“
The Nobodies
Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping
poverty: that one magical day good luck will suddenly rain down on
them---will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn't rain down
yesterday, today, tomorrow, or ever. Good luck doesn't even fall in a
fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their
left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day with their right
foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms.
The nobodies: nobody's children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the
no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life,
screwed every which way.
Who are not, but could be.
Who don't speak languages, but dialects.
Who don't have religions, but superstitions.
Who don't create art, but handicrafts.
Who don't have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police
blotter of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.
”
”
Eduardo Galeano (Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent)
“
You go on, I presume, with your latin Exercises: and I wish to hear of your beginning upon Sallust who is one of the most polished and perfect of the Roman Historians, every Period of whom, and I had almost said every Syllable and every Letter is worth Studying.
In Company with Sallust, Cicero, Tacitus and Livy, you will learn Wisdom and Virtue. You will see them represented, with all the Charms which Language and Imagination can exhibit, and Vice and Folly painted in all their Deformity and Horror.
You will ever remember that all the End of study is to make you a good Man and a useful Citizen.—This will ever be the Sum total of the Advice of your affectionate Father,
John Adams
”
”
John Adams (The Letters of John and Abigail Adams)
“
I don’t want it to be fine. Fine comes from the Latin finis, which means end. This feels a lot more like a beginning.
”
”
Roshani Chokshi (Aru Shah and the City of Gold (Pandava, #4))
“
The trouble with crying over an onion is that once the chopping gets you started and the tears begin to well up, the next thing you know you just can't stop.
”
”
Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate)
“
The root of addict in latin is the word addicere, which means religious devotion. It was an attribute of beginning monks. There is an element in the book [Infinite Jest] in which various people are living out something that I think is true, which is that we all worship. We all have a religious impulse. We can choose, to an extent, what we worship, but the myth that we worship nothing and give ourselves away to nothing, simply sets ourselves up to give ourselves away to something different. For instance, pleasure or drugs or the idea of having a lot of money, being able to buy nice stuff.
”
”
David Foster Wallace
“
Aeneas' mother is a star?"
"No; a goddess."
I said cautiously, "Venus is the power that we invoke in spring, in the garden, when things begin growing. And we call the evening star Venus."
He thought it over. Perhaps having grown up in the country, among pagans like me, helped him understand my bewilderment. "So do we, he said. "But Venus also became more...With the help of the Greeks. They call her Aphrodite...There was a great poet who praised her in Latin. Delight of men and gods, he called her, dear nurturer. Under the sliding star signs she fills the ship-laden sea and the fruitful earth with her being; through her the generations are conceived and rise up to see the sun; from her the storm clouds flee; to her the earth, the skillful maker, offers flowers. The wide levels of the sea smile at her, and all the quiet sky shines and streams with light..."
It was the Venus I had prayed to, it was my prayer, though I had no such words. They filled my eyes with tears and my heart with inexpressible joy.
”
”
Ursula K. Le Guin (Lavinia)
“
There is another apt Latin expression: Materiam superabat opus. (The workmanship is better than the material.) The material we've been given genetically, emotionally, financially, that's where we begin. We don't control that. We do control what we make of that material, and whether we squander it.
”
”
Ryan Holiday (Ego Is the Enemy)
“
They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America?
”
”
Hourly History (Fidel Castro: A Life From Beginning to End (The Cold War))
“
Finifugal originates from the Latin word fuga, for flight. It shows us that endings are fleeting. We may hate them. We may fear them. We may avoid them. But we don’t need to. Like sunsets, endings can be beautiful. The next morning, the sun always rises again, because there is no such thing as an ending, just a new beginning.
”
”
Parker S. Huntington (Devious Lies (Cruel Crown, #1))
“
The decade is over, time to begin forgiving
old sins. Thirteen years since your death
on a Florida interstate - and again
a dream of an old wrong.
”
”
Judith Ortiz Cofer (The Latin Deli: Telling the Lives of Barrio Women)
“
If you have read this far in the chronicle of the Baudelaire orphans - and I certainly hope you have not - then you know we have reached the thirteenth chapter of the thirteenth volume in this sad history, and so you know the end is near, even though this chapter is so lengthy that you might never reach the end of it. But perhaps you do not yet know what the end really means. "The end" is a phrase which refers to the completion of a story, or the final moment of some accomplishment, such as a secret errand, or a great deal of research, and indeed this thirteenth volume marks the completion of my investigation into the Baudelaire case, which required much research, a great many secret errands, and the accomplishments of a number of my comrades, from a trolley driver to a botanical hybridization expert, with many, many typewriter repairpeople in between. But it cannot be said that The End contains the end of the Baudelaires' story, any more than The Bad Beginning contained its beginning. The children's story began long before that terrible day on Briny Beach, but there would have to be another volume to chronicle when the Baudelaires were born, and when their parents married, and who was playing the violin in the candlelit restaurant when the Baudelaire parents first laid eyes on one another, and what was hidden inside that violin, and the childhood of the man who orphaned the girl who put it there, and even then it could not be said that the Baudelaires' story had not begun, because you would still need to know about a certain tea party held in a penthouse suite, and the baker who made the scones served at the tea party, and the baker's assistant who smuggled the secret ingredient into the scone batter through a very narrow drainpipe, and how a crafty volunteer created the illusion of a fire in the kitchen simply by wearing a certain dress and jumping around, and even then the beginning of the story would be as far away as the shipwreck that leftthe Baudelaire parents as castaways on the coastal shelf is far away from the outrigger on which the islanders would depart. One could say, in fact, that no story really has a beginning, and that no story really has an end, as all of the world's stories are as jumbled as the items in the arboretum, with their details and secrets all heaped together so that the whole story, from beginning to end, depends on how you look at it. We might even say that the world is always in medias res - a Latin phrase which means "in the midst of things" or "in the middle of a narrative" - and that it is impossible to solve any mystery, or find the root of any trouble, and so The End is really the middle of the story, as many people in this history will live long past the close of Chapter Thirteen, or even the beginning of the story, as a new child arrives in the world at the chapter's close. But one cannot sit in the midst of things forever. Eventually one must face that the end is near, and the end of The End is quite near indeed, so if I were you I would not read the end of The End, as it contains the end of a notorious villain but also the end of a brave and noble sibling, and the end of the colonists' stay on the island, as they sail off the end of the coastal shelf. The end of The End contains all these ends, and that does not depend on how you look at it, so it might be best for you to stop looking at The End before the end of The End arrives, and to stop reading The End before you read the end, as the stories that end in The End that began in The Bad Beginning are beginning to end now.
”
”
Lemony Snicket (The End (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #13))
“
The word 'humility' comes from the Latin word 'humus' which means fertile ground. Humility is the situation of the earth. The earth is always there, always taken for granted, never remembered, always trodden on by everyone, somewhere we cast and pour out all the refuse, all we don't need. It's there, silent and accepting everything and in a miraculous way making out of all the refuse new richness in spite of corruption, transforming corruption itself into a power of life and a new possibility of creativeness, open to the sunshine, open to the rain, ready to receive any seed we sow and capable of bringing thirtyfold, sixtyfold, a hundredfold, out of every seed.
”
”
Anthony Bloom (Beginning to Pray)
“
let’s begin with the word “vector.” It comes from the Latin root vehere, “to carry,” which also gives us words like “vehicle” and “conveyor belt.” To an epidemiologist, a vector is the carrier of a pathogen, like the mosquito that conveys malaria to your bloodstream. To a mathematician, a vector (at least in its simplest form) is a step that carries you from one place to another.
”
”
Steven H. Strogatz (The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity)
“
One thing I never forgot from my Latin class is that a language that is descended from another language is called a daughter language. It was the beginning of the next era of my life, like this is of yours.
”
”
Cheryl Strayed (Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who's Been There)
“
You might, for example, be interested to know that the word “prestigious” is derived from the Latin praestigiae, which means “conjuror’s tricks.” Isn’t that interesting? This word that we use to mean honorable and esteemed has its beginnings in a word that has everything to do with illusion, deception, and trickery.
”
”
Cheryl Strayed (Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar)
“
Sir it did not belong to me to examine the matter, since I knew full well that I should not be a judge of the matter for it belongs only to a judge to study illam Sacre Scripture clausam where Holy Job says “Causam quam nesciebam diligentissime investigabam”.’ So men were inclined, and able, to break into Latin when addressing one another. Latin was also used for the ruder moments. Of two men in close alliance it was written that singuli caccant uno ano or ‘they shit out of the same arse’.
”
”
Peter Ackroyd (Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors (History of England #1))
“
[Women] complain about many clerks who attribute all sorts of faults to them and who compose works about them in rhyme, prose, and verse, criticizing their conduct in a variety of different ways. They then give these works as elementary textbooks to their young pupils at the beginning of their schooling, to provide them with exempla and received wisdom, so that they will remember this teaching when they come of age ... They accuse [women] of many ... serious vice[s] and are very critical of them, finding no excuse for them whatsoever.
This is the way clerks behave day and night, composing their verse now in French, now in Latin. And they base their opinions on goodness only knows which books, which are more mendacious than a drunk. Ovid, in a book he wrote called Cures for Love, says many evil things about women, and I think he was wrong to do this. He accuses them of gross immorality, of filthy, vile, and wicked behaviour. (I disagree with him that they have such vices and promise to champion them in the fight against anyone who would like to throw down the gauntlet ...) Thus, clerks have studied this book since their early childhood as their grammar primer and then teach it to others so that no man will undertake to love a woman.
”
”
Christine de Pizan (Der Sendbrief vom Liebesgott / The Letter of the God of Love (L'Epistre au Dieu d'Amours))
“
They might be talking in perfect latin tongue and without warning begin to talk in perfect anglo tongue and keep it up like that, alternating between a thing that believes itself to be perfect and a thing that believes itself to be perfect, morphing back and forth between two beasts until out of carelessness or clear intent they suddenly stop switching tongues and start speaking that other one. In it brims nostalgia for the land they left or never knew when they use the words with which they name objects; while actions are alluded to with an anglo verb conjugated latin-style, pinning on a sonorous tail from back there. Using in one tongue the word for a thing in the other makes the attributes of both resound: if you say Give me fire when they say Give me a light, what is not to be learned about fire, light and the act of giving? It’s not another way of saying things: these are new things
”
”
Yuri Herrera (Signs Preceding the End of the World)
“
We know that media vita in morte sumus or, “in the midst of life we are in death.” We begin dying the day we are born, after all.
”
”
Caitlin Doughty (Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory)
“
At Eton boys are woken at 5 a.m.; lessons begin at 6 a.m. and go on to 8 p.m. Teaching is generally in Latin and is a matter of learning by rote,
”
”
Ian Mortimer (The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England)
“
At the beginning of the road into the swamp they put up a sign that said MACONDO and another larger one on the main street that said GOD EXISTS.
”
”
Gabriel García Márquez
“
Erasmus produced a new Latin translation of the New Testament in 1516, based on the original Greek texts.
”
”
Alister E. McGrath (In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and aCulture)
“
who two thousand years hence will still be throwing triumphantly off the yoke of Latin culture and intelligence of which they were never in any great permanent danger to begin with.
”
”
William Faulkner (Absalom, Absalom!)
“
Within the substandard construction of the Charlevoix church, literally upon a shaky foundation, I was baptized into the Orthodox faith; a faith that had existed long before Protestantism had anything to protest and before Catholicism called itself catholic; a faith that stretched back to the beginnings of Christianity, when it was Greek and not Latin, and which, without an Aquinas to reify it, had remained shrouded in the smoke of tradition and mystery whence it began.
”
”
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
“
The Sunday service alone seldom leads people on deeper or even real journeys; we must begin to be honest about this. All that organized religion can do is to hold you inside the boxing ring long enough so you can begin to ask good questions and expect bigger answers. But it seldom teaches you how to really box with the mystery itself. Organized religion does not tend to cook you! It just keeps you on a low, half-cold simmer. It doesn’t teach you how to expect the mystery to show itself at any profound level. It tends, and I don’t mean to be unkind, to make you codependent upon its own ministry, instead of leading you to know something for yourself, which is really the whole point. It’s like we keep saying, “keep coming back, keep coming back” and you’ll eventually get it. But you don’t because the whole thing is oriented toward something you attend or watch and not to something you can participate in 24/7, even without the ministrations of priest and ministers and formal sacraments. Again, I mean no disrespect. If God-experience depends on formal sacramental ministry from ordained clergy, than 99.9 percent of creation has had no chance to know or love God. That can’t be true. And if the clergy themselves have not gone on a further journey, they don’t know how to send you there or guide you there because they have not gone there themselves yet (see Matthew 23:13). Nemo dat quod not hat, we said in Latin: “You cannot give away what you do not have yourself.
”
”
Richard Rohr (Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation)
“
Rarely do things perish from my memory that are worth remembering. Rubbish dies instantly. Hence it happens that passages in Latin or English poets, which I never could have read but once (and that thirty years ago), often begin to blossom anew when I am lying awake, unable to sleep.
”
”
Thomas de Quincey
“
One could say, in fact, that no story really has a beginning, and that no story really has an end, as all of the world's stories are as jumbled as the items in the arboretum, with their details and secrets all heaped together so that the whole story, from beginning to end, depends on how you look at it. We might even say that the world is always in medias res - a Latin phrase which means "in the midst of things" or "in the middle of a narrative" - and that it is impossible to solve any mystery, or find the root of any trouble, and so The End is really the middle of the story
”
”
Lemony Snicket (The End (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #13))
“
The Latin Church, which I constantly find myself admiring, despite its occasional astounding imbecilities, has always kept clearly before it the fact that religion is not a syllogism, but a poem. It is accused by Protestant dervishes of withholding the Bible from the people. To some extent this is true; to some extent the church is wise; again to the same extent it is prosperous.
...
Rome indeed has not only preserved the original poetry of Christianity; it has also made capital additions to that poetry -- for example, the poetry of the saints, of Mary, and of the liturgy itself. A solemn high mass is a thousand times as impressive, to a man with any genuine religious sense in him, as the most powerful sermon ever roared under the big top by Presbyterian auctioneer of God. In the face of such overwhelming beauty it is not necessary to belabor the faithful with logic; they are better convinced by letting them alone.
Preaching is not an essential part of the Latin ceremonial. It was very little employed in the early church, and I am convinced that good effects would flow from abandoning it today, or, at all events, reducing it to a few sentences, more or less formal. In the United States the Latin brethren have been seduced by the example of the Protestants, who commonly transform an act of worship into a puerile intellectual exercise; instead of approaching God in fear and wonder these Protestants settle back in their pews, cross their legs, and listen to an ignoramus try to prove that he is a better theologian than the Pope.
This folly the Romans now slide into. Their clergy begin to grow argumentative, doctrinaire, ridiculous. It is a pity. A bishop in his robes, playing his part in the solemn ceremonial of the mass, is a dignified spectacle; the same bishop, bawling against Darwin half an hour later, is seen to be simply an elderly Irishman with a bald head, the son of a respectable police sergeant in South Bend, Ind. Let the reverend fathers go back to Bach. If they keep on spoiling poetry and spouting ideas, the day will come when some extra-bombastic deacon will astound humanity and insult God by proposing to translate the liturgy into American, that all the faithful may be convinced by it.
”
”
H.L. Mencken
“
But the decubitus ulcer presents a unique psychological horror. The word “decubitus” comes from the Latin decumbere, to lie down. As a rule, bedridden patients have to be moved every few hours, flipped like pancakes to ensure that the weight of their own bodies doesn’t press their bones into the tissue and skin, cutting off blood circulation. Without blood flow, tissue begins decay. The ulcers occur when a patient is left lying in bed for an extended period, as often happens in understaffed nursing homes. Without some movement, the patient will literally begin to decompose while he or she is still living, eaten alive by their own necrotic tissue.
”
”
Caitlin Doughty (Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory)
“
All cultures seem to find a slightly alien local population to carry the Hermes projection. For the Vietnamese it is the Chinese, and for the Chinese it is the Japanese. For the Hindu it is the Moslem; for the North Pacific tribes it was the Chinook; in Latin America and in the American South it is the Yankee. In Uganda it is the East Indians and Pakistanis. In French Quebec it is the English. In Spain the Catalans are "the Jews of Spain". On Crete it is the Turks, and in Turkey it is the Armenians. Lawrence Durrell says that when he lived in Crete he was friends with the Greeks, but that when he wanted to buy some land they sent him to a Turk, saying that a Turk was what you needed for a trade, though of course he couldn't be trusted.
This figure who is good with money but a little tricky is always treated as a foreigner even if his family has been around for centuries. Often he actually is a foreigner, of course. He is invited in when the nation needs trade and he is driven out - or murdered - when nationalism begins to flourish: the Chinese out of Vietnam in 1978, the Japanese out of China in 1949, the Jankees out of South America and Iran, the East Indians out of Uganda under Idi Amin, and the Armenians out of Turkey in 1915-16. The outsider is always used as a catalyst to arouse nationalism, and when times are hard he will always be its victim as well.
”
”
Lewis Hyde (The Gift)
“
Fac, si facis. (Do it if you’re going to do it.) There is another apt Latin expression: Materiam superabat opus. (The workmanship was better than the material.) The material we’ve been given genetically, emotionally, financially, that’s where we begin. We don’t control that. We do control what we make of that material, and whether we squander it.
”
”
Ryan Holiday (Ego Is the Enemy)
“
Beginning about ten thousand years ago, cities began to emerge. Although tiny by today's standards, they were the centers of the first “civilizations,” a word derived from civitas, which means “citizenship” or “inhabitants of a city” in Latin. Because farming created assets to plunder and to protect, it also created a requirement for inventory accounting.
”
”
James Dale Davidson (The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age)
“
I'll lean over your crib, lift your squalling form out, and sit in the rocking chair to nurse you. The word 'infant' is derived from the Latin word for 'unable to speak,' but you'll be perfectly capable of saying one thing: 'I suffer.,' and you'll do it tirelessly and without hesitation. I have to admire your utter commitment to that statement; when you cry, you'll become outrage incarnate, every fiber of your being employed in expressing that emotion. It's funny: when you're tranquil, you will seem to radiate light, and if someone were to paint a portrait of you like that, I'd insist they include the halo. But when you're unhappy, you will become a klaxon, built for radiating sound; a portrait of you then could simply be a fire alarm bell. At that stage of your life, there'll be no past or future for you; until I give you my breast, you'll have no memory of contentment in the past nor expectation of relief in the future. Once you begin nursing, everything will reverse, and all will be right with the world. NOW is the only moment you'll perceive; you'll live in the present tense. In many ways, it's an enviable state.
”
”
Ted Chiang (Stories of Your Life and Others)
“
Not everyone could read Latin; in any case, as Erasmus would make clear, there were some big problems with the accuracy of the Vulgate translation. In 1516, Erasmus declared that this traditional Latin translation of the Bible was awash with translation mistakes. Once Erasmus began his scholarly work in earnest, it did not take him long to expose problems with this widely used Latin translation.
”
”
Alister E. McGrath (In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and aCulture)
“
This hollow of the world, round like a sphere, cannot itself, become of its quality or shape, be wholly visible. Choose any place high on the sphere from which to look down, and you cannot see bottom from there. Because of this, many believe it has the same quality as place. They believe it is visible after a fashion, but only through shapes of the forms whose images seem to be imprinted when one shows a picture of it. In itself, however, the real thing remains always invisible. Hence, the bottom - {if it is a part or a place} in the sphere - is called Haides in Greek because in Greek 'to see' is idein, and there is no-seeing the bottom of a sphere. And the forms are called 'ideas' because they are visible forms. The (regions) called Haides in Greek because they are deprived of visibility are called 'infernal' in Latin because they are at the bottom of the sphere.
Such, then, are the original things, the primeval things, the sources or beginnings of all, as it were, for all are in them or from them or through them.
”
”
Brian P. Copenhaver (Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius)
“
[Saturn, or the Latin age of the gods. Year of the world 2491.] 73 This is the age of the gods beginning among the nations of Latium and corresponding in character to the golden age of the Greeks, among whom our mythology will show [544ff] that the first gold was grain, by the harvests of which for many centuries the first nations counted their years [407]. Saturn was so called by the Latins from sati, sown [fields], and is called Chronos by the Greeks, among whom chronos means time, whence comes the word chronology.
”
”
Giambattista Vico (The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of "Practic of the New Science")
“
In our profession, we tend to name things exactly as we see them. Big red stars we call red giants. Small white stars we call white dwarfs. When stars are made of neutrons, we call them neutron stars. Stars that pulse, we call them pulsars. In biology they come up with big Latin words for things. MDs write prescriptions in a cuneiform that patients can’t understand, hand them to the pharmacist, who understands the cuneiform. It’s some long fancy chemical thing, which we ingest. In biochemistry, the most popular molecule has ten syllables—deoxyribonucleic acid! Yet the beginning of all space, time, matter, and energy in the cosmos, we can describe in two simple words, Big Bang. We are a monosyllabic science, because the universe is hard enough. There is no point in making big words to confuse you further.
Want more? In the universe, there are places where the gravity is so strong that light doesn’t come out. You fall in, and you don’t come out either: black hole. Once again, with single syllables, we get the whole job done. Sorry, but I had to get all that off my chest.
”
”
Neil deGrasse Tyson (Welcome to the Universe: The Problem Book)
“
According to the Inter-American Development Bank, Latin America is one of the most violent areas of the world, second only to Africa. Violence in the society begins at home; you can’t eliminate crime in the streets unless you attack domestic aggression, since children who have been abused often become violent adults. Today there is a great deal of discussion on the subject, it is denounced in the press, and safe houses and education programs and police protection are available for victims, but in those days domestic crimes were taboo topics.
”
”
Isabel Allende (My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile)
“
When Ole Kirk Kristiansen established the company name LEGO in 1934, it was a fortunate play on words. The entrepreneur had been inspired by the Danish phrase "leg godt" - "play well." He took the beginning of each respective word and made what he considered to be a pleasant-sounding, imaginary word out of them. The company owner was unaware that as the first person present singular of the verb legere, "lego" is also the Latin word for "I assemble" - and therefore completely appropriate for the modularity of the company's later invention, the LEGO brick.
”
”
Christian Humberg (50 Years of the Lego Brick)
“
I was only beginning to enter into the infinite subtlety of Gregorian chant. It was - and remains - the only public prayer I have ever been able to engage in without feeling like a phony and a jackass. But then, one day in 1965 or so, it was simply abolished. With a stroke of his pen, Pope John XXIII - who had such good ideas about other things - declared that liturgy would henceforth be in the vernacular language of the people. That was, effectively, the end of Latin chant.
Then all those monks and nuns who had devoted hours and hours a day began to sicken and fall into depressions, but nobody noticed for a long time. Maybe, as I can well believe, the music toned up their systems in some mysterious way. Or perhaps chant really was a language that God understood. Faced with numerous liturgical scholas shrieking away in the new vernacular hymns, Divinity may have covered its ears and withdrawn, leaving the monks to pine. We parish musicians, illiterate in anything written after the 13th century, stumbled around trying to score liturgies for guitar and bongo drums, trying to make sense of texts like "Eat his body! Drink his blood!"
It wasn't because the music got so bad that I quit going to Mass, but it certainly was the beginning of my doubts about papal infallibility.
”
”
Mary Rose O'Reilley (The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd)
“
As Petrus Alfonsi, the converted physician authored a book called the Disciplina Clericalis, which was essentially a collection of Arabic tales translated into Latin. These tales introduced a mode of Oriental storytelling and wisdom literature into Christendom that would become extremely popular. In the section called “The Mule and the Fox,” concerning the true nature of nobility, Alfonsi listed seven accomplishments expected of a knight. “The skills that one must be acquainted with are as follows: Riding, swimming, archery, boxing, hawking, chess, and verse writing.”6 So, by the beginning of the twelfth century, chess had become a mandatory skill for Spain’s elite warriors.
”
”
Marilyn Yalom (Birth of the Chess Queen: A History)
“
When we begin to get in this area, we need new friends, we need new allies. We need to expand the civil-rights struggle to a higher level—to the level of human rights. Whenever you are in a civil-rights struggle, whether you know it or not, you are confining yourself to the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam. No one from the outside world can speak out in your behalf as long as your struggle is a civil-rights struggle. Civil rights comes within the domestic affairs of this country. All of our African brothers and our Asian brothers and our Latin-American brothers cannot open their mouths and interfere in the domestic affairs of the United States. And as long as it’s civil rights, this comes under the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam.
”
”
Joy James (Imprisoned Intellectuals: America's Political Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion (Transformative Politics Series, ed. Joy James))
“
[T]he wave of anger, of demands for justice, of claims for rights, which is beginning to sweep the lands of Latin America, will not stop. That wave will swell with every passing day. For that wave is composed of the greatest number, the majorities in every respect, those whose labour amasses the wealth and turns the wheels of history. Now they are awakening from the long, brutalizing sleep to which they had been subjected. For this great mass of humanity has said, 'enough!' and has begun to march. And their giant march will not be halted until they conquer true independence-- for which they have died in vain more than once. Today, however, those who die will die like the Cubans at Playa Giron. They will die for their own, true and never-to-be-surrendered independence. Patria o Muerte! Venceremos!
”
”
Fidel Castro (The Declarations of Havana (Revolutions))
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When the great Greek cry breaks into the Latin of the Mass, as old as Christianity itself, it may surprise some to learn that there are a good many people in church who really do say kyrie eleison and mean exactly what they say. But anyhow, they mean what they say rather more than a man who begins a letter with "Dear Sir" means what he says. "Dear" is emphatically a dead word; in that place it has ceased to have any meaning. It is exactly what the Protestants would allege of Popish rites and forms; it is done rapidly, ritually, and without any memory even of the meaning of the rite. When Mr. Jones the solicitor uses it to Mr. Brown the banker, he does not mean that the banker is dear to him, or that his heart is filled with Christian love, even so much as the heart of some poor ignorant Papist listening to the Mass.
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G.K. Chesterton (The Blatchford Controversies and Other Essays on Religion)
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There is no doubt: it was San Domingo—Haiti that gave the Creole independence movement a decisive turn. To overcome the fierce resistance of the Spanish troops, Simón Bolívar sought to secure the support of the rebel ex-slaves of the Caribbean state, which he personally visited. The president at the time was Alexandre Pétion, who immediately received the Latin American revolutionary. He promised him the aid he requested on condition that he freed the slaves in areas as they were wrested from Spanish control. Transcending the class and caste limits of the social group he belonged to, and demonstrating intellectual and political courage, Bolívar accepted. Seven ships, 6,000 men with arms and munitions, a printing press and numerous advisors set out from the island. This was the beginning of the abolition of slavery in much of Latin America.
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Domenico Losurdo (Liberalism: A Counter-History)
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A Spinoza in poetry becomes a Machiavelli in philosophy.
Mysticism is the scholastic of the heart, the dialectic of the feelings.
So long as our scholastic education takes us back to antiquity and furthers the study of the Greek and Latin languages, we may congratulate ourselves that these studies, so necessary for the higher culture, will never disappear.
If we set our gaze on antiquity and earnestly study it, in the desire to form ourselves thereon, we get the feeling as if it were only then that we really became men.
The pedagogue, in trying to write and speak Latin, has a higher and grander idea of himself than would be permissible in ordinary life.
If one has not read the newspapers for some months and then reads them all together, one sees, as one never saw before, how much time is wasted with this kind of literature.
The classical is health; and the romantic, disease.
When Nature begins to reveal her open secret to a man, he feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, Art.
For all other Arts we must make some allowance; but to Greek Art alone we are always debtors.
The dignity of Art appears perhaps most conspicuously in Music; for in Music there is no material to be deducted. It is wholly form and intrinsic value, and it raises and ennobles all that it expresses.
Art rests upon a kind of religious sense: it is deeply and ineradicably in earnest. Thus it is that Art so willingly goes hand in hand with Religion.
Art is essentially noble; therefore the artist has nothing to fear from a low or common subject. Nay, by taking it up, he ennobles it; and so it is that we see the greatest artists boldly exercising their sovereign rights.
Ignorant people raise questions which were answered by the wise thousands of years ago.
To praise a man is to put oneself on his level.
In science it is a service of the highest merit to seek out those fragmentary truths attained by the ancients, and to develop them further.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Maxims and Reflections)
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Try my favourite approach to avoiding small talk. Enter the date in media res. That’s Latin for “in the middle of things.” It’s a literary term that describes a story opening somewhere in the middle of the action, rather than at the beginning. (You can think of it as “coming in hot.”) When you walk into a date, instead of starting with the awkward “So, how’s your day going?” or “Where do you live?” jump right into the middle of things: “You’ll never guess what happened on my way over here!” or “I just got off the phone with my sister and she told me about this battles she’s in with her landlord over the recycling bins.” By skipping the getting-to-know you small talk and diving straight into the type of conversation that friends (or lovers!) might have, you take a shortcut to intimacy. Of course the conversation may reverse—you’ll eventually cover how your day is going, where you live, and so on, but at least you will have dipped your toes into the waters of real conversation.
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Logan Ury (How to Not Die Alone: The Surprising Science That Will Help You Find Love)
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Smith to Marx) To unravel the mystery of capital, we have to go back to the seminal meaning of the word. In medieval Latin, “capital” appears to have denoted head of cattle or other livestock, which have always been important sources of wealth beyond the basic meat they provide. Livestock are low-maintenance possessions; they are mobile and can be moved away from danger; they are also easy to count and measure. But most important, from livestock you can obtain additional wealth, or surplus value, by setting in motion other industries, including milk, hides, wool, meat, and fuel. Livestock also have the useful attribute of being able to reproduce themselves. Thus the term “capital” begins to do two jobs simultaneously, capturing the physical dimension of assets (livestock) as well as their potential to generate surplus value. From the barnyard, it was only a short step to the desks of the inventors of economics, who generally defined “capital” as that part of a country’s assets that initiates surplus production and increases productivity.
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Hernando de Soto (The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else)
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Word lessons in particular, the wouldst-couldst-shouldst-have-loved kind, were kept up, with much warlike thrashing, until I had committed the whole of the French, Latin, and English grammars to memory, and in connection with reading-lessons we were called on to recite parts of them with the rules over and over again, as if all the regular and irregular incomprehensible verb stuff was poetry. In addition to all this, father made me learn so many Bible verses every day that by the time I was eleven years of age I had about three fourths of the Old Testament and all of the New by heart and by sore flesh. I could recite the New Testament from the beginning of Matthew to the end of Revelation without a single stop. The dangers of cramming and of making scholars study at home instead of letting their little brains rest were never heard of in those days. We carried our school-books home in a strap every night and committed to memory our next day’s lessons before we went to bed, and to do that we had to bend our attention as closely on our tasks as lawyers on great million-dollar cases. I can’t conceive of anything that would now enable me to concentrate my attention more fully than when I was a mere stripling boy, and it was all done by whipping,—thrashing in general. Old-fashioned Scotch teachers spent no time in seeking short roads to knowledge, or in trying any of the new-fangled psychological methods so much in vogue nowadays.
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John Muir (Nature Writings: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth / My First Summer in the Sierra / The Mountains of California / Stickeen / Essays)
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Like Italian or Portuguese or Catalan, Spanish is a wordy language, bountiful and flamboyant, with a formidable emotional range. But for these same reasons, it is conceptually inexact. The work of our greatest prose writers, beginning with Cervantes, is like a splendid display of fireworks in which every idea marches past, preceded and surrounded by a sumptuous court of servants, suitors, and pages, whose function is purely decorative. In our prose, color, temperature, and music are as important as ideas and, in some cases-Lezama Lima or Valle Inclan, for example-more so. There is nothing objectionable about these typically Spanish rhetorical excesses. They express the profound nature of a people, a way of being in which the emotional and the concrete prevail over the intellectual and the abstract. This is why Valle Inclan, Alfonso Reyes, Alejo Carpentier, and Camilo Jose Cela, to cite four magnificent prose writers, are so verbose in their writing. This does not make their prose either less skillful or more superficial than that of Valery or T.S. Eliot. They are simply quite different, just as Latin Americans are different from the English and the French. To us, ideas are formulated and captured more effectively when fleshed out with emotion and sensation or in some way incorporated into concrete reality, into life-far more than they are in logical discourse. That perhaps is why we have such a rich literature and such a dearth of philosophers.
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Mario Vargas Llosa
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As Father, the authority he claims for himself is the authority of compassion. That authority comes from letting the sins of his children pierce his heart. There is no lust, greed, anger, resentment, jealousy, or vengeance in his lost children that has not cause immense grief to his heart. The grief is so deep because the heart is so pure. From the deep inner place where love embraces all human grief, the Father reaches out to his children. The touch of his hands, radiating inner light, seeks only to heal.
Here is the God I want to believe in: a Father who, from the beginning of creation, has stretched out his arms in merciful blessing, never forcing himself on anyone, but always waiting; never letting his arms drop down in despair, but always hoping that his children will return so that he can speak words of love to them and let his tired arms rest on their shoulders. His only desire is to bless.
In Latin, to bless is benedicere, which means literally: saying good things. The Father wants to say, more with his touch than with his voice, good things of his children. He has no desire to punish them. They have always been punished excessively by their own inner or outer waywardness. The Father wants simply to let them know that the love they have searched for in such distorted ways has been, is, and always will be there for them. The Father wants to say, more with his hands than with his mouth: 'You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests.' He is the shepherd, 'feeding his flock, gathering lambs in his arms, holding them against his breast.' The true center of Rembrandt's painting is the hands of the father.
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Henri J.M. Nouwen (The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming)
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Christ was an Aryan, and St. Paul used his doctrine to mobilise the criminal underworld and thus organise a proto-Bolshevism. This intrusion upon the world marks the end of a long reign, that of the clear Graeco-Latin genius.
What is this God who takes pleasure only in seeing men grovel before Him? Try to picture to yourselves the meaning of the following, quite simple story. God creates the conditions for sin. Later on He succeeds, with the help of the Devil, in causing man to sin. Then He employs a virgin to bring into the world a son who, by His death, will redeem humanity!
I can imagine people being enthusiastic about the paradise of Mahomet, but as for the insipid paradise of the Christians ! In your lifetime, you used to hear the music of Richard Wagner. After your death, it will be nothing but hallelujahs, the waving of palms, children of an age for the feeding-bottle, and hoary old men. The man of the isles pays homage to the forces of nature. But Christianity is an invention of sick brains : one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery. A negro with his tabus is crushingly superior to the human being who seriously believes in Transubstantiation.
I begin to lose all respect for humanity when I think that some people on our side, Ministers or generals, are capable of believing that we cannot triumph without the blessing of the Church. Such a notion is excusable in little children who have learnt nothing else.
For thirty years the Germans tore each other to pieces simply in order to know whether or not they should take Communion in both kinds. There's nothing lower than religious notions like that. From that point of view, one can envy the Japanese. They have a religion which is very simple and brings them into contact with nature. They've succeeded even in taking Christianity and turning it into a religion that's less shocking to the intellect.
By what would you have me replace the Christians' picture of the Beyond? What comes naturally to mankind is the sense of eternity and that sense is at the bottom of every man. The soul and the mind migrate, just as the body returns to nature. Thus life is eternally reborn from life. As for the "why?" of all that, I feel no need to rack my brains on the subject. The soul is unplumbable.
If there is a God, at the same time as He gives man life He gives him intelligence. By regulating my life according to the understanding that is granted me, I may be mistaken, but I act in good faith. The concrete image of the Beyond that religion forces on me does not stand up to examination. Think of those who look down from on high upon what happens on earth: what a martyrdom for them, to see human beings indefatigably repeating the same gestures, and inevitably the same errors !
In my view, H. S. Chamberlain was mistaken in regarding Christianity as a reality upon the spiritual level.
Man judges everything in relation to himself. What is bigger than himself is big, what is smaller is small. Only one thing is certain, that one is part of the spectacle. Everyone finds his own rôle. Joy exists for everybody. I dream of a state of affairs in which every man would know that he lives and dies for the preservation of the species. It's our duty to encourage that idea : let the man who distinguishes himself in the service of the species be thought worthy of the highest honours.
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Adolf Hitler (Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944)
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To begin with, it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting-up of a "standard English" which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called "good prose style." On the other hand it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing, you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures or sensations. Afterwards one can choose--not simply accept--the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impression one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally.
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George Orwell (All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays)
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Finally, I would like to point out that now in the age of English, choosing a language policy is not the exclusive concern of non-English-speaking nations. It is also a concern for English-speaking nations, where, to realize the world’s diversity and gain the humility that is proper to any human being, people need to learn a foreign language as a matter of course. Acquiring a foreign language should be a universal requirement of compulsory education. Furthermore, English expressions used in international conferences should be regulated and standardized to some extent. Native English speakers need to know that to foreigners, Latinate vocabulary is easier to understand than what to the native speakers is easy, child-friendly language. At international conferences, telling jokes that none but native speakers can comprehend is inappropriate, even if fun. If native speakers of English – those who enjoy the privilege of having their mother tongue as the universal language – would not wait for others to protest but would take steps to regulate themselves, what respect they would earn from the rest of the world! If that is too much to ask, the rest of the world would appreciate it if they would at least be aware of their privileged position – and more important, be aware that the privilege is unwarranted. In this age of global communication, some language or other was bound to be come a universal language used in every corner of the world English became that language not because it is intrinsically more universal than other languages, but because through a series of historical coincidences it came to circulate ever more widely until it reached the tipping point. That’s all there is to it. English is an accidental universal language.
If more English native speakers walked through the doors of other languages, they would discover undreamed-of landscapes. Perhaps some of them might then begin to think that the truly blessed are not they themselves, but those who are eternally condemned to reflect on language, eternally condemned to marvel at the richness of the world.
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Minae Mizumura (The Fall of Language in the Age of English)
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With the motto “do what you will,” Rabelais gave himself permission to do anything he damn well pleased with the language and the form of the novel; as a result, every author of an innovative novel mixing literary forms and genres in an extravagant style is indebted to Rabelais, directly or indirectly. Out of his codpiece came Aneau’s Alector, Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller, López de Úbeda’s Justina, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Béroalde de Verville’s Fantastic Tales, Sorel’s Francion, Burton’s Anatomy, Swift’s Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Amory’s John Buncle, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the novels of Diderot and maybe Voltaire (a late convert), Smollett’s Adventures of an Atom, Hoffmann’s Tomcat Murr, Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Southey’s Doctor, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony and Bouvard and Pecuchet, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Frederick Rolfe’s ornate novels, Bely’s Petersburg, Joyce’s Ulysses, Witkiewicz’s Polish jokes, Flann O’Brien’s Irish farces, Philip Wylie’s Finnley Wren, Patchen’s tender novels, Burroughs’s and Kerouac’s mad ones, Nabokov’s later works, Schmidt’s fiction, the novels of Durrell, Burgess (especially A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers), Gaddis and Pynchon, Barth, Coover, Sorrentino, Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Brossard’s later works, the masterpieces of Latin American magic realism (Paradiso, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Three Trapped Tigers, I the Supreme, Avalovara, Terra Nostra, Palinuro of Mexico), the fabulous creations of those gay Cubans Severo Sarduy and Reinaldo Arenas, Markson’s Springer’s Progress, Mano’s Take Five, Ríos’s Larva and otros libros, the novels of Paul West, Tom Robbins, Stanley Elkin, Alexander Theroux, W. M. Spackman, Alasdair Gray, Gaétan Soucy, and Rikki Ducornet (“Lady Rabelais,” as one critic called her), Mark Leyner’s hyperbolic novels, the writings of Magiser Gass, Greer Gilman’s folkloric fictions and Roger Boylan’s Celtic comedies, Vollmann’s voluminous volumes, Wallace’s brainy fictions, Siegel’s Love in a Dead Language, Danielewski’s novels, Jackson’s Half Life, Field’s Ululu, De La Pava’s Naked Singularity, and James McCourt’s ongoing Mawrdew Czgowchwz saga.
(p. 331)
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Steven Moore (The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600)
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In the beginning, emigration was slow and temporary as the fundamental aim was making a fortune and returning home.
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Lorenzo Agar Corbinos (Latin Americans with Palestinian Roots)
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The fear of the Lord is “the beginning of wisdom,” not because a person immediately understands archaic Latin phrases and complex mathematics, but because the worshiper no longer sees only a fragmented world, but stands before the One who holds all things together (see Prov 1:7; 2:1-6; 9:10; Ps 19:9; 111:10). Fearing the Lord means that we are not left to our own resources to control and survive the elements of creation, but that we can trust the Creator who sustains that creation, controls the future and has our best interests at heart (e.g., Prov 23:17-18).
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Kelly M. Kapic (A Little Book for New Theologians: Why and How to Study Theology (Little Books))
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In Alzheimer’s disease the hippocampus is among the areas affected first, that little coil in the central core of the brain that shares a Latin name with sea horses. As the hippocampus erodes, the sufferer loses the ability to form new memories but hangs on to existing ones at first. Then the neocortex, that overmantle of the brain that hosts much of our intellectual functioning, begins to deteriorate. The neocortexes of many animals are comparatively smooth and simple, but the human neocortex is intricately crenelated to create a huge amount of surface area within the confines of the skull.
Think of the brain as an intricate landscape of canyons, arroyos, inlets, bays, tunnels, and escarpments surrounding a buried sea horse, with the neurons that relay information scattered all through–scientists call this the ‘neuron forest’.
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Rebecca Solnit (The Faraway Nearby)
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The roots of ordinary lead back to a Latin word meaning “to begin a web, lay the warp,” and back farther to a Greek cousin with the same meaning. Ernest Klein suggests that its earliest traceable origins lead to the same base that lies at the root of art and harmony: the Indo-European base ar-, “to join.” What is ordinary belongs to and reveals the web that is joined to all else—it embodies and reveals relationship. When you hold an ordinary object in your hand you are touched by its particular history, which is woven from the fabric of the whole universe.
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Philip Shepherd (New Self, New World: Recovering Our Senses in the Twenty-First Century)
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The first Christian writer, in the beginning of the third century, Tertullian of Carthage, the oldest Latin father, whose writings are extant, opposed the baptism of infants, which in the words of Professor Venema, ‘he certainly would not have done, if it had been a tradition, and a public custom of the church, seeing he was very tenacious of traditions; nor had it been a tradition, would he have failed to mention it.’170 His words lead us to conclude, that infant baptism was then a novel practice, just beginning and approved by very few.
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Adoniram Judson (Christian Baptism)
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What a curious man you are!’ she said. ‘Why should you disbelieve the history?’ ‘I disbelieve the history because it isn’t history,’ answered Father Brown. ‘To anybody who happens to know a little about the Middle Ages, the whole story was about as probable as Gladstone offering Queen Victoria a cigar. But does anybody know anything about the Middle Ages? Do you know what a Guild was? Have you ever heard of salvo managio suo? Do you know what sort of people were Servi Regis? ‘No, of course I don’t,’ said the lady, rather crossly. ‘What a lot of Latin words!’ ‘No, of course,’ said Father Brown. ‘If it had been Tutankhamen and a set of dried-up Africans preserved, Heaven knows why, at the other end of the world; if it had been Babylonia or China; if it had been some race as remote and mysterious as the Man in the Moon, your newspapers would have told you all about it, down to the last discovery of a tooth-brush or a collar-stud. But the men who built your own parish churches, and gave the names to your own towns and trades, and the very roads you walk on — it has never occurred to you to know anything about them. I don’t claim to know a lot myself; but I know enough to see that story is stuff and nonsense from beginning to end. It was illegal for a money-lender to distrain on a man’s shop and tools. It’s exceedingly unlikely that the Guild would not have saved a man from such utter ruin, especially if he were ruined by a Jew. Those people had vices and tragedies of their own; they sometimes tortured and burned people. But that idea of a man, without God or hope in the world, crawling away to die because nobody cared whether he lived — that isn’t a medieval idea. That’s a product of our economic science and progress. The Jew wouldn’t have been a vassal of the feudal lord. The Jews normally had a special position as servants of the King. Above all, the Jew couldn’t possibly have been burned for his religion.’ ‘The
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G.K. Chesterton (The Complete Father Brown)
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The history of science may be described as the history of the attempts, and the failures, of men "to see things as they are." "Nothing is harder," said the Latin poet Lucretius, "than to separate manifest facts from doubtful, what straightway the mind adds on of itself." Observations
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Matthew Moncrieff Pattison Muir (The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry)
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Leonardo received an adequate education, learning basic Latin, mathematics, and geography. He was never a stellar student, instead finding his attentions on things other than what were found in classrooms. The
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Hourly History (Leonardo da Vinci: A Life From Beginning to End (Biographies of Painters))
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Castro’s revolution, with all of its supposedly good intentions, put a stop to the growth of Havana. Of course it put an end to the Mafia controlling the casinos and entertainment, but for them it was a minor setback. They just packed their bags and went to Las Vegas where they expanded and developed “The Strip!” Batista and his followers fled Cuba for the Dominican Republic, Europe and South Florida. Many Cubans lost everything they had but others fled taking their wealth with them. The upheaval in 1959 marked the beginning of austerity for this former freewheeling city. The communistic de-privatization of all businesses, along with the embargo imposed by the United States, created a serious decline in Havana’s economy. The constant pressure to nationalize, as well as the severe crackdown by the régime to keep people in line, curtailed growth and placed an enormous hardship on the Cuban people.
Since the Castro Revolution, the people of Havana have been severely affected, because of the absence of commerce with its former trading partner, the United States, located only 90 miles to the north. In all Havana has taken a severe toll economically, with its dilapidated houses, and the pre-1959 cars on the streets of the city being a testimony to the bygone era. It is only now that with the hope of normalization between the governments of Cuba and the United States that perhaps the people will benefit.
For the greatest part, the Port of Havana has also been bypassed, chiefly due to the restrictions placed on them by the United States. However, the Cuban government is now attempting a comeback by attracting tourism from Canada, Mexico, the Bahamas, Latin America, Asia and Europe. The city of Havana has renovated the Sierra Maestra Cruise Port, but only very few cruise companies consider Havana a port of call. Slowly, German and British ships started to arrive, including the Fred Olsen Cruises and Carnival Cruise Line. Technically Real Estate Brokers and Automobile Dealers are illegal in Cuba, although real-estate offices and car dealerships are blatantly open for business. The buying and selling of real estate and cars, which was forbidden for many years, can now be done because of some changes brought about by Raúl Castro, but only by full-time residents of Cuba. However, gray market sales are thriving through the use of friends and family as proxies.
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Hank Bracker
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THE RIVER AND THE DEER The oldest book on education was written by a woman. Dhouda of Gascony wrote Liber Manualis, a manual for her son, in Latin at the beginning of the ninth century. She did not impose a thing. She suggested, she advised, she showed. One of the pages invites us to learn from deer that “ford wide rivers swimming in single file, one after the other, with the head and shoulders of each resting on the rump of the deer ahead; they support one another and thus are able to cross the river more easily. And they are so intelligent and clever that when they realize the one in the very front is tiring, they send him to the end of the line and another takes the lead.
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Eduardo Galeano (Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone)
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Man is born rich, but almost everywhere is poor.
It is to the elucidation of this paradox that many of the finest minds ... have been devoted for nearly a century. And the best answer they have been able to give is that most men are poor because a few men are rich. And, by the same token, those few men are rich because most men are poor. On this view, wealth is a form of institutionalized plunder. Nothing had to be —or remains to be—discovered, invented, or developed. The wealth of the world has been the same since the beginning of time and will remain the same until the end of time. Hence your slice of the economic cake, both personal and international, necessarily decreases the size of mine, and thus poverty is always someone else’s fault. This means that the wealth of Europe and America was erected on a foundation of cheap bananas.
These ideas—a kind of anti-Semitism sans the Jews—are so absurd that they are almost auto-refuting, at least for anyone with a few facts at his disposal and a minimal ability to think connectedly. Yet they have had an historical importance and influence vastly disproportionate to their intellectual merit, and have even constituted an unassailable orthodoxy among ... intellectuals, some of them of great distinction. Indeed, it was hardly possible for someone to be considered an intellectual at all in Latin America unless he subscribed to these ideas. A man who pointed out their logical and empirical shortcomings was considered a traitor to the patria and most likely in the pay of the CIA to boot.
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Theodore Dalrymple
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Six horses waited, adorned in the red and black of the Company of Cooks and harnessed to an open, canopied wagon festooned with ribbons. Upon it lay Bartolomeo's casket, draped with a cloth embroidered with the company's coat of arms. A bear was on the left side of the crest and a stag on the right. Below the central chevron and its two red stars were the tools of the company's trade, a crossed knife and a butcher's knife. The banner beneath bore a Latin phrase coined by Horace- ab ovo usque ad mala- embroidered in gold. From eggs to apples, beginning to end. Roman meals had always begun with eggs and ended with fruit.
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Crystal King (The Chef's Secret)
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The telegram "GRANDMOTHER DEAD FUNERAL WEDNESDAY" can be translated into any language you like—from Latin and Hindustani to the dialects of the Apaches, Eskimos, or the tribe of Dobu. We could even do this, no doubt, with the language of the Mousterian period, if we knew it. The reason is that everyone h as a mother, who has a mother; that everyone must die; that the ritualization of the disposing of a corpse is a cultural constant; as is, also, the principle of reckoning time. But beings that are unisexual would not know the distinction between mother and father, and those that divide like amoebas would be unable to form the idea even of a unisexual parent. The meanings of "grandmother" thus could not be conveyed. Beings that do not die (amoebas, dividing, do not die) would be unacquainted with the notion of death and of funerals. They would therefore have to learn about human anatomy, physiology, evolution, history, and customs before they could begin the translation of this telegram that is so clear to us.
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Stanisław Lem
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It is estimated that Latin words make up 29 percent of modern English.
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Hourly History (Ancient Rome: A History From Beginning to End (Ancient Civilizations))
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bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk! FW 3.15-17 n. Onomatopoeia for the sound of thunder. This is the first of 10 thunder words in Finnegans Wake, it and eight others having 100 letters and the 10th having 101 letters, making 1,001 letters that suggest the Arabian Nights or, in Wakese, “this scherzarade of one’s thousand and one nightinesses.” As a numerical palindrome, 1001 suggests the circular system of Vico and the Wake’s never-ending, never-beginning stylistic structure. In Vico’s system, the Divine Age is the first of three ages in which humanity hears the voice of God in thunder and, driven by fear (“the fright of light”) to hide in caves, pray “Loud, hear us!” “Who in the name of thunder’d ever belevin you were that bolt?” In keeping with this theme, the first thunder word is made up of many words similar to thunder in various languages: “kamminarro” (Japanese kaminari); “tuonn” (Italian tuono); “bronnto” (Greek Bronte); “thurnuk” (Gaelic tornach); “awnska” (Swedish aska); “tonner” (French tonnerre and Latin tonare); “tova” (Portuguese trovao); and “ton” (Old Rumanian tun).
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Bill Cole Cliett (A "Finnegans Wake" Lextionary: Let James Joyce Jazz Up Your Voca(l)bulary)
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If you've been hoping to catch a concert by Cristian Castro and Natalia Jimnez, now is your chance! Check out the information below to find out when and where they're performing next. Besides, you can also find information about Cantautoraespaola and its cost. Here is the schedule of upcoming concerts, along with the cost of tickets. The next concert date for Cristian Castro and Natalia Jimnez is Apr 30, 2022.
Concerts
If you've always wanted to see a concert by a Latino singer, then the next Cristian Castro and Natalia Jimnez concert is just around the corner. This concert is happening at the United Palace Theater in New York, NY, on Sat, Apr 30, 2022 at 8:00 PM, you can buy tickets at Boletosexpress.com by clicking here. There are currently 572 tickets available for this event. It will be a very fun night for fans of Latin music.
Tour dates
Cristian Castro and Natalia Jimnez will be performing three concerts in the United States. The concert series will begin on April 29th and will run through May 1st, tickets for April 29th can be purchased here. For the concert of 1st May buy events tickets from boletosexpress.com. The concerts will include many of the artist's most popular songs. The artists' artistic entrepreneur, Felix Cabrera, announced the tour earlier this month. He stated that the public has responded positively to the news. You can purchase tickets to the show by visiting the official website of the concert series.
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boletosexpress
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the word “Punic” was simply the Latin pronunciation of “Phoenician
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Hourly History (Hannibal Barca: A Life from Beginning to End (Military Biographies))
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Latin translation of Phoenician, gave the Romans Sicily—the first of Rome’s overseas acquisitions.
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Hourly History (Phoenician Civilization: A History from Beginning to End (Ancient Civilizations))
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still I cannot see why, in making a version of (say) Theocritus, one should not use by way of preference those names by which he invariably called them, and which are characteristic of him: why, in turning a Greek author into English, we should begin by turning all the proper names into Latin.
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Theocritus (Complete Works of Theocritus)
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This is why the devil hates the return of the age-old Latin Mass so much. He hates, in fact, all things traditional, for they are the fruits and the tools of good parenting in every sphere of Catholic life, be it liturgy, devotion, doctrine, morals, or artistic culture. They were prepared for us by centuries of spiritual fathers who profoundly understood and fervently lived the fundamental acts of adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, and supplication. These are the acts that save our souls from the world, the flesh, and the devil. It is never too late to adopt better spiritual parents and to begin one’s childhood anew.
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Peter Kwasniewski (Reclaiming Our Roman Catholic Birthright: The Genius and Timeliness of the Traditional Latin Mass)
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The first thing to emphasize is that ‘the origin of social inequality’ is not a problem which would have made sense to anyone in the Middle Ages. Ranks and hierarchies were assumed to have existed from the very beginning. Even in the Garden of Eden, as the thirteenth-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas observed, Adam clearly outranked Eve. ‘Social equality’ – and therefore, its opposite, inequality – simply did not exist as a concept. A recent survey of medieval literature by two Italian scholars in fact finds no evidence that the Latin terms aequalitas or inaequalitas or their English, French, Spanish, German and Italian cognates were used to describe social relations at all before the time of Columbus. So one cannot even say that medieval thinkers rejected the notion of social equality: the idea that it might exist seems never to have occurred to them.6
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David Graeber (The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity)
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Be still.” The Latin term is vacate, from which we get the English word vacation. The invitation of prayer anytime, anywhere is this: Take a vacation. Stop playing God over your own life for a moment. Release control. Return to the created order. Be still. Prayer begins there. But that’s only the beginning.
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Tyler Staton (Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools: An Invitation to the Wonder and Mystery of Prayer)
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THE COMEDIAN ROBIN WILLIAMS SOMETIMES TALKED about politics in his stand-up routines. He would begin by reminding people of the origins of the word. “Politics,” he would explain, comes from “ ‘Poli,’ a Latin word meaning many, and ‘tics’ meaning bloodsucking creatures.” He always got a big laugh. In fact, alas, the word derives from ancient Greek, from polites, which means citizen and itself comes from polis, meaning city or community.
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Fareed Zakaria (Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present)
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We will start with Hawking's few quotations.
“The quantum theory of gravity has opened up a new possibility, in which there would be no boundary to spacetime and so there would be no need to specify the behavior at the boundary. There would be no singularities at which the laws of science broke down and no edge of spacetime at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for spacetime. One could say: ‘The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.’ The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE.”
Or, in the same manner: “There ought to be something very special about the boundary conditions of the universe, and what can be more special than the condition that there is no boundary?” Also, he stated, “According to the no-boundary proposal, asking what came before the Big Bang is meaningless—like asking what is south of the South Pole—because there is no notion of time available to refer to. The concept of time only exists within our universe.”
The “no-boundary proposal” is a classic example of a device called in Latin, Deus ex machina—God from the machine, invented by the ancient Greek dramatists Aeschylus and Euripides. The primary purpose of the device was to resolve the irresolvable.
The question of what came before the Big Bang is not meaningless. We cannot accept that our Big Bang is the beginning of all existence. Since there is "no notion of time available to refer to," that does not mean there is nothing to refer to. This reasoning is a logical fallacy based on the idea that there should be nothing to refer to if there is no time to refer to it. This kind of reasoning falsifies reality to fit the argument. For this statement to be accurate, there must be proof that there is nothing to refer to, not "no notion of time to refer to." The lack of notion of time to refer to or its availability is not proof that there is nothing to refer to, but only that there is no notion of time to refer to and that it is not available. The lack of availability is only proof that something is not available to someone but not proof that nothing exists beyond the “point” where “time” stops. If Something, the Being, the Universal Source of Everything, is not available or approachable in any way by some particular scientist, that does not mean that the Universal Source of Everything (the Absolute) does not exist beyond the physical world.
In this sense, the no-boundary proposal is a boundary proposal of a different kind. Since it is impossible to speculate about abstract concepts or ideas, such as God, Absolute, or Universal Source, it is easier to invent some trick (pardon my language), with all due respect, to compensate for the lack of understanding of the most abstract ideas and to compensate for the limitations of a frame of mind of any particular scientist or philosopher. In this case, the no-boundary proposal precisely serves the purpose of a boundary—to limit the world to the point where “time stops” and declare that there is nothing beyond because time stops there. That should mean that the laws of nature and science stop at this artificially produced boundary. But what do we have as proof that this is true? Precisely like in religions, we have words that sound seductively beautiful and convincing. Also, to a large extent, these words are supported by scientific knowledge and investigation. Yet, they are just words, and in no way do they prove that there is no immaterial Universal Source beyond the “point” where time stops.
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Dejan Stojanovic (ABSOLUTE (THE WORLD IN NOWHERENESS))
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Numa, whose name comes from the same root as “counting” and “coins” in Latin, began improving the calendar system, adding January in honor of the dualistic god of beginnings and endings, Janus.
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David Flynn (The David Flynn Collection)
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Luther’s Wittenberg thesis was quickly translated from Latin to German and widely published. Devout men had already been quietly grumbling about the decadence of the Church and the abuses of the Papacy. Now, it was as if a match had been tossed on the dry kindling of discontent. The fire that began to burn, the Reformation, was sweeping Europe, and even within a conservative bastion like Montaigu, smoke from the Reformist fires was wafting in. Students with open and brilliant minds, like Jean, were beginning to feel the heat.
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Glenn Cooper (Book of Souls (Will Piper #2))
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In ancient Indo-European (...), the word *er* means "to move," "to set in motion," or simply "to go." (...) That root gave rise to the Latin verb *errare*, meaning to wander or, more rakishly, to roam. The Latin, in turn, gave us the English word "erratic", used to describe movement that is unpredictable or aimless. And, of course, it gave us "error." From the beginning, then, the idea of error has contained a sense of motion: of wandering, seeking, going astray.
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Kathryn Schulz (Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error)
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aborigine. William Hone, in his Table Book (1827-28) says that aborigine "is explained in every dictionary...as a general name for the indigenous inhabitants of a country. In reality, it is the proper name of a peculiar people of Italy, who were not indigenous but were supposed to be a colony of Arcadians." Nevertheless, these people of Latium were thought by some Romans to have been residents of Italy from the beginning, aborigine, which gave us the Latin word aborigines for the original inhabitants of a country.
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Robert Hendrickson (The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins)
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From Western Europe and the new settlements in Latin America, some Puritans carried across their judgment of the many African peoples as one inferior people. They carried across racist ideas—racist ideas that preceded American slavery, because the need to justify African slavery preceded colonial America.
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Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
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There is no reason to believe that George Yeardley and the other original enslavers did not rationalize their enslavement of African people in the same way that other British intellectuals did—and in the same way that Latin American slaveholders did—by considering these African people to be stamped from the beginning as a racially distinct people, as lower than themselves, and as lower in the scale of being than the more populous White indentured servants. The
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Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
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Feminist consciousness is consciousness of victimization.
To apprehend one-self as victim is to be aware of an alien and hostile force outside of oneself which is responsible for the blatantly unjust treatment of women and which enforces a stifling and oppressive system of sex-role differentiation.
For some feminists, this hostile power is “society” or “the system”; for others, it is simply men.
Victimization is impartial, even though its damage is done to each one of us personally. One is victimized as a woman, as one among many.
In the realization that others are made to suffer in the same way I am made to suffer lies the beginning of a sense of solidarity with other victims.
To come to see oneself as victim, to have such an altered perception of oneself and of one’s society is not to see things in the same old way while merely judging them differently or to superimpose new attitudes on things like frosting a cake. The consciousness of victimization is immediate and revelatory; it allows us to discover what social reality is really like.
The consciousness of victimization is a divided consciousness.
To see myself as victim is to know that I have already sustained injury, that I live exposed to injury, that I have been at worst mutilated, at best diminished in my being. But at the same time,
feminist consciousness is a joyous consciousness of one’s own power, of the possibility of unprecedented personal growth and the release of energy long suppressed.
Thus, feminist consciousness is both consciousness of weakness and consciousness of strength.
But this division in the way we apprehend ourselves has a positive effect, for it leads to the search both for ways of overcoming those weaknesses in ourselves which support the system and for direct forms of struggle against the system itself.
The consciousness of victimization may be a consciousness divided in a second way. The awareness I have of myself as victim may rest uneasily alongside the awareness that I am also and at the same time enormously privileged, more privileged than the overwhelming majority of the world’s population.
I myself enjoy both white-skin privilege and the privileges of comparative affluence. In our society, of course, women of color are not so fortunate; white women, as a group and on average, are substantially more economically advantaged than many persons of color, especially women of color; white women have better housing and education, enjoy lower rates of infant and maternal mortality, and, unlike many poor persons of color, both men and women, are rarely forced to live in the climate of street violence that has become a standard feature of urban poverty.
But even women of color in our society are relatively advantaged in comparison to the appalling poverty of women in, e.g., Africa and Latin America.
Many women do not develop a consciousness divided in this way at all: they see themselves, to be sure, as victims of an unjust system of social power, but they remain blind to the extent to which they themselves are implicated in the victimization of others.
What this means is that the “raising” of a woman’s consciousness is, unfortunately, no safeguard against her continued acquiescence in racism, imperialism, or class oppression.
Sometimes, however, the entry into feminist consciousness, for white women especially, may bring in its wake a growth in political awareness generally:
The disclosure of one’s own oppression may lead to an understanding of a range of misery to which one was heretofore blind.
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Sandra Lee Bartky (Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression)
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Thirty minutes a day is ideal for language study.
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William E. Linney (Getting Started with Latin: Beginning Latin for Homeschoolers and Self-Taught Students of Any Age)
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The opening verse of John is probably the most quoted in scripture: In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. Unfortunately, it is also the most blatant mistranslation in the whole of the Christian canon. It sounds from the English (and also from the Latin of Saint Jerome’s Vulgate) as if the reference is to the Word of God, meaning the teachings or message of God. But the Greek in the source documents is logos. In Greek philosophy, beginning with Heraclitus of Ephesus who flourished around 500 BCE, the logos is logic or reason, the universal principle by which nature is governed and all things are interrelated. In the original Greek text of the Gospel of John, Jesus is the logic of the universe – a far more powerful conception than merely the word, or spokesperson, of God. Sadly, we can probably blame the influence of the Latin Vulgate for this linguistic vandalism. Latin has a rather small vocabulary compared with modern English. The Latin noun verbum can mean word, but it can also mean idea, concept, point of view, thesis… Translating the Greek logos as the Latin verbum was probably excusable – Saint Jerome agonized over the translation – but taking it back into English as word was a scholarly sin of the highest order.
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Trevelyan (Eternity: God, Soul, New Physics)
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allegorical interpretation. This was one of the most influential approaches to biblical interpretation until the Reformation of the sixteenth century. The roots of allegorical interpretation reach back to the Golden Age of Greece and, in early Jewish hermeneutics, to Philo Judeas. In the beginning centuries of the Christian church, allegorical interpretation was identified with the Alexandrian school and especially with its most famous scholar, *Origen. The key assumption in this hermeneutical approach is that the scriptural text contains several senses. The interpreter seeks to discover levels of meaning that lie beneath the literal sense of a text. The figure of Moses in the Exodus narrative, for example, can be interpreted allegorically as Jesus Christ, who comes to those enslaved in sin and leads them to salvation. Origen identified three primary senses: the literal, the moral and the spiritual. Later Latin fathers expanded the senses into four: the literal, the allegorical, the tropological (moral) and the anagogic (focusing on the end or the goal of the Christian life).
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Nathan P. Feldmeth (Pocket Dictionary of Church History (The IVP Pocket Reference Series))
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That year I had signed up for a course in French Medieval Literature. My mind was turning back, in a way, to the things I remembered from the old days in Saint Antonin. The deep, naive, rich simplicity of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was beginning to speak to me again. I had written a paper on a legend of a 'Jongleur de Notre Dame,' compared with a story from the Fathers of the Desert, in Migne's Latin Patrology. I was being drawn back into the Catholic atmosphere, and I could feel the health of it, even in the merely natural order, working already within me.
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Thomas Merton
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The original meaning of the word recipe was a formula for medicine. The root is Latin and it means "take" as in "take this and feel better." As I mentioned at the beginning, hundreds of years ago, cookbooks were not just collections of delicious things to eat but assortments of remedies for any problems that life might throw at a person, from baldness and stomach aches to the need to preserve a strawberry before it spoiled. Until modern times, most people understood that food was itself a kind of medicine.
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Bee Wilson (The Secret of Cooking: Recipes for an Easier Life in the Kitchen)
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Because we sit there in the gap for a long time saying [gasps]. And that’s when you begin to learn the meaning of ‘Lord Have Mercy’. I can’t do anything to raise my state but what I can do is stay honestly ahead of, in plain sight, what’s happened, acknowledging. Here I am. And I think it’s from that repeated acknowledgement of my own helplessness at that level, but refusing to simply hide from that helplessness, that gradually, gradually, gradually the energy that had originally gone into your, sort of, ego programmes gets recaptured to begin to hold this other kind of field of awareness, of attentiveness, that’s not identified with that small self acting out and can begin to become a nest for that deeper and fuller and truer wiser self to live in. And then we begin to Be. Then we begin to have Being. And it’s from that Being that sometimes we can pull ourselves out of that spiral we were heading into, and it’s from that Being that we can begin to offer our force of Being to the world as love, as assistance, as a shift in the energy field for someone else. ‘Baraka’ the Sufis call it. But it comes slowly, because you can’t just, kind of, click your heels together and have Being. It has to accumulate slowly in your being for a life of painfully bearing the crucifixion of inner honesty, and slowly it emerges.
Interviewer: So that brings up the question in me, what is then freedom? Because you go on this journey. We start out on this journey to become free, which we call enlightenment.
Cynthia: Well, you know, we have so many mixed metaphors as Western and Eastern ways of contexting reality come together like tectonic plates. And they don’t often match up. I think, in a very obvious way, freedom is easy. At the obvious level, what it means is what you’d call ‘freedom from the false self’. Most of us think we’re free, and yet we are not free at all because we are under the absolute compulsion of agendas, addictions and aversions that have been programmed into us from early life, and sometimes from the womb. We have our values, we have our triggers, we have our flash points, we have our agendas. And, as A.H. Almaas said so famously, “Freedom to be your ego is not freedom.” Because that’s slavery. You’re being pulled around by a bull ring in the nose.
So part of the work of freedom begins when you can stabilise in yourself this thing that some of the Eastern traditions helpfully call ‘witnessing presence’, which is something deeper that’s not dependent on the pain-pleasure principle, that’s not attracted by attraction, or repulsed by aversion. You know, as my teacher Rafe, the hermit monk of Snowmass, Colorado, used to say, “I want to have enough Being to be nothing.” Which means he is not dependant on the world to give him his identity, because he’s learned his identity nests in something much deeper.
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And as you finally become free to follow what you might call the ‘homing beacon of your own inner calling’, you realise that it’s only in that complete obedience that freedom lies. And, of course, the trick to that is the word ‘obedience’, which we usually thinks means knuckling under, or capitulating, really comes from the Latin ‘ob audire’, which means ‘to listen deeply’. So, as we listen deeply to the fundamental, what you might call the ‘tuning fork’ of our being – which is given to us not by ourself and is never about self-realisation because the self melts as that realisation comes closer – you find the only freedom is to be your own cell in the vast mystical body of God.
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Cynthia Bourgeault
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Though we’ll get to the poetry of fallen leaves in the next chapter, there’s really no word in Old English corresponding to what English-speakers today would call ‘autumn’ or ‘fall’. To the Anglo-Saxons the fourth season of the year was hærfest, ‘harvest’, and that continued to be its usual name throughout the medieval period. In the four--season pattern of the year, hærfest was used as the equivalent of Latin autumnus, and theoretically ran from 7 August until 6 November. However, in general use hærfest referred more loosely to the period when harvesting was actually being done, from late July to September. In that sense it’s the latter part of summer, as it would have been in the older two-season cycle – and once it’s over, winter begins.
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Eleanor Parker (Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year)
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What is the history of Cuba but the history of Latin America? And what is the history of Latin America but the history of Asia, Africa and Oceania? And what is the history of all these peoples but the history of the most pitiless and cruel exploitation by imperialism throughout the world? At the end of the last and the beginning of the present century a handful of economically developed nations had finished partitioning the world among themselves, subjecting to its economic and political domination two-thirds of humanity, which was thus forced to work for the ruling classes of the economically advanced capitalist countries.
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Fidel Castro (The Declarations of Havana (Revolutions))
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Tertullian—the Spirit makes the basic prophetic utterance, obviously through the human medium, who then takes on different characters or acting-roles, and as such he steps into the role of the Father as the speaker, sometimes the role of the Christ, and at other times the Spirit speaks as the Spirit’s own self—indeed, the person addressed by the speaker also shifts. In short, for Tertullian, there are traces of divine conversation in the Old Testament. On what basis were such role assignments made and justified by early Christian interpreters such as Tertullian?—and what are the theological implications of such assignments? And vitally, when did the church begin using this reading strategy in conceptualizing God? Here I want to introduce the reader more thoroughly to a vehicle that I shall argue was irreducibly essential to the birth of the Trinity—a theodramatic reading strategy best termed “prosopological exegesis.” Previous Scholarship Related to Prosopological Exegesis In 1961 Carl Andresen’s landmark study, “Zur Entstehung und Geschichte des trinitarischen Personbegriffes” (“Toward the Origin and History of Trinitarian Conceptions of the Person”), foregrounded the degree to which early Christian exegesis contributed to the rise of Trinitarian dogma, bringing this critical dimension to the attention of patristic and systematic theologians.41 Andresen showed that Tertullian’s scriptural exegesis was definitive for his formulation of persons (Latin: personae) of the Trinity, and argued that this reading strategy—which Andresen termed prosopographische Schriftexegese (“prosopographic exegesis”)
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Matthew W. Bates (The Birth of the Trinity: Jesus, God, and Spirit in New Testament and Early Christian Interpretations of the Old Testament)
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Only the first part is Latin,” Lin said. “It’s the beginning of an oath. A very old one. Do fidem me nullum librum vel instrumentum aliamve quam rem ad bibliothecam pertinentem…
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A.G. Riddle (Genome (The Extinction Files, #2))
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Different cultures have different systems for learning in part because of the philosophers who influenced the approach to intellectual life in general and science in particular. Although Aristotle, a Greek, is credited with articulating applications-first thinking (induction), it was British thinkers, including Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century and Francis Bacon in the sixteenth century, who popularized these methodologies among modern scholars and scientists. Later, Americans, with their pioneer mentality and disinclination toward theoretical learning, came to be even more applications-first than the British. By contrast, philosophy on the European continent has been largely driven by principles-first approaches. In the seventeenth century, Frenchman René Descartes spelled out a method of principles-first reasoning in which the scientist first formulates a hypothesis, then seeks evidence to prove or disprove it. Descartes was deeply skeptical of data based on mere observation and sought a deeper understanding of underlying principles. In the nineteenth century, the German Friedrich Hegel introduced the dialectic model of deduction, which reigns supreme in schools in Latin and Germanic countries. The Hegelian dialectic begins with a thesis, or foundational argument; this is opposed by an antithesis, or conflicting argument; and the two are then reconciled in a synthesis.
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Erin Meyer (The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business)
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The English word anxiety comes from a Latin root which means narrowing down, and in the beginning the word was used for the entry of a soul into a womb. So the first anxiety is felt when a soul enters a womb, because everything is narrowed down; an infinite soul becomes a small body. This is the most painful process possible, as if the whole sky has been forced to enter into a seed. You don't know it because it is so painful that you become totally unconscious.
There are two painful processes. You may have heard Buddha's saying, "Birth is pain, death is pain." These are the greatest pains, the greatest anguishes possible. When the infinite becomes finite in the womb, it is painful, it is anxiety; and when the infinite is taken out of the body again there is anguish and pain.
So whenever someone dies consciously, he disappears. Then there is no more entry into the body. Then there is no more anxiety, because anxiety is the consequence of desire; then you need not be narrowed down because there is no desire to be fulfilled. You can remain infinite; there is no need to enter a vehicle because now you are going nowhere.
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Osho (Bird on a Wing)
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Dear reader, I know how important you are. I know you’ve got a ton going on at work and have many demands at home. I know there are people who depend on you, a Netflix queue that needs attention, and a social media personality the internet can’t live without, but can I gently remind you that the sons of Korah practiced the prayer posture of stillness, as surely did David as the king of a nation in a world of tribal warfare? I go to bed worried about deadlines, bills, and to-do lists. David hit the pillow worried about the enemy camped in the hill country and waiting for the right moment to charge. And he prioritized time for stillness. He had a habit of stillness that allowed him to see his own life from God’s perspective. “Be still.” The Latin term is vacate, from which we get the English word vacation. The invitation of prayer anytime, anywhere is this: Take a vacation. Stop playing God over your own life for a moment. Release control. Return to the created order. Be still. Prayer begins there. But that’s only the beginning.
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Tyler Staton (Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools: An Invitation to the Wonder and Mystery of Prayer)
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word seduction comes from the Latin term meaning “to lead away.” In every seduction, some psychological or emotional resistance is implied and must be overcome. The resistance may be something as simple as the preoccupations and routines of everyday life, or it may be as complex as a romantic involvement with another. In either case, one person begins to entice the other, drawing his or her attention away from its current
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Lonnie Barbach (Seductions: Tales of Erotic Persuasion)