Conflicting Famous Quotes

The same hot lightning that burns your blood with passion–– cools your fears with peace.

It’s the conflict between Apollo and Dionysus—a famous dilemma in mythology. It’s the age-old battle between mind and heart, which seldom want the same thing.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream was a manifestation of hope that humanity might one day get out of its own way by finding the courage to realize that love and nonviolence are not indicators of weakness but gifts of significant strength.

The philosopher Descartes believed he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: "I think, therefore I am." He had, in fact, given expression to the most basic error: to equate thinking with Being and identity with thinking. The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent separateness, in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects the ever-increasing fragmentation of the mind.

She was born under the sign of Gemini. And that stands for the good and evil twin. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde both hiding and residing inside her heart. Her good twin was not bad at all. But her evil twin was even better, and showed up to be way too fatal!

the famous conflict of science and religion has actually nothing to do with religion, but is simply of two sciences: that of 4000 B.C. and that of A.D. 2000.

Picasso wasn’t in conflict, you can bet your bottom dollar on that. He said, Scram! I need to work, and his mistresses and their spawn ran for the hills. Dickens wasn’t in conflict. He had ten children and wrote as many novels in almost as many years, because it was both understood and appreciated that he was gifted, famous, and rich. The male artist has always been respected.

Cold flu looks nothing in front of cancer...complications in our personal life is like a flu and killing people on name of God or borders or countries is cancer...you can help this planet...there are ways...willingness is an action We are one...the only difference is ...few are awake, few are ready to wake up and few are just ignorant and time is coming when there will be no choice for those who is ignorant because of suffering and pain .... Bigger EGO is always drawn to Bigger Ego so many times Bigger ego ignores the important message being delivered by not a famous person. Love heals...Love not from mind...deep from heart....Mind brings games and play around with relationships...Something sacred deep from heart....L ♥ V E...Unconditional...No business of give and take....unconditional giving.... Don't be afraid and run away from loneliness and start seeking securities....Try to enjoy every part of it and then you will see ...Loneliness turned into something which we never want to loose....investigate your feeling when you feel lonely We always want something in return...we have made LOVE a business...I did it too in the past that's why I know it...this is the reason that we should change...you change, I change....everyone should think again on the way of living life and thinking and specially who thinks they know what life is. 2 births in the same life....physical and spiritual....you break the bondage (psychologically) with physical attributes of life ( detached state of mind) and try to find real "maksad" (purpose) of your existence as Being not Doing If you want to enjoy your relationship with your special one then please keep these tools handy:1) Patience2) Trust3) Freedom4) Honesty5) Respect we are all stars... twinkling with love and when there is love then there is no conflict 4 letters L ♥ V E ..imagine these letters on your hand and try to feel the deep meaning and power of these letters...feel the love you have for this life...start from there and spread love to everyone you see or meet...LOVE

Most people, when directly confronted by evidence that they are wrong, do not change their point of view or course of action but justify it even more tenaciously. Even irrefutable evidence is rarely enough to pierce the mental armor of self-justification. When we began working on this book, the poster boy for "tenacious clinging to a discredited belief" was George W. Bush. Bush was wrong in his claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, he was wrong in claiming that Saddam was linked with Al Qaeda, he was wrong in predicting that Iraqis would be dancing joyfully in the streets to receive the American soldiers, he was wrong in predicting that the conflict would be over quickly, he was wrong in his gross underestimate of the financial cost of the war, and he was most famously wrong in his photo-op speech six weeks after the invasion began, when he announced (under a banner reading MISSION ACCOMPLISHED) that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended.

He developed his revolutionary philosophy, with its grounding not in the Bible or ancient writers but in human reason, and became famous and infamous for it.

there really isn't that much to elaborate on...

The psychologist Walter Mischel captured the conflict in an agonizing choice he gave four-year-olds in a famous 1972 experiment: one marshmallow now or two marshmallows in fifteen minutes.15 Life is a never-ending gantlet of marshmallow tests, dilemmas that force us to choose between a sooner small reward and a later large reward.

A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new, and even the habit of denying entire nations and creating fake countries has a long pedigree. In 1931 the Japanese army staged mock attacks on itself to justify its invasion of China, and then created the fake country of Manchukuo to legitimise its conquests. China itself has long denied that Tibet ever existed as an independent country. British settlement in Australia was justified by the legal doctrine of terra nullius (‘nobody’s land’), which effectively erased 50,000 years of Aboriginal history. In the early twentieth century a favourite Zionist slogan spoke of the return of ‘a people without a land [the Jews] to a land without a people [Palestine]’. The existence of the local Arab population was conveniently ignored. In 1969 Israeli prime minister Golda Meir famously said that there is no Palestinian people and never was. Such views are very common in Israel even today, despite decades of armed conflicts against something that doesn’t exist. For example, in February 2016 MP Anat Berko gave a speech in the Israeli Parliament in which she doubted the reality and history of the Palestinian people. Her proof? The letter ‘p’ does not even exist in Arabic, so how can there be a Palestinian people? (In Arabic, ‘f’ stands for ‘p’, and the Arabic name for Palestine is Falastin.)

The average person wastes his life. He has a great deal of energy but he wastes it. The life of an average person seems at the end utterly meaningless…without significance. When he looks back…what has he done? MIND The mind creates routine for its own safety and convenience. Tradition becomes our security. But when the mind is secure it is in decay. We all want to be famous people…and the moment we want to be something…we are no longer free. Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential…the what is. It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything new…and in that there’s joy. To awaken this capacity in oneself and in others is real education. SOCIETY It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals…whereas culture has invented a single mold to which we must conform. A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person because he conforms to a pattern. He repeats phrases and thinks in a groove. What happens to your heart and your mind when you are merely imitative, naturally they wither, do they not? The great enemy of mankind is superstition and belief which is the same thing. When you separate yourself by belief tradition by nationally it breeds violence. Despots are only the spokesmen for the attitude of domination and craving for power which is in the heart of almost everyone. Until the source is cleared there will be confusion and classes…hate and wars. A man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country to any religion to any political party. He is concerned with the understanding of mankind. FEAR You have religion. Yet the constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear. You can only be afraid of what you think you know. One is never afraid of the unknown…one is afraid of the known coming to an end. A man who is not afraid is not aggressive. A man who has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free and peaceful mind. You want to be loved because you do not love…but the moment you really love, it is finished. You are no longer inquiring whether someone loves you or not. MEDITATION The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence. In meditation you will discover the whisperings of your own prejudices…your own noises…the monkey mind. You have to be your own teacher…truth is a pathless land. The beauty of meditation is that you never know where you are…where you are going…what the end is. Down deep we all understand that it is truth that liberates…not your effort to be free. The idea of ourselves…our real selves…is your escape from the fact of what you really are. Here we are talking of something entirely different….not of self improvement…but the cessation of self. ADVICE Take a break with the past and see what happens. Release attachment to outcomes…inside you will feel good no matter what. Eventually you will find that you don’t mind what happens. That is the essence of inner freedom…it is timeless spiritual truth. If you can really understand the problem the answer will come out of it. The answer is not separate from the problem. Suffer and understand…for all of that is part of life. Understanding and detachment…this is the secret. DEATH There is hope in people…not in societies not in systems but only in you and me. The man who lives without conflict…who lives with beauty and love…is not frightened by death…because to love is to die.

Hearst was eager to stoke the flames of conflict between Spain and the United States over Cuba and sent Frederick Remington the photographer, who could find no signs of war. In a famous exchange of cables, Hearst responded to Remington, “You provide the pictures; I’ll provide the war.”10

The famous axiom "Show, don't tell" is the key. Never force words into a character's mouth to tell the audience about world, history, or person. Rather, show us honest, natural scenes in which human beings talk and behave in honest, natural ways...yet at the same time indirectly pass along the necessary facts. In other words, dramatize exposition. Dramatized exposition serves two ends: Its primary purpose is to further the immediate conflict. Its secondary purpose is to convey information. The anxious novice reverses that order, putting expositional duty ahead of dramatic necessity.

Before the Civil War, a group of Southerners came to visit President Abraham Lincoln at the White House to warn him that when it came to the coming conflict, the South would prevail, because God was on their side. Lincoln famously said in response, “It is more important to know that we are on God’s side.

After a few minutes, Churchill broke the silence, saying, “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.” The remark had such power that Ismay quoted it to his wife after returning home. He had no idea that Churchill would soon deploy the line in one of his most famous speeches.

David and Goliath is a book about what happens when ordinary people confront giants. By “giants,” I mean powerful opponents of all kinds—from armies and mighty warriors to disability, misfortune, and oppression. Each chapter tells the story of a different person—famous or unknown, ordinary or brilliant—who has faced an outsize challenge and been forced to respond. Should I play by the rules or follow my own instincts? Shall I persevere or give up? Should I strike back or forgive? Through these stories, I want to explore two ideas. The first is that much of what we consider valuable in our world arises out of these kinds of lopsided conflicts, because the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty. And second, that we consistently get these kinds of conflicts wrong. We misread them. We misinterpret them. Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness. And the fact of being an underdog can change people in ways that we often fail to appreciate: it can open doors and create opportunities and educate and enlighten and make possible what might otherwise have seemed unthinkable.

It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map. My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the map-maker's distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual. Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in the way a mapmaker's technical interest is obvious ("This is a Mercator projection for long-range navigation-for short-range, you'd better use a different projection"). No, it is presented as if all readers of history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability. This is not intentional deception; the historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations. To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves- unwittingly-to justify what was done. My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)-that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly. The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)-the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they-the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court-represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as "the United States," subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a "national interest" represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.

Most of us do not like not being able to see what others see or make sense of something new. We do not like it when things do not come together and fit nicely for us. That is why most popular movies have Hollywood endings. The public prefers a tidy finale. And we especially do not like it when things are contradictory, because then it is much harder to reconcile them (this is particularly true for Westerners). This sense of confusion triggers in a us a feeling of noxious anxiety. It generates tension. So we feel compelled to reduce it, solve it, complete it, reconcile it, make it make sense. And when we do solve these puzzles, there's relief. It feels good. We REALLY like it when things come together. What I am describing is a very basic human psychological process, captured by the second Gestalt principle. It is what we call the 'press for coherence.' It has been called many different things in psychology: consonance, need for closure, congruity, harmony, need for meaning, the consistency principle. At its core it is the drive to reduce the tension, disorientation, and dissonance that come from complexity, incoherence, and contradiction. In the 1930s, Bluma Zeigarnik, a student of Lewin's in Berlin, designed a famous study to test the impact of this idea of tension and coherence. Lewin had noticed that waiters in his local cafe seemed to have better recollections of unpaid orders than of those already settled. A lab study was run to examine this phenomenon, and it showed that people tend to remember uncompleted tasks, like half-finished math or word problems, better than completed tasks. This is because the unfinished task triggers a feeling of tension, which gets associated with the task and keeps it lingering in our minds. The completed problems are, well, complete, so we forget them and move on. They later called this the 'Zeigarnik effect,' and it has influenced the study of many things, from advertising campaigns to coping with the suicide of loved ones to dysphoric rumination of past conflicts.

By 1952, the University of Minnesota nutritionist Ancel Keys was arguing that high blood levels of cholesterol caused heart disease, and that it was the fat in our diets that drove up cholesterol levels. Keys had a conflict of interest: his research had been funded by the sugar industry—the Sugar Research Foundation and then the Sugar Association—since 1944, if not earlier, and the K-rations he had famously developed for the military during the war (the “K” is said to have stood for “Keys”) were loaded with sugar. This might have naturally led him to perceive something other than sugar as the problem. We can only guess.

The chief guide which must direct us in the choice of a profession is the welfare of mankind and our own perfection. It should not be thought that these two interests could be in conflict, that one would have to destroy the other; on the contrary, man's nature is so constituted that he can attain his own perfection only by working for the perfection, for the good, of his fellow men. If he works only for himself, he may perhaps become a famous man of learning, a great sage, an excellent poet, but he can never be a perfect, truly great man. History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy; religion itself teaches us that the ideal being whom all strive to copy sacrificed himself for the sake of mankind, and who would dare to set at nought such judgments? If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people.

Here is the voice of my main Character in my Talon book series, I’ll let her introduce herself to you: My name is Matica and I am a special needs child with a growth disability. I am stuck in the body of a two year old, even though I am ten years old when my story begins in the first book of the Talon series, TALON, COME FLY WITH ME. Because of that disability, (I am saying ‘that’ disability, not ‘my’ disability because it’s a thing that happens to me, nothing more and because I am not accepting it as something bad. I can say that now after I learned to cope with it.) I was rejected by the local Indians as they couldn’t understand that that condition is not a sickness and so it can’t be really cured. It’s just a disorder of my body. But I never gave up on life and so I had lots of adventures roaming around the plateau where we live in Peru, South America, with my mother’s blessings. But after I made friends with my condors I named Tamo and Tima, everything changed. It changed for the good. I was finally loved. And I am the hero and I embrace my problem. In better words: I had embraced my problem before I made friends with my condors Tamo and Tima. I held onto it and I felt sorry for myself and cried a lot, wanting to run away or something worse. But did it help me? Did it become better? Did I grow taller? No, nothing of that helped me. I didn’t have those questions when I was still in my sorrow, but all these questions came to me later, after I was loved and was cherished. One day I looked up into the sky and saw the majestic condors flying in the air. Here and now, I made up my mind. I wanted to become friends with them. I believed if I could achieve that, all my sorrow and rejection would be over. And true enough, it was over. I was loved. I even became famous. And so, if you are in a situation, with whatever your problem is, find something you could rely on and stick to it, love that and do with that what you were meant to do. And I never run from conflicts.

Freedom from Expectations I don’t measure my effectiveness at all. I don’t believe in self-measurement. I feel like this is a form of self-discipline, self-punishment, and self-conflict. [1] If you hurt other people because they have expectations of you, that’s their problem. If they have an agreement with you, it’s your problem. But, if they have an expectation of you, that’s completely their problem. It has nothing to do with you. They’re going to have lots of expectations out of life. The sooner you can dash their expectations, the better. [1] Courage isn’t charging into a machine gun nest. Courage is not caring what other people think. Anyone who has known me for a long time knows my defining characteristic is a combination of being very impatient and willful. I don’t like to wait. I hate wasting time. I’m very famous for being rude at parties, events, dinners, where the moment I figure out it’s a waste of my time, I leave immediately. Value your time. It is all you have. It’s more important than your money. It’s more important than your friends. It is more important than anything. Your time is all you have. Do not waste your time. This doesn’t mean you can’t relax. As long as you’re doing what you want, it’s not a waste of your time. But if you’re not spending your time doing what you want, and you’re not earning, and you’re not learning—what the heck are you doing? Don’t spend your time making other people happy. Other people being happy is their problem. It’s not your problem. If you are happy, it makes other people happy. If you’re happy, other people will ask you how you became happy and they might learn from it, but you are not responsible for making other people happy. [10]

At a crucial point of the Battle of Britain, when German warplanes were bombing London daily, every available British aircraft was in the sky to stop the planes from reaching the city. As Churchill sat in a car with his military secretary he said, “Don’t speak to me. I have never been so moved.” Churchill sat quietly for five minutes. He then turned to his secretary and asked him to write down a thought that would become one of the most famous quotes of World War II: “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.”6 Only four words in that sentence are more than one syllable and, in six words, Churchill told the entire story of British courage and what it meant to the rest of the world: so much, so many, so few. Those six words summarize stories that fill entire books. “So much” stands for freedom, democracy, and liberty—much of which would have been eliminated if Hitler had not been stopped. “So many” represents the entire population of the British empire at the time and those who lived in the countries Hitler invaded. “So few” is a reference to a small number of English pilots, many of whom were killed in the skies as they defended their homeland.

we compared a sampling of successful and unsuccessful fairy tales in the famous Brothers Grimm collection. Successful (widely known) fairy tales, such as Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood, had just two or three counterintuitive violations. Unsuccessful ones (have you heard of the Donkey Lettuce?) had none, or in other cases, quite the opposite—they had far too many violations. Successful counterintuitive representations and stories were also likely to generate emotional responses, like fear, and encouraged additional inferences.25 These kinds of memory biases play an important role in religious belief.26 The extraordinary agents endemic to religions appear to possess a particularly evocative set of abilities not shared by ordinary beings. They can be invisible; they can see things from afar; they can move through physical objects. This minimal counterintuitiveness is memorable, giving these concepts an advantage in cultural transmission. These departures from common sense are systematic but not radical enough to rupture meaning completely. As Sperber has put it, these minimal counterintuitions are relevant mysteries: they are closely connected to background knowledge, but do not admit to a final interpretation.

The single book that has influenced me most is probably the last book in the world that anybody is gonna want to read: Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. This book is dense, difficult, long, full of blood and guts. It wasn’t written, as Thucydides himself attests at the start, to be easy or fun. But it is loaded with hardcore, timeless truths and the story it tells ought to be required reading for every citizen in a democracy. Thucydides was an Athenian general who was beaten and disgraced in a battle early in the 27-year conflagration that came to be called the Peloponnesian War. He decided to drop out of the fighting and dedicate himself to recording, in all the detail he could manage, this conflict, which, he felt certain, would turn out to be the greatest and most significant war ever fought up to that time. He did just that. Have you heard of Pericles’ Funeral Oration? Thucydides was there for it. He transcribed it. He was there for the debates in the Athenian assembly over the treatment of the island of Melos, the famous Melian Dialogue. If he wasn’t there for the defeat of the Athenian fleet at Syracuse or the betrayal of Athens by Alcibiades, he knew people who were there and he went to extremes to record what they told him.Thucydides, like all the Greeks of his era, was unencumbered by Christian theology, or Marxist dogma, or Freudian psychology, or any of the other “isms” that attempt to convince us that man is basically good, or perhaps perfectible. He saw things as they were, in my opinion. It’s a dark vision but tremendously bracing and empowering because it’s true. On the island of Corcyra, a great naval power in its day, one faction of citizens trapped their neighbors and fellow Corcyreans in a temple. They slaughtered the prisoners’ children outside before their eyes and when the captives gave themselves up based on pledges of clemency and oaths sworn before the gods, the captors massacred them as well. This was not a war of nation versus nation, this was brother against brother in the most civilized cities on earth. To read Thucydides is to see our own world in microcosm. It’s the study of how democracies destroy themselves by breaking down into warring factions, the Few versus the Many. Hoi polloi in Greek means “the many.” Oligoi means “the few.” I can’t recommend Thucydides for fun, but if you want to expose yourself to a towering intellect writing on the deepest stuff imaginable, give it a try.

In any long fiction, Henry James remarked, use of the first-person point of view is barbaric. James may go too far, but his point is worth considering. First person locks us in one character's mind, locks us to one kind of diction throughout, locks out possibilities of going deeply into various characters' minds and so forth. ....Vulgar diction in the telling of the Helen story would clearly create a white-hot irony, probably all but unmanageable. Colloquial diction and relatively short sentences would have the instant effect of humanizing once elevated characters and events. Highly formal diction and all that goes along with the traditional omniscient narrator might seem immediately appropriate for the seriousness of the story, but it can easily backfire, providing not suitable pomp but mere pompousness. And some choices in p.o.v. as well as in other stylistic elements, may have more direct bearing on the theme than would others. For instance, the "town" point of view, in which the voice in the story is some unnamed spokesman for all the community--among the most famous examples is Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"--might have the immediate effect of foregrounding the story's controlling idea, conflicting community values versus personal values.

Congress decided to put him on a committee to write a declaration explaining why the colonies were seeking independence. It was back in the days when Congress knew how to appoint really good committees: Franklin and Jefferson and John Adams were on it. They knew that leadership required not merely asserting values, but finding a balance when values conflict. We can see that in the deft editing of the famous sentence that opens the second paragraph of the Declaration. “We hold these truths to be sacred . . . ,” Jefferson had written. On the copy of his draft at the Library of Congress we can see the dark printer’s ink and backslashes of Franklin’s pen as he changes it to “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” His point was that our rights would come from rationality and the consent of the governed, not the dictates and dogma of any religion. Jefferson’s draft sentence went on to say that all men have certain inalienable rights. We can see Adams’s hand making an addition: “They are endowed by their Creator” with these inalienable rights. So just in the editing of one half of one sentence we can see how Franklin and his colleagues struck a unifying balance between the grace of divine providence and the role of democratic consent in the founding values of our nation.

But the basis of Freud's ideas aren't accepted by all philosophers, though many accept that he was right about the possibility of unconscious thought. Some have claimed that Freud's theories are unscientific. Most famously, Karl Popper (whose ideas are more fully discussed in Chapter 36) described many of the ideas of psychoanalysis as ‘unfalsifiable’. This wasn't a compliment, but a criticism. For Popper, the essence of scientific research was that it could be tested; that is, there could be some possible observation that would show that it was false. In Popper's example, the actions of a man who pushed a child into a river, and a man who dived in to save a drowning child were, like all human behaviour, equally open to Freudian explanation. Whether someone tried to drown or save a child, Freud's theory could explain it. He would probably say that the first man was repressing some aspect of his Oedipal conflict, and that led to his violent behaviour, whereas the second man had ‘sublimated’ his unconscious desires, that is, managed to steer them into socially useful actions. If every possible observation is taken as further evidence that the theory is true, whatever that observation is, and no imaginable evidence could show that it was false, Popper believed, the theory couldn't be scientific at all. Freud, on the other hand, might have argued that Popper had some kind of repressed desire that made him so aggressive towards psychoanalysis. Bertrand

It had been hard enough to drive past the area. It was harder to imagine what it was like living there. Yet people lived with the stench and the terrible air, and had careers there. Even lawyers lived there, I was told. Was the smell of excrement only on the periphery, from the iridescent black lake? No; that stench went right through Dharavi. Even more astonishing was to read in a Bombay magazine an article about Papu's suburb of Sion, in which the slum of Dharavi was written about almost as a bohemian feature of the place, something that added spice to humdrum middle-class life. Bombay clearly innoculated its residents in some way. I had another glimpse of Dharavi some time later, when I was going in a taxi to the domestic airport at Santa Cruz. The taxi-driver - a Muslim from Hyderabad, full of self-respect, nervous about living in Bombay, fearful of sinking, planning to go back home soon, and in the meantime nervously particular about his car and his clothes - the taxi-driver showed the apartment blocks on one side of the airport road where hutment dwellers had been rehoused. In the other direction he showed the marsh on which Dharavi had grown and, away in the distance, the low black line of the famous slum. Seen from here, Dharavi looked artificial, unnecessary even in Bombay: allowed to exist because, as people said, it was a vote-bank, and hate-bank, something to be drawn upon by many people. All the conflicting currents of Bombay flowed there as well; all the new particularities were heightened there. And yet people lived there, subject to this extra exploitation, because in Bombay, once you had a place to stay, you could make money.

When we think of the historic struggles and conflicts of the current and past century, we naturally think of famous leaders: men who governed nations, commanded armies, and inspired movements in the defense of liberty, or in the service of ideologies which have obliterated liberty. Yet today, in this hour of human history, when the forces arrayed against the free spirit of man are more powerful, more brutal, and potentially more deadly than ever before, the single figure who has raised the highest flame of liberty heads no state, commands no army, and leads no movement that our eyes can see. But there is a movement—a hidden movement of human beings who have no offices and no headquarters, who are not represented in the great halls where nations meet, who every day risk or suffer more for the right to speak, to think, and to be true to themselves than any of us here are likely to risk in our lifetime. We heed this voice, not because it speaks for the left or the right or for any faction, but because it hurls truth and courage into the teeth of total power when it would be so much easier and more comfortable to submit to and embrace the lies by which that power lives. What is the strength of this voice? How has it broken through to us when others have been silenced? Its strength is art. Art illuminates the truth. It is, in a sense, subversive: subversive of hypocrisy, subversive of delusion, subversive of untruth. Few combinations in all of history have demonstrated the power of the pen coupled with the courage of free men’s minds. We need that power desperately today. We need it to teach the new and forgetful generations in our midst what it means to be free. Freedom is not an abstraction, neither is the absence of freedom. Art is a unique gift. It cannot be transmuted to another. But let us pray that this courage is contagious. We need echoes of this voice. We need to hear echoes in the White House. We need to hear the echoes in Congress and in the State Department and in the universities and media. The American ethos, from its conception to the contemporary, has been dedicated to the firm, unyielding belief in freedom. Freedom for all mankind, as well as for ourselves. It is in this spirit that we live our lives.

ONCE YOU’VE HOOKED readers, your next task is to put your early chapters to work introducing your characters, settings, and stakes. The first 20-25% of the book comprises your setup. At first glance, this can seem like a tremendous chunk of story to devote to introductions. But if you expect readers to stick with you throughout the story, you first have to give them a reason to care. This important stretch is where you accomplish just that. Mere curiosity can only carry readers so far. Once you’ve hooked that sense of curiosity, you then have to deepen the pull by creating an emotional connection between them and your characters. These “introductions” include far more than just the actual moment of introducing the characters and settings or explaining the stakes. In themselves, the presentations of the characters probably won’t take more than a few scenes. After the introduction is when your task of deepening the characters and establishing the stakes really begins. The first quarter of the book is the place to compile all the necessary components of your story. Anton Chekhov’s famous advice that “if in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired” is just as important in reverse: if you’re going to have a character fire a gun later in the book, that gun should be introduced in the First Act. The story you create in the following acts can only be assembled from the parts you’ve shown readers in this First Act. That’s your first duty in this section. Your second duty is to allow readers the opportunity to learn about your characters. Who are these people? What is the essence of their personalities? What are their core beliefs (even more particularly, what are the beliefs that will be challenged or strengthened throughout the book)? If you can introduce a character in a “characteristic moment,” as we talked about earlier, you’ll be able to immediately show readers who this person is. From there, the plot builds as you deepen the stakes and set up the conflict that will eventually explode in the Inciting and Key Events. Authors sometimes feel pressured to dive right into the action of their stories, at the expense of important character development. Because none of us wants to write a boring story, we can overreact by piling on the explosions, fight sequences, and high-speed car chases to the point we’re unable to spend important time developing our characters. Character development is especially important in this first part of the story, since readers need to understand and sympathize with the characters before they’re hit with the major plot revelations at the quarter mark, halfway mark, and three-quarters mark. Summer blockbusters are often guilty of neglecting character development, but one enduring exception worth considering is Stephen Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. No one would claim the film is a leisurely character study, but it rises far above the monster movie genre through its expert use of pacing and its loving attention to character, especially in its First Act. It may surprise some viewers to realize the action in this movie doesn’t heat up until a quarter of the way into the film—and even then we have no scream-worthy moments, no adrenaline, and no extended action scenes until halfway through the Second Act. Spielberg used the First Act to build suspense and encourage viewer loyalty to the characters. By the time the main characters arrive at the park, we care about them, and our fear for their safety is beginning to manifest thanks to a magnificent use of foreshadowing. We understand that what is at stake for these characters is their very lives. Spielberg knew if he could hook viewers with his characters, he could take his time building his story to an artful Climax.

We need to analyze and contemplate the experience of modernity in the Arab and Muslim world, in order to grasp what is happening. Some of us, for example, reject modernity, and yet it’s obvious that these same people are using the products of modernity, even to the extent that when proselytizing their interpretation of Islam, which conflicts with modernity, they’re employing the tools of modernity to do so. This strange phenomenon can best be understood by contemplating our basic attitude towards modernity, stemming from two centuries ago. If we analyze books written by various Muslim thinkers at the time, concerning modernity and the importance of modernizing our societies, and so forth, we can see that they distinguished between certain aspects of modernity that should be rejected, and others that may be accepted. You can find this distinction in the very earliest books that Muslim intellectuals wrote on the topic of modernity. To provide a specific example, I’ll cite an important book that is widely regarded as having been the first ever written about modern thought in the Muslim world, namely, a book by the famous Egyptian intellectual, Rifa’ Rafi’ al-Tahtawi (1801–1873), Takhlish al-Ibriz fi Talkhish Baris, whose title may be translated as Mining Gold from Its Surrounding Dross. As you can immediately grasp from its title, the book distinguishes between the “gold” contained within modernity—gold being a highly prized, expensive and rare product of mining—and its so-called “worthless” elements, which Muslims are forbidden to embrace. Now if we ask ourselves, “What elements of modernity did these early thinkers consider acceptable, and what did they demand that we reject?,” we discover that technology is the “acceptable” element of modernity. We are told that we may adopt as much technology as we want, and exploit these products of modernity to our heart’s content. But what about the modes of thought that give rise to these products, and underlie the very phenomenon of modernity itself? That is, the free exercise of reason, and critical thought? These two principles are rejected and proscribed for Muslims, who may adopt the products of modernity, while its substance, values and foundations, including its philosophical modes of thought, are declared forbidden. Shaykh Rifa’ Rafi’ al-Tahtawi explained that we may exploit knowledge that is useful for defense, warfare, irrigation, farming, etc., and yet he simultaneously forbade us to study, or utilize, the philosophical sciences that gave rise to modern thought, and the love for scientific methodologies that enlivens the spirit of modern knowledge, because he believed that they harbored religious deviance and infidelity (to God).

Daily, the media report human activity in which force is used to settle disputes. Since 1945 not a single day has gone by without war, and the end of the Cold War has not reduced its frequency. For example, in 1994 more than thirty major armed conflicts were fought in twenty-seven locations throughout the world in such places as Afghanistan, Algeria, Bosnia, Chechnya, Liberia, Rwanda, and Somalia. Given its wide spread occurrence, it is little wonder so many people equate world politics with violence. In On War, Prussian strategist Karl von Clausewitz advanced his famous dictum that war is merely an extension of diplomacy by other means - "a form of communication between countries," albeit an extreme form. This insight underscores the realist belief that war is an instrument for states to use to resolve their disputes. War, however, is the deadliest instrument of conflict resolution, its onset indicating that persuasion and negotiations have failed. In international relations, conflict regularly occurs when actors interact and disputes over incompatible interests rise. In and of itself, conflict is not necessarily threatening when the partners turn to arms to settle their perceived irreconcilable differences.

It’s the conflict between Apollo and Dionysus—a famous dilemma in mythology. It’s the age-old battle between mind and heart, which seldom want the same thing.

ERIK ERIKSON, ONE OF the most innovative psychoanalysts of the twentieth century, wrote about these moments of existential review in his work on the human life cycle. He famously argued that all of us go through eight stages of development, each marked by a specific conflict.

AD 476, the year when Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman emperor of the West, was deposed. But in fact the removal of Romulus was only the final, inevitable step in a process that had begun long before. By 476, the emperor was a puppet without any effective power; the empire had already broken up and was losing one piece after another; barbarians were dominant in Gaul, in Spain, in Africa, and even in Italy; and Rome had been sacked more than once, by the Goths in 410 and again by the Vandals in 455. In short, the dissolution of the empire was already so far advanced that the deposition of the last Western emperor was not very important news. A famous essay by Arnaldo Momigliano titled "An Empire's Silent Fall" demonstrates that the so-called great event of 476, the dethronement of Romulus Augustulus, was noted by few at the time. But if things had reached this point, if the western half of the Roman Empire had been reduced to an empty shell that a barbarian chieftain could sweep aside without eliciting a protest, it was because of a series of traumas that had begun exactly a century before. In 376, an unforeseen flood of refugees at the frontiers of the empire, and the inability of the Roman authorities to manage this emergency properly, gave rise to a dramatic conflict that was to culminate in Rome's most disastrous military defeat since Hannibal's Carthaginians destroyed the Roman army at Cannae in 216 BC.

THE SEA-GULL A PLAY IN FOUR ACTS First produced in 1896, The Seagull is generally considered to be Chekhov’s first major play. It dramatises the romantic and artistic conflicts between four characters: the famous middlebrow story writer Boris Trigorin, the ingénue Nina, the fading actress Irina Arkadina and her son the symbolist playwright Konstantin Tréplev — now regarded by many as the playwright greatest male role.

DARWIN’S “SACRED CAUSE”? Much ink has been dedicated to determining Charles Darwin’s role in “scientific racism.” The only way to empirically and scientifically determine his role is to organize the events as a timeline, and thus placing them into context of historical events. Political analysis without historical context is all sail and no rudder. In America we are constantly made aware that both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day, in the same year, February 12, 1809. Adrian Desmond and James Moore famous 2009 book, “Darwin’s Sacred Cause,” leverages this factoid in an effort to place Charles Darwin at par with Abraham Lincoln in the abolition of slavery. This fraudulently steals away credit from Abraham Lincoln, who took a bullet to the head for the cause, and transfers it by inference to an aristocrat whom remained in his plush abode throughout the conflict and never lifted a finger for the cause.

through the biblical stories and realized that serving YHWH always seemed to come at great personal cost. So did YHWH send the testing, or did it come as a natural course of events when one was willing to serve? With those conflicting thoughts battling each other, the words of Yeshua came to mind—the words spoken on that famous night when the Son of God petitioned the Father to allow him to pass on the terrible events he knew were coming: Not my will but thine, YHWH, Zane thought. “Not my will, but thine,” he repeated, aloud this time.

Hillary served as a U.S. senator from New York but did not propose a single important piece of legislation; her record is literally a blank slate. Liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas admits that she “doesn’t have a single memorable policy or legislative accomplishment to her name.”2 Despite traveling millions of miles as secretary of state, Hillary negotiated no treaties, secured no agreements, prevented no conflicts—in short, she accomplished nothing. Lack of accomplishment is one thing; deceit is quite another. Everyone who has followed her career knows that Hillary is dishonest to the core, a “congenital liar” as columnist William Safire once put it. The writer Christopher Hitchens titled his book about the Clintons No One Left to Lie To. Even Hollywood mogul David Geffen, an avid progressive, said a few years ago of the Clintons, “Everybody in politics lies but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.”3 She said her mother named her after the famed climber Sir Edmund Hillary, until someone pointed out that Hillary was born in 1947 and her “namesake” only became famous in 1953. On the campaign trail in 2008, Hillary said she had attempted as a young woman to have applied to join the Marines but they wouldn’t take her because she was a woman and wore glasses. In fact, Hillary at this stage of life detested the Marines and would never have wanted to join. She also said a senior professor at Harvard Law School discouraged her from going there by saying, “We don’t need any more women.”4 If this incident actually occurred one might expect Hillary to have identified the professor. Certainly it would be interesting to get his side of the story. But she never has, suggesting it’s another made-up episode.

One was made famous by Ulysses S. Grant and later John J. Pershing, emphasizing finding the enemy, then confronting and destroying him through overwhelming firepower.

Quoting page 60: In the 1960s, racism was chiefly understood to mean discrimination by whites against African-Americans. But in the immigration debate of the Progressive Era, the nation’s most prominent black leaders—most notably the Republican conservative, Booker T. Washington, and the socialist intellectual, W.E.B. DuBois—supported the restrictionists. Washington, in his famous Atlanta address at the Cotton States Exposition in 1895, pleaded with industrial leaders to employ loyal, hardworking freedmen, rather than import millions of European immigrants to take the industrial jobs that otherwise might have freed native-born African-Americans from segregated misery in the rural South.

On the one side was Darcie Burrell—a reed-thin woman with a permanently conflicted expression, as though, deep inside her, someone was trying to bathe a cat. She attended our church, and was famous for praying over people who later

Much ink has been spilled over whether fascism represented an emergency form of capitalism, a mechanism devised by capitalists by which the fascist state—their agent—disciplined the workforce in a way no traditional dictatorship could do. Today it is quite clear that businessmen often objected to specific aspects of fascist economic policies, sometimes with success. But fascist economic policy responded to political priorities, and not to economic rationale. Both Mussolini and Hitler tended to think that economics was amenable to a ruler’s will. Mussolini returned to the gold standard and revalued the lira at 90 to the British pound in December 1927 for reasons of national prestige, and over the objections of his own finance minister. Fascism was not the first choice of most businessmen, but most of them preferred it to the alternatives that seemed likely in the special conditions of 1922 and 1933—socialism or a dysfunctional market system. So they mostly acquiesced in the formation of a fascist regime and accommodated to its requirements of removing Jews from management and accepting onerous economic controls. In time, most German and Italian businessmen adapted well to working with fascist regimes, at least those gratified by the fruits of rearmament and labor discipline and the considerable role given to them in economic management. Mussolini’s famous corporatist economic organization, in particular, was run in practice by leading businessmen. Peter Hayes puts it succinctly: the Nazi regime and business had “converging but not identical interests.” Areas of agreement included disciplining workers, lucrative armaments contracts, and job-creation stimuli. Important areas of conflict involved government economic controls, limits on trade, and the high cost of autarky—the economic self-sufficiency by which the Nazis hoped to overcome the shortages that had lost Germany World War I. Autarky required costly substitutes—Ersatz— for such previously imported products as oil and rubber. Economic controls damaged smaller companies and those not involved in rearmament. Limits on trade created problems for companies that had formerly derived important profits from exports. The great chemical combine I. G. Farben is an excellent example: before 1933, Farben had prospered in international trade. After 1933, the company’s directors adapted to the regime’s autarky and learned to prosper mightily as the suppliers of German rearmament. The best example of the expense of import substitution was the Hermann Goering Werke, set up to make steel from the inferior ores and brown coal of Silesia. The steel manufacturers were forced to help finance this operation, to which they raised vigorous objections.

Far from being a distraction from holy things, as St. Bernard had claimed, this earthly order is their complement. The fact that man has two aspects, the material and the spiritual, does not mean conflict or compromise: “Grace does not replace nature, it perfects nature.” It’s Aquinas’s most famous aphorism, and it simply means we can merge the two halves of ourselves into a single higher whole—just as Thomas Aquinas had merged Aristotle and Christianity into a single system.

After studying at Edinburgh University, he spent a decade broadening his mind on the Continent; for example, he befriended some Jansenists in the famous Catholic seminary at Douay in the Spanish Netherlands, and discovered in them a depth of sincere Christian faith and spiritual life he had not thought possible in Roman Catholics. It seems they reminded him of the Christians of the earliest centuries. There was always to be a Jansenist leaven in Leighton’s own piety; in particular, he admired monasticism and the celibate life—he himself never married.25

Rudi Dutschke summed up his strategy in 1967 with the famous phrase, “the long march through the institutions,” which Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School described as “working against the established institutions while working within them” and building “counterinstitutions.

Political authority, the authority of the State, may arise in a number of possible ways: in Locke's phrase, for instance, a father may become the "politic monarch" of an extended family; or a judge may acquire kingly authority in addition, as in Herodotus' tale. Whatever its first origin, political authority tends to include all four pure types of authority. Medieval scholastic teachings of the divine right of kings display this full extent of political authority. Even in this context, however, calls for independence of the judicial power arose, as exemplified by the Magna Carta; in this way the fact was manifested that the judge's authority, rooted in Eternity, stands apart from the three temporal authorities, which more easily go together, of father, master, and leader. The medieval teaching of the full extent of political authority is complicated and undermined by the existence of an unresolved conflict, namely that arising between ecclesiastical and state power, between Pope and Emperor, on account of the failure to work out an adequate distinction between the political and the ecclesiastical realms. The teachings of absolutism by thinkers such as Bodin and Hobbes resolved this conflict through a unified teaching of sovereignty that removed independent theological authority from the political realm. In reaction to actual and potential abuses of absolutism, constitutional teachings arose (often resting on the working hypothesis of a "social contract") and developed—most famously in Montesquieu—a doctrine of "separation of powers." This new tradition focused its attention on dividing and balancing political power, with a view to restricting it from despotic or tyrannical excess. Kojève makes the astute and fascinating observation that in this development from absolutism to constitutionalism, the authority of the father silently drops out of the picture, without any detailed analysis or discussion; political authority comes to be discussed as a combination of the authority of judge, leader, and master, viewed as judicial power, legislative power, and executive power. In this connection, Kojève makes the conservative or traditionalist Hegelian suggestion that, with the authority of the father dropped from the political realm, the political authority, disconnected from its past, will have a tendency towards constant change.

Rommel soon enjoyed almost mystical status among his Africa Korps troops, bringing to mind Virgil’s famous comment on improbable achievement: “Possunt, quia posse videntur” (“They can, because they think they can,” Aeneid 5.231).

The Secret on How to Write Comedy In a fashionable context, comedy is a subjective element. Making humans funny is an incredibly difficult job and developing a chunk of comedy is even more difficult. If you are an aspiring comedy writer, there is loads to be found out and Filipino concert in Las Vegas( ticklemecomedy.com) in case you lack that writing skills, there's no way you may produce an excellent comedy piece. So how do you write stuff that is actually funny and will make everyone roll round in laughter? Are there definitely techniques on how to write comedy or steps with a view to decorate your comedic writing? Maybe these are the questions rambling around your thoughts now. Well, happily, there are some easy strategies on for writing humorous cloth. Tips on How to Write Comedy Like all different forms of writing, comedy writing is no one of a kind. It additionally takes exercise to get it right. Some comedic writers might also master the artwork of comedy writing with only a little exercise while a few conflict lots before getting Filipino show in Las Vegas to know it. With that being said, every person who wants to realize the secret to writing high-quality comedy need to consider some easy pointers. Whether you come to be being funny or no longer, the most essential element is which you have discovered how to excellent write comedic cloth and are capable of produce quality comedy pieces. To assist you emerge as a very good comedic writer, beneath are some guidelines. • Choose the type of comedy - One tip on how to write comedic portions is to pick out the type of humor you need to exhibit. There are various forms of comedy along with slapstick, parody, dark humor, edgy humor, own family humor, dry observational humor, and plenty of others. You simply need to select one in your comedy piece and paintings on it. Failure to consciousness on one sort of humor will end result on your audience being careworn. • Use warfare - Another golden rule is to discover the battle in anything and play on the boundaries. Professional comedic writers say that anger is frequently the middle of all comedy. But this doesn't suggest however that you need to be a raging psycho simply so one can realize the way to write comedy. This virtually approach that you got to have the ability to address a conflict in a humorous manner. • Carefully choose your words - Successful comedic playwrights realize nicely the way to maximize the comedic impact. Obviously, they are experts in finding the funniest in everything. Choose phrases that sound funny and discover ways to tweak your paintings to give you actual funny piece. • Know how and whilst to magnify - In comedy, "extra" is generally better. Think approximately conditions that might be funnier if things have been exaggerated a chunk. Something mildly humorous can quickly Las Vegas Filipino shows become hilarious with a little bit of embellishment. • Timing - In comedy, timing is the whole thing. It is a totally critical component in writing comedy. You want to inject the proper joke inside the proper location and in the right time. This is in which your punch traces ought to appear. This also manner understanding whilst to end. But take word that timing depends significantly at the sort of comedy you're pursuing. Practice makes best After being given these few hints on how to write comedy, you need to have a terrific begin composing fine, comedic work. But as the famous adage says "Practice makes best" so preserve to exercise and work at your stuff. You don't always want to be intrinsically humorous to study comedic writing but it'll help.

Without conflict, it’s hard to have – it’s hard to have drama. I mean one of the things – famous lines about literature - the French writer Henry de Montherlant said about happiness that’s almost impossible to write about. Happiness writes in white ink on a white page. You know it doesn’t show up. If people are happy, there’s no story, you know. These people are happy we are told. The end. You know, because what else is there to say? The hardest thing I think of all is to write about happiness.

The conflict of perspectives and competing wills that is the true reality is obscured and flattened out by the social imposition of a common standpoint, in language, thought, morality, and politics, which presents itself as simply or cosmically true by concealing its true sources. The inquiry into the geneology of these ruling ideas is therefore a vital part of their unmasking. The proposed geneology of Christian morality, as the expression not of universal love but of the slave revolt of the base against the noble, motivated by fear, hatred, and envy, is Nietzsche’s most famous thesis, expounded in Beyond Good and Evil and On the Geneology of Morals. . . . He regarded modern morality, which speaks with the voice of the community or even of humanity as a whole, as particularly dangerous, because it requires suppression of the cruelty and recklessness that distinguishes the strong individual. The height of self-realization cannot be reached by someone who is too concerned with the reactions of others, or his effects on them. There is a fundamental conflict between the pursuit of individual creativity and perfection and the claims of the general welfare. For this reason, Nietzsche was not a democrat. Already at the time of writing The Birth of Tragedy, he defended slavery as a condition of the possibility of great cultural achievement by the few, as in ancient Athens. And he defended its modern counterpart, the economic oppression of the masses, for the same reason. He opposed shortening the workday from twelve hours to eleven when it was proposed in Basel, he approved of child labor, and he opposed the educational groups for workers. When in 1871 he heard the false rumor that the Paris communards had pillaged the Louvre, he called it ‘the worst day of my life.’ Equality meant nothing to him; he believed it would inevitably push everything down to the lowest common denominator, that of the ‘democratic herd animal.’ Life, he insisted, is tragic; it is necessary to choose between justice and aesthetic perfection. And in his latest writings he expressed fantasies of annihilation, with ‘degenerates’ being got rid of to make room for the highest type of man.

The major benefit is that working is the best way of being completely fulfilled. And that's the kind of woman who makes her husband happiest. [...] During my little research into the special problems of working couples I talked to my old friends, Lynn and Alfred Lunt — perhaps the most famous (and blissfully married) professional couples in the world. [...] As for professional conflicts, she [Lynn] said, 'We’re both working people, you know. Do you suppose that while I was studying O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra and he was doing Marco Millions, there was time to indulge in any grousing? Perhaps that is the mysterious secret of our happy marriage — or one of them. That there was no time.' She added, 'I’m not a jealous woman, which is a wonderful thing, both for me and him.

The competitive concept of the creation of the universe is the mental reflection of the contest and conflict which began at a particular period in human society. This competitive concept could not have developed in a classless society; in fact it arose when society divided into classes. Monarchies were established and conflicts between them became a daily occurrence. Wars were fought, settlements destroyed, the blood of innocents was shed along with soldiers, and the winning rival became famous. Epics would be written in his honour and hymns and songs would be sung; so much so that every kind of goodness was attributed to his person and enemies were made into idols of evil.

He spent the last four years of his life there engaged in practice of Zazen (meditation), painting, and joining tea ceremonies and poetry gatherings with the domain’s elite. Many of Musashi’s famous ink paintings were created during this period of intense personal reflection. By this time, Japan had become politically stable and war was now a distant memory. Musashi, being among the last generations who had personally experienced conflict, sensed that samurai were losing their sense of identity. He resolved to make a pilgrimage to Reigandō Cave43 in 1643 and started writing Gorin-no-sho there, hoping to preserve for posterity his Way, and what he believed to be the very essence of warriorship. A year later he fell ill, and the domain elders encouraged him to return to Kumamoto to be cared for. He continued working on his treatise for five or six months. On the twelfth day of the fifth month of 1645, he passed the not quite finished manuscript to his student Magonojō. He gave away all his worldly possessions, and then wrote Dokkōdō, a brief list of twenty-one precepts that summed up his principles shaped over a lifetime of austere training. He died on the nineteenth day of the fifth month of 1645. It is said that he had taken ill with “dysphagia,” which suggests perhaps that he had terminal stomach cancer. Some say he died of lung cancer. In Bukōden, it is recorded that Musashi was laid in his coffin dressed in full armor and with all his weapons. It evokes a powerful image of a man who had dedicated his whole life to understanding the mind of combat and strategy. As testament once again to the conspiracy theories surrounding Musashi’s life, I am reminded of a bizarre book titled Was Musashi Murdered and Other Questions of Japanese History by Fudo Yamato (Zensho Communications, 1987). In it the author postulates that Musashi’s death was actually assassination through poisoning. The author argues that Musashi and many of his contemporaries such as the priest Takuan, Hosokawa Tadaoki (Tadatoshi’s father) who was suspected of “Christian sympathies,” and even Yagyū Munenori were all viewed with suspicion by the shogunate. He goes so far as to hypothesize that the phrase found at the end of Musashi’s Combat Strategy in 35 Articles “Should there be any entries you are unsure of, please allow me to explain in person…” was actually interpreted by the government as a call for those with anti-shogunate sentiments to gather in order to hatch a seditious plot (p. 20). This is why, Fudo Yamato argues, Musashi and these other notable men of his age all died mysteriously at around the same time.

he started writing counterpoint songs for the theater in the same period that he publicly claimed his desire to compose an opera, because in opera two or more characters regularly express conflicting feelings simultaneously, as in the famous quartet from Verdi’s Rigoletto, which Berlin parodied in his first musical comedy, Watch Your Step.

Without Washington’s guidance or public responsibility, [Hamilton] had again revealed a blazing, ungovernable temper that was unworthy of him and rendered him less effective. He also revealed anew that the man who had helped to forge a new structure of law and justice for American society remained mired in the old-fashioned world of blood feuds. When it came to intensely personal conflicts, New York’s most famous lawyer still turned instinctively not to the courtroom, but to the dueling ground.

After the Marxist revolution failed to topple capitalism in the early twentieth century, many Marxists went back to the drawing board, modifying and adapting Marx’s ideas. Perhaps the most famous was a group associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, which applied Marxism to a radical interdisciplinary social theory. The group included Max Horkheimer, T.W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Georg Lukács, and Walter Benjamin and came to be known as the Frankfurt School. These men developed Critical Theory as an expansion of Conflict Theory and applied it more broadly, including other social sciences and philosophy. Their main goal was to address structural issues causing inequity. They worked from the assumption that current social reality was broken, and they needed to identify the people and institutions that could make changes and provide practical goals for social transformation.

Jobs noticed that when the heart gave him an intuition, it was for him a command that he had to follow, regardless of the opinions of others. The only thing that mattered was finding a way to give shape to the intuition. For Jobs, the vegan diet, Zen meditation, a life immersed in nature, abstention from alcohol and coffee were necessary to nourish his inner voice, the voice of his heart and strengthen his ability to intuit the future. At the same time, this caused great difficulties. He was sensitive, intuitive, irrational and nervous. He was aware of the limitations that his irrationality caused in handling a large company, such as Apple Computer, and chose a rationalist manager to run the company: John Sculley, a famous manager he admired but with whom he entered continually in conflict, to the point that in 1985 the board of directors decided to fire Jobs from Apple, the company he had founded. Apple Computer continued to make money for a while with the products designed by Jobs, but after a few years the decline began and in the mid-1990s it came to the brink of bankruptcy. On December 21, 1996, the board of directors asked Jobs to return as the president’s personal advisor. Jobs accepted. He asked for a salary of one dollar a year in exchange for the guarantee that his insights, even if crazy, were accepted unconditionally. In a few months he revolutionized the products and on September 16, 1997 he became interim CEO. Apple Computer resurrected in less than a year. How did he manage? He believed that we should not let the noise of others’ opinions dull our inner voice. And, more importantly, he repeated that we must always have the courage to believe in our heart and in our intuitions, because they already know the future and know where we need to go. For Jobs, everything else was secondary.

As Mark Twain famously quipped, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

A famous pioneer does more for human progress than a billion others who live a normal life.

So if you want to help humanity while having the most exciting life, then the way to live is to be a famous pioneer.

Here’s how to live: Be a famous pioneer.

Beyond the nonnegotiables of rule by the ulama and the enactment of Islamic law, Khomeini had never given much thought to what an Islamic state should look like. He once famously answered a question about his economic policies by declaring that “economics is for donkeys.” Later he observed in his dour way that “we did not make a revolution to slash the price of watermelon.” Khomeini, in short, was a classic big-picture man. To him, the details of governance mattered little, if at all. Still, his lieutenants had a country to run. Many borrowed ideas from the copious works of Sunni fundamentalist thinkers in Pakistan and the Arab world to give shape to the Islamic Republic. The state that Khomeini built would be an intolerant theocracy in which Islamic law was narrowly interpreted and implemented to limit individual and minority rights and erase all Western influences on society and culture.

What about Jerusalem? When discussing the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, pundits and politicians often tell us that Jerusalem is one of the holy cities of Islam—indeed, its third holiest city, right after Mecca and Medina. But in reality, the Islamic claim to Jerusalem is extremely tenuous, based only on a legendary journey of Muhammad—a journey that is at best a dream and at worst a fabrication. The Koran refers to this journey only obliquely and in just one place; Islamic tradition fills in the details and connects Jerusalem with the words of the Koran. But the Koran itself never mentions Jerusalem even once—an exceptionally inconvenient fact for Muslims who claim that the Palestinians must have a share of Jerusalem because the city is sacred to Islam. Muhammad’s famous Night Journey is the basis of the Islamic claim to Jerusalem. The Koran’s sole reference to this journey appears in the first verse of sura 17, which says that Allah took Muhammad from “the Sacred Mosque” in Mecca “to the farthest [al-aqsa] Mosque.” There was no mosque in Jerusalem at this time, so the “farthest” mosque probably wasn’t really the one that now bears that name in Jerusalem, the Al-Aqsa mosque located on the Temple Mount. Nevertheless, Islamic tradition is firm that this mosque was in Jerusalem.

Planting the US flag at the site of the Twin Towers did presage a war. Tom Franklin said that when he took his shot he had been aware of the similarities between it and another famous image from a previous conflict –the Second World War, when US Marines planted the American flag atop Iwo Jima. Many Americans will have recognized the symmetry immediately and appreciated that both moments captured a stirring mix of powerful emotions: sadness, courage, heroism, defiance, collective perseverance and endeavour. Both images, but perhaps more so the 9/ 11 photograph, also evoke the opening stanza of the American national anthem, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, particularly its final lines: O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave? At a moment of profound shock for the American people, the sight of their flag yet waving was, for many, reassuring. That the stars of the fifty states were held aloft by men in uniform may have spoken to the streak of militarism that tinges American culture, but to see the red, white and blue amid the awful grey devastation of Ground Zero will also have helped many ordinary citizens to cope with the other deeply disturbing images emerging from New York City that autumn day.

The Calvinist nobles convey their objections by throwing two imperial representatives out the window of Prague Castle in the famous “defenestration of Prague.

When a burdened Augustinian friar in Wittenberg in October 1516 lamented in a letter how busy he was, no Reformation was in sight. Only Luther’s religious anxiety and his pastoral concern for Christian souls were present. By the summer of 1521, Martin Luther is Europe’s most famous man and its all-time bestselling author.