“
We have been expropriated from our own language by television, from our songs by reality TV contests, from our flesh by mass pornography, from our city by the police and from our friends by wage-labor.
”
”
The Invisible Committee (The Coming Insurrection)
“
The opportunity was too perfect to miss. Harry crept silently around behind Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle, bent down, and scooped a large handful of mud out of the path.
'We were just talking about your friend Hagrid,'
Malfoy said to Ron. 'Just trying to imagine what he's saying to the Committee for the Disposal of Dangerous Creatures. D'you think he'll cry when they cut off his hippogriff's—'
SPLAT.
Malfoy's head jerked back as the mud hit him; his silverblond hair was suddenly dripping in muck.
”
”
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter, #3))
“
Lena was suspicious of many things. But she had earned her suspicions about boys. Lena knew boys. They never looked beyond your looks. They pretended to be your friend to get you to trust them, and as soon as you trusted them, they went in for the grope. They pretended to want to work on a history project or volunteer on your blood drive committee to get your attention. But as soon as they got it through their skulls that you didn't want to go out with them, they suddenly weren't interested in time lines or dire blood shortages. Worst of all, on occasion they even went out with one of your best friends to get close to you, and broke that same best friend's heart when the truth came out. Lean preferred plain guys to cute ones, but even the plain ones disappointed her.
”
”
Ann Brashares (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Sisterhood, #1))
“
Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience. I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited success to help the reduced forces of Czech dissent to stay nourished (and published). The most pregnant moment of that commitment was one that I managed to miss at the time: I passed an afternoon with Zdenek Mlynar, exiled former secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who in the bleak early 1950s in Moscow had formed a friendship with a young Russian militant with an evident sense of irony named Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev. In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel's 'Charter 77' committees. That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a cliché (as well as a tundra of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the cliché upon me in turn. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who had been consistent friends through the stultifying years of what 'The Party' had so perfectly termed 'normalization.' As with my tiny moment with Nelson Mandela, a whole historic stretch of nothingness and depression, combined with the long and deep insult of having to be pushed around by boring and mediocre people, could be at least partially canceled and annealed by one flash of humor and charm and generosity.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
“
According to the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Foundation statement, approximately 10,000 American military women were stationed in Vietnam during the war. Most were nurses in the Army, Air Force, and Navy, but women also served as physicians and medical personnel, and in air traffic control and military intelligence. Civilian women also served in Vietnam as news correspondents and workers for the Red Cross, Donut Dollies, the USO, Special Services, the American Friends Service Committee, Catholic Relief Services, and other humanitarian organizations.
”
”
Kristin Hannah (The Women)
“
Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg, including Hitler's former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression against Czechoslovakia and committing atrocities against the Jewish people. On the same day, the State of Israel celebrated its first Passover seder and the United Nations, still meeting in those days at Flushing Meadow in Queens, voted to consider the Jewish state's application for membership. In Damascus, eleven newspapers were closed by the regime of General Hosni Zayim. In America, the National Committee on Alcoholism announced an upcoming 'A-Day' under the non-uplifting slogan: 'You can drink—help the alcoholic who can't.' ('Can't'?) The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled in favor of Britain in the Corfu Channel dispute with Albania. At the UN, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko denounced the newly formed NATO alliance as a tool for aggression against the USSR. The rising Chinese Communists, under a man then known to Western readership as Mao Tze-Tung, announced a limited willingness to bargain with the still-existing Chinese government in a city then known to the outside world as 'Peiping.'
All this was unknown to me as I nuzzled my mother's breast for the first time, and would certainly have happened in just the same way if I had not been born at all, or even conceived. One of the newspaper astrologists for that day addressed those whose birthday it was:
There are powerful rays from the planet Mars, the war god, in your horoscope for your coming year, and this always means a chance to battle if you want to take it up. Try to avoid such disturbances where women relatives or friends are concerned, because the outlook for victory upon your part in such circumstances is rather dark. If you must fight, pick a man!
Sage counsel no doubt, which I wish I had imbibed with that same maternal lactation, but impartially offered also to the many people born on that day who were also destined to die on it.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
“
Mrs. Fixer
We call her Mrs. Fixer because she fixes
Everything for everybody.
If you need a ride, you call her,
Or a meal, or a telephone committee.
She'll find you an apartment or a part-time job,
Even a date if you're in the market.
And all the time she only wants someone to love her
But she's afraid to ask.
So she fixes everything for everybody instead
And you keep calling her when you need something
And forget to tell her that you love her.
So she'll probably die lonely
And have a big funeral
And everyone will tell about
The way she fixed things all the time.
”
”
James Kavanaugh (Will You Be My Friend?)
“
Things are going so well today that it feels not impossible it is the Nobel Committee. But, friends, it is not the Nobel Committee. It is a rule of life, alas, that it is never the Nobel Committee.
”
”
Andrew Sean Greer (Less Is Lost (Arthur Less #2))
“
Our lives are spent plopped on the gluteal upholstery for eight hours a day with only imaginary friends for company, spinning lies, marinating in envy, and wondering when the Pulitzer committee is going to twig to our brilliance.
”
”
Sarah Bird (Recent Studies Indicate: The Best of Sarah Bird)
“
Power and influence in Congress," he explained, "are not obtained by promoting one's own measures. They come either from blocking measures others want enacted or sup- porting measures others oppose. As a member of the Agricul- ture Committee, Mrs. Chisholm would have been in an ideal position to make her presence felt. Without offending her own constituents, she could have voted against all of the bills introduced for the benefit of farmers. At the same time she could have introduced bills to scuttle price supports and other farm programs. Before long, farm belt congressmen would have been knocking on her door, asking favors." That kind of long-range Machiavellian strategy may be fine for a white, mid-western congressman whose district has more cows than voters, and who has all the time in the world to try to work himself up to that comfortable share of power that a House member can achieve if he plays by the rules, makes his district "safe," and lives long enough. What I can never forget, and what my friend the reporter apparently never knew, is that there are children in my district who will not live long enough for me to play it the way he proposes.
”
”
Shirley Chisholm (Unbought and Unbossed)
“
One of the more stunning moments during Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2017 occurred when he confessed that he deliberately leaked to “a friend” the contents of the presidential memorandums memorializing his conversations with Trump.59 He directed that friend, Daniel Richman of Columbia Law School, to leak the information to the New York Times with the objective that it would trigger the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the man who had just fired him.
”
”
Gregg Jarrett (The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump)
“
Hunting Down the Secular Humanists" "...What makes them so dangerous is that Secular Humanists look just like you and me. Some of them could be your best friends without you knowing that they are Humanists. They could come into your house, play with your children, eat your food and even watch football with you on television, and you'd never know they have read Catcher in the Rye, Brave New World, and Huckleberry Finn....
No one is safe until Congress sets up an Anti-Secular Humanism Committee to get at the rot. Witnesses have to be called, and they have to name names.
”
”
Art Buchwald
“
A healthy agency does not require relevance to the national agenda so much as the APPEARANCE of relevance to the national agenda," Humphrey explained. "It is perhaps the second-most important tool in ensuring continued funding."
"And the most important?"
"A friend on the Appropriations committee.
”
”
Jim Geraghty (The Weed Agency: A Comic Tale of Federal Bureaucracy Without Limits)
“
What Hunter Biden, the son of America’s vice president, and Christopher Heinz, the stepson of the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (later to be secretary of state) were creating was an international private equity firm. It was anchored by the Heinz family alternative investment fund, Rosemont Capital.
”
”
Peter Schweizer (Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends)
“
Once people started coming up with ways to maintain larger groups, like armies, cities, and nations, humans started subdividing those groups. Dunbar’s number explains why big groups are made of smaller, more manageable groups like companies, platoons, and squads—or branches, divisions, departments, and committees. No human institution can efficiently function above 150 members without hierarchies, ranks, roles, and divisions.
”
”
David McRaney (You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself)
“
I was amongst them – the first female pilot who had got admission to the Sturmoviks…Since my childhood I’d been lucky enough to meet good people. Wherever I studied, wherever I worked I would meet loyal friends, kind-hearted tutors. I was trained at the factory school by the old craftsman Goubanov, I was assisted by the engineer Aliev, who was the shift boss, in my transfer to the most important sector of operations – the tunnel. I was trained by the superb instructor Miroevskiy in the aeroclub, the secretary of the Ulyanovsk District Comsomol Committee gave me a hand at a very hard moment of my life, then there was Maria Borek from Leningrad, the Secretary of the Smolensk District Comsomol Committee, the Commissar of the Smolensk aeroclub…Was it really possible to count all those who had warmed my soul with their sympathy and human kindness and helped me to realize my dream!
”
”
Anna Timofeeva-Egorova (Over Fields of Fire: Flying the Sturmovik in Action on the Eastern Front 1942-45 (Soviet Memories of War))
“
She’d been raised not to dwell on such injustices, because dwelling made it difficult to be good company in the present. Perhaps it was necessary to dwell, though, even to be obsessive, for any real change to occur. Plenty of Quakers dwelled—the American Friends Service Committee, for example—and hadn’t that done the world a lot of good? When she got back to Haverford, she’d volunteer for something to do with animals—if Dick could spare her.
”
”
Alice Elliott Dark (Fellowship Point)
“
Mr. Mitchell should stop worrying and put Steph in charge. She will be good at this; she has the party planning gene in her family. I swear, they always have the entire familia over for every occasion. All her tias, tios, cousins, friends, ninas, and ninos go to her house for practically anything. Every day is a holiday at Casa Ayala. Anyway, we’re placed into committees, which totally sucks, because the fab four get split up. Keesha and I get selected for Activities, while Amy and Steph are slated for Rally committee. All the upperclassmen say these are the best committees, and we should feel lucky.
”
”
Julie Prestsater (So I'm a Double Threat (Double Threat, #1))
“
With Yanukovych’s removal, Manafort was out of a job, and he owed about $17 million to allies of Yanukovych and Putin. His longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone was advising the floundering presidential campaign of Donald Trump, and Manafort stepped in to help. He did not take a salary, but immediately after getting the job, he did reach out to a Russian oligarch to whom he owed millions, asking him: “How do we use [this] to get whole?”[2] Manafort began to advise the Trump campaign in March 2016, and by April, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Putin had launched an effort to hurt the Clinton campaign in order to boost Trump’s chances.
”
”
Heather Cox Richardson (Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America)
“
You know that you are not a hero and that you never wanted to be the one. You have never wanted to die for your nation, or for freedom, or for anything else, for that matter: the fates of Winkelried and Ordon [legendary heroes who died for their countries, which were overwhelmed by superior enemies] have never tempted you. You have always wanted to be alive, to live like a normal person, to have respect for yourself and for your friends. You have always enjoyed the moral comfort that allows you to take pleasure in your inner freedom, in beautiful women, and in wine. This war surprised you in the company of a pretty woman, not while you were plotting an assault on the Central Committee headquarters.
Nevertheless, they did declare this war on you and over thirty million other people, and so you are forced to recognise that amid the street roundups, the ignoble court sentences, the despicable radio programs, and the distribution of leaflets by underground Solidarity you will not regain the normalcy that was based on respect for yourself. Now you must choose between moral and material stability, because you know that today's "normalcy" will have the bitter taste of self-defeat. And you will not, for the sake of life's enjoyments, give in to the tempting offers of freedom made by the policeman, who seeks to delude you with promises of happiness but really brings suffering and inner hell instead.
No, this is not heroism. It is mere common sense.
”
”
Adam Michnik (Letters from Prison and Other Essays (Society and Culture in East-Central Europe))
“
Insofar as craft and poetics in a poem have a politics, I wanted to avoid that brittle enjambed-prose-sentence-lyric verse, where you have standard sentences snapped off and scattered decoratively across the page (which I might go out on a limb and say was characteristic of some leftist poets, Beat poets, street poets and populist poets of the 70s and 80s—all of whom I basically view as comrades, I should probably say, to this day) and on the other hand I also wanted my poetics to operate differently than those more right-wing academics—in practice—even if in their poems or statements they proclaim public leftist views or ideas—they remain academic poets, operating in elite university-supported circles, institutionalized and reading before institutional audiences, awarding grants and awards to each other, sitting on each other’s grants panels, awards and tenure committees, as Philip Levine admitted in an interview in Don’t Ask, 'giving prizes to friends.
”
”
Sesshu Foster
“
Mr. Duffy Napp has just transmitted a nine-word e-mail asking that I immediately send a letter of reference to your firm on his behalf; his request has summoned from the basement of my heart a star-spangled constellation of joy, so eager am I to see Mr. Napp well established at Maladin IT.
As for the basis of our acquaintanceship: I am a professor in an English department whose members consult Tech Help—aka Mr. Napp—only in moments of desperation. For example, let us imagine that a computer screen, on the penultimate page of a lengthy document, winks coyly, twice, and before the “save” button can be deployed, adopts a Stygian façade. In such a circumstance one’s only recourse—unpalatable though it may be—is to plead for assistance from a yawning adolescent who will roll his eyes at the prospect of one’s limited capabilities and helpless despair. I often imagine that in olden days people like myself would crawl to the doorway of Tech Help on our knees, bearing baskets of food, offerings of the harvest, the inner organs of neighbors and friends— all in exchange for a tenuous promise from these careless and inattentive gods that the thoughts we entrusted to our computers will be restored unharmed.
Colleagues have warned me that the departure of Mr. Napp, our only remaining Tech Help employee, will leave us in darkness. I am ready. I have girded my loins and dispatched a secular prayer in the hope that, given the abysmal job market, a former mason or carpenter or salesman—someone over the age of twenty-five—is at this very moment being retrained in the subtle art of the computer and will, upon taking over from Mr. Napp, refrain (at least in the presence of anxious faculty seeking his or her help) from sending text messages or videos of costumed dogs to both colleagues and friends. I can almost imagine it: a person who would speak in full sentences—perhaps a person raised by a Hutterite grandparent on a working farm.
”
”
Julie Schumacher (Dear Committee Members)
“
Committees were everywhere chosen, who were directed to keep up a regular correspondence with each other, and to give information of all intelligence received relative to the proceedings of administration, so far as they affected the interest of the British colonies throughout America. The trust was faithfully and diligently discharged, and when afterwards all legislative authority was suspended, the courts of justice shut up and the last traits of British government annihilated in the colonies, this new institution became a kind of juridical tribunal. Its injunctions were influential beyond the hopes of its most sanguine friends, and the recommendations of the committees of correspondence had the force of law. Thus, as despotism frequently springs from anarchy, a regular democracy sometimes arises from the severe encroachments of despotism. This institution had given such a general alarm to the adherents of administration and had been replete with such important consequences through the union, that it was justly dreaded by those who opposed it, and considered by them as the most important bulwark of freedom. A
”
”
Mercy Otis Warren (History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution)
“
For many, an explosion of mental problems occurred during the first months of the pandemic and will continue to progress in the post-pandemic era. In March 2020 (at the onset of the pandemic), a group of researchers published a study in The Lancet that found that confinement measures produced a range of severe mental health outcomes, such as trauma, confusion and anger.[153] Although avoiding the most severe mental health issues, a large portion of the world population is bound to have suffered stress to various degrees. First and foremost, it is among those already prone to mental health issues that the challenges inherent in the response to the coronavirus (lockdowns, isolation, anguish) will be exacerbated. Some will weather the storm, but for certain individuals, a diagnostic of depression or anxiety could escalate into an acute clinical episode. There are also significant numbers of people who for the first time presented symptoms of serious mood disorder like mania, signs of depression and various psychotic experiences. These were all triggered by events directly or indirectly associated with the pandemic and the lockdowns, such as isolation and loneliness, fear of catching the disease, losing a job, bereavement and concerns about family members and friends. In May 2020, the National Health Service England’s clinical director for mental health told a Parliamentary committee that the “demand for mental healthcare would increase ‘significantly’ once the lockdown ended and would see people needing treatment for trauma for years to come”.[154] There is no reason to believe that the situation will be very different elsewhere.
”
”
Klaus Schwab (COVID-19: The Great Reset)
“
Witch," said Sarah Brown, "I have got to say something."
"Oh, have you?" said the witch, a little disappointed at being interrupted. "Oh, well, I can sympathise, I know what that feels like. Get on and say it."
The Dog David, who was really a good and attentive son to Sarah Brown, came and laid his chin, with an exaggerated look of interest, on her knee-cap.
"Is it any use," said Sarah Brown, "fighting against the Habits in the world, there are so many. Who set these strange and senseless deceivers at large? Religion which has forgotten ecstasy.... Law which has forgotten justice.... Charity which has forgotten love.... Surely magic has suffered at the stake for saner ideals than these?"
"Why, of course," said the witch impatiently. "Magic generally suffered because it was so sane. I thought everybody knew that."
"All habits. All habits," chanted Sarah Brown. "What is this Charity, this clinking of money between strangers, and when did Charity cease to be a comforting and secret thing between one friend and another? Does Love make her voice heard through a committee, does Love employ an almoner to convey her message to her neighbour?"
"Not that I know of," sighed the witch. "Sarah Brown, how long do you want me to keep quiet, while you say things that everybody surely knows?"
~ from Chapter IV 'The Forbidden Sandwich' of 'Living Alone' by Stella Benson, published 1919.
”
”
Stella Benson (Living Alone)
“
If there was any politician in America who reflected the Cold War and what it did to the country, it was Richard Nixon—the man and the era were made for each other. The anger and resentment that were a critical part of his temperament were not unlike the tensions running through the nation as its new anxieties grew. He himself seized on the anti-Communist issue earlier and more tenaciously than any other centrist politician in the country. In fact that was why he had been put on the ticket in the first place. His first congressional race in 1946, against a pleasant liberal incumbent named Jerry Voorhis, was marked by red-baiting so savage that it took Voorhis completely by surprise. Upon getting elected, Nixon wasted no time in asking for membership in the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was the committee member who first spotted the contradictions in Hiss’s seemingly impeccable case; in later years he was inclined to think of the case as one of his greatest victories, in which he had challenged and defeated a man who was not what he seemed, and represented the hated Eastern establishment. His career, though, was riddled with contradictions. Like many of his conservative colleagues, he had few reservations about implying that some fellow Americans, including perhaps the highest officials in the opposition party, were loyal to a hostile foreign power and willing to betray their fellow citizens. Yet by the end of his career, he became the man who opened the door to normalized relations with China (perhaps, thought some critics, he was the only politician in America who could do that without being attacked by Richard Nixon), and he was a pal of both the Soviet and Chinese Communist leadership. If he later surprised many long-standing critics with his trips to Moscow and Peking, he had shown his genuine diplomatic skills much earlier in the way he balanced the demands of the warring factions within his own party. He never asked to be well liked or popular; he asked only to be accepted. There were many Republicans who hated him, particularly in California. Earl Warren feuded with him for years. Even Bill Knowland, the state’s senior senator and an old-fashioned reactionary, despised him. At the 1952 convention, Knowland had remained loyal to Warren despite Nixon’s attempts to help Eisenhower in the California delegation. When Knowland was asked to give a nominating speech for Nixon, he was not pleased: “I have to nominate the dirty son of a bitch,” he told friends. Nixon bridged the gap because his politics were never about ideology: They were the politics of self. Never popular with either wing, he managed to negotiate a delicate position acceptable to both. He did not bring warmth or friendship to the task; when he made attempts at these, he was, more often than not, stilted and artificial. Instead, he offered a stark choice: If you don’t like me, find someone who is closer to your position and who is also likely to win. If he tilted to either side, it was because that side seemed a little stronger at the moment or seemed to present a more formidable candidate with whom he had to deal. A classic example of this came early in 1960, when he told Barry Goldwater, the conservative Republican leader, that he would advocate a right-to-work plank at the convention; a few weeks later in a secret meeting with Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal Republican leader—then a more formidable national figure than Goldwater—Nixon not only reversed himself but agreed to call for its repeal under the Taft-Hartley act. “The man,” Goldwater noted of Nixon in his personal journal at the time, “is a two-fisted four-square liar.
”
”
David Halberstam (The Fifties)
“
They won’t, your kind of intellectuals are the first to scream when it’s safe—and the first to shut their traps at the first sign of danger. They spend years spitting at the man who feeds them—and they lick the hand of the man who slaps their drooling faces. Didn’t they deliver every country of Europe, one after another, to committees of goons, just like this one here? Didn’t they scream their heads off to shut out every burglar alarm and to break every padlock open for the goons? Have you heard a peep out of them since? Didn’t they scream that they were the friends of labor? Do you hear them raising their voices about the chain gangs, the slave camps, the fourteen-hour workday and the mortality from scurvy in the People’s States of Europe? No, but you do hear them telling the whip-beaten wretches that starvation is prosperity, that slavery is freedom, that torture chambers are brother-love and that if the wretches don’t understand it, then it’s their own fault that they suffer, and it’s the mangled corpses in the jail cellars who’re to blame for all their troubles, not the benevolent leaders! Intellectuals? You might have to worry about any other breed of men, but not about the modern intellectuals: they’ll swallow anything. I don’t feel so safe about the lousiest wharf rat in the longshoremen’s union: he’s liable to remember suddenly that he is a man—and then I won’t be able to keep him in line. But the intellectuals? That’s the one thing they’ve forgotten long ago. I guess it’s the one thing that all their education was aimed to make them forget. Do anything you please to the intellectuals. They’ll take it.
”
”
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
“
So what did Mussolini do? He founded, as he put it, the only genuinely socialist government in the world, with the possible exception of the Soviet Union.35 Mussolini attempted to put into effect what he termed the “true socialism” that he said “plutocratic elements and sections of the clergy” had prevented him from implementing in Italy. At Salo, Mussolini outlined a socialist program that went beyond anything he attempted in Italy. The new program of November 1943 called for the state to take over all the critical sections of the economy—energy, raw materials, all necessary social services—leaving only private savings and private homes and assets in the hands of the citizens. The public sector was to be run by management committees in which workers would have a key role. Unions would also be part of the fascist governing assembly. The next step, declared Mussolini’s adviser Ugo Spirito, would be to abolish all private property. Interestingly Mussolini’s closest adviser in Salo was Nicola Bombacci, once a friend and disciple of Lenin who had in 1921 been a co-founder of the Italian Communist Party. Mussolini’s Salo period, although short-lived, proves that he never abandoned his original leftist ideals; he remained to the last a dedicated statist, collectivist, and socialist.
”
”
Dinesh D'Souza (The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left)
“
After that eggroll lunch with Tom, I began having search committee fantasies: I imagined myself among focused, intelligent adults engaged in heady theological discussion, my seminary education finally being put to use. Those two years were the deepest lived of my life intellectually and spiritually. I’d fallen in love with church history, the mystics, William James, and Lacan. I still yearned for the immersion in spiritual thought and values, the ongoing conversation with school friends that moved from classroom to cafeteria to phone calls, and I never missed that intense engagement with ideas more than when I was dashing off puff pieces for the food section and not doing any of my own writing, as I was now.
”
”
Michelle Huneven (Search)
“
As early as November 1966, the Red Guard Corps of Beijing Normal University had set their sights on the Confucian ancestral home in Qufu County in Shandong Province. Invoking the language of the May Fourth movement, they proceeded to Qufu, where they established themselves as the Revolutionary Rebel Liaison State to Annihilate the Old Curiosity Shop of Confucius.
Within the month they had totally destroyed the Temple of Confucius, the Kong Family Mansion, the Cemetery of Confucius (including the Master’s grave), and all the statues, steles, and relics in the area...
In January 1967 another Red Guard unit editorialized in the People’s Daily:
To struggle against Confucius, the feudal mummy, and thoroughly eradicate . . . reactionary Confucianism is one of our important tasks in the Great Cultural Revolution.
And then, to make their point, they went on a nationwide rampage, destroying temples, statues, historical landmarks, texts, and anything at all to do with the ancient Sage...
The Cultural Revolution came to an end with Mao’s death in 1976. In 1978 Deng Xiaoping (1904–97) became China’s paramount leader, setting China on a course of economic and political reform, and effectively bringing an end to the Maoist ideal of class conflict and perpetual revolution. Since 2000, the leadership in Beijing, eager to advance economic prosperity and promote social stability, has talked not of the need for class conflict but of the goal of achieving a “harmonious society,” citing approvingly the passage from the Analects, “harmony is something to be cherished” (1.12).
The Confucius compound in Qufu has been renovated and is now the site of annual celebrations of Confucius’s birthday in late September. In recent years, colleges and universities throughout the country—Beijing University, Qufu Normal University, Renmin University, Shaanxi Normal University, and Shandong University, to name a few—have established Confucian study and research centers. And, in the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics, the Beijing Olympic Committee welcomed guests from around the world to Beijing with salutations from the Analects, “Is it not a joy to have friends come from afar?” and “Within the fours seas all men are brothers,” not with sayings from Mao’s Little Red Book.
Tellingly, when the Chinese government began funding centers to support the study of the Chinese language and culture in foreign schools and universities around the globe in 2004—a move interpreted as an ef f ort to expand China’s “soft power”—it chose to name these centers Confucius Institutes...
The failure of Marxism-Leninism has created an ideological vacuum, prompting people to seek new ways of understanding society and new sources of spiritual inspiration.
The endemic culture of greed and corruption—spawned by the economic reforms and the celebration of wealth accompanying them—has given rise to a search for a set of values that will address these social ills. And, crucially, rising nationalist sentiments have fueled a desire to fi nd meaning within the native tradition—and to of f set the malignant ef f ects of Western decadence and materialism.
Confucius has thus played a variety of roles in China’s twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At times praised, at times vilified, he has been both good guy and bad guy. Yet whether good or bad, he has always been somewhere on the stage. These days Confucius appears to be gaining favor again, in official circles and among the people. But what the future holds for him and his teachings is difficult to predict. All we can say with any certainty is that Confucius will continue to matter.
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Daniel K. Gardner (Confucianism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
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After General Washington was established as President of these United States, a general committee of the Baptist churches in Virginia presented an address to him, in August, 1789, wherein they expressed a high regard for him; but a fear that our religious rights were not well secured in our new constitution of government. In answer to which, he assured them of his readiness to use his influence to make them more secure, and then said, “While I recollect with satisfaction, that the religious society of which you are members have been, throughout America, uniformly and almost unanimously the firm friends of civil liberty, and the persevering promoters of our glorious Revolution, I cannot hesitate to believe that they will be the faithful supporters of a free, yet efficient general government.” [Leland’s Virginia Chronicle, p. 47, 48.]
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Isaac Backus (Your Baptist Heritage: 1620-1804)
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Middle School is such a perfect name for middle school. If I were told that there was a commission for nationwide title submissions for the grades between elementary and high and a committee was appointed to boil down the entries in search of a name that was simple, public friendly, easy to spell, syllabically chantable (Mid-dle-school! Mid-dle-school!) devoid of possible copyright infringement, and most importantly, evocative of the emotion of being In Limbo, and Middle School was the out and out winner, I would believe that.
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Ani Baker (Handsome Vanilla)
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A Party Central Committee and Government decree stipulates that, as from November 1969, the population will be exempted from all taxation. Thus, the income of the budget will be secured entirely from the socialist sector of our economy.
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Harilla Papajorgja (Our Friends Ask...)
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Destiny reads me the gym schedule. “Upside-down yoga at six a.m.,” she says. “Water yoga at seven. Hot yoga at eight.” “What time is the Very Hot Yoga?” Instead of saying “There is no very hot yoga” or, worse, “Should I put in a request to the Wellness Committee?,” she says, “It’s right before Unbearably Hot Yoga,” and so we become friends.
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Tahmima Anam (The Startup Wife)
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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.
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E. Michael Jones (The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing)
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The ethnics caught up in the racial struggies oi the post-war period in Chicago were in the unenviable position of people who had the rules changed on them in mid-game. The Poles who settled Calumet Park as Sobieski Park had created their neighborhood enclaves under certain assumptions, all of which got changed when the environmentalist East Coast WASP internationalist establishment took power in 1941. Not only hadn’t they been informed of the rule change, they were doubly vulnerable because compared to their opponents who were further along on the scale of assimilation, they didn’t have a clear sense of themselves as Poles or Catholics or Americans or “white” people.
They also feared the sexual mores of the invading black hordes but could not articulate this fear in polite language. As a result, each attempt to explain their position drove them further beyond the pale of acceptable public discourse. More often than not, the only people who were articulating their position were the American Civil Liberties Union and American Friends Service Committee agents sent into their neighborhoods to spy on them. One AFSC spy reported that fear of intermarriage “caused the intensity of feelings” in Trumbull Park.*
Black attempts to use the community swimming pool were similarly seen in a sexual light. The ACLU agent who was paid to infiltrate bars in South Deering reported that the real motivation behind Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision mandating desegregation of Southern schools, was to move “niggers into every neighborhood” to intermarry and thereby send the “whole white race . . . downhill.”
Deprived of their ethnic designation as Catholic by a Church that was either hostile (as in the case of Catholic intellectuals) or indifferent (as in the case of the bishops and their chancery officials), Chicago ethnics, attempting to be good Americans, chose to become “white” instead, a transformation that not only guaranteed that they would lose their battle in the court of public opinion, but one which also guaranteed that they would go out of existence as well, through the very assimilation process being proposed by their enemies.
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E. Michael Jones (The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing)
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In 1970 the Quakers released a slim book entitled “Who Shall Live? Man’s Control over Birth and Death: A Report Prepared for the American Friends Service Committee” which was the result of a decision which the Family Planning Committee of the AFSC reached in December 1966 “to explore the issues involved in abortion.” That meeting in turn flowed from the November 1966 meeting that the AFSC had had with Planned Parenthood, and that meeting resulted from the setback the Quaker and Episcopalian forces for sexual liberation and eugenics in Philadelphia had suffered at the hands of Martin Mullen, when the governor capitulated to his demands and backed away from state-promoted birth control in August of the same year. As a result of their meeting with Planned Parenthood, the Quakers decided to “make a study of the availability of family planning services for medically indigent families in the city and to form an estimate as to the extent of the unmet need for such services. “Who Shall Live” was the fruit of this labor.
“Who Shall Live?” is a graphic example of moral theology in the Quaker mode. It begins by announcing that “for 300 years members of the Society of Friends (Quakers) have been seekers after the truth” and concludes by admitting that they have been so far unsuccessful in their efforts. Where once people like Fox and Penn “thought of himself as created only a few thousand years ago,” the enlightened Quakers who wrote birth-control tracts in the 1960s “now know he is part of an evolutionary process that has been going on for billions of years. In that process he has arrived at a stage of knowledge and technology whereby he himself has the power, at least in part, to determine the direction
in which he will evolve in the future.”
Having decided that their religious forebears were wrong on just about everything because they didn’t understand science, the 1970 Quakers then give some sense of their own grasp of science as it applies to population issues. Looking at the world from outer space in 1968, the Quakers found it “incredible that 3.5 billion people should be living on that small spinning planet.” Taking their cue from Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book “The Population Bomb” the Quakers concluded quite logically that if the planet cannot sustain 3.5 billion people in 1968, then it certainly couldn’t sustain 6 billion people in the year 2000. Unless drastic population-control measures are introduced immediately, dire consequences will follow. “Lamont C. Cole, who is a Professor of Ecology warns that we may one day find ourselves short of breathable air,” the Quakers announced breathlessly.
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E. Michael Jones (The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing)
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To write the history of neighborhood strife during this period of time without describing the efforts of people like Louis Wirth and his collaboration with the psychological warfare establishment during World War II, or the American Friends Service Committee and their work in both Philadelphia and Chicago, or Paul YIvisaker and his creation of the Gray Areas grants for the Ford Foundation and their subsequent takeover by a quintessential establishment figure like McGeorge Bundy, or Leon Sullivan, one of the players created by the Ford Foundation, and his collaboration with Robert Weaver while head of the Federal Housing Administration, is to tell less than half of the story. It is to do a remake of King Kong without the gorilla. It is also a bad example of whiggish history, a genre depressingly familiar to anyone who has done any reading in the conventional accounts of the sexual revolution and the civil rights movement, where effects have no causes and actual people making actual decisions in actual rooms are replaced by broad historical forces and Enlightenment melodramas like the triumph of liberation over bondage and light over darkness.
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E. Michael Jones (The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing)
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But why would you want to sabotage your mom’s friend? You heard Cassandra—if she’s elected to the board, she might be able to make your mom a committee member.
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Kyla Zhao (The Fraud Squad: The most dazzling and glamorous debut of 2023!)
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No, no, no!” Trump shouted. “You don’t understand, Mike. You can do this. I don’t want to be your friend anymore if you don’t do this.”196
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The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol (The January 6 Report)
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Adorno echoed the words and works of Karl Marx in his music. Whereas Marx focused on the economic aspect, Adorno placed his emphasis on the role played by culture in maintaining the politically apathetic status quo. Music of the 12-atonal métier would be even more powerful than Marx’s economic assault on western capitalism. Adorno was of course a serious student and polished writer and performer of classical music. He was, perhaps, the most important music “new ground” philosopher, an intellectual giant in modernism in music. While attending the University of Frankfurt in Germany, he became friends with Alban Berg and studied composition under him from 1924. There Adorno learned the “dialectics” of George Hegel and applied it to his compositions. Adorno became Professor of Philosophy at the University of Frankfort.
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John Coleman (The Conspirator's Hierarchy: The Committee of 300)
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Would you buy a used car from your occupier? For the first six months of the intifada, Ehud Gol was the official Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman. Every day he had to go before the world’s press and defend Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. But in the spring of 1988, Gol was made the Israeli Consul General in Rio de Janeiro and he had to sell his car before he left the country. Practically the first place he went was to a Palestinian car dealer in the West Bank town of Ramallah. “Intifada or no intifada, this was business,” Gol explained to me. “The car dealer even came down to the Foreign Ministry and we went over all the papers in my office. There I was, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, and this guy, whose son was probably out throwing stones, was ready to buy from me—and it was a used car!” A Palestinian teacher I knew was driving from Ramallah to Jerusalem one afternoon when he saw a colleague of his from Bir Zeit University and offered to give him a lift. “This fellow came from a small village near Ramallah,” said my teacher friend. “The whole way into Jersualem he was talking to me about the intifada and how it had changed his village, how everyone was involved, and how the local committees of the uprising were running the village and they were getting rid of all the collaborators. He was really enthusiastic, and I was really impressed. As we got close to Jerusalem, I asked him where he wanted to be dropped off and he said, ‘The Hebrew University.’ I was really surprised, so I said, ‘What are you going there for?’ and he said, ‘I teach an Arabic class there.’ It simply didn’t occur to him that there was any contradiction between enthusiasm for the intifada and where he was going.
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Thomas L. Friedman (From Beirut to Jerusalem)
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The phrase “conflict of interest” barely begins to describe Tom Lanphier’s rabidly partisan approach to advising one of the most powerful congressional allies of the American military-industrial complex. Yet he was in good company. Air force intelligence was crammed with highly competitive analysts who believed they were in a zero-sum game not only with the Russians but also with the army and the navy. If they could make the missile-gap theory stick, America would have to respond with a crash ICBM program of its own. The dominance of the Strategic Air Command in the U.S. military hierarchy would be complete—and Convair would profit mightily. It is hardly surprising that the information Lanphier fed to Symington and Symington to every politician and columnist who would listen was authoritative, alarming, and completely, disastrously wrong. Symington’s “on the record” projection of Soviet nuclear strength, given to Senate hearings on the missile gap in late 1959, was that by 1962 they would have three thousand ICBMs. The actual number was four. Symington’s was a wild guess, an extrapolation based on extrapolations by air force generals who believed it was only responsible to take Khrushchev at his word when, for example, he told journalists in Moscow that a single Soviet factory was producing 250 rockets a year, complete with warheads. Symington knew what he was doing. He wanted to be president and believed rightly that missile-gap scaremongering had helped the Democrats pick up nearly fifty seats in Congress in the 1958 midterm elections. But everyone was at it. The 1958 National Intelligence Estimate had forecast one hundred Soviet ICBMs by 1960 and five hundred by 1962. In January 1960 Allen Dulles, who should have known better because he did know better, told Eisenhower that even though the U-2 had shown no evidence of mass missile production, the Russians could still somehow conjure up two hundred of them in eighteen months. On the political left a former congressional aide called Frank Gibney wrote a baseless five-thousand-word cover story for Harper’s magazine accusing the administration of giving the Soviets a six-to-one lead in ICBMs. (Gibney also recommended putting “a system of really massive retaliation” on the moon.) On the right, Vice President Nixon quietly let friends and pundits know that he felt his own boss didn’t quite get the threat. And in the middle, Joe Alsop wrote a devastating series of columns syndicated to hundreds of newspapers in which he calculated that the Soviets would have 150 ICBMs in ten months flat and suggested that by not matching them warhead for warhead the president was playing Russian roulette with the national future. Alsop, who lived well but expensively in a substantial house in Georgetown, was the Larry King of his day—dapper, superbly well connected, and indefatigable in the pursuit of a good story. His series ran in the last week of January 1960. Khrushchev read it in translation and resolved to steal the thunder of the missile-gap lobby, which was threatening to land him with an arms race that would bankrupt Communism. Before the four-power summit, which was now scheduled for Paris in mid-May, he would offer to dismantle his entire ICBM stockpile. No one needed to know how big or small it was; they just needed to know that he was serious about disarmament. He revealed his plan to the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at a secret meeting in the Kremlin on
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Giles Whittell (Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War)
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This world disappoints you, does it not?” Quinn asked. “Your crusade was intended to create something exceptional, exquisite even. But you have become lost amongst your own desires, my friend. What you are doing no longer falls under the rubric of surgery… you work in darker hues. Kelly must be the last. Any more and the East End of London will explode. We already have Lusk and his Vigilante Committee roaming the streets, accosting every fletcher, leather apron and anyone trading with a knife. Warren is poised to retire, people are afraid.
What you have accomplished cannot be understated. We have large plans for this city and our vision of social reform has been led by you… you should be proud. But the increased enthusiasm for your work threatens to undermine those plans. You are upsetting the status quo, for want of a better word.
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David McCaffrey (In Extremis: A Hellbound Novella)
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Harriet had lost count of the times she’d read a note Eben Pulsifer had sent her: “I so much enjoyed the time we spent together. You sparkled with brilliance, the best company I’ve had for months. As unlikely as it seems, I believe we can form a friendship.”
She asked herself what she knew about him. They were the same age; he was divorced. Very ambitious, he wanted to be president of the university, but that was a second choice, after other avenues closed to him. It didn’t seem that he was so crude that he wanted her friendship to secure her vote. Did he actually like her? Did she like him?
She called Pulsifer: “I’ve read your note. Thanks. It’s flattering. If we keep on seeing each other, either I’ll have to resign from the search committee – or you’ll have to stop dreaming of being president of the school.”
“How about if I set you up for the job instead? ” Pulsifer asked.
“Don’t think about it. That’s the poorest joke I’ve heard in months.”
“Thank you,” Pulsifer said. “I needed to know what you think. Everyone wants what’s best. But not everyone sees all the problems. Russian missiles in Cuba, tests of nuclear weapons. Sensitive people are frightened, especially young ones. Why bother to do our best if the world is about to get blown up? Why don’t we worship idols? That might do some good. Or live for a good time?”
“It sounds like you’re running for essayist-at-large,” Harriet said.
Pulsifer’s voice deepened. “What happens if weapons fall into irresponsible hands? We need to develop a new kind of person – smart, flexible, sturdy – who can live with the fears that run through mass society and help others overcome them.”
“How do you propose to build this new kind of person?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Pulsifer admitted.
“A president knows how to do things not just point to problems.”
They talked on, hardly aware of undercurrents in their conversation. They’d had a brief romance as undergraduates, then went separate ways. Old feelings revived, potentially deeper, but new romance seemed unlikely, so different were they from one another. “What do you say to dinner tonight?” Pulsifer asked.
“I was thinking about seeing Macbeth again.”
“Let’s do both,” Pulsifer offered.
Maybe he really does want a friend, Harriet thought. Like a sophomore all at sea.
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Richard French (Surveys)
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There are many different structures for movement groups. They can be service organizations, nonprofit entities, support groups, religious-based committees, friends who get together, and more. Each structure presents different advantages and disadvantages (and whole books are devoted to this subject4). But what they all share is an ability to act courageously together, grow and recruit new people into their fold, and exert their power to make change.
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Daniel Hunter (Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow: an organizing guide)
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During NASA’s first fifty years the agency’s accomplishments were admired globally. Democratic and Republican leaders were generally bipartisan on the future of American spaceflight. The blueprint for the twenty-first century called for sustaining the International Space Station and its fifteen-nation partnership until at least 2020, and for building the space shuttle’s heavy-lift rocket and deep spacecraft successor to enable astronauts to fly beyond the friendly confines of low earth orbit for the first time since Apollo. That deep space ship would fly them again around the moon, then farther out to our solar system’s LaGrange points, and then deeper into space for rendezvous with asteroids and comets, learning how to deal with radiation and other deep space hazards before reaching for Mars or landings on Saturn’s moons. It was the clearest, most reasonable and best cost-achievable goal that NASA had been given since President John F. Kennedy’s historic decision to land astronauts on the lunar surface. Then Barack Obama was elected president. The promising new chief executive gave NASA short shrift, turning the agency’s future over to middle-level bureaucrats with no dreams or vision, bent on slashing existing human spaceflight plans that had their genesis in the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush White Houses. From the starting gate, Mr. Obama’s uncaring space team rolled the dice. First they set up a presidential commission designed to find without question we couldn’t afford the already-established spaceflight plans. Thirty to sixty thousand highly skilled jobs went on the chopping block with space towns coast to coast facing 12 percent unemployment. $9.4 billion already spent on heavy-lift rockets and deep space ships was unashamedly flushed down America’s toilet. The fifty-year dream of new frontiers was replaced with the shortsighted obligations of party politics. As 2011 dawned, NASA, one of America’s great science agencies, was effectively defunct. While Congress has so far prohibited the total cancellation of the space agency’s plans to once again fly astronauts beyond low earth orbit, Obama space operatives have systematically used bureaucratic tricks to slow roll them to a crawl. Congress holds the purse strings and spent most of 2010 saying, “Wait just a minute.” Thousands of highly skilled jobs across the economic spectrum have been lost while hundreds of billions in “stimulus” have been spent. As of this writing only Congress can stop the NASA killing. Florida’s senior U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat, a former spaceflyer himself, is leading the fight to keep Obama space advisors from walking away from fifty years of national investment, from throwing the final spade of dirt on the memory of some of America’s most admired heroes. Congressional committees have heard from expert after expert that Mr. Obama’s proposal would be devastating. Placing America’s future in space in the hands of the Russians and inexperienced commercial operatives is foolhardy. Space legend John Glenn, a retired Democratic Senator from Ohio, told president Obama that “Retiring the space shuttles before the country has another space ship is folly. It could leave Americans stranded on the International Space Station with only a Russian spacecraft, if working, to get them off.” And Neil Armstrong testified before the Senate’s Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee that “With regard to President Obama’s 2010 plan, I have yet to find a person in NASA, the Defense Department, the Air Force, the National Academies, industry, or academia that had any knowledge of the plan prior to its announcement. Rumors abound that neither the NASA Administrator nor the President’s Science and Technology Advisor were knowledgeable about the plan. Lack of review normally guarantees that there will be overlooked requirements and unwelcome consequences. How could such a chain of events happen?
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Alan Shepard (Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon)
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In fact, when I came to Detroit, Coleman Young had just become a hero in the black community because he had stood up against the House Un-American Activities Committee, declaring, “If being for human rights makes me a Communist, then I’m a Communist.” Like most of his friends Jimmy was aware that the American Communists had provided indispensable leadership in the struggle against Jim Crow and to create the unions: it was the intervention of the Communist Party that stopped the legal lynching of the Scottsboro Boys, and the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) would probably not have been organized in the 1930s without the active participation of Communist Party members. At the shop and community level Jimmy worked with Communists as comrades; they were his coworkers, friends, and neighbors. During World War II he participated with black members of the Communist Party in sitdown strikes to protest union and management discrimination against black workers. During the Reuther-led witchhunt, when management and the union tried to get rid of radicals, he mobilized black workers to support Van Brooks, a Chrysler-Jefferson coworker and Communist Party member. He was very conscious that without the existence of the Soviet Union and its opposition to Western imperialism, the struggles of blacks in this country for civil rights and of Third World peoples for political independence would have been infinitely more difficult. Jimmy was not unaware of the atrocities that had been committed by the party and Stalin. However, what mattered to him was not the party’s or the Soviet Union’s record but where people stood on the concrete issue at hand, and he was grateful to the party because, as he used to say, “It gave me the fortitude to stand up against the odds.” Like other politically conscious blacks of his generation he recognized that without the Communists it would have taken much longer for blacks to make the leap from being regarded as inferior to being feared as subversive, that is, as a social force.
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Grace Lee Boggs (Living for Change: An Autobiography)
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You know that you are no hero and that you never wanted to be the one. You have never wanted to die for your nation, or for freedom, or for anything else, for that matter: the fates of Winkelried and Ordon [legendary heroes who died for their countries, which were overwhelmed by superior enemies] have never tempted you. You have always wanted to be alive, to live like a normal person, to have respect for yourself and for your friends. You have always enjoyed the moral comfort that allows you to take pleasure in your inner freedom, in beautiful women, and in wine. This war surprised you in the company of a pretty woman, not while you were plotting an assault on the Central Committee headquarters.
Nevertheless, they did declare this war on you and over thirty million other people, and so you are forced to recognise that amid the street roundups, the ignoble court sentences, the despicable radio programs, and the distribution of leaflets by underground Solidarity you will not regain the normalcy that was based on respect for yourself. Now you must choose between moral and material stability, because you know that today's "normalcy" will have the bitter taste of self-defeat. And you will not, for the sake of life's enjoyments, give in to the tempting offers of freedom made by the policeman, who seeks to delude you with promises of happiness but really brings suffering and inner hell instead.
No, this is not heroism. It is mere common sense.
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Adam Michnik (Letters from Prison and Other Essays (Society and Culture in East-Central Europe))
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In 1961, at Robert Kennedy’s first press conference as attorney general, he spoke of an “alarming increase” in juvenile delinquency. Juvenile delinquents intrigued Kennedy; he identified with outsiders, “young toughs,” underdogs. Bobby once said that if he had not been born a Kennedy he would have become “perhaps a juvenile delinquent or a revolutionary.” The issue of juvenile delinquency was something of a vogue among social scientists in the early 1960s, though on its face delinquency was a law enforcement issue. In May 1961, John Kennedy installed his attorney general as chairman of the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency (PCJD); Bobby appointed a lifelong friend, David Hackett, as director. The square-jawed Hackett was a former Olympic hockey player and, though not exactly the administration’s best or brightest, possessed a shrewd intelligence. He knew nothing, however, about juvenile delinquency.
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Jeff Shesol (Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade)
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John R. Rice was ecstatic about the enormous success Billy Graham was having on the revival trail. But he’d apparently heard reports or warnings from other fundamentalists about Billy entertaining modernists and liberals on the platform with him or as members of the ministerial committees that sponsored Graham campaigns in various cities. Rice sent Graham a letter of inquiry into Graham’s beliefs and associations before announcing his membership on the Sword cooperating board. In response, Graham reassured his friend and mentor of his fundamentalist orthodoxy: “Contrary to any rumors that are constantly floating about, we have never had a modernist on our Executive Committee, and we have never been sponsored by the Council of Churches in any city, except Shreveport and Greensboro, both small towns where the majority of the ministers are evangelical.
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Andrew Himes (The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family)
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Your mother never wanted to remarry?” “Even if she wanted to, I don’t think she would, because of me. I want her to be happy, but I don’t want her to remarry.” “I would feel the same way. Did she really fight with another professor?” “So you heard that story.” “They said it’s why she had to leave Nsukka University.” “No, she didn’t fight. She was on a committee and they discovered that this professor had misused funds and my mother accused him publicly and he got angry and slapped her and said he could not take a woman talking to him like that. So my mother got up and locked the door of the conference room and put the key in her bra. She told him she could not slap him back because he was stronger than her, but he would have to apologize to her publicly, in front of all the people who had seen him slap her. So he did. But she knew he didn’t mean it. She said he did it in a kind of ‘okay sorry if that’s what you want to hear and just bring out the key’ way. She came home that day really angry, and she kept talking about how things had changed and what did it mean that now somebody could just slap another person. She wrote circulars and articles about it, and the student union got involved. People were saying, Oh, why did he slap her when she’s a widow, and that annoyed her even more. She said she should not have been slapped because she is a full human being, not because she doesn’t have a husband to speak for her. So some of her female students went and printed Full Human Being on T-shirts. I guess it made her well-known. She’s usually very quiet and doesn’t have many friends.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah)
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Led by the party’s founder, Anton Drexler, they drew up an indictment of the would-be dictator and circulated it as a pamphlet. It was the most drastic accusation Hitler was ever confronted with from the ranks of his own party—from those, that is, who had firsthand knowledge of his character and how he operated. A lust for power and personal ambition have caused Herr Adolf Hitler to return to his post after his six weeks’ stay in Berlin, of which the purpose has not yet been disclosed. He regards the time as ripe for bringing disunion and schism into our ranks by means of shadowy people behind him, and thus to further the interests of the Jews and their friends. It grows more and more clear that his purpose is simply to use the National Socialist party as a springboard for his own immoral purposes, and to seize the leadership in order to force the Party onto a different track at the psychological moment. This is most clearly shown by an ultimatum which he sent to the Party leaders a few days ago, in which he demands, among other things, that he shall have a sole and absolute dictatorship of the Party, and that the Committee, including the locksmith Anton Drexler, the founder and leader of the Party, should retire…. And how does he carry on his campaign? Like a Jew. He twists every fact … National Socialists! Make up your minds about such characters! Make no mistake. Hitler is a demagogue … He believes himself capable … of filling you up with all kinds of tales that are anything but the truth.21 Although weakened by a silly anti-Semitism (Hitler acting like a Jew!), the charges were substantially true, but publicizing them did not get the rebels as far as might be supposed. Hitler promptly brought a libel suit against the authors of the pamphlet, and Drexler himself, at a public meeting, was forced to repudiate it.
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Anonymous
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When ObamaCare was being passed, Senator Chuck Grassley--a towering giant in this body; a strong, principled conservative--introduced a commonsense provision to ObamaCare that said: If you are going to force ObamaCare on the American people, if you are going to create these health insurance exchanges and you are going to force millions of people into these exchanges, then Congress should not operate by better rules than the American people. So he introduced a simple amendment designed to treat Members of Congress just like the American people so that we didn't have this two-class system. It has been reported--I was not serving in this body at the time--that amendment was voted on and accepted because Democratic Senators believed the bill would go to conference and in the conference committee they could strip it out and it would magically disappear. But then, because of the procedural games it took to pass it, they didn't have the opportunity to do that, and suddenly, horror of all horrors, this bill saying Congress should be bound by the same rules as the American people became the law of the land. So what happened? Majority leader Harry Reid and Democratic Senators had a closed-door meeting with the President here in the Capitol where they said, according to public news reports: Let us out of ObamaCare. We don't want to be in these exchanges. One would assume they are reading the same news reports the rest of us are reading--that ObamaCare is a train wreck, that it is not working--and the last thing Members of Congress wanted to do was to have their health care jeopardized. And the President directed his administration to exempt Members of Congress and their staff, ignoring the language of the statute, disregarding the language of the statute and saying: You guys are friends of the administration. We are taking care of you. I
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Ted Cruz (TED CRUZ: FOR GOD AND COUNTRY: Ted Cruz on ISIS, ISIL, Terrorism, Immigration, Obamacare, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Republicans,)
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You and your friends played a big role in the aesthetic sensibility bred in the anarchist milieu in the early 2000s. While most anarchists and radicals were occupied with identity politics, accountability processes, justice, and ethical living and consumption, you and your friends started projects that had a more nihilist bent. Queer hedonism and negation, ‘doing-being totally out of control’. What inspired this turn, and what were you guys doing? The aesthetic sensibility we bred corresponded with the (re-)emergence of the hipster. While the hipster identity was about separating oneself out into a certain identity, to us it was more about being able to become anything. To welcome the power that comes with being malleable. To turn this weak metropolitan subject against itself. There were university occupations across the country, at the New School, in California, mini-riots across the Midwest and in the South. That also corresponded to the English translation of The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection, which was an important moment. Notably, that book was the same blue as Obama’s branding, and was a book instead of some zine somewhere. The new interest in insurrectionist aesthetics beyond the anarchist milieu provided a sort of opening. Part of the program behind Institute for Experimental Freedom, why I made all this aesthetic crap, why Politics is Not a Banana was a bright-ass pink book, was to take advantage of this opening.
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Anonymous
“
Hey stranger, did the committee decide to hold this thing on the moon, and you're calling me to tell me to get my space suit ready?"
I cough as the beer I'm drinking goes down my windpipe.
"Mason, are you alright? I wasn't trying to kill you with my bad joke.
”
”
Abby Greyson (Never Fall For Your Brother's Best Friend (Sweet Spring Kisses))
“
But would they respect me here, if all I do is stick underneath the only Black professor in the program?” On the other end, Dr. Oludara heaved a sigh. “Ailey, why are you making things harder than they have to be?” “I’m not. It’s just—” “Ailey. Let me ask you something. Do any of your classmates invite you to their study sessions?” “No, ma’am.” “Are they even friendly to you?” “I mean . . . no. Not really.” “Then why do you give a good goddamn about what they think? You could have nothing but white folks on your dissertation committee, and your classmates still would have something to say. I’m sure they’ve passed around that you’re there on a quota. They love to accuse Black folks of taking their place. Even when it ain’t but one of us, and fifty of them, they don’t even want us to have that one spot.
”
”
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois)
“
Unbeknown to them, secret negotiations had already been taking place, as early as 1947, before the British Mandate in Palestine ended. These were between King Abdullah and the Zionist leaders, who were united in their goal of preventing the birth of a Palestinian state under their common enemy, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian head of the Arab Higher Committee, which was established on April 25, 1936, and outlawed by the British Mandatory administration in September 1937 after the assassination of a British official. The British government was continuing with its determined efforts to deprive the Palestinians of their country, exploring the possibility that the Arab parts of Palestine, which it believed would be unviable as an Arab Palestine on their own, could be fused with the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan, established in 1946. At a secret meeting in London in February 1948, Ernest Bevin, the UK foreign secretary, gave King Abdullah the green light to snatch part of Palestine provided that the king’s forces stayed out of those areas allotted by the UN partition plan to the Jews.
”
”
Raja Shehadeh (We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir)
“
The most severe impact of the oil crisis hit the United States’ largest city, New York. In December 1974, nine of the world’s most powerful bankers, led by David Rockefeller‘s Chase Manhattan, Citibank, and the London-New York investment bank, Lazard Freres, told the Mayor of New York, an old-line machine politician named Abraham Beame, that unless he turned over control of the city’s huge pension funds to a committee of the banks, called the Municipal Assistance Corporation, the banks and their influential friends in the media would ensure financial ruin to the city. Not surprisingly, the overpowered Mayor capitulated, New York City was forced to slash spending for roadways, bridges, hospitals and schools in order to service their bank debt, and to lay off tens of thousands of city workers. The nation’s greatest city was turned into a scrap heap beginning then. Felix Rohatyn, of Lazard Freres, became head of the new bankers’ collection agency, dubbed by the press as ‘Big MAC.
”
”
F. William Engdahl (A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order)
“
The way Bill was the other day, and with what’s happening at the farm I –’ ‘Dad talked to me about that after you left.’ Heather’s voice was sharp. ‘He said you’re imagining things, just like your mother.’ Ellie clenched her hands on her lap as anger surged through her. ‘It’s something to do with the Aboriginal council or the environmental committee, isn’t it?’ It was dark now and Ellie couldn’t see Heather’s expression. Kane reached over and squeezed her hand. ‘What happened the other day?’ ‘Bill warned me off when I asked him some questions.’ ‘Like he said, Ellie, just drop it. It was an accident.’ Heather’s voice was short. There was no more conversation until they got back to the lodge. Ellie pushed opened the door of her apartment. Kane raised his hand and stepped in first and flicked the lights on. ‘It’s okay. All good.’ ‘You can have my room. I’ve got an early start. I’ll sleep on the sofa.’ Ellie frowned as Heather nodded and walked past her into the bedroom. The door closed behind her with a loud click and Kane raised his eyebrows. Ellie crossed the living area and stood by the bedroom door. ‘Something sounded a bit off, didn’t it?’ ‘It did.’ ‘I’m not going to let it go.’ Ellie pushed open the door and sat beside her friend as she lay back on the pillow with her hand over her eyes. ‘What’s going on, Heather? I know there’s something. Why would someone do this to Bill? Has he been threatened?’ Heather’s eyes flew open and she stared at Ellie. ‘What?’ ‘I think I know what’s going on.’ Heather’s face closed. ‘You heard Dad at our place. He’s right. Just stay out of it.’ ‘For fuck’s sake, Heather. Someone tortured him tonight. They cut his finger off. What the hell is
”
”
Annie Seaton (Kakadu Sunset (The Porter Sisters #1))
“
You do know scones are not donuts, right?" Nina wasn't one to pass up any baked goods, but a donut was a donut. No scone would do.
"This is not your white, British-royals high tea, my friend. This is Highland Park high tea. It opened a month ago, and I think we're about to have our whole world rocked."
The Jam's exterior was black-and-white---- if you blinked you'd miss it. But when they went inside Nina immediately spotted a colorful mural of dinosaurs seated on velvet cushions, eating donuts and drinking out of porcelain cups. A pristine glass display case on the opposite wall featured rows and rows of endless donuts--- a happy welcoming committee of frosting and dough.
"We'll be having tea for two," Jasmine said at the counter. "And for my donut, could I get the Swirly Rosewater, please?"
As soon as she saw the names and flavors of the donuts, she instantly knew two things: one, she was going to love these, and two, Leo would absolutely hate them. Nina suddenly felt sympathy for Leo any time a contestant created a unique flavor pairing on the show. She raced to find the donut her friend had ordered in the case, and landed on a frosted pink cake donut that had a lemon rosewater glaze topped with roasted pistachios. "You live your life in pink, Jas."
"No better color. So from what I read online, the deal is that instead of scones, they do vegan donuts---"
Nina's eyes narrowed, and Jasmine glared right back. "Don't judge. What are you going to get?"
"I need chocolate," Nina said. She scanned the rows in search of the perfect solution.
"May I recommend our Chocolate from the Crypt donut?" the saleswoman suggested from behind the display. Her sharp bangs and blunt ponytail bobbed as she explained, "It's our fall-themed donut--- chocolate cake with a chocolate glaze, and it's got a kick from the cayenne pepper and cinnamon we add in."
"Oh, my donut," Nina said. In the case was an absolutely gorgeous chocolate confection--- the cayenne and cinnamon flakes on the outside created a black-and-orange effect. "I am sold."
"You got it." The saleswoman nodded and rang them up.
A narrow hallway covered in murals of cartoon animals drinking tea led them to the official tearoom. Soaring ceilings revealed exposed beams and brick walls, signaling that the building was likely older and newly restored. Modern, barrel-back walnut chairs were clustered around ultrasleek Scandinavian round tables. Nina felt like she'd followed Jasmine down a rabbit hole and emerged into the modern interpretation of the Mad Hatter's tea party.
"This is like..." Nina began. "It's a fun aesthetic."
"I know, right?" Jasmine replied as they sat down.
"It makes me feel like I'm not cool enough to be here, but glad I got invited." Nina picked up the prix fixe high tea menu on the table. The Jam's version of finger sandwiches were crispy "chicken" sliders, potato-hash tacos and mini banh mi, and in lieu of scones, they offered cornbread with raspberry jam and their signature donuts. "And it's all vegan...?"
"Yes, my friendly carnivore, and hopefully delicious.
”
”
Erin La Rosa (For Butter or Worse (The Hollywood Series #1))
“
Upon receiving word of the arms embargo, the Boston Committee of Correspondence sent the news by Paul Revere to their friends in New Hampshire, warning them that two British ships would be proceeding to Fort William and Mary at Portsmouth to secure the Crown's materiel. On December 14, some 400 armed men approached the fort by boat and overran it.
”
”
Stephen P. Halbrook (The Founders' Second Amendment: Origins of the Right to Bear Arms)
“
My old friends in the House{91} were gone. The Western Massachusetts Club, that had its headquarters in the Adams House where most of us lived that came from beyond the Connecticut, was inactive. The committees I had, except the chairmanship of agriculture, did not interest me greatly, and to crown my discontent the Democratic governor sent in a veto which the senate sustained, to a bill authorizing the New Haven Railroad to construct a trolley system in western Massachusetts.
”
”
William Allen White (A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge)
“
The real limit to be observed in friendship is this: the characters of two friends must be stainless. There must be complete harmony of interests, purpose, and aims, without exception. Then if the case arises of a friend’s wish (not strictly right in itself) calling for support in a matter involving his life or reputation, we must make some concession from the straight path—on condition, that is to say, that extreme disgrace is not the consequence. Something must be conceded to friendship. And yet we must not be entirely careless of our reputation, nor regard the good opinion of our fellow-citizens as a weapon which we can afford to despise in conducting the business of our life, however lowering it may be to tout for it by flattery and smooth words.
”
”
Charles William Eliot
“
I understand some of the committee people, despite their official positions, are not very friendly toward gays and lesbians.
”
”
David Aikman (When the Almond Tree Blossoms)
“
The national team players were in camp in Orlando, Florida, preparing for a pair of friendlies against Colombia when Rich Nichols and Jeffrey Kessler scheduled a conference call with the players on the team’s CBA committee. It was then that Hope Solo, Carli Lloyd, Alex Morgan, Becky Sauerbrunn, and Megan Rapinoe were presented with the idea of filing a wage-discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, against U.S. Soccer. If the players agreed to sign on, they would be asking a government agency to investigate whether U.S. Soccer was violating U.S. laws against workplace discrimination. In other words, the players were going to publicly accuse U.S. Soccer of discriminating against the women’s national team. It was a move guaranteed to ratchet up the tension between the national team and the federation. “I was nervous about that call the entire week because, in essence, what we were asking these great players to do was to sue their current employer for wage discrimination,” Nichols says. “That takes huge courage from anybody.
”
”
Caitlin Murray (The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women who Changed Soccer)
“
In February 1905, the Liquor Law Committee convened a group of “friends and foes of the semicolon” to discuss the law. For neither the first nor the last time in history, a bunch of men sat around in a room fretting that given a taste of any kind of freedom (in this case, in the form of liquor), women might ride off the rails of decency.
”
”
Cecelia Watson (Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark)
“
When it comes to this, to us, it's not up for debate by committee. It's not for my friends or family to weigh in on. It's mine. He's mine.
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”
Abigail Owen (The Stolen Throne (Dominions, #2))
“
Factors that drive turnover for the S&P 500 and Wilshire 5000 stem from market-related events. When a company exits the S&P 500 through merger, acquisition, or bankruptcy, a committee-chosen replacement takes the departing company’s place. The Wilshire 5000 passively accepts the ebb and flow of company creation and elimination, making as-frequent-as-necessary adjustments to the composition of the index. Bankrupt companies disappear, cash merger deals require redeployment of proceeds, and stock-for-stock transactions lead to elimination of the line item of the acquired company. Public offerings of securities force full-replication Wilshire 5000 index-fund managers to raise cash to acquire newly issued shares, while spinoffs simply require adding another line to the list of security holdings. In somewhat different fashion, both the S&P 500 and the Wilshire 5000 produce extremely low, investor-friendly levels of portfolio turnover.
”
”
David F. Swensen (Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment)
“
Then she called one of her dear friends to ask if she would serve on her committee. Her friend listened for a long time and then said, “Sandra, that sounds like a wonderful project, a really worthy undertaking. I appreciate so much your inviting me to be a part of it. I feel honored by it. For a number of reasons, I won’t be participating myself, but I want you to know how much I appreciate your invitation.” Sandra was ready for anything but a pleasant “no.” She turned to me and sighed, “I wish I’d said that.” •
”
”
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)
“
The Mortuary Committee would be burdened with many unenviable tasks, but the first was straightforward: instead of storing the corpses at a half dozen locations around town, which made it more difficult for soldiers to transport the bodies and record-keepers and families to find them, they needed to select a single building to house an official, temporary morgue. They quickly settled on the Chebucto Road School, which, despite its broken windows, had a lot to recommend it: it was large, it could be quickly cleared out and converted to its new purpose, and it was close to Pier 6, minimizing the transport of corpses and travel for their relatives. The committee also needed a place that could keep bodies for as long as possible, giving them the best chance of being identified. They designated the upper floors for offices and the wide-open, cooler basement for the bodies, which they planned to lay in rows and cover with sheets. The Royal Engineers quickly fixed up the damaged school, covered its windows, and cleaned the space. As soon as people learned of the location, bodies began to pile up outside the building, stacked two and three high until morgue workers could retrieve them. The Relief Committee also dispatched crews of volunteers to put out fires and turn off water mains, faucets, and spigots, and to pick up the dead—tagging their names, when they knew them, to the victims’ wrists, or simply attaching a number when they didn’t—loading them onto rudimentary flat wagons dozens at a time. They soon learned to conduct this dispiriting job late at night so as not to offend the friends and relatives of the deceased. But because everyone could hear the horses’ hooves each night, the rolling midnight morgue was a poorly kept secret, one that woke many Haligonians whose homes still lacked windows.
”
”
John U. Bacon (The Great Halifax Explosion)
“
For drawing attention to these men, the Anti-Defamation League was somehow tarred as a liberal, partisan organization by an elected Jewish Republican—the essence of an assault on a century-old Jewish institution. I did not see any organized effort to rally around the institution. Why is that significant? The question brings to mind a haunting passage from a Jewish newspaper in Berlin, written in 1933 and quoted by Timothy Snyder in On Tyranny. We do not subscribe to the view that Mr. Hitler and his friends, now finally in possession of the power they have so long desired, will implement the proposals circulating in [Nazi newspapers]; they will not suddenly deprive German Jews of their constitutional rights, nor enclose them in ghettos, nor subject them to the jealous and murderous impulses of the mob. They cannot do this because a number of crucial factors hold powers in check … and they clearly do not want to go down that road. When one acts as a European power, the whole atmosphere tends towards ethical reflection upon one’s better self and away from revisiting one’s earlier oppositional posture. * * * Institutions matter, but they do not survive on their own. They must be defended, and at the moment, the Anti-Defamation League is an institution under concerted, partisan attack and is not being defended. Truth also needs to be defended, and groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center try to defend truth as they expose hate. To most of us, at least for now, the notion that Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager, John Podesta, ran a pedophile ring in the back of Comet Ping Pong, on a busy commercial strip in Washington’s affluent Northwest quadrant, is absurd. So is the tall tale that Seth Rich, a young Democratic National Committee staffer who was tragically murdered in a gentrifying part of Washington before dawn in 2016, was rubbed out by Democrats because he was leaking emails to the Russians. But in the alternative universe of the alt-right, these stories are taken as truth—not because the haters in the alt-right have found logic in these stories but because they feed the larger narrative of a debauched world of liberalism that needs cleansing by fire. Even after a disturbed man from North Carolina showed up with a gun at Comet Ping Pong to free the enslaved children and nearly caused a real tragedy, the promulgators of Pizzagate like Mike Cernovich offered no mea culpas or apologies. The lies are too valuable to the larger movement.
”
”
Jonathan Weisman ((((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump)
“
Tencent had partnered with leading mobile carriers like China Mobile to receive 40 percent of the SMS charges that QQ users racked up when they sent messages to mobile phones. A new service could hurt Tencent’s financial bottom line and at the same time risk its relationships with some of China’s most powerful companies. It was the sort of decision that publicly traded, ten-thousand-person companies typically refer to a committee for further study. But Ma wasn’t a typical corporate executive. That very night, he gave Zhang the go-ahead to pursue the idea. Zhang put together a ten-person team, including seven engineers, to build and launch the new product. In just two months, Zhang’s small team had built a mobile-first social messaging network with a clean, minimalistic design that was the polar opposite of QQ. Ma named the service Weixin, which means “micromessage” in Mandarin. Outside of China, the service became known as WeChat. What came next was staggering. Just sixteen months after Zhang’s fateful late-night message to Ma, WeChat celebrated its one hundred millionth user. Six months after that, it had grown to two hundred million users. Four months after that, it had grown to three hundred million users. Pony Ma’s late-night bet paid off handsomely. Tencent reported 2016 revenues of $ 22 billion, up 48 percent from the previous year, and up nearly 700 percent since 2010, the year before WeChat’s launch. By early 2018, Tencent reached a market capitalization of over $ 500 billion, making it one of the world’s most valuable companies, and WeChat was one of the most widely and intensively used services in the world. Fast Company called WeChat “China’s app for everything,” and the Financial Times reported that more than half of its users spend over ninety minutes a day using the app. To put WeChat in an American context, it’s as if one single service combined the functions of Facebook, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Venmo, Grubhub, Amazon, Uber, Apple Pay, Gmail, and even Slack into a single megaservice. You can use WeChat to do run-of-the-mill things like texting and calling people, participating in social media, and reading articles, but you can also book a taxi, buy movie tickets, make doctors’ appointments, send money to friends, play games, pay your rent, order dinner for the night, plus so much more. All from a single app on your smartphone.
”
”
Reid Hoffman (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies)
“
A CLASSIC WAITS for me, it contains all, nothing is lacking,
Yet all were lacking if taste were lacking, or if the endorsement of the right man were lacking.
O clublife, and the pleasures of membership,
O volumes for sheer fascination unrivalled.
Into an armchair endlessly rocking,
Walter J. Black my president,
I, freely invited, cordially welcomed to membership,
My arm around John Kieran, Pearl S. Buck,
My taste in books guarded by the spirits of William Lyon Phelps, Hendrik Willem Van Loon,
(From your memories, sad brothers, from the fitful risings and callings I heard),
I to the classics devoted, brother of rough mechanics, beauty-parlor technicians, spot welders, radio-program directors
(It is not necessary to have a higher education to appreciate these books),
I, connoisseur of good reading, friend of connoisseurs of good reading everywhere,
I, not obligated to take any specific number of books, free to reject any volume, perfectly free to reject Montaigne, Erasmus, Milton,
I, in perfect health except for a slight cold, pressed for time, having only a few more years to live,
Now celebrate this opportunity.
Come, I will make the club indissoluble,
I will read the most splendid books the sun ever shone upon,
I will start divine magnetic groups,
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of distinguished committees.
I strike up for an Old Book.
Long the best-read figure in America, my dues paid, sitter in armchairs everywhere, wanderer in populous cities, weeping with Hecuba and with the late William Lyon Phelps,
Free to cancel my membership whenever I wish,
Turbulent, fleshy, sensible,
Never tiring of clublife,
Always ready to read another masterpiece provided it has the approval of my president, Walter J. Black,
Me imperturbe, standing at ease among writers,
Rais'd by a perfect mother and now belonging to a perfect book club,
Bearded, sunburnt, gray-neck'd, astigmatic,
Loving the masters and the masters only
(I am mad for them to be in contact with me),
My arm around Pearl S. Buck, only American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature,
I celebrate this opportunity.
And I will not read a book nor the least part of a book but has the approval of the Committee,
For all is useless without that which you may guess at many times and not hit, that which they hinted at,
All is useless without readability.
By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms (89¢ for the Regular Edition or $1.39 for the DeLuxe Edition, plus a few cents postage).
I will make inseparable readers with their arms around each other's necks,
By the love of classics,
By the manly love of classics.
”
”
E.B. White
“
I want to talk to a nation, not to a select committee." ~ Joseph Pulitzer
"My especial object is to help the poor; the rich can help themselves. I believe in self-made men." ~ Joseph Pulitzer
"Publicity, publicity, PUBLICITY is the greatest moral factor and force in our public life." ~ Joseph Pulitzer
"Our republic and its press will rise and fall together." ~ Joseph Pulitzer
"Newspapers should have no friends." ~ Joseph Pulitzer
”
”
Joseph Pulitzer
“
in April 2015, when Senator Lisa Murkowski, chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, observed that the export ban “equates to a sanctions regime against ourselves.” Why, she asked, was the U.S. government lifting the “sanctions on Iranian oil” as part of the 2015 nuclear deal “while keeping sanctions on American oil”? She was joined by two other senators in arguing that exporting crude oil to “our friends and allies” would bolster both the security of U.S. partners and America’s own international position. The European Union broadcast the same message, declaring that U.S. crude oil exports would, in the aftermath of Russia’s moves on Ukraine in 2014, enhance European energy security.3
”
”
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
“
Perhaps the vetting committee was swayed by one of Różycki père’s good points. He was exceptionally lucky, which led his Polish friends to say of him, ‘Bebenek could jump into the water stark naked, and still come up wearing a tuxedo.
”
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Hugh Sebag-Montefiore (Enigma: The Battle for the Code)
“
The church has a very narrow commission. It is not called to be an alternative neighborhood, circle of friends, political action committee, social club, or public service agency; it is called to deliver Christ so clearly and fully that believers are prepared to be salt and light in the worldly stations to which God has called them. Why should a person go through all the trouble of belonging to a church and showing up each Sunday if God is the passive receiver and we are the active giver?
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Michael Scott Horton (Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church)
“
2 to 2gether together 4 for 4eva forever any1 anyone BFF best friends forever BFFAE best friends forever and ever b-room bathroom b/t between c See caf cafeteria comm committee comp computer DEK don’t even know def definitely diff different
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Lisa Greenwald (TBH, This Is So Awkward (TBH, #1))
“
One of the songs I wrote while living there was called “Tearing Us Apart,” which was about “the committee,” the group of Pattie’s friends whom I now blamed for coming between us.
”
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Eric Clapton (Clapton: The Autobiography)
“
It's rather the possibility of friendship, unencumbered by feelings of attraction or shyness; the possibility of working on the same wavelength, as it were, with someone who understands you because he's a boy as you are, or a girl as you are. Committee work stifles the imagination, because people have to work down to the common denominator of what would be minimally acceptable to everyone. But friendship exalts the imagination. Indeed it is one of the things that the ancients said friendship was for. Plato suggests in Symposium that one of the highest forms of friendship is one whose love issues forth in beautiful and virtuous deeds, for thus "the partnership between [the friends] will be far closer and the bond of affection far stronger than between ordinary parents, because the children that they share surpass human children by being immortal as well as more beautiful.
”
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Anthony Esolen (Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child)
“
If pastors become accomplices in treating every child as a problem to be figured out, every spouse as a problem to be dealt with, every clash of wills in choir or committee as a
problem to be adjudicated, we abdicate our most important work, which is directing worship in the traffic, discovering the presence of the cross in the paradoxes and chaos between Sundays, calling attention to the "splendor in the ordinary," and, most of all, teaching a life of prayer to our friends and companions in the pilgrimage.
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Eugene H. Peterson (The Contemplative Pastor: Returning to the Art of Spiritual Direction)
“
Your friends become your tormentors. Although, come on, they’re not bullying you, you just can’t take a joke! The psychological warfare puts Putin to shame. One day you come into school and you say hi to your supposed friends, but, overnight they’ve been discussing how terrible you are behind your back and are now freezing you out without admitting that’s what they’re doing. So they’ll go for lunch without you but say they forgot. Or you’ll be walking home and they’ll all just randomly run off and leave you there, laughing, pretending it’s ok. A female friendship group will then hold a little “committee,” telling their chosen victim, in grown-up voices, everything that’s wrong with them as a person and how nobody wants to be their friend anymore, and…why are you crying? We’re just trying to be honest, jeez. Year Nine. We should all get a special medal and six month of counseling on the NHS.
”
”
Holly Bourne (The Yearbook)
“
2 to 2gether together 4 for 4eva forever any1 anyone BFF best friends forever BFFAE best friends forever and ever b-room bathroom b/t between c See caf cafeteria comm committee comp computer DEK don’t even know def definitely diff different disc discussion fab fabulous fac faculty fave favorite fone phone fyi for your information gtg gotta go gn good night gnight good night hw homework ICB I can’t believe IDC I don’t care IDK I don’t know IHNC I have no clue IK I know ILY I love you ILYSM I love you so much JK just kidding K okay L8r later LMK let me know lol laugh out loud luv love n e way anyway nums numbers obv obviously obvi obviously OMG oh my God peeps people pgs pages plzzzz please pos possibly q question r are rlly really sci science sec second sem semester scheds schedules SWAK sealed with a kiss TBH to be honest thx thanks tm tomorrow tmrw tomorrow tomrw tomorrow tomw tomorrow totes totally u you ur your vv very, very w/ with wb write back w/o without WIGO what is going on whatev whatever wut what wuzzzz what’s Y why
”
”
Lisa Greenwald (TBH, This Is So Awkward (TBH, #1))
“
This committee has shown you the testimony of dozens of Republican witnesses, those who served President Trump loyally for years. The case against Donald Trump in these hearings is not made by witnesses who were his political enemies; it is instead a series of confessions by Donald Trump's own appointees--his own friends, his own campaign officials, people who worked for him for years, and his own family.
”
”
Liz Cheney (Dick Cheney: In My Time- A Personal and Political Memoir)
“
[The J6] committee has shown you the testimony of dozens of Republican witnesses, those who served President Trump loyally for years. The case against Donald Trump in these hearings is not made by witnesses who were his political enemies; it is instead a series of confessions by Donald Trump's own appointees--his own friends, his own campaign officials, people who worked for him for years, and his own family.
”
”
Liz Cheney (Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning)