“
So, you do speak English. That makes sense now.” Catherine said, shaking her head.
“Of course, I speak English. I’m from Australia, not Tanzania.
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”
Diane Merrill Wigginton (A Compromising Position)
“
...[G]reat progress was evident in the last Congress of the American 'Labour Union' in that among other things, it treated working women with complete equality. While in this respect the English, and still more the gallant French, are burdened with a spirit of narrow-mindedness. Anybody who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex (the ugly ones included).
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Karl Marx (Selected Letters: The Personal Correspondence 1844-1877)
“
Good teachers make it possible for people to change their positions without shame.
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Rosaria Champagne Butterfield (The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor's Journey Into Christian Faith)
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Good teachers make it possible for people to change their positions without shame. Even as Ken prayed for my soul, he did it in a way that welcomed me into the church rather than made me a scapegoat of Christian fear or an example of what not to become," (p 14).
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Rosaria Champagne Butterfield (The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor's Journey Into Christian Faith)
“
The inferior position of blacks, the exclusion of Indians from the new society, the establishment of supremacy for the rich and powerful in the new nation--all this was already settled in the colonies by the time of the Revolution. With the English out of the way, it could now be put on paper, solidified, regularized, made legitimate by the Constitution of the United States.
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Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present)
“
Democracy today, especially in the English-speaking world, is a political system that specialises in positioning inadequate, unqualified and dubious types in leadership positions.
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Gilad Atzmon (The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics)
“
Brian had once had an English teacher, a guy named Perpich, who was always talking about being positive, thinking positive, staying on top of things.
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Gary Paulsen (Hatchet (Hatchet, #1))
“
I’m lecturing my class last week. In the English language, I tell them, a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn’t a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative. And I hear a voice from the back of the room: ‘Yeah, right.’
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William Alexander (Flirting with French: How a Language Charmed Me, Seduced Me, and Nearly Broke My Heart)
“
He caught a glimpse of that extraordinary faculty in man, that strange, altruistic, rare, and obstinate decency which will make writers or scientists maintain their truths at the risk of death. Eppur si muove, Galileo was to say; it moves all the same. They were to be in a position to burn him if he would go on with it, with his preposterous nonsense about the earth moving round the sun, but he was to continue with the sublime assertion because there was something which he valued more than himself. The Truth. To recognize and to acknowledge What Is. That was the thing which man could do, which his English could do, his beloved, his sleeping, his now defenceless English. They might be stupid, ferocious, unpolitical, almost hopeless. But here and there, oh so seldome, oh so rare, oh so glorious, there were those all the same who would face the rack, the executioner, and even utter extinction, in the cause of something greater than themselves. Truth, that strange thing, the jest of Pilate's. Many stupid young men had thought they were dying for it, and many would continue to die for it, perhaps for a thousand years. They did not have to be right about their truth, as Galileo was to be. It was enough that they, the few and martyred, should establish a greatness, a thing above the sum of all they ignorantly had.
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T.H. White (The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once & Future King)
“
But are there philosophical problems? The present position of English philosophy - my point of departure - originates, I believe, in the late Professor Ludwig Wittgenstein's doctrine that there are none; that all genuine problems are scientific problems; that the alleged propositions or theories of philosophy are pseudo-propositions or pseudo-theories; that they are not false (if they were false, their negations would be true propositions or theories) but strictly meaningless combinations of words, no more meaningful than the incoherent babbling of a child who has not yet learned to speak properly.
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Karl Popper (Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (Routledge Classics))
“
Although I am a political liberal, I believe that conservatives have a better understanding of moral development (although not of moral psychology in general—they are too committed to the myth of pure evil). Conservatives want schools to teach lessons that will create a positive and uniquely American identity, including a heavy dose of American history and civics, using English as the only national language. Liberals are justifiably wary of jingoism, nationalism, and the focus on books by “dead white males,” but I think everyone who cares about education should remember that the American motto of e pluribus, unum (from many, one) has two parts. The celebration of pluribus should be balanced by policies that strengthen the unum.
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Jonathan Haidt (The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom)
“
These Cro-Magnon people were identical to us: they had the same physique, the same brain, the same looks. And, unlike all previous hominids who roamed the earth, they could choke on food. That may seem a trifling point, but the slight evolutionary change that pushed man's larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well articulated speech.
Other mammals have no contact between their air passages and oesophagi. They can breathe and swallow at the same time, and there is no possibility of food going down the wrong way. But with Homo sapiens food and drink must pass over the larynx on the way to the gullet and thus there is a constant risk that some will be inadvertently inhaled. In modern humans, the lowered larynx isn't in position from birth. It descends sometime between the ages of three and five months - curiously, the precise period when babies are likely to suffer from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. At all events, the descended larynx explains why you can speak and your dog cannot.
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Bill Bryson (The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way)
“
Nobody ever got started on a career as a writer by exercising good judgment, and no one ever will, either, so the sooner you break the habit of relying on yours, the faster you will advance. People with good judgment weigh the assurance of a comfortable living represented by the mariners’ certificates that declare them masters of all ships, whether steam or sail, and masters of all oceans and all navigable rivers, and do not forsake such work in order to learn English and write books signed Joseph Conrad. People who have had hard lives but somehow found themselves fetched up in executive positions with prosperous West Coast oil firms do not drink and wench themselves out of such comfy billets in order in their middle age to write books as Raymond Chandler; that would be poor judgment. No one on the payroll of a New York newspaper would get drunk and chuck it all to become a free-lance writer, so there was no John O’Hara. When you have at last progressed to the junction that enforces the decision of whether to proceed further, by sending your stuff out, and refusing to remain a wistful urchin too afraid to beg, and you have sent the stuff, it is time to pause and rejoice.
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George V. Higgins
“
A third general cause of confusion has been timidity. A fear of feeling definitely committed to any statement that might cause trouble or inconvenience seems to haunt almost everyone in Britain who holds a public position, however unimportant.
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Robert Graves (The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose)
“
I ran across an excerpt today (in English translation) of some dialogue/narration from the modern popular writer, Paulo Coelho in his book: Aleph.(Note: bracketed text is mine.)... 'I spoke to three scholars,' [the character says 'at last.'] ...two of them said that, after death, the [sic (misprint, fault of the publisher)] just go to Paradise. The third one, though, told me to consult some verses from the Koran. [end quote]' ...I can see that he's excited. [narrator]' ...Now I have many positive things to say about Coelho: He is respectable, inspiring as a man, a truth-seeker, and an appealing writer; but one should hesitate to call him a 'literary' writer based on this quote. A 'literary' author knows that a character's excitement should be 'shown' in his or her dialogue and not in the narrator's commentary on it. Advice for Coelho: Remove the 'I can see that he's excited' sentence and show his excitement in the phrasing of his quote.(Now, in defense of Coelho, I am firmly of the opinion, having myself written plenty of prose that is flawed, that a novelist should be forgiven for slipping here and there.)Lastly, it appears that a belief in reincarnation is of great interest to Mr. Coelho ... Just think! He is a man who has achieved, (as Leonard Cohen would call it), 'a remote human possibility.' He has won lots of fame and tons of money. And yet, how his preoccupation with reincarnation—none other than an interest in being born again as somebody else—suggests that he is not happy!
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Roman Payne
“
A few words explanatory of that famine may not be amiss to some of our readers. The staple food of the Irish peasantry was the potato; all other agricultural produce, grains and cattle, was sold to pay the landlord’s rent. The ordinary value of the potato crop was yearly approximately twenty million pounds in English money; in 1848, in the midst of the famine the value of agricultural produce in Ireland was £44,958,120. In that year the entire potato crop was a failure, and to that fact the famine is placidly attributed, yet those figures amply prove that there was food enough in the country to feed double the population, were the laws of capitalist society set aside, and human rights elevated to their proper position.
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James Connolly (Labour in Irish History)
“
When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another. Her father had held a position under the English Government and had always been busy and ill himself, and her mother had been a great beauty who cared only to go to parties and amuse herself with gay people.
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Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden)
“
The poet and poetess have always had a rough time of it in the Republic. It has ever been their endemic luck to starve, become a Harvard professor, commit suicide, lose their reading glasses before an audience of sophomores, go upon the people a la Barnum, and serve as homework in state universities, where they could in nowise get a position and where their presence usually scatters the English faculty like a truant officer among the Amish.
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Guy Davenport (The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays)
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He was very pleased with the position he was now in. But he was as ready to leave this job, if it came to that. He always enjoyed himself no matter what he was doing because he did everything, even the smallest things, for the love of God.
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Marshall Davis (The Practice of the Presence of God In Modern English)
“
Hope is intrinsically positive in English, but in Greek (and the same with the Latin equivalent, spes) it is not. Since it really means the anticipation of something good or bad, a more accurate translation would probably be ‘expectation’. Before we can worry about whether it’s advantageous to us that it remains in the jar, we first have to decide if it is intrinsically good or bad. This is a genuinely complex linguistic and philosophical puzzle. No wonder it’s easier to just blame Pandora.
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Natalie Haynes (Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths)
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We have this word in German, Sachlichkeit, which is most closely translated in English as “objectivity.” With Sachlichkeit, we can separate someone’s opinions or idea from the person expressing that idea. A German debate is a demonstration of Sachlichkeit. When I say “I totally disagree,” I am debating Erin’s position, not disapproving of her. Since we were children, we Germans have learned to exercise Sachlichkeit. We believe a good debate brings more ideas and information than we could ever discover without disagreement. For us, an excellent way to determine the robustness of a proposal is to challenge it.
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Erin Meyer (The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business)
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Pacifism is a psychological curiosity rather than a political movement. Some of the extremer pacifists, starting out with a complete renunciation of violence, have ended by warmly championing Hitler and even toying with antisemitism. This is interesting, but it is not important. ‘Pure’ pacifism, which is a by-product of naval power, can only appeal to people in very sheltered positions. Moreover, being negative and irresponsible, it does not inspire much devotion.
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George Orwell (The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius)
“
When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another. Her father had held a position under the English Government and had always been busy and ill himself, and her mother had been a great beauty who cared only to go to parties and amuse herself
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Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden)
“
I was thinking,' said Crusher dreamily [...] 'about LANGUAGE and how in English two negatives make a positive, but in spriteish, a double negative is still a negative. However there is NO language in which two positives make a negative ...'
'Yeah right, like THAT'S the problem,' said Xar, sarcastically. 'I hadn't thought of that!' said Crusher in gentle surprise [...]. 'You're correct, Car. "Yeah, right" IS a statement in English where two positives make a negative...
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Cressida Cowell (Twice Magic (The Wizards of Once, #2))
“
The inferior position of blacks, the exclusion of Indians from the new society, the establishment of supremacy for the rich and powerful in the new nation—all this was already settled in the colonies by the time of the Revolution. With the English out of the way, it could now be put on paper, solidified, regularized, made legitimate, by the Constitution of the United States, drafted at a convention of Revolutionary leaders in Philadelphia.
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Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present)
“
When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another. Her father had held a position under the English Government and had always been busy and ill himself, and her mother had been a great beauty who cared only to go to parties and amuse herself with gay people. She
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Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden)
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One soldier in the Ypres Salient, at Messines, Belgium, wrote of the frustration of the trench stalemate. “We are still in our old positions, and keep annoying the English and French. The weather is miserable and we often spend days on end knee-deep in water and, what is more, under heavy fire. We are greatly looking forward to a brief respite. Let’s hope that soon afterwards the whole front will start moving forward. Things can’t go on like this for ever.” The author was a German infantryman of Austrian descent named Adolf Hitler.
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Erik Larson (Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania)
“
Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys' house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him. This position of affairs had now lasted three days, and not only the husband and wife themselves, but all the members of their family and household, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the house felt that there was so sense in their living together, and that the stray people brought together by chance in any inn had more in common with one another than they, the members of the family and household of the Oblonskys. The wife did not leave her own room, the husband had not been at home for three days. The children ran wild all over the house; the English governess quarreled with the housekeeper, and wrote to a friend asking her to look out for a new situation for her; the man-cook had walked off the day before just at dinner time; the kitchen-maid, and the coachman had given warning.
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Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)
“
I’d date more, probably, as well.” Alex can’t help laughing again. “Right, because it’s so hard to get a date when you’re a prince.” Henry cuts his eyes back down to Alex. “You’d be surprised.” “How? You’re not exactly lacking for options.” Henry keeps looking at him, holding his gaze for two seconds too long. “The options I’d like…” he says, dragging the words out. “They don’t quite seem to be options at all.” Alex blinks. “What?” “I’m saying that I have … people … who interest me,” Henry says, turning his body toward Alex now, speaking with a fumbling pointedness, as if it means something. “But I shouldn’t pursue them. At least not in my position.” Are they too drunk to communicate in English? He wonders distantly if Henry knows any Spanish. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Alex says. “You don’t?” “No.” “You really don’t?” “I really, really don’t.” Henry’s whole face grimaces in frustration, his eyes casting skyward like they’re searching for help from an uncaring universe. “Christ, you are as thick as it gets,” he says, and he grabs Alex’s face in both hands and kisses him.
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Casey McQuiston (Red, White & Royal Blue)
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[L]iberals insist that children should be given the right to remain part of their particular community, but on condition that they are given a choice. But for, say, Amish children to really have a free choice of which way of life to choose, either their parents’ life or that of the “English,” they would have to be properly informed on all the options, educated in them, and the only way to do what would be to extract them from their embeddedness in the Amish community, in other words, to effectively render them “English.” This also clearly demonstrates the limitations of the standard liberal attitude towards Muslim women wearing a veil: it is deemed acceptable if it is their free choice and not an option imposed on them by their husbands or family. However, the moment a woman wears a veil as the result of her free individual choice, the meaning of her act changes completely: it is no longer a sign of her direct substantial belongingness to the Muslim community, but an expression of her idiosyncratic individuality, of her spiritual quest and her protest against the vulgarity of the commodification of sexuality, or else a political gesture of protest against the West. A choice is always a meta-choice, a choice of the modality of choice itself: it is one thing to wear a veil because of one’s immediate immersion in a tradition; it is quite another to refuse to wear a veil; and yet another to wear one not out of a sense of belonging, but as an ethico-political choice. This is why, in our secular societies based on “choice,” people who maintain a substantial religious belonging are in a subordinate position: even if they are allowed to practice their beliefs, these beliefs are “tolerated” as their idiosyncratic personal choice or opinion; they moment they present them publicly as what they really are for them, they are accused of “fundamentalism.” What this means is that the “subject of free choice” (in the Western “tolerant” multicultural sense) can only emerge as the result of an extremely violent process of being torn away from one’s particular lifeworld, of being cut off from one’s roots.
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Slavoj Žižek (Living in the End Times)
“
Oh, those lapses, darling. So many of us walk around letting fly with “errors.” We could do better, but we’re so slovenly, so rushed amid the hurly-burly of modern life, so imprinted by the “let it all hang out” ethos of the sixties, that we don’t bother to observe the “rules” of “correct” grammar.
To a linguist, if I may share, these “rules” occupy the exact same place as the notion of astrology, alchemy, and medicine being based on the four humors. The “rules” make no logical sense in terms of the history of our language, or what languages around the world are like.
Nota bene: linguists savor articulateness in speech and fine composition in writing as much as anyone else. Our position is not—I repeat, not—that we should chuck standards of graceful composition. All of us are agreed that there is usefulness in a standard variety of a language, whose artful and effective usage requires tutelage. No argument there.
The argument is about what constitutes artful and effective usage. Quite a few notions that get around out there have nothing to do with grace or clarity, and are just based on misconceptions about how languages work.
Yet, in my experience, to try to get these things across to laymen often results in the person’s verging on anger. There is a sense that these “rules” just must be right, and that linguists’ purported expertise on language must be somehow flawed on this score. We are, it is said, permissive—perhaps along the lines of the notorious leftist tilt among academics, or maybe as an outgrowth of the roots of linguistics in anthropology, which teaches that all cultures are equal. In any case, we are wrong. Maybe we have a point here and there, but only that.
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John McWhorter (Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English)
“
October 16, 2009 Avengers Paintball, Inc. 1778 Industrial Blvd. Lakeville, MN 55044 Esteemed Avengers, This letter recommends Mr. Allen Trent for a position at your paintball emporium. Mr. Trent received a C– in my expository writing class last spring, which—given my newly streamlined and increasingly generous grading criteria—is quite the accomplishment. His final project consisted of a ten-page autobiographical essay on the topic of his own rageful impulses and his (often futile) attempts to control them. He cited his dentist and his roommate as primary sources. Consider this missive a testament to Mr. Trent’s preparedness for the work your place of business undoubtedly has in store. Hoping to maintain a distance of at least one hundred yards, Jason T. Fitger Professor of Creative Writing and English Payne University (“Teach ’til It Hurts”)
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Julie Schumacher (Dear Committee Members)
“
The more obsessed with personal identity campus liberals become, the less willing they become to engage in reasoned political debate. Over the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our universities into the media mainstream: 'Speaking as an X' . . . This is not an anodyne phrase. It tells the listener that I am speaking from a privileged position on this matter. (One never says, 'Speaking as an gay Asian, I fell incompetent to judge on this matter'). It sets up a wall against questions, which by definition come from a non-X perspective. And it turns the encounter into a power relation: the winner of the argument will be whoever has invoked the morally superior identity and expressed the most outrage at being questioned. So classroom conversations that once might have begun, 'I think A, and here is my argument', now take the form, 'Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B'. This makes perfect sense if you believe that identity determines everything. It means that there is no impartial space for dialogue. White men have one "epistemology", black women have another. So what remains to be said?
What replaces argument, then, is taboo. At times our more privileged campuses can seem stuck in the world of archaic religion. Only those with an approved identity status are, like shamans, allowed to speak on certain matters. Particular groups -- today the transgendered -- are given temporary totemic significance. Scapegoats -- today conservative political speakers -- are duly designated and run off campus in a purging ritual. Propositions become pure or impure, not true or false. And not only propositions but simple words. Left identitarians who think of themselves as radical creatures, contesting this and transgressing that, have become like buttoned-up Protestant schoolmarms when it comes to the English language, parsing every conversation for immodest locutions and rapping the knuckles of those who inadvertently use them.
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Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics)
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The Americans of the United States stand in precisely the same position with regard to the peoples of South America as their fathers, the English, occupy with regard to the Italians, the Spaniards, the Portuguese, and all those nations of Europe which receive their articles of daily consumption from England, because they are less advanced in civilization and trade.
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Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America)
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He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people. He could never cross it and explain to them his position,--the Nietschean position, in regard to socialism. There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them. Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetish before which they fell down and worshipped.
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Jack London
“
At every one of those concerts in England you will find rows of weary people who are there, not because they really like classical music, but because they think they ought to like it. Well, there is the same thing in heaven. A number of people sit there in glory, not because they are happy, but because they think they owe it to their position to be in heaven. They are almost all English.
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George Bernard Shaw (Man and Superman)
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Cameron found that when people use female as a noun, as opposed to woman, it’s often in explicitly negative contexts. For example: My poor Clemence was as helpless a female as you’d find in a long day’s march. “Stupid, crazy female” was all he said as he set about bandaging it. A call yesterday involved giving the chatty female at the other end one’s address. These examples all involve a speaker passing derogatory judgment on the subject. And though their statements would still be insulting if you swapped in the word woman, they would be, as Cameron says, “less unequivocally contemptuous.” The corpus data also showed that the noun form of female is almost never used in a positive context. You wouldn’t hear someone say, “My best friend is the kindest, most generous female I have ever met.
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Amanda Montell (Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language)
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The upside for him was that my worsening reputation meant no one would believe me about anything else. He acted as if behaviour like mine (boy nicks thing) was beyond his comprehension. He’d never do anything wrong, upright citizen that he was, respectable, civilised and legally parked, he was in the privileged position of having absolute power in a world where racism, misogyny and in-house child molestation lay within the parameters of acceptability. If you queued properly, had a current tax disc in your car and always watched the Queen’s Speech at Christmas then you were exemplary (provided you were English).
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Alan Davies (Just Ignore Him)
“
According to an equally lovingly preserved English translation of the prospectus, the purpose of Ibuka’s firm was “to establish an ideal factory that stresses a spirit of freedom and open-mindedness, and where engineers with sincere motivation can exercise their technological skills to the highest level.” We shall, he pledged, “eliminate any unfair profit-seeking exercises” and “seek expansion not only for the sake of size.” Further, “we shall carefully select employees . . . we shall avoid to have [sic] formal positions for the mere sake of having them, and shall place emphasis on a person’s ability, performance and character, so that each
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Simon Winchester (Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers)
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It is noted that from 1967 to 1995 essays on negative emotions far outnumbered those on positive emotions in the psychological literature. The ratio was 21:1. Even those supreme perpetrators of pop nihilism, The New York Times and The Washington Post, have a better ratio than psychological literature. They average 12 negative stories to every one that might be construed to be non-negative. Many of their non-negative stories, however, cover success in sports and entertainment.
I demand that the purveyors of despair who pretend to be dispassionate observes of the human condition go ahead and disclose that the 10 most beautiful words in the English languages are chimes, dawn, golden, hush, lullaby, luminous, melody, mist, murmuring, and tranquil; that Java sparrows prefer the music of Back over that of Schoenberg; that math experts have determined there are 1/96 trillion ways to lace up your shoes; that the Inuit term for making love is translated as ‘laughing together in bed;' and that according to Buckminster Fuller, “pollution is nothing but resources we’re not harvesting.
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Rob Brezsny (Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You With Blessings)
“
Cabinet is a conscious, explicit attempt to portray the Doctor himself as myth. “He’s a mischief, a leprechaun, a boojum,” says one character, bookseller and collector of incunabula, Syme. “The Doctor is a myth. He’s straight out of Old English folklore, typical trickster figure really.”29 Neither part of an ongoing narrative, nor specifically located within the series’ past, Cabinet is in a position to challenge the portrayal of the Doctor.
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Anthony Burdge, Jessica Burke, Kristine Larsen (The Mythological Dimensions of Doctor Who)
“
Via Banchi di Sopra and Via Banchi di Sotto These main drags in town are named “upper row of banks” and “lower row of banks.” They were once lined with market tables (banchi), and rents were paid to the city for a table’s position along the street. If the owner of a banco neglected to pay the rent for his space, thugs came along and literally broke (rotto) his table. It is from this practice—banco rotto, broken table—that we get the English word “bankrupt.
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Rick Steves (Rick Steves' Florence & Tuscany 2014)
“
I'll be in position." Vadim left the building, struggling with the emotion, fuck, Dan kissing him like that hat shaken him, deeply. He'd needed that touch, that oath, that everything, but coudln't have responded any other way. Not in Russian, not in English. Couldn't have just held on to him for a moment longer. He wanted to hold him, fuck him, be fucked, he wanted to rest at Dan's shoulder after sex and think nothing but that they were both alive. Fuck the war, fuck the past, fuck the money.
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Aleksandr Voinov
“
One of the great failings of the American education system, in our view, is that young people can graduate from university without any understanding of poverty at home or abroad. Study-abroad programs tend to consist of herds of students visiting Oxford or Florence or Paris. We believe that universities should make it a requirement that all graduates spend at least some time in the developing world, either by taking a "gap year" or by studying abroad. If more Americans worked for a summer teaching English at a school like Mukhtar's in Pakistan, or working at a hospital like HEAL Africa in Congo, our entire society would have a richer understanding of the world around us. And the rest of the world might also hold a more positive view of Americans.
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Nicholas D. Kristof (Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide)
“
The only points in which I differ from all ecclesiastical teaching is that I do not believe that any man ever saw or talked with God, I do not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or told the historians what they say he did about woman, for all the religions on the face of the earth degrade her, and so long as woman accepts the position that they assign her, her emancipation is impossible. Whatever the Bible may be made to do in Hebrew or Greek, in plain English it does not exalt and dignify woman.
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Elizabeth Cady Stanton (The Woman's Bible)
“
The point is that you have here a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency; and even - since some of Dali’s pictures would tend to poison the imagination like a pornographic postcard - on life itself. What Dali has done and what he has imagined is debatable, but in his outlook, his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does not exist. He is as anti-social as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it.
Now, if you showed this book, with its illustrations, to Lord Elton, to Mr. Alfred Noyes, to The Times leader writers who exult over the “eclipse of the highbrow” - in fact, to any “sensible” art-hating English person - it is easy to imagine what kind of response you would get. They would flatly refuse to see any merit in Dali whatever. Such people are not only unable to admit that what is morally degraded can be æsthetically right, but their real demand of every artist is that he shall pat them on the back and tell them that thought is unnecessary. And they can be especially dangerous at a time like the present, when the Ministry of Information and the British Council put power into their hands. For their impulse is not only to crush every new talent as it appears, but to castrate the past as well. Witness the renewed highbrow-baiting that is now going on in this country and America, with its outcry not only against Joyce, Proust and Lawrence, but even against T. S. Eliot.
But if you talk to the kind of person who can see Dali’s merits, the response that you get is not as a rule very much better. If you say that Dali, though a brilliant draughtsman, is a dirty little scoundrel, you are looked upon as a savage. If you say that you don’t like rotting corpses, and that people who do like rotting corpses are mentally diseased, it is assumed that you lack the æsthetic sense. Since “Mannequin rotting in a taxicab” is a good composition. And between these two fallacies there is no middle position, but we seldom hear much about it. On the one side Kulturbolschewismus: on the other (though the phrase itself is out of fashion) “Art for Art’s sake.” Obscenity is a very difficult question to discuss honestly. People are too frightened either of seeming to be shocked or of seeming not to be shocked, to be able to define the relationship between art and morals.
It will be seen that what the defenders of Dali are claiming is a kind of benefit of clergy. The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word “Art,” and everything is O.K.
”
”
George Orwell (Dickens, Dali And Others: (Authorized Orwell Edition): A Mariner Books Classic)
“
Are you a nice guy or gal who is having trouble processing all this bad news? Maybe that’s because not having a high status position at the office contributes to a reduction in executive function. Want that in English? Feeling powerless actually makes you dumber.
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Eric Barker (Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong)
“
Old Campion had once said that he believed – he positively believed, with shudders – that Christopher desired to live in the spirit of Christ. That had seemed horrible to the general, but Mark did not see that it was horrible, per se.… He doubted, however, whether Christ would have refused to manage Groby had it been his job. Christ was a sort of an Englishman and Englishmen did not as a rule refuse to do their jobs.… They had not used to; now no doubt they did. It was a Russian sort of trick. He had heard that even before the revolution great Russian nobles would disperse their estates, give their serfs their liberty, put on a hair shirt and sit by the roadside begging.… Something like that. Perhaps Christopher was a symptom that the English were changing. He himself was not. He was just lazy and determined – and done with it!
”
”
Ford Madox Ford (Parade's End (Vintage Classics))
“
Most people give substantial weight to anecdotal evidence, perhaps so much that it will cancel out positive recommendations found in consumer reports. People's tendency to give undue weight to some types of information is called the availability heuristic. A heuristic is a rule of thumb, a mental shortcut. Suppose someone asked you a question like what's more common in English, words that start with the letter to r words that have t as the third letter. You would have an easier time generating words that started with the letter t. Words starting with t would be more 'available'.
”
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Barry Schwartz (The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less)
“
Generally, the last hindrance to leave the mind is hatred. When it is gone, metta arises naturally. The void is filled with feelings of friendliness toward everyone. When you no longer push things away, you naturally feel close to everything. You feel positive toward everybody. Everybody is your friend.
”
”
Henepola Gunaratana (Beyond Mindfulness in Plain English: An Introductory guide to Deeper States of Meditation)
“
Ebonics is not a separate language. It is ghetto speech and substandard English. To claim that ebonics is a positive way of communicating for blacks is to condemn blacks to menial jobs and economic inferiority. A person who fails to learn correct language skills is forever handicapped in seeking employment.
”
”
Jesse Lee Peterson (Scam: How the Black Leadership Exploits Black America)
“
Biology - Polarity of silver lining – review of positive/negative (254) elements
English - Poetry, Emily Dickinson, (6444) color themes: orange, apple red
History - appeal processes (908), new information
Geometry - segment division provided 2546444908
Assignments due October 30, response required.
”
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Brenda Vicars (Polarity in Motion)
“
Johnson's later life, from 1763, is among the best documented of all literary lives. James Boswell gave himself the enormous task, after Johnson's death in 1784, of producing what is now held to be a model of biography; rich in detail and anecdote, a complete picture of the man and his times, traced over a period of more than twenty years. Boswell's Life of Johnson, published in 1791, carries on Johnson's own contribution to the growing art of biography, and consolidates Johnson's position as a major literary figure, who, although a poet and a novelist, is remembered more for his academic and critical achievement than for his creative writings.
”
”
Ronald Carter (The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland)
“
In culturally responsive teaching, rapport is connected to the idea of affirmation. Affirmation simply means that we acknowledge the personhood of our students through words and actions that say to them, “I care about you.” Too often, we confuse affirmation with building up a student’s self-esteem. As educators, we think it’s our job to make students of color, English learners, or poor students feel good about themselves. That’s a deficit view of affirmation. In reality, most parents of culturally and linguistically diverse students do a good job of helping their children develop positive self-esteem. It is when they come to school that many students of color begin to feel marginalized, unseen, and silenced.
”
”
Zaretta Lynn Hammond (Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students)
“
You must let the color to set for as long as it is possible.The darker the stain,the more that he loves you," she says,her English halting,broken, but the message is clear. Emphasized by the meaningful look she shoots Vane and me.
"Oh,we're not-" I start to say. We're not in love! But Vane's quick to stop me.
Slipping an arm around my shoulder, he presses his lips to my cheek, bestowing on the old woman the kind of smile that encourages her to smile back in a startling display of grayed and missing teeth. His actions stunning me stupid, leaving me to sit slack faced and dumb-with heated cheeks,muddied hands, and a rising young breakout start draped over my back.
Having never been in love,I admit that I'm definitely no expert on the subject. I have no idea what it feels like.
Though I'm pretty sure it doesn't feel like this.
I'm pretty dang positive Vane's just cast himself in yet another starring role-playing the part of my dashing young love interest,if only to appease this strange,Moroccan woman we'll never see again.
Still,Vane is an actor,and an audience is an audience-no matter how small.
”
”
Alyson Noel (Fated (Soul Seekers, #1))
“
Husband,” she protested. “I can ride. I am not hurt.” “Yer gown is torn and bloodied and ye’ve added yet another bruise to yer pretty face. Do no’ tell me yer no’ hurt,” he said grimly, shifting her about before him until she was pressed snugly up against his groin. Satisfied with her position, he then gestured for the others to follow, and turned his horse toward the castle.
”
”
Lynsay Sands (An English Bride In Scotland (Highland Brides, #1))
“
Some historians think those first blacks in Virginia were considered as servants, like the white indentured servants brought from Europe. But the strong probability is that, even if they were listed as “servants” (a more familiar category to the English), they were viewed as being different from white servants, were treated differently, and in fact were slaves. In any case, slavery developed quickly into a regular institution, into the normal labor relation of blacks to whites in the New World. With it developed that special racial feeling—whether hatred, or contempt, or pity, or patronization—that accompanied the inferior position of blacks in America for the next 350 years—that combination of inferior status and derogatory thought we call racism.
”
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Howard Zinn (A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present)
“
English heart surgeon Martyn Lloyd-Jones asserted, “Most unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself rather than talking to yourself.” What kind of voices do you hear? When you face new experiences, does a voice in your head say you’re going to fail? If you’re hearing negative messages, you need to learn to give yourself positive mental pep talks.
”
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John C. Maxwell (The Maxwell Daily Reader: 365 Days of Insight to Develop the Leader Within You and Influence Those Around You)
“
No one can understand history without continually relating the long periods which are constantly mentioned to the experiences of our own short lives. Five years is a lot. Twenty years is the horizon to most people. Fifty years is antiquity. To understand how the impact of destiny fell upon any generation of men one must first imagine their position and then apply the time-scale of our own lives. Thus nearly all changes were far less perceptible to those who lived through them from day to day than appears when the salient features of an epoch are extracted by the chronicler. We peer at these scenes through dim telescopes of research across a gulf of nearly two thousand years. We cannot doubt that the second and to some extent the third century of the Christian era, in contrast with all that had gone before and most that was to follow, were a Golden Age for Britain. But by the early part of the fourth century shadows had fallen upon this imperfect yet none the less tolerable society. By steady, persistent steps the sense of security departed from Roman Britain. Its citizens felt by daily experience a sense that the world-wide system of which they formed a partner province was in decline.
”
”
Winston S. Churchill (The Birth of Britain (A History of the English Speaking Peoples #1))
“
Let your walls down, be vulnerable, life is too short to be half in. Being psycho is so tacky, not something to flaunt. If you want to flaunt anything, let it be your love and passion for someone. Spend your energy being happy and in love. If your partner is the “psycho” one, cut them off. Find the one that is just as positive as you, give each other good vibes only and you’ll be living in a modern day fairy tale.
”
”
Jessica English
“
It is not enough for a population or a section of the population to have Christian faith and be docile to the ministers of religion in order to be in a position properly to judge political matters. If this population has no political experience, no taste for seeing clearly for itself nor a tradition of initiative and critical judgment, its position with respect to politics grows more complicated, for nothing is easier for political counterfeiters than to exploit good principles for purposes of deception, and nothing is more disastrous than good principles badly applied. And moreover nothing is easier for human weakness than to merge religion with prejudices of race, family or class, collective hatreds, passions of a clan and political phantoms which compensate for the rigors of individual discipline in a pious but insufficiently purified soul. Politics deal with matters and interests of the world and they depend upon passions natural to man and upon reason. But the point I wish to make here is that without goodness, love and charity, all that is best in us—even divine faith, but passions and reason much more so—turns in our hands to an unhappy use. The point is that right political experience cannot develop in people unless passions and reason are oriented by a solid basis of collective virtues, by faith and honor and thirst for justice. The point is that, without the evangelical instinct and the spiritual potential of a living Christianity, political judgment and political experience are ill protected against the illusions of selfishness and fear; without courage, compassion for mankind and the spirit of sacrifice, the ever-thwarted advance toward an historical ideal of generosity and fraternity is not conceivable.
”
”
Jacques Maritain (Christianity & Democracy (Essay Index Reprint Series) (English and French Edition))
“
Remembering his creative exposition on the subject of purple-spotted dingy-dippers, Lillian gave a little huff of amusement. She had always considered Westcliff an utterly humorless man…and in that, she had misjudged him. “I thought you never lied,” she said.
His lips twitched. “Given the options of seeing you become ill at the dinner table, or lying to get you out of there quickly, I chose the lesser of two evils. Do you feel better now?”
“Better…yes.” Lillian realized that she was resting in the crook of his arm, her skirts draped partially over one of his thighs. His body was solid and warm, perfectly matched to hers. Glancing downward, she saw that the fabric of his trousers had molded firmly around his muscular thighs. Unladylike curiosity awakened inside her, and she clenched her fingers against the urge to slide her palm over his leg. “The part about the dingy-dipper was clever,” she said, dragging her gaze up to his face. “But inventing a Latin name for it was positively inspired.”
Westcliff grinned. “I always hoped my Latin would be good for something.” Shifting her a little, he reached into the pocket of his waistcoat and glanced at his watch. “We’ll return to the dining hall in approximately a quarter hour. By that time the calves’ heads should be removed.”
Lillian made a face. “I hate English food,” she exclaimed. “All those jellies and blobs, and wiggly puddings, and the game that is aged until by the time it’s served, it is older than I am, and—” She felt a tremor of amusement run through him, and she turned in the half circle of his arm. “What is so amusing?”
“You’re making me afraid to go back to my own dinner table.”
“You should be!” she replied emphatically, and he could no longer restrain a deep laugh.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (It Happened One Autumn (Wallflowers, #2))
“
The first recorded use to date of OMG is from 1917, and reads in full “I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis—O.M.G. (Oh! My God!)—Shower it on the Admiralty!” The citation comes from a letter by one John Arbuthnot Fisher, who happens to have been the admiral in charge of the British navy (a position known as first sea lord), and was written to Winston Churchill, staunch defender of both the English people and their language.
”
”
Ammon Shea (Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravation)
“
With a regal inclination of her head, she said, "You know,I was positive you wouldn't want me to work for you either, and I tried to tell Mr. Weatherby that." She started toward the rosewood doors. "But he felt that when you realized I'm bilingual, you'd change your mind."
"Bilingual?" Nick scoffed contemptuously.
She turned toward him with her hand on the doorknob. "Oh,but I am. I can tell you exactly what I think of you in perfect Italian." She saw a nerve jerk in his tightly clenched jaw, and she added in a low,scathing voice, "But it's much more satisfying to say it to you in English; you're a bastard!"
Wrenching open the door,Lauren marched across the luxurious reception area. She was punching the button to summon the elevator when Nick's hand clamped over her wrist. "Get back into my office," he growled between his teeth.
"Take your hand off me!" she whispered furiously.
"There are four people watching us," he warned. "Either you walk into my office on your own,or I'll drag you in there in front of them."
"Go ahead and try it!" she raged right back at him. "I'll sue you for assault and subpoena all four of them as witnesses!"
Unexpectedly,her threat wrung a reluctant, admiring smile from him. "You have the most incredibly beautiful eyes. When you're angry,they-"
"Save it!" Lauren hissed, jerking violently at her wrist.
"I have been," he teased suggestively.
"Don't talk to me like that-I don't want any part of you!"
"Little liar.You want every part of me.
”
”
Judith McNaught (Double Standards)
“
My reading has been lamentably desultory and immedthodical. Odd, out of the way, old English plays, and treatises, have supplied me with most of my notions, and ways of feeling. In everything that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world. I should have scarcely cut a figure among the franklins, or country gentlemen, in King John's days. I know less geography than a schoolboy of six weeks standing. To me a map of old Ortelius is as authentic as Arrowsmith. I do not know whereabout Africa merges into Asia, whether Ethiopia lie in one or other of those great divisions, nor can form the remotest, conjecture of the position of New South Wales, or Van Diemen's Land. Yet do I hold a correspondence with a very dear friend in the first named of these two Terrae Incognitae. I have no astronomy. I do not know where to look for the Bear or Charles' Wain, the place of any star, or the name of any of them at sight. I guess at Venus only by her brightness - and if the sun on some portentous morn were to make his first appearance in the west, I verily believe, that, while all the world were grasping in apprehension about me, I alone should stand unterrified, from sheer incuriosity and want of observation. Of history and chronology I possess some vague points, such as one cannot help picking up in the course of miscellaneous study, but I never deliberately sat down to a chronicle, even of my own country. I have most dim apprehensions of the four great monarchies, and sometimes the Assyrian, sometimes the Persian, floats as first in my fancy. I make the widest conjectures concerning Egypt, and her shepherd kings. My friend M., with great pains taking, got me to think I understood the first proposition in Euclid, but gave me over in despair at the second. I am entirely unacquainted with the modern languages, and, like a better man than myself, have 'small Latin and less Greek'. I am a stranger to the shapes and texture of the commonest trees, herbs, flowers - not from the circumstance of my being town-born - for I should have brought the same inobservant spirit into the world with me, had I first seen it, 'on Devon's leafy shores' - and am no less at a loss among purely town objects, tool, engines, mechanic processes. Not that I affect ignorance - but my head has not many mansions, nor spacious, and I have been obliged to fill it with such cabinet curiosities as it can hold without aching. I sometimes wonder how I have passed my probation with so little discredit in the world, as I have done, upon so meagre a stock. But the fact is, a man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out, in mixed company; everybody is so much more ready to produce his own, than to call for a display of your acquisitions. But in a tete-a-tete there is no shuffling. The truth will out. There is nothing which I dread so much, as the being left alone for a quarter of an hour with a sensible, well-informed man that does not know me.
”
”
Charles Lamb
“
Quickly, she pulls out a photograph from the same drawer. Two girls; one English, one Japanese. Their hair is in plaits, knees in the same position, peeking out under school skirts. There is no gap between their bodies. They look entirely different. Chinatsu is delicate, so flawless that she seems like a drawing, whereas Fleur is scrawny and ablaze with freckles. And yet, they look like sisters; the same posture, the same sadness in their eyes. She remembers that day. It was the worst and best of her life.
”
”
Sarah Dobbs (Killing Daniel)
“
And this love of definite conception, this clearness of vision, this artistic sense of limit, is the characteristic of all great work and poetry; of the vision of Homer as of the vision of Dante, of Keats and William Morris as of Chaucer and Theocritus. It lies at the base of all noble, realistic and romantic work as opposed to the colourless and empty abstractions of our own eighteenth-century poets and of the classical dramatists of France, or of the vague spiritualities of the German sentimental school: opposed, too, to that spirit of transcendentalism which also was root and flower itself of the great Revolution, underlying the impassioned contemplation of Wordsworth and giving wings and fire to the eagle- like flight of Shelley, and which in the sphere of philosophy, though displaced by the materialism and positiveness of our day, bequeathed two great schools of thought, the school of Newman to Oxford, the school of Emerson to America. Yet is this spirit of transcendentalism alien to the spirit of art. For the artist can accept no sphere of life in exchange for life itself. For him there is no escape from the bondage of the earth: there is not even the desire of escape. He is indeed the only true realist: symbolism, which is the essence of the transcendental spirit, is alien to him. The metaphysical mind of Asia will create for itself the monstrous, many-breasted idol of Ephesus, but to the Greek, pure artist, that work is most instinct with spiritual life which conforms most clearly to the perfect facts of physical life.
”
”
Oscar Wilde (The English Renaissance of Art)
“
Two centuries ago, the United States settled into a permanent political order, after fourteen years of violence and heated debate. Two centuries ago, France fell into ruinous disorder that ran its course for twenty-four years. In both countries there resounded much ardent talk of rights--rights natural, rights prescriptive. . . .
[F]anatic ideology had begun to rage within France, so that not one of the liberties guaranteed by the Declaration of the Rights of Man could be enjoyed by France's citizens. One thinks of the words of Dostoievski: "To begin with unlimited liberty is to end with unlimited despotism." . . .
In striking contrast, the twenty-two senators and fifty-nine representatives who during the summer of 1789 debated the proposed seventeen amendments to the Constitution were men of much experience in representative government, experience acquired within the governments of their several states or, before 1776, in colonial assembles and in the practice of the law. Many had served in the army during the Revolution. They decidedly were political realists, aware of how difficult it is to govern men's passions and self-interest. . . . Among most of them, the term democracy was suspect. The War of Independence had sufficed them by way of revolution. . . .
The purpose of law, they knew, is to keep the peace. To that end, compromises must be made among interests and among states. Both Federalists and Anti-Federalists ranked historical experience higher than novel theory. They suffered from no itch to alter American society radically; they went for sound security. The amendments constituting what is called the Bill of Rights were not innovations, but rather restatements of principles at law long observed in Britain and in the thirteen colonies. . . .
The Americans who approved the first ten amendments to their Constitution were no ideologues. Neither Voltaire nor Rousseau had any substantial following among them. Their political ideas, with few exceptions, were those of English Whigs. The typical textbook in American history used to inform us that Americans of the colonial years and the Revolutionary and Constitutional eras were ardent disciples of John Locke. This notion was the work of Charles A. Beard and Vernon L. Parrington, chiefly. It fitted well enough their liberal convictions, but . . . it has the disadvantage of being erroneous. . . .
They had no set of philosophes inflicted upon them. Their morals they took, most of them, from the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Their Bill of Rights made no reference whatever to political abstractions; the Constitution itself is perfectly innocent of speculative or theoretical political arguments, so far as its text is concerned. John Dickinson, James Madison, James Wilson, Alexander Hamilton, George Mason, and other thoughtful delegates to the Convention in 1787 knew something of political theory, but they did not put political abstractions into the text of the Constitution. . . .
Probably most members of the First Congress, being Christian communicants of one persuasion or another, would have been dubious about the doctrine that every man should freely indulge himself in whatever is not specifically prohibited by positive law and that the state should restrain only those actions patently "hurtful to society." Nor did Congress then find it necessary or desirable to justify civil liberties by an appeal to a rather vague concept of natural law . . . .
Two centuries later, the provisions of the Bill of Rights endure--if sometimes strangely interpreted. Americans have known liberty under law, ordered liberty, for more than two centuries, while states that have embraced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, with its pompous abstractions, have paid the penalty in blood.
”
”
Russell Kirk (Rights and Duties: Reflections on Our Conservative Constitution)
“
But Welsh spellings are as nothing compared with Irish Gaelic, a language in which spelling and pronunciation give the impression of having been devised by separate committees, meeting in separate rooms, while implacably divided over some deep semantic issue. Try pronouncing geimhreadh, Gaelic for “winter,” and you will probably come up with something like “gem-reed-uh.” It is in fact “gyeeryee.” Beaudhchais (“thank you”) is “bekkas” and Ó Séaghda (“Oh-seeg-da?”) is simply “O’Shea.” Against this, the Welsh pronunciation of cwrw—“koo-roo”—begins to look positively self-evident.
”
”
Bill Bryson (The Mother Tongue: The Fascinating History of the English Language)
“
There is indeed a poetical attitude to be adopted towards all things, but all things are not fit subjects for poetry. Into the secure and sacred house of Beauty the true artist will admit nothing that is harsh or disturbing, nothing that gives pain, nothing that is debatable, nothing about which men argue. He can steep himself, if he wishes, in the discussion of all the social problems of his day, poor-laws and local taxation, free trade and bimetallic currency, and the like; but when he writes on these subjects it will be, as Milton nobly expressed it, with his left hand, in prose and not in verse, in a pamphlet and not in a lyric. This exquisite spirit of artistic choice was not in Byron: Wordsworth had it not. In the work of both these men there is much that we have to reject, much that does not give us that sense of calm and perfect repose which should be the effect of all fine, imaginative work. But in Keats it seemed to have been incarnate, and in his lovely ODE ON A GRECIAN URN it found its most secure and faultless expression; in the pageant of the EARTHLY PARADISE and the knights and ladies of Burne-Jones it is the one dominant note. It is to no avail that the Muse of Poetry be called, even by such a clarion note as Whitman’s, to migrate from Greece and Ionia and to placard REMOVED and TO LET on the rocks of the snowy Parnassus. Calliope’s call is not yet closed, nor are the epics of Asia ended; the Sphinx is not yet silent, nor the fountain of Castaly dry. For art is very life itself and knows nothing of death; she is absolute truth and takes no care of fact; she sees (as I remember Mr. Swinburne insisting on at dinner) that Achilles is even now more actual and real than Wellington, not merely more noble and interesting as a type and figure but more positive and real.
”
”
Oscar Wilde (The English Renaissance of Art)
“
To the Greeks this problem of the conditions of poetic production, and the places occupied by either spontaneity or self-consciousness in any artistic work, had a peculiar fascination. We find it in the mysticism of Plato and in the rationalism of Aristotle. We find it later in the Italian Renaissance agitating the minds of such men as Leonardo da Vinci. Schiller tried to adjust the balance between form and feeling, and Goethe to estimate the position of self-consciousness in art. Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as ‘emotion remembered in tranquillity’ may be taken as an analysis of one of the stages through which all imaginative work has to pass; and in Keats’s longing to be ‘able to compose without this fever’ (I quote from one of his letters), his desire to substitute for poetic ardour ‘a more thoughtful and quiet power,’ we may discern the most important moment in the evolution of that artistic life. The question made an early and strange appearance in your literature too; and I need not remind you how deeply the young poets of the French romantic movement were excited and stirred by Edgar Allan Poe’s analysis of the workings of his own imagination in the creating of that supreme imaginative work which we know by the name of THE RAVEN.
”
”
Oscar Wilde (The English Renaissance of Art)
“
It may be said at once that it any case no blame whatever attaches to the persons responsible for the framing of these charges, who are placed in a most difficult position by the appellant's unfortunate act. It is a principle of the English law that a person who appears in a police court has done something undesirable, and citizens who take it upon themselves to do unusual actions which attract the attention of the police should be careful to bring these actions into one of the recognized categories of crimes and offenses, for it is intolerable that the police should be put to the pains of inventing reasons for finding them undesirable.
" Is It a Free Country?
”
”
A.P. Herbert (Uncommon Law: Being 66 Misleading Cases Revised and Collected in One Volume)
“
Master Wong told me that in ancient China, time was kept according to the position of the sun in the sky. Inherent in this character is the understanding that time is circular, that no matter how much the sun moves, it will always come back around again. In English time is spelled with four letters. A finite thing made of finite letters. Maybe this is the difference, I think, for those that speak English, there is a limit to time. That is why it is so important to differentiate between past, present and future. When I know this, I also know I will be able to write time perfectly for the rest of my life in both languages. This is how I begin to understand English.
”
”
Jenny Tinghui Zhang (Four Treasures of the Sky)
“
By the time we had reached the chestnut grove in front of the inn I had said so little that my companion was sure I was one of the most intelligent women he had ever met. I know he thought so, for he turned suddenly to me as we were walking past the Frau Förster’s wash-house and rose-garden up to the chestnuts, and said, ‘How is it that German women are so infinitely more intellectual than English women?’ Intellectual! How nice. And all the result of keeping quiet in the right places. ‘I did not know they were,’ I said modestly; which was true. ‘Oh but they are,’ he assured me with great positiveness; and added, ‘Perhaps you have noticed that I am English?’ Noticed
”
”
Elizabeth von Arnim (The Elizabeth von Arnim Collection)
“
Churchill complained to the King that with the Coordination Committee, War Cabinet, Commons debates and thirty or forty important naval messages coming in daily, ‘which have to be sifted and carefully gone through, before sending out new instructions to the Fleet off Norway’, he found it hard to get on with his Admiralty work.163 He could, however, still find time to see the King, and somehow, too, he was able to continue working at night on the manuscript of his History of the English-Speaking Peoples.* Even in the midst of the Norway Campaign, at eleven o’clock one evening in late April, Churchill was able to discuss with William Deakin and Freddie Birkenhead the Norman invasion of England in 1066. Deakin recalled that, despite naval signals being brought in by admirals as the battle progressed, talk ranged round the spreading shadows of the Norman invasion and the figure of Edward the Confessor who, as Churchill wrote, ‘comes down to us faint, misty, frail’. I can still see the map on the wall, with the dispositions of the British fleet off Norway, and hear the voice of the First Lord as he grasped with his usual insight the strategic position in 1066. But this was no lack of attention to current business. It was the measure of the man with the supreme historical eye. The distant episodes were as close and real as the mighty events on hand.164
”
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Andrew Roberts (Churchill: Walking with Destiny)
“
The propagandist as one who creates symbols which are not only popular but which bring about positive realignments of behavior is no phrasemonger but a promoter of overt acts.” Note the free use of the term “propagandist,” as with Bernays. This was in the ’30s. In those days, the term did not have the negative connotations it has since assumed (in English; other languages still use the term neutrally). Putting aside the pseudo-scientific gobbledygook, we’re back to the same principles. In a democratic society, we, the intelligent minority, have the duty of directing the “ignorant and stupid” masses to what we decide are proper goals, using whatever deception is required. All for their own good.
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Noam Chomsky (Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance)
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I peered cautiously through a loophole, trying to find the Fascist trench. ‘Where are the enemy?’ Benjamin waved his hand expansively. ‘Over zere.’ (Benjamin spoke English—terrible English.) ‘But where?’ According to my ideas of trench warfare the Fascists would be fifty or a hundred yards away. I could see nothing—seemingly their trenches were very well concealed. Then with a shock of dismay I saw where Benjamin was pointing; on the opposite hill-top, beyond the ravine, seven hundred metres away at the very least, the tiny outline of a parapet and a red-and-yellow flag—the Fascist position. I was indescribably disappointed. We were nowhere near them! At that range our rifles were completely useless.
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George Orwell (Homage to Catalonia)
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The word for religion that James uses here is threskeia, and like our English word religion, it can be used positively or negatively. Threskeia primarily refers to the external behaviors of a religion, including the ceremonies and rituals. So James is saying that the religious rituals of Christ-followers are no longer things like memorizing religious liturgies, attending religious services, going on religious pilgrimages, celebrating religious holidays, or saying specific prayers at specific times while facing a specific direction in a specific posture. Rather, our rituals are acts of mercy and kindness and compassion, and courage not to take our cues from the world around us. In other words, our religion is love. Jesus
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Bruxy Cavey (Reunion: The Good News of Jesus for Seekers, Saints, and Sinners)
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The very terms “split infinitive” and “split verb” are based on a thick-witted analogy to Latin, in which it is impossible to split a verb because it consists of a single word, such as amare, “to love.” But in English, the so-called infinitive to write consists of two words, not one: the subordinator to and the plain form of the verb write, which can also appear without to in constructions such as She helped him pack and You must be brave.23 Similarly, the allegedly unsplittable verb will execute is not a verb at all but two verbs, the auxiliary verb will and the main verb execute. There is not the slightest reason to interdict an adverb from the position before the main verb, and great writers in English have placed it there for centuries.
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Steven Pinker (The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century)
“
A few days after the fireworks, I gave them a lesson on category nouns versus exact nouns. I hadn’t heard of this distinction prior to opening the textbook. It transpired that a category noun was something like “vegetables,” whereas exact nouns were “beetroot,” “carrots,” “broccoli.” It was better to use exact nouns because this made your writing more precise and interesting. The chapter gave a short explanation followed by an exercise: an A4 page divided into columns. On the left were various category nouns. On the right, you had to fill in at least three corresponding exact nouns. I told the kids they could use their Cantonese-to-English dictionaries. Cynthia Mak asked what to say for “people.” Did it mean “sister,” “brother,” “father,” or “teacher,” “doctor,” “artist,” or— “They’re all okay,” I said. “But if I put ‘sister,’ ‘father,’ ‘brother’ in ‘people,’ then what about here?” She pointed to the box marked “family.” “Okay, don’t do those. Do ‘teacher’ or something.” “But what about here?”—signaling the “professions” row. “Okay, something else for ‘people.’” “Happy people, sad people?” “‘Happy people’ isn’t an exact noun—it’s an adjective plus a category noun.” “So what should I write?” We looked at each other. It was indeed a challenge to describe people in a way not immediately related to how they earned money or their position in the family unit. I said: “How about ‘friend,’ ‘boyfriend,’ ‘colleague’?” “I don’t want to write ‘boyfriend.’” I couldn’t blame her for questioning the exercise. “Friend,” “enemy,” and “colleague” didn’t seem like ways of narrowing down “people” in the way “apple” did for “fruit.” An apple would still be a fruit if it didn’t have any others in its vicinity, but you couldn’t be someone’s nemesis without their hanging around to complete the definition. The same issue cropped up with my earlier suggestions. “Family” was relational, and “profession” was created and given meaning by external structures. Admittedly “adult,” “child,” and “teenager” could stand on their own. But I still found it depressing that the way we specified ourselves—the way we made ourselves precise and interesting—was by pinpointing our developmental stage and likely distance from mortality. Fruit didn’t have that problem.
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Naoise Dolan (Exciting Times)
“
Dryden was a highly prolific literary figure, a professional writer who was at the centre of all the greatest debates of his time: the end of the Commonwealth, the return of the monarch, the political and religious upheavals of the 1680s, and the specifically literary questions of neoclassicism opposed to more modern trends. He was Poet Laureate from 1668, but lost this position in 1688 on the overthrow of James II. Dryden had become Catholic in 1685, and his allegorical poem The Hind and the Panther (1687) discusses the complex issues of religion and politics in an attempt to reconcile bitterly opposed factions. This contains a well-known line which anticipates Wordsworth more than a century later: 'By education most have been misled … / And thus the child imposes on the man'. The poem shows an awareness of change as one grows older, and the impossibility of holding one view for a lifetime:
My thoughtless youth was winged with vain desires,
My manhood, long misled by wandering fires,
Followed false lights…
After 1688, Dryden returned to the theatre, which had given him many of his early successes in tragedy, tragi-comedy, and comedy, as well as with adaptations of Shakespeare.
......
Dryden was an innovator, leading the move from heroic couplets to blank verse in drama, and at the centre of the intellectual debates of the Augustan age. He experimented with verse forms throughout his writing life until Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), which brings together critical, translated, and original works, in a fitting conclusion to a varied career.
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Ronald Carter (The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland)
“
When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too. She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another. Her father had held a position under the English Government and had always been busy and ill himself, and her mother had been a great beauty who cared only to go to parties and amuse herself with gay people. She had not wanted a little girl at all, and when Mary was born she handed her over to the care of an Ayah, who was made to understand that if she wished to please the Mem Sahib she must keep the child out of sight as much as possible. So when she was a sickly, fretful, ugly little baby she was kept out of the way, and when she became a sickly, fretful, toddling thing she was kept out of the way also.
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Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden)
“
First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, 2for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. 3This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, 4who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. 5For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man [1] Christ Jesus, 6who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time. 7For this I was appointed a preacher and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth. 8I desire then that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling; 9likewise also that women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire, 10but with what is
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Anonymous (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (without Cross-References))
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By structural violence, I mean the violence committed by configurations of social inequalities that, in the end, has injurious effects on bodies similar to the violence of a stabbing or shooting. This is what the English working men described by Friedrich Engels called 'social murder'. Much of the structural violence is organized along the fault lines of class, race, citizenship, gender, and sexuality. (...) Symbolic violence works through the perceptions of the 'dominating' and the 'dominated' (in Bourdieu's words), while it tends to benefit those with more power. each group understands not only itself but also the other to belong naturally in their positions in the social hierarchy. (...) Structural violence - with its pernicious effects on health - and symbolic violence - with its subtle naturalization of inequalities on the farm, in the clinic, and in the media - form the nexus of violence and suffering through which the phenomenon of migrant labor in North America is produced.
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Seth Holmes (Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States)
“
Yet there is dynamism in our house. Day to day, week to week, Cady blossoms: a first grasp, a first smile, a first laugh. Her pediatrician regularly records her growth on charts, tick marks indicating her progress over time. A brightening newness surrounds her. As she sits in my lap smiling, enthralled by my tuneless singing, an incandescence lights the room. Time for me is now double-edged: every day brings me further from the low of my last relapse but closer to the next recurrence—and, eventually, death. Perhaps later than I think, but certainly sooner than I desire. There are, I imagine, two responses to that realization. The most obvious might be an impulse to frantic activity: to “live life to its fullest,” to travel, to dine, to achieve a host of neglected ambitions. Part of the cruelty of cancer, though, is not only that it limits your time; it also limits your energy, vastly reducing the amount you can squeeze into a day. It is a tired hare who now races. And even if I had the energy, I prefer a more tortoiselike approach. I plod, I ponder. Some days, I simply persist. If time dilates when one moves at high speeds, does it contract when one moves barely at all? It must: the days have shortened considerably. With little to distinguish one day from the next, time has begun to feel static. In English, we use the word time in different ways: “The time is two forty-five” versus “I’m going through a tough time.” These days, time feels less like the ticking clock and more like a state of being. Languor settles in. There’s a feeling of openness. As a surgeon, focused on a patient in the OR, I might have found the position of the clock’s hands arbitrary, but I never thought them meaningless. Now the time of day means nothing, the day of the week scarcely more. Medical training is relentlessly future-oriented, all about delayed gratification; you’re always thinking about what you’ll be doing five years down the line. But now I don’t know what I’ll be doing five years down the line. I may be dead. I may not be. I may be healthy. I may be writing. I don't know. And so it's not all that useful to spend time thinking about the future - that is, beyond lunch.
”
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Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air)
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In the car ahead, Jane was thinking fast and furiously. She had felt the purpose for which Tarzan had asked a few words with her, and she knew that she must be prepared to give him an answer in the very near future.
He was not the sort of person one could put off, and somehow that very thought made her wonder if she did not really fear him.
And could she love where she feared?
She realized the spell that had been upon her in the depths of that far-off jungle, but there was no spell of enchantment now in prosaic Wisconsin.
Nor did the immaculate young Frenchman appeal to the primal woman in her, as had the stalwart forest god.
Did she love him? She did not know—now.
She glanced at Clayton out of the corner of her eye. Was not here a man trained in the same school of environment in which she had been trained—a man with social position and culture such as she had been taught to consider as the prime essentials to congenial association?
Did not her best judgment point to this young English nobleman, whose love she knew to be of the sort a civilized woman should crave, as the logical mate for such as herself?
Could she love Clayton? She could see no reason why she could not. Jane was not coldly calculating by nature, but training, environment and heredity had all combined to teach her to reason even in matters of the heart.
That she had been carried off her feet by the strength of the young giant when his great arms were about her in the distant African forest, and again today, in the Wisconsin woods, seemed to her only attributable to a temporary mental reversion to type on her part—to the psychological appeal of the primeval man to the primeval woman in her nature.
If he should never touch her again, she reasoned, she would never feel attracted toward him. She had not loved him, then. It had been nothing more than a passing hallucination, super-induced by excitement and by personal contact.
Excitement would not always mark their future relations, should she marry him, and the power of personal contact eventually would be dulled by familiarity.
Again she glanced at Clayton. He was very handsome and every inch a gentleman. She should be very proud of such a husband.
”
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Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan of the Apes (Tarzan, #1))
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Criticizing the “corrupt, questionable, and unqualified leaders [placed] into key positions,” the argument rested on the principle of command responsibility: “The international community has enabled and encouraged bad governance through agreement and silence, and often active partnership.” Moving the issue away from the humanitarian terrain where it often resides, we made corruption relevant to war fighters by explaining its centrality to prospects of victory. “Afghans’ acute disappointment with the quality of governance . . . has contributed to permissiveness toward, or collusion with,” the Taliban, we wrote, laboring to stultify our language with a credible amount of jargon. In plain English: why would a farmer stick out his neck to keep Taliban out of his village if the government was just as bad? If, because of corruption, an ex-policeman like Nurallah was threatening to turn a blind eye to a man planting an IED, others were going further. Corruption, in army-speak, was a force multiplier for the enemy. “This condition is a key factor feeding negative security trends and it undermines the ability of development efforts to reverse these trends,” our draft read.
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Sarah Chayes (Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security)
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While I was intent on improving my language, I met with an English grammar (I think it was Greenwood's), at the end of which there were two little sketches of the arts of rhetoric and logic, the latter finishing with a specimen of a dispute in the Socratic method; and soon after I procur'd Xenophon's Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are many instances of the same method. I was charm'd with it, adopted it, dropt my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and put on the humble inquirer and doubter. And being then, from reading Shaftesbury and Collins, become a real doubter in many points of our religious doctrine, I found this method safest for myself and very embarrassing to those against whom I used it; therefore I took a delight in it, practis'd it continually, and grew very artful and expert in drawing people, even of superior knowledge, into concessions, the consequences of which they did not foresee, entangling them in difficulties out of which they could not extricate themselves, and so obtaining victories that neither myself nor my cause always deserved. I continu'd this method some few years, but gradually left it, retaining only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence; never using, when I advanced any thing that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears to me, or I should think it so or so, for such and such reasons; or I imagine it to be so; or it is so, if I am not mistaken. This habit, I believe, has been of great advantage to me when I have had occasion to inculcate my opinions, and persuade men into measures that I have been from time to time engag'd in promoting; and, as the chief ends of conversation are to inform or to be informed, to please or to persuade, I wish well-meaning, sensible men would not lessen their power of doing good by a positive, assuming manner, that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create opposition, and to defeat every one of those purposes for which speech was given to us, to wit, giving or receiving information or pleasure. For, if you would inform, a positive and dogmatical manner in advancing your sentiments may provoke contradiction and prevent a candid attention. If you wish information and improvement from the knowledge of others, and yet at the same time express yourself as firmly fix'd in your present opinions, modest, sensible men, who do not love disputation, will probably leave you undisturbed in the possession of your error. And by such a manner, you can seldom hope to recommend yourself in pleasing your hearers, or to persuade those whose concurrence you desire. Pope says, judiciously: "Men should be taught as if you taught them not, And things unknown propos'd as things forgot;" farther recommending to us "To speak, tho' sure, with seeming diffidence." And he might have coupled with this line that which he has coupled with another, I think, less properly, "For want of modesty is want of sense." If you ask, Why less properly? I must repeat the lines, "Immodest words admit of no defense, For want of modesty is want of sense." Now, is not want of sense (where a man is so unfortunate as to want it) some apology for his want of modesty? and would not the lines stand more justly thus? "Immodest words admit but this defense, That want of modesty is want of sense." This, however, I should submit to better judgments.
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Benjamin Franklin (The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin)
“
A samurai warfare state of mind called mushin is defined as “the still center,” or the ability to stay calm, read your opponent, and attempt to redirect his aggression in a more positive way. If you cannot keep a still center, you cannot stay in control of yourself or the situation.
The mushin state underlies both physical judo and Verbal Judo—a mind-mouth harmony, if you will. The English word closest to the idea of mushin is disinterested. Many make the mistake of defining disinterested as uninterested. In fact, disinterested means impartial. Dis is from the Latin root meaning “not” and interested is from the Latin word meaning “biased.” So the word means “not biased, open, flexible.” As you can imagine, those are the three great traits of not only a good police officer, but also of any good communicator.
A closed mind misreads people and makes terrible errors. The flexible mind has the surviving strength of the willow tree, which survives even in heavy winds because it bends, it is malleable. This is precisely what we have to do and be when under the influence of verbal abuse.
Being malleable is always superior to that which is unmovable, thus the judo principle of controlling things by going along with them—mastery through adaptation. This allows you the strength to deal with people different from yourself.
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George J. Thompson (Verbal Judo: The Gentle Art of Persuasion)
“
Elizabeth, we’re going to have to stop.”
Elizabeth’s swirling senses began to return to reality, slowly at first, and then with a sickening plummet. Passion gave way to fear and then to anguished shame as she realized she was lying in a man’s arms, her shirt unfastened, her flesh exposed to his gaze and touch. Closing her eyes, she fought back the sting of tears and shoved his hand away, lurching into an upright position. “Let me rise, please,” she whispered, her voice strangled with self-revulsion. Her skin flinched as he began to fasten her shirt, but in order to do it he had to release his hold on her, and the moment he did, she scrambled to her feet.
Turning her back to him, she fastened her shirt with shaking hands and snatched her jacket from the peg beside the fire. He moved so silently that she had no idea he’d stood until his hands settled on her stiff shoulders. “Don’t be frightened of what is between us. I’ll be able to provide for you-“
All of Elizabeth’s confusion and anguish exploded in a burst of tempestuous, sobbing fury that was directed at herself, but which she hurtled at him. Tearing free of his grasp, she whirled around. “Provide for me,” she cried. “Provide what? A-a hovel in Scotland where I’ll stay while you dress the part of an English gentleman so you can gamble away everything-“
“If things go on as I expect,” he interrupted her in a voice of taut calm, “I’ll be one of the richest men in England within a year-two at the most. If they don’t, you’ll still be well provided for.”
Elizabeth snatched her bonnet and backed away from him in a fear that was partly of him and partly of her own weakness. “This is madness. Utter madness.” Turning, she headed for the door.
“I know,” he said gently. She reached for the door handle and jerked the door open. Behind her, his voice stopped her in midstep. “If you change your mind after we leave in the morning, you can reach me at Hammund’s town house in Upper Brook Street until Wednesday. After that I’d intended to leave for India. I’ll be gone until winter.”
“I-I hope you have a safe voyage,” she said, too overwrought to wonder about the sharp tug of loss she felt at the realization he was leaving.
“If you change your mind in time,” he teased, “I’ll take you with me.”
Elizabeth fled in sheer terror from the gentle confidence she’d heard in his smiling voice. As she galloped through the thick fog and wet underbrush she was no longer the sensible, confident young lady she’d been before; instead she was a terrified, bewildered girl with a mountain of responsibilities and an upbringing that convinced her the wild attraction she felt for Ian Thornton was sordid and unforgivable.
”
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Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
“
The undercurrent of despair in our society is epitomized in a German word that first appeared in English in 1963, and is now incorporated into the Oxford English Dictionary. It is torschlusspanik, (pronounced torshlusspanic), defined as "panic at the thought that a door between oneself and life's opportunities has shut." The doors that were once opened through initiation rites are still crucial thresholds in the human psyche, and when those doors do not open, or when they are not recognized for what they are, life shrinks into a series of rejections fraught with torschlusspanik. Torschlusspanik is now a part of our culture because there are so few rites to which individuals will submit in order to transcend their own selfish drives. Without the broader perspective, they see no meaning in the rejection. The door thuds, leaving them bitter or resigned. If, instead, they could temper themselves to a point of total concentration, a bursting point where they could either pass over or fall back as in a rite of passage, then they could test who they are. Their passion would be spent in an all-out positive effort, instead of deteriorating into disillusionment and despair. The terror behind that word torschlusspanik is what drives many people into analysis—the last door has shut, the last rejection has taken place. No door will ever open again. Nothing means anything.
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Marion Woodman (The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation)
“
Today there is much talk about democratic ideals in the outside world. But not in Germany! For here in Germany we had more than enough time-fifteen years-to acquaint ourselves with these democratic ideals. And we ourselves had to pick up the legacy left behind by this democracy.
Now we are being credited with many a truly astounding war aim, especially by the English. After all, England is quite experienced in issuing proclamations of objectives in warfare as it has waged the greatest number of wars the world over.
Truly astounding are the war aims announced to us today. A new Europe will arise. This Europe will be characterized by justice. This justice will render armament obsolete. This will lead to disarmament at last. This disarmament in turn will bring about an economic blossoming. Change and trade will spring up-much trade-free trade. And with the sponsorship of this trade, culture shall once more blossom, and not only culture will benefit, but religion will also prosper.
In other words: we are heading towards a golden age! Well, we have heard of this golden age before. Many times precisely the same people attempted to illustrate its virtues to us who are now flooding us with descriptions of its benefits. The records are old ones, played once too often. We can only pity these gentlemen who cannot even come up with a new idea to trap a great people. For all this they had already promised us in 1918.
Then, too, England’s objectives in the war were the creation of this “new Europe,” the establishment of a “new justice,” of which the “right to selfdetermination of the peoples” was to form an integral part. Back then already they promised us justice to render obsolete-for all time-the bearing of any sort of weaponry.
Back then already they submitted to us a program for disarmament-one for global disarmament. To make this disarmament more evident, it was to be crowned by the establishment of an association of nations bearing no arms.
These were to settle their differences in the future-for even back then there was no doubt that differences would still arise-by talking them to death in discussion and debate, just as is the custom in democratic states. There would be no more shooting under any circumstances! In 1918, they declared a blessed and pious age to come! What came to pass in its stead we all lived to see: the old states were destroyed without even as much as asking their citizenry. Historic, ancient structures were severed, not only state bodies but grown economic structures as well, without anything better to take their place. In total disregard of the principle of the right to self-determination of the peoples, the European peoples were hacked to pieces, torn apart. Great states were dissolved.
Nations were robbed of their rights, first rendered utterly defenseless and then subjected to a division which left only victors and vanquished in this world.
And then there was no more talk of disarmament. To the contrary, armament went on. Nor did any efforts materialize to settle conflicts peacefully. The armed states waged wars just as before. Yet those who had been disarmed were no longer in a position to ward off the aggressions of those well armed.
Naturally, this did not herald economic prosperity but, to the contrary, produced a network of lunatic reparations payments which led to increasing destitution for not only the vanquished, but also the so-called victors themselves. The consequences of this economic destitution were felt most acutely by the German Volk.
International finance remained brutal and squeezed our Volk ruthlessly.
Adolf Hitler – speech in the Sportpalast Berlin, January 30, 1940
”
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Adolf Hitler
“
robbery by European nations of each other's territories has never been a sin, is not a sin to-day. To the several cabinets the several political establishments of the world are clotheslines; and a large part of the official duty of these cabinets is to keep an eye on each other's wash and grab what they can of it as opportunity offers. All the territorial possessions of all the political establishments in the earth—including America, of course—consist of pilferings from other people's wash. No tribe, howsoever insignificant, and no nation, howsoever mighty, occupies a foot of land that was not stolen. When the English, the French, and the Spaniards reached America, the Indian tribes had been raiding each other's territorial clothes-lines for ages, and every acre of ground in the continent had been stolen and re-stolen 500 times. The English, the French, and the Spaniards went to work and stole it all over again; and when that was satisfactorily accomplished they went diligently to work and stole it from each other. In Europe and Asia and Africa every acre of ground has been stolen several millions of times. A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law. Christian governments are as frank to-day, as open and above-board, in discussing projects for raiding each other's clothes-lines as ever they were before the Golden Rule came smiling into this inhospitable world and couldn't get a night's lodging anywhere. In 150 years England has beneficently retired garment after garment from the Indian lines, until there is hardly a rag of the original wash left dangling anywhere. In 800 years an obscure tribe of Muscovite savages has risen to the dazzling position of Land-Robber-in-Chief; she found a quarter of the world hanging out to dry on a hundred parallels of latitude, and she scooped in the whole wash. She keeps a sharp eye on a multitude of little lines that stretch along the northern boundaries of India, and every now and then she snatches a hip-rag or a pair of pyjamas. It is England's prospective property, and Russia knows it; but Russia cares nothing for that. In fact, in our day land-robbery, claim-jumping, is become a European governmental frenzy. Some have been hard at it in the borders of China, in Burma, in Siam, and the islands of the sea; and all have been at it in Africa. Africa has been as coolly divided up and portioned out among the gang as if they had bought it and paid for it. And now straightway they are beginning the old game again—to steal each other's grabbings. Germany found a vast slice of Central Africa with the English flag and the English missionary and the English trader scattered all over it, but with certain formalities neglected—no signs up, "Keep off the grass," "Trespassers-forbidden," etc.—and she stepped in with a cold calm smile and put up the signs herself, and swept those English pioneers promptly out of the country. There is a tremendous point there. It can be put into the form of a maxim: Get your formalities right—never mind about the moralities. It was an impudent thing; but England had to put up with it. Now, in the case of Madagascar, the formalities had originally been observed, but by neglect they had fallen into desuetude ages ago. England should have snatched Madagascar from the French clothes-line. Without an effort she could have saved those harmless natives from the calamity of French civilization, and she did not do it. Now it is too late. The signs of the times show plainly enough what is going to happen. All the savage lands in the world are going to be brought under subjection to the Christian governments of Europe. I am
”
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Mark Twain (Following the Equator)
“
Baron, Baroness
Originally, the term baron signified a person who owned land as a direct gift from the monarchy or as a descendant of a baron. Now it is an honorary title. The wife of a baron is a baroness.
Duke, Duchess, Duchy, Dukedom
Originally, a man could become a duke in one of two ways. He could be recognized for owning a lot of land. Or he could be a victorious military commander. Now a man can become a duke simply by being appointed by a monarch. Queen Elizabeth II appointed her husband Philip the Duke of Edinburgh and her son Charles the Duke of Wales. A duchess is the wife or widow of a duke. The territory ruled by a duke is a duchy or a dukedom.
Earl, Earldom
Earl is the oldest title in the English nobility. It originally signified a chieftan or leader of a tribe. Each earl is identified with a certain area called an earldom. Today the monarchy sometimes confers an earldom on a retiring prime minister. For example, former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan is the Earl of Stockton.
King
A king is a ruling monarch. He inherits this position and retains it until he abdicates or dies. Formerly, a king was an absolute ruler. Today the role of King of England is largely symbolic. The wife of a king is a queen.
Knight
Originally a knight was a man who performed devoted military service. The title is not hereditary. A king or queen may award a citizen with knighthood. The criterion for the award is devoted service to the country.
Lady
One may use Lady to refer to the wife of a knight, baron, count, or viscount. It may also be used for the daughter of a duke, marquis, or earl.
Marquis, also spelled Marquess.
A marquis ranks above an earl and below a duke. Originally marquis signified military men who stood guard on the border of a territory. Now it is a hereditary title.
Lord
Lord is a general term denoting nobility. It may be used to address any peer (see below) except a duke. The House of Lords is the upper house of the British Parliament. It is a nonelective body with limited powers. The presiding officer for the House of Lords is the Lord Chancellor or Lord High Chancellor. Sometimes a mayor is called lord, such as the Lord Mayor of London. The term lord may also be used informally to show respect.
Peer, Peerage
A peer is a titled member of the British nobility who may sit in the House of Lords, the upper house of Parliament. Peers are ranked in order of their importance. A duke is most important; the others follow in this order: marquis, earl, viscount, baron. A group of peers is called a peerage.
Prince, Princess
Princes and princesses are sons and daughters of a reigning king and queen. The first-born son of a royal family is first in line for the throne, the second born son is second in line. A princess may become a queen if there is no prince at the time of abdication or death of a king. The wife of a prince is also called a princess.
Queen
A queen may be the ruler of a monarchy, the wife—or widow—of a king.
Viscount, Viscountess
The title Viscount originally meant deputy to a count. It has been used most recently to honor British soldiers in World War II. Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery was named a viscount. The title may also be hereditary. The wife of a viscount is a viscountess. (In pronunciation the initial s is silent.)
House of Windsor
The British royal family has been called the House of Windsor since 1917. Before then, the royal family name was Wettin, a German name derived from Queen Victoria’s husband. In 1917, England was at war with Germany. King George V announced that the royal family name would become the House of Windsor, a name derived from Windsor Castle, a royal residence. The House of Windsor has included Kings George V, Edward VII, George VI, and Queen Elizabeth II.
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Nancy Whitelaw (Lady Diana Spencer: Princess of Wales)
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True law necessarily is rooted in ethical assumptions or norms; and those ethical principles are derived, in the beginning at least, from religious convictions. When the religious understanding, from which a concept of law arose in a culture, has been discarded or denied, the laws may endure for some time, through what sociologists call "cultural lag"; but in the long run, the laws also will be discarded or denied.
With this hard truth in mind, I venture to suggest that the corpus of English and American laws--for the two arise for the most part from a common root of belief and experience--cannot endure forever unless it is animated by the spirit that moved it in the beginning: that is, by religion, and specifically by the Christian people. Certain moral postulates of Christian teaching have been taken for granted, in the past, as the ground of justice. When courts of law ignore those postulates, we grope in judicial darkness. . . .
We suffer from a strong movement to exclude such religious beliefs from the operation of courts of law, and to discriminate against those unenlightened who cling fondly to the superstitions of the childhood of the race.
Many moral beliefs, however, though sustained by religious convictions, may not be readily susceptible of "scientific" demonstration. After all, our abhorrence of murder, rape, and other crimes may be traced back to the Decalogue and other religious injunctions. If it can be shown that our opposition to such offenses is rooted in religion, then are restraints upon murder and rape unconstitutional?
We arrive at such absurdities if we attempt to erect a wall of separation between the operation of the laws and those Christian moral convictions that move most Americans. If we are to try to sustain some connection between Christian teaching and the laws of this land of ours, we must understand the character of that link. We must claim neither too much nor too little for the influence of Christian belief upon our structure of law. . . .
I am suggesting that Christian faith and reason have been underestimated in an age bestridden, successively, by the vulgarized notions of the rationalists, the Darwinians, and the Freudians. Yet I am not contending that the laws ever have been the Christian word made flesh nor that they can ever be. . . .
What Christianity (or any other religion) confers is not a code of positive laws, but instead some general understanding of justice, the human condition being what it is. . . .
In short, judges cannot well be metaphysicians--not in the execution of their duties upon the bench, at any rate, even though the majority upon the Supreme Court of this land, and judges in inferior courts, seem often to have mistaken themselves for original moral philosophers during the past quarter century. The law that judges mete out is the product of statute, convention, and precedent. Yet behind statute, convention, and precedent may be discerned, if mistily, the forms of Christian doctrines, by which statute and convention and precedent are much influenced--or once were so influenced. And the more judges ignore Christian assumptions about human nature and justice, the more they are thrown back upon their private resources as abstract metaphysicians--and the more the laws of the land fall into confusion and inconsistency.
Prophets and theologians and ministers and priests are not legislators, ordinarily; yet their pronouncements may be incorporated, if sometimes almost unrecognizably, in statute and convention and precedent. The Christian doctrine of natural law cannot be made to do duty for "the law of the land"; were this tried, positive justice would be delayed to the end of time. Nevertheless, if the Christian doctrine of natural law is cast aside utterly by magistrates, flouted and mocked, then positive law becomes patternless and arbitrary.
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Russell Kirk (Rights and Duties: Reflections on Our Conservative Constitution)
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While people will submit to suffering which may hit anyone, they will not so easily submit to suffering which is the result of the decision of authority. It may be bad to be just a cog in an impersonal machine; but it is infinitely worse if we can no longer leave it, if we are tied to our place and to the superiors who have been chosen for us. Dissatisfaction of everybody with his lot will inevitably grow with the consciousness that it is the result of deliberate human decision.
Once government has embarked upon planning for the sake of justice, it cannot refuse responsibility for anybody’s fate or position. In a planned society we shall all know that we are better or worse off than others, not because of circumstances which nobody controls, and which it is impossible to foresee with certainty, but because some authority wills it. And all our efforts directed toward improving our position will have to aim, not at foreseeing and preparing as well as we can for the circumstances over which we have no control, but at influencing in our favor the authority which has all the power. The nightmare of English nineteenth-century political thinkers, the state in which “no avenue to wealth and honor would exist save through the government,” would be realized in a completeness which they never imagined — though familiar enough in some countries which have since passed to totalitarianism.
As soon as the state takes upon itself the task of planning the whole economic life, the problem of the due station of the different individuals and groups must indeed inevitably become the central political problem. As the coercive power of the state will alone decide who is to have what, the only power worth having will be a share in the exercise of this directing power. There will be no economic or social questions that would not be political questions in the sense that their solution will depend exclusively on who wields the coercive power, on whose are the views that will prevail on all occasions.
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Friedrich A. Hayek (The Road to Serfdom)
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At the heart of the Reformation message was a rejection of the power of individual believers, or of the church acting on their behalf, to affect God's judgment about who should be saved and who should be damned. Martin Luther had been convinced, like Augustine, of the powerlessness and unworthiness of fallen humanity, and struck by the force of God's mercy. Good works could not merit this mercy, or affect a sovereign God; instead individual sinners were entirely dependent on God's mercy and justified (saved) by faith alone. Jean Calvin, a generation later, developed more clearly the predestinarian implications - since some men were saved and some were damned, and since this had nothing to do with their own efforts, it must mean that God had created some men predestined for salvation (the elect). This seemed to imply that He must also have predestined other men for damnation (double predestination), a line of argument which led into dangerous territory. Some theologians, Calvin's close associate Beza among them, went further and argued that the entire course of human history was foreordained prior to Adam and Eve's fall in the Garden of Eden. These views (particularly the latter, 'supralapsarian' arguments) seemed to their opponents to suggest that God was the author of the sin, both in Eden and in those who were subsequently predestined for damnation. They also raised a question about Christ's sacrifice on the cross - had that been made to atone for the sins of all, or only of the elect? Because of these dangers many of those with strong predestinarian views were unsure about whether the doctrine should be openly preached. Clever theologians, like expensive lawyers, are adept at failing to push arguments too far and there were many respectable positions short of the one adopted by Beza. But predestination was for many Protestants a fundamental - retreat from this doctrine implied a role for free will expressed in works rather than justification by faith. It thus reopened the door to the corruptions of late-medieval Christianity.
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Michael Braddick (God's Fury, England's Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars)
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Finally, I would like to point out that now in the age of English, choosing a language policy is not the exclusive concern of non-English-speaking nations. It is also a concern for English-speaking nations, where, to realize the world’s diversity and gain the humility that is proper to any human being, people need to learn a foreign language as a matter of course. Acquiring a foreign language should be a universal requirement of compulsory education. Furthermore, English expressions used in international conferences should be regulated and standardized to some extent. Native English speakers need to know that to foreigners, Latinate vocabulary is easier to understand than what to the native speakers is easy, child-friendly language. At international conferences, telling jokes that none but native speakers can comprehend is inappropriate, even if fun. If native speakers of English – those who enjoy the privilege of having their mother tongue as the universal language – would not wait for others to protest but would take steps to regulate themselves, what respect they would earn from the rest of the world! If that is too much to ask, the rest of the world would appreciate it if they would at least be aware of their privileged position – and more important, be aware that the privilege is unwarranted. In this age of global communication, some language or other was bound to be come a universal language used in every corner of the world English became that language not because it is intrinsically more universal than other languages, but because through a series of historical coincidences it came to circulate ever more widely until it reached the tipping point. That’s all there is to it. English is an accidental universal language.
If more English native speakers walked through the doors of other languages, they would discover undreamed-of landscapes. Perhaps some of them might then begin to think that the truly blessed are not they themselves, but those who are eternally condemned to reflect on language, eternally condemned to marvel at the richness of the world.
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Minae Mizumura (The Fall of Language in the Age of English)
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Sky's The Limit"
[Intro]
Good evening ladies and gentlemen
How's everybody doing tonight
I'd like to welcome to the stage, the lyrically acclaimed
I like this young man because when he came out
He came out with the phrase, he went from ashy to classy
I like that
So everybody in the house, give a warm round of applause
For the Notorious B.I.G
The Notorious B.I.G., ladies and gentlemen give it up for him y'all
[Verse 1]
A nigga never been as broke as me - I like that
When I was young I had two pair of Lees, besides that
The pin stripes and the gray
The one I wore on Mondays and Wednesdays
While niggas flirt I'm sewing tigers on my shirts, and alligators
You want to see the inside, I see you later
Here comes the drama, oh, that's that nigga with the fake, blaow
Why you punch me in my face, stay in your place
Play your position, here come my intuition
Go in this nigga pocket, rob him while his friends watching
And hoes clocking, here comes respect
His crew's your crew or they might be next
Look at they man eye, big man, they never try
So we rolled with them, stole with them
I mean loyalty, niggas bought me milks at lunch
The milks was chocolate, the cookies, butter crunch
88 Oshkosh and blue and white dunks, pass the blunts
[Hook: 112]
Sky is the limit and you know that you keep on
Just keep on pressing on
Sky is the limit and you know that you can have
What you want, be what you want
Sky is the limit and you know that you keep on
Just keep on pressing on
Sky is the limit and you know that you can have
What you want, be what you want, have what you want, be what you want
[Verse 2]
I was a shame, my crew was lame
I had enough heart for most of them
Long as I got stuff from most of them
It's on, even when I was wrong I got my point across
They depicted me the boss, of course
My orange box-cutter make the world go round
Plus I'm fucking bitches ain't my homegirls now
Start stacking, dabbled in crack, gun packing
Nickname Medina make the seniors tote my Niñas
From gym class, to English pass off a global
The only nigga with a mobile can't you see like Total
Getting larger in waists and tastes
Ain't no telling where this felon is heading, just in case
Keep a shell at the tip of your melon, clear the space
Your brain was a terrible thing to waste
88 on gates, snatch initial name plates
Smoking spliffs with niggas, real-life beginner killers
Praying God forgive us for being sinners, help us out
[Hook]
[Verse 3]
After realizing, to master enterprising
I ain't have to be in school by ten, I then
Began to encounter with my counterparts
On how to burn the block apart, break it down into sections
Drugs by the selections
Some use pipes, others use injections
Syringe sold separately Frank the Deputy
Quick to grab my Smith & Wesson like my dick was missing
To protect my position, my corner, my lair
While we out here, say the Hustlers Prayer
If the game shakes me or breaks me
I hope it makes me a better man
Take a better stand
Put money in my mom's hand
Get my daughter this college grant so she don't need no man
Stay far from timid
Only make moves when your heart's in it
And live the phrase sky's the limit
Motherfuckers
See you chumps on top
[Hook]
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The Notorious B.I.G
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And now I come to the first positively important point which I wish to make. Never were as many men of a decidedly empiricist proclivity in existence as there are at the present day. Our children, one may say, are almost born scientific. But our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout. Now take a man of this type, and let him be also a philosophic amateur, unwilling to mix a hodge-podge system after the fashion of a common layman, and what does he find his situation to be, in this blessed year of our Lord 1906? He wants facts; he wants science; but he also wants a religion. And being an amateur and not an independent originator in philosophy he naturally looks for guidance to the experts and professionals whom he finds already in the field. A very large number of you here present, possibly a majority of you, are amateurs of just this sort.
Now what kinds of philosophy do you find actually offered to meet your need? You find an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough, and a religious philosophy that is not empirical enough. If you look to the quarter where facts are most considered you find the whole tough-minded program in operation, and the 'conflict between science and religion' in full blast.
The romantic spontaneity and courage are gone, the vision is materialistic and depressing. Ideals appear as inert by-products of physiology; what is higher is explained by what is lower and treated forever as a case of 'nothing but'—nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort. You get, in short, a materialistic universe, in which only the tough-minded find themselves congenially at home.If now, on the other hand, you turn to the religious quarter for consolation, and take counsel of the tender-minded philosophies, what do you find?
Religious philosophy in our day and generation is, among us English-reading people, of two main types. One of these is more radical and aggressive, the other has more the air of fighting a slow retreat. By the more radical wing of religious philosophy I mean the so-called transcendental idealism of the Anglo-Hegelian school, the philosophy of such men as Green, the Cairds, Bosanquet, and Royce. This philosophy has greatly influenced the more studious members of our protestant ministry. It is pantheistic, and undoubtedly it has already blunted the edge of the traditional theism in protestantism at large.
That theism remains, however. It is the lineal descendant, through one stage of concession after another, of the dogmatic scholastic theism still taught rigorously in the seminaries of the catholic church. For a long time it used to be called among us the philosophy of the Scottish school. It is what I meant by the philosophy that has the air of fighting a slow retreat. Between the encroachments of the hegelians and other philosophers of the 'Absolute,' on the one hand, and those of the scientific evolutionists and agnostics, on the other, the men that give us this kind of a philosophy, James Martineau, Professor Bowne, Professor Ladd and others, must feel themselves rather tightly squeezed. Fair-minded and candid as you like, this philosophy is not radical in temper. It is eclectic, a thing of compromises, that seeks a modus vivendi above all things. It accepts the facts of darwinism, the facts of cerebral physiology, but it does nothing active or enthusiastic with them. It lacks the victorious and aggressive note. It lacks prestige in consequence; whereas absolutism has a certain prestige due to the more radical style of it.
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William James