Demand Your Respect Quotes

Ladies, let me give you some advice. You can throw all your stupid fucking chick-lit, self-help, why-doesn't-he-love-me books out, because this is all you need to know: Men will treat you the way you let them. There is no such thing as "deserving" respect; you get what you demand from people.. if you demand respect, he will either respect you or he won't associate with you. It really is that simple.

There are things you can't back down on, things you gotta take a stand on. But it's up to you to decide what them things are. You have to demand respect in this world, ain't nobody just gonna hand it to you. How you carry yourself, what you stand for--that's how you gain respect. But, little one, ain't nobody's respect worth more than your own.

Those who deserve respect are given it freely. If one must demand such a thing, he’ll never truly command it. I am your daughter, not your horse, sir.” I stepped closer, enjoying the way Father leaned away from me as if he were just now discovering that a cat, while precious and cute, also had sharp claws. “I’d rather be a lowly wretch on the streets than live in a house full of cages. Do not lecture me on propriety when it’s a virtue you so grossly lack.

Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched. The things which are sacred or precious to us are the things we withdraw from promiscuous sharing. But now we are taught to throw everything within us into public light and common pawing. To seek joy in meeting halls. We haven't even got a word for the quality I mean--for the self-sufficiency of man's spirit. It's difficult to call it selfishness or egotism, the words have been perverted, they've come to mean Peter Keating. Gail, I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I've always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I've always recognized it at once--and it's the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that. Now I know what it is. A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters.

You have to demand respect in this world, ain't nobody just going to hand it to you. How you carry yourself, what you stand for-- thats how you gain respect. but little one aint nobody's respect worth more than your own

A Poem by Tecumseh “So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.” ~ Chief Tecumseh

So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion;respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people.Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend,even a stranger, when in a lonely place.Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living.If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weepand pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way.Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.

Those who deserve respect are given it freely. If one must demand such a thing, he’ll never truly command it. I am your daughter, not your horse, sir.

Respect should be found in your own heart and never demanded, sacraficed, begged for or negotiated. If you have to explain why you deserve it then you never had it.

So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide

Rose," Alberta said, leaning toward me. "I'm going to be blunt with you. I'm not going to give you lectures or demand any explanations. Honestly, since you aren't my student anymore, I don't have the right to ask or tell you anything." "You can lecture," I told her. "I've always respected you and want to hear what you have to say." The ghost of a smile flashed on her face. "All right, here it is. You screwed up." "Wow. You weren't kidding about bluntness." "The reasons don't matter. You shouldn't have left. You shouldn't have dropped out. Your education and training are too valuable—no matter how much you think you know—and you are too talented to risk throwing away your future." I almost laughed. "To tell you the truth? I'm not sure what my future is anymore." "Which is why you need to graduate." "But I dropped out." She snorted. "Then drop back in!" "I—what? How?" "With paperwork. Just like everything else in the world.

Beati bellicosi. Blessed are the warriors.” “Good organization,” said Magnus. “I knew the man who founded it, back in the 1800s. Woolsey Scott. Respectable old werewolf family.” Alec made an ugly sound in the back of his throat. “Did you sleep with him, too?” Magnus’s cat eyes widened. “Alexander!” “Well, I don’t know anything about your past, do I?” Alec demanded. “You won’t tell me anything; you just say it doesn’t matter.” Magnus’s face was expressionless, but there was a dark tinge of anger to his voice. “Does this mean every time I mention anyone I’ve ever met, you’re going to ask me if I had an affair with them?” Alec’s expression was stubborn, but Simon couldn’t help having a flash of sympathy; the hurt behind his blue eyes was clear. “Maybe.” “I met Napoleon once,” said Magnus. “We didn’t have an affair, though. He was shockingly prudish for a Frenchman.” “You met Napoleon?” Jordan, who appeared to be missing most of the conversation, looked impressed. “So it’s true what they said about warlocks, then?” Alec gave him a very unpleasant look. “What’s true?” “Alexander,” said Magnus coldly, and Clary met Simon’s eyes across the table. Hers were wide, green, and full of an expression that said Uh-oh. “You can’t be rude to everyone who talks to me.” Alec made a wide, sweeping gesture. “And why not? Cramping your style, am I? I mean, maybe you were hoping to flirt with werewolf boy here. He’s pretty attractive, if you like the messy-haired, broad-shouldered, chiseled-good looks type.” “Hey, now,” said Jordan mildly. Magnus put his head in his hands. “Or there are plenty of pretty girls here, since apparently your taste goes both ways. Is there anything you aren’t into?” “Mermaids,” said Magnus into his fingers. “They always smell like seaweed.” “It’s not funny,” Alec said savagely, and kicking back his chair, he got up from the table and stalked off into the crowd.

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: ‘I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm? —But it’s nicer here… So you were born to feel ‘nice’? Instead of doings things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands? —But we have to sleep sometime… Agreed. But nature set a limit on that—as it did on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit. You’ve had more than enough of that. But not of working. There you’re still below your quota. You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts.

There are things you can't back down on, things you gotta take a stand on. But it's up to you to decide what them things are. You have to demand respect in this world, ain't nobody just gonna hand it to you. How you carry yourself, what you stand for - that's how you gain respect. But, little one, ain't nobody's respect worth more than your own. You understand that?

My sweet, there are altogether too many respectable ladies in the world. The supply has far exceeded the demand. But there’s an appalling shortage of attractive pirates, and you do seem to have a gift for plundering and ravishing. I think we’ve found your true calling.

What do we want from our mothers when we are children? Complete submission. Oh, it's very nice and rational and respectable to say that a woman has every right to her life, to her ambitions, to her needs, and so on--it's what I've always demanded myself--but as a child, no, the truth is it's a war of attrition, rationality doesn't come into it, not one bit, all you want from your mother is that she once and for all admit that she is your mother and only your mother, and that her battle with the rest of life is over. She has to lay down arms and come to you. And if she doesn't do it, then it's really a war, and it was a war between my mother and me. Only as an adult did I come to truly admire her--especially in the last, painful years of her life--for all that she had done to claw some space in this world for herself.

I prefer your company, Em." He said it as if it were obvious. I snorted again, assuming he was teasing me. "Over the company of a tavern filled with a rapt and grateful audience? I'm sure you do." "Over anyone else's company." Again, he said it with some amusement, as if wondering what I was doing speculating about something so evident. "You are drunk," I said. "Shall I prove it to you?" "No, you shan't," I said, alarmed, but he was already sweeping to the floor, bending his knee and taking my hand between his. "What in God's name are you doing?" I said between my teeth. "And why are you doing it now?" "Shall I make an appointment?" he said, then laughed. "Yes, I believe you would like that. Well, name the time when it would be convenient for you to receive a declaration of love." "Oh, get up," I said, furious now. "What sort of jest is this, Wendell?" "You don't believe me?" He smiled, all mischief, a look I'd seen from other Folk, enough to know not to trust him one inch. "Ask for my true name, and I'll give it to you." "Why on earth would you do that?" I demanded, yanking my hand back. "Oh, Em," he said forlornly. "You are the cleverest dolt I have ever met." I stared at him, my heart thundering. Of course, I am not a dolt in any sense; I had supposed he felt something for me and had only hoped he would keep it to himself. Forever. Not that a part of me didn't wish for the opposite. But that was when I assumed his feelings in that respect were equivalent to what he felt for any of the nameless women who passed in and out of his bed. And why would I lower myself to that, when he and I already had something that was vastly more valuable?

Maria, lonely prostitute on a street of pain, You, at least, hail me and speak to me While a thousand others ignore my face. You offer me an hour of love, And your fees are not as costly as most. You are the madonna of the lonely, The first-born daughter in a world of pain. You do not turn fat men aside, Or trample on the stuttering, shy ones, You are the meadow where desperate men Can find a moment's comfort. Men have paid more to their wives To know a bit of peace And could not walk away without the guilt That masquerades as love. You do not bind them, lovely Maria, you comfort them And bid them return. Your body is more Christian than the Bishop's Whose gloved hand cannot feel the dropping of my blood. Your passion is as genuine as most, Your caring as real! But you, Maria, sacred whore on the endless pavement of pain, You, whose virginity each man may make his own Without paying ought but your fee, You who know nothing of virgin births and immaculate conceptions, You who touch man's flesh and caress a stranger, Who warm his bed to bring his aching skin alive, You make more sense than stock markets and football games Where sad men beg for virility. You offer yourself for a fee--and who offers himself for less? At times you are cruel and demanding--harsh and insensitive, At times you are shrewd and deceptive--grasping and hollow. The wonder is that at times you are gentle and concerned, Warm and loving. You deserve more respect than nuns who hide their sex for eternal love; Your fees are not so high, nor your prejudice so virtuous. You deserve more laurels than the self-pitying mother of many children, And your fee is not as costly as most. Man comes to you when his bed is filled with brass and emptiness, When liquor has dulled his sense enough To know his need of you. He will come in fantasy and despair, Maria, And leave without apologies. He will come in loneliness--and perhaps Leave in loneliness as well. But you give him more than soldiers who win medals and pensions, More than priests who offer absolution And sweet-smelling ritual, More than friends who anticipate his death Or challenge his life, And your fee is not as costly as most. You admit that your love is for a fee, Few women can be as honest. There are monuments to statesmen who gave nothing to anyone Except their hungry ego, Monuments to mothers who turned their children Into starving, anxious bodies, Monuments to Lady Liberty who makes poor men prisoners. I would erect a monument for you-- who give more than most-- And for a meager fee. Among the lonely, you are perhaps the loneliest of all, You come so close to love But it eludes you While proper women march to church and fantasize In the silence of their rooms, While lonely women take their husbands' arms To hold them on life's surface, While chattering women fill their closets with clothes and Their lips with lies, You offer love for a fee--which is not as costly as most-- And remain a lonely prostitute on a street of pain. You are not immoral, little Maria, only tired and afraid, But you are not as hollow as the police who pursue you, The politicians who jail you, the pharisees who scorn you. You give what you promise--take your paltry fee--and Wander on the endless, aching pavements of pain. You know more of universal love than the nations who thrive on war, More than the churches whose dogmas are private vendettas made sacred, More than the tall buildings and sprawling factories Where men wear chains. You are a lonely prostitute who speaks to me as I pass, And I smile at you because I am a lonely man.

Patience and kindness don’t show up on demand; they’re disciplines that require constant practice, and there is no better boot camp for learning those skills than hitching your survival to your ability to discern—and respect—the needs of another creature

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for— the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm? —But it’s nicer here. . . . So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands? —But we have to sleep sometime. . . . Agreed. But nature set a limit on that—as it did on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit. You’ve had more than enough of that. But not of working. There you’re still below your quota. You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts. Is helping others less valuable to you? Not worth your effort?

Why did you come in to-night with your heads in the air? 'Make way, we are coming! Give us every right and don't you dare breathe a word before us. Pay us every sort of respect, such as no one's ever heard of, and we shall treat you worse than the lowest lackey!' They strive for justice, they stand on their rights, and yet they've slandered him like infidels in their article. We demand, we don't ask, and you will get no gratitude from us, because you are acting for the satisfaction of your own conscience! Queer sort of reasoning!... He has not borrowed money from you, he doesn't owe you anything, so what are you reckoning on, if not his gratitude? So how can you repudiate it? Lunatics! They regard society as savage and inhuman, because it cries shame on the seduced girl; but if you think society inhuman, you must think that the girl suffers from the censure of society, and if she does, how is it you expose her to society in the newspapers and expect her not to suffer? Lunatics! Vain creatures! They don't believe in God, they don't believe in Christ! Why, you are so eaten up with pride and vanity that you'll end by eating up one another, that's what I prophesy. Isn't that topsy-turvydom, isn't it infamy?

Become individuals, that’s the first thing. The second thing is, don’t expect perfection and don’t ask and don’t demand. Love ordinary people. Nothing is wrong with ordinary people. Ordinary people are extraordinary! Each human being is so unique; have respect for that uniqueness. Third, give, and give without any condition—then you will know what love is. I cannot define it. I can show you the path to grow it. I can show you how to put in a rosebush, how to water it, how to give fertilizers to it, how to protect it. Then one day, out of the blue, comes the rose, and your home is full of the fragrance. That’s how love happens.

Be unpredictable. Always surprise your enemies with the train of your thoughts and actions. Do things they least expect you to do. Don’t feed your ego, feed your thirst for knowledge because knowledge is power. Earn respect, never demand it. Talk less, observe more.

Hell yeah, you can pay. This was your idea and I’m not blowing part of my rent money this month just to prove I’m a feminist. I can do that for free by demanding respect and getting it.

See, you teach people how to treat you. If you don't like someone's behavior toward you, educate them. Your Girl Logic might be urging you to crawl into a corner, to cry or sulk and pretend it's not happening. And of course you need to pick your battles... But if you aren't getting the respect you deserve, demand it.

Now I’ll just have to do without.” She raised her eyebrows. “I’m sorry?” Then Maximus did something very strange: he went on one knee before her. “This isn’t right at all,” he said, continuing to glare as if he found it all her fault. She sat up. “What are you doing?” “Artemis Greaves, will you do me the honor of —” “Are you insane?” she demanded. “What of your father? Your conviction that you must marry for the dukedom?” “My father is dead,” he said softly. “And I’ve decided the dukedom can go hang.” “But —” “Hush,” he snapped. “I’m trying to propose to you properly even without my mother’s necklace.” “But why?” she asked... “I know that this is rather disappointing,” he said. “But I intend to make you respectable.

Gilan,” she said, “you’re looking well.” And apart from those wrinkles, he was. He smiled at her. “And you grow more beautiful every day, Pauline,” he replied. “What about me?” Halt said, with mock severity. “Do I grow more handsome every day? More impressive, perhaps?” Gilan eyed him critically, his head to one side. Then he announced his verdict. “Scruffier,” he said. Halt raised his eyebrows. “’Scruffier’?” he demanded. Gilan nodded. I’m not sure if you’re aware of recent advances in technology, Halt,” he said. “But there a wonderful new invention called scissors. People use them for trimming beards and hair.” “Why?” Gilan appealed to Pauline. “Still using his saxe knife to do his barbering, is he?” Pauline nodded, slipping her hand inside her husband’s arm. “Unless I can catch him at it,” she admitted. Halt regarded them both with a withering look. They both refused to wither, so he abandoned the expression. “You show a fine lack of respect for your former mentor,” he told Gilan. The younger man shrugged. “It goes with my exalted position as your commander.” “Not mine,” Halt said. “I’ve retired.” “So I can expect little in the way of deference from you?” Gilan grinned. “No. I’ll show proper deference….the day you train your horse to fly back around the castle’s turrets.

In any modern society encouraging your child to cut himself is an unthinkable act, but only with religious belief becomes part of the culture, and demands respect.

So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.

So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide Show respect to all people and when it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.

Only idiots listen with their eyes," she said. "If people don't hear your words, the SHOUT them. ... Demanding respect is never easy, but if something you love is at stake, then I say it's worth the price ...

There'll be a whole lot of things you ain't gonna want to do, but you'll have to do in this life just so you can survive. 'Now, I don't like the idea of what Charlie Simms did to you no more than your Uncle Hammer, but I had to weigh the hurt of what happened to you to what could've happened if I went after him. If I'd-a gone after Charlie Simms and given him a good thrashin', like I felt like doing, the hurt to all of us would've been a whole lot more than the hurt to you. So I let it be. I don't like letting it be, but I can live with that decision. 'But there are other things, Cassie, that if I'd let be, they'd eat away at me and destroy me in the end. And it's the same with you, baby. There are things you can't back down on. Things you gotta take a stand on, but it's up to you to decide what them things are. 'You have to demand respect in this world. Ain't nobody just gonna hand it to you. How you carry yourself, what you stand for, that's how you gain respect. But little one, ain't nobody's respect worth more than your own. You understand that?' 'Now, there ain't no sense going around being mad. You clear your head so you can think sensibly. Then I want you to think real hard about whether Lillian Jean's worth taking a stand about. But keep in mind that Lillian Jean probably won't be the last white person to think you this way.

People ask me, 'Who is your hero?' My answer, my true answer, is that I am my hero, the me I aspire to be, the very best at everything I put my hand to, treating people with dignity and respect because it's the right thing to do, surmounting obstacles with justice and empathy and compassion. I don't need anyone else to live my life for me, to mold me, to tell me what is or isn't possible. I don't need a path to follow. I create my own path. I live up to my own dreams. I demand greatness of mind, body, and spirit, not someone else's, but my own. I am my own hero. Are you yours?

KEEPER . . . Never gives in easily, and the standards/requirements start the moment you open your mouth. See, she understands her power and wields it like a samurai sword. She commands—not demands—respect, just by the way she carries herself. You can walk up to her and give her your best game, and while she may be impressed by what you say, that’s no guarantee that she’s going to let the conversation go any further, much less give you her phone number and agree to give you some of her valuable time. Men automatically know from the moment she opens her mouth that if they want her, they’ll have to get in line with her standards and requirements, or keep it moving because she’s done with the games and isn’t interested in playing. But she will also send all the signals that she is capable of being loyal to a man and taking good care of him, appreciative of what he’s bringing to the relationship, and ready for love—true, long-lasting love.   Newsflash: it’s not the guy who determines whether you’re a sports fish or a keeper—it’s you. (Don’t hate the player, hate the game.) When a man approaches

So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend,even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way.Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.

Family are people who never earn your respect or love but demand it nevertheless.

Demanding of another that he earns your respect is, in of itself, an act of arrogance, a way of self-elevation, implying by its very nature that your respect is worth earning.

My Sadness is Deeper than Yours My sadness is deeper than yours. My interior life is richer than yours. I am more interesting than you. I don’t care about anybody else’s problems. They are not as serious as mine. Nobody knows the weight I carry, the trouble I’ve seen. There are worlds in my head that nobody has access to: fortunately for them, fortunately for me. I have seen things that you will never see, and I have feelings that you are incapable of feeling, that you would never allow yourself to feel, because you lack the capacity and the curiosity. Once you felt the hint of such a feeling, you would stamp it out. I am a martyr to futility and I don’t expect to be shut down by a pretender. Mothballs are an aphrodisiac to me, beauty depresses me. You could never hope to fathom the depth of my feelings, deeper than death. I look down upon you all from my lofty height of lowliness. The fullness of your satisfaction lacks the cadaverous purity of my pain. Don’t talk to me about failure. You don’t know the meaning of the word. When it comes to failure, you’re strictly an amateur. Bush league stuff. I’m ten times the failure you’ll ever be. I have more to complain about than you, and regrets: more than a few, too many to mention. I am a fully-qualified failure, I have proven it over and over again. My credentials are impeccable, my resume flawless. I have worked hard to put myself in a position of unassailable wretchedness, and I demand to be respected for it. I expect to be rewarded for a struggle that produced nothing. I want the neglect, the lack of acknowledgment. And I want the bitterness that comes with it too.

Role entitlement is an attitude of demanding certain treatment because of your social role. When parents feel entitled to do what they want simply because they’re in the role of parent, this is a form of role entitlement. They act as though being a parent exempts them from respecting boundaries or being considerate.

what is the expression which the age demands? the age demands no expression whatever. we have seen photographs of bereaved asian mothers. we are not interested in the agony of your fumbled organs. there is nothing you can show on your face that can match the horror of this time. do not even try. you will only hold yourself up to the scorn of those who have felt things deeply. we have seen newsreels of humans in the extremities of pain and dislocation. you are playing to people who have experienced a catastrophe. this should make you very quiet. speak the words, convey the data, step aside. everyone knows you are in pain. you cannot tell the audience everything you know about love in every line of love you speak. step aside and they will know what you know because you know it already. you have nothing to teach them. you are not more beautiful than they are. you are not wiser. do not shout at them. do not force a dry entry. that is bad sex. if you show the lines of your genitals, then deliver what you promise. and remember that people do not really want an acrobat in bed. what is our need? to be close to the natural man, to be close to the natural woman. do not pretend that you are a beloved singer with a vast loyal audience which has followed the ups and downs of your life to this very moment. the bombs, flame-throwers, and all the shit have destroyed more than just the trees and villages. they have also destroyed the stage. did you think that your profession would escape the general destruction? there is no more stage. there are no more footlights. you are among the people. then be modest. speak the words, convey the data, step aside. be by yourself. be in your own room. do not put yourself on. do not act out words. never act out words. never try to leave the floor when you talk about flying. never close your eyes and jerk your head to one side when you talk about death. do not fix your burning eyes on me when you speak about love. if you want to impress me when you speak about love put your hand in your pocket or under your dress and play with yourself. if ambition and the hunger for applause have driven you to speak about love you should learn how to do it without disgracing yourself or the material. this is an interior landscape. it is inside. it is private. respect the privacy of the material. these pieces were written in silence. the courage of the play is to speak them. the discipline of the play is not to violate them. let the audience feel your love of privacy even though there is no privacy. be good whores. the poem is not a slogan. it cannot advertise you. it cannot promote your reputation for sensitivity. you are students of discipline. do not act out the words. the words die when you act them out, they wither, and we are left with nothing but your ambition. the poem is nothing but information. it is the constitution of the inner country. if you declaim it and blow it up with noble intentions then you are no better than the politicians whom you despise. you are just someone waving a flag and making the cheapest kind of appeal to a kind of emotional patriotism. think of the words as science, not as art. they are a report. you are speaking before a meeting of the explorers' club of the national geographic society. these people know all the risks of mountain climbing. they honour you by taking this for granted. if you rub their faces in it that is an insult to their hospitality. do not work the audience for gasps ans sighs. if you are worthy of gasps and sighs it will not be from your appreciation of the event but from theirs. it will be in the statistics and not the trembling of the voice or the cutting of the air with your hands. it will be in the data and the quiet organization of your presence. avoid the flourish. do not be afraid to be weak. do not be ashamed to be tired. you look good when you're tired. you look like you could go on forever. now come into my arms. you are the image of my beauty.

women have a second biological clock, and it is equally as valuable as the 24-hour clock. The 28-day clock can be measured; it is predictable; and it demands the same respect, attention, and priority as the 24-hour clock.

I want you to guard against those who demand that you die just to prove something. It is not that I advise you to respect your life more than anything else, but not to die uselessly for the need of others… for you still have many years ahead of you. Many years of joy and happiness to experience. Who else but you can experience your life?

Empowered Women 101: Forgive yourself for having chosen to expose yourself to people who don't care about your feelings and help others to do the same. Enjoy life! It is as simple as changing your focus or perspective when you start thinking about people from the past who hurt your feelings. Eventually, you will forget about those types of people because your time and attention will be taken up by more positive things/people/events/activities etc. When you understand how much time is wasted trying to make people see you, understand you, respect you, value you, like you or agree with you...life becomes a pointless negative fight for validation that will drain your happiness. You are worth more than the indifference, inattention or crumbs people throw you. You are a queen that demands respect and God will bring the right person into your life to make you forget why you ever wasted your time on nothing important.

For it is precisely how I feel, who have inherited not measurable wealth but, as we all do who care for it, that immeasurable fund of thoughts and ideas, from writers and thinkers long gone into the ground—and, inseparable from those wisdoms because demanded by them, the responsibility to live thoughtfully and intelligently. To enjoy, to question—never to assume, or trample. Thus the great ones (my great ones, who may not be the same as your great ones) have taught me—to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always caringly. So here I am, walking on down the sandy path, with my wild body, with the inherited devotions of curiosity and respect.

So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and Demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, Beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and Its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, Even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and Bow to none. When you arise in the morning, give thanks for the food and For the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, The fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and nothing, For abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts Are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes They weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again In a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.

Live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about his religion. Respect others in their views and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life. Beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and of service to your people. When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.

While learning others, respect demands that one never takes issue with another's freedom to choose their 'get down' - their way of living... and don't be mad. But carefully listen, observe, and compare mental notes before you open your heart's desire -- to make a clear determination what's in your best interest. If you already know how the story ends, and it doesn't fit you, keep [the] proper distance in perspective, in any form(s) of relationship, for the love of self. It may be disappointing, but you'll eventually discover the right one deserving of your full attention. Or, you may be surprised by their sudden awakening to your worthiness. Walk slowly, especially, when it comes to matters of the heart.

I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I’ve always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I’ve always recognized it at once—and it’s the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that...A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters.

You are never the lesser, not in your own home, mia cara bella. Demand respect in your space because it is yours, and do not let someone take it from you. You are the queen, and this is your castle. This is your home, and those who are lucky enough to be allowed inside should understand what that means. Smile. Always smile here.

I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I’ve always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I’ve always recognized it at once—and it’s the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that. Now I know what it is. A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters.

Be patient till the last. Romans, countrymen, and lovers! hear me for my cause, and be silent, that you may hear: believe me for mine honour, and have respect to mine honour, that you may believe: censure me in your wisdom, and awake your senses, that you may the better judge. If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of Caesar's, to him I say, that Brutus' love to Caesar was no less than his. If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: --Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men? As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him: but, as he was ambitious, I slew him. There is tears for his love; joy for his fortune; honour for his valour; and death for his ambition. Who is here so base that would be a bondman? If any, speak; for him have I offended. Who is here so rude that would not be a Roman? If any, speak; for him have I offended. Who is here so vile that will not love his country? If any, speak; for him have I offended. I pause for a reply.

Fair-minded people earn the respect of their colleagues rather than demanding it.

I am not your friend, not your doll, not your playmate. I am your teacher and will expect every consideration, every show of respect, that my position demands.

Although the body had lost the spark that animated it, deeply rooted social conventions demanded that it be given proper respect and care from the living.

So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing afriend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.” - Chief Tecumseh, Shawnee Nation

I ask, I demand to be respected! Shatov went on shouting. "Not for my person--to hell with it--but for something else, just for now, for a few words...We are two beings, and we have come together in infinity...for the last time in the world. Abandon your tone and take a human one! At least for once in your life speak in a human voice. Not for my sake, but for your own. Do you understand that you should forgive me that slap in the face if only because with it I gave you an opportunity to know your infinite power...Again you smile that squeamish, worldly smile. Oh, when will you understand me! Away with the young squire!

be your own person. No one can live for you. Choose freedom. Choose to be yourself no matter who likes it or who doesn’t. You can still be loving to people. You can love people and still demand respect for yourself.

It is important when talking about police brutality to stand secure in your experience, without trying to override the experiences of other communities with police. What has happened to you is valid and true, but it is not what has happened to everyone. The experience of white communities with police are real, and the experience of communities of color with police are real—but they are far from the same. And while it is important to recognize these different viewpoints, we must remember this: If you do trust and value your police force, and you also believe in justice and equality for people of color, you will not see the lack of trust on behalf of communities of color as simply a difference of opinion. You will instead expect your police force to earn the respect and trust of communities of color by providing them with the same level of service that you enjoy. People of color are not asking white people to believe their experiences so that they will fear the police as much as people of color do. They are asking because they want white people to join them in demanding their right to be able to trust the police like white people do.

This is a perfect picture of what you want to develop in the soul of your child: a desire to do the right things and to avoid the wrong ones because of empathic concern for others and because of a healthy respect for the demands of God’s reality.

Heartache is so physically real that it needs to be recognized as a sickness, an ailment, a cancer of love. A broken heart is a sad, angry, powerful thing that shakes you by the collar and demands your respect, and it's pummeling me into the mattress, shattering me to pieces. It's as real as the actual heart in my chest. In some ways, it's more real because it flows throughout your whole body, wrapping around your bones and your organs and your blood. It's in everything you do, every breath you take.

The continent has embraced a spiritual death long before the demographic one. In those seventeen European countries that have fallen into the "lowest-low fertility," where are the children? In a way, you're looking at them: the guy sipping espresso at a sidewalk cafe listening to his iPod, the eternal adolescent charges of the paternalistic state. The government makes the grown-up decisions and we spend our pocket money on our record collection...the long-term cost of welfare is the infantilization of the population. The populations of wealthy democratic societies expect to have total choice over their satellite TV package, yet think it perfectly normal to allow the state to make all the choices in respect of their health care. It's a curious inversion of citizenship to demand control over peripheral leisure activities but to contract out the big life-changing stuff to the government. And it's hard to come up with a wake-up call for a society as dedicated as latter-day Europe to the belief that life is about sleeping in.

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: ‘I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm? ‘—But it’s nicer here…’ So you were born to feel ‘nice’? Instead of doings things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands? ‘—But we have to sleep sometime…’ Agreed. But nature set a limit on that—as it did on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit. You’ve had more than enough of that. But not of working. There you’re still below your quota. You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts.

To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out – since our self-image is untenable – their false notion of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan; no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

You can demand respect. You can treat them with it too. You can save their children. You can find their wandering grandparents. You can judge the goddamn pie contest. But sometimes you still have to remind them you’re not to be fucked with. It’s the only thing some people understand.

Give me your time, your honesty, your respect, kindness, patience, fidelity. Give me comfort when things are tough...I give off an air of being self-sufficient and instead of expressing and demanding the right kind of love for myself, I always wanted to appear like I was fine, in fact, I thought I was fine - and so did they. But it wasn't true. Just because you're a strong girl doesn't mean you don't need to be loved and cared for like anybody else. And it doesn't matter where you sit in this world, poor or rich, famous or not, we all need to be loved in the right way.

high-reactive child’s ideal parent: someone who “can read your cues and respect your individuality; is warm and firm in placing demands on you without being harsh or hostile; promotes curiosity, academic achievement, delayed gratification, and self-control; and is not harsh, neglectful, or inconsistent.

a high-reactive child’s ideal parent: someone who “can read your cues and respect your individuality; is warm and firm in placing demands on you without being harsh or hostile; promotes curiosity, academic achievement, delayed gratification, and self-control; and is not harsh, neglectful, or inconsistent.

So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people.

When you finally meet someone who loves you and respects you in words and actions, relationships take on a whole new meaning. Your life becomes bigger because the things you discovered about yourself in your alone time are still being honored and cared for and you have a partner to share your life with. Love accommodates you and all your interests and obligations. You’re not being asked to give anything up for love and someone is helping to support you while you support him or her. Real love, functional love, doesn’t cause you to lose people, places, things, health, sleep, or appetite. Real love does not demand, either actively or passively, that you give up your friends, hobbies, or interests. In fact, it encourages independence and being fulfilled by other people, places, and things. When you are a healthy and functional person, your healthy and functional mate trusts and supports you. Your partner does not purposefully or unwittingly engulf you.

Responsibility to yourself… means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short, simply to avoid conflict and confrontation. And this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be 'different'; not to be continuously available to others when we need time for ourselves and our work; to be able to demand of others that they respect our sense of purpose and our integrity as persons… The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.

If you cut me out of your life because I disagree with your beliefs or your philosophy, then who is the one being judgmental? We all differ in our opinions. We all require a degree of tolerance. But this tolerance you demand from me is a two-way street. How can you expect me to be respectful of your views if you are disrespectful of mine?

Now keep looking at this unpleasant situation or person until you realize that it isn’t they that are causing the negative emotions. They are just going their way, being themselves, doing their thing whether right or wrong, good or bad. It is your computer that, thanks to your programming, insists on your reacting with negative emotions. You will see this better if you realize that someone with a different programming when faced with this same situation or person or event would react quite calmly, even happily. Don’t stop till you have grasped this truth: The only reason why you too are not reacting calmly and happily is your computer that is stubbornly insisting that reality be reshaped to conform to its programming. Observe all of this from the outside so to speak and see the marvelous change that comes about in you. Once you have understood this truth and thereby stopped your computer from generating negative emotions you may take any action you deem fit. You may avoid the situation or the person; or you may try to change them; or you may insist on your rights or the rights of others being respected; you may even resort to the use of force. But only after you have got rid of your emotional upsets, for then your action will spring from peace and love, not from the neurotic desire to appease your computer or to conform to its programming or to get rid of the negative emotions it generates. Then you will understand how profound is the wisdom of the words: “If a man wants to sue you for your shirt, let him have your coat as well. If a man in authority makes you go one mile, go with him two.” For it will have become evident to you that real oppression comes, not from people who fight you in court or from authority that subjects you to slave labor, but from your computer whose programming destroys your peace of mind the moment outside circumstances fail to conform to its demands. People have been known to be happy even in the oppressive atmosphere of a concentration camp! It is from the oppression of your programming that you need to be liberated.

The way they were treated should make you angry,” Richard said as he started away, “but not because you share an attribute with them.” Taken aback by his words, even looking a little hurt, Jennsen didn’t move. “What do you mean?” Richard paused and turned back to her. “That’s how the Imperial Order thinks. That’s how Owen’s people think. It’s a belief in granting disembodied prestige, or the mantle of guilt, to all those who share some specific trait or attribute. “The Imperial Order would like you to believe that your virtue, your ultimate value, or even your wickedness, arises entirely from being born a member of a given group, that free will itself is either impotent or nonexistent. They want you to believe that all people are merely interchangeable members of groups that share fixed, preordained characteristics, and they are predestined to live through a collective identity, the group will, unable to rise on individual merit because there can be no such thing as independent, individual merit, only group merit. “They believe that people can only rise above their station in life when selected to be awarded recognition because their group is due an indulgence, and so a representative, a stand-in for the group, must be selected to be awarded the badge of self-worth. Only the reflected light off this badge, they believe, can bring the radiance of self-worth to others of their group. “But those granted this badge live with the uneasy knowledge that it’s only an illusion of competence. It never brings any sincere self-respect because you can’t fool yourself. Ultimately, because it is counterfeit, the sham of esteem granted because of a connection with a group can only be propped up by force. “This belittling of mankind, the Order’s condemnation of everyone and everything human, is their transcendent judgment of man’s inadequacy. “When you direct your anger at me for having a trait borne by someone else, you pronounce me guilty for their crimes. That’s what happens when people say I’m a monster because our father was a monster. If you admire someone simply because you believe their group is deserving, then you embrace the same corrupt ethics. “The Imperial Order says that no individual should have the right to achieve something on his own, to accomplish what someone else cannot, and so magic must be stripped from mankind. They say that accomplishment is corrupt because it is rooted in the evil of self-interest, therefore the fruits of that accomplishment are tainted by its evil. This is why they preach that any gain must be sacrificed to those who have not earned it. They hold that only through such sacrifice can those fruits be purified and made good. “We believe, on the other hand, that your own individual life is the value and its own end, and what you achieve is yours. “Only you can achieve self-worth for yourself. Any group offering it to you, or demanding it of you, comes bearing chains of slavery.

A woman is the most powerful figure in the world. She is able to stir the emotions of man to anything she wishes. She can do this by demanding respect, adoration and to become a fantasy figure by being able to say no and knowing when to say yes. A major factor in successful magick is to affirm your Will, use the amount of discipline needed to delay satisfaction and you will create Thralls

For freed slaves, an impoverished and, until recently, almost entirely powerless segment of the population, Garfield represented freedom and progress, but also, and perhaps more importantly, dignity. As president, he demanded for black men nothing less than what they wanted most desperately for themselves—complete and unconditional equality, born not of regret but respect. “You were not made free merely to be allowed to vote, but in order to enjoy an equality of opportunity in the race of life,” Garfield had told a delegation of 250 black men just before he was elected president. “Permit no man to praise you because you are black, nor wrong you because you are black. Let it be known that you are ready and willing to work out your own material salvation by your own energy, your own worth, your own labor.

Reasonable? Your demands are about as reasonable as the ones made of the Ten Heralds on Proving Day! With all due respect, Brightness, you seem to want potential wards to be master scholars already. I may be able to find a pair of eighty-year-old ardents in the city who might fit your requirements. They could interview for the position, though they may have trouble hearing well enough to answer your questions.

Any time a child demands something or asks for it disrespectfully (this includes screaming at you), that request must be denied. Period. For example, let’s say your son comes running and belligerently shouts at you, “Give me money for the ice-cream truck!” Don’t get distracted by his urgency. Calmly say to him, “If you want something, you need to ask with respect. If you ask without respect, the answer will always be no.

Fortunately the essence of this revelation did not escape Mary despite the angel's obscure speech, and, much surprised, she asked him, So Jesus is my son and the son of the Lord, Woman, what are you saying, show some respect for rank and precedence, what you must say is the son of the Lord and me, Of the Lord and of you, No, of the Lord and of you, You're confusing me, just answer my question, is Jesus our son, You mean to say the Lord's son because you only served to bear the child, So the Lord didn't choose me, Don't be absurd (...) Is there any real proof that it was the Lord's seed which engendered my first-born, Well, it's a delicate matter, and what you're demanding is nothing less than a paternity test which in these mixed unions, no matter how many analyses, tests, and globule counts one carries out, can never give conclusive results.

Ten years after lending a man from Barbados ten pounds, he wrote to him in 1700, “Sir, I presume the old verity ‘If knocking thrice, no one comes, go off ’ is not to be understood of creditors in demanding their just debts. The tenth year is now current since I let you ten pounds, merely out of respect to you as a stranger and scholar…. I am come again to knock at your door to enquire if any ingenuity or honor dwell there….

So, if you are respectful of the rule, and conscious of its importance, and realize that it serves as a bulwark against the chaos of the unknown, and you still decide to break it, carefully, because the particularities of the circumstances demand it – well, then, more power to you. If you are just a careless, ignorant, antisocial narcissist instead, however, then look out. You break a rule at your peril, whether you know it or not.

The experience of white communities with police are real, and the experience of communities of color with police are real—but they are far from the same. And while it is important to recognize these different viewpoints, we must remember this: If you do trust and value your police force, and you also believe in justice and equality for people of color, you will not see the lack of trust on behalf of communities of color as simply a difference of opinion. You will instead expect your police force to earn the respect and trust of communities of color by providing them with the same level of service that you enjoy. People of color are not asking white people to believe their experiences so that they will fear the police as much as people of color do. They are asking because they want white people to join them in demanding their right to be able to trust the police like white people do.

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm? —But it’s nicer here. . . . So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands? —But we have to sleep sometime. . . . Agreed. But nature set a limit on that—as it did on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit. You’ve had more than enough of that. But not of working. There you’re still below your quota. You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts. Is helping others less valuable to you? Not worth your effort?

On a subtle level, even democracy encourages division. Modern political leaders can still force their way to the top — they can cheat, spin or bend the truth, manipulate and even buy their way into leadership. Until leadership demands its highest frequency, that of the 7th Siddhi of Virtue, we will never fully see the end of political division and hierarchy. The 7th Shadow cannot command true respect or loyalty because it has at its core the lust for power rather than the good of others.

No one ever changed the world by being beautiful," she said. "If you want to make a difference, you can't let something as trivial as appearance get in your way. A daisy doesn't need the roses' permission to bloom - and neither do you." "I may not need permission, but I do need support," the woman argued. "I can't fight an army on my own - I'll need others to join me. But I'm afraid they'll only see my looks and won't listen to my words. I'm afraid they'll only laugh at my hopes of rescuing my loved ones." The little girl placed her hands on her hips and stared at the woman with the confidence of someone twice her age. "Only idiots listen with their eyes," she said. "If people don't hear your words, then shout them. If people silence you, then write your message with fire. Demanding respect is never easy, but if something you love is at stake, then I'd say it's worth the price. Besides, if you can't get villagers to take you seriously, you'll never defeat an army! Sometimes we're meant to face the demons at home so we know how to fight the demons abroad." The little girl had waited years to give someone that advice, and it appeared to do the trick. As if a sudden electric charge had run through the woman's body, she stood taller and straighter, and her eyes beamed with determination. "You're right, child," she said. "With all the energy I've wasted moping in front of the mirror, I could have accomplished great things by now. Well, I'm going to stop moping at once and get to work.

But attentiveness, consideration, compliments, small and large kindnesses, feeling truly loved, having someone put you first while you put them first because you’re in cahoots to make each other’s lives easier and better: most people do like that, when it’s thoughtful and sincere. It’s here, more than in the big gestures, that romance lives: in being actively caring and thoughtful, in a way that is reciprocal but not transactional. And yet, for most of my life, I never would have asked for or expected such a thing. Many women wouldn’t, even the ones who secretly or not-so-secretly pine to be treated like a princess. It’s one thing to fantasize about a perfect proposal or an expensive gift; that’s high-maintenance, sure, but it’s also par for the course. It’s asking something from a man, but primarily it’s asking him to step into an already-choreographed mating dance. But asking to be thought of, understood, prioritized: this is a request so deep it is almost unfathomable. It’s a voracious request, the demand of the attention whore. Women talk ourselves into needing less, because we’re not supposed to want more—or we know we won’t get more, and we don’t want to feel unsatisfied. We reduce our needs for food, for space, for respect, for help, for love and affection, for being noticed, according to what we think we’re allowed to have. Sometimes we tell ourselves that we can live without it, even that we don’t want it. But it’s not that we don’t want more. It’s that we don’t want to be seen asking for it. And when it comes to romance, women always, always need to ask.

So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.

Live your life that the fear of death never enters your heart. Trouble no one about his religion. Respect others in their views and demand they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, and beautify all things in your life. Seek to make you life long and of service to your people. When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to life their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.

Live your life that the fear of death never enters your heart. Trouble no one about his religion. Respect others in their views and demand they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, and beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and of service to your people. When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.

Hey Pete. So why the leave from social media? You are an activist, right? It seems like this decision is counterproductive to your message and work." A: The short answer is I’m tired of the endless narcissism inherent to the medium. In the commercial society we have, coupled with the consequential sense of insecurity people feel, as they impulsively “package themselves” for public consumption, the expression most dominant in all of this - is vanity. And I find that disheartening, annoying and dangerous. It is a form of cultural violence in many respects. However, please note the difference - that I work to promote just that – a message/idea – not myself… and I honestly loath people who today just promote themselves for the sake of themselves. A sea of humans who have been conditioned into viewing who they are – as how they are seen online. Think about that for a moment. Social identity theory run amok. People have been conditioned to think “they are” how “others see them”. We live in an increasing fictional reality where people are now not only people – they are digital symbols. And those symbols become more important as a matter of “marketing” than people’s true personality. Now, one could argue that social perception has always had a communicative symbolism, even before the computer age. But nooooooothing like today. Social media has become a social prison and a strong means of social control, in fact. Beyond that, as most know, social media is literally designed like a drug. And it acts like it as people get more and more addicted to being seen and addicted to molding the way they want the world to view them – no matter how false the image (If there is any word that defines peoples’ behavior here – it is pretention). Dopamine fires upon recognition and, coupled with cell phone culture, we now have a sea of people in zombie like trances looking at their phones (literally) thousands of times a day, merging their direct, true interpersonal social reality with a virtual “social media” one. No one can read anymore... they just swipe a stream of 200 character headlines/posts/tweets. understanding the world as an aggregate of those fragmented sentences. Massive loss of comprehension happening, replaced by usually agreeable, "in-bubble" views - hence an actual loss of variety. So again, this isn’t to say non-commercial focused social media doesn’t have positive purposes, such as with activism at times. But, on the whole, it merely amplifies a general value system disorder of a “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT HOW GREAT I AM!” – rooted in systemic insecurity. People lying to themselves, drawing meaningless satisfaction from superficial responses from a sea of avatars. And it’s no surprise. Market economics demands people self promote shamelessly, coupled with the arbitrary constructs of beauty and success that have also resulted. People see status in certain things and, directly or pathologically, use those things for their own narcissistic advantage. Think of those endless status pics of people rock climbing, or hanging out on a stunning beach or showing off their new trophy girl-friend, etc. It goes on and on and worse the general public generally likes it, seeking to imitate those images/symbols to amplify their own false status. Hence the endless feedback loop of superficiality. And people wonder why youth suicides have risen… a young woman looking at a model of perfection set by her peers, without proper knowledge of the medium, can be made to feel inferior far more dramatically than the typical body image problems associated to traditional advertising. That is just one example of the cultural violence inherent. The entire industry of social media is BASED on narcissistic status promotion and narrow self-interest. That is the emotion/intent that creates the billions and billions in revenue these platforms experience, as they in turn sell off people’s personal data to advertisers and governments. You are the product, of course.

Ultimatums have negative connotations for many because they’re often used by bullies and abusers, who tend to be comfortable pushing their partners’ backs against a wall, demanding that he or she choose this or that, all or nothing. But when used by emotionally healthy people with good intentions, ultimatums offer a respectful and loving way through an impasse that will sooner or later destroy a relationship on its own anyway. Besides, the two of you have been up against the wall for years now, forced by your partners to be the sole financial providers, even when you have repeatedly stated that you will not and cannot continue to be. You’ve continued. Your partners have made their excuses and allowed you to do what you said you don’t want to do, even though they know it makes you profoundly unhappy. Your ultimatum is simple. It’s fair. And it’s stating your own intentions, not what you hope theirs will be. It’s: I won’t live like this anymore. I won’t carry our financial burdens beyond my desires or capabilities. I won’t enable your inertia. I won’t, even though I love you. I won’t, because I love you. Because doing so is ruining us.

New Rule: If you're going to have a rally where hundreds of thousands of people show up, you may as well go ahead and make it about something. With all due respect to my friends Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, it seems that if you truly wanted to come down on the side of restoring sanity and reason, you'd side with the sane and the reasonable--and not try to pretend the insanity is equally distributed in both parties. Keith Olbermann is right when he says he's not the equivalent of Glenn Beck. One reports facts; the other one is very close to playing with his poop. And the big mistake of modern media has been this notion of balance for balance's sake, that the left is just as violent and cruel as the right, that unions are just as powerful as corporations, that reverse racism is just as damaging as racism. There's a difference between a mad man and a madman. Now, getting more than two hundred thousand people to come to a liberal rally is a great achievement that gave me hope, and what I really loved about it was that it was twice the size of the Glenn Beck crowd on the Mall in August--although it weight the same. But the message of the rally as I heard it was that if the media would just top giving voice to the crazies on both sides, then maybe we could restore sanity. It was all nonpartisan, and urged cooperation with the moderates on the other side. Forgetting that Obama tried that, and found our there are no moderates on the other side. When Jon announced his rally, he said that the national conversation is "dominated" by people on the right who believe Obama's a socialist, and by people on the left who believe 9/11 was an inside job. But I can't name any Democratic leaders who think 9/11 was an inside job. But Republican leaders who think Obama's socialist? All of them. McCain, Boehner, Cantor, Palin...all of them. It's now official Republican dogma, like "Tax cuts pay for themselves" and "Gay men just haven't met the right woman." As another example of both sides using overheated rhetoric, Jon cited the right equating Obama with Hitler, and the left calling Bush a war criminal. Except thinking Obama is like Hitler is utterly unfounded--but thinking Bush is a war criminal? That's the opinion of Major General Anthony Taguba, who headed the Army's investigation into Abu Ghraib. Republicans keep staking out a position that is farther and farther right, and then demand Democrats meet them in the middle. Which now is not the middle anymore. That's the reason health-care reform is so watered down--it's Bob Dole's old plan from 1994. Same thing with cap and trade--it was the first President Bush's plan to deal with carbon emissions. Now the Republican plan for climate change is to claim it's a hoax. But it's not--I know because I've lived in L.A. since '83, and there's been a change in the city: I can see it now. All of us who live out here have had that experience: "Oh, look, there's a mountain there." Governments, led my liberal Democrats, passed laws that changed the air I breathe. For the better. I'm for them, and not the party that is plotting to abolish the EPA. I don't need to pretend both sides have a point here, and I don't care what left or right commentators say about it, I can only what climate scientists say about it. Two opposing sides don't necessarily have two compelling arguments. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on that mall in the capital, and he didn't say, "Remember, folks, those southern sheriffs with the fire hoses and the German shepherds, they have a point, too." No, he said, "I have a dream. They have a nightmare. This isn't Team Edward and Team Jacob." Liberals, like the ones on that field, must stand up and be counted, and not pretend we're as mean or greedy or shortsighted or just plain batshit at them. And if that's too polarizing for you, and you still want to reach across the aisle and hold hands and sing with someone on the right, try church.

You have your faults too. I’m sure you won’t deny that.” “How could I?” “Overbearing, gloomy. You brood a lot.” “That’s true enough.” “Very demanding. Have to have your own way. She says you wore her out, asking for help, support.” “It’s all correct. And more. I’m hasty, irascible, spoiled. And what else?” “You’ve been reckless about women.” “Since Madeleine threw me out, maybe. Trying to get back my self-respect.” “No, while you still were married.” Zelda’s mouth tightened. Herzog felt himself redden. A thick, hot, sick pressure filled his chest. His heart felt ill and his forehead instantly wet. He muttered, “She made it tough for me, too. Sexually.

So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.

I don't think that many performers necessarily want to see their audience empowered. I think a lot of performers, no different from priests, need the hierarchy. Modern, celebrity-driven entertainment turns the stage into an altar, and so many celebrities refuse to be removed from those altars once they manage to ascend. They will not be taken down— the Goddess is offended … As a storyteller in the old tradition, you held an important place at the circle. Your position was fluid, not necessarily permanent, but it demanded that you respected the others witnessing your performance as much as they respected you. All storytellers, all troubadours worth their salt knew their myths.

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for— the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm? —But it’s nicer here. . . . So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands? —But we have to sleep sometime. . . . Agreed. But nature set a limit on that—as it did on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit. You’ve had more than enough of that. But not of working. There you’re still below your quota. You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts.

When I graduated from college and joined Spade Hotels, my father pulled me aside. He said there are two things anyone can control when they’re starting a new job. The first is your reputation. How you treat others, how you demand respect. How dedicated you are to the job. Maybe a coworker doesn’t end up liking you, maybe your personalities clash, but don’t give them a chance to call you lazy or for them to question your work ethic. In a work environment, your reputation is all you have.” I paused as the waitress dropped off another round of drinks, and I downed the rest of mine before I handed her the empty. “The second is punctuality. Neither my father nor Walter tolerates anyone being late.

[There is] a widespread approach to ideas which Objectivism repudiates altogether: agnosticism. I mean this term in a sense which applies to the question of God, but to many other issues also, such as extra-sensory perception or the claim that the stars influence man’s destiny. In regard to all such claims, the agnostic is the type who says, “I can’t prove these claims are true, but you can’t prove they are false, so the only proper conclusion is: I don’t know; no one knows; no one can know one way or the other.” The agnostic viewpoint poses as fair, impartial, and balanced. See how many fallacies you can find in it. Here are a few obvious ones: First, the agnostic allows the arbitrary into the realm of human cognition. He treats arbitrary claims as ideas proper to consider, discuss, evaluate—and then he regretfully says, “I don’t know,” instead of dismissing the arbitrary out of hand. Second, the onus-of-proof issue: the agnostic demands proof of a negative in a context where there is no evidence for the positive. “It’s up to you,” he says, “to prove that the fourth moon of Jupiter did not cause your sex life and that it was not a result of your previous incarnation as the Pharaoh of Egypt.” Third, the agnostic says, “Maybe these things will one day be proved.” In other words, he asserts possibilities or hypotheses with no jot of evidential basis. The agnostic miscalculates. He thinks he is avoiding any position that will antagonize anybody. In fact, he is taking a position which is much more irrational than that of a man who takes a definite but mistaken stand on a given issue, because the agnostic treats arbitrary claims as meriting cognitive consideration and epistemological respect. He treats the arbitrary as on a par with the rational and evidentially supported. So he is the ultimate epistemological egalitarian: he equates the groundless and the proved. As such, he is an epistemological destroyer. The agnostic thinks that he is not taking any stand at all and therefore that he is safe, secure, invulnerable to attack. The fact is that his view is one of the falsest—and most cowardly—stands there can be.

Proactive people show you what they love, what they want, what they purpose, and what they stand for. These people are very different from those who are known by what they hate, what they don’t like, what they stand against, and what they will not do. While reactive victims are primarily known by their “against” stances, proactive people do not demand rights; they live them. Power is not something you demand or deserve; it is something you express. The ultimate expression of power is love; it is the ability not to express power, but to restrain it. Proactive people are able to “love others as themselves.” They have mutual respect. They are able to “die to self” and not “return evil for evil.” They have gotten past the reactive stance of the law and are able to love and not react.

The parents of high-reactive children are exceedingly lucky, Belsky told me. “The time and effort they invest will actually make a difference. Instead of seeing these kids as vulnerable to adversity, parents should see them as malleable—for worse, but also for better.” He describes eloquently a high-reactive child’s ideal parent: someone who “can read your cues and respect your individuality; is warm and firm in placing demands on you without being harsh or hostile; promotes curiosity, academic achievement, delayed gratification, and self-control; and is not harsh, neglectful, or inconsistent.” This advice is terrific for all parents, of course, but it’s crucial for raising a high-reactive child. (If you think your child might be high-reactive, you’re probably already asking yourself what else you can do to cultivate your son or daughter. Chapter 11 has some answers.)

You squeeze and crinkle the toothpaste tube even though you know it bothers your spouse. You complain about the dirty dishes instead of putting them in the dishwasher. You fight for your own way in little things, rather than seeing them as an opportunity to serve. You allow yourself to go to bed irritated after a little disagreement. Day after day you leave for work without a moment of tenderness between you. You fight for your view of beauty rather than making your home a visual expression of the tastes of both of you. You allow yourself to do little rude things you would never have done in courtship. You quit asking for forgiveness in the little moments of wrong. You complain about how the other does little things, when it really doesn’t make any difference. You make little decisions without consultation. You quit investing in the friendship intimacy of your marriage. You fight for your own way rather than for unity in little moments of disagreement. You complain about the other’s foibles and weaknesses. You fail to seize those openings to encourage. You quit searching for little avenues for expressing love. You begin to keep a record of little wrongs. You allow yourself to be irritated by what you once appreciated. You quit making sure that every day is punctuated with tenderness before sleep takes you away. You quit regularly expressing appreciation and respect. You allow your physical eyes and the eyes of your heart to wander. You swallow little hurts that you would have once discussed. You begin to turn little requests into regular demands. You quit taking care of yourself. You become willing to live with more silence and distance than you would have when you were approaching marriage. You quit working in those little moments to make your marriage better, and you begin to succumb to what is.

There was a moment of stillness before something in him seemed to snap. she pounced on her with a sort of tigerish delight, and clamped his mouth over hers. She squeaked in surprise, wriggling in his hold, but his arms clamped around her easily, his muscles as solid as oak. He kissed her possessively, almost roughly at first, gentling by voluptuous degrees. Her body surrendered without giving her brain a chance to object, applying itself eagerly to every available inch of him. The luxurious male heat and hardness of him satisfied a wrenching hunger she hadn't been aware of until now. It also gave her the close-but-not-close-enough feeling she remembered from before. Oh, how confusing this was, this maddening need to crawl inside his clothes, practically inside his skin. She let her fingertips wander over his cheeks and jaw, the neat shape of his ears, the taut smoothness of his neck. When he offered no objection, she sank her fingers into his thick, vibrant hair and sighed in satisfaction. He searched for her tongue, teased and stroked intimately until her heart pounded in a tumult of longing, and a sweet, empty ache spread all through her. Dimly aware that she was going to lose control, that she was on the verge of swooning, or assaulting him again, she managed to break the kiss and turn her face away with a gasp. "Don't," she said weakly. His lips grazed along her jawline, his breath rushing unsteadily against her skin. "Why? Are you still worried about Australian pox?" Slowly it registered that they were no longer standing. Gabriel was sitting on the ground with his back against the grass-covered mound, and- heaven help her- she was in his lap. She glanced around them in bewilderment. How had this happened? "No," she said, bewildered and perturbed, "but I just remembered that you said I kissed like a pirate." Gabriel looked blank for a moment. "Oh, that. That was a compliment." Pandora scowled. "It would only be a compliment if I had a beard and a peg leg." Setting his mouth sternly against a faint quiver, Gabriel smoothed her hair tenderly. "Forgive my poor choice of words. What I meant to convey was that I found your enthusiasm charming." "Did you?" Pandora turned crimson. Dropping her head to his shoulder, she said in a muffled voice, "Because I've worried for the past three days that I did it wrong." "No, never, darling." Gabriel sat up a little and cradled her more closely to him. Nuzzling her cheek, he whispered, "Isn't it obvious that everything about you gives me pleasure?" "Even when I plunder and pillage like a Viking?" she asked darkly. "Pirate. Yes, especially then." His lips moved softly along the rim of her right ear. "My sweet, there are altogether too many respectable ladies in the world. The supply has far exceeded the demand. But there's an appalling shortage of attractive pirates, and you do seem to have a gift for plundering and ravishing. I think we've found you're true calling." "You're mocking me," Pandora said in resignation, and jumped a little as she felt his teeth gently nip her earlobe. Smiling, Gabriel took her head between his hands and looked into her eyes. "Your kiss thrilled me beyond imagining," he whispered. "Every night for the rest of my life, I'll dream of the afternoon in the holloway, when I was waylaid by a dark-haired beauty who devastated me with the heat of a thousand troubled stars, and left my soul in cinders. Even when I'm an old man, and my brain has fallen to wrack and ruin, I'll remember the sweet fire of your lips under mine, and I'll say to myself, 'Now, that was a kiss.'" Silver-tongued devil, Pandora thought, unable to hold back a crooked grin. Only yesterday, she'd heard Gabriel affectionately mock his father, who was fond of expressing himself with elaborate, almost labyrinthine turns of phrase. Clearly the gift had been passed down to his son.

If you want something, ask for it. Another thing I learned while living with the Ballases was that if you want love or affection, sometimes you’ve just got to ask for it. This is tough for a lot of people. As adults, the fear of rejection or embarrassment often stops the words before you ever utter them. But leaders aren’t afraid to ask for what they want and need. Even if someone shoots you down, you’ve put it out there in the universe. I’d tease Nan or Shirley: “I’m feeling kind of down today, get over here and give me a hug, dammit.” And they did. The people who love you want to come through for you; you just sometimes need to make that easier by saying what you need. It isn’t selfish or bossy or demanding. It’s respecting yourself and your worth. I loved the freedom of not being afraid to just ask for something instead of waiting and being disappointed if it never came. Asking for something is simply the best way to ensure that you eventually get it.

Suppose two countries, A and B. A possesses over B all kinds of advantages. You infer from this, that every sort of industry will concentrate itself in A, and that B is powerless. A, you say, sells much more than it buys; B buys much more than it sells. I might dispute this, but I respect your hypothesis. On this hypothesis, labour is much in demand in A, and will soon rise in price there. Iron, coal, land, food, capital, are much in demand in A, and they will soon rise in price there. Contemporaneously with this, labour, iron, coal, land, food, capital, are in little request in B, and will soon fall in price there. Nor is this all. While A is always selling, and B is always buying, money passes from B to A. It becomes abundant in A, and scarce in B. But abundance of money means that we must have plenty of it to buy everything else. Then in A, to the real dearness which arises from a very active demand, there is added a nominal dearness, which is due to a redundancy of the precious metals. Scarcity

According to H.G. Wells, you either adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative. It is not necessary to change, after all survival is not mandatory This generation might seem arrogant to the older generation due to some reasons. The older generation believes an older person or someone of higher authority is always right and being sceptical is an insult, lol Our generation is full of people who are so skeptical, they wanna know why this is this and that is that, they don't just hear and believe, they hear, hear from other sides, look at it critically and express their opinions based on their conviction. This generation is full of people who are somewhat confident cos they study, they observe and due to these, they are equipped with better information and like you know, knowledge is power. You know right from wrong, you know truth from lies. When you are with those in authority and have this knowledge, an ignorant person of higher authority would be scared of you, feel threatened and might resort to maltreating and frustrating you, defaming your character etc The older generation and the younger generation are usually having misunderstanding because the older generation are being deceived by pride, the younger generation due to their advanced education do not wanna give merit to whom it isn't due. While the older generation postulates that respect is not earned but compulsory for them to be accorded, the younger generation believes respect must be earned. lol The older generation rules by fiction but the younger generation lives by facts. The older generation uses age to oppress, the younger generation uses their knowledge to defend. The older generation believes they can never be wrong, the younger generation wants fair hearing, demands for it, if denied, they take it by force due to the confidence they've built around themselves. The older generation is unfair to the younger generation, there was once a time they were listened to without doubts and opposition, this is the time for the younger generation to be listened to due to advancement in education and exposure. The younger generation, due to their quest for higher knowledge through research, etc, they have realized the consequences of being ignorant and with their power of conviction, they are not letting the older generation have their autocratic ways affect them. To the younger generation, one should be able to prove whatever he says, no more latent heresies and this is what the older generation don't wanna hear of. The older generation wants to continue enslaving the younger generation but the younger generation is more equipped than the older generation and as such, not letting that happen. Technology advances every day, the younger generation are ever ready to adapt to the changes but the older generation is not ready for that, they wanna remain stagnant and still have the say of the day. Like George Bernard Shaw once said, the reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man

Yet each time, after consulting her watch, she sat down again at my request, so that in the end she had spent several hours with me without my having demanded anything of her; the things I said to her were related to those I had said during the preceding hours, were totally unconnected with what I was thinking about, what I desired, and remained doggedly parallel to all this. There is nothing like desire for obstructing any resemblance between what one says and what one has on one’s mind. Time presses, and yet it seems as though we were trying to gain time by speaking about things that are utterly alien to the one thing that preoccupies us. We chatter away, whereas the words we should like to utter would have by now been accompanied by a gesture, if indeed we have not – to give ourselves the pleasure of immediate action and to slake the curiosity we feel about the ensuing reactions to it – without a word, without so much as a by-your-leave, already made this gesture. It is true that I was not in the least in love with Albertine: born from the mist outside, she could do no more than satisfy the fanciful desire awakened in me by the change in the weather, poised midway between the desires that are satisfied by culinary arts and by monumental sculpture respectively, because it made me dream both of mingling my flesh with a substance that was different and warm, and of attaching to some point of my recumbent body a divergent body, as Eve’s body is barely attached by the feet to the side of Adam, to whose body hers is almost perpendicular in the Romanesque bas-reliefs in the Balbec cathedral, representing in so noble and so placid a fashion, still almost like a classical frieze, the creation of woman; in them God is followed everywhere, as by two ministers, by two little angels recalling – like the winged, swirling creatures of the summer that winter has caught by surprise and spared – cupids from Herculaneum still surviving well into the thirteenth century, flagging now in their last flight, weary, but never relinquishing the grace we might expect of them, over the whole front of the porch.

So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing afriend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for being grateful , the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.

Even in government the role of women grew. Cato cried out that “all other men rule over women; but we Romans, who rule all men, are ruled by our women.”12 In 195 B.C.. the free women of Rome swept into the Forum and demanded the repeal of the Oppian Law of 215, which had forbidden women to use gold ornaments, varicolored dresses, or chariots. Cato predicted the ruin of Rome if the law should be repealed. Livy puts into his mouth a speech that every generation has heard: If we had, each of us, upheld the rights and authority of the husband in our own households, we should not today have this trouble with our women. As things are now, our liberty of action, which has been annulled by female despotism at home, is crushed and trampled on here in the Forum. . . . Call to mind all the regulations respecting women by which our ancestors curbed their license and made them obedient to their husbands; and yet with all those restrictions you can scarcely hold them in. If now you permit them to remove these restraints . . . and to put themselves on an equality with their husbands, do you imagine that you will be able to bear them? From the moment that they become your equals they will be your masters.13

You know those short, brown-toned South American immigrants that pick your fruit, slaughter your meat, and bus your tables? Would you—a respectable person with a middle-class upbringing—ever consider going on a date with one of them? It's a rude question, because it affects to inquire into what everyone gets to know at the cost of forever leaving it unspoken. But if you were to put your unspoken thoughts into words, they might sound something like this: Not only are these people busing the tables, slaughtering the meat, and picking the fruit; they are the descendants of the people who bused the tables, slaughtered the meat, and picked the fruit of the Aztecs and Incas. The Spanish colonisers slaughtered or mixed their blood with the princes, priests, scholars, artisans, warriors, and beautiful women of the indigenous Americas, leaving untouched a class of Morlocks bred for good-natured servility and thus now tailor-made to the demands of an increasingly feudal postindustrial America. That's, by the way, part of the undertow of the immigration debate, the thing that makes an honest appraisal of the issue impossible, because you can never put anything right without first admitting you're in the wrong.

Keeley, Burke tells me your new trainer is a natural with the horses, with Travis and with cards as well." "And I hear he's gorgeous,too," Mo added. "Where'd you hear that?" Keeley demanded before she could bite her tongue into two. "Oh,the word gets around in our snug little world," Mo said grandly. "And Shelley Mason-one of your kids? Her sister Lorna's in my Worl History class, a huge, bore by the way. The class, that is, not Lorna, who's only a small bore.Anyway, she picked Shelley up last week from your place and got a load of the Irish hunk, so I heard all about it. Which is why I'm planning on coming over as soon as I can and getting a load of him myself." "Trevor, give your sister your pork chop so the can stuff it in her mouth." "Dad." Giggling, Mo snatched another fry. "I'm just going to look. So, Keeley, is he gorgeous? I respect your opinion more than Lorna Mason's." "He's too old for you," Keeley said, a bit more sharply than she intended and had Mo rolling her eyes. "Jeez.I don't want to marry him and have his children." Travis's laugh prevented Keeley from snapping back with something foolish. "Good thing. Now that I've found someone who comes close to replacing Paddy,I don't intend to lose him to Three Acres." "okay." Mo licked salt from her fingertip. "I'll just ogle him.

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?” —But it’s nicer here.… So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands? —But we have to sleep sometime.… Agreed. But nature set a limit on that—as it did on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit. You’ve had more than enough of that. But not of working. There you’re still below your quota. You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts. Is helping others less valuable to you? Not worth your effort?

1. At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?” —But it’s nicer here.… So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands? —But we have to sleep sometime.… Agreed. But nature set a limit on that—as it did on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit. You’ve had more than enough of that. But not of working. There you’re still below your quota. You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts. Is helping others less valuable to you? Not worth your effort?

The girl really needed to let him go. This was the voyage Gray went respectable. And it was off to a very bad start. It was all her fault-this delicate wisp of a governess, with that porcelain complexion and her big, round eyes tilting up at him like Wedgwood teacups. She looked as if she might break if he breathed on her wrong, and those eyes keep beseeching him, imploring him, making demands. Please, rescue me from this pawing brute. Please, take me on your ship and away to Tortola. Please, strip me out of this revolting gown and initiate me in the pleasure of the flesh right here on the barstool. Well, innocent miss that she was, she might have lacked words to voice the third quite that way. But worldly man that he was, Gray cold interpret the silent petition quite clearly. He only wished he could discourage his body’s instinctive, affirmative response. He didn’t know what to do with the girl. He ought to do the respectable thing, seeing as how this voyage marked the beginning of his respectable career. But Miss Turner had him pegged. He was no kind of gentleman, and damned if he knew the respectable thing. Allowing a young, unmarried, winsome lady to travel unaccompanied probably wasn’t it. But then, if he refused her, who was to say she wouldn’t end up in an even worse situation? The chit couldn’t handle herself for five minutes in a tavern. Was he truly going to turn her loose on the Gravesend quay?

Our city teems with sons who have escaped their fathers in a similar way. Usually, this remains obscure. The Oedipal relation­ship is reduced to a malaise between individuals. The loss of esteem is inevitable, but people get along with one another. Moreover, I am troubled less by my background than by the respect that my old man demands on the basis of his paternity. He cites a credit that is not his due: the fact that fathers, rulers, professors once lived and deserved this name. Nowadays, that is nothing but a rumor. When he swaggers, I sometimes feel like reminding him of the map room and the tricks he harassed my mother with. She shel­tered me from him in her cavern just as Rhea shielded her Zeus against the gluttonous Cronus. Naturally, I avoid making this chess move; I am aware, here too, of imperfection, which torments me. There are truths that we must hush if we are to live together; but you cannot knock over the chessboard. I owe my restraint partly to Bruno, whose course also covers magical and even practical conduct. He said: "If the words are about to flee your lips, then reach toward the left side of your chest for your wallet. You will then save your joke; it will accrue to your capital. You will feel your heart." That is how I act with my dad. At such times, I am even over­come with benevolence. This is also my advice to Vigo when he wants to parry hateful criticism by giving tit for tat.

What if you can't help but judge life negatively? What if yesterday felt awful, today feels awful, and tomorrow is likely to feel awful too? What if you are poverty stricken, coughing up blood, incarcerated, alone, under siege, helpless, and hopeless? How absurd is it to ask you to make meaning and choose the meanings of your life? Don't you need medicine, money, and a friend more than some hard-nosed philosophy? Aren't you better off with a romantic movie, a pitcher of beer, and a dream of heaven rather than a demanding, soul-searching regimen? Doesn't natural psychology make little or no sense in your circumstances? ... It may be the case that someone who has a hard life is exactly the sort of person who would benefit from a philosophy that respects the hardness of reality and that proposes solutions, especially if that person is smart enough to understand the alternatives. That isn't to say that there won't be days when all of us need meaning to amount to more than this, to something more profound and important, to something that better soothes us and helps us forget that we are bound to suffer and that we will cease to be. The natural psychological view does not controvert the facts of existence, and there will be days—many days—when even the staunchest heart wishes that it could. We boldly stare at the facts of existence—and on some days, each of us will blink. Adherents of natural psychology know that days like that are coming.

As everyone knows, Islam set up a social order from the outset, in contrast, for example, to Christianity. Islamic social teachings are so basic to the religion that still today many people, including Muslims, are completely unaware of Islam's spiritual dimensions. Social order demands rules and regulations, fear of the king, respect for the police, acknowledgement of authority. It has to be set up on the basis of God's majesty and severity. It pays primary attention to the external realm, the realm of the body and the desires of the lower soul, the realm where God is distant from the world. In contrast, Islamic spiritual teachings allow for intimacy, love, boldness, ecstatic expressions, and intoxication in the Beloved. All these are qualities that pertain to nearness to God. (...) In short, on the social level, Islam affirms the primacy of God as King, Majestic, Lord, Ruler. It establishes a theological patriarchy even if Muslim theologians refuse to apply the word father (or mother) to God. God is yang, while the world, human beings, and society are yin. Thereby order is established and maintained. Awe and distance are the ruling qualities. On the spiritual level, the picture is different. In this domain many Muslim authorities affirm the primacy of God as Merciful, Beautiful, Gentle, Loving. Here they establish a spiritual matriarchy, though again such terms are not employed. God is yin and human beings are yang. Human spiritual aspiration is accepted and welcomed by God. Intimacy and nearness are the ruling qualities. This helps explain why one can easily find positive evaluations of women and the feminine dimension of things in Sufism. (...) Again, this primacy of yin cannot function on the social level, since it undermines the authority of the law. If we take in isolation the Koranic statement, "Despair not of God's mercy surely God forgives all sins" (39:53), then we can throw the Sharia out the window. In the Islamic perspective, the revealed law prevents society from degenerating into chaos. One gains liberty not by overthrowing hierarchy and constraints, but by finding liberty in its true abode, the spiritual realm. Freedom, lack of limitation and constraint, bold expansivenessis achieved only by moving toward God, not by rebelling against Him and moving away. Attar (d. 618/1221) makes the same point more explicitly in an anecdote he tells about the great Sufi shaykh, Abu'l- Hasan Kharraqani (d. 425/1033): It is related that one night the Shaykh was busy with prayer. He heard a voice saying, "Beware, Abu'l-Hasan! Do you want me to tell people what I know about you so that they will stone you to death?" The Shaykh replied, "O God the Creator! Do You want me to tell the people what I know about Your mercy and what I see of Your generosity? Then no one will prostrate himself to You." A voice came, "You keep quiet, and so will I." Sufism is concerned with "maintaining the secret" (hifz al-sirr) for more reasons than one. The secret of God's mercy threatens the plain fact of His wrath. If "She" came out of the closet, "He" would be overthrown. But then She could not be found, for it is He who shows the way to Her door.

When you finally meet someone who loves you and respects you in words and actions, relationships take on a whole new meaning. Your life becomes bigger because the things you discovered about yourself in your alone time are still being honored and cared for and you have a partner to share your life with. Love accommodates you and all your interests and obligations. You’re not being asked to give anything up for love and someone is helping to support you while you support him or her. Real love, functional love, doesn’t cause you to lose people, places, things, health, sleep, or appetite. Real love does not demand, either actively or passively, that you give up your friends, hobbies, or interests. In fact, it encourages independence and being fulfilled by other people, places, and things. When you are a healthy and functional person, your healthy and functional mate trusts and supports you. Your partner does not purposefully or unwittingly engulf you. If you’re losing your friends, your family, or your children due to a relationship you’re in, you need to think about what is going on in this relationship. Don’t automatically blame your friends, family, and children. If your partner always wants you to choose him or her over others in your life, even if it’s not an explicit demand but always turns out that way, there is something wrong. Real love does not strip you of the things you love or the people you love, and real love does not make you choose. Real love encourages quality time alone with friends, family, and children. Being nurtured and loved by others makes a person fulfilled and, in turn, adds to the primary relationship.

Nicki laughs. “This matters to me, Carrie. Putting my whole soul into this game matters to me. These tournaments matter. I’ve dedicated my life to this.” “Well, so have I,” I say. “And you had your chance to shine––you were given that opportunity.” “I took it,” I say. “It wasn’t given to me. Nobody wanted me to be the face of women’s tennis. They still don’t. I had to demand it. Just like I am doing now. So if you want it, you’re going to have to take it from me.” “No,” Nicki says. “That’s what you don’t seem to get. I have taken it from you. I have the record. And if you want it, you’re going to have to take it from me.” I stare at her, and she continues. “I am the best player women’s tennis has seen,” she says. “And I deserve to be recognized for it.” “You are recognized for it,” I say. “Constantly.” Nicki shakes her head. “No, by you. By the person I’ve respected my entire life. The woman I’ve looked up to.” There is no smile on her face anymore. Not even the hint of one. I look over at the TV. It’s playing sports commentary with the sound off. The closed captioning says they are talking about Nicki and me right now. “I see it,” I say, finally looking at her. “Me hating it is me seeing it.” Nicki sighs. “Okay, Soto. I guess I can’t squeeze blood from a stone.” “Look, what do you want from me?” Nicki looks me in the eye. “Don’t worry about what I say,” I tell her. “Pay attention to what I do. I’m back, aren’t I? I’m playing here today. That’s how good you are.” The trainer is done. I stand up. I walk past Nicki and put my hand on her shoulder. “Good luck,” I say. “I’m rooting for you up until the last second when I play you.” Nicki smiles. “You should be so lucky.” I put my hand out for her to shake. And she takes it.

1. At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?” —But it’s nicer here.… So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands? —But we have to sleep sometime.… Agreed. But nature set a limit on that—as it did on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit. You’ve had more than enough of that. But not of working. There you’re still below your quota. You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts. Is helping others less valuable to you? Not worth your effort? 2. To shrug it all off and wipe it clean—every annoyance and distraction—and reach utter stillness. Child’s play. 3. If an action or utterance is appropriate, then it’s appropriate for you. Don’t be put off by other people’s comments and criticism. If it’s right to say or do it, then it’s the right thing for you to do or say.

Such words are pleasing in the ear of the father of spirits. He is not a God to accept the flattery which declares him above obligation to his creatures; a God to demand of them a righteousness different from his own; a God to deal ungenerously with his poverty-stricken children; a God to make severest demands upon his little ones! Job is confident of receiving justice. There is a strange but most natural conflict of feeling in him. His faith is in truth profound, yet is he always complaining. It is but the form his faith takes in his trouble. Even while he declares the hardness and unfitness of the usage he is receiving, he yet seems assured that, to get things set right, all he needs is admission to the presence of God—an interview with the Most High. To be heard must be to have justice. He uses language which, used by any living man, would horrify the religious of the present day, in proportion to the lack of truth in them, just as it horrified his three friends, the honest pharisees of the time, whose religion was 'doctrine' and rebuke. God speaks not a word of rebuke to Job for the freedom of his speech:—he has always been seeking such as Job to worship him. It is those who know only and respect the outsides of religion, such as never speak or think of God but as the Almighty or Providence, who will say of the man who would go close up to God, and speak to him out of the deepest in the nature he has made, 'he is irreverent.' To utter the name of God in the drama—highest of human arts, is with such men blasphemy. They pay court to God, not love him; they treat him as one far away, not as the one whose bosom is the only home. They accept God's person. 'Shall not his excellency'—another thing quite than that you admire—' make you afraid? Shall not his dread'—another thing quite than that to which you show your pagan respect—' fall upon you?

This past, the Negro's past, of rope, fire torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of life, since everyone around him denied it; sorrow for this women, for his kinfolk, for his children, who needed his protection, and whom he could not protect; rage, hatred, and murder, hatred for white men so deep that it often turned against him and his own, and made all love, all trust, all joy impossible - this past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful. I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering - enough is certainly as good as a feast - but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. That man who is forced each day to snatch manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth - and indeed, no church - can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable. This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words. If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne. And at this level of experience one's bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry. The apprehension of life here so briefly and inadequately sketched has been the experience of generations of Negroes, and it helps to explain how they have endured and how they have been able to produce children of kindergarten age who can walk through mobs to get to school. It demands great force and great cunning continually to assault the mighty and indifferent fortress of white supremacy, as Negroes in this country have done so long. It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate. The Negro boys and girls who are facing mobs today come out of a long line of improbable aristocrats - the only genuine aristocrats this country has produced. I say "this country" because their frame of reference was totally American. They were hewing out of the mountain of white supremacy the stone of their individuality. I have great respect for that unsung army of black men and women who trudged down back lanes and entered back doors, saying "Yes, sir" and "No, Ma'am" in order to acquire a new roof for the schoolhouse, new books, a new chemistry lab, more beds for the dormitories, more dormitories. They did not like saying "Yes, sir" and "No Ma'am", but the country was in no hurry to educate Negroes, these black men and women knew that the job had to be done, and they put their pride in their pockets in order to do it. It is very hard to believe that they were in anyway inferior to the white men and women who opened those back doors. It is very hard to believe that those men and women, raising their children, eating their greens, crying their curses, weeping their tears, singing their songs, making their love, as the sun rose, as the sun set, were in any way inferior to the white men and women who crept over to share these splendors after the sun went down. ... I am proud of these people not because of their color but because of their intelligence and their spiritual force and their beauty. The country should be proud of them, too, but, alas, not many people in this country even know of their existence.

Anarchists and antiauthoritarians clearly differentiate between charity and solidarity--especially thanks to working with indigenous solidarity movements and other international solidarity movements--based on the principles of affinity and mutual aid. Affinity is just what it sounds like: that you can work most easily with people who share your goals, and that your work will be strongest when your relationships are based on trust, friendship, and love. Mutual aid is the idea that we all have a stake in one another's liberation, and that when we can act from that interdependence, we can share with one another as equals. Charity, however, is something that is given not only because it feels like there is an excess to share but also because it is based in a framework that implies that others inherently need the help--that they are unable to take care of themselves and that they would suffer without it. Charity is patronizing and selfish. It establishes some people as those who assist and others as those who need assistance, stabilizing oppressive paradigms by solidifying people's positions in them. Autonomy and self-determination are essential to making this distinction as well. Recognizing the autonomy and self-determination of individuals and groups acknowledges their capability. It's an understanding of that group as having something of worth to be gained through interactions with them, whether that thing is a material good or something less tangible, like perspective, joy, or inspiration. The solidarity model dispels the idea of one inside and one outside, foregrounding how individuals belong to multiple groups and how groups overlap with one another, while simultaneously demanding respect for the identity of self-sufficientcy of each of those groups. Original Zine: Ain't no PC Gonna Fix it, Baby. 2013. Featured in: A Critique of Ally Politics. Taking Sides.

But I am pondering over the skill with which you have presented the whole argument in support of your proposition, Ischomachus. For you stated that husbandry is the easiest of all arts to learn, and after hearing all that you have said, I am quite convinced that this is so. Of course it is, cried Ischomachus; but I grant you, Socrates, that in respect of aptitude for command, which is common to all forms of business alike—agriculture, politics, estate-management, warfare—in that respect the intelligence shown by different classes of men varies greatly. [...]Just as a love of work may spring up in the mind of a private soldier here and there, so a whole army under the influence of a good leader is inspired with love of work and ambition to distinguish itself under the commander’s eye. Let this be the feeling of the rank and file for their commander; and I tell you, he is the strong leader, he, and not the sturdiest soldier, not the best with bow and javelin, not the man who rides the best horse and is foremost in facing danger, not the ideal of knight or targeteer, but he who can make his soldiers feel that they are bound to follow him through fire and in any adventure. [...]And this, in my judgment, is the greatest thing in every operation that makes any demand on the labour of men, and therefore in agriculture. Mind you, I do not go so far as to say that this can be learnt at sight or at a single hearing. On the contrary, to acquire these powers a man needs education; he must be possessed of great natural gifts; above all, he must be a genius. For I reckon this gift is not altogether human, but divine—this power to win willing obedience: it is manifestly a gift of the gods to the true votaries of prudence. Despotic rule over unwilling subjects they give, I fancy, to those whom they judge worthy to live the life of Tantalus, of whom it is said that in hell he spends eternity, dreading a second death.

Millions of us daily take advantage of [Skype], delighted to carry the severed heads of family members under our arms as we move from the deck to the cool of inside, or steering them around our new homes, bobbing them like babies on a seasickening tour. Skype can be a wonderful consolation prize in the ongoing tournament of globalization, though typically the first place it transforms us is to ourselves. How often are the initial seconds of a video's call takeoff occupied by two wary, diagonal glances, with a quick muss or flick of the hair, or a more generous tilt of the screen in respect to the chin? Please attend to your own mask first. Yet, despite the obvious cheer of seeing a faraway face, lonesomeness surely persists in the impossibility of eye contact. You can offer up your eyes to the other person, but your own view will be of the webcam's unwarm aperture. ... The problem lies in the fact that we can't bring our silence with us through walls. In phone conversations, while silence can be both awkward and intimate, there is no doubt that each of you inhabits the same darkness, breathing the same dead air. Perversely, a phone silence is a thick rope tying two speakers together in the private void of their suspended conversation. This binding may be unpleasant and to be avoided, but it isn't as estranging as its visual counterpart. When talk runs to ground on Skype, and if the purpose of the call is to chat, I can quickly sense that my silence isn't their silence. For some reason silence can't cross the membrane of the computer screen as it can uncoil down phone lines. While we may be lulled into thinking that a Skype call, being visual, is more akin to a hang-out than a phone conversation, it is in many ways more demanding than its aural predecessor. Not until Skype has it become clear how much companionable quiet has depended on co-inhabiting an atmosphere, with a simple act of sharing the particulars of a place -- the objects in the room, the light through the window -- offering a lovely alternative to talk.

Earth (481-640) People with this personality type are likely to become successful leaders. You tend to be more disciplined and careful at planning tasks. Loyalty and trust are important equations in your relationships hence they prove to be your strength in hard times. You respect others and keep people united which makes people flourish under your leadership. Earth signs are efficient decision makers hence always remain firm on the step they took. Fire: (400-300) Fire people are smart enthusiastic and energetic to be around. You are very competitive and curious, and more often very passionate about your goals and desires. Trusting people with a job or any important personal task is hard hence making emotional connections are difficult for you. making friends or getting a lover, your life is full of drama and there’s always a lot happening around you. You are intelligent and always find new ways to do things Water (160-320) Water people are kind and empathetic but sensitive. And you sometimes tend to become people pleasers. being quite impulsive and always in a hurry, you make decisions haphazardly. Water people are shy and introverted while partying around with friends on a weekend would be the last thing you want to do. You dread small talk and expressing yourself to a group of people is quite a demanding job. People feel relaxed in your presence you bring out the best in them. Decision-making can be demanding and you are sometimes regretful of overthinking and hence not capable of finding a firm decision. Air: (0-160) You have quite an entrancing personality. People are naturally drawn towards you and find your company comforting and friendly. Air signs are naturally smart and quite efficient in their workplace. While using your challenges and opportunities wisely you are likely to have great careers. you are good at advising your colleagues. But being bound in a relationship sometimes doesn’t seem to help you, rather you respect open free yet intimate emotional connections. Air people who are artistic and creative always look at things from a unique lens. So now you know your element.

Men are seeking a divinity to serve and adore. But the reality is, most women are so disconnected from their sensual feminine self that, as men, the only option we now have is to turn inwards to our own anima, or turn to other men for sensual feminine affection. A lot of men are becoming accustomed to embracing romance from the same sex, others opted to having sex with ANY woman they can get to console themselves. Problem is, we are living in a generation of women that are constantly protesting “Accept me for who I am!” IN THEIR MASCULINE ENERGY. They don’t know what it truly means to be a woman. But there’s a new breed of men that are awakened and of high quality in every respect of the word, and they’re not willing to settle for any woman that simply wants to be accepted for who she is. They want a woman who wants to be challenged for growth purposes. “I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.” ~Anaïs Nin Listen ladies, you have not yet fully become a woman if no man is seeking to serve and adore you. Now, understand the meaning of ‘serve and adore’. This means that a man has to NOT want to see you struggle in any way, shape or form that he can change for the better. So, if you’re still struggling in ANY way that a man can change for the better for you as a female, then you have not yet become a full grown WOMAN. The ultimate sign that you’ve become a full grown woman is when you are constantly being served and adored, especially by an emotionally healthy masculine man, without you having to ask. So tell me, are you a woman yet? "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." ~Simone de Beauvoir Too bad that so many of you are so hellbent on fighting to be ‘yourselves’ (masculine selves), yet that very ‘self’ isn’t serving you like you need to be served. For many of you, fighting to be ‘yourselves’ is, for the most part, fighting to be independent of the masculine and of your divine purpose which is to be a WOMAN. It’s easier to be disagreeable than it is to surrender to your true calling.

These are things to have under your belt in order to make and strengthen boundaries: Educate them. To be blunt, narcissists aren’t exactly in tune with their interpersonal or communication skills. Try using incentives or other motivators to get them to pay attention to how their behavior affects others. They may not empathize or seem to get what you’re saying, but at least you can say you tried to look at it from your point of view. Understand your personal rights. In order to demand being treated fairly and with respect, it’s important to know what your rights are. You’re allowed to say no, you have a right to your feelings, you are allowed privacy—and there are no wedding or relationship vows that say you are at the beck and call of your partner. When a person has been abused for a long time, they may lack the confidence or self-esteem to take a stand on their rights. The more power they take back, though, the less the abuser has. Be assertive. This is something that depends on confidence, and will take practice, but it’s worth it. Being assertive means standing up for yourself and exuding pride in who you are. Put your strategies into play. After the information you’ve absorbed so far, you have an advantage in that you are aware of your wants, what the narcissist demands, what you are able to do and those secret tiny areas you may have power over. Tap into these areas to put together your own strategies. Re-set your boundaries. A boundary is an unseen line in the sand. It determines the point you won’t allow others to cross over or they’ll hurt you. These are non-negotiable and others must be aware of them and respect them. But you have to know what those lines are before making them clear to others. Have consequences. As an extension of the above point, if a person tries ignoring your boundaries, make sure you give a consequence. There doesn't need to be a threat, but more saying, “If you ________, we can’t hang out/date/talk/etc.” You’re just saying that crossing the boundary hurts you so if they choose to disregard it, you choose not to accept that treatment. The narcissist will not tolerate you standing up for yourself, but it’s still important. The act of advocating for yourself will increase your self-confidence, self-esteem and self-worth. Then you’ll be ready to recover and heal.

You may find this hard to believe, Mr. Pinter," she went on defensively, "but some men enjoy my company. They consider me easy to talk to." A ghost of a smile touched his handsome face. "You're right. I do find that hard to believe." Arrogant wretch. "All the same, there are three men who might consider marrying me, and I could use your help in securing them." She hated having to ask him for that, but he was necessary to her plan. She just needed one good offer of marriage, one impressive offer that would show Gran she was capable of gaining a decent husband. Gran didn't believe she could, or she wouldn't be holding to that blasted ultimatum. If Celia could prove her wrong, Gran might allow her to choose a husband in her own good time. And if that plan didn't work, Celia would at least have a man she could marry to fulfill Gran's terms. "So you've finally decided to meet Mrs. Plumtree's demands," he said, his expression unreadable. She wasn't about to let him in on her secret plan. Oliver might have employed him, but she was sure Mr. Pinter also spied for Gran. He would run right off and tell her. "It's not as if I have a choice." Bitterness crept into her tone. "In less than two months, if I remain unmarried, my siblings will be cut off. I can't do that to them, no matter how much I resent Gran's meddling." Something that looked oddly like sympathy flickered in his gaze. "Don't you want to marry?" "Of course I want to marry. Doesn't every woman?" "You've shown little interest in it before," he said skeptically. That's because men had shown little interest in her. Oh, Gab's friends loved to stand about with her at balls and discuss the latest developments in cartridges, but they rarely asked her to dance, and if they did, it was only to consult her on rifles. She'd tried flirting, but she was terrible at it. It seemed so...false. So did men's compliments, the few that there were. It was easier to laugh them off than to figure out which ones were genuine, easier to pretend to be one of the lads. She secretly wished she could find a man she could love, who would ignore the scandals attached to he family's name and indulge her hobby of target shooting. One who could shoot as well as she, since she could never respect a man who couldn't hit what he aimed at. I'll bet Mr. Pinter knows his way around a rifle.

He and Powell would be celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary a few days later, and he admitted that at times he had not been as appreciative of her as she deserved. “I’m very lucky, because you just don’t know what you’re getting into when you get married,” he said. “You have an intuitive feeling about things. I couldn’t have done better, because not only is Laurene smart and beautiful, she’s turned out to be a really good person.” For a moment he teared up. He talked about his other girlfriends, particularly Tina Redse, but said he ended up in the right place. He also reflected on how selfish and demanding he could be. “Laurene had to deal with that, and also with me being sick,” he said. “I know that living with me is not a bowl of cherries.” Among his selfish traits was that he tended not to remember anniversaries or birthdays. But in this case, he decided to plan a surprise. They had gotten married at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite, and he decided to take Powell back there on their anniversary. But when Jobs called, the place was fully booked. So he had the hotel approach the people who had reserved the suite where he and Powell had stayed and ask if they would relinquish it. “I offered to pay for another weekend,” Jobs recalled, “and the man was very nice and said, ‘Twenty years, please take it, it’s yours.’” He found the photographs of the wedding, taken by a friend, and had large prints made on thick paper boards and placed in an elegant box. Scrolling through his iPhone, he found the note that he had composed to be included in the box and read it aloud: "We didn’t know much about each other twenty years ago. We were guided by our intuition; you swept me off my feet. It was snowing when we got married at the Ahwahnee. Years passed, kids came, good times, hard times, but never bad times. Our love and respect has endured and grown. We’ve been through so much together and here we are right back where we started 20 years ago—older, wiser—with wrinkles on our faces and hearts. We now know many of life’s joys, sufferings, secrets and wonders and we’re still here together. My feet have never returned to the ground."  By the end of the recitation he was crying uncontrollably. When he composed himself, he noted that he had also made a set of the pictures for each of his kids. “I thought they might like to see that I was young once.

General R. E. Lee, Commanding Army of Northern Virginia: Yours of the 8th instant has been received. I am glad to find that you concur so entirely with me as to the want of our country in this trying hour, and am happy to add that after the first depression consequent upon our disasters in the West, indications have appeared that our people will exhibit that fortitude which we agree in believing is alone needful to secure ultimate success. It well became Sidney Johnston, when overwhelmed by a senseless clamor, to admit the rule that success is the test of merit, and yet there has been nothing which I have found to require a greater effort of patience than to bear the criticisms of the ignorant, who pronounce everything a failure which does not equal their expectations or desires, and can see no good result which is not in the line of their own imaginings. I admit the propriety of your conclusions, that an officer who loses the confidence of his troops should have his position changed, whatever may be his ability; but when I read the sentence I was not at all prepared for the application you were about to make. Expressions of discontent in the public journals furnish but little evidence of the sentiment of an army.… But suppose, my dear friend, that I were to admit, with all their implications, the points which you present, where am I to find that new commander who is to possess the greater ability which you believe to be required? I do not doubt the readiness with which you would give way to one who could accomplish all that you have wished, and you will do me the justice to believe that if Providence should kindly offer such a person for our use, I would not hesitate to avail of his services. My sight is not sufficiently penetrating to discover such hidden merit, if it exists, and I have but used to you the language of sober earnestness when I have impressed upon you the propriety of avoiding all unnecessary exposure to danger, because I felt our country could not bear to lose you. To ask me to substitute you by someone in my judgment more fit to command, or who would possess more of the confidence of the army or of the reflecting men in the country, is to demand of me an impossibility. It only remains for me to hope that you will take all possible care of yourself, that your health and strength may be entirely restored, and that the Lord will preserve you for the important duties devolved upon you in the struggle of our suffering country for the independence which we have engaged in war to maintain. As ever, very respectfully and truly yours, JEFFERSON DAVIS

Cultivate Spiritual Allies One of the most significant things you learn from the life of Paul is that the self-made man is incomplete. Paul believed that mature manhood was forged in the body of Christ In his letters, Paul talks often about the people he was serving and being served by in the body of Christ. As you live in the body of Christ, you should be intentional about cultivating at least three key relationships based on Paul’s example: 1. Paul: You need a mentor, a coach, or shepherd who is further along in their walk with Christ. You need the accountability and counsel of more mature men. Unfortunately, this is often easier said than done. Typically there’s more demand than supply for mentors. Some churches try to meet this need with complicated mentoring matchmaker type programs. Typically, you can find a mentor more naturally than that. Think of who is already in your life. Is there an elder, a pastor, a professor, a businessman, or other person that you already respect? Seek that man out; let him know that you respect the way he lives his life and ask if you can take him out for coffee or lunch to ask him some questions — and then see where it goes from there. Don’t be surprised if that one person isn’t able to mentor you in everything. While he may be a great spiritual mentor, you may need other mentors in the areas of marriage, fathering, money, and so on. 2. Timothy: You need to be a Paul to another man (or men). God calls us to make disciples (Matthew 28:19). The books of 1st and 2nd Timothy demonstrate some of the investment that Paul made in Timothy as a younger brother (and rising leader) in the faith. It’s your job to reproduce in others the things you learn from the Paul(s) in your life. This kind of relationship should also be organic. You don’t need to approach strangers to offer your mentoring services. As you lead and serve in your spheres of influence, you’ll attract other men who want your input. Don’t be surprised if they don’t quite know what to ask of you. One practical way to engage with someone who asks for your input is to suggest that they come up with three questions that you can answer over coffee or lunch and then see where it goes from there. 3. Barnabas: You need a go-to friend who is a peer. One of Paul’s most faithful ministry companions was named Barnabas. Acts 4:36 tells us that Barnabas’s name means “son of encouragement.” Have you found an encouraging companion in your walk with Christ? Don’t take that friendship for granted. Enjoy the blessing of friendship, of someone to walk through life with. Make it a priority to build each other up in the faith. Be a source of sharpening iron (Proverbs 27:17) and friendly wounds (Proverbs 27:6) for each other. But also look for ways to work together to be disruptive — in the good sense of that word. Challenge each other in breaking the patterns of the world around you in order to interrupt it with the Gospel. Consider all the risky situations Paul and Barnabas got themselves into and ask each other, “what are we doing that’s risky for the Gospel?

Kode’s older sister, Kira, was leaning over a display of jewelry, fisting a jade-green necklace in one hand. Her nose was two inches from the Braetic across the table, the two exchanging intimidating glares. Eena watched for a few seconds as Kira all but crawled over a pile of merchandise, her face scrunched up with resentment, yet enviably stunning as always. “Hey Kode,” the young queen whispered. “Hey, girl.” “What’s going on?” “Kira’s bartering.” Eena watched the fistful of necklace come within a whisker of smacking the merchant’s nose. “She isn’t going to hurt the guy, is she?” Kode snorted on a chuckle. “Not if the dude’s got any sense.” Validly concerned, Eena inched closer to the confrontation, straining to hear their growled dialogue. Kode and Niki crept closer too. Efren, however, stayed where he was, testing the flagpole’s ability to support his body weight. They watched the feisty Mishmorat hold up a small pouch and shake it in front of the Braetic’s eyes. Kira’s fingers curled like claws around the purse. She seemed to smirk for a second when the merchant flinched. In a blink he was back in her face again, shoving aside the purse. “What is she trying to trade?” Eena asked, her voice still hushed as though she might disturb the haggling taking place across the way. “Viidun coins,” Kode said. “Ef gave ‘em to her.” “Are they worth much?’ Kode grinned wryly, “He sure as hell don’t freakin’ think so.” Eena foresaw Niki’s disapproving smack to the back of Kode’s head before he even finished his sentence. He cursed at his girlfriend for the physical abuse, an unwise response that earned him an additional thump on the head. “Freakin’ tyrant,” Kode grumbled. “Vulgar grogfish,” Niki retorted. Still unable to hear well enough to satisfy her curiosity, Eena stole in closer to the scene of heated bartering. She stopped when Kira’s strong voice carried over the murmur of the crowd. Kode and his girlfriend were right on her heels. “This purse is worth ten of those gaudy necklaces. You oughta be payin’ me to take ‘em off your hands, Braetic!” “That alien money is worthless to me, Mishmorat. In all my life I’ve never left Moccobatran soil. And even if I were to take an interstellar trip someday, you’d never catch the likes of me on a barbarian planet like Rapador!” Kira jerked her head, causing her black, cascading hair to ripple over her shoulder. The action made the trader flinch again. His eyes tapered, appearing to fume over what he perceived as intentional bullying. “You ain’t gonna sell this crap to no one else,” the exotic Mishmorat said. “Be smart and take the money. Hell, you could make a dozen pieces of jewelry from these coins. Sell ’em all for ten times the worth of anything you got here.” The Braetic shoved his finger at Kira’s chest, breathing down her throat at the same time. “Why don’t you just take your pretty little backside away from my table and make your own Viidun jewelry. Sell it yourself and then come back with a reasonable offer for my necklace.” His palm opened flat, demanding she hand over the jade stones still in her fist. “You wanna make me?” Kira breathed. “What do you plan to do, steal it?” The merchant challenged her in a gesture, nostrils flaring. “I’m no thief, but I’m not above beating some sense into you ‘til you choose to barter like a respectable Braetic!” Caught up in the intense interaction, Kode supported his sister a little too loudly. “Teach the freakin’ crook a lesson, Sis!” Niki smacked her boyfriend upside the head without missing a beat.

Successful con men are treated with considerable respect in the South. A good slice of the settler population of that region were men who’d been given a choice between being shipped off to the New World in leg-irons and spending the rest of their lives in English prisons. The Crown saw no point in feeding them year after year, and they were far too dangerous to be turned loose on the streets of London—so, rather than overload the public hanging schedule, the King’s Minister of Gaol decided to put this scum to work on the other side of the Atlantic, in The Colonies, where cheap labor was much in demand. Most of these poor bastards wound up in what is now the Deep South because of the wretched climate. No settler with good sense and a few dollars in his pocket would venture south of Richmond. There was plenty of opportunity around Boston, New York, and Philadelphia—and by British standards the climate in places like South Carolina and Georgia was close to Hell on Earth: swamps, alligators, mosquitoes, tropical disease... all this plus a boiling sun all day long and no way to make money unless you had a land grant from the King... So the South was sparsely settled at first, and the shortage of skilled labor was a serious problem to the scattered aristocracy of would-be cotton barons who’d been granted huge tracts of good land that would make them all rich if they could only get people to work it. The slave-trade was one answer, but Africa in 1699 was not a fertile breeding ground for middle-management types... and the planters said it was damn near impossible for one white man to establish any kind of control over a boatload of black primitives. The bastards couldn’t even speak English. How could a man get the crop in, with brutes like that for help? There would have to be managers, keepers, overseers: white men who spoke the language, and had a sense of purpose in life. But where would they come from? There was no middle class in the South: only masters and slaves... and all that rich land lying fallow. The King was quick to grasp the financial implications of the problem: The crops must be planted and harvested, in order to sell them for gold—and if all those lazy bastards needed was a few thousand half-bright English-speaking lackeys in order to bring the crops in... hell, that was easy: Clean out the jails, cut back on the Crown’s grocery bill, jolt the liberals off balance by announcing a new “Progressive Amnesty” program for hardened criminals.... Wonderful. Dispatch royal messengers to spread the good word in every corner of the kingdom; and after that send out professional pollsters to record an amazing 66 percent jump in the King’s popularity... then wait a few weeks before announcing the new 10 percent sales tax on ale. That’s how the South got settled. Not the whole story, perhaps, but it goes a long way toward explaining why George Wallace is the Governor of Alabama. He has the same smile as his great-grandfather—a thrice-convicted pig thief from somewhere near Nottingham, who made a small reputation, they say, as a jailhouse lawyer, before he got shipped out. With a bit of imagination you can almost hear the cranky little bastard haranguing his fellow prisoners in London jail, urging them on to revolt: “Lissen here, you poor fools! There’s not much time! Even now—up there in the tower—they’re cookin up some kind of cruel new punishment for us! How much longer will we stand for it? And now they want to ship us across the ocean to work like slaves in a swamp with a bunch of goddamn Hottentots! “We won’t go! It’s asinine! We’ll tear this place apart before we’ll let that thieving old faggot of a king send us off to work next to Africans! “How much more of this misery can we stand, boys? I know you’re fed right up to here with it. I can see it in your eyes— pure misery! And I’m tellin’ you, we don’t have to stand for it!...

According to the book of Genesis, “God created man in his own image.” According to Aristotle, “men create the gods after their own image.” As should be clear by now, Aristotle seems to have been onto something, especially when it comes to the minds of gods. So, in theory, some of the more basic features of the human mind should be fairly standard equipment in gods, especially the gods of “primitive” religions. That seems to be the case, and one of these features deserves special consideration: the part of the human mind shaped by the evolutionary dynamic known as “reciprocal altruism.” In light of this dynamic, much about the origin of religion, and for that matter much about contemporary religion, makes a new kind of sense. Thanks to reciprocal altruism, people are “designed” to settle into mutually beneficial relationships with other people, people whom they can count on for things ranging from food to valuable gossip to social support, and who in turn can count on them. We enter these alliances almost without thinking about it, because our genetically based emotions draw us in. We feel gratitude for a favor received, along with a sense of obligation, which may lead us to return the favor. We feel growing trust of and affection for people who prove reliable reciprocators (aka “friends”), which keeps us entwined in beneficial relationships. This is what feelings like gratitude and trust are for—the reason they’re part of human nature. But of course, not everyone merits our trust. Some people accept our gifts of food and never reciprocate, or try to steal our mates, or exhibit disrespect in some other fashion. And if we let people thus take advantage of us day after day, the losses add up. In the environment of our evolution, these losses could have made the difference between surviving and not surviving, between prolifically procreating and barely procreating. So natural selection gave us emotions that lead us to punish the untrustworthy—people who violate our expectations of exchange, people who seem to lack the respect that a mutually beneficial relationship demands. They fill us with outrage, with moral indignation, and that outrage—working as “designed” —impels us to punish them in one way or another, whether by actually harming them or just by withholding future altruism. That will teach them! (Perhaps more important, it will also teach anyone else who is watching, and in the ancestral hunter-gatherer environment, pretty much everyone in your social universe was watching.) This is the social context in which the human mind evolved: a world full of neighbors who, to varying degrees, are watching you for signs of betrayal or disrespect or dishonesty—and who, should they see strong evidence of such things, will punish you. In such a social universe, when misfortune comes your way, when someone hits you or ridicules you or suddenly gives you the cold shoulder, there’s a good chance it’s because they feel you’ve violated the rules of exchange. Maybe you’ve failed to do them some favor they think they were due, or maybe you’ve shown them disrespect by doing something that annoys them. Surely it is no coincidence that this generic explanation of why misfortune might emanate from a human being is also the generic explanation of why misfortune emanates from gods. In hunter-gatherer religions—and lots of other religions—when bad things happen, the root cause is almost always that people in one sense or another fail to respect the gods. They either fail to give gods their due (fail, say, to make adequate sacrifices to ancestral spirits), or they do things that annoy gods (like, say, making a noise while cicadas are singing). And the way to make amends to the aggrieved gods is exactly the way you’d make amends to aggrieved people: either give them something (hence ritual sacrifice), or correct future behavior so that it doesn’t annoy them (quit making noises while cicadas are singing).

But when I finally got to the end, I would quote from one of my very favorite poems. It is written by Chief Tecumseh of the Shawnee Nation. He was one of the most impressive warriors to ever walk this land. His words have helped to guide me. “Live your life,” Tecumseh said, “that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion. Respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people…. Show respect to all people and grovel to none…. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.

This one’s for the unusual motherfuckers in this world. A lot of people think that once they reach a certain level of status, respect, or success, that they’ve made it in life. I’m here to tell you that you always have to find more. Greatness is not something that if you meet it once it stays with you forever. That shit evaporates like a flash of oil in a hot pan. If you truly want to become uncommon amongst the uncommon, it will require sustaining greatness for a long period of time. It requires staying in constant pursuit and putting out unending effort. This may sound appealing but will require everything you have to give and then some. Believe me, this is not for everyone because it will demand singular focus and may upset the balance in your life.

What has happened to you is valid and true, but it is not what has happened to everyone. The experience of white communities with police are real, and the experience of communities of color with police are real—but they are far from the same. And while it is important to recognize these different viewpoints, we must remember this: If you do trust and value your police force, and you also believe in justice and equality for people of color, you will not see the lack of trust on behalf of communities of color as simply a difference of opinion. You will instead expect your police force to earn the respect and trust of communities of color by providing them with the same level of service that you enjoy. People of color are not asking white people to believe their experiences so that they will fear the police as much as people of color do. They are asking because they want white people to join them in demanding their right to be able to trust the police like white people do.

Every stage of an experience demands a sacrifice: The obtaining of external forms of respect demands the sacrifice of self-respect; the gaining of validation and social acceptance demands the sacrifice of personal values; and the obtaining of wealth beyond common standards demands the sacrifice of aesthetics. Along the way, you are battling between the aspirations of your soul, common sense and paradigms you reject. The decisions are made at every second, at every provocation, at every betrayal and disappointment, denial, offer or alluring proposition. What you take and what you do with it is equally important. But the idea that you are in control of your life is truly an illusion. You can only control how you respond to life and within the framework presented by life itself. If you want to either change the rules of the game or the nature of the challenges, you must change the framework, which in this case means sacrificing the previous framework in which you operated and the identity built within such structure. You can’t change reality without changing yourself, or you will replicate the same reality wherever you go. And so, to a great extent, it is as relevant to be aware of what you can or can’t tolerate, who you are and are not, as it is to have the capacity to change the program behind the projections you observe and observe the meaning of such projections. No change is ever allowed to the one who cannot see what is being projected. Such an individual is a victim of his own ignorance. And that is why so many religious scriptures warn against the dangers of arrogance. For it is when you consider yourself above the projections of your environment that you are crushed by them. Such a secret will always be hidden from the masses for as long as it remains profitable to the ones benefiting from the projections such masses experience.

Date: 27th of Feb, 2021 What is Love ? Is it something you feel, vibe or exhibit ? Or is it in caring, sharing or sacrifices L.O.V.E Love is in small details, everywhere around, the sun loves the sky amidst it colours, the sky loves the clouds inspite of its darkness, the darkness loves the light inspite of its own capabilities to lighten, Love is not something that can be talked or explained, but then what am i trying to do so?? Weird. Despite the running thoughts right now i have to share what i feel before that thought would never strike again (Ps: You are a constant thought that runs in my mind) For me what love really is ! For me, love is a gift, that feeling is magical, being in that feeling is lucky, Love is not something you fall for, how can u fall in love, when you feel embraced and butterflies, in your stomach you are actually lifted in love, you are actually strong when you love. You admire the person with all its possibilities to be with her and its goodness and makeup your mind about the righteous of the person and imagine and day dreaming of being with them. That's the first sip. Love is true, when you demand no change and when u accept her the way she is with all her negativity and positivity, with her moods and habits, accepting and going with her choices, supporting her beyond the support you expect from her, pushing yourself to make efforts to see her smile, taking her stand in public, respecting her thoughts despite having different opinions. love is not about being right every time about everything, its about making her feel right about things that are not, its about sacrificing your thoughts to hear hers, its about sacrificing your last bite to look her smile, its about starring into your partner eyes and talk without a word, holding hands until you go home, hold her mood until she's back, and being insecured about her safety until she's home This is the only feeling that makes me feel special, its the only feeling that helps me finds happiness in sacrificing too, That's the only feeling that lifts my mood by seeing her or motivating her when i m having a bad day, its tough though sometimes, love can make you think for possibilities and impossibilities that may never occur and give you a hard time, sometimes you push yourself and them away. But cannot really stay away, then why do we do that, Sharing of emotions will be the best part of the journey of love You don't shy accepting, being in love, coz not everybody is lucky to have it, You embrace it, You love being in Love ❤️ but then why do they not talk about love Its a complex simple feeling. 05:19 AM (the moon was still so pretty)

About your beliefs. If you want to make a nod to a god when it occurs to you, or wear your faith’s symbols and colors, or wear a sieve on your head and chant at a chicken if you feel like it, go ahead. Just support each other. I don’t ask you to like everyone you encounter on this journey, but I demand that you treat them with respect. Anyone who disparages you for following this rule is going to answer to me.” He made a fist with his right hand, and Delia wondered if that was the same fist that he beat the criminal with. “I hope that’s clear.

He describes eloquently a high-reactive child’s ideal parent: someone who “can read your cues and respect your individuality; is warm and firm in placing demands on you without being harsh or hostile; promotes curiosity, academic achievement, delayed gratification, and self-control; and is not harsh, neglectful, or inconsistent.

Men are seeking a divinity to serve and adore. But the reality is, most women are so disconnected from their sensual feminine self that, as men, the only option we now have is to turn inwards to our own anima, or turn to other men for sensual feminine affection. A lot of men are becoming accustomed to embracing romance from the same sex, others opted to having sex with ANY woman they can get to console themselves. Problem is, we are living in a generation of women that are constantly protesting “Accept me for who I am!” IN THEIR MASCULINE ENERGY. They don’t know what it truly means to be a woman. But there’s a new breed of men that are awakened and of high quality in every respect of the word, and they’re not willing to settle for any woman that simply wants to be accepted for who she is. They want a woman who wants to be challenged for growth purposes. “I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.” ~Anaïs Nin Listen ladies, you have not yet fully become a woman if no man is seeking to serve and adore you. Now, understand the meaning of ‘serve and adore’. This means that a man has to NOT want to see you struggle in any way, shape or form that he can change for the better. So, if you’re still struggling in ANY way that a man can change for the better for you as a female, then you have not yet become a full grown WOMAN. The ultimate sign that you’ve become a full grown woman is when you are constantly being served and adored, especially by an emotionally healthy masculine man, without you having to ask. So tell me, are you a woman yet? "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." ~Simone de Beauvoir Too bad that so many of you are so hellbent on fighting to be ‘yourselves’ (masculine selves), yet that very ‘self’ isn’t serving you like you need to be served. For many of you, fighting to be ‘yourselves’ is, for the most part, fighting to be independent of the masculine and of your divine purpose which is to be a WOMAN. It’s easier to be disagreeable than it is to surrender to your true calling. A lot of women are just fighting to be a nonentity and they don’t even know it. They resent the divine masculine with passion, not realizing that it is the ultimate key to fully unlocking their WOMANHOOD.

AS A MASTER OF SELF, when I look into the eyes of another individual I see another Authentic Self, a beautiful expression of the Divine. No matter where this person is in the process of awakening, I respect that his or her intent is just as powerful as mine, and doing so is an act of unconditional love. If I were to try to control this person, I would be lost in the fog and place conditions on my love and acceptance of him or her. If you see the world through the eyes of conditional love, you are by definition attempting to control others, imposing your will so that they conform to the definition of who and what you think they should be. If they don't agree to your demands, they will receive the punishment of your judgment. This is conditional love in a nutshell. But remember, every time you judge someone you are punishing that person for not following agreements they never made. As you look back over your life, you can see that many of the relationship battles you thought were for your own personal freedom were really battles of who was going to domesticate whom. And every time you experienced a moment of anger, outrage, indignation, or any other negative emotion as the result of someone else's behavior, you created a dream of villains and victims, and you were once again caught in the drama of the party. Perceiving yourself as a victim and another as a villain doesn't allow you to see the person who is actually standing before you: you don't see their story, their past, their heartbreaks, and how all of that has impacted their life and contributed to forming the person you're talking to. All you can see through the fog of domestication is that the person you have cast as the villain in your story isn't living up to the values you think they should. But when you see another with the eyes of unconditional love, you are then able to clearly see who is actually in front of you, a living being who is trying to survive and thrive in a world filled with domestication and conditional love. Unconditional love allows you to disagree with the choices or beliefs of others while still respecting their right to have them. Practicing unconditional love is the art of the Master of Self. Once you have recognized, released, and forgiven the self-judgments that have arisen from your own domestication, you can then recognize and forgive others when they act from their domestication. The person in front of you has been domesticated, and now they want to pass that on to you because it's all they know. However, they can only subjugate you with your permission.

Battles have been won and lost, but you’ve learned to leave everything you have out on the field always. Effort, desire, heart, hustle—life is about earning your reputation and demanding respect.

Think of yourself rather as something much humbler and less spectacular, but to my mind, far more interesting—a poet in whom live all the poets of the past, from whom all poets in time to come will spring. You have a touch of Chaucer in you, and something of Shakespeare; Dryden, Pope, Tennyson—to mention only the respectable among your ancestors—stir in your blood and sometimes move your pen a little to the right or to the left. In short you are an immensely ancient, complex, and continuous character, for which reason please treat yourself with respect and think twice before you dress up as Guy Fawkes and spring out upon timid old ladies at street corners, threatening death and demanding twopence–halfpenny.

I had cut myself in two, as the mystics preached, and I ran my business by one code of rules, but my own life by another. I rebelled against the looters’ attempt to set the price and value of my steel—but I let them set the moral values of my life. I rebelled against demands for an unearned wealth—but I thought it was my duty to grant an unearned love to a wife I despised, an unearned respect to a mother who hated me, an unearned support to a brother who plotted for my destruction. I rebelled against undeserved financial injury—but I accepted a life of undeserved pain. I rebelled against the doctrine that my productive ability was guilt—but I accepted, as guilt, my capacity for happiness. I rebelled against the creed that virtue is some disembodied unknowable of the spirit—but I damned you, you, my dearest one, for the desire of your body and mine. But if the body is evil, then so are those who provide the means of its survival, so is material wealth and those who produce it—and if moral values are set in contradiction to our physical existence, then it’s right that rewards should be unearned, that virtue should consist of the undone, that there should be no tie between achievement and profit, that the inferior animals who’re able to produce should serve those superior beings whose superiority in spirit consists of incompetence in the flesh.

Work is work, and a cup of tea is a cup of tea. Do not mix both, and do not ever refrain from both. They are equally important, but you have to learn to distinguish between work life and personal life. Command respect, or you will have to demand respect. Be a leader and a boss when you are working, be a friend and a mentor when you are not. This will not only help you bond with your ninjas but will also tell them how to keep the two disciplines apart

How you must hate us for what we did to you.” Behind her, she heard Sedric give a small gasp of dismay. She ignored him. “Hate you?” Paragon slowly digested her words before he spoke again. He did not turn to look at her, but kept his eyes focused on the river ahead of him as the ship moved steadily against the current. “Why would I waste my time with hate? What was done to me was unforgivable, of course. Completely unforgivable. Those who did it are no longer alive to be punished or to apologize. Even if they were and did, it would not undo what they did. The torments I endured cannot be undone. The stolen future cannot be given back to me. The companionship of my own kind, the chance to hunt and kill, to fight and mate, to live a life in which I am neither servant or master—all those things are forever lost to me.” He did glance back at her now; the blue of his eyes paled to an icy gray. “Can you think of anything that anyone could do to make up for it? Any sacrifice that could be offered that would be adequate reparation?” Her heart was beating so hard that there was a ringing in her ears. Was that why he had rolled so many times and taken so many human lives? Did he think that enough humans had died in expiation for the sin against him, or would he demand more? She hadn’t answered his questions. His voice was a bit more penetrating as he nudged her with, “Well? What sacrifice would be adequate?” “None that I can think of,” she replied softly. She tightened her grip on the railing, wondering if he would immediately turn turtle and drown then all. “Neither can I,” he replied. “No vengeance could resolve it. No sacrifice would make reparations for it.” He returned his gaze to the river. “And so I have decided to move beyond it. To be what I am now, in this incarnation, as no other is available to me. To have what life I may for as long as the wood of this body lasts me.” She couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing. “Then you have forgiven us?” Paragon gave a quiet snort. “Wrong on two points. I haven’t forgiven anything. And I don’t believe in the ‘us’ you think I might take vengeance on. You didn’t do this to me. But even if you had, killing you would not undo it.” Behind her, Sedric suddenly spoke. “That is not the attitude I would have expected from a dragon.” Paragon have a snort, half contempt, half amusement. “I told you. I am not a dragon. And neither are those creatures that you intend to visit and study. That’s why I called you forward. To tell you that. To tell you that there’s no point to your journey. Studying those pathetic wretches will not teach you anything about dragons. No more than studying me would.” “How can they not be dragons?” “In a world where dragons lived, they would not have survived.” “Other dragons would have killed them?” “Other dragons would have ignored them. They would have died and been eaten. Their memories and knowledge would have been preserved by those who fed upon them.” “It seems cruel.” “Would it have been crueler than enabling them to exist as they are now?” She took a breath and then tried to speak boldly. “You have chosen to continue as you are. Should not they be given that choice?” The muscles in his back tightened, and she felt a gout of fear. But when he turned back to her, there was a spark of respect in his blue eyes that had not been there before. He gave her a slow nod. “A point.

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course l will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to anyone's Annie Sullivan: no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

did on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit. You’ve had more than enough of that. But not of working. There you’re still below your quota. You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts. Is helping others less valuable to you? Not worth your effort?

Agreed. But nature set a limit on that—as it did on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit. You’ve had more than enough of that. But not of working. There you’re still below your quota. You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts. Is helping others less valuable to you? Not worth your effort?

William Paul Young, author of The Shack, was asked by a LifeTree Café interviewer: What is God’s role in suffering? Young responded: [The question is,] how can there be a good God who has the power to stop evil and doesn’t[?] [T]here [are] a lot of ways to come at that question. One of the ways that has helped me the most is to realize that God respects His creation way more than we do, that God doesn’t just step in and say, “I’m sorry, you’ve crossed the line, you’re not allowed to think that, you’re not allowed to do that.”… God has not promised that He’s … going to stop it, but He’ll show up in the middle of it, and there is nothing so dead that He can’t grow something out of it. There’s nothing so broken that He can’t heal it. And there’s not anything so lost He can’t find it. So, this idea of His respect for the creation is a little bit of a shock to us because … we want God to mete … out [justice for us].… The question is, at what point does He stop our ability to choose evil? … [T]o love, you have to have the ability to choose. And at what point does He just stop that?

I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time,” he said in a dangerous drawl, “and you just gave me the excuse I needed.” “What—what are you talking about?” Lily demanded, stepping backwards. A drop of rainwater from the leaky roof landed with a disconcerting ker-plop on the top of her head. Caleb was unbuttoning his cuffs, rolling up his sleeves. “I’m talking,” he replied evenly, “about raising blisters on your sweet little backside.” Lily was careful to keep to the opposite side of the table. “Now, Caleb, that wouldn’t be wise.” “Oh, I think it would be about the smartest thing I’ve ever done,” Caleb answered, advancing on her again. Lily kept the table between them. “I might be pregnant!” she reasoned desperately. “Then again,” Caleb countered, “you might not.” The muscles of his forearms were corded, the skin covered with maple-sugar hair. “I wasn’t going to shoot you—I only wanted to scare you away.” Lily dodged him, moving from one side of the table to the other, always keeping it between them. “Caleb, be reasonable. I wouldn’t shoot you—I love you!” “I love you, too,” Caleb returned in a furious croon, “and right now I’d like nothing better than to shoot you!” Lily picked up a chair and held it as she’d seen a lion tamer do in an illustration in one of her beloved dime novels. Helga of the Circus, if she remembered correctly. “Now, just stay back, Caleb. If you lay a hand on me, I assure you, you’ll regret it!” “I doubt that very much,” Caleb replied. And then he gripped one leg of the chair, and Lily realized what a pitiful defense it had been. He set it easily on the floor even as his other arm shot out like a coiled snake and caught Lily firmly by the wrist. Like a man sitting down to a cigar and a glass of port after a good dinner Caleb dropped comfortably into the chair. With a single tug he brought Lily facedown across his lap. Quick as mercury he had her skirts up and her drawers down, and when she struggled he simply imprisoned her between his thighs scissor fashion. “Caleb Halliday,” Lily gasped, writhing between his legs, “you let me go this instant!” “Or else you’ll do what?” he asked evenly. Lily felt his hand caress one cheek of her bottom and then the other, as though charting them for assault. “I’ll scream, and Hank Robbins will run over here and shoot you for the rascal you are!” Caleb laughed thunderously at that. “You’ve had your little joke,” Lily huffed, “now let me up!” “No,” Caleb replied. Lily threw back her head and screamed as loudly as she could. “You can do better than that,” Caleb said. “Hell, nobody would hear a whimper like that in this rain.” Lily filled her lungs to capacity and screamed again. She was as surprised as Caleb when the door flew open and Velvet burst in, ready for battle. Color filled her face when she understood the situation. In no particular rush, Caleb released Lily, and she scrambled to her feet unassisted, blushing painfully as she righted her drawers and lowered her skirts. Caleb chuckled at her indignation and then stood up respectfully.

My office is over here—” He stopped. Frowned. Looked about. Had to backtrack to the kitchen in order to find the various parties. Sola’s grandmother had her head in the Sub-Zero refrigerator, rather as if she were a gnome looking for a cool place in the summer. “Madam?” Assail inquired. She shut the door and moved on to the floor-to-ceiling cabinets. “There is nothing here. Nothing. What do you eat?” “Ah . . .” Assail found himself looking at the cousins for aid. “Usually we take our meals in town.” The scoffing sound certainly appeared like the old-lady equivalent of Fuck that. “I need the staples.” She pivoted on her little shiny shoes and put her hands on her hips. “Who is taking me to supermarket.” Not an inquiry. And as she stared up at the three of them, it appeared as though Ehric and his violent killer of a twin were as nonplussed as Assail was. The evening had been planned out to the minute—and a trip to the local Hannaford was not on the list. “You two are too thin,” she announced, flicking her hand in the direction of the twins. “You need to eat.” Assail cleared his throat. “Madam, you have been brought here for your safety.” He was not going to permit Benloise to up the stakes—and so he’d had to lock down potential collateral damage. “Not to be a cook.” “You have already refused the money. I no stay here for free. I earn my keep. That is the way it will be.” Assail exhaled long and slow. Now he knew where Sola got her independent streak. “Well?” she demanded. “I no drive. Who takes me.” “Madam, would you not prefer to rest—” “Your body rest when dead. Who.” “We do have an hour,” Ehric hedged. As Assail glared at the other vampire, the little old lady hitched her purse up on her forearm and nodded. “So he will take me.” Assail met Sola’s grandmother’s gaze directly and dropped his tone a register just so that the line drawn would be respected. “I pay. Are we clear—you are not to spend a cent.” She opened her mouth as if to argue, but she was headstrong—not foolish. “Then I do the darning.” “Our clothes are in sufficient shape—” Ehric cleared his throat. “Actually, I have a couple of loose buttons. And the Velcro strip on his flak jacket is—” Assail looked over his shoulder and bared his fangs at the idiot—out of eyesight of Sola’s grandmother, of course. Remarshaling his expression, he turned back around and— Knew he’d lost. The grandmother had one of those brows cocked, her dark eyes as steady as any foe’s he’d ever faced. Assail shook his head. “I cannot believe I’m negotiating with you.” “And you agree to terms.” “Madam—” “Then it is settled.” Assail threw up his hands. “Fine. You have forty-five minutes. That is all.” “We be back in thirty.” At that, she turned and headed for the door. In her diminutive wake, the three vampires played ocular Ping-Pong. “Go,” Assail gritted out. “Both of you.” The cousins stalked for the garage door—but they didn’t make it. Sola’s grandmother wheeled around and put her hands on her hips. “Where is your crucifix?” Assail shook himself. “I beg your pardon?” “Are you no Catholic?” My dear sweet woman, we are not human, he thought. “No, I fear not.” Laser-beam eyes locked on him. Ehric. Ehric’s brother. “We change this. It is God’s will.” And out she went, marching through the mudroom, ripping open the door, and disappearing into the garage. As that heavy steel barrier closed automatically, all Assail could do was blink.

My name is Isaiah,” Isaiah said. Bug held his meaty paw in the shape of a handgun, shooting it for emphasis. “Well, I’m gonna tell you straight up,” he said. “You might be something in Long Beach but you ain’t shit up in here. Get disrespectful and your shit is over, you feel me? Cal’s my nigga. You fuck this up and oh my GOD I’ll put a hurtin’ on you.” Isaiah looked at him like he’d come to the door selling five-dollar candy bars you could buy at the store for a dollar. He hated threats. Some asshole like Bug demanding respect as if bullying was a quality to admire like wisdom or kindness. “What?

Love him enough to demand that he find it in his heart to value and respect you, according to his deepest values.

Would you like to take a walk with me?” she asked. “I always walk on the beach in the mornings when you’re working. That is, if you aren’t too busy?” He caught her hand and brought it to his lips. “I’m not too busy for you and our child. But should you be resting?” An exasperated shriek left her lips, startling him with her ferocity. She yanked her hand from him and parked both of her fists on her hips. “Do I look like I need to be resting?” Anger and disappointment burned in her eyes. “Look, Chrysander, if you don’t want to spend time with me, just say so, but stop throwing out your pat ‘You need to be resting’ line.” She turned and stalked farther down the beach, leaving him there feeling like she’d punched him in the stomach. He ran a hand through his hair as he watched her hurry away, and then he strode after her, his feet kicking up sand as he closed the distance between them. “Marley! Marley, wait,” he called as he caught her elbow. When he turned her around, he was gutted by the tears streaking down her cheeks. She turned her face away and swiped blindly at her eyes with her other hand. “Please, just go away,” she choked out. “Go do whatever it is you do with your time. I’ll wait for my appointment with you in the afternoon.” It came out bitter and full of hurt, and he realized that he hadn’t fooled her at all with the distance he put between them. He reached for her chin and gently tugged until she faced him. With his thumb, he wiped at a tear that slipped over her cheekbone. “You aren’t an appointment, Marley.” “No?” She yanked away from his touch and retreated a few feet until there was a respectable distance between them. “I’ve tried to be patient and understanding even though I don’t understand any of it. Us. You or even me. I can’t figure you out, Chrysander, and I’m tired of trying. I’ve tried to be strong and undemanding, but I can’t do it anymore. I’m scared to death. I don’t know who I am. I wake up one day to find myself pregnant, and there’s a stranger by my bed who says he’s my fiancé and the father of my child. One would think this would tell me that at least I was loved and cherished, but nothing you’ve done has made me feel anything but confusion. You run hot and cold, and I never know which one to expect. I can’t do this.” Coldness wrapped around Chrysander’s chest, squeezing until he couldn’t draw a breath. “What are you saying?” he demanded.

The gun’s slinky power has a special appeal to the young, the weak, the confused and the powerless. To those overlooked or spurned, access to a firearm is the spark of agency. With a gun in your hands, everything is possible. In a moment you imagine the respect it demands.

Art is long. Life is short, but it deserves our attentive devotion. Embrace life. No person has a monopoly on wisdom. Despite the plethora of written books and e-books covering virtually every imaginable subject, advances in human knowledge and changes in the physical environment will cause recurrent alterations in the human condition that writers are uniquely able to express, explain, explicate, and elucidate. The complexities of human life demand humanistic persons to explore and offer guidance and solace to troubled souls. The world is not in the need of any more corporate entities devoted to milling money. What the world needs is writers, singers, poets, and philosophers whom can expand upon the universal desire to display an intense and absorbing respect for life and honor the principles of truthfulness and charity in human relations. I wish for every person to cull the lyrical prose from their stroll in the meadow of life and express the vivacity of their inner daemon in whatever artistic methodology stirs their imagination and voices their uniqueness. I call upon each person to use logic, intuition, and imagination to share all their adventures in this world of rocks and stones, earth and sky, sunshine and rain. Splash it out there for everyone to witness your appreciativeness of nature’s glory, verification of your meaningful existence demands that you settle for nothing less.

A Poem by Tecumseh (Shawnee Tribe Chief ) “So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for criticizing others , the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.

4 Times to Get Tough . . . 1. Self-Respect—You don’t have to take everything on the chin and lose the respect of yourself and others in the process. Don’t be a doormat or a pushover by allowing people to disrespect or run over you. Stand firm in your beliefs and values. 2. Self-Preservation—Understand and set boundaries. Decide what is and what is not acceptable in how people treat you. Claim your power to live life on your terms and not at the whims of others’ unreasonable requests and demands. 3. Protecting others—If you are a parent of a child or a caretaker of the elderly or disabled, it is your moral duty to defend them to the end. 4. Self-Defense—Have you ever felt threatened, unsafe, or abused because of another’s behavior? Assert yourself and do whatever is necessary to ensure your safety. Being kind DOES NOT mean you should excuse such behavior.

What did you say?” Jentry said in low, terrifying tone from somewhere behind me. The edge in his voice was enough to make Linda and me stiffen for a few seconds before Linda’s head snapped up and she turned on her mom charm. “Oh, you know how ladies are, always standing around gossipin’. Go on now, son, just put the food anywhere.” He set the large dishes down on the counter closest to the door, then took slow steps toward us. “What the fuck did you just say,” he demanded again; this time it was no longer a question. “Jentry, don’t,” I pleaded as he neared us. “Young man!” Linda said in a horrified tone. “I am so very disappointed in what has come out of your mouth this weekend. I raised yo—” “Raised me better? Is that what you were going to say?” Jentry huffed as he took the last few steps to place himself between us. “Really, don’t,” I said through clenched teeth, and rocked forward so I could reach for his arm to pull him away, but he held a hand out behind him to stop me. When he continued speaking, his dangerous tone was laced with disappointment. “In a few days I’ve seen more than enough from you to know that you aren’t the woman who raised me. The woman who raised me wasn’t so threatened by her son’s girlfriend that she’d pretend she wasn’t there. The woman who raised me wasn’t so heartless that she’d tear down the same girl every chance she got just because she was hurting. We’re all hurting. Rorie’s fucking hurting, too.” “She has ruined this family!” Linda seethed; her entire frame shook from her anger. Jentry took a step back toward me. His hand was still outstretched, but now looked like it was reaching for me. “You know, I’ve been going crazy trying to figure some things out since I got home, but I’m starting to put a lot together just from this conversation. The woman who raised me also taught me to respect women. And I do. I respect women who deserve it, and Rorie does. Because she loves Declan, too. She’s grieving, too. And throughout everything you’ve done, she’s never said a word. She wouldn’t tell me what you were doing even when I figured out that it was you, and when I did, she said it was deserved. What kind of woman makes a girl think she deserves the bullshit you’ve put her through?” Jentry grabbed on to my forearm and pulled me close to him as he took another step back, away from Linda, toward the door leading out of the kitchen area. Linda watched our movements with a mixture of emotions. There was shock and hurt at Jentry’s words, but whenever her eyes flickered back in my direction, anger unlike anything I’d yet to see from her burned there. Jentry turned us around and came to a halt when we found Kurt standing just inside the doorway holding two dishes, staring at us in shock and confusion. “Do you want to tell me why you’re talking to your mother that way?” he asked. Jentry’s head tilted to the side. “No.” “No?” Kurt’s tone was rougher and rang with authority as Jentry began leading us out of the room. “No,” Jentry confirmed. “Because if I tell you now, I’m gonna say a lot that I’ll regret.” Jentry

I don't care what your liberal Western education teaches you, but as a young Chinese woman, I demand you have some respect for your father.

But Jesus didn’t stop at claiming to be eternal and omniscient. In Matthew 28:18, we find this additional claim: 18b“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” In the theological and cultural milieu of first-century Israel, Jesus is claiming to be omnipotent. Furthermore, he tells his followers in the very next two verses that his claim to be omnipotent is the reason why his followers are to spend the rest of the church age telling the world about him: 19“Therefore, as you go, disciple people in all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, 20teaching them to obey everything that I’ve commanded you. And remember, I am with you each and every day until the end of the age.” Of course, the last sentence of that statement is a reiteration of Jesus’ claims in Matthew 18:20 to be omnipresent. For Jesus to be able to be present with everyone whoever believes in him throughout the centuries to come until the end of human history requires him to be omnipresent, omniscient, and eternal. There can be no escape from the claim: Jesus claimed to be God, and this truth was the foundation stone upon which he would build his Church. In Luke 10:22, Jesus claims that his divine attributes had been granted by God his Father in eternity past. By this claim, Jesus is saying that God his Father has given him all authority in the Universe: 22“All things have been entrusted to me by my Father. No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and no one knows who the Father is except the Son and the person to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” It is apparent from what Jesus has to say about how things are going to go with respect to his followers throughout the centuries to come that Jesus’ claim to possess divine attributes isn’t going to be some mere theoretical exercise. In Luke 21:12b-15, Jesus warns his followers about persecution that will happen to them in years to come: 12“They will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors for my name’s sake, 13in order to give you an opportunity to testify. 14So purpose in your hearts not to prepare your defense ahead of time, 15because I will give you the ability to speak, along with wisdom, that none of your opponents will be able to resist or refute.” Besides reiterating Christ’s claims that he possesses the divine attributes of omnipresence, eternal existence, and omniscience, this remarkable statement also demonstrates that Jesus claimed to be able to bring a practical, real-life application of those divine attributes to his persecuted followers: he claims that he will communicate—what today we might call “in real time”—his wisdom right at the very moment that wisdom will be needed most. As a result, Jesus claims, those who oppose his followers will not be able to refute the arguments raised by those followers, whom Jesus claims will have received their wisdom directly from him. But only God himself can provide wisdom such as described by this claim. And so this passage also requires us to conclude that Jesus is claiming to himself attributes that only God can possess. CLAIM 4 |   JESUS DEMANDED LOYALTIES OF LOVE AND DEVOTION THAT IN THE JEWISH THEOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING RIGHTLY MAY BE GIVEN ONLY TO GOD, SINCE TO GIVE THEM TO CREATED BEINGS WOULD VIOLATE THE FIRST AND SECOND COMMANDMENTS.

Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification—that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero—that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions—that to withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement—that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit—and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Mass of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.

Live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about his religion. Respect others in their views and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and of service to your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide’.

Courage and honor, respect and even pity, justice and, yes, you may not like for me to say it, but let me use the word - love? Do you know these words, Mahn? A love for your children, so deep that you would die for them? Or maybe a love of justice, so pure that it demands that you speak out? These are the feelings that push the world forward.

If she insists on keeping that animal, the least she can do is behave respectfully and stop shacking up with this limping has-been.” A.J. gasped and watched as Devlin, who had been silent, closed the distance between himself and Peter. Her step-brother’s response was priceless. He looked like someone who’d stepped into the path of an avalanche. “I’m going to do you a favor,” Devlin growled, “and forget you ever said that.” Turning to A.J. and her father, he continued with a disarming softness. “I think this argument is best left between family members. However astounding it is to witness the collective wisdom of the Sutherlands, I’d rather do something more constructive. Like watch paint dry.” He turned and began walking away. A.J. immediately went after him, reaching out and taking his arm. “I’m sorry he’s such a—” Devlin carefully removed her hand. “I think you better settle this with your family first. Then we can deal with what’s going on between you and me.” After he’d dissolved into the crowd, A.J. wheeled on her stepbrother. “If I didn’t think he’d give you a shiner that would clash with your Day-Glo tie, I’d demand you go and apologize.

God’s Word   “Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it.” Joshua 1:8   Dear Heavenly Father, thank You for the Book of Joshua. This verse is especially important because You are telling us how important it is not to forget You. Lord so many times Your people disappointed You by taking Your love and forgetting it. So many times You showed Your people miracles and they forgot and got distracted with other people in the world who were worshipping statues and engraved images. Lord help me keep Your rules at the front of my mind so You stay full in my heart.   Lord in these times thousands of years later the same problems are all around me. Now everyone gets tattoos of images of worship so they can be worshipped. So many people are distracted by music, drugs and being popular that it shows me that it is all a false god and leads to destruction. Lord help me be an example for many that Your laws are meant for good. Lord help me be an example that praising You is courageous in a world so full of pressure to be popular. Lord help me be an example that being who You want me to be is all that matters, in Jesus name, amen.   “Now fear the LORD and serve him with all faithfulness.” Joshua 24:14   Dear Heavenly Father, I thank You that I understand that to fear You is wisdom. Lord I now know that You don’t force Yourself on anyone but that You do demand that I chose to either honor You or dishonor You.   Lord to fear You is to have respect for You as my creator. Lord when I remind myself every moment that You are the LORD, and that I am to be Your faithful servant, I know that I am protected and blessed. Lord

When she’s in a courtroom, Wendy Patrick, a deputy district attorney for San Diego, uses some of the roughest words in the English language. She has to, given that she prosecutes sex crimes. Yet just repeating the words is a challenge for a woman who not only holds a law degree but also degrees in theology and is an ordained Baptist minister. “I have to say (a particularly vulgar expletive) in court when I’m quoting other people, usually the defendants,” she admitted. There’s an important reason Patrick has to repeat vile language in court. “My job is to prove a case, to prove that a crime occurred,” she explained. “There’s often an element of coercion, of threat, (and) of fear. Colorful language and context is very relevant to proving the kind of emotional persuasion, the menacing, a flavor of how scary these guys are. The jury has to be made aware of how bad the situation was. Those words are disgusting.” It’s so bad, Patrick said, that on occasion a judge will ask her to tone things down, fearing a jury’s emotions will be improperly swayed. And yet Patrick continues to be surprised when she heads over to San Diego State University for her part-time work of teaching business ethics. “My students have no qualms about dropping the ‘F-bomb’ in class,” she said. “The culture in college campuses is that unless they’re disruptive or violating the rules, that’s (just) the way kids talk.” Experts say people swear for impact, but the widespread use of strong language may in fact lessen that impact, as well as lessen society’s ability to set apart certain ideas and words as sacred. . . . [C]onsider the now-conversational use of the texting abbreviation “OMG,” for “Oh, My God,” and how the full phrase often shows up in settings as benign as home-design shows without any recognition of its meaning by the speakers. . . . Diane Gottsman, an etiquette expert in San Antonio, in a blog about workers cleaning up their language, cited a 2012 Career Builder survey in which 57 percent of employers say they wouldn’t hire a candidate who used profanity. . . . She added, “It all comes down to respect: if you wouldn’t say it to your grandmother, you shouldn’t say it to your client, your boss, your girlfriend or your wife.” And what about Hollywood, which is often blamed for coarsening the language? According to Barbara Nicolosi, a Hollywood script consultant and film professor at Azusa Pacific University, an evangelical Christian school, lazy script writing is part of the explanation for the blue tide on television and in the movies. . . . By contrast, she said, “Bad writers go for the emotional punch of crass language,” hence the fire-hose spray of obscenities [in] some modern films, almost regardless of whether or not the subject demands it. . . . Nicolosi, who noted that “nobody misses the bad language” when it’s omitted from a script, said any change in the industry has to come from among its ranks: “Writers need to have a conversation among themselves and in the industry where we popularize much more responsible methods in storytelling,” she said. . . . That change can’t come quickly enough for Melissa Henson, director of grass-roots education and advocacy for the Parents Television Council, a pro-decency group. While conceding there is a market for “adult-themed” films and language, Henson said it may be smaller than some in the industry want to admit. “The volume of R-rated stuff that we’re seeing probably far outpaces what the market would support,” she said. By contrast, she added, “the rate of G-rated stuff is hardly sufficient to meet market demands.” . . . Henson believes arguments about an “artistic need” for profanity are disingenuous. “You often hear people try to make the argument that art reflects life,” Henson said. “I don’t hold to that. More often than not, ‘art’ shapes the way we live our lives, and it skews our perceptions of the kind of life we're supposed to live." [DN, Apr. 13, 2014]

To sum up—what can you do now to build up your self-confidence? Following are ten simple, workable rules for overcoming inadequacy attitudes and learning to practice faith. Thousands have used these rules, reporting successful results. Undertake this program and you, too, will build up confidence in your powers. You, too, will have a new feeling of power. 1. Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop this picture. Never think of yourself as failing; never doubt the reality of the mental image. That is most dangerous, for the mind always tries to complete what it pictures. So always picture “success” no matter how badly things seem to be going at the moment. 2. Whenever a negative thought concerning your personal powers comes to mind, deliberately voice a positive thought to cancel it out. 3. Do not built up obstacles in your imagination. Depreciate every so-called obstacle. Minimize them. Difficulties must be studied and efficiently dealt with to be eliminated, but they must be seen for only what they are. They must not be inflated by fear thoughts. 4. Do not be awestruck by other people and try to copy them. Nobody can be you as efficiently as YOU can. Remember also that most people, despite their confident appearance and demeanor, are often as scared as you are and as doubtful of themselves. 5. Ten times a day repeat these dynamic words, “If God be for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31) (Stop reading and repeat them NOW slowly and confidently.) 6. Get a competent counselor to help you understand why you do what you do. Learn the origin of your inferiority and self-doubt feelings which often begin in childhood. Self-knowledge leads to a cure. 7. Ten times each day practice the following affirmation, repeating it out loud if possible. “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.” (Philippians 4:13) Repeat those words NOW. That magic statement is the most powerful antidote on earth to inferiority thoughts. 8. Make a true estimate of your own ability, then raise it 10 per cent. Do not become egotistical, but develop a wholesome self-respect. Believe in your own God-released powers. 9. Put yourself in God’s hands. To do that simply state, “I am in God’s hands.” Then believe you are NOW receiving all the power you need. “Feel” it flowing into you. Affirm that “the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21) in the form of adequate power to meet life’s demands. 10. Remind yourself that God is with you and nothing can defeat you. Believe that you now RECEIVE power from him.

Very well. Since you won’t divulge her location, answer me this. Why would Miss Plum turn down a respectable offer of marriage from a gentleman such as my Bram?” “Why is it that ladies seem to believe I enjoy discussing these types of personal matters?” Mr. Skukman countered. Iris continued as if Mr. Skukman had not spoken. “Bram is a wealthy, eligible, and influential gentleman who owns his own castle—not to mention his stellar good looks.” “You’re his mother. Of course you’re going to believe he has stellar good looks.” “You don’t believe my Bram is handsome?” “Yet another topic I’m not comfortable discussing, but . . . I suppose if I really consider the matter, yes . . . Mr. Haverstein’s features are adequately arranged, but Miss Plum is not a lady who is impressed by a handsome face.” “She’s an actress.” Mr. Skukman let out a bit of a growl, which had Lucetta immediately stepping from behind the curtain. “Thank you, Mr. Skukman, but I think it might be for the best if I take it from here.” “Were you hiding behind the curtains?” Iris demanded. “Obviously,” Lucetta said as she headed across the room, stepping in between Iris, who was looking indignant, and Mr. Skukman, who’d adopted his most intimidating pose—a pose that didn’t appear to intimidate Iris in the least. “Now then,” Lucetta began, sending Mr. Skukman a frown when he cracked his knuckles, “from what I overheard, you’re here, Mrs. Haverstein, to learn why I rejected Bram’s offer.” Iris lifted her chin. “That’s one of the reasons I’ve sought you out.” “Lovely, and before we address those other reasons, allow me to say that the reason I refused Bram’s proposal was because your son was offering to marry a woman who doesn’t exist. He simply has yet to realize that.” Iris narrowed her eyes. “Bram could provide you with everything.” “I’m fairly good at providing for myself, Mrs. Haverstein.” Iris’s eyes narrowed to mere slits. “What are you really playing at? Are you, by chance, hoping that because you turned him down, he’ll make you a better offer?” Lucetta’s brows drew together. “What else could he possibly offer me that would be more appealing than his name?” For a second, Iris looked a little taken aback, but she rallied quickly. “You may be the type of woman who prefers the freedom spinsterhood provides, so I would imagine you’re holding out for a nice place in the city, replete with all the fashionable amenities.” Even though Lucetta was well aware of the reputation most actresses were assumed to enjoy, and even though such insinuations normally never bothered her, a sliver of hurt wormed its way into her heart. Before she could summon up a suitable response, though, Abigail suddenly breezed into the room. “Lucetta is like a granddaughter to me, Iris, and as such, you will treat her accordingly, as well as apologize for your serious lack of manners,” Abigail said as she plunked her hands on her hips and scowled at her daughter. At first, it seemed that Iris wanted to argue the point, but then she blew out a breath and nodded Lucetta’s way. “My mother is quite right. That was unkind of me, and unfair. Forgive me.” Lucetta

So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing afriend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.” – Chief Tecumseh, Shawnee Nation

You have much sorrow within you. Do you care to speak of it, Warrior?” Baird scarcely knew where to begin. “It’s my bride—our minds have been aligned these six Earth months and I can tell by her scent that she needs me as much as I need her. But I can’t make her see it. She…refuses me over and over again.” The priestess frowned. “And this hurts your pride?” “Hell, yes, it hurts my pride,” Baird burst out. Then he remembered who he was talking too. “Sorry, your holiness. It’s just…it hurts my heart too. I love her so much, need her so much and she wants nothing to do with me.” “Are you kind to her? Do you honor and respect her? Worship her body with your own?” the priestess demanded. “Uh…” Baird squirmed uncomfortably. “As much as she’ll let me. She’s, uh, decided that she doesn’t…doesn’t want me to touch her anymore. At least, no more than necessary.” “She fears you.” It was a statement, not a question. Baird nodded. “Yeah, I guess she does. Or fears what she’ll lose by giving in to me.” “What does she fear to lose?” the priestess asked. “Her family—especially her sister who she loves very much. And her career. She just finished schooling to become some kind of a medic and she wants to be able to use her training.” The priestess nodded regally. “That is much to give up for the love of a male she’s never seen except in her dreams.” “I know it is,” Baird said desperately. “But she’s the only one for me—my one true mate.” “Then what are you prepared to give up for her?” The green-within-green eyes watched him sharply. “Anything I have to. But it’s not like I can move down to Earth to be with her. The Council has forbidden cohabitation on the planet’s surface until the Scourge is taken care of.” “Would you wait for her until the war is over?” She raised an olive green eyebrow inquiringly. “If I had to. But that could take years! And she’s not bonded to me—how could I trust that another wouldn’t win her heart while I was stuck up here without her?” Baird demanded. “I need her—need to bond her to me but she’s determined not to.” “You present a thorny dilemma.

You know the limited edition ramp. If you write very obscure verse (and why shouldn't you, pray?) for which there is little or no market, you pretend there is an enormous demand, and that the stuff has to be rationed. Only 300 copies will be printed, you say, and then the type will be broken up forever. Let the connoisseurs and bibliophiles savage each other for the honor of snatching a copy. Positively no reprint. Reproduction in whole or in part forbidden. 300 copes of which this is Number 4,312. Hand-monkeyed oklamon paper, indigo boards in inter-pulped squirrel-toe, not to mention twelve point Campile Perpetua cast specially for the occasion. Complete, unabridged, and positively unexpurgated. Thirty-five bob a knock and a gory livid bleeding bargain at the price. Well, I have decided to carry this thing a bit further. I beg to announce respectfully my coming volume of verse entitled 'Scorn for Taurus.' We have decided to do it in eight point Caslon on turkey-shutter paper with covers in purple corduroy. But look out for the catch. When the type has been set up, it will instantly be destroyed, and NO COPY WHATSOEVER WILL BE PRINTED. In no circumstances will the company's servants be permitted to carry away even a rough printer's proof. The edition will be so utterly limited that a thousand pounds will not even buy one copy. This is my idea of being exclusive. The charge will be 5 shillings. Please do not make an exhibition of yourself by asking me what you get for your money. You get nothing you can see or feel, not even a receipt. But you do yourself the honor of participating in one of the most far-reaching literary experiments ever carried out in my literary workshop.

Naked servants rushed to do their emperor’s bidding, pawing at Voxinus’ armor and cloak, but true to form, the aging soldier drove them away with a swat and that commanding baritone voice which demanded respect. “Sit down, now!” the courtesans and servants scurried back to their skinny, shameless emperor. “Are you throwing away a gift from your holy emperor, Voxinus?” Kwisus asked, pushing away food as his face grew more severe. “We have been down this road before, Eminence, and as always, I accept the tokens of your good will, but I will not overuse them in a liberal and lavish manner.” The general was choosing his words carefully, sensing a chess-game for power for the second time in one day between the teenager and himself

Are Class Captains and School Prefects managers or leaders? Schools miss it when they assign a student to discipline other students. Class captains and school prefects are leaders not managers. A Leader is on A MISSION not on A DUTY. And being a leader goes beyond expecting compliance from others, which is what managers do. If your school assigns prefect to enforce compliance in any way you are doing it all wrong. For one, seeking compliance from anyone is complicated and it comes with a position that "demands" respect and thus you are putting such children at a risk of being hated by their peers. Prefect should be examples not authority figures, plus they should be trained to act like leaders should, if you also don't train them, you are doing it too wrong. Here are some of those "things" you should train your prefect: 1. Active listening 2. How to help their peers and other students find meaning in learning 3. How to make others students wellbeing and safety their priority. 4. How to inspire others and lead by example. Charity begins from school too. Your prefects can learn people skills that can guarantee their future right from your school. Your prefects should be assets to your school because of what they can learn to do now to become better in future not because of what they can do for your school now, which obviously is very little.

Well?” she demanded. “I no drive. Who takes me.” “Madam, would you not prefer to rest—” “Your body rest when dead. Who.” “We do have an hour,” Ehric hedged. As Assail glared at the other vampire, the little old lady hitched her purse up on her forearm and nodded. “So he will take me.” Assail met Sola’s grandmother’s gaze directly and dropped his tone a register just so that the line drawn would be respected. “I pay. Are we clear—you are not to spend a cent.” She opened her mouth as if to argue, but she was headstrong—not foolish. “Then I do the darning.” “Our clothes are in sufficient shape—” Ehric cleared his throat. “Actually, I have a couple of loose buttons. And the Velcro strip on his flak jacket is—” Assail looked over his shoulder and bared his fangs at the idiot—out of eyesight of Sola’s grandmother, of course.

You cannot leave your destiny to chance. You have to draw the line and demand respect. Do not go through life thinking that you are powerless. You are not powerless. You are powerful!

The 5 Scientific Truths Behind Excellent Habits Truth #1: World-class willpower isn’t an inborn strength, but a skill developed through relentless practice. Getting up at dawn is perfect self-control training. Truth #2: Personal discipline is a muscle. The more you stretch it, the stronger it grows. Therefore, the samurais of self-regulation actively create conditions of hardship to build their natural power. Truth #3: Like other muscles, willpower weakens when tired. Recovery is, therefore, absolutely necessary for the expression of mastery. And to manage decision fatigue. Truth #4: Installing any great habit successfully follows a distinct four-part pattern for automation of the routine. Follow it explicitly for lasting results. Truth #5: Increasing self-control in one area of your life elevates self-control in all areas of your life. This is why joining The 5 AM Club is the game-changing habit that will lift everything else that you do. The 3 Values of Heroic Habit-Makers Value #1: Victory demands consistency and persistency. Value #2: Following through on what is started determines the size of the personal respect that will be generated. Value #3: The way you practice in private is precisely the way you’ll perform once you’re in public.

For me, Coates’s words contain relief in that they were spoken aloud, in public, with the forcefulness history demands. But talking about race in America is not usually a hopeful experience if you’re Black. It brings no pleasure to speak of the hatred inflicted on our souls, the stories of discrimination and pain and injustices large and small that populate our lives. At the same time, we are barraged by society’s reinforcement that we are less than. I may be grieving the murder of Trayvon Martin and at the same time dodging the inquisitive fingers of a white woman reaching to touch my hair. I may be angry over the events in Ferguson and in the same moment attempting to respond with dignity to a white man who treats me as his verbal punching bag. I may have just heard about the latest racist words spewed by a white talk-show host, actor, or politician on the same day when I’m trying to claim my space in the classroom or on my college campus. The persistence of racism in America—individual and societal—is altogether overwhelming. It doesn’t lay the best fertilizer for hope to grow. And so hope for me has died one thousand deaths. I hoped that friend would get it, but hope died. I hoped that person would be an ally for life, but hope died. I hoped that my organization really desired change, but hope died. I hoped I’d be treated with the full respect I deserve at my job, but hope died. I hoped that racist policies would change, and just policies would never be reversed, but hope died. I hoped the perpetrator in uniform would be brought to justice this time, but hope died. I hoped history would stop repeating itself, but hope died. I hoped things would be better for my children, but hope died.

Went off in one of his pets as soon as he heard you wasn't home," said Ferdy. "Said he'd call on Revesby to answer for his villainy. Good God. I'm dashed if that Greek thing hasn't got after Monty too, Sherry! Very remarkable circumstance, 'pon my soul it is!" "What the devil *is* all this about a dashed Greek?" demanded Sherry. "George was trying to tell me about him, but I'm hanged if I could make head or tail of it! All I know is, I'm not acquainted with any Greeks, and what's more I don't want to be!" "It ain't a thing you're acquainted with, dear old boy. Duke knows what it is. Comes up behind a fellow when he ain't expecting it. Thought it was after me, but it turns out to be Monty. Good thing." "Yes, but what *is* it?" Mr. Tarleton said, with a quiver of amusement in his voice: "I fancy he means Nemesis." "That's it!" Ferdy said, looking at him with respect. "Nemesis! You know him too?" "Well, it's more than I do!" declared Sherry. "What's more, whoever he is, he had nothing to do with my coming to Bath!

Calibrated “How” questions are a surefire way to keep negotiations going. They put the pressure on your counterpart to come up with answers, and to contemplate your problems when making their demands. With enough of the right “How” questions you can read and shape the negotiating environment in such a way that you’ll eventually get to the answer you want to hear. You just have to have an idea of where you want the conversation to go when you’re devising your questions. The trick to “How” questions is that, correctly used, they are gentle and graceful ways to say “No” and guide your counterpart to develop a better solution—your solution. A gentle How/No invites collaboration and leaves your counterpart with a feeling of having been treated with respect.

Moral influence takes its start where humiliation begins; indeed, it is nothing more than this humiliation itself the breaking and bending of courage down into humility. If I shout to someone to get out of there when a rock is about to be blasted, I'm exerting no moral influence with this demand; if I say to a child, "You'll go hungry if you don't eat what is put on the table;' this is not moral influence. But if I tell him: "You're going to pray, honor your parents, respect the crucifix, speak the truth, etc., because this belongs to the human being and is the human calling;' or even, "this is God's will;' then moral influence is complete : a person should bend to the human calling, should be obedient, become humble, should give up his will to an alien one which is set up as rule and law; he should abase himself before something higher: self-abasement. "He who abases himself shall be exalted." Yes, yes, in time children must be required to practice piety, godliness, and respectability; a person of good upbringing is one into whom "good principles" have been instilled and impressed, drummed, rammed, and preached.

Suka, hiding from tough choices is a choice; and, Rumfuss, never changing means never improving. Arax, how can you demand freedom for yourself but not for those in your care? Dinesh, don’t let your greatness be only a matter of size. “Tellun . . .” Essix paused, momentarily unsure how to proceed. The elk seemed unimpeachable. And yet . . . “I respect you, but I do not understand you. I fear you are too distant.” “And Ninani?” Cabaro asked expectantly. Essix gazed upon the swan. “I believe that Ninani does her best.” “Fight bravely,” Ninani said, her voice music for the soul. “If I had it in me, I would join you. For what it’s worth, I believe you. I will help as I can.” Bolstered by the soft-spoken encouragement and disgusted by the others, the falcon spread her wings and took flight. As she

The only way to win respect from Superstars is by driving a hard bargain. If you hang around with these vampires, you have to show them that you’re capable of playing in their league. If you don’t constantly demonstrate that you’re as tough as they are, they’ll just take whatever they want from you and never give anything back at all. With Superstars, there are some battles you don’t want to win. Actually, these are battles you can appear to win but in fact lose. To get you off their case, Superstars may tell you what you want to hear even though they don’t actually feel it. The price for this kind of false deference is their respect. Superstars never feel wrong, they never feel gratitude, they don’t believe other people are entitled to the same rights and privileges as they are, and they seldom see other people’s actions as worthy of spontaneous praise. If you demand any of these indulgences, Superstars will speak whatever words you want to hear and never again give you anything more than lip service. Superstars will formally acknowledge your worthiness at the price of genuine regard. In public, they will say whatever you deem to be politically correct, and laugh in private at your presumptuousness. If they praise you, either they’re trying to sneak up on your Narcissistic side or they’re indicating that you are one of the little people who needs occasional doses of praise to keep going, much as a car has to be filled with gas. Be very careful what you ask of Superstars. They’re famous for taking the best of what people have and giving back only hollow words, worth less than nothing. It’s always up to you to know the difference between inconsequential trinkets and tokens of real respect.

You want to know what happened to Josh?” he hissed, taking a step forward, and Lydia’s skin prickled with chills – despite being shorter than her his gaze and his presence somehow managed to pierce directly into her, demanding attention; demanding respect. “They cut him open. Turned him into the kind of monster you wouldn’t recognise even if you’d known him. Then, when Tori and I escaped from that place, they sent our own squad – our family – to get us back. Josh was caught in the crossfire. I buried him. He's dead. Your life revolved around him? There, then. Job done. Purpose fulfilled.

Steps to changing your subjugation lifetrap 14. Make flashcards. Use them to keep you on track. When you find that you are having trouble, use flashcards. A flashcard can remind you of your right to be assertive. Here is an example of a flash card related to submission: What I what is important. I deserve to be treated with respect. I don’t have to let them treat me badly. I deserve better than that. I can stand up for myself. I can calmly demand they treat me with respect or the discussion is over. If they can’t grow enough to give me my equal rights in this relationship, then I can leave the relationship and find one that betters suits my needs. Carry the flashcard with you. When your lifetrap is triggered, and it is time for you to be assertive, take out the card and read it. Flashcards are valuable in making the slow transition from intellectual understanding to emotional acceptance.

This brother- and sisterhood with other Asian American people in entertainment--how they treat me and take care of me and demand other people respect me--has given me my community that keeps me protected. So I'm saying you need both--your community and what lies outside of it.

You use profanity as a weapon. A way to be disarming. To charm or sometimes offend, depending on your audience. It’s how you demand parity and respect

Love, respect and trust can never be demanded. Love is just felt. It is not something to be exchanged. Respect and trust are earned. And to earn respect and trust you need to focus on your words and actions. You cannot force others to respect or trust you.

You deserve someone better. Someone who respects your sentiments, someone who consults you. Not someone who is always demanding and authoritative. Believe in yourself. Wait for someone worth you.

Daughters don’t need to respect their mothers, she says, and mothers don’t need to demand that feeling from their daughters. The daughter can feel any way she likes. But in order to have the privilege of your attention she is required to speak politely.

Take the eighteenth-century general who had fallen into disfavor with the great Prussian warrior king, Frederick the Great. Coming upon the king, the general saluted him with the greatest respect, but Frederick turned his back. “I am happy to see that Your Majesty is no longer angry with me,” murmured the general. “How so?” demanded Frederick. “Because Your Majesty has never in his life turned his back on an enemy,” replied the general.

Do recall how you behaved as a child: Maybe your child is just like you once were. (The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree!) Ask yourself what you would have liked to make your childhood easier and more pleasurable. More trips to the playground, free time, or cuddling? Fewer demands? Lower expectations? Try saying, “When I was a kid and life got rough, I liked to climb trees. How about you?” Do respect your child’s needs, even if they seem unusual: “You sure do like a tight tuck-in! There, now you’re as snug as a bug in a rug.” Or, “I’ll stand in front of you while we’re on the escalator. I won’t let you fall.” Do respect your child’s fears, even if they seem senseless: “I see that your ball bounced near those big kids. I’ll go with you. Let’s hold hands.” Your reassurances will help her trust others. Do say “I love you”: Assure your child that you accept and value who she is. You cannot say “I love you” too often! Do follow your instincts: Your instincts will tell you that everyone needs to touch and be touchable, to move and be movable. If your child’s responses seem atypical, ask questions, get information, and follow up with appropriate action. Do listen when others express concerns: When teachers or caregivers suggest that your child’s behavior is unusual, you may react with denial or anger. But remember that they see your child away from home, among many other children. Their perspective is worth considering. Do educate yourself about typical child development: Read. Take parent education classes. Learn about invariable stages of human development, as well as variable temperaments and learning styles. It’s comforting to know that a wide variety of behaviors falls within the normal range. Then, you’ll find it easier to differentiate between typical and atypical behavior. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and a six-year-old is just a six-year-old! Do seek professional help: SPD is a problem that a child can’t overcome alone. Parents and teachers can’t “cure” a child, just as a child can’t cure himself. Early intervention is crucial. Do keep your cool: When your child drives you crazy, collect your thoughts before responding, especially if you are angry, upset, or unpleasantly surprised. A child who is out of control needs the calm reassurance of someone who is in control. She needs a grown-up. Do take care of yourself: When you’re having a hard day, take a break! Hire a babysitter and go for a walk, read a book, take a bath, dine out, make love. Nobody can be expected to give another person undivided attention, and still cope.

Here is a most significant fact-the subconscious mind takes any orders given it in a spirit of absolute FAITH, and acts upon those orders, although the orders often have to be presented over and over again, through repetition, before they are interpreted by the subconscious mind. Following the preceding statement, consider the possibility of playing a perfectly legitimate "trick" on your subconscious mind, by making it believe, because you believe it, that you must have the amount of money you are visualizing, that this money is already awaiting your claim, that the subconscious mind MUST hand over to you practical plans for acquiring the money which is yours. Hand over the thought suggested in the preceding paragraph to your IMAGINATION, and see what your imagination can, or will do, to create practical plans for the accumulation of money through transmutation of your desire. DO NOT WAIT for a definite plan, through which you intend to exchange services or merchandise in return for the money you are visualizing, but begin at once to see yourself in possession of the money, DEMANDING and EXPECTING meanwhile, that your subconscious mind will hand over the plan, or plans you need. Be on the alert for these plans, and when they appear, put them into ACTION IMMEDIATELY. When the plans appear, they will probably "flash" into your mind through the sixth sense, in the form of an "inspiration." This inspiration may be considered a direct "telegram," or message from Infinite Intelligence. Treat it with respect, and act upon it as soon as you receive it. Failure to do this will be FATAL to your success. In the fourth of the six steps, you were instructed to "Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire, and begin at once to put this plan into action." You should follow this instruction in the manner described in the preceding paragraph. Do not trust to your "reason when creating your plan for accumulating money through the transmutation of desire. Your reason is faulty. Moreover, your reasoning faculty maybe lazy, and, if you depend entirely upon it to serve you, it may disappoint you.

Would you have bedded him if you’d been whole?” demanded Luther. “If you remembered me?” Charm breathed. Men did not respect anger in a woman. They labeled it weakness. “You ask a question designed to ferret out or create guilt, because you’re convinced your best dramatic stance is to be hurt because I’ve ‘spurned’ you. Have I got that right? You want me to feel as hurt as you do? Well, I don’t, and I’m not going to. I won’t mourn my surviving. No one has the right to ask me for that. Certainly not you so that you can feel nobly blameless. You seduced a child, and got a child on my body. And you abandoned us both. My child and my body and my ghosts had to pay the price for it. You didn’t even have the decency to come see me until after your father was dead.

Would you have bedded him if you’d been whole?” demanded Luther. “If you remembered me?” Charm breathed. Men did not respect anger in a woman. They labeled it weakness. “You ask a question designed to ferret out or create guilt, because you’re convinced your best dramatic stance is to be hurt because I’ve ‘spurned’ you. Have I got that right? You want me to feel as hurt as you do? Well, I don’t, and I’m not going to. I won’t mourn my surviving. No one has the right to ask me for that. Certainly not you so that you can feel nobly blameless.

What is my ambition? (What do you want to become exactly? Where do you want to reach?) What are my current goals? (Short-term and long-term goals to actualise the ambition mentioned above.) What is the routine I need to achieve my goals? (Doesn’t need explanation.) What are my dreams? (Why do you want to achieve that?) What is the nature of the line of work I have chosen? (How demanding is it? What’s the scope for relaxation? At what age and with what skillset would you have achieved credible respect in your field or workplace?)

I’m a guest in your apartment,” Rose snaps. “Treat me with some respect, Loren.” “Respect is earned. Next time maybe you should call before you stop by, or maybe you should start with hey Lo, hey Lily, how was your day, not demanding things like a royal bitch.” Rose whips her head to me. “Are you going to let him talk to me like this?

Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you, 16yet do it with gentleness and respect.