Commissioner. Quotes

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Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.
Edward Abbey
We took the liberty to make some enquiries concerning the ground of their pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation. The Ambassador [of Tripoli] answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise. {Letter from the commissioners, John Adams & Thomas Jefferson, to John Jay, 28 March 1786}
Thomas Jefferson (Letters of Thomas Jefferson)
Actually I'd always thought he sat in the library with a slim volume of metaphysical poetry until the commissioner called him on the bat phone and summoned him into action. Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale - to the Jag mobile.
Ben Aaronovitch (Whispers Under Ground (Rivers of London, #3))
Robinson had thoroughly enjoyed her evening at the opera. Her only previous experience had been a performance of Wagner, to which the Assistant Commissioner, an avid Wagnerian, had taken her a year before. It was a strange but admirable British characteristic, she had thought at the time, how little antagonism was directed against the great artistic creations of the enemy, even of Richard Wagner, the great idol of Hitler.
Mark Ellis (The French Spy)
Merlin stood up. For once, late as it was, he was pleased to see the Assistant Commissioner because he had been trying unsuccessfully to get hold of him all day. “May I introduce Detective Bernard Goldberg of the New York Police Department.” Merlin held out a hand to the stocky young man now standing on the AC’s right. Detective Goldberg was an inch or two shorter than Merlin, with a closely cropped head of dark-brown hair and the crumpled face of a man who might have walked into a wall.
Mark Ellis (The French Spy)
I'm not Barbara Gordon. I have to keep remembering that. Tonight, I'm not Barbara. Tonight, I'm not the Police Commissioner's daughter. Tonight, I'm the one who pored over the details of the confidential police and reports when her dad wasn't looking. I'm the one who recognized the vintage costumes you wear. Tonight? Tonight, I'm Batgirl.
Gail Simone
Commissioner Harris at the far end stared along the mad pathway. This was his first child and it had already become a murderer.
Michael Ondaatje (In the Skin of a Lion (Vintage International))
Why do you not want schools?” the commissioner asked. “They will teach us to have churches,” Joseph answered. “Do you not want churches?” “No, we do not want churches.” “Why do you not want churches?” “They will teach us to quarrel about God,” Joseph said. “We do not want to learn that. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on this earth, but we never quarrel about God. We do not want to learn that.
Dee Brown (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West)
You deflowered a Baron’s daughter, no, a Commissioner’s daughter—your boss’s daughter—before her wedding and got her to pay you for it? Christ, Morley, I’ve misjudged you all this time. Color me bloody impressed.
Kerrigan Byrne (A Dark and Stormy Knight (Victorian Rebels, #7; Goode Girls, #1))
Why do you call them yi? You must know that they hate it.’ ‘But all it means is “foreign”,’ said Commissioner Lin. ‘They are the ones who insisted on its connotations. They create the insult for themselves.’ ‘Then wouldn’t it be easier just to say yáng?’ ‘Would you let someone come in and tell you what words in your own language mean?
R.F. Kuang (Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution)
The two men were greedily hunched over the table, like two wolves disputing a carcass, but their muttered speech in the echoing hall resembled more the grunting of pigs. One was less than a wolf: he was a public prosecutor. The other was more than a pig, he was a chief commissioner of police.
Jan Neruda (Prague Tales (CEU Press Classics))
They're selling postcards of the hanging They're painting the passports brown The beauty parlor is filled with sailors The circus is in town Here comes the blind commissioner They've got him in a trance One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker The other is in his pants And the riot squad they're restless They need somewhere to go As Lady and I look out tonight From Desolation Row.
Bob Dylan
American citizens should not lose their constitutional rights because they lack the money to pay for them.
Bernard B. Kerik (From Jailer to Jailed: My Journey from Correction and Police Commissioner to Inmate #84888-054)
There is no greater threat to a free and democratic nation than a government that fails to protect its citizen’s freedom and liberty as aggressively as it pursues justice.
Bernard B. Kerik (From Jailer to Jailed: My Journey from Correction and Police Commissioner to Inmate #84888-054)
And beneath Cornwall, beyond and beneath this whole realm of England, beneath the sodden marshes of Wales and the rough territory of the Scots border, there is another landscape; there is a buried empire, where he fears his commissioners cannot reach. Who will swear the hobs and boggarts who live in the hedges and hollow trees, and the wild men who hide in the woods? Who will swear the saints in their niches, and the spirits that cluster at holy wells rustling like fallen leaves, and the miscarried infants dug in to unconsecrated ground: all those unseen dead who hover in winter around forges and village hearths, trying to warm their bare bones? For they too are his countrymen: the generations of uncounted dead, breathing through the living, stealing their light from them, the bloodless ghosts of lord and knave, nun and whore, the ghosts of priest and friar who feed on living England, and suck the substance from the future.
Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell, #1))
There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction. As Police Commissioner it was my duty to deal with all kinds of squalid misery and hideous and unspeakable infamy, and I should have been worse than a coward if I had shrunk from doing what was necessary; but there would have been no use whatever in my reading novels detailing all this misery and squalor and crime, or at least in reading them as a steady thing. Now and then there is a powerful but sad story which really is interesting and which really does good; but normally the books which do good and the books which healthy people find interesting are those which are not in the least of the sugar-candy variety, but which, while portraying foulness and suffering when they must be portrayed, yet have a joyous as well as a noble side.
Theodore Roosevelt (Theodore Roosevelt's Letters to His Children)
Commissioner Marlowe stood on the platform with his arms crossed as we disembarked. He had the cheerful demeanor of someone who has been beaten about the face all night with a sock full of porridge--only even more so than usual.
William Ritter (Beastly Bones (Jackaby, #2))
That's the moon, commissioner: hours of boredom followed by a few seconds of terror.
David Pedreira (Gunpowder Moon)
Duncan, a broad-browed bishop’s son and the head of Organized Crime in Capitol, as the new chief commissioner.
Jo Nesbø (Macbeth (Hogarth Shakespeare, #7))
Baseball is a public trust. Players turn over, owners turn over and certain commissioners turn over. But baseball goes on.
Peter Ueberroth
A man of the present day, whether he believes in the divinity of Christ or not, cannot fail to see that to assist in the capacity of tzar, minister, governor, or commissioner in taking from a poor family its last cow for taxes to be spent on cannons, or on the pay and pensions of idle officials, who live in luxury and are worse than useless; or in putting into prison some man we have ourselves corrupted, and throwing his family on the streets; or in plundering and butchering in war; or in inculcating savage and idolatrous superstitious in the place of the law of Christ; or in impounding the cow found on one's land, though it belongs to a man who has no land; or to cheat the workman in a factory, by imposing fines for accidentally spoiled articles; or making a poor man pay double the value for anything simply because he is in the direst poverty;--not a man of the present day can fail to know that all these actions are base and disgraceful, and that they need not do them. They all know it.
Leo Tolstoy (The Kingdom of God Is Within You)
Batman: One more thing. When you find something out, you can call me on this. Commissioner Gordan: A cell phone with one button? Batman: A bat signal. Commissioner Gordan: Christ. He actually put a bat on it.
Geoff Johns (Batman: Earth One, Volume 2)
In a short time a group of commissioners arrived to begin organization of a new Indian agency in the valley. One of them mentioned the advantages of schools for Joseph’s people. Joseph replied that the Nez Percés did not want the white man’s schools. “Why do you not want schools?” the commissioner asked. “They will teach us to have churches,” Joseph answered. “Do you not want churches?” “No, we do not want churches.” “Why do you not want churches?” “They will teach us to quarrel about God,” Joseph said. “We do not want to learn that. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on this earth, but we never quarrel about God. We do not want to learn that.
Dee Brown (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West)
Excuse my charisma, vodka with a spritzer. Swagger down pat, call my shit Patricia. Young Money militia and I am the commissioner. You don't want start Weezy 'cause the F is for finisher So misunderstood but what's a world without enigma?
Lil' Wayne
See here, son, if a deputy sheriff beats a prisoner to death, it’s sweepstakes odds that the county commissioners didn’t order it, didn’t know it, and wouldn’t have permitted it had they known. At worst they shut their eyes to it—afterwards—rather than upset their own applecarts. But assassination has never been an accepted policy in this country.
Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land)
Toodles looked so thunderstruck that the Assistant Commissioner smiled faintly.
Joseph Conrad (The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale)
The Lacedaemonians at home now sent to the fleet three commissioners, Timocrates, Brasidas, and Lycophron, to advise Cnemus. (Book 2 Chapter 85.1)
Thucydides (History of the Peloponnesian War: Books 1-2)
No one should ever be wrongfully deprived of their rights to liberty and freedom without just cause, yet in the past 25 years alone thousands of people have been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to tens of thousands of years in prison.
Bernard B. Kerik (From Jailer to Jailed: My Journey from Correction and Police Commissioner to Inmate #84888-054)
The Commissioner went away, taking three or four of the soldiers with him. In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learned a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details s cutting a hanged man from a tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point. As he walked back to the court he thought about that book. Every day brought him some new material. The story of the man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter ob him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart (The African Trilogy, #1))
Detective work is neither a happy nor a satisfying business, Miss Rook,” said Jackaby, settling in as the amber buildings sailed past our window. “Marlowe will understand.” “I don’t understand at all.” Commissioner Marlowe kept his voice low and even as we sat across from him the following morning.
William Ritter (Ghostly Echoes (Jackaby, #3))
We were the Bechuanaland Protectorate then, and the British ran our country, to protect us from the Boers (or that is what they said). There was a Commissioner down in Mafikeng, over the border into South Africa, and he would come up the road and speak to the chiefs. He would say: "You do this thing; you do that thing." And the chiefs all obeyed him because they knew that if they did not he would have them deposed. But some of them were clever, and while the British said "You do this," they would say "Yes, yes, sir, I will do that" and all the time, behind their backs, they did the other thing or they just pretended to do something. So for many years, nothing at all happened. It was a good system of government, because most people want nothing to happen. That is the problem with governments these days. They want to do things all the time; they are always very busy thinking of what things they can do next. That is not what people want. People want to be left alone to look after their cattle.
Alexander McCall Smith (The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, #1))
Upon learning of Sebastian’s success with the commissioner, Cam Rohan remarked admiringly, “That was a spruce trick, my lord. I’m beginning to think you can persuade anyone to do nearly anything.” Sebastian grinned and glanced at Evie, who was sitting nearby. “I should think Lady St. Vincent is proof of that,” he said.
Lisa Kleypas (Devil in Winter (Wallflowers, #3))
Gin, as every commissioner, general and governor knew, could bring sophistication to the bleakest of outposts and lift the spirits of Britain’s most downhearted servants. Its manufacture and distribution was a national priority.
Rhidian Brook (The Aftermath)
So, in a Civil Service where smooth and sociable performance was more useful than an individualistic competence, Enderby went up the scale quickly, and was at the Commissioner level when Baley himself was nothing more than a C-5.
Isaac Asimov (The Caves of Steel (Robot, #1))
I have come upon the conviction that it is not the stern voice of a priest delivering the threat of brimstone, but the gentle and inquiring tones of a friend that will best draw back the curtain to her soul, District Commissioner.
Hannah Kent (Burial Rites)
The sad truth is that the FDA ignored, enabled, or encouraged every Johnson & Johnson disaster in this book. But the 1982 Tylenol poisonings stand out because of an element not present in the others: the most corrupt FDA commissioner in history.
Gardiner Harris (No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson)
Do you know who the real heroes are? The guys who wake up every morning and go into their normal jobs, and get a distress call from the Commissioner and take off their glasses and change into capes and fly around fighting crime. Those are the real heroes.
Dwight Schrute
We must everywhere be part of the cry for civilian review boards, not in the naive belief that they are a panacea but in the conviction that police conduct is not the exclusive responsibility of commissioners and politicians. Police must be answerable to the citizenry they presumably protect, and if they have been educated to any other concept of their role, now is the time to educate them.
Bayard Rustin (Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin)
I didn’t tell you because you’re my girlfriend, not the police commissioner. And because it really isn’t any of your business.” Carmela was taken aback for a moment. By his abruptness and his choice of words. “Your girlfriend? Is that what I am?” “I guess so,” said Babcock. He let loose a warm, throaty chuckle, then added, “Face it, we weren’t exactly playing tiddlywinks last night.” “Well, no,” said Carmela. “But girlfriend just sounds so formal.” “Friend?” suggested Babcock. “No, no,” said Carmela. “I really do prefer the former.
Laura Childs (Tragic Magic (A Scrapbooking Mystery, #7))
And, pointing a trembling finger at Bonetti-Alderighi, with an expression of indignation and a quasi-castrato voice, he launched into the climax: Ah, so you, Mr. Commissioner, actually believed such a groundless accusation? Ah, I feel so insulted and humiliated! You're accusing me of an act - no, indeed, a crime that, if true, would warrant a severe punishment! As if I were a common idiot or gambler! That journalist must be possessed to think of such a thing!" End of climax. The inspector inwardly congratulated himself. He had managed to utter a statement using only titles of novels by Dostoyevsky. Had the comissioner noticed? Of course not! The man was ignorant as a goat!
Andrea Camilleri (The Potter's Field (Inspector Montalbano #13))
One other thing,” Commissioner Lewis said. The detectives sank back in their seats. “I have heard officers in this command referring to the killer as the ‘Tooth Fairy.’ I don’t care what you call him among yourselves, I realize you have to call him something. But I had better not hear any police officer refer to him as the Tooth Fairy in public. It sounds flippant. Neither will you use that name on any internal memoranda.
Thomas Harris (Red Dragon (Hannibal Lecter, #1))
In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learned a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting a hanged man from a tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point. As he walked back to the court he thought about that book. Every day brought him some new material. The story of the man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart (The African Trilogy, #1))
CAPT. J. W. SIMMONS, master of the steamship Pensacola, had just as little regard for weather as the Louisiana’s Captain Halsey. He was a veteran of eight hundred trips across the Gulf and commanded a staunch and sturdy ship, a 1,069-ton steel-hulled screw-driven steam freighter built twelve years earlier in West Hartlepool, England, and now owned by the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company. Friday morning the ship was docked at the north end of 34th Street, in the company of scores of other ships, including the big Mallory liner Alamo, at 2,237 tons, and the usual large complement of British ships, which on Friday included the Comino, Hilarius, Kendal Castle, Mexican, Norna, Red Cross, Taunton, and the stately Roma in from Boston with its Captain Storms. As the Pensacola’s twenty-one-man crew readied the ship for its voyage to the city of Pensacola on Florida’s Gulf Coast, two men came aboard as Captain Simmons’s personal guests: a harbor pilot named R. T. Carroll and Galveston’s Pilot Commissioner J. M. O. Menard, from one of the city’s oldest families. At
Erik Larson (Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History)
In a free and democratic society such as ours, justice should not eternally abrogate one’s rights to freedom and liberty, except in the most extreme cases.
Bernard B. Kerik (From Jailer to Jailed: My Journey from Correction and Police Commissioner to Inmate #84888-054)
With the one hundred and ninety-ninth pick in the draft,” the commissioner announced, “the New England Patriots select Tom Brady.
Jeff Benedict (The Dynasty)
M. Morrel realized that there was no sense in trying to argue in the circumstances: a commissioner wearing his sash is no longer a man but a statue of the law, cold, deaf and dumb.
Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo)
-Wow. Grazie. Quasi quasi mi dispiace di non poterti avere nella mia commissione di tesi. Forse le voci sulla tua crudeltà sono esagerate. -Forse tu tiri fuori il meglio di me?
Ali Hazelwood (The Love Hypothesis)
By 1778, British peace commissioners were offering to rectify all the American grievances of 1776, ignoring only the demand for independence.
Willard Sterne Randall (Benedict Arnold: Patriot and Traitor)
I pledge myself to serve the Corporate State, the Chief, all Commissioners, the Mystic Wheel, and the troops of the Republic in every thought and deed.
Sinclair Lewis (It Can't Happen Here)
I know of no one who would be a good High Commissioner of Palestine except God.
John Chancellor
You used me to get back at Grunshaw.’ ‘I thought you’d be pleased, mate. She’s going to have egg all over her face. The Assistant Commissioner isn’t going to be pleased.
Anthony Horowitz (The Sentence is Death (Hawthorne & Horowitz, #2))
Poets are Prisoners 8-29-2015 Poets are prisoners Practitioners, commissioners & conditioners of the spoken word Caged by their own minds Words are shackles
Debbie Tosun Kilday
People do not come out to vote for a United States Senator. They come out to vote for the Sheriff or the County Commissioner.
Lyndon B. Johnson
Through the cold night air the Assistant Commissioner imagined for a moment that between the verses he could hear the footsteps of the warders pacing in the tower.
Graham Greene (It's a Battlefield)
Capital-P Play was last year’s management theory, following multitasking, singletasking, grit, learning-from-failure, napping, cardioworking, saying no, saying yes, the wisdom of the crowd > trusting one’s gut, trusting one’s gut > the wisdom of the crowd, Viking management theory, Commissioner Gordon workflow theory, X-teams, B-teams, embracing simplicity, pursuing complexity, seeking zemblanity, creativity through radical individualism, creativity through groupthink, creativity through the rejection of groupthink, organizational mindfulness, organizational blindness, microwork, macrosloth, fear-based camaraderie, love-based terror, working while standing, working while ambulatory, learning while sleeping, and, most recently, limes.
Dave Eggers (The Every)
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower, reflecting on Bush’s “stay-the-course” strategy, said, “If ignorance ever goes to $40 a barrel, I want the drillin’ rights on that man’s head.
Molly Ivins (Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?)
The recent sea-fight had been the first attempt of the Lacedaemonians, and they were quite amazed and could not imagine that their own fleet was so inferior to that of the enemy. They suspected that there had been cowardice, not considering that the Athenians were old sailors and that they were only beginners. So they despatched the commissioners in a rage. (Book 2 Chapter 85.2)
Thucydides (History of the Peloponnesian War: Books 1-2)
Even the commissioner of the Department of Labor, Andrew McBride, who had previously seemed reluctant to intervene, now beat the drum of change. He made a personal visit to the Orange studio and asked why the Drinkers’ safety recommendations had not been put into effect; he was informed that the firm “did not agree with them all, many of them had already been followed, and some were impractical.”32
Kate Moore (The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women)
One of his fellow AEC commissioners said of him, “If you disagree with Lewis about anything, he assumes you’re just a fool at first. But if you go on disagreeing with him, he concludes you must be a traitor.
Kai Bird (American Prometheus: THE INSPIRATION FOR 'OPPENHEIMER', WINNER OF 7 OSCARS, INCLUDING BEST PICTURE, BEST DIRECTOR AND BEST ACTOR)
If there is a mistake, Monsieur Morrel,’ the commissioner replied, ‘you may be sure that it will soon be put right. In the meanwhile, I have a warrant here; and though I do it with regret, I must fulfil my duty.
Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo)
In 1960, The New York Times printed an advertisement titled “Heed Their Rising Voices” that attempted to raise money to defend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. against perjury charges in Alabama. Southern officials responded by going on the offensive and suing the newspaper. Public Safety Commissioner L. B. Sullivan and Governor Patterson claimed defamation. A local jury awarded them half a million dollars, and the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a landmark ruling, New York Times v. Sullivan changed the standard for defamation and libel by requiring plaintiffs to prove malice—that is, evidence of actual knowledge on the part of the publisher that a statement is false. The ruling marked a significant victory for freedom of the press, and it liberated media outlets and publishers to talk more honestly about civil rights protests and activism.
Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption)
A caste society,” wrote U.S. Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel 25 years ago, “violates the style of American democracy.… The nation in effect does not have a truly public school system in a large part of its communities; it has permitted what is in effect a private school system to develop under public auspices.… Equality of educational opportunity throughout the nation continues today for many to be more a myth than a reality.
Jonathan Kozol (Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools)
Q. Would you repeat, Dr. Seldon, your thoughts concerning the future of Trantor? A. I have said, and I say again, that Trantor will lie in ruins within the next three centuries. Q. You do not consider your statement a disloyal one? A. No, sir. Scientific truth is beyond loyalty and disloyalty." Q. You are sure that your statement represents scientific truth? A. I am. Q. On what basis? A. On the basis of the mathematics of psychohistory. Q. Can you prove that this mathematics is valid? A. Only to another mathematician. Q. ( with a smile) Your claim then is that your truth is of so esoteric a nature that it is beyond the understanding of a plain man. It seems to me that truth should be clearer than that, less mysterious, more open to the mind. A. It presents no difficulties to some minds. The physics of energy transfer, which we know as thermodynamics, has been clear and true through all the history of man since the mythical ages, yet there may be people present who would find it impossible to design a power engine. People of high intelligence, too. I doubt if the learned Commissioners— At this point, one of the Commissioners leaned toward the Advocate. His words were not heard but the hissing of the voice carried a certain asperity. The Advocate flushed and interrupted Seldon. Q. We are not here to listen to speeches, Dr. Seldon. Let us assume that you have made your point. Let me suggest to you that your predictions of disaster might be intended to destroy public confidence in the Imperial Government for purposes of your own! A. That is not so. Q. Let me suggest that you intend to claim that a period of time preceding the so-called ruin of Trantor will be filled with unrest of various types. A. That is correct. Q. And that by the mere prediction thereof, you hope to bring it about, and to have then an army of a hundred thousand available. A. In the first place, that is not so. And if it were, investigation will show you that barely ten thousand are men of military age, and none of these has training in arms. Q. Are you acting as an agent for another? A. I am not in the pay of any man, Mr. Advocate. Q. You are entirely disinterested? You are serving science? A. I am.
Isaac Asimov (Foundation (Foundation, #1))
The thing that bugs me is that the people think the FDA is protecting them. It isn’t. What the FDA is doing and what the public thinks it’s doing are as different as night and day. —Herbert Lay, M.D., former FDA Commissioner
Kevin Trudeau (Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You To Know About)
As the Bitterroot’s water commissioner, Vern Woolsey, explained it succinctly to me, “Whenever you have a source of water and more than two people using it, there will be a problem. But why fight about water? Fighting won’t make more water!
Jared Diamond (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed)
I object to all punishment whatsoever. I don't want to punish anybody, but there are an extraordinary number of people who I want to kill. Not in any unkind or personal spirit. But it must be evident to all of you, you must all know half a dozen people at least, who are no use in this world; who are more trouble than they are worth. And I think it would be a good thing to make everybody come before a properly appointed board just as he might come before the income tax commissioners and say every 5 years or every 7 years, just put them there, and say, sir or madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you can’t justify your existence; if you’re not pulling your weight in the social boat; if you are not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
Civil Service Commissioner William Dudley Foulke recorded his interview with Pat Garrett, slayer of Billy the Kid and candidate for Customs Collectorship of El Paso, Texas: ROOSEVELT How many men have you killed? GARRETT Three. ROOSEVELT How did you come to do it? GARRETT In the discharge of my duty as a public officer. ROOSEVELT (looking pleased) Have you ever played poker? GARRETT Yes. ROOSEVELT Are you going to do it when you are in office? GARRETT No. ROOSEVELT All right, I am going to appoint you. But see you observe the civil service law. The appointment dismayed many Texans, not because of Garrett’s bloody record but because he was an agnostic. “In El Paso,” the President said approvingly, “the people are homicidal but orthodox.
Edmund Morris (Theodore Rex)
Every FDA commissioner of the modern era has worked for drugmakers after leaving government service, and many worked for them beforehand. But only Dr. Arthur Hayes, Jr., surreptitiously and illegally took money from drug companies while he led the agency.
Gardiner Harris (No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson)
The California real estate commissioner refused to take any action, asserting that while regulations prohibited licensed agents from engaging in “unethical practices,” the exploitation of racial fear was not within the real estate commission’s jurisdiction.
Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
As early as 1999, Major League Baseball Commissioner Allan H. (“Bud”) Selig had taken to calling the Oakland A’s success “an aberration,” but that was less an explanation than an excuse not to grapple with the question: how’d they do it? What was their secret?
Michael Lewis (Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game)
They live in a world that was created by somebody else, or they create a world for themselves. It can be a world of violence, a world of antisocial behavior, a world of crime. Hulan Hanna, Former Assistant Commissioner of Police with the Royal Bahamas Police Force.
Drexel Deal (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped in My Father Book 1))
Louis XVI made the Franco-American treaties official by receiving the three commissioners at Versailles on March 20. Crowds gathered at the palace gates to catch a glimpse of the famous American, and they shouted “Vive Franklin” as his coach passed through the gold-crested gates.
Walter Isaacson (Benjamin Franklin: An American Life)
We had gone with David and Jean Halberstam to see the Lakers play the Knicks. David had gotten seats through the commissioner of the NBA, David Stern. The Lakers won. Rain had been sluicing down the glass beyond the escalator. “It’s good luck, an omen, a great way to start this trip,” I remembered John saying. He did not mean the good seats and he did not mean the Laker win and he did not mean the rain, he meant we were doing something we did not ordinarily do, which had become an issue with him. We were not having any fun, he had recently begun pointing out. I would take exception (didn’t we do this, didn’t we do that) but I had also known what he meant. He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them. He meant wanting. He meant living. This
Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking)
He panned the streams for gold. Some winters he stayed with John Evans at Trevelin and swapped dirty nuggets for flour. He was a crack shot. He shot trout from the rivers; a cigarette packet from the police commissioner’s mouth; and had the habit of picking off ladies’ high-heels.
Bruce Chatwin (In Patagonia)
Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, and his chief construction engineer on the site, an Arkansas-born bulldog named L. F. “Lem” Wylie, Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Floyd Dominy had sanctioned January 21 as the day the diversion tunnel in the west wall of the canyon would be sealed.
Russell Martin (A Story that Stands Like a Dam: Glen Canyon and the Struggle for the Soul of the West)
Sometimes, indeed, he went so far as to visualise himself as an archangel, a rotund St. Michael, armed with the sword of Dymond and defended by the shield of Green, protecting the helpless from the assault of the massed powers of Darkness, those arch-fiends, the Commissioners of Inland Revenue.
Martin Edwards Michael Gilbert
As the Pensacola’s twenty-one-man crew readied the ship for its voyage to the city of Pensacola on Florida’s Gulf Coast, two men came aboard as Captain Simmons’s personal guests: a harbor pilot named R. T. Carroll and Galveston’s Pilot Commissioner J. M. O. Menard, from one of the city’s oldest families.
Erik Larson (Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History)
In the 1989–90 season, he and New York’s Mark Jackson were fined for saying they had bet on which of them would make the winning shot in a close Knicks-76ers game. Barkley would be called in by the commissioner for a slap on the wrist and lecture, only to say, when asked if he were going to be fined, “Wanna bet?
Sam Smith (The Jordan Rules: The Inside Story of One Turbulent Season with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls)
They [the Puritans] disallowed of the cathedral mode of worship; of singing their prayers, and of the antiphone or chanting of the Psalms by turns, which the ecclesiastical commissioners in King Edward the Sixth’s time advised the laying aside. Nor did they approve of musical instruments, as trumpets, organs, etc.
Daniel Neal
Then there was a new epidemic—of fear,” said Dr. Sam Okware, Commissioner of Health Services, when I visited him in Kampala a month later. Among Dr. Okware’s other duties, he served as chairman of the national Ebola virus task force. “That was the most difficult to contain,” he said. “There was a new epidemic—of panic.
David Quammen (Ebola: The Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus)
For a while parents seemed to forget that their responsibility as parents did not cease when the child turned on the radio; rather it increases. In the August, 1938, issue of Your Life, Mary Linton has this to say to the parent who is blaming everyone but himself for his child's actions: It isn't up to the teachers in the schools, nor the Federal Radio Commissioners, nor anyone else on earth. It's up to us — it's our job! Our job to teach them right from wrong, honesty from dishonesty, a clean and intelligent attitude toward sex, a healthful fastidiousness about their own bodies. We can teach these things because we have the daily opportunity of knowing our children and their reactions.
Judith C. Waller (Radio: The Fifth Estate)
It is sobering to remember that one does not become gracious by reading a good book on grace. What’s more, the incarnation itself argues against it, since by definition our claim is that theory and praxis were brought together in the pure compassion of one who wrote nothing down. Our faith is “commissional,” not rhetorical. We are commanded to “go and do likewise,” not to go and talk likewise. Disciples are empowered to heal and forgive sins, not to apply for endowed chairs or publish and debate papers on the Q gospel - important as these may be. The life of the mind is not the problem, unless of course our life begins and ends there. Words can be a form of action, but they can also be a substitute for action.
Robin Meyers (Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus)
Halcyons are never supportive of dream hoverers and their associates.
Hamsa Priya Selvam (The Gambit (Beyond Nexus #1))
That infamous day was the most powerful reminder I have ever been given that you should never take life for granted and should treat each day as if it's your last.
Bernard B. Kerik (From Jailer to Jailed: My Journey from Correction and Police Commissioner to Inmate #84888-054)
This is old politicians," says Joel Swerdlow, the twenty-six-year-old who ran McGovern's operation in the North half of Milwaukee. "We have precinct captains, ward leaders, car captains, the whole bit. That's the only way you win. But instead of patronage bosses and sewer commissioners, we've got young people who work because they're interested in the issues.
Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72)
But Strauss was not a student; he was a powerful, thin-skinned, vengeful man easily humiliated. He left the hearing room that day very angry. “I remember clearly,” said Gordon Dean, another AEC commissioner, “the terrible look on Lewis’ face.” Years later, David Lilienthal vividly recalled, “There was a look of hatred there that you don’t see very often in a man’s face.
Kai Bird (American Prometheus)
the commissioners presciently warned that “if the American government decided to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, they are committing the American people to the use of force in that area, since only by force can a Jewish state in Palestine be established or maintained.”82 The commission thereby accurately predicted the course of the subsequent century.
Rashid Khalidi (The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017)
As requested by quite a mixture—the Police Commissioner and two of his deputies, the District Attorney, a bunch of inspectors and deputy inspectors, not to mention Sergeant Purley Stebbins. I’m talking from the private office of the Commissioner—you know it; you’ve been here. After these days and nights of camaraderie with them—is that the way to pronounce it?” “Almost.” “Good. I am held in high esteem by the whole shebang, from Commissioner all the way down to Lieutenant Rowcliff, which is quite a distance. Wanting to show me what they think of me, they are bestowing a great honor on me. Having a request to make of you, they are letting me make it. They’re all sitting here gazing at me so tenderly I’ve got a lump in my throat. You ought to see them.
Rex Stout (Prisoner's Base (Nero Wolfe, #21))
Il Consiglio dei Topi Un Gatto, che diceano il Mangialardo, facea dei Topi un così gran macello, e tanti nell’avello n’avea sospinti e sbigottiti tanti, che i pochi vivi ancora non osavano il muso cacciar fuora. Quatti nei buchi sen morian di fame, tanta paura avean di quel, non gatto, ma carnefice infame. Un giorno tuttavia, colto il momento che il gatto andò a far visita all’amante e stette in alto tutta la giornata, si radunano i Topi a parlamento. Il presidente ch’era una persona di gran senno, propose, e parve bello a tutti il suo consiglio, che si attaccasse al gatto un campanello, un campanel che suona e dia l’avviso ai topi di fuggire, quando il nemico accenna di venire. - Bravo, bene, benissimo! – Ciascuno approva la mozione. Ma quando si trattò di sceglier quello che attaccare doveva il campanello, non si trovò nessuno. O fossi matto… io no… fossi corbello… Vedendo ch’era chiacchiera perduta, il presidente leva la seduta. Ho veduto qualche altro parlamento, (non di topi) e qualche altra commissione che venne alla precisa conclusione. A ciarlar son bravi in cento, ma diverso è ben l’affare quando trattasi di fare.
Jean de la Fontaine (Fables)
The commissioner was silent for a moment. “It was Dickens did this to you,” he said at last. “Gave you ideas above your station, didn’t he.” “Dickens? Not him, sir. I’d say the greater influence on my current thinking would be Mr. Karl Marx.” “Karl Marx? Indeed.” “Indeed, sir. Herr Marx urged me personally to stop waiting beneath your bloody table for the bleeding crumbs to fall.
Tim Mason (The Darwin Affair)
His instinct of a successful man had taught him long ago that, as a general rule, a reputation is built on manner as much as on achievement. And he felt that his manner when confronted with the telegram had not been impressive. He had opened his eyes widely, and had exclaimed 'Impossible!' exposing himself thereby to the unanswerable retort of a finger-tip laid forcibly on the telegram which the Assistant Commissioner, after reading it aloud had flung on the desk. To be crushed, as it were, under the tip of a forefinger was an unpleasant experience. Very damaging too! Furthermore, Chief Inspector Heat was conscious of not having mended matters by allowing himself to express a conviction. 'One thing I can tell you at once: none of our lot had anything to do with this.' He was strong in his integrity of a good detective, but he saw now that an impenetrably attentive reserve towards this incident would have served his reputation better. On the other hand, he admitted to himself that it was difficult to preserve one's reputation if rank outsiders were going to take a hand in the business. Outsiders are the bane of the police as of other professions.
Joseph Conrad (The Secret Agent)
It is quick to over punish and uninterested in rewarding good behavior. What would we say about an individual who had these characteristics? Mean? Cruel? Heartless? Mindless? Hypocritical? Stupid?
Bernard B. Kerik (From Jailer to Jailed: My Journey from Correction and Police Commissioner to Inmate #84888-054)
The Frankfurt, however, did not give her latitude or longitude, and after waiting 20 minutes asked the operator of the Titanic, “What is the matter?” To this the Titanic replied that he was a fool (pp.
U.S. Senate (The "Titanic" Reports: The Official Conclusions of the 1912 Inquiries by the US Senate and the British Wreck Commissioner)
The commissioner has requested permission to use water cannon against the civilian population for the first time in British history—” “Although it has been used in Northern Ireland,” the interviewer chipped in. “Yes, in very specific circumstances.” And who cares about the Paddies anyway? I filled in silently. As usual, what was perfectly acceptable in Belfast or Derry would be an outrage in Southwark.
Jane Casey (The Kill (Maeve Kerrigan, #5))
Meanwhile, the federal government committed to defending the institution of slavery by officially granting Louisiana statehood, as a slave state, in 1812. Louisiana remained a state until 1861, when it seceded from the Union. In a speech at the time, Louisiana’s commissioner made the state’s priorities clear: “Louisiana looks to the formation of a Southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery.
Clint Smith (How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America)
For all the scandalous women Who blazed the trails before us And refused to take no for an answer. I have been compelled to see orphans robbed, starved, and burned for money. I decided long ago that…no citizen…cared whether or not an orphan is robbed or starved or killed—because his dead claim is easier to handle than if he were alive. —Kate Barnard, Oklahoma state commissioner of charities and corrections, 1907–1915.
Lisa Wingate (Shelterwood)
During all that time I didn't see Willie. I didn't see him again until he announced in the Democratic primary in 1930. But it wasn't a primary. It was hell among the yearlings and the Charge of the Light Brigade and Saturday night in the back room of Casey's saloon rolled into one, and when the dust cleared away not a picture still hung on the walls. And there wasn't any Democratic party. There was just Willie, with his hair in his eyes and his shirt sticking to his stomach with sweat. And he had a meat ax in his hand and was screaming for blood. In the background of the picture, under a purplish tumbled sky flecked with sinister white like driven foam, flanking Willie, one on each side, were two figures, Sadie Burke and a tallish, stooped, slow-spoken man with a sad, tanned face and what they call the eyes of a dreamer. The man was Hugh Miller, Harvard Law School, Lafayette Escadrille, Croix de Guerre, clean hands, pure heart, and no political past. He was a fellow who had sat still for years, and then somebody (Willie Stark) handed him a baseball bat and he felt his fingers close on the tape. He was a man and was Attorney General. And Sadie Burke was just Sadie Burke. Over the brow of the hill, there were, of course, some other people. There were, for instance, certain gentlemen who had been devoted to Joe Harrison, but who, when they discovered there wasn't going to be any more Joe Harrison politically speaking, had had to hunt up a new friend. The new friend happened to be Willie. He was the only place for them to go. They figured they would sign on with Willie and grow up with the country. Willie signed them on all right, and as a result got quite a few votes not of the wool-hat and cocklebur variety. After a while Willie even signed on Tiny Duffy, who became Highway Commissioner and, later, Lieutenant Governor in Willie's last term. I used to wonder why Willie kept him around. Sometimes I used to ask the Boss, "What do you keep that lunk-head for?" Sometimes he would just laugh and say nothing. Sometimes he would say, "Hell, somebody's got to be Lieutenant Governor, and they all look alike." But once he said: "I keep him because he reminds me of something." "What?" "Something I don't ever want to forget," he said. "What's that?" "That when they come to you sweet talking you better not listen to anything they say. I don't aim to forget that." So that was it. Tiny was the fellow who had come in a big automobile and had talked sweet to Willie back when Willie was a little country lawyer.
Robert Penn Warren (All the King's Men)
Mad' sounds dashing, daring and admirable when you hold the tattered flag in the midst of battle and expired natives lie all over the carpet with holes in 'em that you put there. 'Mad' is less impressive written on a form by a commissioner of lunacy as you're turned over to the hospitallers of St Mary of Bedlam to be dunked in ice water because your latest 'scrape' was running starkers down Oxford Street while gibbering like a baboon.
Kim Newman (Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles)
The clean-sweeping Commissioners, who had been animated with wonderful zeal by the nature and novelty of their work, probably felt that they had been betrayed, but it may be doubted whether any one else was disconcerted by the result of the trial, unless it might be some poor innocents here and there about the country who had been induced to believe that bribery and corruption were in truth to be banished from the purlieus of Westminster
Anthony Trollope (Complete Works of Anthony Trollope)
My life ?! : is not a continuum ! (not simply fractured into white and black pieces by day and night ! For even by day they are all someone else, the fellow who walks to the train; sits in the office; bookworms; stalks through groves; copulates; small-talks; writes; man of a thousand thoughts; of fragmenting categories; who runs; smokes; defecates: listens to the radio; says "Commissioner, sir" : that's me !) : a tray full of glistening snapshots.
Arno Schmidt (Nobodaddy's Children: Scenes from the Life of a Faun, Brand's Heath, Dark Mirrors)
... you know what was really messing me up when I got down there to Pittsburgh? Was how young he seemed. He kept asking me things like what did I think of Kanye West's music, and did I think he should hold on to Kevin Garnett in this fantasy basketball league he was in or trade him. And how he wasn't just in this league; he was commissioner of it. Like that was some big mark of distinction: commissioner of make-believe. And I wanted to slam him, one-handed, against the wall, the way he used to do to me, and scream in his face, 'Stop it! Act your age!' ... I didn't do it, though. I wanted to, but I couldn't. 'Honor thy father,' you know what I'm saying? So instead, I grabbed my car keys, got out of there, and took off. It was messing with my head, you know? You get out of there alive, more or less, wait for your father to come see you at the hospital you're stuck at, and when you finally go to see him, he's younger than you are.
Wally Lamb (The Hour I First Believed)
Evelyn did more than complain. He also looked for ways to clear the air. He accepted appointment as one of London’s commissioners of sewers. And since he was interested in gardening and in trees, his inventive mind turned to moving industry out of London and perfuming the city’s precincts with flowering plants—reversing, as it were, at least locally, the transition from wood to coal. King Charles II had been restored to the throne on his thirtieth birthday, 29 May 1660,
Richard Rhodes (Energy: A Human History)
Duiri Tal, a small lake, lies cradled on the hill above Okhimath, at a height of 8,000 feet. It was a favourite spot of one of Garhwal's earliest British Commissioners, J.H. Batten, whose administration continued for twenty years (1836-56). He wrote:   The day I reached there, it was snowing and young trees were laid prostrate under the weight of snow; the lake was frozen over to a depth of about two inches. There was no human habitation, and the place looked a veritable wilderness. The next morning when the sun appeared, the Chaukhamba and many other peaks extending as far as Kedarnath seemed covered with a new quilt of snow, as if close at hand. The whole scene was so exquisite that one could not tire of gazing at it for hours. I think a person who has a subdued settled despair in his mind would all of a sudden feel a kind of bounding and exalting cheerfulness which will be imparted to his frame by the atmosphere of Duiri Tal.   This
Ruskin Bond (Roads to Mussoorie)
Presently the Commissioner of Police walked in. He was a young man and this was his first case and the Greek was highly respected in Luc. “What have you done?” he demanded when he came into the parlour. “It is not the case of what have I done,” the old man said, “but of what I am going to do,” and he took a gun from under the cushion and shot himself through the head. Doctor Colin since those days had often found comfort in the careful sentence of the old Greek storekeeper.
Graham Greene (A Burnt-Out Case)
The third gentleman now stepped forth.  A mighty man at cutting and drying, he was; a government officer; in his way (and in most other people’s too), a professed pugilist; always in training, always with a system to force down the general throat like a bolus, always to be heard of at the bar of his little Public-office, ready to fight all England.  To continue in fistic phraseology, he had a genius for coming up to the scratch, wherever and whatever it was, and proving himself an ugly customer.  He would go in and damage any subject whatever with his right, follow up with his left, stop, exchange, counter, bore his opponent (he always fought All England) to the ropes, and fall upon him neatly.  He was certain to knock the wind out of common sense, and render that unlucky adversary deaf to the call of time.  And he had it in charge from high authority to bring about the great public-office Millennium, when Commissioners should reign upon earth.   ‘Very
Charles Dickens (Hard Times)
In January 1951, high commissioner of occupied Germany John McCloy announced that only five of the 15 death sentences from the Nuremberg judgments would be carried out. He then reduced the sentences of 64 out of the remaining 74 war criminals. One third of these were to be released immediately. He also reduced the sentences of all remaining convicted doctors who had experimented on concentration camp inmates. McCloy had sat in Adolf Hitler's box at the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin.
Carol Rutz (A Nation Betrayed: Secret Cold War Experiments Performed on Our Children and Other Innocent People)
His majesty not only confirmed the decision to which the commissioners had come, but issued other royal letters by which Cortes was empowered to banish from New Spain all deserters and those Spaniards who strolled about the country like vagabonds, as they obstructed the conversion of the Indians to Christianity. Further, all lawyers were forbidden to settle in New Spain for a certain number of years to come, for they only created lawsuits, quarrels, and dissensions among the inhabitants.
Bernal Díaz del Castillo (The Conquest of New Spain)
The Indians must conform to 'the white man’s ways', peaceably if they will, forcibly if they must. They must adjust themselves to their environment, and conform their mode of living substantially to our civilization. This civilization may not be the best possible, but it is the best the Indians can get. They cannot escape it, and must either conform to it or be crushed by it. The tribal relations should be broken up, socialism destroyed, and the family and the autonomy of the individual substituted.
Thomas Morgan U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs
Utilitarian economists, skeletons of schoolmasters, Commissioners of Fact, genteel and used-up infidels, gabblers of many little dog’s-eared creeds, the poor you will have always with you. Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the utmost graces of the fancies and affections, to adorn their lives so much in need of ornament; or, in the day of your triumph, when romance is utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand face to face, Reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you.
Charles Dickens (Hard Times)
The Chicago Commission on Race Relations found evidence of systemic profiling, abuse, and corruption. Officials testified that officers routinely arrested blacks on suspicion and brought them “into court without a bit of evidence of any offense.” A former chief of police admitted that black migrants “naturally” attracted “greater suspicion than would attach to the white man.” Such startling testimony proved that police bias and discrimination were baked into the arrest statistics, leading the commissioners to abandon
Khalil Gibran Muhammad (The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, With a New Preface)
hydroxychloroquine in other countries, early-use outpatient treatment would be an important key to interrupting the exponential spread of the virus and minimizing deaths in the United States.)* Nonetheless, five days later, those very same FDA bureaucrats—including FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn and his eventual replacement, Janet Woodcock—completely countermanded the POTUS-Azar-Kadlec order. Instead, on March 28, the FDA issued a rogue directive restricting the use of hydroxychloroquine to the late treatment of hospitalized patients.13
Peter Navarro (In Trump Time: A Journal of America's Plague Year)
Willing as both men were to suggest what and whom Roosevelt might attack—for he was clearly in a fighting mood—they cautioned him to “go a bit slow” at first, and to discuss a program of reform with his colleagues.26 But Roosevelt knew he could achieve little in this job by proceeding deliberately; it was about as powerful, in constitutional terms, as his last. Once again he must exercise his genius for press relations. Instinct told him that these scribes would be of more use to him than the three Commissioners now waiting in the hallway.27
Edmund Morris (The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (Theodore Roosevelt, #1))
Coming from a country where no one seemed to think it particularly disgraceful that a child with a brain tumour could be sent home to die because his father didn’t have the wherewithal to pay a surgeon, or where an insurance company could be permitted by a state insurance commissioner to cancel the policies of its 14,000 sickest patients because it wasn’t having a very good year (as happened in California in 1989), it seemed to me admirable beyond words that a nation could dedicate itself to providing equally and fairly for everyone, whatever the cost.
Bill Bryson (Neither Here, Nor There: Travels in Europe (Bryson Book 11))
In 1956, with no leads and public outcry mounting, the police turned to James A. Brussel, a psychiatrist and criminologist and the assistant commissioner of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene, who lived with his wife on the grounds of Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens. Brussel examined the letters from the bomber and the crime scene photos and came up with a “portrait” of the bomber—the very first case of criminal profiling ever. Among his many predictions: that when he was found, the bomber would be wearing a double-breasted suit, buttoned.
Fiona Davis (The Spectacular)
Friends," said he, "the taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly; and from these taxes the commissioners cannot ease or deliver us by allowing an abatement. However, let us hearken to good advice, and something may be done for us; God helps them that help themselves, as Poor Richard says.
Benjamin Franklin (Franklin's Autobiography)
MR. COMMISSIONER BOOTHROYD was a Humanity Party appointee, of course, as were all of his staff except for civil service technical employees. But Dak had told me that it was at least sixty-forty that Boothroyd had not had a finger in the plot; Dak considered him honest but stupid. For that matter, neither Dak nor Rog Clifton believed that Supreme Minister Quiroga was in it; they attributed the thing to the clandestine terrorist group inside the Humanity Party who called themselves the “Actionists”—and they attributed them to some highly respectable big-money boys who stood to profit heavily.
Robert A. Heinlein (Double Star)
One time, over half of my warlords refused to attend a summit because I had failed to properly address them by the decorative titles my father had doled out like candy after the war: Minister of Horses, Master of Archery, Commissioner of Arts. Titles that had no weight in the council, because to be part of the council one actually needed to do some work. The warlords didn’t even have the decency to inform me they felt slighted. If I had known they would throw such massive sulks beforehand, I would’ve gone and made up extra titles just to please them. I’ve always wanted to use Secretary of the Dung Heap.
K.S. Villoso (The Wolf of Oren-Yaro (Chronicles of the Bitch Queen, #1))
One of the most effective remedies against urban anarchy over the past two decades is under attack. Proactive policing—also called Broken Windows policing—calls for the enforcement of low-level misdemeanor laws regulating public order. Manhattan Institute fellow George Kelling and Harvard professor James Q. Wilson first articulated the Broken Windows theory in 1982 as a means of quelling public fear of crime and restoring order to fraying communities. William Bratton embraced the thinking in his first tour as commissioner of the New York Police Department in the 1990s, with great benefit to public safety.
Heather Mac Donald (The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe)
If the official criteria established by the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police for defining the term “prostitute” is applied to Polly, Annie, and Kate, it immediately becomes obvious that they cannot be identified as such. Even when relying on inquest testimony, there exists no proof to support these assertions. Similarly, there is no absolute proof that Elisabeth Stride returned to prostitution in the period prior to her murder. Quite simply, there is no evidence that any of these women self-identified as prostitutes and no evidence that anyone among their community regarded them as part of the sex trade.
Hallie Rubenhold (The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper)
On the second to last day, Lt. Russo, who ran the program, announced, "Unless you were at dinner last night and had the opportunity to say 'Howard, pass the salt,' you are going to Brooklyn North and Manhattan North. That's where they need people, and that's where you're going." "Howard" referred to to the Commissioner Safir, and when they read the list of assignments the next afternoon-- "Alvarez... Brooklyn North..." "Baker... Brooklyn North..." "Buono... Manhattan North..." "Calderon... Brooklyn North..." "Conlon... South Bronx Initiative..." --more than a few people turned around to look. Howard, pass the salt. I was a little surprised myself.
Edward Conlon (Blue Blood by Conlon, Edward (2004) Paperback)
However, the fact that American forces continued to work with the warlords and pay them gave them new power in their communities. They intimidated local people by telling them they could call in airstrikes on their satellite phones. And to the horror of many of the Europeans, Rumsfeld and other US officials would visit them as if they were important leaders. ‘There is a certain illogic in trying to boost the authority of the central government on one hand and in conniving with local warlords on the other,’ complained Chris Patten, the European Union Commissioner, when he visited Kabul in May 2002. ‘There are things done in the short term which are unhelpful in the long term.
Christina Lamb (Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World)
The squad’s leader, Inspector Martin Roma, had been trying for two months to get the new Police Commissioner to learn more about our group. The NYPD Special Situations Squad is off the official org chart, but has been in existence in one form or another for decades. Formed to deal with the unexplainable world of the supernatural, the head of the squad always reports directly to the Commissioner. When the new mayor had swept into office last November on a platform of social issues, he had fired the old Commissioner and brought in his handpicked replacement. Said replacement hadn’t taken his Department of Homeland Security briefing on things that go bump in the night very seriously.
John Conroe (Demon Driven (The Demon Accords, #2))
When Marxian socialism came to the United States after the 1848 revolutions, it brought along in its baggage this European suspicion of liberal-democratic procedures. Eventually that was dispelled and socialist organizations began participating in electoral politics. But they continued to think of themselves more as the vanguard of a movement than as voices in a democratic chorus. And their preferred political tactics remained the mass demonstration and the strike -- rather than, say, winning elections for county commissioner. The significance of these groups in American politics peaked during the Great Depression and then faded. But their movement ideal retained its grip on the left, and in the 1960s it captured the imagination of liberals as well. There had been emancipatory movements before, against slavery, for women's rights, for workers' protection. They did not question the legitimacy of the American system; they just wanted it to live up to its principles and respect its procedures. And they worked with parties and through institutions to achieve their ends. But as the 1970s flowed into the 1980s, movement politics began to be seen by many liberals as an alternative rather than a supplement to institutional politics, and by some as being more legitimate. That's when what we now call the social justice warrior was born, a social type with quixotic features whose self-image depends on being unstained by compromise and above trafficking in mere interests.
Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics)
Mapema, kabla ndege haijaondoka na baada ya kuagana na maafisa waliomsindikiza, Nanda aliingia katika ndege na kutafuta namba ya kiti chake. Alivyoiona, alishtuka. Msichana mrembo alikaa kando ya kiti (cha Nanda) akiongea na simu, mara ya mwisho kabla ya kuondoka. Alivyofika, Nanda hakujizuia kuchangamka – alitupa tabasamu. Alivyoliona, kupitia miwani myeusi, binti alitabasamu pia, meno yake yakimchanganya kamishna. Alimsalimia Nanda, harakaharaka, na kurudi katika simu huku Nanda akikaa (vizuri) na kumsubiri. Alivyokata simu, alitoa miwani na kumwomba radhi Kamishna Nanda. Nanda akamwambia asijali, huku akitabasamu. Alikuwa na safari ya Bama kupitia Tailandi, kwa ndege ya Shirika la Ndege la Skandinavia na Maxair kutokea Bangkok; sawa kabisa na safari ya kamishna.
Enock Maregesi (Kolonia Santita)
You look at the English people you meet. Some of them you like. Some you hate. Many you are indifferent to. But even the ones you like do not matter. The ones who matter you will never see – they are tucked away in England – and they are indifferent to us as individuals. You think these officials over here rule us? These viceroys, these governors, these commissioners and commanders-in-chief and brigadier-generals? Then you are wrong. We are ruled by people who do not even know where Ranpur is. But now they know where Jallianwallah Bagh is and what it is, and many of them do not like what they know. Those of them who do like what they know are the ones you hear about and hear from. Like the General at Amritsar they are frightened people and frightened people shriek the loudest and fire at random.
Paul Scott (The Day of the Scorpion (The Raj Quartet, #2))
Ningependa kujitokeza leo kutoa salamu zangu za rambirambi kwa Watu wa Musoma; kutokana na ajali mbaya ya mabasi ya J4 Express, Mwanza Coach, na gari ndogo aina Nissan Terrano, iliyotokea Ijumaa tarehe 5/9/2014 katika eneo la Sabasaba mjini Musoma. Kulingana na vyombo vya habari, watu 39 wamefariki dunia. Wengine wengi wamejeruhiwa vibaya. Mali za mamilioni ya fedha zimeteketea kabisa. Hii ni ajali mbaya na ya kusikitisha mno kwa maana halisi ya maneno mabaya na ya kusikitisha. Maneno hayataweza kuelezea kikamilifu huzuni niliyonayo juu ya ajali hii ya kutisha, lakini Mungu awasaidie wale wote waliofiwa au walioguswa na ajali hiyo kwa namna yoyote ile, na awasamehe marehemu wote dhambi zao na awapumzishe mahali pema peponi. Wale wote waliofariki hawataweza kurudi huku, lakini sisi tutakwenda huko.
Enock Maregesi
As a commissioner (delegate) to the Old School Presbyterian General Assembly in 1845, Thornwell wrote to his wife, “I have no doubts but that the Assembly, by a very large majority, will declare slavery not to be sinful, will assert that it is sanctioned by the word of God, that it is purely a civil relation with which the Church, as such, has no right to interfere, and that abolitionism is essentially wicked, disorganizing, and ruinous.”7 In an 1850 sermon Thornwell painted a clear picture that Christians supported slavery and atheists opposed it: “The parties in this conflict are not merely Abolitionists and Slaveholders; they are Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground—Christianity and atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity the stake.”8
Jack Rogers (Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality, Revised and Expanded Edition: Explode the Myths, Heal the Church)
This work has, among other things, led to the rescue of 23 children from rape and assault, the seizure of a quarter-million child abuse videos, and the arrest of 370 alleged pedophiles. It has resulted in the largest-ever seizure of cryptocurrency headed to Hamas, al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. When Changpeng Zhao, chief of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, reported to prison in June, it was because Koopman’s small cybercrime team had uncovered evidence of the firm’s money laundering for terrorists and sanctions-busting for Iran, Syria and Russia. In the past 10 years, this work has returned more than $12 billion to victims of crime and to the U.S. Treasury. If he worked anywhere else, Koopman would probably be celebrated. But he’s employed by the Internal Revenue Service, the arm of government that even its commissioner, Danny Werfel, describes as “iconically unpopular.
Michael Lewis (Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service)
It’s about a letter Facebook promised the privacy commissioner in Hong Kong, responding to questions about the privacy of Facebook users there: Update: Rob and I spoke with Vaughan and Zhen on the China team yesterday, and they flagged a potential complication arising from the likely course of our negotiations with the Chinese government. In exchange for the ability to establish operations in China, FB will agree to grant the Chinese government access to Chinese users’ data—including Hongkongese users’ data. Facebook will grant the Chinese government access to Chinese users’ data—including Hong Kong users’ data—in exchange for getting into China? This can’t be true. It’s one of those crazy ideas the other offices at Facebook are always floating that Marne and I beat back down before they go very far. This proposal, which would surely violate the consent order Facebook agreed to with the Federal Trade Commission in 2012 (and the earlier 2011 agreement with the Irish Data Protection Commission), doubtless is the work of juniors who haven’t subjected it to any scrutiny by the actual decision makers at Facebook. This is so far-fetched I’m sure there’s no danger of it becoming real anytime soon or ever. So I ignore it, even though the next sentence in the email explains exactly how Facebook would accomplish this: New users in China will agree to a modified DUP/SRR reflecting this practice, but we will have to re-TOS Hongkongese users. Translation: new users in China will have a new Data Use Policy they’ll agree to when they sign up for Facebook—a policy that discloses that the Chinese government will have access to their data—and existing users in Hong Kong will be forced to accept a new Terms of Service (the contract Facebook has with its users) that will also contain this stipulation.
Sarah Wynn-Williams (Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism)
By the end of June, Strauss had the votes of all but one commissioner. The only scientist on the Commission, Professor Smyth had made it clear that he thought Oppenheimer’s security clearance should be restored. As the author of the 1945 “Smyth Report,” an unclassified scientific history of the Manhattan Project, Smyth was familiar with both Oppenheimer and the security issues at stake. On a personal level, he didn’t particularly care for Oppenheimer; they had been Princeton neighbors for ten years, and Oppenheimer had always struck him as a vain and pretentious man. What mattered was that Smyth didn’t find the evidence convincing. In early May, he and Strauss had lunch and proceeded to argue about the verdict. At the end of their lunch, Smyth said, “Lewis, the difference between you and me is that you see everything as either black or white and to me everything looks gray.” “Harry,” Strauss snapped back, “let me recommend you to a good oculist.
Kai Bird (American Prometheus)
[...]a man and a boy, side by side on a yellow Swedish sofa from the 1950s that the man had bought because it somehow reminded him of a zoot suit, watching the A’s play Baltimore, Rich Harden on the mound working that devious ghost pitch, two pairs of stocking feet, size 11 and size 15, rising from the deck of the coffee table at either end like towers of the Bay Bridge, between the feet the remains in an open pizza box of a bad, cheap, and formerly enormous XL meat lover’s special, sausage, pepperoni, bacon, ground beef, and ham, all of it gone but crumbs and parentheses of crusts left by the boy, brackets for the blankness of his conversation and, for all the man knew, of his thoughts, Titus having said nothing to Archy since Gwen’s departure apart from monosyllables doled out in response to direct yes-or-nos, Do you like baseball? you like pizza? eat meat? pork?, the boy limiting himself whenever possible to a tight little nod, guarding himself at his end of the sofa as if riding on a crowded train with something breakable on his lap, nobody saying anything in the room, the city, or the world except Bill King and Ken Korach calling the plays, the game eventless and yet blessedly slow, player substitutions and deep pitch counts eating up swaths of time during which no one was required to say or to decide anything, to feel what might conceivably be felt, to dread what might be dreaded, the game standing tied at 1 and in theory capable of going on that way forever, or at least until there was not a live arm left in the bullpen, the third-string catcher sent in to pitch the thirty-second inning, batters catnapping slumped against one another on the bench, dead on their feet in the on-deck circle, the stands emptied and echoing, hot dog wrappers rolling like tumbleweeds past the diehards asleep in their seats, inning giving way to inning as the dawn sky glowed blue as the burner on a stove, and busloads of farmhands were brought in under emergency rules to fill out the weary roster, from Sacramento and Stockton and Norfolk, Virginia, entire villages in the Dominican ransacked for the flower of their youth who were loaded into the bellies of C-130s and flown to Oakland to feed the unassuageable appetite of this one game for batsmen and fielders and set-up men, threat after threat giving way to the third out, weak pop flies, called third strikes, inning after inning, week after week, beards growing long, Christmas coming, summer looping back around on itself, wars ending, babies graduating from college, and there’s ball four to load the bases for the 3,211th time, followed by a routine can of corn to left, the commissioner calling in varsity teams and the stars of girls’ softball squads and Little Leaguers, Archy and Titus sustained all that time in their equally infinite silence, nothing between them at all but three feet of sofa;
Michael Chabon (Telegraph Avenue)
First, banish the lawyers from the land. Currently the SEC, like most Washington agencies, is dominated by lawyers. In 2009 all five SEC Commissioners were lawyers. Now, I have nothing against lawyers. I’m sure they are good to their children, and many of them contribute to charities. But putting them in charge of supervising our capital markets has been an unmitigated disaster. It would be like putting a political appointee in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and expecting him to handle a flood. Very few SEC lawyers understand the complex financial instruments of the twenty-first century, and almost none have ever sat on a trading desk or worked in the industry other than doing legal work. A primary reason the SEC has reached this point is that historically the SEC Commissioners have been lawyers who may know where to find the best power lunches in Washington, D.C., but don’t have a clue as to how the financial industry actually operates on a day-to-day basis.
Harry Markopolos (No One Would Listen)
Under Louis XIV., not to go any further back, the king rightly desired to create a fleet. The idea was a good one. But let us consider the means. There can be no fleet, if, beside the sailing ship, that plaything of the winds, and for the purpose of towing it, in case of necessity, there is not the vessel which goes where it pleases, either by means of oars or of steam; the galleys were then to the marine what steamers are to-day. Therefore, galleys were necessary; but the galley is moved only by the galley-slave; hence, galley-slaves were required. Colbert had the commissioners of provinces and the parliaments make as many convicts as possible. The magistracy showed a great deal of complaisance in the matter. A man kept his hat on in the presence of a procession—it was a Huguenot attitude; he was sent to the galleys. A child was encountered in the streets; provided that he was fifteen years of age and did not know where he was to sleep, he was sent to the galleys. Grand reign; grand century.
Victor Hugo (Complete Works of Victor Hugo)
You have heard the good Talks which our Brother (George Morgan) Weepemachukthe [The White Deer] has delivered to us from the Great Council at Philadelphia representing all our white Brethern who have grown out of this same Ground with ourselves for this Big [Turtle] Island being our common Mother, we and they are like one Flesh and Blood." -Chief Cornstalk to Mingo representatives at a conference at Fort Pitt [Pittsburgh], Friday, June 21st, 1776 [response] "We are sprung from one common Mother, we were all born in this big Island; we earnestly wish to repose under the same Tree of Peace with you; we request to live in Friendship with all the Indians in the Woods...We call God to Witness, that we desire nothing more ardently than that the white and red Inhabitants of this big Island should cultivate the most Brotherly affection, and be united in the firmest bands of Love and friendship." -Morgan Letterbrook, "American Commissioners for Indian Affairs to Delawares, Senecas, Munsees, and Mingos" Pittsburgh, 1776
Chief Cornstalk
For the poverty in which my mother and father lived, for the failure of the mill, all the hard times, for the awful sheep, for constant tiredness, thank you, my God! For lips, which I was feeding too much, for the dirty noses of the children, for the guarded sheep, I thank you! Thank you, my God, for the prosecutor and the police commissioner, for the policemen, and for the harsh words of Father Peyramale! For the days in which you came, Mary, for the ones in which you did not come, I will never be able to thank you…only in Paradise. For the slap in the face, for the ridicule, the insults, and for those who suspected me for wanting to gain something from it, thank you, my Lady. For my spelling, which I never learned, for the memory that I never had, for my ignorance and for my stupidity, thank you. For the fact that my mother died so far away, for the pain I felt when my father instead of hugging his little Bernadette called me, “Sister Marie-Bernard”, I thank you, Jesus. I thank you for the heart you gave me, so delicate and sensitive, which you filled with bitterness. For the fact that Mother Josephine proclaimed that I was good for nothing, thank you. For the sarcasm of the Mother Superior: her harsh voice, her injustices, her irony and for the bread of humiliation, thank you. Thank you that I was the privileged one when it came to be reprimanded, so that my sisters said, “How lucky it is not to be Bernadette.” Thank you for the fact that it is me, who was the Bernadette threatened with imprisonment because she had seen you, Holy Virgin; regarded by people as a rare animal; that Bernadette so wretched, that upon seeing her, it was said, “Is that it?” For this miserable body which you gave me, for this burning and suffocating illness, for my decaying tissues, for my de-calcified bones, for my sweats, for my fever, for my dullness and for my acute pains, thank you, my God. And for this soul which you have given me, for the desert of inner dryness, for your night and your lightening, for your silences and your thunders, for everything. For you - when you were present and when you were not—thank you, Jesus.
Bernadette Soubirous
…we know what to do with rebels here. They are dug into shallow graves, the Cornishmen who came up the country when he was a boy; but there are always more Cornishmen. And beneath Cornwall, beyond and beneath this whole realm of England, beneath the sodden marches of Wales and the rough territory of the Scots border, there is another landscape; there is a buried empire, where he fears his commissioners cannot reach. Who will swear the hobs and boggarts who live in the hedges and in hollow trees, and the wild men who hide in the woods? Who will sear the saints in their niches, and the spirits that cluster at holy wells rustling like fallen leaves, and the miscarried infants dug into unconsecrated ground: all those unseen dead who hover in winter around forges and village hearths, trying to warm their bare bones? For they too are his countrymen: the generations of the uncounted dead, breathing through the living, stealing their light from them, the bloodless ghosts of lord and knave, nun and whore, the ghosts of priest and friar who feed on living England, and suck the substance from the future.
Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell, #1))
Roosevelt was a brilliant, vociferous, combustible man, not the type who ordinarily reaches the presidency. In his whirlwind career, which had taken him from college to the White House in less than twenty years, he had been many things: a historian, lawyer, ornithologist, minority leader of the New York State Assembly, boxer, ranchman, New York City police commissioner, naturalist, hunter, civil service reformer, prolific author, devoted husband and father, voracious reader, assistant secretary of the navy, war hero, empire builder, advocate of vigorous physical exercise, governor of New York, and vice president of the United States. He was a big, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested man, with tan, rough-textured skin. His hair was close-cropped and reddish-brown in color, with bristles around the temples beginning to show gray, and his almost impossibly muscular neck looked as if it was on the verge of bursting his collar-stays. He wore pince-nez spectacles with a ribbon that hung down the left side of his face. When he smiled or spoke, he revealed two very straight rows of teeth, plainly visible from incisor to incisor, their gleaming whiteness sharply accented by his ruddy complexion.
Ian W. Toll (Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942)
As Garrison had tried to show, belatedly, the Gray Board hearings were patently unfair and outrageously extrajudicial. The primary responsibility for the proceedings lay with Lewis Strauss. But as chairman of the board, Gordon Gray could have ensured that the hearing was conducted properly and fairly. He did not do his job. Instead of taking control of the hearing to maintain fairness, which would have required him to rein in Robb’s illicit tactics, he allowed Robb to control the proceedings. Prior to the hearing, Gray permitted Robb to meet exclusively with the board to review the FBI files, a direct violation of the AEC’s 1950 “Security Clearance Procedures.” He accepted Robb’s recommendation that Garrison be denied a similar meeting; he acquiesced to Robb’s refusal to reveal his witness list to Garrison; he did not share Lawrence’s damaging written testimony with the defense; he did nothing to expedite a security clearance for Garrison. The Gray Board was, in sum, a veritable kangaroo court in which the head judge accepted the prosecutor’s lead. As AEC commissioner Henry D. Smyth would insist, any objective legal review of how the hearing was conducted surely would result in its nullification.
Kai Bird (American Prometheus)
And if McCloy couldn’t get government money to fund these operations, there were other options available to him. Toward the end of his tenure as high commissioner in Germany in the early 50s, McCloy wrote to the Ford Foundation mentioning Der Monat and asking them to “help to carry on certain operations which the future U.S. Embassy may find it difficult to continue, but which are of great significance to United States objectives in Germany.” The Ford Foundation, we are told, “obliged.” Other organizations were happy to oblige as well. One of the things one notices in the reports on the housing riots in Chicago is that the reports which were filed by spies working for the Office of War Information and the Office of Facts and Figures during the war years started getting filed by spies working for the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Friends Service Committee once the war was over. This was precisely the devolution of government policy by “private” agency which McCloy was urging at the Ford Foundation, which would in turn become a major benefactor of the American Friends Service Committee, which in turn became a major player in disrupting ethnic neighborhoods in cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, Oakland, California and elsewhere by promoting racial “integration.
E. Michael Jones (The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing)
we have much to learn from the struggles in Alabama and Mississippi in the early 1960s. In the spring of 1963 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Dr. King launched a “fill the jails” campaign to desegregate downtown department stores and schools in Birmingham. But few local blacks were coming forward. Black adults were afraid of losing their jobs, local black preachers were reluctant to accept the leadership of an “Outsider,” and city police commissioner Bull Connor had everyone intimidated. Facing a major defeat, King was persuaded by his aide, James Bevel, to allow any child old enough to belong to a church to march. So on D-day, May 2, before the eyes of the whole nation, thousands of schoolchildren, many of them first graders, joined the movement and were beaten, fire-hosed, attacked by police dogs, and herded off to jail in paddy wagons and school buses. The result was what has been called the “Children’s Miracle.” Inspired and shamed into action, thousands of adults rushed to join the movement. All over the country rallies were called to express outrage against Bull Connor’s brutality. Locally, the power structure was forced to desegregate lunch counters and dressing rooms in downtown stores, hire blacks to work downtown, and begin desegregating the schools. Nationally, the Kennedy administration, which had been trying not to alienate white Dixiecrat voters, was forced to begin drafting civil rights legislation as the only way to forestall more Birminghams. The next year as part of Mississippi Freedom Summer, activists created Freedom Schools because the existing school system (like ours today) had been organized to produce subjects, not citizens. People in the community, both children and adults, needed to be empowered to exercise their civil and voting rights. A mental revolution was needed. To bring it about, reading, writing, and speaking skills were taught through discussions of black history, the power structure, and building a movement. Everyone took this revolutionary civics course, then chose from more academic subjects such as algebra and chemistry. All over Mississippi, in church basements and parish halls, on shady lawns and in abandoned buildings, volunteer teachers empowered thousands of children and adults through this community curriculum. The Freedom Schools of 1964 demonstrated that when Education involves young people in making community changes that matter to them, when it gives meaning to their lives in the present instead of preparing them only to make a living in the future, young people begin to believe in themselves and to dream of the future.
Grace Lee Boggs (The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century)
Patients tend to assume that their generic drugs are identical to brand-name drugs, in part because they imagine a simple and amicable process: as a patent expires, the brand-name company turns over its recipe, and a generic company makes the same drug, but at a fraction of the cost, since it no longer has to invest in research or marketing. But in fact, generic drug companies fight a legal, scientific, and regulatory battle, often in the dark, from the moment they set out to develop a generic. Mostly, their drugs come to market not with help from brand-name drug companies, but in spite of their efforts to stop them. Brand companies often resort to “shenanigans” and “gaming tactics” to delay generic competition, as the exasperated FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb put it. They will erect a fortress of patents around their drugs, sometimes patenting each manufacturing step—even the time-release mechanism, if there is one. They may make small alterations to their drugs and declare them new, to add years to their patents, a move known as “evergreening.” Rather than sell samples of their drugs, which generic makers need in order to study and reverse-engineer them, brand-name companies will withhold samples, which in 2018 led the FDA to begin publicly shaming the companies accused of such practices by posting their names on its website.
Katherine Eban (Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom)
He had been a timid child in New York City, cut off from schoolboy society by illness, wealth, and private tutors. Inspired by a leonine father, he had labored with weights to build up his strength. Simultaneously, he had built up his courage “by sheer dint of practicing fearlessness.” With every ounce of new muscle, with every point scored over pugilistic, romantic, and political rivals, his personal impetus (likened by many observers to that of a steam train) had accelerated. Experiences had flashed by him in such number that he was obviously destined to travel a larger landscape of life than were his fellows. He had been a published author at eighteen, a husband at twenty-two, an acclaimed historian and New York State Assemblyman at twenty-three, a father and a widower at twenty-five, a ranchman at twenty-six, a candidate for Mayor of New York at twenty-seven, a husband again at twenty-eight, a Civil Service Commissioner of the United States at thirty. By then he was producing book after book, and child after child, and cultivating every scientist, politician, artist, and intellectual of repute in Washington. His career had gathered further speed: Police Commissioner of New York City at thirty-six, Assistant Secretary of the Navy at thirty-eight, Colonel of the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, the “Rough Riders,” at thirty-nine. At last, in Cuba, had come the consummating “crowded hour.” A rush, a roar, the sting of his own blood, a surge toward the sky, a smoking pistol in his hand, a soldier in light blue doubling up “neatly as a jackrabbit” … When the smoke cleared, he had found himself atop Kettle Hill on the Heights of San Juan, with a vanquished empire at his feet.
Edmund Morris (Theodore Rex)
In January 2016, KPMG issued a public statement after the ‘considerable exposure’ its report had received, which, according to KPMG, should not have happened ‘as the work was being conducted under strict rules of confidentiality which were clearly articulated in our letter of engagement as well as in our findings’.23 According to the statement, KPMG submitted a number of drafts to SARS on which they received feedback and their last report was submitted to SARS on 4 December 2015.24 ‘Our mandate was to undertake a documentary review and did not include interviewing individuals named in the report, nor were they given sight of our findings by us.’25 The KPMG report, which had cost the state R23 million, was therefore not a comprehensive forensic investigation but merely a ‘documentary review’. I also wonder how they could claim they didn’t interview anyone named in the report, when I met with the KPMG team on two occasions, at their request. The report contains sweeping statements, is factually incorrect and there is little or no substantiating evidence in too many instances to mention here. The following examples should give the reader an idea, though, of how taxpayers’ money was spent on a KPMG ‘investigation’. Take, for instance, the following finding: ‘We found no evidence indicating that the Minister of Finance, at the time, new about the existence of the Unit in SARS.’26 Firstly, the word ‘new’ means something entirely different from the word ‘knew’. Secondly, since that ‘unit’ was established there have been three ministers of finance and three deputy ministers and two SARS commissioners and deputy commissioners. Which particular minister was being referred to here, and why leave out the deputy ministers and commissioners?
Johann van Loggerenberg (Rogue: The Inside Story of SARS's Elite Crime-busting Unit)
Sadiq al-Mahdi, former prime minister of Sudan, would agree. On March 24, 1999, he wrote to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, that “the traditional concept of JIHAD does allow slavery as a by-product.”11 And so slavery persists to this day in some areas of the Islamic world. The BBC reported in December 2008 that “strong evidence has emerged of children and adults being used as slaves in Sudan’s Darfur region”—where a jihad rages today.12 Mauritanian human rights activist Boubakar Messaoud asserted in 2004 that in that country, people are born and bred as slaves: “A Mauritanian slave, whose parents and grandparents before him were slaves, doesn’t need chains. He has been brought up as a domesticated animal.”13 Three years later, nothing had changed. Messaoud explained in March 2007, “It’s like having sheep or goats. If a woman is a slave, her descendants are slaves.”14 Likewise in Niger, which formally abolished slavery only in 2003, slavery is a long-standing practice. Journalist and anti-slavery activist Souleymane Cisse explained that even Western colonial governments did nothing to halt the practice: “The colonial rulers preferred to ignore it because they wanted to co-operate with the aristocracy who kept these slaves.”15 Islamic slavery has not been unknown even in the United States. When the Saudi national Homaidan Al-Turki was imprisoned for holding a woman as a slave in Colorado, he complained that “the state has criminalized these basic Muslim behaviors. Attacking traditional Muslim behaviors was the focal point of the prosecution.”16 Where did he get the idea that slavery was a “traditional Muslim behavior”? From the Koran. Slavery: it’s in the Koran. And if it’s in the Koran, it is unquestionably right.
Robert Spencer (The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran)
According to Bartholomew, an important goal of St. Louis zoning was to prevent movement into 'finer residential districts . . . by colored people.' He noted that without a previous zoning law, such neighborhoods have become run-down, 'where values have depreciated, homes are either vacant or occupied by color people.' The survey Bartholomew supervised before drafting the zoning ordinance listed the race of each building's occupants. Bartholomew attempted to estimate where African Americans might encroach so the commission could respond with restrictions to control their spread. The St. Louis zoning ordinance was eventually adopted in 1919, two years after the Supreme Court's Buchanan ruling banned racial assignments; with no reference to race, the ordinance pretended to be in compliance. Guided by Bartholomew's survey, it designated land for future industrial development if it was in or adjacent to neighborhoods with substantial African American populations. Once such rules were in force, plan commission meetings were consumed with requests for variances. Race was frequently a factor. For example, on meeting in 1919 debated a proposal to reclassify a single-family property from first-residential to commercial because the area to the south had been 'invaded by negroes.' Bartholomew persuaded the commission members to deny the variance because, he said, keeping the first-residential designation would preserve homes in the area as unaffordable to African Americans and thus stop the encroachment. On other occasions, the commission changed an area's zoning from residential to industrial if African American families had begun to move into it. In 1927, violating its normal policy, the commission authorized a park and playground in an industrial, not residential, area in hopes that this would draw African American families to seek housing nearby. Similar decision making continued through the middle of the twentieth century. In a 1942 meeting, commissioners explained they were zoning an area in a commercial strip as multifamily because it could then 'develop into a favorable dwelling district for Colored people. In 1948, commissioners explained they were designating a U-shaped industrial zone to create a buffer between African Americans inside the U and whites outside. In addition to promoting segregation, zoning decisions contributed to degrading St. Louis's African American neighborhoods into slums. Not only were these neighborhoods zoned to permit industry, even polluting industry, but the plan commission permitted taverns, liquor stores, nightclubs, and houses of prostitution to open in African American neighborhoods but prohibited these as zoning violations in neighborhoods where whites lived. Residences in single-family districts could not legally be subdivided, but those in industrial districts could be, and with African Americans restricted from all but a few neighborhoods, rooming houses sprang up to accommodate the overcrowded population. Later in the twentieth century, when the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) developed the insure amortized mortgage as a way to promote homeownership nationwide, these zoning practices rendered African Americans ineligible for such mortgages because banks and the FHA considered the existence of nearby rooming houses, commercial development, or industry to create risk to the property value of single-family areas. Without such mortgages, the effective cost of African American housing was greater than that of similar housing in white neighborhoods, leaving owners with fewer resources for upkeep. African American homes were then more likely to deteriorate, reinforcing their neighborhoods' slum conditions.
Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
As those people are extreamly apt to get drunk, and, when so, are very quarrelsome and disorderly, we strictly forbad the selling any liquor to them; and when they complain'd of this restriction, we told them that if they would continue sober during the treaty, we would give them plenty of rum when business was over. They promis'd this, and they kept their promise, because they could get no liquor, and the treaty was conducted very orderly, and concluded to mutual satisfaction. They then claim'd and receiv'd the rum; this was in the afternoon; they were near one hundred men, women, and children, and were lodg'd in temporary cabins, built in the form of a square, just without the town. In the evening, hearing a great noise among them, the commissioners walk'd out to see what was the matter. We found they had made a great bonfire in the middle of the square; they were all drunk, men and women, quarreling and fighting. Their dark-colour'd bodies, half naked, seen only by the gloomy light of the bonfire, running after and beating one another with firebrands, accompanied by their horrid yellings, form'd a scene the most resembling our ideas of hell that could well be imagin'd; there was no appeasing the tumult, and we retired to our lodging. At midnight a number of them came thundering at our door, demanding more rum, of which we took no notice. The next day, sensible they had misbehav'd in giving us that disturbance, they sent three of their old counselors to make their apology. The orator acknowledg'd the fault, but laid it upon the rum; and then endeavored to excuse the rum by saying, "The Great Spirit, who made all things, made every thing for some use, and whatever use he design'd any thing for, that use it should always be put to. Now, when he made rum, he said 'Let this be for the Indians to get drunk with,' and it must be so." And, indeed, if it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the appointed means. It has already annihilated all the tribes who formerly inhabited the sea-coast.
Benjamin Franklin (The Complete Harvard Classics - ALL 71 Volumes: The Five Foot Shelf & The Shelf of Fiction: The Famous Anthology of the Greatest Works of World Literature)
You will make a very good Chief Magistrate, I think.” Shock swept over him that he fought mightily to disguise. So she knew of that, did she? “I’m only one of several possible candidates, madam. You do me great honor to assume I’ll be chosen.” “Masters tells me that the appointment is all but settled.” “Then Masters knows more than I do on the subject.” “And more than my granddaughter as well,” she said. His stomach knotted. Damn Mrs. Plumtree and her machinations. “But I’m sure you took great pains to inform her of it.” The woman hesitated, then gripped the head of her cane with both hands. “I thought she should have all the facts before she threw herself into a misalliance.” Hell and blazes. And Mrs. Plumtree had probably implied that a rich wife would advance his career. He could easily guess how Celia would respond to hearing that, especially after he’d fallen on her with all the subtlety of an ox in rut. His temper swelled. Although he’d suspected that Mrs. Plumtree wouldn’t approve of him for her granddaughter, some part of him had thought that his service to the family-and the woman’s own humble beginnings-might keep her from behaving predictably. He should have known better. “No doubt she was grateful for the information.” After all, it gave Celia just the excuse she needed to continue in her march to marry a great lord. “She claimed that there was nothing between you and her.” “She’s right.” There never had been. He’d been a fool to think there could me. “I am glad to hear it.” Her sidelong glance was filled with calculation. “Because if you play your cards right, you have an even better prospect before you than that of Chief Magistrate.” He froze. “What do you mean?” “You may not be aware of this, but one of my friends is the Home Secretary, Robert Peel. Your superior.” “I’m well aware who my superior is.” “It seems he wishes to establish a police force,” she went on. “He is fairly certain that it will come to pass eventually. When it does, he will appoint a commissioner to oversee the entire force in London.” She cast him a hard stare. “You could be that man.” Jackson fought to hide his surprise. He’d heard rumors of Peel’s plans, of course, but hadn’t realized that they’d progressed so far. Or that she was privy to them. Then it dawned on him why she was telling him this. “You mean, I could be that man if I leave your granddaughter alone.
Sabrina Jeffries (A Lady Never Surrenders (Hellions of Halstead Hall, #5))
And what’s the solution of preventing this debacle? Plenty of ‘em! The Communists have a patent Solution they know will work. So have the Fascists, and the rigid American Constitutionalists—who call themselves advocates of Democracy, without any notion what the word ought to mean; and the Monarchists—who are certain that if we could just resurrect the Kaiser and the Czar and King Alfonso, everybody would be loyal and happy again, and the banks would simply force credit on small business men at 2 per cent. And all the preachers—they tell you that they alone have the inspired Solution. “Well, gentlemen, I have listened to all your Solutions, and I now inform you that I, and I alone, except perhaps for Walt Trowbridge and the ghost of Pareto, have the perfect, the inevitable, the only Solution, and that is: There is no Solution! There will never be a state of society anything like perfect! “There never will be a time when there won’t be a large proportion of people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy neighbors who can dance or make love or digest better.” Doremus suspected that, with the most scientific state, it would be impossible for iron deposits always to find themselves at exactly the rate decided upon two years before by the National Technocratic Minerals Commission, no matter how elevated and fraternal and Utopian the principles of the commissioners. His Solution, Doremus pointed out, was the only one that did not flee before the thought that a thousand years from now human beings would probably continue to die of cancer and earthquake and such clownish mishaps as slipping in bathtubs. It presumed that mankind would continue to be burdened with eyes that grow weak, feet that grow tired, noses that itch, intestines vulnerable to bacilli, and generative organs that are nervous until the age of virtue and senility. It seemed to him unidealistically probable, for all the “contemporary furniture” of the 1930’s, that most people would continue, at least for a few hundred years, to sit in chairs, eat from dishes upon tables, read books—no matter how many cunning phonographic substitutes might be invented, wear shoes or sandals, sleep in beds, write with some sort of pens, and in general spend twenty or twenty-two hours a day much as they had spent them in 1930, in 1630.
Sinclair Lewis (It Can't Happen Here)
Kamishna … karibu," alisema Nafi huku akisimama na kutupa gazeti mezani na kuchukua karatasi ya faksi, iliyotumwa. "Ahsante. Kuna nini …" "Kamishna, imekuja faksi kutoka Oslo kama nilivyokueleza – katika simu. Inakutaka haraka, kesho, lazima kesho, kuwahi kikao Alhamisi mjini Copenhagen," alisema Nafi huku akimpa kamishna karatasi ya faksi. "Mjini Copenhagen!" alisema kamishna kwa kutoamini. "Ndiyo, kamishna … Sidhani kama kuna jambo la hatari lakini." "Nafi, nini kimetokea!" "Kamishna … sijui. Kwa kweli sijui. Ilipofika, hii faksi, kitu cha kwanza niliongea na watu wa WIS kupata uthibitisho wao. Nao hawajui. Huenda ni mauaji ya jana ya Meksiko. Hii ni siri kubwa ya tume kamishna, na ndiyo maana Oslo wakaingilia kati." "Ndiyo. Kila mtu ameyasikia mauaji ya Meksiko. Ni mabaya. Kinachonishangaza ni kwamba, jana niliongea na makamu … kuhusu mabadiliko ya katiba ya WODEA. Hakunambia chochote kuhusu mkutano wa kesho!" "Kamishna, nakusihi kuwa makini. Dalili zinaonyesha hali si nzuri hata kidogo. Hawa ni wadhalimu tu … wa madawa ya kulevya." "Vyema!" alijibu kamishna kwa jeuri na hasira. Halafu akaendelea, "Kuna cha ziada?" "Ijumaa, kama tulivyoongea wiki iliyopita, nasafiri kwenda Afrika Kusini." "Kikao kinafanyika Alhamisi, Nafi, huwezi kusafiri Ijumaa …" "Binti yangu atafukuzwa shule, kam …" "Nafi, ongea na chuo … wambie umepata dharura utaondoka Jumatatu; utawaona Jumanne … Fuata maadili ya kazi tafadhali. Safari yako si muhimu hivyo kulinganisha na tume!" "Sawa! Profesa. Niwie radhi, nimekuelewa, samahani sana. Samahani sana.
Enock Maregesi (Kolonia Santita)
British / Pakistani ISIS suspect, Zakaria Saqib Mahmood, is arrested in Bangladesh on suspicion of recruiting jihadists to fight in Syria • Local police named arrested Briton as Zakaria Saqib Mahmood, also known as Zak, living in 70 Eversleigh Road, Westham, E6 1HQ London • They suspect him of recruiting militants for ISIS in two Bangladeshi cities • He arrived in the country in February, having previously spent time in Syria and Pakistan • Suspected militant recruiter also recently visited Australia A forty year old Muslim British man has been arrested in Bangladesh on suspicion of recruiting would-be jihadists to fight for Islamic State terrorists in Syria and Iraq. The man, who police named as Zakaria Saqib Mahmood born 24th August 1977, also known as Zak, is understood to be of Pakistani origin and was arrested near the Kamalapur Railway area of the capital city Dhaka. He is also suspected of having attempted to recruit militants in the northern city of Sylhet - where he is understood to have friends he knows from living in Newham, London - having reportedly first arrived in the country about six months ago to scout for potential extremists. Militants: The British Pakistani man (sitting on the left) named as Zakaria Saqib Mahmood was arrested in Bangladesh. The arrested man has been identified as Zakaria Saqib Mahmood, sources at the media wing of Dhaka Metropolitan Police told local newspapers. He is believed to have arrived in Bangladesh in February and used social media websites including Facebook to sound out local men about their interest in joining ISIS, according Monirul Islam - joint commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police - who was speaking at a press briefing today. Zakaria has openly shared Islamist extremist materials on his Facebook and other social media links. An example of Zakaria Saqib Mahmood sharing Islamist materials on his Facebook profile He targeted Muslims from Pakistan as well as Bangladesh, Mr Islam added, before saying: 'He also went to Australia but we are yet to know the reason behind his trips'. Zakaria saqib Mahmood trip to Australia in order to recruit for militant extremist groups 'From his passport we came to know that he went to Pakistan where we believe he met a Jihadist named Rauf Salman, in addition to Australia during September last year to meet some of his links he recruited in London, mainly from his weekly charity food stand in East London, ' the DMP spokesperson went on to say. Police believes Zakaria Mahmood has met Jihadist member Rauf Salman in Pakistan Zakaria Saqib Mahmood was identified by the local police in Pakistan in the last September. The number of extremists he has met in this trip remains unknown yet. Zakaria Saqib Mahmood uses charity food stand as a cover to radicalise local people in Newham, London. Investigators: Dhaka Metropolitan Police believe Zakaria Saqib Mhamood arrived in Bangladesh in February and used social media websites including Facebook to sound out local men about their interest in joining ISIS The news comes just days after a 40-year-old East London bogus college owner called Sinclair Adamson - who also had links to the northern city of Sylhet - was arrested in Dhaka on suspicion of recruiting would-be fighters for ISIS. Zakaria Saqib Mahmood, who has studied at CASS Business School, was arrested in Dhaka on Thursday after being reported for recruiting militants. Just one day before Zakaria Mahmood's arrest, local police detained Asif Adnan, 26, and Fazle ElahiTanzil, 24, who were allegedly travelling to join ISIS militants in Syria, assisted by an unnamed Briton. It is understood the suspected would-be jihadists were planning to travel to a Turkish airport popular with tourists, before travelling by road to the Syrian border and then slipping across into the warzone.
Zakaria Zaqib Mahmood
Mayor Bill Thompson was vacationing in Wyoming, and he’d insisted on bringing Police Commissioner John Garrity with him, leaving Chicago without its top law enforcement official when the riot exploded.
Simon Balto (Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power)
In March 1950 Sukumar Sen was appointed chief election commissioner.
Ramachandra Guha (India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy)
By 1937, Charlestown’s civic leaders were fed up with the practice, which had blighted the Town’s reputation. A committee demanded that the Police Commissioner end looping “at all costs.” Late that year, authorities announced that any captured looper would be publicly flogged on a platform in City Square. The plan was never implemented, but increased police surveillance led to the arrest of seventy-seven loopers in 1937 alone. The next March, Mayor Maurice Tobin ordered Bunker Hill Street dug up at three locations to create “bottlenecks” slightly wider than an automobile wheel base and filled with low concrete pyramids. If these traps weren’t negotiated at low speeds the pyramids would rupture the car’s undercarriage.
J. Anthony Lukas (Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (Pulitzer Prize Winner))
Over the next few years, the number of African Americans seeking jobs and homes in and near Palo Alto grew, but no developer who depended on federal government loan insurance would sell to them, and no California state-licensed real estate agent would show them houses. But then, in 1954, one resident of a whites-only area in East Palo Alto, across a highway from the Stanford campus, sold his house to a black family. Almost immediately Floyd Lowe, president of the California Real Estate Association, set up an office in East Palo Alto to panic white families into listing their homes for sale, a practice known as blockbusting. He and other agents warned that a 'Negro invasion' was imminent and that it would result in collapsing property values. Soon, growing numbers of white owners succumbed to the scaremongering and sold at discounted prices to the agents and their speculators. The agents, including Lowe himself, then designed display ads with banner headlines-"Colored Buyers!"-which they ran in San Francisco newspapers. African Americans desperate for housing, purchased the homes at inflated prices. Within a three-month period, one agent alone sold sixty previously white-owned properties to African Americans. The California real estate commissioner refused to take any action, asserting that while regulations prohibited licensed agents from engaging in 'unethical practices,' the exploitation of racial fear was not within the real estate commission's jurisdiction. Although the local real estate board would ordinarily 'blackball' any agent who sold to a nonwhite buyer in the city's white neighborhoods (thereby denying the agent access to the multiple listing service upon which his or her business depended), once wholesale blockbusting began, the board was unconcerned, even supportive.
Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
Over the next few years, the number of African Americans seeking jobs and homes in and near Palo Alto grew, but no developer who depended on federal government loan insurance would sell to them, and no California state-licensed real estate agent would show them houses. But then, in 1954, one resident of a whites-only area in East Palo Alto, across a highway from the Stanford campus, sold his house to a black family. Almost immediately Floyd Lowe, president of the California Real Estate Association, set up an office in East Palo Alto to panic white families into listing their homes for sale, a practice known as blockbusting. He and other agents warned that a 'Negro invasion' was imminent and that it would result in collapsing property values. Soon, growing numbers of white owners succumbed to the scaremongering and sold at discounted prices to the agents and their speculators. The agents, including Lowe himself, then designed display ads with banner headlines-"Colored Buyers!"-which they ran in San Francisco newspapers. African Americans desperate for housing, purchased the homes at inflated prices. Within a three-month period, one agent alone sold sixty previously white-owned properties to African Americans. The California real estate commissioner refused to take any action, asserting that while regulations prohibited licensed agents from engaging in 'unethical practices,' the exploitation of racial fear was not within the real estate commission's jurisdiction. Although the local real estate board would ordinarily 'blackball' any agent who sold to a nonwhite buyer in the city's white neighborhoods (thereby denying the agent access to the multiple listing service upon which his or her business depended), once wholesale blockbusting began, the board was unconcerned, even supportive. At the time, the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration not only refused to insure mortgages for African Americans in designated white neighborhoods like Ladera; they also would not insure mortgages for whites in a neighborhood where African Americans were present. So once East Palo Alto was integrated, whites wanting to move into the area could no longer obtain government-insured mortgages. State-regulated insurance companies, like the Equitable Life Insurance Company and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, also declared that their policy was not to issue mortgages to whites in integrated neighborhoods. State insurance regulators had no objection to this stance. The Bank of America and other leading California banks had similar policies, also with the consent of federal banking regulators. Within six years the population of East Palo Alto was 82 percent black. Conditions deteriorated as African Americans who had been excluded from other neighborhoods doubled up in single-family homes. Their East Palo Alto houses had been priced so much higher than similar properties for whites that the owners had difficulty making payments without additional rental income. Federal and state hosing policy had created a slum in East Palo Alto. With the increased density of the area, the school district could no longer accommodate all Palo Alto students, so in 1958 it proposed to create a second high school to accommodate teh expanding student population. The district decided to construct the new school in the heart of what had become the East Palo Alto ghetto, so black students in Palo Alto's existing integrated building would have to withdraw, creating a segregated African American school in the eastern section and a white one to the west. the board ignored pleas of African American and liberal white activists that it draw an east-west school boundary to establish two integrated secondary schools. In ways like these, federal, state, and local governments purposely created segregation in every metropolitan area of the nation.
Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
ACLU had won at the court of appeals level, Charles E. Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg (My Own Words)
Major Rootham stretched out his hand for the phone. “I’ll ask for a first rate man,” he said to himself. The upshot of Major Rootham’s request to the Commissioner’s Office was that Chief Inspector Macdonald was detailed to investigate the matter of Sister Monica’s death.
E.C.R. Lorac (Murder in the Mill Race)
Almost immediately it was confirmed that Assistant Commissioner Ray McAndrew would review the allegations made by Mrs Farrell and, in particular, her claims in respect of the behaviour of key officers involved in the du Plantier investigation over the previous decade. The review would involve interviews with all key players involved. But, critically, there was no indication at the outset that the report would ever be published. Instead, the McAndrew Report would be submitted to the garda commissioner on its completion in 2007. It comprised interviews with almost 100 people, around 50 of whom were either serving or retired gardaí and detectives. The Minister for Justice would also be briefed on its findings and recommendations. But it wasn’t just the garda commissioner and Minister for Justice who examined the McAndrew Report. It was also submitted to the DPP’s office for consideration. To the surprise of no one, it subsequently emerged that no prosecutorial action was recommended on the basis of the report or its findings. That report has never been made available to the public–and has never been fully referenced in any of the court proceedings either in Ireland or France. The McAndrew Report was not even discussed in detail in the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission (GSOC) report, which would be painstakingly compiled over eight years following
Ralph Riegel (A Dream of Death: How Sophie Toscan du Plantier’s Dream Became a Nightmare and a West Cork Village Became the Centre of Ireland’s Most Notorious Unsolved Murder)
By early 2014 there were sufficient indications that the High Court action would prove extraordinary by Irish legal standards. It had emerged that a telephone system that handled emergency calls, which had been installed in garda stations across Ireland in the 1980s, had a recording function. Such a recording function posed fundamental problems at a garda station–not least for some conversations between gardaí, which should have been treated as confidential. This system with a recording function was discontinued in November 2013. The garda commissioner at the time, Martin Callinan, had alerted the Department of Justice in March 2014 to the fact that the recording system had been in place. So seriously was the matter taken that it was immediately brought to the attention of Taoiseach Enda Kenny and discussed at a full Cabinet meeting on 25 March. By that time, the retirement of Commissioner Callinan had been confirmed in the wake of the controversy over the treatment of the so-called garda ‘whistle-blower’ Maurice McCabe. Bandon Garda Station, the centre of the du Plantier murder investigation, had such a telephone recording system and it had been in operation between 1997 and 2003–critical periods for the du Plantier investigation.
Ralph Riegel (A Dream of Death: How Sophie Toscan du Plantier’s Dream Became a Nightmare and a West Cork Village Became the Centre of Ireland’s Most Notorious Unsolved Murder)
The first Board of Commissioners were F. Law Olmsted, J. D. Whitney, William Ashburner, I. W. Raymond, E. S. Holden, Alexander Deering, George W. Coulter, and Galen Clark.
John Muir (The Yosemite (Modern Library Classics))
The trio of white men with the commissioner—a marquess, and two earls—were known throughout London as powerful, vocal members of the House of Lords. They were trotted out every time a reform bill was even whispered about in the news—workers’ rights, women’s rights, immigrants’ rights,
Sarah MacLean (Knockout (Hell's Belles, #3))
The trio of white men with the commissioner—a marquess, and two earls—were known throughout London as powerful, vocal members of the House of Lords. They were trotted out every time a reform bill was even whispered about in the news—workers’ rights, women’s rights, immigrants’ rights, compulsory education—to shout down the truth and drum up anger from any who would listen.
Sarah MacLean (Knockout (Hell's Belles, #3))
both the Presidential Commission and the House Committee fully agreed on one point: “Neither NASA nor Thiokol fully understood the operation of the joint prior to the accident.”132 Commissioner Feynman observed, “The origin and consequences of the erosion and blow-by were not understood . . . officials behaved as if they understood it, giving apparently logical arguments to each other often depending on the ‘success’ of previous flights.”133 Only in the wake of the tragedy was it clear they had not understood. At the end of 1985, they believed they did.
Diane Vaughan (The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA)
People, unless they’re paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority. For me, I’ve noodled about this a fair amount because a lot of this sort of language afflicts me. My guess is this: officialese, as spoken by officials, is meant to empty the communication of a certain level of humanity. On purpose. If I’m delivering a press release as an official, I’m speaking not as David Wallace. I’m speaking as the deputy assistant commissioner in charge of whatever. I’m speaking with and for some sort of bureaucratic entity. My guess is one of the reasons why we as a people tolerate, or even expect, this officialese is that we associate it with a different form of communication than interpersonal—Dave and Bryan talking together. That the people who are speaking are in many senses speaking not as human beings but as the larynx and tongue of a larger set of people, responsibilities, laws, regulations, whatever.
David Foster Wallace (Quack This Way)
Commissioner Floyd was inclined to think they hadn’t. Rear Admiral Pyun was inclined to think Commissioner Floyd was an idiot.
David Weber (A Rising Thunder (Honor Harrington, #13))
American Indians, for example, had resisted every effort by the English to teach them the arts of civilization. Franklin thought this striking, yet hardly inexplicable. “They visit us frequently,” he told Collinson, “and see the advantages that arts, sciences, and compact society procure us. They are not deficient in natural understanding, and yet they have never shewn any inclination to change their manner of life for ours, or to learn any of our arts.” The reason was plain enough: “In their present way of living, almost all their wants are supplied by the spontaneous productions of nature, with the addition of very little labour, if hunting and fishing may indeed be called labour when game is so plenty.” Significantly, when an Indian child was brought up in white ways, the education often failed to stick. “If he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.” More significantly, the opposite was not true. White children raised as Indians demonstrated no desire, after visits to English settlements, to stay there. “In a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.” In one case an Englishman raised with the Indians inherited a substantial estate; he came home to test his new circumstances but soon abandoned them, leaving the estate to a younger brother and carrying off only a gun and a coat. Franklin related yet another story that further illustrated his point. Some years earlier one of the colonies had concluded a treaty with the Six Nations (the Iroquois confederacy of the lower Great Lakes region). All that remained was the exchange of civilities. The English commissioners offered to underwrite the education of half a dozen of the brightest Indian lads at the College of William and Mary, the finest educational institution in the region. The Indians responded that they were most grateful for this kind offer but must decline. Some Indian youths had been educated in this way several years before and had returned good for nothing, being unable to hunt, trap, or fight. The Indians made a counteroffer: to take a dozen English children to the Indians’ great council, where they would be raised as real and useful men.
H.W. Brands (The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin)
When the British Empire sank beneath the waves of history,’ the high commissioner told him, ‘it would leave behind only two monuments: one was the game of Association Football, the other was the expression, “Fuck off”.’12
James Barr (Lords of the Desert: Britain's Struggle with America to Dominate the Middle East)
Now this-this bootlicking gesture!-having a Commissioner take a Vegan scribbler on a tour any staff guide could conduct! Vegans aren't gods!
Zelazny Roger
In the meantime, the Zionist movement’s men in London were spinning fantasies of a provisional administration headed by a Jewish president, whose authority would resemble that of a high commissioner in a British colony
Tom Segev (One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate)
An intelligent and industrious crofter was proud to show our commissioner a cart of his own particular invention, and which, though furnished with what is proverbially regarded as a superfluity in the shape of of a 'third wheel', seemed exceedingly well adapted to its purpose. It was in use at the time for the purpose of driving home turnips from the field, the team consisting of the owner's two cows; and a more tractable or docile team it would have been difficult to imagine, indeed the assurance was given by a neighbour that not only did they obey their owner readily and efficiently in the draught, but that one of them, in particular, would come from the most distant part of the holding whenever he chose to call and wave his hat as a signal that her presence was wanted for business!
William Alexander (Rural life in Victorian Aberdeenshire)
Bloomberg allowed Commissioner Kelly a lot of autonomy to make law enforcement decisions. There’s good reason for this: operational choices and even strategic plans are better when they’re based on objective conditions and free of politics.
Bill Bratton (The Profession: A Memoir of Policing in America)
Along with such worthies as Almond L. Bliss, Archimedes Stevenson, Alton F. Pratt, Dusenberry J. Furman, and Deacon Ransom Todd, he was one of several hundred individuals profiled in the 1888 commemorative volume Portrait and Biographical Album of Lenawee County, Mich. That publication extoled him as a “valuable citizen” who had become known throughout the locality as a stock breeder, first of short-horn cattle, later of Shropshire fine-wool sheep and Poland-China hogs. His prize bull, Garfield—a “fine, well-proportioned animal”—was the envy of neighboring farmers.3 In addition to his business pursuits, he served in a number of official capacities, including township drain commissioner. He was a pillar of his church, St. Dominic in the township of Clinton.4
Harold Schechter (Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer)
In 1930, Lord Irwin had waited before arresting Gandhi. It was unlikely that his successor would repeat that mistake. Knowing this, on 3 January 1932, Gandhi issued instructions through the press as to what the public should do when he was taken into custody. They should wear khadi, boycott foreign goods, manufacture their own salt and picket liquor shops, in all of these actions ‘discard[ing] every trace of violence’. In Bombay, Gandhi was staying as usual at Mani Bhavan. It was his custom to sleep on the terrace, the open sky above him, his disciples on the floor around him. Early in the morning of 4 January, he was woken up by the city’s commissioner of police, who had come to arrest him. It was Gandhi’s day of silence. Asking for a pencil and piece of paper, he wrote; ‘I shall be ready to come with you in half an hour'.
Ramachandra Guha (Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World)
the installation of Congress ministries in six large provinces of British India was a major milestone in the constitutional history of the subcontinent. Much more power had devolved on to the shoulder of Indians than at any previous time in the history of the Raj. Indeed, since precolonial regimes were themselves devoid of democratic representation, and were run by unelected kings who nominated their ministers, this was the furthest that Indians had thus far got in the direction of self-rule, swaraj. Surely it was now only a matter of years before the Congress, and India, achieved the next step, of Dominion Status, thus to place themselves on par with Canada, Australiaand South Africa. A sign of how much of a departure from colonial practice these elections were is underlined in a humble office order issued by the Central Provinces government after their own Congress ministry was installed. It was signed by an Indian ICS officer, C.M. Trivedi, then serving as the secretary to the general administration department. The order was sent to all commissioners and deputy commissioners, the chief conservator of forests, the inspector general of police, all secretaries to government, and a host of other senior officials (including the military secretary and the governor), almost all of whom were, of course, British. The text of the order was short and simple, albeit, in the eyes of its recipients, not altogether sweet. It read: ‘In future Mr. Gandhi should be referred to in all correspondence as “Mahatma Gandhi”.
Ramachandra Guha (Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World)
Threatening a police officer, let alone the commissioner, is a crime, you know.” “Yeah, I know. I also know a good lawyer,” he smirked.
Eve Marian (Protecting Nikole (Billionaire Bodyguards #1))
After the fractious second trial of the Watch in the summer of 1764, the Board of Longitude allowed months to pass without saying a word. The commissioners were waiting for the mathematicians to compare their computations of H-4’s performance with the astronomers’ observations of the longitude of Portsmouth and Barbados, all of which had to be factored into the judging. When they heard the final report, the commissioners conceded that they were “unanimously of opinion that the said timekeeper has kept its time with sufficient correctness.” They could hardly say otherwise: The Watch proved to tell the longitude within ten miles—three times more accurately than the terms of the Longitude Act demanded! But this stupendous success gained Harrison only a small victory. The Watch and its maker still had lots of explaining to do.
Dava Sobel (Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time)
on his own games—“covert” and “conspiratorial” bets—was a player with a conflict of interest, more invested in himself than he was in the team, and more beholden to outside forces than any commissioner could tolerate.
Keith O'Brien (Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball)
[T]here is no question about society’s instinctive response to her plight. It is simply to ostracize her…she will probably be expelled from school…such swift action is not meted out to the unmarried school boy father…Says former U.S. Commissioner of Education, Lawrence Derthick, ‘Many school systems …are prevented by law from providing teachers…or making homebound programs available from public funds for unwed mothers…there is no way a girl can earn credits for any scholastic work she does during pregnancy…there is no way by which she can conceal the fact that the earning was done in a maternity home…
Karen Wilson-Buterbaugh (The Baby Scoop Era: Unwed Mothers, Infant Adoption, and Forced Surrender)
But before Haffenden could even make a choice of go-betweens, he had to recruit an inspector in the Westchester District, who then made clear to Haffenden that there was yet another hurdle: In order to set up a meeting with Luciano in prison, Haffenden would have to get the approval of the New York Commissioner of Correction, John Lyons.
Matthew Black (Operation Underworld: How the Mafia and U.S. Government Teamed Up to Win World War II)
Social distancing mandates also rested on a dubious scientific footing. In September 2021, former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gotleib admitted that the six-foot distancing rule that Dr. Fauci and his HHS colleagues imposed upon Americans was “arbitrary,” and not, after all, science backed.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
two turnpike commissioners in Pennsylvania. Even the jury found those boys guilty of conspiracy.
Richard S. Prather (Shell Scott PI Mystery Series, Volume Three)
In early 1962, he defended his friend and loyal supporter, Boston Police Commissioner Leo Sullivan and his beloved Boston policemen in the face of the embarrassing television evidence of the Key Shop Bookie operation which showed Boston policemen entering the shop during book-making hours.
Joseph Dever (Cushing of Boston: A Candid Portrait)
Beginning in the late 1800s, New York Criminal Court judges could, at their discretion, appoint a lunacy commission to evaluate the sanity of a defendant charged with homicide. Each commission consisted of three “disinterested men”: an attorney, a physician, and a layman, almost always a businessman. After conducting a lengthy investigation, the members would offer an opinion as to whether the defendant was mentally fit to stand trial. In later years, the commissioners were also expected to assess the defendant’s state of mind while committing the crime. The role of the commission was strictly advisory—the court was at liberty to approve or dismiss its findings.10
Harold Schechter (The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation)
The blue-ribbon panel of 150 potential jurors selected for the Irwin trial, however, consisted entirely of men. When Leibowitz protested, he was informed by Frederick H. Cahoon, Acting Commissioner of Jurors, that, while women now had the option to serve on juries, they were “barred from membership on special panels of talesmen for murder trials.” Leibowitz immediately declared that “the procedure was not legal” and that “if Irwin were found guilty of first-degree murder, he would make the exclusion of women talesmen the main contention for a reversal.”15
Harold Schechter (The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation)
It is interesting to note that, following World War II, McCloy became the high commissioner of occupied Germany; John Foster Dulles became President Eisenhower’s secretary of state; Allen Dulles became the longest-serving CIA director; and Bush, as a senator from Connecticut, was instrumental in forming the CIA. It might also be noted that both McCloy and Allen Dulles sat on the largely discredited Warren Commission assigned by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Jim Marrs (The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy)
When he’d represented Roxbury’s Ward 14 in the statehouse, John Collins had felt powerless to compete with suburban legislators and lobbyists. Boston’s elected officials could not raise taxes or even appoint a new police commissioner without the approval of legislators from neighboring cities and towns, and Boston’s legislators rarely got the better of their suburban counterparts. Boston’s Finance Commission — to take only one example — was funded through city taxes but the governor appointed all of its members.
Lawrence Harmon (The Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good Intentions)
That was Wield, a mind for all seasons. In Pascoe’s opinion he was one of the best cops in Mid-Yorkshire, if not in the whole country. Sticking at sergeant had been his own choice, at first because he didn’t want his gayness to become a promotion issue, and latterly, since setting up home with Edwin Digweed, because he had no desire to take any step which might disturb his domestic happiness. In an unprejudiced society, he’d have been Commissioner by now, thought Pascoe.
Reginald Hill (Death Comes For The Fat Man (Dalziel & Pascoe, #22))
Today I fear that we are in fact waking up to a surveillance society that is already all around us. —Richard Thomas, U.K. information commissioner, November 2006
Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism)
Typically, a constable only sits in the Commissioner’s anteroom when he’s been very brave or very stupid, and I really couldn’t tell which one applied to me.
Ben Aaronovitch (Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1))
I come from the lower orders, that is understood by all. Not the lowest; you’d have to go back to my grandfather for the lowest. He was a night-soil remover, did you know that, Sam? One shilling per stinking cesspit. Did you know that they set me to working with him when I was a boy? One summer I chucked it, ran to the countryside, hid in a hay mow. Farmer found me in the morning, took pity, let me stay. Let me work with him and his dogs, tending his sheep. It was bliss. I never loved anything like I loved them dogs. Then my father showed up and dragged me home. Why? He didn’t want me. “Never mind. You could say my father’s rise to running his own public house was nothing short of a miracle, really. And then I went and edged up a rung from him, didn’t I, when I became a constable. Promoted to detective. Then chief of detectives. Still and all, I got about as high as I could possibly go, given what I come from. And that ain’t particular high. Just ask Sir Richard Mayne, commissioner of the Metropolitan, if you’re unsure of that.” Llewellyn sighed deeply and shook his head. “You seem impatient, Mr. Llewellyn. Am I keeping you?” Field poured the last of the whiskey into his glass. “Now, forget my old man. Forget the night-soil remover. Start over. Say I come from a monkey. And so did you. And Commissioner Mayne—him, too.” He looked around the tavern. “And so did every bleeding body on the whole earth come from monkeys, and those monkeys come from God knows what—fish? Worms? Who benefits, Sam? Who gets hurt? Who likes it, and who don’t?” Llewellyn shrugged. “I’ll tell you who don’t like it: the merchants who run the bleeding empire don’t like it, not one bit. It puts every man on the same level as them, see? The rich, the poor, the light-skinned, and the dark. The bishops don’t like it, nor the lords, because if Mr. Darwin has his way, where’s the control? Who’s in charge, who’s on top and who’s not? Bad for business, Mr. Darwin’s notions are. But for blokes like me and you? Well, even a policeman can dream, can’t he? It’s not flattering, perhaps, having an orangutan as your forefather, but there’s a kind of hope in it, don’t you see? Last I checked, there weren’t no quality monkeys, nor were there lower-class ones.” “And?” “Crash, boom, Mr. Darwin brings it all down. Rule Britannia and the lot. Brings it down harder and more thorough than Mr. Marx ever dreamt in his darkest revolutionary dream.
Tim Mason (The Darwin Affair)
The initiatory step of the policy subsequently developed was found in one sentence: "Therefore, all manufacturers of arms and munitions of war are hereby requested to report to me forthwith, so that the lawfulness of their occupations may be known and understood, and all misconstruction of their doings avoided." There soon followed a demand for the surrender of the arms stored by the city authorities in a warehouse. The police refused to surrender them without the orders of the police commissioners. The police commissioners, upon representation that the demand of General Butler was by order of the President, decided to surrender the arms under protest, and they were accordingly removed to Fort McHenry. Baltimore was now disarmed.
Jefferson Davis (The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government)
The Commissioners, in the discharge of the duty intrusted to them, arrived in Washington on the 26th of December. Before they could communicate with the President, however—indeed, on the morning after their arrival—they were startled, and the whole country electrified, by the news that, during the previous night, Major Anderson had "secretly dismantled Fort Moultrie," 116 spiked his guns, burned his gun-carriages, and removed his command to Fort Sumter, which occupied a more commanding position in the harbor. This movement changed the whole aspect of affairs. It was considered by the Government and people of South Carolina as a violation of the implied pledge of a maintenance of the status quo; the remaining forts and other public property were at once taken possession of by the State; and the condition of public feeling became greatly exacerbated.
Jefferson Davis (The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government)
commissioners. Generally, however, Chen and Cottrell found less bias in plans prepared by commissions than when a party with a trifecta had control.131
Charles S. Bullock III (Redistricting: The Most Political Activity in America)
In 1767 he crossed to France, where he was received with honor; but before his return home in 1775 he lost his position as postmaster through his share in divulging to Massachusetts the famous letter of Hutchinson and Oliver. On his arrival in Philadelphia he was chosen a member of the Continental Congress and in 1777 he was despatched to France as commissioner for the United States. Here he remained till 1785, the favorite of French society; and with such success did he conduct the affairs of his country that when he finally returned he received a place only second to that of Washington as the champion of American independence. He died on April 17, 1790.
Benjamin Franklin (The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin)
In a short time a group of commissioners arrived to begin organization of a new Indian agency in the valley. One of them mentioned the advantages of schools for Joseph’s people. Joseph replied that the Nez Percés did not want the white man’s schools. “Why do you not want schools?” the commissioner asked. “They will teach us to have churches,” Joseph answered. “Do you not want churches?” “No, we do not want churches.” “Why do you not want churches?” “They will teach us to quarrel about God,” Joseph said. “We do not want to learn that. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on this earth, but we never quarrel about God. We do not want to learn that.” 3 Meanwhile,
Dee Brown (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West)
member of the Continental Congress and in 1777 he was despatched to France as commissioner for the United States. Here he remained till 1785, the favorite of French society; and with such success did he conduct the affairs of his country that when he finally returned he received a place only second to that of Washington as the champion of American independence. He died on April 17, 1790. The first five chapters of the Autobiography were composed in England in 1771, continued in 1784-5, and again in 1788, at which date he brought it down to 1757. After a most extraordinary series of adventures, the original form of the manuscript was finally printed by Mr. John Bigelow, and is here reproduced in recognition of its value as a picture of one of the most notable personalities of Colonial times, and of its acknowledged rank as one of the great autobiographies
Benjamin Franklin (The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin)
What do you say, Doctor?” asked Hawks. The doctor hesitated a moment and then smiled. “Well, Commissioner, Cadet Manning has several strained muscles in his back, but the best treatment for that is exercise.” Hawks nodded and signed a release slip which the doctor gave him. Astro helped Roger put on his space boots, and five minutes later they were speeding back to the exposition grounds
Carey Rockwell (The Tom Corbett Space Cadet Megapack: 10 Classic Young Adult Sci-Fi Novels)
He asked for fifteen Lieutenant-Commissioners, one of whom was to be Cicero (who accepted, typically, on condition that he would not have to leave Rome).
Anthony Everitt (Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician)
Albert Robbins was a good sheriff, even though he didn’t hold the job for long. The commissioners were impressed by him. When we heard of his passing, I told my husband, ‘A fine, upstanding man who faithfully served our community deserves to have his family taken care of. Two little boys, now without a father. It’s a pitiful shame.’ ” She sighed and shook her head. “I declare, sometimes I wonder if the Lord knows what He is doing.
Sharyn McCrumb (Prayers the Devil Answers (Ballad #11))
As Powers shortly learned, one of Holden’s high-ranking friends was Malcolm MacDonald, the last British Governor of Kenya, which he helped to gain independence in 1963. Previously, MacDonald was the High Commissioner of India, and, prior to that, the Commissioner-General for Southeast Asia, where Holden spent much of his time. The likelihood that the movie star might have been a CIA informant was a distinct possibility – if not an absolute certainty. Whatever the answer, he never confided the truth to Powers.
Howard Johns (Drowning Sorrows: A True Story of Love, Passion and Betrayal)