Bare Minimum Quotes

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.

Elsie, it’s the bare minimum. The bar’s so low, you could pick it up and beat him with it.

This new world was a vicious, sleek world made of street lights and tight jeans, sharp smiles and fast cars. This was a city, edited. A city, pared down to its bare minimums, beautiful and abusive.

If you can’t even stop watching TV long enough to get your life together, you obviously don’t want to change. That’s basic shit. It’s the bare minimum, to be honest.

Your objective should always be to eliminate instructions entirely by making everything self-explanatory, or as close to it as possible. When instructions are absolutely necessary, cut them back to a bare minimum.

Beautiful. You can be taught. Makes my job so much easier when you’re actually intelligent. You’d be amazed at the idiots I’ve come across.” – Death “I try to keep my stupid to a bare minimum, since my mom’s always telling me it can be fatal in large doses.” – Nick “Oh, she’s right. Believe me, I know. For that matter, it can be fatal even in small measures. Remind me sometime to tell you about the woman I claimed who was vacuuming her cat.” – Death

But life is not about half doing. You cannot half love or half accept or half live. It's about giving everything you have. When you are old and worn, do you really want to look back and say you gave the bare minimum? You owe yourself more than that.

But shouldn't there be a least? Shouldn't there be a bare minimum that life should give you? Is it too much to ask for a job you don't hate, or for someone to truly have and hold? Is it too much to ask for one child? Even one some would call flawed? Couldn't I at least have that?

When you travel a lot, you learn to pack the same for every trip. Six white shirts, two black trousers. The bare minimum you need to survive.

Prejudice isn’t a question of preference but one of whether you are offering other human beings the bare minimum courtesy of treating them as human.

I try to limit my exposure to politicians to a bare minimum; they trigger my hypocrite allergy.

I live inside my own skin. Anything that happens outside it doesn't change who I am. This isn't something I'm proud of; as far as I'm concerned, it's a bare minimum baseline requirement for calling yourself an adult human being, somewhere around the level of knowing how to do your own washing or change a toilet roll. All those idiots on the websites, begging for other people to pull their sagging puppet-strings, turn them real: they make me want to spit.

Then know that I’ll be laughing at your ineptitude every time your enemies strike you, and if you fail to return with my daughter, I’ll have your heart and your head for decorations. (Zephyra) Your words are noted, my most prickly rose. And I shall endeavor to keep your amusement at a bare minimum. (Stryker)

It was all part of a way of doing things in the United States that, as I would gradually realize, forced you to be constantly on guard, constantly worried that whatever amount of money you had or earned would never be enough, and constantly anxious about navigating the complex and mysterious fine print thrown at you from every direction by corporations that had somehow managed to evade even the bare minimum of sensible protections for consumers.

The bare minimum will get you a bare minimum life. Going above and beyond will launch you above and beyond.

You don't obtain excellence by doing the bare minimum.

I'm sorry you feel so threatened by depictions of fictional men doing more than the bare minimum.

But you, dear #GIRLBOSS, should save 10 percent at the bare minimum. I know it’s a lot easier to talk about saving money than it is to actually save it. Here’s a tip: Treat your savings account like just another bill. It has to be paid every month, or there are consequences. If you have direct deposit, have a portion of your paycheck automatically diverted into a savings account. Once it’s in there, forget about it. You never saw it anyway. It’s an emergency fund only (and vacations are not emergencies).

dont beg a boy to be a man dont beg him to change dont beg for flowers dont beg for reassurance dont beg for him to post you dont beg for a call back dont beg for the bare minimum

Yeah. It is. And if you're going to get out of bed and come here and talk to me, the bare minimum you can do is assume I'm not everybody. When I ask you, I actually want to know how you are.

I can’t help but wonder if I could get away with stabbing her cold, cold heart with an ice pick. For that, I might win the Nobel Peace Prize. Or, bare minimum, a call from the Vatican, thanking me.

For most of my life, I would have automatically said that I would opt for conscientious objector status, and in general, I still would. But the spirit of the question is would I ever, and there are instances where I might. If immediate intervention would have circumvented the genocide in Rwanda or stopped the Janjaweed in Darfur, would I choose pacifism? Of course not. Scott Simon, the reporter for National Public Radio and a committed lifelong Quaker, has written that it took looking into mass graves in former Yugoslavia to convince him that force is sometimes the only option to deter our species' murderous impulses. While we're on the subject of the horrors of war, and humanity's most poisonous and least charitable attributes, let me not forget to mention Barbara Bush (that would be former First Lady and presidential mother as opposed to W's liquor-swilling, Girl Gone Wild, human ashtray of a daughter. I'm sorry, that's not fair. I've no idea if she smokes.) When the administration censored images of the flag-draped coffins of the young men and women being killed in Iraq - purportedly to respect "the privacy of the families" and not to minimize and cover up the true nature and consequences of the war - the family matriarch expressed her support for what was ultimately her son's decision by saying on Good Morning America on March 18, 2003, "Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? I mean it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?" Mrs. Bush is not getting any younger. When she eventually ceases to walk among us we will undoubtedly see photographs of her flag-draped coffin. Whatever obituaries that run will admiringly mention those wizened, dynastic loins of hers and praise her staunch refusal to color her hair or glamorize her image. But will they remember this particular statement of hers, this "Let them eat cake" for the twenty-first century? Unlikely, since it received far too little play and definitely insufficient outrage when she said it. So let us promise herewith to never forget her callous disregard for other parents' children while her own son was sending them to make the ultimate sacrifice, while asking of the rest of us little more than to promise to go shopping. Commit the quote to memory and say it whenever her name comes up. Remind others how she lacked even the bare minimum of human integrity, the most basic requirement of decency that says if you support a war, you should be willing, if not to join those nineteen-year-olds yourself, then at least, at the very least, to acknowledge that said war was actually going on. Stupid fucking cow.

Because they’re your family and you’re mine, and the fact you even have to ask is mind-blowing to me. Learning to communicate with your family is the bare minimum, Ind.

In my husband I found someone for whom the bare minimum was more than enough, someone who didn’t expect anything of me that I wasn’t willing to give.

Voting rights are the most basic tenet of our democracy, and the bare minimum one should expect from the government.

But all these traits - style, hygiene, the ability to care for oneself and one's home - are, in a man, considered exceptional, almost miraculous. Whereas in women, they are the bare minimum.

I look at some of my worst relationships and think, At least they didn’t hit me. I work from a place of gratitude for the bare minimum. Since then I’ve never been in a relationship where I’ve had to hide nonconsensual bruises. I’ve never feared for my life. I’ve never been in a situation where I couldn’t walk away. Does this make me a lucky girl? Given the stories I’ve heard from other women, yes, it does make me a lucky girl. This is not how we should measure luck.

Why couldn’t I live normally? Manage to do the bare minimum needed to be human? I never meant to break things, make a mess of them. I tried to live, but things just kept piling up like the waste from my own body. I tried to live and my home collapsed around me. I

I’d come across a strap-on penis. It seemed pretty old and was Band-Aid colored, about three inches long and not much bigger around than a Vienna sausage, which was interesting to me. You’d think that if someone wanted a sex toy she’d go for the gold, sizewise. But this was just the bare minimum, like getting AAA breast implants. Who had this person been hoping to satisfy, her Cabbage Patch doll? I thought about taking the penis home and mailing it to one of my sisters for Christmas but knew that the moment I put it in my knapsack, I’d get hit by a car and killed. That’s just my luck. Medics would come and scrape me off the pavement, then, later, at the hospital, they’d rifle through my pack and record its contents: four garbage bags, some wet wipes, two flashlights, and a strap-on penis.

Streamline your products by choosing the bare minimum for your most necessary jobs. Don’t force yourself to choose among five different cleaners like you’re scrolling a Netflix queue of disinfectants. Pick up a bottle and go clean. You don’t need to waste time choosing

With Hamas now in control of the Gaza Strip, Israel imposed a full-blown siege. Goods entering the strip were reduced to a bare minimum; regular exports were stopped completely; fuel supplies were cut; and leaving and entering Gaza were only rarely permitted. Gaza was in effect turned into an open-air prison, where by 2018 at least 53 percent of some two million Palestinians lived in a state of poverty,24 and unemployment stood at an astonishing 52 percent, with much higher rates for youth and women.25 What had begun with international refusal to recognize Hamas’s election victory had led to a disastrous Palestinian rupture and the blockade of Gaza. This sequence of events amounted to a new declaration of war on the Palestinians. It also provided indispensable international cover for the open warfare that was to come.

Minimifidian (n.) A person who has the bare minimum of faith (in something). To the minimifidian the secret to happiness lies in the doctrine of lowered expectations. Which is not the worst way to go through life; it’s hard to be disappointed when you never expect anything. Minionette

No one needs a relationship. What you need is the basic cop-on to figure that out, in the face of all the media bullshit screaming that you're nothing on your own and you're a dangerous freak if you disagree. The truth is, if you don't exist without someone else, you don't exist at all. And that doesn't just go for romance. I love my ma, I love my friends, I love the bones of them. If any of them wanted me to donate a kidney or crack a few heads, I'd do it, no questions asked. And if they all waved goodbye and walked out of my life tomorrow, I'd still be the same person I am today. I live inside my own skin. Anything that happens outside it doesn't change who I am. This isn't something I'm proud of; as far as I'm concerned, it's a bare minimum baseline requirement for calling yourself an adult human being, somewhere around the level of knowing how to do your own washing or change a toilet roll. All those idiots on the websites, begging for other people to pull their sagging puppet-strings, turn them real: they make me want to spit.

Full citizenship rights are the bare minimum one should expect from the government. Yet, for two-thirds of our history, full citizenship was denied to those who built this country from theory to life. African slaves and Chinese workers and Native American environmentalists and Latino gauchos and Irish farmers—and half the population: women. Over the course of our history, these men and women, these patriots and defenders of liberty, have been denied the most profound currency of citizenship: power. Because, let’s be honest, that is the core of this fight. The right to be seen, the right to be heard, the right to direct the course of history are markers of power. In the United States, democracy makes politics one of the key levers to exercising power. So, it should shock none of us that the struggle for dominion over our nation’s future and who will participate is simply a battle for American power.

Bit by bit, he has pared down his desires to what is now approaching a bare minimum. He has cut out smoking and drinking, he no longer eats in restaurants, he does not own a television, a radio, or a computer. He would like to trade his car in for a bicycle, but he can’t get rid of the car, since the distances he must travel for work are too great. The same applies to the cell phone he carries around in his pocket, which he would dearly love to toss in the garbage, but he needs it for work as well and therefore can’t do without it. The digital camera was an indulgence, perhaps, but given the drear and slog of the endless trash-out rut, he feels it is saving his life. His rent is low, since he lives in a small apartment in a poor neighborhood, and beyond spending money on bedrock necessities, the only luxury he allows himself is buying books, paperback books, mostly novels, American novels, British novels, foreign novels in translation, but in the end books are not luxuries so much as necessities, and reading is an addiction he has no wish to be cured of.

Why?” “Why what, baby?” “Why are you learning sign?” “Because they're your family and you're mine, and the fact you even have to ask is mind blowing to me. Learning to communicate with your family is the bare minimum, Ind. And because I love you and when I tell your dad that, I'll be the one to say it.

Because they’re your family and you’re mine, and the fact you even have to ask is mind-blowing to me. Learning to communicate with your family is the bare minimum, Ind.” I guess it is, but I didn’t know the bar was on the floor until Ryan Shay walked into my life and quietly raised it to the fucking moon.

God does not want my bare minimum. God does not want me to go just one step further than other people. He does not say, “Be good enough.” He does not say, “Be better than most.” He says, “Be perfect.” Of course, it’s hard to shoot for perfection. It is all the harder when you are surrounded by people who are not even trying. The world tells us that there is no such thing as good or bad. All is permissible. Sin is no big deal. Some sins are even laudatory. There is no perfection. But Christ calls us out of that relativistic fog—all the way out. Not to mere acceptability or decency, but to holiness, to sainthood. He will settle for nothing less, so neither can we.

John thought his father was an overbearing megalomaniac and tried to keep their interactions to a bare minimum.

The guard's job, like the job of every other organism, singular or collective, is to maintain its existence — to do the bare minimum required to continue doing the bare minimum.

She could see the bare minimum out on the horizon, rising up against the sky like a mountain range she would never climb.

But you, dear #GIRLBOSS, should save 10 percent at the bare minimum....Treat your savings account like just another bill. It has to be paid every month, or there are consequences.

Elsie, it's the bare minimum. The bar is so low, you could pick it up and beat him with it.

I’m glad, but don’t be grateful for the bare minimum you deserve.

He stood up for you when some shit-faced manboy verbally harassed you—Elsie, it’s the bare minimum. The bar’s so low, you could pick it up and beat him with it.

When we let boys succeed by performing the bare minimum, we’ll never see them blossom into the men we know they can become.

He was a houseplant, and I was an infant. One of us was content to exist with the bare minimum of care, the other an endless source of unarticulated needs.

This guy isn’t offering you the world, he’s offering you the same thing he always has: the bare minimum. He’s holding you back and you know it. If you concede, you’ll resent him forever.

Things you need aren't bonus material, they're the bare minimum. You don't have to go without something that's part of you just because it's not the most common thing in the world. You don't deserve to. Someone should be spoiling you and spanking you and making you really fucking happy. All of it. If that's what you want. You deserve to feel good just like everybody else.

I swear to God my chest feels like it might explode, he’s so happy and free. A lump forms in my throat, and I will back the burn behind my eyes as I watch them together. I’m so fucking angry that this is even a thing I have to feel, that someone treating Quinten like a human being is a gift and not the bare minimum. But the truth is the truth, no matter how ugly it feels.

You’re . . .” I search for the right word. It’s rare that my vocabulary fails me like this. “Organized.” His eyes crackle with light as he laughs. “Organized?” “Extremely,” I deadpan. “Not to mention thorough.” “You make me sound like a contract,” he says, amused. “And you know how I feel about a good contract,” I say. His smirk pulls higher. “Actually, I only know how you feel about a bad one, written on a damp napkin.” He lies back fully on the mattress, and I do too, leaving a healthy gap between us. “A good contract is . . .” I think for a moment. “Adorable?” Charlie supplies, teasing. “No.” “Comely?” “At bare minimum,” I say. “Charming?” “Sexy as hell,” I reply. “Irresistible. It’s a list of great traits and working compromises that watch out for all parties involved. It’s . . . satisfying, even when it’s not what you expected, because you work for it. You go back and forth until every detail is just how it needs to be.

In fact, he had always done the bare minimum of research necessary to support these myths. He was lazy, and essentially what he did was allow people’s enthusiastic credulity to do the work for him.

All the while, the botanist spoke only of Mei, of his need to find her. Holden realized that he’d never in his life needed anything as badly as this man needed to see his daughter again. To his surprise, it made him sad. Prax had been robbed of everything, had all his fat boiled away; he’d been rendered down to the bare minimum of humanity. All he had left was his need to find his little girl, and Holden envied him for it.

Reports of gas vans at Chelmno, Poland, and mass exterminations had surfaced. Hitler even stated his plan openly in his ranting speeches, yet Roosevelt was slow to react and kept immigration at a bare minimum. Saint

A study conducted at Harvard Medical School found that people who got more sleep than the bare minimum they needed increased the volume of gray matter in their brains, which is linked to improved psychological health.

Avoidants often use sex to distance themselves from their partner. It doesn’t necessarily mean they will cheat on their partner, although studies have shown that they are more likely to do so than other attachment types. Phillip Shaver, in a study with then University of California-Davis graduate student Dory Schachner, found that of the three styles, avoidants would more readily make a pass at someone else’s partner or respond to such a proposition. Intriguingly, they also found that avoidant men and women were more likely to engage in less sex if their partner had an anxious attachment style! Researchers believe that in relationships like Marsha and Craig’s, there is less lovemaking because the anxious partner wants a great deal of physical closeness and this in turn causes the avoidant partner to withdraw further. What better way to avoid intimacy than by reducing sex to a bare minimum.

In the first half of 1944, battle casualty rates for every 1,000 bomber crewmen serving six months in combat included 712 killed or missing and 175 wounded: 89 percent. By one calculation, barely one in four U.S. airmen completed twenty-five missions over Germany, a minimum quota that was soon raised to thirty and then thirty-five on the assumption that the liberation of France and Belgium and the attenuation of German airpower made flying less lethal.

I live inside my own skin. Anything that happens outside it doesn’t change who I am. This isn’t something I’m proud of; as far as I’m concerned, it’s a bare minimum baseline requirement for calling yourself an adult human being,

You can want the world for someone but if all they want is the bare minimum, they will do things to keep themselves there. The biggest factor to look for is the people they listen to over you. That's who they inspire to be like.

You’ll discover how to slow things down and make your counterpart feel safe enough to reveal themselves; to discern between wants (aspirations) and needs (the bare minimum for a deal); and to laser-focus on what the other party has to say.

I still felt the burden of my involuntary role as a mammal dragging me down. In the same way that a night of sleep put wrinkles in a bedsheet, just being alive took a toll. To talk to someone you had to move the flesh on your face. You bathed to get rid of the grime that built up on your skin and clipped your nails because they kept growing. I exhausted myself trying to achieve the bare minimum, but it had never been enough. My will and my body would always disengage before I got there.

All you have to do is convince the sanctimonious that they are free of all sin and they'll start throwing stones, or bombs, with gusto. In fact, it doesn't take much, because they can be convinced with the bare minimum of encouragement and excuses.

But life is not about half doing. You cannot half love, or half accept, or half live. It’s about giving everything you have. When you are old and worn, do you really want to look back and say you gave the bare minimum? You owe yourself more than that.

And it’s a shame that the measure is what is not so bad instead of what is thriving and good. I look at some of my worst relationships and think, “at least he or she didn’t hit me.” I work from a place of gratitude for the bare minimum. I’ve never been in a relationship where I’ve had to hide nonconsensual bruises. I’ve never feared for my life. I’ve never been in a situation where I couldn’t walk away. Does this make me a lucky girl? Given the stories I’ve seen women sharing via the hashtags #whyIstayed and #whyIleft, yes. This is not how we should measure luck. I have had good relationships but it’s hard to trust that because what I consider good sometimes doesn’t feel very good at all. Or I am thinking about testimony and how there has been so much over the past day and some–women sharing their truths, daring to use their voices to say, “This is what happened to me. This is how I have been wronged.” I’ve been thinking about how so much testimony is demanded of women and still, there are those who doubt our stories. There are those who think we are all lucky girls because we are still, they narrowly assume, alive. I am weary of all our sad stories–not hearing them, but that we have these stories to tell, that there are so many.

Brothers are not like sisters […] They don’t call each other every week. They don’t have secret worlds to share. Can you think of two brothers who are really, inseparably close? No, for brothers it’s a different set of rules. Like it or not, we’re held to the bare minimum. Will you be there for him if he needs you? Of course. Should you love him without question? Absolutely. But those are the easy things. Do you make him a large part of your life, an equal to a wife or a best friend? At the beginning, when you’re kids, the answer is often yes. But when you get to high school, or older? Do you tell him everything? Do you let him know who you really are? The answer is usually no. Because all these other things get in the way. Girlfriends. Rebellion. Work.

I want to live my life without troubling anyone. That's why it's best for me to keep my interactions... with others to the bare minimum...not that I've ever been the type of person to attract other people...but if I keep my distance...at least I won't bother anyone.

Accessible design is not ubiquitous, though, and despite governmental regulations (which differ from country to country and from city to city), it’s not a standard of physical or digital experiences. More often than not, the bare minimum is done to meet requirements.

We all know many people who come from hard-working families, where they had to grow up with a bare minimum and become self-sufficient and independent at a very young age. We look at them now and see responsible citizens, self-reliant adults, successful members of the business community, outstanding performers, and just happy people. Yes, they’re happy, because they know the meaning of labor, they appreciate the pleasure of leisure, they value relationships with others, and they respect themselves. In contrast, there are people who come from wealthy families, had nannies to do everything for them, went to private schools where they were surrounded with special attention, never did their own laundry, never learned how to cook an omelet for themselves, never even gained the essential skills of unwinding on their own before bedtime, and of course, never did anything for anyone else either. You look at their adult life and see how dependent they are on others and how unhappy they are because of that. They need someone to constantly take care of them. They may see no meaning in their life as little things don’t satisfy them, because they were spoiled at a very young age. They may suffer a variety of eating disorders, use drugs, alcohol and other extremes in search of satisfaction and comfort. And, above all, in search of themselves.

In it they argue persuasively for a new model of care that takes the best of the past and adapts it to a modern medical setting. No one can improve without the bare minimum—shelter, clothing, and food—but they also need care: intelligent medical intervention, personal contact, community, and meaning.

Streamline your products by choosing the bare minimum for your most necessary jobs. Don’t force yourself to choose among five different cleaners like you’re scrolling a Netflix queue of disinfectants. Pick up a bottle and go clean. You don’t need to waste time choosing something when you can decide once.

For any challenge, the first thing to do is optimize it. Break it down to its bare minimum, simplify it, and eliminate everything that’s not completely necessary. Once you’ve boiled the task down to its essentials, the goal is to break what’s left into bite-sized tasks that can be replicated and possibly delegated.

At every step, we must demand not only more than they are willing to concede us, but more than they are capable of conceding us, such that the limitations of the present society are exposed and pushed towards their breaking point. After all, at the moment, it is the ruling class which demands of us more than we can give - what is "reasonable" to it is the sacrifice of thousands upon thousands to a global pandemic and impending climate catastrophe. In such a case, being unreasonably ambitious is the bare minimum. One may doubt whether a global revolutionary movement is still possible, but one cannot doubt that it is necessary.

Full citizenship rights are the bare minimum one should expect from the government. Yet, for two-thirds of our history, full citizenship was denied to those who built this country from theory to life. African slaves and Chinese workers and Native American environmentalists and Latino gauchos and Irish farmers—and half the population: women.

State interventions in markets (once created) must be kept to a bare minimum because, according to the theory, the state cannot possibly possess enough information to second-guess market signals (prices) and because powerful interest groups will inevitably distort and bias state interventions (particularly in democracies) for their own benefit.

I feel successful 3–4 days a month. The other days I feel like I’m barely accomplishing the minimum or that I’m a loser. I have imposter syndrome so even when I get compliments they are difficult to take and I just feel like I’m a bigger fraud than before. I feel the worst when I get so paralyzed by fear that I end up huddled in bed and fall further and further behind. To make myself feel more successful I spend real time with my daughter every day, even if it’s just huddling under a blanket and watching Doctor Who reruns on TV. I also try to remind myself that people like Dorothy Parker and Hunter S. Thompson struggled as well, and that this struggle might make me stronger, if it doesn’t first destroy me.

You can trace every success (or failure) in your life back to a habit. What you do on a daily basis largely determines what you’ll achieve in life. Habits create routine, and let’s face it—most of us run our lives by some sort of routine. We get up in the morning and follow a preset pattern: Take a shower, brush our teeth, get dressed, make breakfast, drive to work, do work and then go home. Some of us choose to follow self-improvement habits: Set goals, read inspirational books, work on important projects and ignore wasteful distractions. Others choose self-destructive habits: Do the bare minimum, dull creativity through low-quality entertainment, eat junk food and blame others for their failures in life.

All my life, I've been replaceable, but I want to be wanted. I want my relationships to be more than just inserting tab A into slot B. For me, it's an emotional thing. I want to be giddy and giggly. I want to be in lust." I moved, knowing he had to be getting chilled without the hot water. "Sure, I want to fall in love with everyone, but lust and friendship are the bare minimum.

uncaged it’s easy to push people away to retreat into yourself to give only the bare minimum. it’s much harder to take that risk to splay open your chest to peel each rib back one by one and bare your heart and soul to a world that might not handle them with the care they deserve. but when you find a person whose mind complements yours, you’ll see the reward was well worth the risk.

Or should I have said that I wanted to die, not in the sense of wanting to throw myself off of that train bridge over there, but more like wanting to be asleep forever because there isn’t any making up for killing women or even watching women get killed, or for that matter killing men and shooting them in the back and shooting them more times than necessary to actually kill them and it was like just trying to kill everything you saw sometimes because it felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul and then your soul is gone and knowing from being taught your whole life that there is no making up for what you are doing, you’re taught that your whole life, but then even your mother is so happy and proud because you lined up your sign posts and made people crumple and they were not getting up ever and yeah they might have been trying to kill you too, so you say, What are you goona do?, but really it doesn’t matter because by the end you failed at the one good thing you could have done, and the one person you promised would live is dead, and you have seen all things die in more manners than you’d like to recall and for a while the whole thing fucking ravaged your spirit like some deep-down shit, man, that you didn’t even realize you had until only the animals made you sad, the husks of dogs filled with explosives and old arty shells and the fucking guts of everything stinking like metal and burning garbage and you walk around and the smell is deep down into you now and you say, How can metal be so on fire? and Where is all this fucking trash coming from? and even back home you’re getting whiffs of it and then that thing you started to notice slipping away is gone and now it’s becoming inverted, like you have bottomed out in your spirit but yet a deeper hole is being dug because everybody is so fucking happy to see you, the murderer, the fucking accomplice, that at-bare-minimum bearer of some fucking responsibility, and everyone wants to slap you on the back and you start to want to burn the whole goddamn country down, you want to burn every yellow ribbon in sight, and you can’t explain it but it’s just, like, Fuck you, but then you signed up to go so it’s your fault, really, because you went on purpose, so you are in the end doubly fucked, so why not just find a spot and curl up and die and let’s make it as painless as possible because you are a coward and, really, cowardice got you into this mess because you wanted to be a man and people made fun of you and pushed you around in the cafeteria and the hallways in high school because you liked to read books and poems sometimes and they’d call you a fag and really deep down you know you went because you wanted to be a man and that’s never gonna happen now and you’re too much of a coward to be a man and get it over with so why not find a clean, dry place and wait it out with it hurting as little as possible and just wait to go to sleep and not wake up and fuck ‘em all.

I'd given the bare minimum of info-especially after-hypocrite that he is-Frankie made such dramatic gagging motions at my description of the Mustang that a passing shopper had asked if she should call 911. So I braced myself. "Dare." Frankie's brows went up. "Well. All right,then." He scanned the floor. "I dare you to stand up next to that mannequin over there,and list the five best Unrequited Love songs of all time.

But there is nothing sweeter than to dwell in towers that rise On high, serene and fortified with teachings of the wise, From which you may peer down upon the others as they stray This way and that, seeking the path of life, losing their way: The skirmishing of wits, the scramble for renown, the fight, Each striving harder than the next, and struggling day and night, To climb atop a heap of riches and lay claim to might. O miserable minds of men! O hearts that cannot see! Beset by such great dangers and in such obscurity You spend your little lot of life! Don't you know it's plain That all your nature yelps for is a body free from pain, And, to enjoy pleasure, a mind removed from fear and care? And so we see the body's needs are altogether spare - Only the bare minimum to keep suffering at bay, Yet which can furnish pleasures for us in a wide array.

This implies that we would also like the world to be a certain way: full of variety, certainly, and with lots of sustenance and delight—but more important in this context: not so savagely demanding (given our needs and abilities) as to constrain our options to a bare minimum. If we must live on a desert island, make it fertile and rich with opportunity, not so barren and unyielding that all our moves would be like forced moves in chess.

I live inside my own skin. Anything that happens outside it doesn’t change who I am. This isn’t something I’m proud of; as far as I’m concerned, it’s a bare minimum baseline requirement for calling yourself an adult human being, somewhere around the level of knowing how to do your own washing or change a toilet roll. All those idiots on the websites, begging for other people to pull their sagging puppet-strings, turn them real: they make me want to spit.

Maria has a specific job, but it’s boring, and anyway, she doesn’t really do it. Once you’ve been at a job for a minute, you figure out what you’re doing; once you’ve been there for a few minutes, you master it and can do the minimum necessary without really thinking about it; this is the first time she’s been at a job for this long, and she’s finding out that she’s pushing at the bare minimum, trying to find out where, exactly, lazy ends and We’re writing you up begins.

i’ve stopped attempting to justify being kind-hearted to strangers by making up heartbreaking backstories for them, like maybe they’re going through a nasty divorce or maybe their childhood dog just died or maybe their parents told them they’re a disappointment or maybe they had a terrible week at work. i’m going to be kind-hearted no matter the circumstance, because isn’t that the bare minimum treatment we all deserve from one another? —every day you determine the legacy you leave.

Of course, there will be certain times when you have to respond. When it directly relates to a relevant issue, then by all means reply, just do so from a place of logic. Focus on the issue at hand, be methodical in the words you choose, and condense your communication to the bare minimum, when appropriate. Politicians are brilliant at this. If they don’t like a question or don’t want to answer, they don’t. Or if they do, they’ll respond in a way that sidesteps the question. Over the many years of holding post in front of the dais, I’ve heard firsthand presidents and First Ladies asked the most ridiculous or inappropriate things. Do they respond? Nope! At least not in the way the questioner was hoping they would. This is the true essence of not catching the ball. If you ever find yourself struggling to identify whether or not you need to respond, either in person, or via phone, text, or email, ask yourself these questions: Is this a true emergency that requires my immediate attention? Is this a relevant issue that I must respond to? Is this something I can ignore? Is my response going to invite unnecessary drama?

Under capitalism workers are forced to sell their labour – which Marx regards as the essence of human existence – to the capitalists, who use this labour to accumulate more capital, which further increases the power of the capitalists over the workers. Capitalists become rich, while wages are driven down to the bare minimum needed to keep the workers alive. Yet in reducing so large a class of people to this degraded condition, capitalism creates the material force that will overthrow it. For Marx, the importance of economics lay in the insight it provided into the workings of this alienation and the manner in which it could be overcome.

The following morning, I met with the mayor. I had barely set foot in his office before he told me that Philippe Toussaint and I would be employed starting in August of 1997 as cemetery keepers. That we would each receive the minimum wage, a house that went with the job, and that any water and electricity we used, as well as our household taxes, would be paid for by the council.

I survived something meant to destroy me –I can’t squander this second chance by living a life that is beneath my standing. I don’t accept the little crumbs that people try to throw, right? I don’t do “frenemies”, I don’t accept people who never have a positive thing to say, I don’t accept liars, I don’t share a partner with anybody, I don’t accept anybody’s bare-minimum. When you come to me, you come correct. I demand it.

The world I grew up in was a brutal one. The murder rate was once seven people for every hundred thousand. The average American on minimum wage could barely afford to keep themselves alive on canned food. Millions died over private oil fortunes. Wealthy men and women ran the world for profit. Fools and charlatans got into our Parliaments and set the world on fire. We had everything on paper - checks, balances, freedom, democracy - and yet to live was to be a slave.

The second jump resulted from our adoption of a sedentary lifestyle, which happened at different times in different parts of the world, as early as 13,000 years ago in some areas and not even today in others. For the most part, that adoption was linked to our adoption of food production, which required us to remain close to our crops, orchards, and stored food surpluses. Sedentary living was decisive for the history of technology, because it enabled people to accumulate nonportable possessions. Nomadic hunter-gatherers are limited to technology that can be carried. If you move often and lack vehicles or draft animals, you confine your possessions to babies, weapons, and a bare minimum of other absolute necessities small enough to carry. You can’t be burdened with pottery and printing presses as you shift camp. That practical difficulty probably explains the tantalizingly early appearance of some technologies, followed by a long delay in their further development.

Scarcity has a way of revealing our true understanding of the Golden Rule. Here’s the bare truth: when there is one piece of pie, I don’t want to deny myself and bless someone else with it, and I don’t want to divide it equitably. I want the whole piece. And that’s precisely why I should give the whole piece to someone else—because in doing so, I fulfill the Golden Rule. Yes, at bare minimum I want to be treated fairly by others. But what I really want is to be treated preferentially. My love of preferential treatment displays itself in a thousand ways. I want the best concert seats, the best parking spot, the upgrade to first class, the most comfortable seat in the living room, the biggest serving of pie, the last serving of pie, all the pie all the time. Giving someone else the preferential treatment that I want requires humility. But God gives grace to the humble. Any time we dine on humble pie, we can be certain it will be accompanied by an oversized dollop of grace.

If a woman is flourishing in her home and glorifying God while rejoicing in her domestic duties, and doing them well, but still finding extra hours in her day, she is in a position to look for more to do. She has something to export. This might be volunteer work for the community or church, it may be part-time employment, or it might be learning new skills at home. The possibilities are endless when we really think about it. A new wife may be able to ease gradually into assuming more responsibilities outside the home as she becomes more and more proficient at the job God has given her, but it is unwise to do this too quickly. Sometimes a woman can kid herself into thinking she has extra time, when in fact she is actually just barely getting by with the minimum in her basic domestic duties. For example, if she simply rotates three dinners over and over because that’s all she knows how to make, her problem is not that she has too much time on her hands. She needs help and input and encouragement, not outside activities to give her more to do. She has to determine to become skilled at the tasks God has assigned for her.

People in bands often have this well-intentioned but misguided notion that, somehow, the payin' customers have some sort of responsibility to... y'know... pay and be customers - that the general populace has some kinda cultural duty to provide an audience for musicians, so their latest bit of creative brilliance may be dutifully appreciated and validated. The truth is nothing of the sort. No one has a duty, real or implied, to pay attention to ANYTHING. A band isn't entitled to an audience just because they put in the effort required for being a band; a band isn't really entitled to anything ((other than free beer. Fair is fair!)). This ass-backwardness of the highest order. The only entitlement in the whole band-crowd dynamic is on the part of the crowd, who, by paying their cover ((or, at bare minimum, showing up)), are ENTITLED to being ENTERTAINED. Conversely, the only cultural duty in a crowd-band situation is incumbent on the BAND, not the crowd - it is the band's sworn duty to ENTERTAIN THE CROWD. That's how it works. The BAND are the ones with responsibilities and duties; the crowd can do whatever the fuck they want.

One could understand feminism generally as an attack on woman as she was under “patriarchy” (that concept is a social construction of feminism). The feminine mystique was her ideal; in regard to sex, it consisted of women’s modesty and in the double standard of sexual conduct that comes with it, which treated women’s misbehavior as more serious than men’s. Instead of trying to establish a single standard by bringing men up to the higher standard of women, as with earlier feminism, today’s feminism decided to demand that women be entitled to sink to the level of men. It bought into the sexual revolution of the late sixties and required that women be rewarded with the privileges of male conquest rather than, say, continue serving as camp followers of rock bands. The result has been the turn for the worse. ... What was there in feminine modesty that the feminists left behind? In return for women’s holding to a higher standard of sexual behavior, feminine modesty gave them protection while they considered whether they wanted to consent. It gave them time: Not so fast! Not the first date! I’m not ready for that! It gave them the pleasure of being courted along with the advantage of looking before you leap. To win over a woman, men had to strive to express their finer feelings, if they had any. Women could judge their character and choose accordingly. In sum, women had the right of choice, if I may borrow that slogan. All this and more was social construction, to be sure, but on the basis of the bent toward modesty that was held to be in the nature of women. That inclination, it was thought, cooperated with the aggressive drive in the nature of men that could be beneficially constructed into the male duty to take the initiative. There was no guarantee of perfection in this arrangement, but at least each sex would have a legitimate expectation of possible success in seeking marital happiness. They could live together, have children, and take care of them. Without feminine modesty, however, women must imitate men, and in matters of sex, the most predatory men, as we have seen. The consequence is the hook-up culture now prevalent on college campuses, and off-campus too (even more, it is said). The purpose of hooking up is to replace the human complexity of courtship with “good sex,” a kind of animal simplicity, eliminating all the preliminaries to sex as well as the aftermath. “Good sex,” by the way, is in good part a social construction of the alliance between feminists and male predators that we see today. It narrows and distorts the human potentiality for something nobler and more satisfying than the bare minimum. The hook-up culture denounced by conservatives is the very same rape culture denounced by feminists. Who wants it? Most college women do not; they ignore hookups and lament the loss of dating. Many men will not turn down the offer of an available woman, but what they really want is a girlfriend. The predatory males are a small minority among men who are the main beneficiaries of the feminist norm. It’s not the fault of men that women want to join them in excess rather than calm them down, for men too are victims of the rape culture. Nor is it the fault of women. Women are so far from wanting hook-ups that they must drink themselves into drunken consent — in order to overcome their natural modesty, one might suggest. Not having a sociable drink but getting blind drunk is today’s preliminary to sex. Beautifully romantic, isn’t it?

Whilst the earlier forms of oppression confronted by Gandhi and King were in decline, when King turned his attention to economic injustice, it was another matter. He had come to realize that the fundamental, underlying injustice in American life was the exclusion of the poor of all races and cultures from the opportunity to attain even the bare minimum of the necessities of life. Martin King, then, entered a new and different arena. He was involved no longer in fighting regional, social injustice but rather in attempting to confront the core issue of economic injustice in American society, which went hand in hand with waging a costly war and the growth of militarism. This new struggle brought him into direct conflict with the federal government and its numerous agency surrogates whose mission it was to serve and protect American corporate interests at home and abroad. The new post-war corporate colonialism was very far from being a spent force in 1968. If his opposition to the war was unacceptable to the corporate beneficiaries, the Poor People's Campaign was intolerable. Not only could it turn into a revolution which could only be stopped, if at all, by the massacre of Americans but, in the very least, millions of Americans would unavoidably be required to see for themselves the previously unseen massive number of their impoverished fellow citizens.

Neoliberal economics, the logic of which is tending today to win out throughout the world thanks to international bodies like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund and the governments to whom they, directly or indirectly, dictate their principles of ‘governance’,10 owes a certain number of its allegedly universal characteristics to the fact that it is immersed or embedded in a particular society, that is to say, rooted in a system of beliefs and values, an ethos and a moral view of the world, in short, an economic common sense, linked, as such, to the social and cognitive structures of a particular social order. It is from this particular economy that neoclassical economic theory borrows its fundamental assumptions, which it formalizes and rationalizes, thereby establishing them as the foundations of a universal model. That model rests on two postulates (which their advocates regard as proven propositions): the economy is a separate domain governed by natural and universal laws with which governments must not interfere by inappropriate intervention; the market is the optimum means for organizing production and trade efficiently and equitably in democratic societies. It is the universalization of a particular case, that of the United States of America, characterized fundamentally by the weakness of the state which, though already reduced to a bare minimum, has been further weakened by the ultra-liberal conservative revolution, giving rise as a consequence to various typical characteristics: a policy oriented towards withdrawal or abstention by the state in economic matters; the shifting into the private sector (or the contracting out) of ‘public services’ and the conversion of public goods such as health, housing, safety, education and culture – books, films, television and radio – into commercial goods and the users of those services into clients; a renunciation (linked to the reduction in the capacity to intervene in the economy) of the power to equalize opportunities and reduce inequality (which is tending to increase excessively) in the name of the old liberal ‘self-help’ tradition (a legacy of the Calvinist belief that God helps those who help themselves) and of the conservative glorification of individual responsibility (which leads, for example, to ascribing responsibility for unemployment or economic failure primarily to individuals, not to the social order, and encourages the delegation of functions of social assistance to lower levels of authority, such as the region or city); the withering away of the Hegelian–Durkheimian view of the state as a collective authority with a responsibility to act as the collective will and consciousness, and a duty to make decisions in keeping with the general interest and contribute to promoting greater solidarity. Moreover,

If we had an atom and wished to see the nucleus, we would have to magnify it until the whole atom was the size of a large room, and then the nucleus would be a bare speck which you could just about make out with the eye, but very nearly all the weight of the atom is in that infinitesimal nucleus. What keeps the electrons from simply falling in? This principle: If they were in the nucleus, we would know their position precisely, and the uncertainty principle would then require that they have a very large (but uncertain) momentum, i.e., a very large kinetic energy. With this energy they would break away from the nucleus. They make a compromise: they leave them- selves a little room for this uncertainty and then jiggle with a certain amount of minimum motion in accordance with this rule.

A while back a young woman from another state came to live with some of her relatives in the Salt Lake City area for a few weeks. On her first Sunday she came to church dressed in a simple, nice blouse and knee-length skirt set off with a light, button-up sweater. She wore hose and dress shoes, and her hair was combed simply but with care. Her overall appearance created an impression of youthful grace. Unfortunately, she immediately felt out of place. It seemed like all the other young women her age or near her age were dressed in casual skirts, some rather distant from the knee; tight T-shirt-like tops that barely met the top of their skirts at the waist (some bare instead of barely); no socks or stockings; and clunky sneakers or flip-flops. One would have hoped that seeing the new girl, the other girls would have realized how inappropriate their manner of dress was for a chapel and for the Sabbath day and immediately changed for the better. Sad to say, however, they did not, and it was the visitor who, in order to fit in, adopted the fashion (if you can call it that) of her host ward. It is troubling to see this growing trend that is not limited to young women but extends to older women, to men, and to young men as well. . . . I was shocked to see what the people of this other congregation wore to church. There was not a suit or tie among the men. They appeared to have come from or to be on their way to the golf course. It was hard to spot a woman wearing a dress or anything other than very casual pants or even shorts. Had I not known that they were coming to the school for church meetings, I would have assumed that there was some kind of sporting event taking place. The dress of our ward members compared very favorably to this bad example, but I am beginning to think that we are no longer quite so different as more and more we seem to slide toward that lower standard. We used to use the phrase “Sunday best.” People understood that to mean the nicest clothes they had. The specific clothing would vary according to different cultures and economic circumstances, but it would be their best. It is an affront to God to come into His house, especially on His holy day, not groomed and dressed in the most careful and modest manner that our circumstances permit. Where a poor member from the hills of Peru must ford a river to get to church, the Lord surely will not be offended by the stain of muddy water on his white shirt. But how can God not be pained at the sight of one who, with all the clothes he needs and more and with easy access to the chapel, nevertheless appears in church in rumpled cargo pants and a T-shirt? Ironically, it has been my experience as I travel around the world that members of the Church with the least means somehow find a way to arrive at Sabbath meetings neatly dressed in clean, nice clothes, the best they have, while those who have more than enough are the ones who may appear in casual, even slovenly clothing. Some say dress and hair don’t matter—it’s what’s inside that counts. I believe that truly it is what’s inside a person that counts, but that’s what worries me. Casual dress at holy places and events is a message about what is inside a person. It may be pride or rebellion or something else, but at a minimum it says, “I don’t get it. I don’t understand the difference between the sacred and the profane.” In that condition they are easily drawn away from the Lord. They do not appreciate the value of what they have. I worry about them. Unless they can gain some understanding and capture some feeling for sacred things, they are at risk of eventually losing all that matters most. You are Saints of the great latter-day dispensation—look the part.

To get girls he had figured out that all you had to do was talk little, the bare minimum, and listen much, without ever passing judgment. [Mister Gregory]