buying TextNow accounts offers numerous advantages for both personal and business use. First, the flexibility of having a second phone number can enhance privacy. You can keep your main number separate from work-related calls or online registrations. Buy TextNow Accounts TextNow provides affordable calling and texting options, making it budget-friendly compared to traditional carriers. Users appreciate the convenience of using these services over Wi-Fi, which is especially beneficial in areas with poor cellular reception. If you want more information just contact me now. 24 Hours Reply/Contact WhatsApp: +1 (236) 349-3102 Skype: Buy5StarRanking Telegram:@buy5starranking Email: buy5starranking@gmail.com
Where Can I Buy Textnow Accounts Instantly?
Briefly, the book’s central arguments are these: 1. Rapid productivity growth in the modern economy has led to cost trends that divide its output into two sectors, which I call “the stagnant sector” and “the progressive sector.” In this book, productivity growth is defined as a labor-saving change in a production process so that the output supplied by an hour of labor increases, presumably significantly (Chapter 2). 2. Over time, the goods and services supplied by the stagnant sector will grow increasingly unaffordable relative to those supplied by the progressive sector. The rapidly increasing cost of a hospital stay and rising college tuition fees are prime examples of persistently rising costs in two key stagnant-sector services, health care and education (Chapters 2 and 3). 3. Despite their ever increasing costs, stagnant-sector services will never become unaffordable to society. This is because the economy’s constantly growing productivity simultaneously increases the community’s overall purchasing power and makes for ever improving overall living standards (Chapter 4). 4. The other side of the coin is the increasing affordability and the declining relative costs of the products of the progressive sector, including some products we may wish were less affordable and therefore less prevalent, such as weapons of all kinds, automobiles, and other mass-manufactured products that contribute to environmental pollution (Chapter 5). 5. The declining affordability of stagnant-sector products makes them politically contentious and a source of disquiet for average citizens. But paradoxically, it is the developments in the progressive sector that pose the greater threat to the general welfare by stimulating such threatening problems as terrorism and climate change. This book will argue that some of the gravest threats to humanity’s future stem from the falling costs of these products, rather than from the rising costs of services like health care and education (Chapter 5). The central purpose of this book is to explain why the costs of some labor-intensive services—notably health care and education—increase at persistently above-average rates. As long as productivity continues to increase, these cost increases will persist. But even more important, as the economist Joan Robinson rightly pointed out so many years ago, as productivity grows, so too will our ability to pay for all of these ever more expensive services.
William J. Baumol (The Cost Disease: Why Computers Get Cheaper and Health Care Doesn't)
macy's, sears and walmart can't afford to spend billions getting the delivery times of their relatively small online businesses down from two days to one.
Scott Galloway (The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google)
Why the us government Should Maintain students Healthcare Claims education and learning is probably the finest ventures in ensuring the people stay a greater existence from the contemporary setting. Over time, education and learning methods have transformed to guarantee individuals gain access to it in the very best ways. Besides, the adjustment can be a purposeful relocate making sure that learning meets pupils distinct needs nowadays. Consequently, any country that is focused on establishing in the current technical period must be ready to devote in schooling no matter what. We appreciate that lots of claims have was able to meet the most affordable threshold in offering secondary and basic education. It is actually commendable for schooling is focused and attends on the needs in the present environment. In addition to, we certainly have observed reduced rates of dropouts due to correct education and learning systems into position. Nevertheless, it is not enough because there are many other factors that, in turn, lower the superiority of education. We appreciate the reality that educational costs is mainly purchased and virtually totally given through the express or low-successful businesses. Sadly, small is defined in range to be sure the unique treatment of learners. It has led to the indiscriminate govt accountability. Apart from putting everything in place, the government must also provide the proper healthcare of a learner because it' s the foundation of excellent learning. The arranged provision of health care to students is defined around the periphery, plus it is amongst the essential things that degrade the grade of training. Standard attendance is actually a necessity for pupils to acquire much more and carry out greater. For that reason, government entities need to ensure an original set up of arranged healthcare to pupils to ensure they are certainly not stored away from university because of health care problems. Re-Analyzing the goal of Government in mastering It can be only by re-dealing with government entitiesAnd#039; s role in supplying primary and secondary education and learning that people can completely set up the skewed the outdoors of learner’s health care and the desire to influence the state to reconsider it. The cause of why the government must pay for the student’s healthcare is that its responsibility is unbalanced. It provides maintained to purchase basic training effectively but has did not shield the health-related requirements of any learner. Aside from, it is suitably interested in increasing the size of young menAnd#039; s and ladiesAnd#039; s chances in obtaining technical and professional education. But it has not searched for has and aims unacceptable method of achieving the medical care requirements of any learner. As a result, education require is not met because its services are skewed. The possible lack of equilibrium in government activities replicates the malfunction to discrete primarily sharply amid the steps right for authorities financing and activities to become implemented. Financing healthcare for students, which is equally essential, is neglected, though Financing education is largely accepted. For that reason, this is a deliberate demand government entities to perform the circle by paying for student' s health care. When there is stability in federal government commitments in education and learning, its requirements will probably be fulfilled. So, the state should pay for pupil' s medical care. If they are healthful, they find out better. In addition to, a large stress will probably be lifted, and will also unquestionably raise enrolment in professional coachingcenters and colleges, along with other studying companies.
Sandy Miles
Trademark Trademark is fundamentally exceptional of a licensed innovation comprising plans, logos, and imprints. Organizations utilize different plans, logos, or words to recognize their items and administrations from others. Those imprints which help in distinctive the item or administrations from others and help the clients in distinguishing their image, quality, and even source of the item is known as Trademark. In contrast to licenses, a brand name is enlisted for a very long time, and from that point, it tends to be recharged for an additional 10 years after an additional installment of reestablishment expenses. Trademark Objection After the enrollment of the brand name, an Examiner/Registrar or outsider can set a trademark objection. As per Section(s) 9 (Absolute Grounds of Refusal) and 11 (Relative Grounds of Refusal) of the Act, these two can be the ground of a complaint:- The application contains wrong data, or Comparable or indistinguishable brand names exist. At whatever point a Trademark enlistment center mentions a criticism, a candidate has an occasion to send a composed answer alongside the strong proof, realities, and reasons why the imprint ought to be assigned to him within 30 days of the protest. On the off chance that the analyst/enlistment center discovers the answer to be adequate and addresses the entirety of his interests in the assessment report and there is no contention, at that point he may give authorization to the candidate to distribute the application in the Trademark diary before enrollment. How to respond to an objection A Trademark assessment report is set up on the Trademark office site alongside the subtleties of the brand name application and a candidate or a specialist has the occasion to send a composed answer which ought to be known as a trademark objection reply. The answer can be submitted as "Answer to the assessment report" either on the web or it tends to be submitted through a post or individual alongside supporting archives or a sworn statement. When the application gets recorded a candidate ought to be given a notification about the protest and ground of the complaint. Different grounds are:- There ought to be a counter assertion of the application, It ought to be recorded within 2 months of the application, On the off chance that the analyst neglects to record a complaint inside the time, at that point the status of the application will be deserted. After recording the counter of a complaint, the enlistment center will call a candidate for the meeting. On the off chance that it rules in the courtesy, at that point, the candidate will get it enrolled, and on the off chance that the answer isn't agreeable, at that point, the application for the enlistment will get dismissed. Trademark Objection Reply Fees Although I have gone through various sites, finding a perfect formal reply is quite difficult. But Professional Utilities provides a perfect reply through experts, also the trademark objection reply fees are really affordable. They provide services for just 1,499/- only.
Shweta Sharma
I used to firmly believe that prestigious schools, which encompasses both private schools and top-tier quantile 5 public schools with impressive graduation rates, held a clear advantage over lower-quality no fee public schools. That was, until Dr Thomas Sowell introduced me to the sorting function of the formal schooling system and the unfair advantage prestigious schools have since they can pick and choose who they admit. From the outset they can choose to admit students of a certain intellect thus increasing the chances of these students performing favourably relative to no fee public schools that have an obligation to admit everyone. Parents who can afford to send their child to private school are usually more involved and provide more resources for their child to succeed. The ability of parents to afford the prohibitively high costs of the schools is also an indicator of the child’s abilities since his parents had it in them to work hard enough to earn what enabled to afford a prestigious school. Once you have factored those aspects as a minimum, the prestigious school’s performance doesn’t seem that great. As long as the parents have resources to support the child’s learning environment, the type of school a child attends becomes less relevant. This is why the quantile 5 public schools perform at the level of private schools. As the level of the parent’s material wealth increases such that more educational resources can be availed to the child, so does the performance of a child. This, off course happens to a certain level as the law of diminishing return eventually kicks in.
Salatiso Lonwabo Mdeni
like. Electricity was relatively new, and magnetism was all the rage. Bicycles were new, replacing roller-skates as the latest fad. Bustles were on the way out. The American Civil War was only a generation past. Photographic cameras were on the cusp of being made commercially affordable to the general public, but were still too expensive to print in newspapers. Horses, trains, and streetcars were the three standard forms of transportation.
Nellie Bly (Nellie Bly's World: Her Complete Reporting 1887-1888)