Austin Powers Sayings Quotes

We have not thoroughly assessed the bodies snatched from dirt and sand to be chained in a cell. We have not reckoned with the horrendous, violent mass kidnapping that we call the Middle Passage. We have not been honest about all of America's complicity - about the wealth the South earned on the backs of the enslaved, or the wealth the North gained through the production of enslaved hands. We have not fully understood the status symbol that owning bodies offered. We have not confronted the humanity, the emotions, the heartbeats of the multiple generations who were born into slavery and died in it, who never tasted freedom on America's land. The same goes for the Civil War. We have refused to honestly confront the fact that so many were willing to die in order to hold the freedom of others in their hands. We have refused to acknowledge slavery's role at all, preferring to boil things down to the far more palatable "state's rights." We have not confessed that the end of slavery was so bitterly resented, the rise of Jim Crow became inevitable - and with it, a belief in Black inferiority that lives on in hearts and minds today. We have painted the hundred-year history of Jim Crow as little more than mean signage and the inconvenience that white people and Black people could not drink from the same fountain. But those signs weren't just "mean". They were perpetual reminders of the swift humiliation and brutal violence that could be suffered at any moment in the presence of whiteness. Jim Crow meant paying taxes for services one could not fully enjoy; working for meager wages; and owning nothing that couldn't be snatched away. For many black families, it meant never building wealth and never having legal recourse for injustice. The mob violence, the burned-down homes, the bombed churches and businesses, the Black bodies that were lynched every couple of days - Jim Crow was walking through life measuring every step. Even our celebrations of the Civil Rights Movement are sanitized, its victories accentuated while the battles are whitewashed. We have not come to grips with the spitting and shouting, the pulling and tugging, the clubs, dogs, bombs, and guns, the passion and vitriol with which the rights of Black Americans were fought against. We have not acknowledged the bloodshed that often preceded victory. We would rather focus on the beautiful words of Martin Luther King Jr. than on the terror he and protesters endured at marches, boycotts, and from behind jail doors. We don't want to acknowledge that for decades, whiteness fought against every civil right Black Americans sought - from sitting at lunch counters and in integrated classrooms to the right to vote and have a say in how our country was run. We like to pretend that all those white faces who carried protest signs and batons, who turned on their sprinklers and their fire hoses, who wrote against the demonstrations and preached against the changes, just disappeared. We like to pretend that they were won over, transformed, the moment King proclaimed, "I have a dream." We don't want to acknowledge that just as Black people who experienced Jim Crow are still alive, so are the white people who vehemently protected it - who drew red lines around Black neighborhoods and divested them of support given to average white citizens. We ignore that white people still avoid Black neighborhoods, still don't want their kids going to predominantly Black schools, still don't want to destroy segregation. The moment Black Americans achieved freedom from enslavement, America could have put to death the idea of Black inferiority. But whiteness was not prepared to sober up from the drunkenness of power over another people group. Whiteness was not ready to give up the ability to control, humiliate, or do violence to any Black body in the vicinity - all without consequence.

Bartender: "Listen to me. This is real freedom, freedom to own property, make a profit, make your life. The West, so afraid of strong government, now has no government. Only financial power." JC Denton: "Our governments have limited power by design." Bartender: "Rheroric... And you belive it! Don't you know where those slogans come from? Well-paid researchers -- how do you say it? -- "think tanks," funded by big businesses. What is that? "A think tank"? It's privately-funded propagandea. The Trilateral Commission in the United States, for instance.

For all they may talk about the people as a coherent group, demagogues are actually devoted to pitting the people against each other. Demagogues rarely create new prejudices; they amplify those that already exist, giving people permission to say things that had previously been unpopular or taboo. Much as demagogues work to weaken the rule of law, they try to weaken the social norms that enforce civic friendship, opening old wounds and encouraging the eruption of anger and hatred that have been kept below the surface by a thin but crucially important layer of civility and civic decency. The final point is especially important. Demagogues don't simply flatter the populace. They flatter a portion of the people by attacking and demonizing everyone else. Those who stand with the demagogue become 'the people.' Everybody else becomes effectively subhuman: 'animals,' 'vermin,' 'criminals,' 'enemies of the state,' In this way, demagogues ensure that a portion of the people will always side with them against their common enemy. At the same time, they create the perception of emergency to justify their destruction of the constitutional safeguards that would otherwise check their power. A demagogue needs division the way that a fire needs oxygen. They succeed only because they are able to fan the flames.

Others praise ceremonial Magic, and are supposed to suffer much Ecstasy! Our asylums are crowded, the stage is over-run! Is it by symbolizing we become the symbolized? Were I to crown myself King, should I be King? Rather should I be an object of disgust or pity. These Magicians, whose insincerity is their safety, are but the unemployed dandies of the Brothels. Magic is but one's natural ability to attract without asking; ceremony what is unaffected, its doctrine the negation of theirs. I know them well and their creed of learning that teaches the fear of their own light. Vampires, they are as the very lice in attraction. Their practices prove their incapacity, they have no magic to intensify the normal, the joy of a child or healthy person, none to evoke their pleasure or wisdom from themselves. Their methods depending on a morass of the imagination and a chaos of conditions, their knowledge obtained with less decency than the hyena his food, I say they are less free and do not obtain the satisfaction of the meanest among animals. Self condemned in their disgusting fatness, their emptiness of power, without even the magic of personal charm or beauty, they are offensive in their bad taste and mongering for advertisement. The freedom of energy is not obtained by its bondage, great power not by disintegration. Is it not because our energy (or mind stuff) is already over bound and divided, that we are not capable, let alone magical? 

beyond Will and Belief is Self-Love. Self-love is free to believe what it desires. You are free to believe in nothing related to belief. The ‘Truth’ is not difficult to understand: the Truth has no will, and will no truth! The truth is that ‘will’ has never believed. ‘Could be’ is the only immediate thing we can say with certainty. Does this haunting Sphinx teach us the value of the ‘will to...’ anything? Then there can be no greater risk than ‘absolute Knowledge’: if only a little knowledge of it is dangerous, then what about Omniscience? There is nothing one can add to an already mighty power!

Another game-changing project is the BRCK, pronounced “brick,” created by the same team behind Ushahidi and iHub. On a flight back to Africa from the United States some years ago, Hersman looked down on our vast, rugged continent and wondered why it was that most routers and modems were built for the first-world comfort zones of, say, New York or London, whereas most Internet users actually live in the harsh, far less comfortable environments of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The team sketched out a design for a rugged portable connectivity device that could work in remote conditions where electrical power and Internet connections were a problem. The result is the BRCK, a sturdy, brick-shaped, cloud-enabled Wi-Fi hotspot router from which you can access the Internet from anywhere on the continent that is close to a signal. It has an antenna, charger, USB ports, 4 GB of storage, a built-in global SIM card and enough backup power to survive a blackout. The device sells for $199 online and is already being used in 45 countries around the world. Consider the provenance: designed in Nairobi, Kenya; manufactured in Austin, Texas. This is a complete reversal of the standard manufacturing paradigm. Again, an example of African technology going global.

As I was saying, My Lord. This art is so much more about you than it is me. It's about expectation. It's about hope. Deep down you hold a secret hope that you will be freed. It doesn't matter that you're far too intelligent a man to really believe that to be true, the hope remains." He stood with a shrug and tapped the flat of the blade against his lips. "If I'm honest I don't know if you will ever be freed. The order could come to kill you tomorrow, or not. It is hope that this art deals in. Hope that you might know enough to make me stop, or at least give me pause. Hope is stronger than faith, more powerful that love. Hope is the lever that can move worlds.

My father was a man of iron will. He had a red beard and eyes like caves. He married my mother sensibly for the triple joy of her widowhood, the three estates, but he was concerned - as an English country gentleman and an epitome of the chivalric virtues - with the making of a son. Having heard well of the giant's child-inspiring powers, my father takes my mother by the hand and leads her up to him the night before their wedding. It had been a hot day, the hottest day that any man could remember, the skylarks swooning in the sticky air, milk turning sour in the cows' udders. At the end of that hottest day now it is suddenly Midsummer Eve and the giant stands out bold and wonderful and monstrous on his long green Dorset hill, the moon at the full above his knobbled club. My father lays my mother down on the giant's thistle, in the modest shade of Mr Wiclif's burgeoning fig tree. 'Dear hart,' he says, taking off his spurs and his liripipe hat, 'I shall require an heir.' If ever widow woman blushed then my mother blushed hot when she saw my father unbuttoned above her in the moonlight. 'My womb,' she says, 'is empty.' My father engages the key in the lock. It is well-oiled. He turns and enters and makes himself at home. 'I have been told,' he says, 'that any true woman,' he says, 'childless,' he adds, 'who lies,' he says, 'on the Cerne giant, - my father takes a shuddering juddering breath - 'conceives without fail,' he explains. My father goes on, without need of saying. It is sixty yards if it is an inch from the top to the toe of the giant of Cerne Abbas. The creature's club alone must be every bit of forty yards. 'O Gog,' says my mother eventually. 'O Gog, O Gog, O Gog.' 'I do believe,' says my father, 'Magog.' Now, in the moment of my conception, as a star falls into my mother's left eye, as the wind catches its breath, as the little hills skip for joy, and the moon hides her face behind a cloud - a bit of local history. When St Augustine came calling in those parts the people of Cerne tied a tail to his coat and whipped him out of their valley. The saint was furious. He got down on his knees and prayed to God to give tails to all the children that were born in Dorset. 'Right,' said the Omnipotence. This went on, tails, tails, tails, tails, until the folk regretted their pagan manners. When they expressed their regret, St Austin came back and founded the abbey, calling it Cernal because he was soon seeing his visions there - from the Latin, 'cerno', I see, and the Hebrew, 'El, God. That's enough history. I prefer mystery.

My anger didn’t destroy me. It did not leave me alone and desolate. On the contrary, my anger undergirded my calling, my vocation. It gave me the courage to say hard things and to write like Black lives are on the line. It shouldn’t have surprised me. I serve a God who experienced and expressed anger. One of the most meaningful passages of Scripture for me is found in the New Testament, where Jesus leads a one-man protest inside the Temple walls. Jesus shouts at the corrupt Temple officials, overturns furniture, sets animals free, blocks the doorways with his body, and carries a weapon—a whip—through the place. Jesus throws folks out the building, and in so doing creates space for the most marginalized to come in: the poor, the wounded, the children. I imagine the next day’s newspapers called Jesus’s anger destructive. But I think those without power would’ve said that his anger led to freedom—the freedom of belonging, the freedom of healing, and the freedom of participating as full members in God’s house.

The Aztecs located the Templo Mayor and surrounding sacred precinct – by far the grandest and most powerful nepantla-middled ritual time-place stretched out and put in place by human beings – at tlallinepantla (“in the middle of the earth”).159 Tlallinepantla coincided with the center of the earth (tlalli olloco),160 the navel of the earth (tlalxicco), the crossroads of the horizontal forces of the Fifth Sun-Earth Ordering, the confluence of vertical malinalli-twisting-spinning forces that ascend from below and descend from above the earth, and the axis mundi. Here is the meeting point of the four roads created by the four sons of Tonacatecuhtli~Tonacacihuatl (each associated with one of four intercardinal directions).161 In so doing, they arranged the earth into four quadrants and a center. Here, too, is the time-place defined by the crossing of two springs, red and blue (or yellow), on a small island in the middle of Lake Texcoco. Mendieta describes their crossing as formada a manera de una aspa de san Andrés (“shaped like a Saint Andrew’s cross”).162 Hernando Alvarado Tezozomoc likewise describes a spot defined by two springs intersecting one another. Van Zantwjik, Berdan and Anawalt, and Heyden read Tezozomoc as claiming the two springs are Tleatl-Atlatlayan (“Fire Water, Place of Burning Water”) and Matlalatl-Toxpalatl (“Dark Blue Water, Yellow Water”). The former ran from east to west, the latter, from north to south, and so they crossed one another.163 López Austin and López Lujan, however, read Tezozomoc as identifying the two intersecting springs as Matlalatl (“Dark Blue Water) and Toxpalatl (“Yellow Water”).164 Either way, their intersecting divides the island into four quadrants and forms the St. Andrew’s cross depicted in Codex Mendoza, fol. 2r. Dúran says the Aztecs found the sight of yellow and blue streams “espanto” (“frightening, terrifying, astonishing, awesome”).165 Next to this spot was where an eagle perched upon a prickly pear cactus. Lastly, here, too, the Aztecs constructed their Huey Tocalli. After building their first temple at the site, the Aztecs ordered the surrounding area divided into four quarters, with the Huey Teocalli at their intersection. The roads of Tepeyac, Itztapalapa, and Tlacopan, which arranged the city into four quadrants and served as communication routes between the island and the surrounding lake shores, intersected at the Huey Teocalli, forming a grand human-constructed crossroads with the Huey Tecocalli at its center.166 All of these crossings and intersectings coincided with one another as well as with the center of the earth, the navel of the earth, and the axis mundi. Codex Mendoza (fol. 2r) depicts the founding of Tenochtitlan at this nepantla-middled, nepantla-intersecting time-place (see Figure 4.10).

If the parents of schoolchildren in an elementary school in Austin worry most about the dangers their children face crossing busy streets near the school, they getting a stop sign installed or a traffic pattern changed will be their first goal. Other aims and actions may follow, once they experience their collective power. "Winning creates imagination," says Sister Judy Donovan, leading organizer of Valley Interfaith. "Once they see they can get a stop sign, they start thinking about what might be done in the school." Successful action gives people lessons in their own power.

Austin Phelps makes this point in a chapter in his volume on prayer. He tells of Ethelfrith, the pagan Saxon king of Northumbria, who had invaded Wales and was about to give battle. The Welsh were Christians, and as Ethelfrith was observing the army of his opponents spread out before him, he noticed a host of unarmed men. When he asked who they were, he was told that they were the Christian monks of Bangor, praying for the success of their army. Ethelfrith immediately realized the seriousness of the situation. “Attack them first,” he ordered. Phelps goes on to say that the non-Christians of the world often have more respect for the “sturdy reality” of prayer than we do. The power of prayer “is no fiction, whatever [we] may think of it.”334 If prayer is so powerful, how should we use it?