Casual Geographic Quotes

Now sensitiveness to the state of mind of the public is a difficult thing to achieve or maintain. Any man can tell you with more or less accuracy and clearness his own reactions on any particular issue. But few men have the time or the interest or the training to develop a sense of what other persons think or feel about the same issue. In his own profession the skilled practitioner is sensitive and understanding. lhe lawyer can tell what argument will appeal to court or jury. “The salesman can tell what points to stress to his prospective buyers. The politician can tell what to emphasize to his audience, but the ability to estimate group reactions on a large scale over a wide geographic and psychological area is a specialized ability which must be developed with the same painstaking self-criticism and with the same dependence on experience that are required for the development of the clinical sense in the doctor or the surgeon. The significant revolution of modern times is not industrial or economic or political, but the revolution which is taking place in the art of creating consent among the governed. Within the life of the new generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government. None of us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political premise. Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the world alone, the only constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the cardinal dogma of democracy that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception and to farms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach.

You can casually read about the military campaigns of Joshua, but to truly appreciate them you must study a map or Bible atlas. Joshua is a very geographical book. Place-names appear in every chapter, describing the military progress and also the division of the land among the tribes of Israel. As you read Joshua, keep two major themes in mind: Joshua’s leadership and God’s direct involvement in history.

He said he would send his young assistant with us, a third- year student from the Delhi School of Architecture, who had taken a year of to appren-tice with him. We could pick him up from a building site where he was currently working with Daddy’s masons. We did. The young assistant threaded his way through the little heaps of building material on the site. I couldn’t believe it. He was Jesus. He was rock ’n’ roll. And he had walked on water all the way from Woodstock to Kerala just to meet me. I was nearly ffteen, he was nineteen, and for the frst time in my life I understood what sexual desire was. My brain, my heart, my soul –  all parked themselves in my groin. He had long, lank, Jesus hair, a Jesus beard and a lean, fat, easy- walking Jesus body. Brown Jesus, I mean, not the geographically relocated, genetically modifed blond one. Apart from a black sarong, he was barebodied and barefoot. As he came up to the van, he casually stubbed out the bidi he was smoking on the calloused heel of his foot. I died.