β
Five Great Charters knit the land
Together linked, hand in hand
One in the people who wear the crown
Two in the folk who keep the Dead down
Three and Five became stone and mortar
Four sees all in frozen water.
β
β
Garth Nix (Sabriel (Abhorsen, #1))
β
Only you can charter the course of your destiny.
β
β
C. Toni Graham (Crossroads and the Himalayan Crystals (Crossroads, #1))
β
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous 'cash payment.' It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedomβFree Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
β
β
Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto)
β
Danzhol. The one with the marriage proposal and the objections to the town charter in central Monsea. "Bacon," Bitterblue muttered. "Bacon!" she repeated, then carefully made her way up the spiral stairs.
β
β
Kristin Cashore (Bitterblue (Graceling Realm, #3))
β
VALENTINE: Are you talking about Lord Byron, the poet?
BERNARD: No, you fucking idiot, we're talking about Lord Byron, the chartered accountant.
β
β
Tom Stoppard (Arcadia)
β
They will say I smoked cigarettes and marijuana, cursed hoarse as a crow in all my languages, and loved morphine and Demerol and tequila and pulque, women and men. I will shrug my illusion of shoulders and answer that I am a water woman, not a vessel, not something you can sail or charter. I am instead the tributary, the river, the fluid source, and the sea itself. I am all her rainy implications. And what do you, with your rusted compass, know of love?
β
β
Kate Braverman
β
I used to think like that at school," Sabriel answered. "Dreaming about the Old Kingdom. Proper Charter Magic. Dead to bind. Princes to be --"
"Rescued?
β
β
Garth Nix (Sabriel (Abhorsen, #1))
β
It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, it has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- free trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
β
β
Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto)
β
If the charter of your liberties entails death and despair for untold multitudes, then it is nothing but a license for slaughter.
β
β
Amitav Ghosh (River of Smoke)
β
London
I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear
How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls
But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
β
β
William Blake (Songs of Innocence and of Experience)
β
I'll sing you a song of the long ago -
Seven shine the shiners, oh!
What did the Seven do way back when?
Why, they wove the Charter then!
Five for the warp, from beginning to end.
Two for the woof, to make and mend.
That's Seven, but what of the Nine -
What of the two who chose not to shine?
The Eighth did hide, hide all away,
But the Seven caught him and made him pay.
The Ninth was strong and fought with might,
But lone Orannis was put out of the light,
Broken in two and buried under hill,
For ever to lie there, wishing us ill.
β
β
Garth Nix (Lirael (Abhorsen, #2))
β
Independence means.. enjoying freedom and empowering others too to let them do so.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (10 Alone)
β
The Clayr saw me, the Wallmaker made me, the King quenched me, the Abhorsen wields me so that no Dead shall walk in Life. For this is not their path.
β
β
Garth Nix (Sabriel (Abhorsen, #1))
β
The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us β the poet β whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom.
β
β
Audre Lorde (Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches)
β
So...did she just agree to sponsor the charter?" asked Katar.
"I think so," Miri whispered.
"You think so?"Katar grabbed the paper from Miri. "If I present this in session and the queen doesn't offer her sponsorship, 'I think so' isn't going to save my head."
"Your head will be fine," said Miri. "It's your neck you should worry about.
β
β
Shannon Hale (Palace of Stone (Princess Academy, #2))
β
Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.
β
β
George Eliot (Middlemarch)
β
Together, the bells and Dog sang a song that was more than sound and power. It was the song of the earth, the moon, the stars, the sea, and the sky, of Life and Death and all that was and would be. It was the song of the Charter, the song that had bound Orannis in the long ago, the song that sought to bind the Destroyer once again.
β
β
Garth Nix (Abhorsen (Abhorsen, #3))
β
On either side of a potentially violent conflict, an opportunity exists to exercise compassion and diminish fear based on recognition of each other's humanity. Without such recognition, fear fueled by uninformed assumptions, cultural prejudice, desperation to meet basic human needs, or the panicked uncertainty of the moment explodes into violence.
β
β
Aberjhani (Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays)
β
I look at the hundreds of algebra problems facing me in the next three days.
And here I thought Iβd figured out the equation to my happiness.
β
β
Elizabeth Eulberg (Take a Bow)
β
Your good friends can write a book on you; but Your best friends can create an embarrassing full fledged 3 hours movie on you, with silliest jingles and animation made ever.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Guru with Guitar)
β
The Greatest architecture is building charter
β
β
Lewis R. Korns
β
Doesnβt matter if you can dream it or not, all that matters is if you can begin it or not? Take that first step.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (You By You)
β
We children of public school age can do much to aid in the promotion of peace. We must try to train ourselves and those about us to live together with one another as good neighbors for this idea is embodied in the great new Charter of the United Nations. It is the only way to secure the world against future wars and maintain an everlasting peace.
β
β
Ruth Bader Ginsburg (My Own Words)
β
Gentlemen! I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States. I have had men watching you for a long time, and am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out, and by the Eternal, (bringing his fist down on the table) I will rout you out!
β
β
Andrew Jackson
β
Good people wonβt do bad to you if you hurt them. Theyβll just be neutral and walk away, with experience and a lesson; and youβll be left with well-wishers less one.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Guru with Guitar)
β
Black and white is mix of toughest simplicity and easiest complexity.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (You By You)
β
It hurts deeper is when somebody you love becomes someone you loved.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Guru with Guitar)
β
Her German language made my arteries harden-
I've no annuity for the play we blew.
I chartered an aluminum canoe,
I had her six times in the English Garden.
β
β
Robert Lowell
β
In a world like this with no laws, no charter of human rights, it's the women who suffer. It's the women who learn what it is to be tough, not the men.
β
β
Alex Scarrow (Afterlight (Last Light, #2))
β
It [bourgeoisie] has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom β Free Trade.
β
β
Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto)
β
Black and white, oldest of the vintages, newest of the last season.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (You By You)
β
Black and white is salt and pepper of colors, for life tastes bland without them.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (You By You)
β
Life as a defeated warrior with dignity is lot better than the king ruling without it.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Guru with Guitar)
β
Not even ten additional years of slavery could have done so much to throttle the thrift of the freedmen as the mismanagement and bankruptcy of the series of savings banks chartered by the Nation for their especial aid.
β
β
W.E.B. Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folk)
β
Relativism is a widespread evil, and it is not easy to combat it. The task becomes more complex inasmuch as it arbitrarily serves as a sort of charter for a way of communal life. Relativism attempts to complete the process of the social disappearance of God. It guides mankind with an attractive logic that proves to be a perverse totalitarian system.
β
β
Robert Sarah (God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith)
β
Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedienceβs sake.
β
β
Barack Obama
β
New year is a day, to tune the rhythm called SOUL, with best chords called EXPERIENCES and play the guitar called LIFE.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (10 Alone)
β
Only one person can stop me or keep me going; I myself.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (You By You)
β
Every vision has its own rainbow; The day you realise your vision you'll see your rainbow.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Guru with Guitar)
β
Never ever let anyone take the charge of your Guitar called LIFE. Tune your Dreams, for you are the composer of the tracks of your life. Why do you wait? What are you scared of?
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Guru with Guitar)
β
Black and white is heaviest of vibrant and at the same time lightest of achromatic.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (You By You)
β
Yes, Leo Ming, charter member of Hong Kongβs Lucky Sperm Club,
β
β
Kevin Kwan (Crazy Rich Asians (Crazy Rich Asians, #1))
β
Time spent for temporary happiness like movie or outing or weekend on a beach is all synthetic; with shelf life of a day or two. Work for your bigger dreams that should last for whole life. Then movie and beach would seem more interesting, realising that you have done something.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Guru with Guitar)
β
Somewhere beyond the battening, urged sweep of three-bedroom houses rushing by their thousands across all the dark beige hills, somehow implicit in an arrogance or bite to the smog the more inland somnolence of San Narciso did lack, lurked the sea, the unimaginable Pacific, the one to which all surfers, beach pads, sewage disposal schemes, tourist incursions, sunned homosexuality, chartered fishing are irrelevant, the hole left by the moonβs tearing-free and monument to her exile; you could not hear or even smell this but it was there, something tidal began to reach feelers in past eyes and eardrums, perhaps to arouse fractions of brain current your most gossamer microelectrode is yet too gross for finding.
β
β
Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)
β
Muhammad adhered meticulously to the charter he forged for Medina, which - grounded as it was in the Quranic injunction, "Let there be no compulsion in religion" (2:256) - is arguably the first mandate for religious tolerance in human history.
β
β
Huston Smith
β
Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience. I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited success to help the reduced forces of Czech dissent to stay nourished (and published). The most pregnant moment of that commitment was one that I managed to miss at the time: I passed an afternoon with Zdenek Mlynar, exiled former secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who in the bleak early 1950s in Moscow had formed a friendship with a young Russian militant with an evident sense of irony named Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev. In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel's 'Charter 77' committees. That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a clichΓ© (as well as a tundra of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the clichΓ© upon me in turn. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who had been consistent friends through the stultifying years of what 'The Party' had so perfectly termed 'normalization.' As with my tiny moment with Nelson Mandela, a whole historic stretch of nothingness and depression, combined with the long and deep insult of having to be pushed around by boring and mediocre people, could be at least partially canceled and annealed by one flash of humor and charm and generosity.
β
β
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
β
Forgive all before you go to sleep, you'll be forgiven before you get up. β Lord Krishna.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (You By You)
β
You win, not by defeating others, but by performing better than before.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (10 Golden Steps of Life)
β
Work is just a part of our Life, not vice versa. So Live life full time, work work, part time.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Guru with Guitar)
β
He'd long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men's destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he'd drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he'd ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them.
β
β
Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West)
β
I repose in this quiet and secluded spot, not from any natural preference for solitude, but finding other cemeteries limited as to race, by charter rules, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life, equality of man before his Creator.
β
β
Thaddeus Stevens
β
Who said I won't fail? I might. Who said I might give up? I won't.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (10 Alone)
β
Be a master of your dreams, not the slave of your sorrows.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Guru with Guitar)
β
Dream high, beyond the sky; no matter wings so small, keep vision bright; just dare to learn, for you are born to fly.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Guru with Guitar)
β
No one else can understand you better than you yourself.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Guru with Guitar)
β
If you want to fly you need to grow up, to grow up you need to be a kid again. To be a kid again you have to just be yourself; so come out of your cozy comfort zone, Yell out and break the boundaries your are stuck in.. Then only you can fly.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Guru with Guitar)
β
Our schools will not improve if we continue to focus only on reading and mathematics while ignoring the other studies that are essential elements of a good education. Schools that expect nothing more of their students than mastery of basic skills will not produce graduates who are ready for college or the modern workplace.
***
Our schools will not improve if we value only what tests measure. The tests we have now provide useful information about students' progress in reading and mathematics, but they cannot measure what matters most in education....What is tested may ultimately be less important that what is untested...
***
Our schools will not improve if we continue to close neighborhood schools in the name of reform. Neighborhood schools are often the anchors of their communities, a steady presence that helps to cement the bond of community among neighbors.
***
Our schools cannot improve if charter schools siphon away the most motivated students and their families in the poorest communities from the regular public schools.
***
Our schools will not improve if we continue to drive away experienced principals and replace them with neophytes who have taken a leadership training course but have little or no experience as teachers.
***
Our schools cannot be improved if we ignore the disadvantages associated with poverty that affect children's ability to learn. Children who have grown up in poverty need extra resources, including preschool and medical care.
β
β
Diane Ravitch (The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education)
β
He watched the fire and if he saw portents there it was much the same to him. He would live to look upon the western sea and he was equal to whatever might follow for he was complete at every hour. Whether his history should run concomitant with men and nations, whether it should cease. He'd long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men's destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he'd drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he'd ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them.
β
β
Cormac McCarthy
β
I needed no convincing of the fatal possibilities of government overreach, of the way the fatalities told the story of who the nation considered expendable, but, even after the low points of the previous decade, I believed in government, or at least believed in it more than the alternative. That my country might always expect me to audition for my life I accepted as fact, but I trusted the public charter of national government more than I trusted average white citizens acting unchecked.
β
β
Danielle Evans (The Office of Historical Corrections)
β
But Jack was not Polish scum of the earth, barefoot and chained to the land, or even French scum of the earth, in wooden clogs and in thrall to the priest and the tax-farmer, but English scum of the earth in good boots, equipped with certain God-given rights that were (as rumor had it) written down in a Charter somewhere, and armed with a loaded gun.
β
β
Neal Stephenson (The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World)
β
Stupid fuckin' ninja dude.
β
β
Lila Rose (Hear Me Out (Hawks MC Caroline Springs Charter, #5))
β
Hurting a softhearted caring person would please you but loss is yours; you would have friends less one.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Guru with Guitar)
β
Thinking in loneliness and speaking in public are the two things leaders are masters at.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Guru with Guitar)
β
Beware of will power. It damages your giving-up skills.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (You By You)
β
Trace was just one of those guys who caught your attention no matter if you had a ring on your finger. He would be hot 'til the day he died. Seriously.
β
β
Chelsea Lynn Charters The Gossip Web
β
Black and white is as if phoenix of colors has eloped into opacity.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (You By You)
β
Corporate rule number 7; survival of the fittest spoon. Those who follow reach nowhere.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Guru with Guitar)
β
Irony of the world is that it wants to simplify the complexity and complicate the simplicity.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Guru with Guitar)
β
Irony, we want our handwriting to look like typed fonts, and our computer fonts to look like handwritten text.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (You By You)
β
People may create your dreams with you, not for you. Itβs you and only you who has to think, start and continue.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (You By You)
β
Black and white, severally incomplete and at the same time completely several.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (You By You)
β
Sunshine, external, is universal; internal, the eternal. Choose; shine.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (You By You)
β
All human beings are born with equal and inalienable rights and fundamental freedoms. The United Nations is committed to upholding, promoting and protecting the human rights of every individual. This commitment stems from the United Nations Charter, which reaffirms the faith of the peoples of the world in fundamental human rights and in the dignity and worth of the human person. In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations has stated in clear and simple terms the rights which belong equally to every person. These rights belong to you. They are your rights. Familiarize yourself with them. Help to promote and defend them for yourself as well as for your fellow human beings.
β
β
United Nations (Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
β
His optimistic dream of the great American adventure was what made his writing alive, his belief in the essential joyousness of following his own emotions and being excited by the promise of life.
β
β
Ann Charters (Kerouac: A Biography)
β
The Reformation was an attempt to put the Bible at the heart of the Church again--not to give it into the hands of private readers. The Bible was to be seen as a public document, the charter of the Church's life; all believers should have access to it because all would need to know the common language of the Church and the standards by which the Church argued about theology and behaviour. The huge Bibles that were chained up in English churches in the sixteenth century were there as a sign of this. It was only as the rapid development of cheap printing advanced that the Bible as a single affordable volume came to be within everyone's reach as something for individuals to possess and study in private. The leaders of the Reformation would have been surprised to be associated with any move to encourage anyone and everyone to form their own conclusions about the Bible. For them, it was once again a text to be struggled with in the context of prayer and shared reflection.
β
β
Rowan Williams (Tokens of Trust)
β
I realized that all this explained him, and it wasn't the words he said which angered me. It was only that he was so ignorant, that he knew nothing of the gypsy summer, nothing of the loss I was fighting to endure, of skylarks and splashes and petal-bearing breezes, he had not seen Leper's snails or the Charter of the Super Suicide Society; he shared nothing, knew nothing, felt nothing as Phineas had done.
β
β
John Knowles (A Separate Peace)
β
Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.
β
β
Audre Lorde (Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches)
β
Jerico was from Madagascarβone of the worldβs seven Charter Regions, where the Thunderhead employed different social structures to better the human experienceβand people flocked to Madagascar because of the popular uniqueness of its mandate. All children in Madagascar were raised genderless and forbidden to choose a gender until reaching adulthood. Even then, many didnβt choose a single state of being. Some, like Jerico, found fluidity to be their nature. βI feel like a woman beneath the sun and the stars. I feel like a man under the cover of clouds,β Jerico had explained to the crew when assuming command. βA simple glance at the skies will let you know how to address me at any given time.
β
β
Neal Shusterman (The Toll (Arc of a Scythe, #3))
β
Doll face, even if I'm a guy, I'm 100 percent gay. My hot dog won't even get hard over staring at your bun. It's all good. I know what I'm doing. Low, come and hold her hand.
β
β
Lila Rose (Down and Out (Hawks MC Caroline Springs Charter, #3))
β
Freedom of speech doesn't mean threatening the freedom of others.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (You By You)
β
Rainbow of happiness is the byproduct of your inner sunshine, after the rain of sorrows.
β
β
Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma (Guru with Guitar)
β
Heβd long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that menβs destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and heβd drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if heβd ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them.
β
β
Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West)
β
Don't rely on someone else for your happiness and self-worth. Only you can be responsible for that. If you can't love and respect yourself - no one else will be able to make that happen. Accept who you are - completely; the good and the bad - and make changes as YOU see fit - not because you think someone else wants you to be different.
β
β
Stacey Charter
β
And what these winners wanted was for the world to be changed in ways that had their buy-inβthink charter schools over more equal public school funding, or poverty-reducing tech companies over antitrust regulation of tech companies. The entrepreneurs were willing to participate in making the world better if you pursued that goal in a way that exonerated and celebrated and depended on them.
β
β
Anand Giridharadas (Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World)
β
Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals -- that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government -- that it is not a charter _for_ government power, but a charter of the citizen's protection _against_ the government.
β
β
Ayn Rand
β
As life in general constituted much pain in the form of struggles against poverty, disease, ignorance, and emotional anguish, what more civilized way for people to alleviate the same than by giving themselves to one another as brothers and sisters in deed as well as in word? A society of people hoping to become politically superior needed first to become spiritually valid.
β
β
Aberjhani (The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois)
β
I turned with an inward groan to look at him. Quackenbush wasn't going to let me just do the work for him like the automaton I wished to be. We were going to have to be pitted against each other. It was easy enough now to see why. For Quackenbush had been systematically disliked since he first set foot in Devon, with careless, disinterested insults coming at him from the beginning, voting for and applauding the class leaders through years of attaining nothing he wanted for himself. I didn't want to add to his humiliations; I even sympathized with his trembling, goaded egotism he could no longer contain, the furious arrogance which sprang out now at the mere hint of opposition from someone he had at last found whom he could consider inferior to himself. I realized that all this explained him, and it wasn't the words he said which angered me. It was only that he was so ignorant, that he knew nothing of the gypsy summer, nothing of the loss I was fighting to endure, of skylarks and splashes and petal-bearing breezes, he had not seen Leper's snails or the Charter of the Super Suicide Society; he shared nothing, knew nothing, felt nothing as Phineas had done.
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John Knowles (A Separate Peace)
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Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves.
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Andrew Jackson
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The catch is that for most people the New Testament is taken as proof for the conventional picture of Christian origins, and the conventional picture is taken as proof for the way in which the New Testament was written. . . . For this reason the New Testament is commonly viewed and treated as a charter document that came into being much like the Constitution of the United States. According to this view, the authors of the New Testament were all present at the historic beginnings of the new religion and collectively wrote their gospels and letters for the purpose of founding the Christian church that Jesus came to inaugurate. Unfortunately for this view, that is not the way it happened.
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Burton L. Mack
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No, it's okay. It was just β¦ weird. No one has ever called me hot before.β
βReally?β Trace frowned. βWell, that changes right now.β
He ceased walking, stopping in the dead center of the pathway and reached for my hands. βJade Cannon, you are totally hot!β Trace announced loudly, and people nearby stopped to stare at us after his outburst. I couldn't help but laugh.
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Chelsea Lynn Charters (The Gossip Web)
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Regardless of who leads it, the professional-class liberalism I have been describing in these pages seems to be forever traveling on a quest for some place of greater righteousness. It is always engaged in a search for some subject of overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness with which it can identify itself and under whose umbrella of virtue it can put across its self-interested class program.
There have been many other virtue-objects over the years: people and ideas whose surplus goodness could be extracted for deployment elsewhere. The great virtue-rush of the 1990s, for example, was focused on children, then thought to be the last word in overwhelming, noncontroversial goodness. Who could be against kids? No one, of course, and so the race was on to justify whatever your program happened to be in their name. In the course of Hillary Clintonβs 1996 book, It Takes a Village, the favorite rationale of the dayβthink of the children!βwas deployed to explain her husbandβs crime bill as well as more directly child-related causes like charter schools.
You can find dozens of examples of this kind of liberal-class virtue-quest if you try, but instead of listing them, let me go straight to the point: This is not politics. Itβs an imitation of politics. It feels political, yes: itβs highly moralistic, it sets up an easy melodrama of good versus bad, it allows you to make all kinds of judgments about people you disagree with, but ultimately itβs a diversion, a way of putting across a policy program while avoiding any sincere discussion of the policies in question. The virtue-quest is an exciting moral crusade that seems to be extremely important but at the conclusion of which you discover youβve got little to show for it besides NAFTA, bank deregulation, and a prison spree.
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Thomas Frank (Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People)
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The Constitution is a limitation of the government, not on private individuals--that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government--that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens' protection against the government.
Instead of being a protector of man's rights, the government is becoming their most dangerous violator; instead of guarding freedom, the government is establishing slavery; instead of protecting men from the initiators of physical force, the government is initiating physical force and coercion in any manner and issue it pleases; instead of serving as the instrument of objectivity in human relationships, the government is creating a deadly, subterranean reign of uncertainty and fear, by means of nonobjective laws whose interpretation is left to the arbitrary decisions of random bureaucrats; instead of protecting men from injury by whim, the government is arrogating to itself the power of unlimited whim--so that we are fast approaching the stage of ultimate inversion; the stage where the government is "free" to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may only act by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of humanity, the stage of rule by brute force.
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Ayn Rand (The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism)
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Second, we need to protect our constitutional rights. Our founding charter has served us well for more than two centuries. It protects liberty by separating powers, limiting the authority of the federal government, and guaranteeing every American the freedom to speak your mind, pray to God, and protect yourself and your family by bearing arms in their defense. Every single one of those constitutional protections has come under assault from the Obama administration, which has usurped the power of Congress through executive amnesty, redefined the relationship between the federal government and the governed through Obamacare, and attempted to repeal and undermine the First and Second Amendments through abusive campaign finance regulations, coercions of religious consciences, and repeated attacks on the right to bear arms.
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Ted Cruz (A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America)
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Take childcare for example, an issue that never gets much support beyond lip service in the feminist world, despite it being something that would benefit the majority of women. Once you reach a certain income level, itβs easier and more convenient for you to take care of your own childcare needs than to pay the taxes or contribute to a system that would help all women. If your child is in a failing school, itβs much more convenient to place your child in a private or charter school than to organize ways to improve the situation for the entire community. This also applies to expanding social welfare programs, supporting community clinics, and so on. As a womanβs ability to take care of herself expands thanks to feminist efforts, the feminist goals sheβs willing to really fight for, or contribute time and money and effort to, shrink.
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Jessa Crispin (Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto)
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Wilson argued further, as he had to, that the federal courts are not bound to the Constitution. βThe weightiest import of the matter is seen only when it is remembered that the courts are the instruments of the nationβs growth, and that the way in which they serve that use will have much to do with the integrity of every national process. If they determine what powers are to be exercised under the Constitution, they by the same token determine also the adequacy of the Constitution in respect of the needs and interests of the nation; our conscience in matters of law and our opportunity in matters of politics are in their hands.β10 Moreover, the only legitimate opinions the federal courts can render are those that endorse and promote the expansion of federal power. β[T]hat if they had interpreted the Constitution in its strict letter, as some proposed, and not in its spirit, like the charter of a business corporation and not like the charter of a living government, the vehicle of a nation
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Mark R. Levin (Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America)
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About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
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Calvin Coolidge
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Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I'll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another....
Say now the king
Should so much come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give your harbour? go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, any where that not adheres to England,
Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made you, nor that the claimants
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? this is the strangers case;
And this your mountainish inhumanity.
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William Shakespeare
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Our sin is our resistance to going along with God's initiative in making suffering reparative. We are deeply drawn towards God, but we also sense how following him will dislocate and transform beyond recognition the forms which have made life tolerable for us. We often react with fear, dismay, hostility. We are at war with ourselves, and responding differently to this inner conflict, we end up at war with each other. So it is undoubtedly true that the result of sin is much suffering. But this is by no means distributed according to desert. Many who are relatively innocent are swept up in this suffering, and some of the worse offenders get off lightly. The proper response to all this is not retrospective book-keeping, but making ourselves capable of responding to God's initiative.
But now if that's what sin is, then one can sympathize with a lot of the modern critique of a religion which focuses on the evil tendencies of human nature, and the need for renunciation and sacrifice. This is not because humans are in fact angelic, or there is no point to sacrifice. It's just that focusing on how bad human beings can be, even if it's to refute the often over-rosy views of secular humanists with their reliance on human malleability and therapy, can only strengthen misanthropy, which certainly wonβt bring you closer to God; and propounding sacrifice and renunciation for themselves takes you away from the main points, which is following God's initiative. That this can involve sacrifice, we well know from the charter act in this initiative, but renunciation is not is point.
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Charles Margrave Taylor (A Secular Age)
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The Winding Stair
My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair;
Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,
Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,
Upon the breathless starlit air,
'Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;
Fix every wandering thought upon
That quarter where all thought is done:
Who can distinguish darkness from the soul
My Self. The consecretes blade upon my knees
Is Sato's ancient blade, still as it was,
Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass
Unspotted by the centuries;
That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn
From some court-lady's dress and round
The wodden scabbard bound and wound
Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn
My Soul. Why should the imagination of a man
Long past his prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war?
Think of ancestral night that can,
If but imagination scorn the earth
And intellect is wandering
To this and that and t'other thing,
Deliver from the crime of death and birth.
My Self. Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it
Five hundred years ago, about it lie
Flowers from I know not what embroidery -
Heart's purple - and all these I set
For emblems of the day against the tower
Emblematical of the night,
And claim as by a soldier's right
A charter to commit the crime once more.
My Soul. Such fullness in that quarter overflows
And falls into the basin of the mind
That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,
For intellect no longer knows
Is from the Ought, or knower from the Known -
That is to say, ascends to Heaven;
Only the dead can be forgiven;
But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.
II
My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop.
What matter if the ditches are impure?
What matter if I live it all once more?
Endure that toil of growing up;
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress
Of boyhood changing into man;
The unfinished man and his pain
Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;
The finished man among his enemies? -
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
And what's the good of an escape
If honour find him in the wintry blast?
I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul.
I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest
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W.B. Yeats
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Where is everybody?β
βHiding,β she said. βExcept for Doolittle. He was excused from the chewing-out due to having been kidnapped. Heβs napping now like he doesnβt have a care in the world. I got to hear all sorts of interesting stuff through the door.β
βGive.β
She shot me a sly smile. βFirst, I got to listen to Jimβs βitβs all my fault; I did it all by myselfβ speech. Then I got to listen to Derekβs βitβs all my fault and I did it all by myselfβ speech. Then Curran promised that the next person who wanted to be a martyr would get to be one. Then Raphael made a very growling speech about how he was here for a blood debt. It was his right to have restitution for the injury caused to the friend of the boudas; it was in the damn clan charter on such and such page. And if Curran wanted to have an issue with it, they could take it outside. It was terribly dramatic and ridiculous. I loved it.β
I could actually picture Curran sitting there, his hand on his forehead above his closed eyes, growling quietly in his throat.
βThen Dali told him that she was sick and tired of being treated like she was made out of glass and she wanted blood and to kick ass.β
That would do him in. βSo what did he say?β
βHe didnβt say anything for about a minute and then he chewed them out. He told Derek that heβd been irresponsible with Livieβs life, and that if he was going to rescue somebody, the least he could do is to have a workable plan, instead of a poorly thought-out mess that backfired and broke just about every Pack law and got his face smashed in. He told Dali that if she wanted to be taken seriously, she had to accept responsibility for her own actions instead of pretending to be weak and helpless every time she got in trouble and that this was definitely not the venue to prove oneβs toughness. Apparently he didnβt think her behavior was cute when she was fifteen and heβs not inclined to tolerate it now that sheβs twenty-eight.β
I was cracking up.
βHe told Raphael that the blood debt overrode Pack law only in cases of murder or life-threatening injury and quoted the page of the clan charter and the section number where that could be found. He said that frivolous challenges to the alpha also violated Pack law and were punishable by isolation. It was an awesome smackdown. They had no asses left when he was done.β
Andrea began snapping the gun parts together. βThen he sentenced the three of them and himself to eight weeks of hard labor, building the north wing addition to the Keep, and dismissed them. They ran out of there like their hair was on fire.β
βHe sentenced himself?β
βHeβs broken Pack law by participating in our silliness, apparently.β
Thatβs Beast Lord for you. βAnd Jim?β
βOh, he got a special chewing-out after everybody else was dismissed. It was a very quiet and angry conversation, and I didnβt hear most of it. I heard the end, thoughβhe got three months of Keep building. Also, when he opened the door to leave, Curran told him very casually that if Jim wanted to pick fights with his future mate, he was welcome to do so, but he should keep in mind that Curran wouldnβt come and rescue him when you beat his ass. You shouldβve seen Jimβs face.β
βHis what?β
βHis mate. M-A-T-E.β
I cursed.
Andrea grinned. βI thought that would make your day. And now youβre stuck with him in here for three days and you get to fight together in the Arena. Itβs so romantic. Like a honeymoon.β
Once again my mental conditioning came in handy. I didnβt strangle her on the spot.
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Ilona Andrews (Magic Strikes (Kate Daniels, #3))