Era Of Peace Quotes

In the post-Warhol era a single gesture such as uncrossing one's legs will have more significance than all the pages in War and Peace.

This time was different. The tools of this era--phones, computers--enabled people to move at a blurring pace. Yet despite all they accomplished, they were never at peace.

When each one of us become an active and living book of lessons for those who see our examples, the boundaries of religious interpretation will give way to the new era of brotherhood and peace we're waiting for.

A wise man from my home once told me that these mountains have seen far too much suffering and killing, and that each rock and every boulder you see represents a mujahadeen who died fighting either the Russians or the Taliban. Then the man went on to say that now that the fighting is finished, it is time to build a new era of peace-and the first step in that process is to take up the stones and start turning them into schools.

After a week, it's better. I miss her. I mourn her. But some peace has returned. She had been so unattainable - so young, so much a citizen of a different era - that it is hard to feel fully deprived.

The coming era of Artificial Intelligence will not be the era of war, but be the era of deep compassion, non-violence, and love.

[He] seemed at home and content now they were sailing, as though leaving the port meant the cessation of all his worries, and heading out to sea a new era of peace and amenity.

We can no longer rely on the external teachings of Buddha, Confucius, or Christ. The era of organized religion controlling every aspect of life is over. No single religion has all the answers. Construction of shrine and temple buildings is not enough. Establish yourself as a living buddha image. We all should be transformed into goddesses of compassion or victorious buddhas.

Let us dedicate this new era to mothers around the world, and also to the mother of all mothers -- Mother Earth. It is up to us to keep building bridges to bring the world closer together, and not destroy them to divide us further apart. We can pave new roads towards peace simply by understanding other cultures. This can be achieved through traveling, learning other languages, and interacting with others from outside our borders. Only then will one truly discover how we are more alike than different. Never allow language or cultural traditions to come between brothers and sisters. The same way one brother may not like his sister's choice of fashion or hairstyle, he will never hate her for her personal style or music preference. If you judge a man, judge only his heart. And if you should do so, make sure you use the truth in your conscience when weighing one's character. Do not measure anybody strictly based on the bad you see in them and ignore all the good.

(...) y todo aquello unido era el río, todas las voces, los fines, los anhelos, los sufrimientos, los placeres; el río era la música de la vida. Y cuando Siddharta escuchaba con atención al río, podía oír esa canción de mil voces; y sino escuchaba el dolor ni la risa, si no ataba su alma a una de aquellas voces y no penetraba su yo en ella ni oía todas las tonalidades, entonces percibía únicamente el total, la unidad. En aquel momento, la canción de mil voces, consistía en una sola palabra: el Om, la perfección.

Remember your math: an anecdote is not a trend. Remember your history: the fact that something is bad today doesn't mean it was better in the past. Remember your philosophy: one cannot reason that there's no such thing as reason, or that something is true or good because God said it is. And remember your psychology: much of what we know isn't so, especially when our comrades know it too. Keep some perspective. Not every problem is a Crisis, Plague, Epidemic, or Existential Threat, and not every change is the End of This, the Death of That, or the Dawn of a Post-Something Era. Don't confuse pessimism with profundity: problems are inevitable, but problems are solvable, and diagnosing every setback as a symptom of a sick society is a cheap grab for gravitas. Finally, drop the Nietzsche. His ideas may seem edgy, authentic, baad,while humanism seems sappy, unhip, uncool But what's so funny about peace, love, and understanding?

The elders say Shim Cheong was fashioned by the Goddess of Creation to be the Sea God’s final bride, the one to ease all his sorrows and usher in a new era of peace in the kingdom. She has skin forged from the purest of pearls. She has hair stitched from the deepest night. She has lips colored by the blood of men.

Dor came from a time before the written word, a time when if you wished to speak with someone, you walked to see them. This time was different. The tools of this era—phones, computers—enabled people to move at a blurring pace. Yet despite all they accomplished, they were never at peace. They constantly checked their devices to see what time it was— the very thing Dor had tried to determine once with a stick, a stone, and a shadow.

Not only to myself or before the mirror or at the hour of my death, which I hope will be long in coming, but in the presence of my children and my wife and in the face of the peaceful life I’m building, I must acknowledge: (1) That under Stalin I wouldn’t have wasted my youth in the gulag or ended up with a bullet in the back of my head. (2) That in the McCarthy era I wouldn’t have lost my job or had to pump gas at a gas station. (3) That under Hitler, however, I would have been one of those who chose the path of exile, and that under Franco I wouldn’t have composed sonnets to the caudillo or the Holy Virgin like so many lifelong democrats. One thing is as true as the other. My bravery has its limits, certainly, but so does what I’m willing to swallow. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragicomedy.

I listened to a feminist astrologer portend that in 2020 humanity would begin transitioning into a two-thousand year era of either matriarchy or chaos, communal peace and love or tribal fear and loathing—the choice was ours.

The airplane said Mr. Hargraves would cut down the distance between nations and peoples. The airplane would be a great instrument in making people understand one another in making people love one another. The airplane said Mr. Hargraves was ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity and mutual understanding. Everyone would be friends said Mr. Hargraves when the airplane knitted the world together so that the people of the world understood each other.

for the existentialists, what generated anxiety was not the godlessness of the world, per se, but rather the freedom to choose between God and godlessness. Though freedom is something we actively seek, the freedom to choose generates anxiety. “When I behold my possibilities,” Kierkegaard wrote, “I experience that dread which is the dizziness of freedom, and my choice is made in fear and trembling.” Many people try to flee anxiety by fleeing choice. This helps explain the perverse-seeming appeal of authoritarian societies—the certainties of a rigid, choiceless society can be very reassuring—and why times of upheaval so often produce extremist leaders and movements: Hitler in Weimar Germany, Father Coughlin in Depression-era America, or Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Vladimir Putin in Russia today. But running from anxiety, Kierkegaard believed, was a mistake because anxiety was a “school” that taught people to come to terms with the human condition.

Statesmen should remember that they have been elected to persuade and to lead, and not just to accept as fixed the momentary moods and pernicious prejudices of the public.

Nurture the child within oneself and define a new era of global peace and understanding.'-Dalia Qutob

But I was learning that you can’t fast-forward through grief or read a CliffsNotes version of your life and expect to make peace with it.

The healing happens the day you recognize that this isn’t about justice or fairness; it’s about self-preservation and peace.

The magic of Italy seems to be in its ability to connect to some time out of time, some era that is unmarked by modernity. There is so much peacefulness in being present, right here.

The day shall usher in a new era of liberty when a large number of men and women, taking courage from the idea of serving humanity and liberating them from sufferings and distress, decide that there is no alternative before them except devoting their lives for this cause. They will wage a war against their oppressors, tyrants or exploiters, not to become kings, or to gain any reward here or in the next birth or after death in paradise; but to cast off the yoke of slavery, to establish liberty and peace they will tread this perilous, but glorious path.

Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won... A new era is upon us. Even the lesson of victory itself brings with it profound concern, both for our future security and the survival of civilization. The destructiveness of the war potential, through progressive advances in scientific discovery, has in fact now reached a point which revises the traditional concepts of war. Men since the beginning of time have sought peace... Military alliances, balances of power, leagues of nations, all in turn have failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war. We have had our last chance. If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our matchless advances in science, art, literature and all material and cultural developments of the past two thousand years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.

Mr. Hargraves who was superintendent of schools made a speech before the flight. He told about how the invention of the airplane was the greatest step forward man had made in a hundred years. The airplane said Mr. Hargraves would cut down the distance between nations and peoples. The airplane would be a great instrument in making people understand one another in making people love one another. The airplane said Mr. Hargraves was ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity and mutual understanding. Everyone would be friends said Mr. Hargraves when the airplane knitted the world together so that the people of the world understood each other.

When boys unite hearts with all souls and creatures they become gentle men. When girls unite hearts with all souls and creatures they become gentle women. When humanity unites with the heart of the ONE, an era of peace and love shall return to earth.

But the loneliness of her life had developed in her a sensitiveness which could not endure situations such as the present; difficulties which are of small account to people who take their part in active social life, harassed her to the destruction of all peace.

What theorists of the old modern age had to confront were the altogether unexpected disasters of the twentieth century: that after three hundred years of the scientific revolution and in the emergence of rational ethics in European Christendom, Western man in the twentieth century elected instead of an era of peace and freedom an orgy of wars, tortures, genocide, suicide, murder, and rapine unparalleled in history. The old modern age ended in 1914. In 1916 one million Frenchmen and Germans were killed in a single battle.

The greatest victory in living memory – of the United States over the Soviet Union – was achieved without any major military confrontation. The United States then got a fleeting taste of old-fashioned military glory in the First Gulf War, but this only tempted it to waste trillions on humiliating military fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan. China, the rising power of the early twenty-first century, has assiduously avoided all armed conflicts since its failed invasion of Vietnam in 1979, and it owes its ascent strictly to economic factors. In this it has emulated not the Japanese, German and Italian empires of the pre-1914 era, but rather the Japanese, German and Italian economic miracles of the post-1945 era. In all these cases economic prosperity and geopolitical clout were achieved without firing a shot.

There is coming a day, when freedom will just be a essence of the mind, an inner dwelling that was once physically attainable. They will tell you where you can live, and what you can wear and drive, what and how much you can eat and drink, and how to purchase those. They will strip you of your religion, race, gender, national origin, age, color, creed, views and power, and have control of the population. They will set in a new world order, and put you in the back of the line, marked and branded. Everything before will be erased, and the new will be manipulated. And what you believe most, can only be kept secret, for all must fall in line of their govern. Anything outside will be abolished. Even death, will be sought, but restrained. They will execute complete and total control over everything, and be sole owners of your soul. The light, that once guided will go dim, and liberty will be like an unwilled bird, suppressed in the cage of your ribs; wings cut off.

Heade’s calm is unsteady, storm-stirred; we respond in our era to its hint of the nervous and the fearful. His weather is interior weather, in a sense, and he perhaps was, if far from the first to portray a modern mood, an ambivalent mood tinged with dread and yet imbued with a certain lightness.The mood could even be said to be religious: not an aggressive preachment of God’s grandeur but a kind of Zen poise and acceptance, represented by the small sedentary or plodding foreground figures that appear uncannily at peace as the clouds blacken and the lightning flashes.

That is our mandate and path as we shift from a period of competition and war to an era of cooperation and peace for all people.

Il pensiero le tornava sempre a un punto: che non c'era nessuno capace d'intendere, neanche lontanamente, tutto quello che lei intendeva, tutto quello che c'era in lei.

To be a Bahá’í simply means to love all the world; to love humanity and try to serve it; to work for universal peace and universal brotherhood.

Most people don’t appreciate just how peaceful an era we live in. None of us was alive a thousand years ago, so we easily forget how much more violent the world used to be.

To receive this incredible gift all you have to do is follow four simple steps: 1) desire it; 2) know it; 3) grow in its virtue; 4) live it.

What shall we say when people ask us how we met?” The corners of her mouth twitched. “We’ll say I was in my nightrail, brushing my hair in peaceful solitude, when you climbed up to my balcony and—” “Do you even have a balcony?” She pursed her lips. “You’re not invited upon it, regardless.” He gave her a slow, naughty smile. “No one’s ever *invited* to scale a balcony.

And for those like Norma and Macky, born and raised in the forties and fifties, it was such a drastic change from that era when everyone felt safe, and your only knowledge of the Middle East was a picture on a Christmas card of a bright star shining down on a peaceful manger, not the place full of hate and rage they saw daily on the television and read about in the newspapers.

Though we live in an era of relative peace and comfort, we have settled into a mood of pessimism about the long-term future, fearful that our superpower nation is somehow rotting from within.

So, is the modern era one of mindless slaughter, war and oppression, typified by the trenches of World War One, the nuclear mushroom cloud over Hiroshima and the gory manias of Hitler and Stalin? Or is it an era of peace, epitomised by the trenches never dug in South America, the mushroom clouds that never appeared over Moscow and New York, and the serene visages of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King?

Some say that the weeping willows once stood upright and strong, but that the broken hearts of lovers so touched the heart of the trees that they bent in grief and were never able to straighten themselves again, weeping the tears of each lover. Others say that they weep for the pain that mankind inflicts upon the earth and that they will right themselves, once again, when a new era of peace and kindness becomes a reality.

The era of Terra’s history that had spawned sublight interstellar exploration and the generation ships had not been one of trust and peaceful cooperation between peoples. More one of desperate gambles and bloody-nailed survival.

There's something ironic about a man like Ron Finley—who plants gardens in spaces white supremacy created to nutritionally and intellectually starve minorities—being celebrated by the mainstream white news media. The goal of guerrilla gardening isn't to make black folks look more peaceful and benevolent; it's to engage in a new type of fight in which we are taking care of ourselves in an era that's actively trying to poison and kill us. It's an act of survival. It's great that people like Ron and other urban farmers are engaging with DIY, grassroots activism to fight back. However, we need to watch how we frame their stories and most importantly, we need to watch out for who is framing these stories.

in a hundred years. The airplane said Mr. Hargraves would cut down the distance between nations and peoples. The airplane would be a great instrument in making people understand one another in making people love one another. The airplane said Mr. Hargraves was ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity and mutual understanding. Everyone would be friends said Mr. Hargraves when the airplane knitted the world together so that the people of the world understood each other.

Better to work for one's self alone. The public is so stupid. Who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire? Ah, blessed peaceful times of the past, blessed eras of powdered wigs! You lived with complete assurance, poised on your high heels, twirling your silver-headed canes! Beneath us the earth is trembling. Where can we place our fulcrum, even admitting that we possess the lever? The thing we all lack is not style, nor that dexterity of finger and bow known as talent. We have a large orchestra, a rich palette, a variety of resources. We know many more tricks and dodges, probably, than were ever known before. No; what we lack is the intrinsic principle, the soul of the thing, the very idea of the subject.We take notes, we make journeys: emptiness! Emptiness! We become scholars, archaeologists, historians, doctors, cobblers, connoisseurs. What good is all that? Where is the heart, the verve, the sap? Where to start out from? Where to go to?

Jesus certainly was not a “Bible believer,” as we use that term in the post Billy Graham era of American fundamentalist religiosity that’s used as a trade-marked product to sell religion. Jesus didn’t take the Jewish scriptures at face value. In fundamentalist terms, Jesus was a rule-breaking relativist who wasn’t even “saved,” according to evangelical standards. Evangelicals insist that you have to believe very specific interpretations of the Bible to be saved. Jesus didn’t. He undercut the scriptures.

it was the horror of the two world wars—Verdun, the Somme, Hiroshima—that led to our own era’s questioning of the tragic view of war. Such a reaction was certainly true and understandable in a Europe that nearly destroyed itself in two devastating industrial wars within a roughly twenty-year period. Yet out of such numbing losses we may have missed the lesson of the horror. The calamity of sixty million dead was not just because nationalistic Westerners went to war in an industrial age of weaponry of mass annihilation, but rather because the liberal democracies were unwilling to make moderate sacrifices to keep the peace well before 1914 and 1939—when real resolve could have stopped Prussian militarism, and then Nazism without millions of the blameless perishing.

He wanted to conquer himself, to make life itself submit to him, to cause people to live rather than die. The Way of the Sword should not be used merely for his own perfection. It should be a source of strength for governing people and leading them to peace and happiness.

When Communism fell in 1989, the temptation for Western commentators to gloat triumphantly proved irresistible. This, it was declared, marked the end of History. Henceforth, the world belonged to liberal capitalism – there was no alternative – and we would all march forward in unison towards a future shaped by peace, democracy and free markets. Twenty years on this assertion looks threadbare. There can be no question that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the domino-like collapse of Communism states from the suburbs of Vienna to the shores of the Pacific marked a very significant transition: one in which millions of men and women were liberated from a dismal and defunct ideology and its authoritarian institutions. But no one could credibly assert that what replaced Communism was an era of idyllic tranquility. There was no peace in post-Communist Yugoslavia, and precious little democracy in any of the successor states of the Soviet Union. As for free markets, they surely flourished, but it is not clear for whom. The West – Europe and the United States above all – missed a once-in-a-century opportunity to re-shape the world around agreed and improved international institutions and practices. Instead, we sat back and congratulated ourselves upon having won the Cold War: a sure way to lose the peace. The years from 1989 to 2009 were consumed by locusts.

And then peace broke out. It seems surprising, in view of what had been and what would one day follow, but there now began an era of tranquillity between England and Scotland, and consequently along the Border, which was to endure almost uninterrupted for nearly two hundred years.

Dusk, they’d labeled the room—as if out of all the worlds mentioned within, this world remained their focus. This place. Pelias told her it was a world the Daglan had long coveted but had not had the chance to conquer. An empty world, but one of plenty. She had no way of knowing that he had spent our era of peace learning ancient summoning magic and searching the cosmos for whatever remained of the Daglan on other worlds. What he wanted from them, I can only guess—perhaps he knew that to wrest the Trove from Theia and seize power for himself, he needed someone more powerful than he was.

The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes.As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money powers of the country will endeavor to prolong it’s reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.

The foundation of morality on the human sentiments of what is acceptable behavior versus repulsive behavior has always made morals susceptible to change. Much of what was repulsive 100 years ago is normal today, and - although it may be a slippery slope - what is repulsive today is possible to be normal 100 years into tomorrow; the human standard has always been but to push the envelope. In this way, all generations are linked, and one can only hope that every extremist, self-proclaimed progressive is considering this ultimate 'Utopia' to which his kindness will lead at the end of the chain.

Everyone is a forgiveness cheerleader these days and will encourage other people to forgive repeat offenders such as narcissists. That drive to “keep the peace” means that the toxic person keeps getting forgiveness and Get Out of Jail Free cards and is never made to be accountable for his or her behavior.

The late modern era has seen unprecedented levels not only of violence and horror, but also of peace and tranquillity. Charles Dickens wrote of the French Revolution that ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ This may be true not only of the French Revolution, but of the entire era it heralded.

On Christmas Eve, my mother and I and Teddy and Anita went to Mass together. The shadowy church was lit only by an overhead light trained on the altar and by the flames of hundreds of flickering candles in glass cups set all around the nave. If you squinted, the columns and vaults seemed to melt away, all the grandness of the architecture receded, and the space became intimate, almost as if you were cast back many centuries to a humble place where a miracle had occurred, where the radiance issued not from candles but from the air itself, back to a less hectic era before the invention of clocks, to a night of peace from which a renewed world would then begin to date itself.

Vinge compares it to the Cold War strategy called MAD—mutually assured destruction. Coined by acronym-loving John von Neumann (also the creator of an early computer with the winning initials, MANIAC), MAD maintained Cold War peace through the promise of mutual obliteration. Like MAD, superintelligence boasts a lot of researchers secretly working to develop technologies with catastrophic potential. But it’s like mutually assured destruction without any commonsense brakes. No one will know who is ahead, so everyone will assume someone else is. And as we’ve seen, the winner won’t take all. The winner in the AI arms race will win the dubious distinction of being the first to confront the Busy Child.

The Heian Period (794–1185) was Japan’s classical era, a time of peace and opulence, when the imperial court in Heian-kyō (“Capital of Peace and Tranquility”: later Kyoto) was the fountainhead of culture, and the arts flourished. Toward the end, however, political power slipped from the aristocracy to the warrior class, the decline of the imperial court led to the decay of the capital, and peace gave way to unrest. This was the part of the Heian Period that interested Akutagawa, who identified it with fin-de-siècle Europe, and he symbolized the decay with the image of the crumbling Rashōmon gate that dominates his story. Director Kurosawa Akira borrowed Akutagawa’s gate and went him one better, picturing it as a truly disintegrating structure, entirely bereft of its Heian lacquer finish, and suggestive of the moral decay against which his characters struggle. His film Rashōmon (1950) was based on two of Akutagawa’s stories, “Rashōmon” and “In a Bamboo Grove.” Both—themselves based on tales from the twelfth century—reach far more skeptical conclusions than the film regarding the dependability of human nature and its potential for good. (Jay Rubin)

Let us hope that the advent of a successful flying machine, now only dimly foreseen and nevertheless thought to be possible, will bring nothing but good into the world; that it shall abridge distance, make all parts of the globe accessible, bring men into closer relation with each other, advance civilization, and hasten the promised era in which there shall be nothing but peace and goodwill among all men.

Most people don’t appreciate just how peaceful an era we live in. None of us was alive a thousand years ago, so we easily forget how much more violent the world used to be. And as wars become more rare they attract more attention. Many more people think about the wars raging today in Afghanistan and Iraq than about the peace in which most Brazilians and Indians live. Even more importantly, it’s easier to relate to the

On December 21, we will be celebrating in Guatemala the beginning of a new era in accordance with the calendar of the Mayan civilization. The new era, the 13 Baktun, is an invitation to renew physical and spiritual energies in an environment of peace, cooperation and dialogue. All ... are invited to join us to share in this dawn of a new era. The Mayans of yesterday and today, and all Guatemalans, await you with open arms.

All Russians I knew hoped passionately that, with Hitler beaten, the War allies might continue friendship into long years of peace. They knew, of course - they had known all through the war - that there were elements in America that sabotaged the alliance, and even some who would rather see Hitler win. For two years while Russians perished by millions, they had watched their Allies delay the promised "second front" in the west.

Keller, who devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind, never wavered in her belief that our society needed radical change. Having herself fought so hard to speak, she helped found the American Civil Liberties Union to fight for the free speech of others. She sent $100 to the NAACP with a letter of support that appeared in its magazine The Crisis—a radical act for a white person from Alabama in the 1920s. She supported Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate, in each of his campaigns for the presidency. She composed essays on the women’s movement, on politics, on economics. Near the end of her life, she wrote to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, leader of the American Communist Party, who was then languishing in jail, a victim of the McCarthy era: “Loving birthday greetings, dear Elizabeth Flynn! May the sense of serving mankind bring strength and peace into your brave heart!

Encouraging campaign crowds to join in lauding economic gains for minorities is quite a strange approach for a racist. For a quick refresher: racists order the National Guard to block entry to universities. They segregate federal facilities, and they order the police to fire water cannons at peaceful protesters seeking basic human rights. Please note, when you actively work to enrich and empower blacks, like Donald Trump has done for the last three and a half years, you are at odds with racists.

Indeed. But what is sane? Especially here in ‘our own country’––in this doomstruck era of Nixon. We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the Sixties. Uppers are going out of style. This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling ‘consciousness expansion’ without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously. After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him…but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badly for himself, because he took too many others down with him. Not that they didn’t deserve it: No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create…a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody––or at least some force––is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel. This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit that has kept the Catholic Church going for so many centuries. It is also the military ethic…a blind faith in some higher and wiser ‘authority.’ The Pope, The General, The Prime Minister…all the way up to “God”.

This book is about what may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history. Believe it or not—and I know that most people do not—violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence. The decline, to be sure, has not been smooth; it has not brought violence down to zero; and it is not guaranteed to continue. But it is an unmistakable development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars to the spanking of children.

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.

Keep some perspective. Not every problem is a Crisis, Plague, Epidemic, or Existential Threat, and not every change is the End of This, the Death of That, or the Dawn of a Post-Something Era. Don't confuse pessimism with profundity: problems are inevitable, but problems are solvable, and diagnosing every setback as a symptom of a sick society is a cheap grab for gravitas. Finally, drop the Nietzsche. His ideas may seem edgy, authentic, baaad, while humanism seems sappy, unhip, uncool. But what's so funny about peace, love, and understanding?

What I’ve learned from these long voyages of ours is that, in the end, we all strive for our own good. It does not matter what race we are, who we are… We have that one thing in common – the wish to live this life the best way possible. Hence, our definitions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ always remain subjective – no matter how many perspectives we consider, no matter how objective we try to be, we still judge according to our own beliefs, principles, and opinions – things that we develop throughout our entire life. In truth, nothing is either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but is both good and bad, all at the same time, depending on the perspective and the relation with other matters. This world is much more versatile than we thought it was. The only universal truth is the energy of life and love – the unending circle, and the undying emotion – interconnected for eternity. Life bears love, and love bears life. Hence, I believe that whatever era may come, major concepts shall never change. We should pave our way and live to our content, staying harmonious with ourselves, because in the end, we shall never know what is right and what is wrong. We interrelate just like the tiniest substances – molecules, atoms, etc. – and the biggest substances – planets, galaxies, universes… During these interrelations, there shall be unions as well as collisions, destructions as well as creations… As long as we live, there shall be both oppositions and friendships. There shall be peace, there shall be war, and then peace again. This shall not change. Hope will motivate us, mind shall guide us, love shall rejoice us, death shall sadden us, but life will go on. Life is always moving and ardent, never to stop or pause. This is the only universal truth that exists in this world – the energy of ardour and life.

Dor came from a time before the written word, a time when if you wished to speak with someone, you walked to see them. This time was different. The tools of this era—phones, computers—enabled people to move at a blurring pace. Yet despite all they accomplished, they were never at peace. They constantly checked their devices to see what time it was—the very thing Dor had tried to determine once with a stick, a stone, and a shadow. Why did you measure the days and nights? To know. Sitting high above the city, Father Time realized that knowing something and understanding it were not the same thing.

You are to make up your mind whether it is to be God or man. Whether you are to be free or a slave. Whether it is to be progress or stagnation. As long as man loves a phantom in the sky more than he loves his fellow man, there will never be peace upon this earth; so long as man worships a Tyrant as the "Fatherhood of God," there will never be a "Brotherhood of Man." You must make the choice, you must come to the decision. Is it to be God or Man? Churches or Homes—preparation for death or happiness for the living? If ever man needed an example of the benefit of the one against the other, he need but read the pages of history for proof of how religion retarded progress and provoked hatred among the children of men. When theology ruled the world, man was a slave. The people lived in huts and hovels. They were clad in rags and skins; they devoured crusts and gnawed bones; the priests wore garments of silk and satin; carried mitres of gold and precious stones, robbed the poor and lived upon the fat of the land! Here and there a brave man appeared to question their authority. These martyrs to intellectual emancipation slowly and painfully broke the spell of superstition and ushered in the Age of Reason and the Dawn of Science. Man became the only god that man can know. He no longer fell upon his knees in fear. He began to enjoy the fruits of his own labor. He discovered a way to relieve himself from the drudgery of continuous toil; he began to enjoy a few comforts of life—and for the first time upon this earth he found a few moments for happiness. It is far more important to learn how to live than to learn how to pray. A new day and a new era dawned for him. His labors produced enormous dividends. He looked at the sky for the first time and saw that it was blue! He searched the heavens and found no God. He no longer feared the manifestations of nature.

For hundreds of years these religions provided satisfying goals for people to spend their lives pursuing. But today it is more difficult to accept their worldviews as definitive. The form in which religions have presented their truths—myths, revelations, holy texts—no longer compels belief in an era of scientific rationality, even though the substance of the truths may have remained unchanged. A vital new religion may one day arise again. In the meantime, those who seek consolation in existing churches often pay for their peace of mind with a tacit agreement to ignore a great deal of what is known about the way the world works.

Não tinham mais nada para dizer? Seus olhos, no entanto, estavam repletos de uma conversa mais séria; e, enquanto esforçavam-se para encontrar frases banais, ambos sentiam um mesmo langor invadir-lhes; era como um murmúrio da alma, profundo, contínuo, que dominava o das vozes. Tomados de espanto por aquela nova suavidade, não pensavam em narrar ao outro aquela sensação ou em descobrir sua causa. As alegrias futuras, assim como as costas dos trópicos, projetam suas indolências natais sobre a imensidão que as precede, uma espécie de brisa perfumada, e adormece-se naquela embriaguez sem nem mesmo preocupar-se com o horizonte, o qual não se pode avistar.

Sometimes time can play tricks. One moment it idles by, an hour can seem a lifetime, such as when sitting by the river at dusk watching the bats snatching insects above the limpid waters; the breaching fish causing ringed ripples and a satisfying plop. Other times, time flashes by in an immodest fashion. So it is with the start of war. First time quivers with the last strum of a wonderful peace, the note holding in the air, mysterious and haunting, filling the listener with awe. Then, with a rising crescendo the terror starts with uncouth haste; with a boom the listener is shaken from their reverie and delivered into the servitude, of an ear-shattering cacophony.

To the samurai of this age, the most important thing in the world was honor. As a class, they virtually competed with each other to see who would be the first to die for it. The government had until recently been too busy with its wars to work out an adequate administrative system for a country at peace, and even Kyoto was governed only by a set of loose, makeshift regulations. Still, the emphasis of the warrior class on personal honor was respected by farmers and townsmen alike, and it played a role in preserving peace. A general consensus regarding what constituted honorable behavior, and what did not, made it possible for the people to govern themselves even with inadequate laws.

would be easier to satisfy his ambitions in Poland, but the Russian documents show clearly that this was not his main motivation. On the contrary, the emperor believed that so long as Napoleon ruled neither the German settlement nor European peace would be secure. The basic point was that Alexander was convinced that Russian and European security depended on each other. That is still true today. But perhaps there is some inspiration to be drawn from a story in which the Russian army advancing across Europe in 1813–14 was in most places seen as an army of liberation, whose victories meant escape from Napoleon’s exactions, an end to an era of constant war, and the restoration of European trade and prosperity.

It is especially true of the seven decades that have elapsed since the end of World War Two. During this period humankind has for the first time faced the possibility of complete self-annihilation and has experienced a fair number of actual wars and genocides. Yet these decades were also the most peaceful era in human history – and by a wide margin. This is surprising because these very same decades experienced more economic, social and political change than any previous era. The tectonic plates of history are moving at a frantic pace, but the volcanoes are mostly silent. The new elastic order seems to be able to contain and even initiate radical structural changes without collapsing into violent conflict.3

He who saw the Deep, the country's foundation, [who] knew ... , was wise in all matters! [Gilgamesh, who] saw the Deep, the country's foundation, [who] knew ... , was wise in all matters! [He] ... everywhere ... and [learnt] of everything the sum of wisdom. He saw what was secret, discovered what was hidden, he brought back a tale of before the Deluge. He came a far road, was weary, found peace, and set all his labours on a tablet of stone. He built the rampart of Uruk-the-Sheepfold, of holy Eanna, the sacred storehouse. See its wall like a strand of wool, view its parapet that none could copy! Take the stairway of a bygone era, draw near to Eanna, seat of Ishtar the goddess, that no later king could ever copy!

During the Meiji era, the Japanese Zen master, Nan-in had a visitor from a respected university – a professor who wanted to learn about Zen. Nan-in served the professor a pot of tea, but when the cupwas full, he continued pouring until the cup was overflowing. The startled professor watched in amazement until he could no longer restrain himself from intervening, “The cup is full and no more will go in. You’re making a mess!” “Like this cup,” Nan-insaid, “You are full of your own opinions, artificial concepts and negative speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?” Like the learned professor who wanted to understand spirituality, you too must empty your cup and have an open mind and heart.

We currently live in an era of human history that some have referred to as the Long Peace. There has not been a war for more than seven decades between great powers such as we’ve seen from Mesopotamia onward—the world wars, the Napoleonic Wars, the Thirty Years’ War, the Hundred Years’ War, the Punic Wars. Large-scale warfare between the most powerful states has been a regular feature of human history right up until about seventy-five years ago—right about the time that humanity’s weaponry made a quantum leap forward in power. This is not to say there haven’t been bloody conflicts—human violence is, alas, ongoing and constant—but we’ve managed to avoid major conflicts between the superpowers. Have we seen the last of the big wars?

It’s clear where the world is going. We’re entering a world where every thermostat, every electrical heater, every air conditioner, every power plant, every medical device, every hospital, every traffic light, every automobile will be connected to the Internet. Think about what it will mean for the world when those devices are the subject of attack.” Then he made his pitch. “The world needs a new, digital Geneva Convention. It needs new rules of the road,” Smith said, intoning the words slowly for emphasis. “What we need is an approach that governments will adopt that says they will not attack civilians in times of peace, they will not attack hospitals, they will not attack the electrical grid, they will not attack the political processes of other countries.

Yet when, one day, standing on the outskirts of Yokohama town, bristling with its display of modern miscellanies, I watched the sunset in your southern sea, and saw its peace and majesty among your pine-clad hills,—with the great Fujiyama growing faint against the golden horizon, like a god overcome with his own radiance,—the music of eternity welled up through the evening silence, and I felt that the sky and the earth and the lyrics of the dawn and the dayfall are with the poets and idealists, and not with the marketmen robustly contemptuous of all sentiment,—that, after the forgetfulness of his own divinity, man will remember again that heaven is always in touch with his world, which can never be abandoned for good to the hounding wolves of the modern era, scenting human blood and howling to the skies.

European statesmen of the First World War era did—to some extent—recognize the problem and its significance. As soon as they began to plan their annexation of the Middle East, Allied leaders recognized that Islam’s hold on the region was the main feature of the political landscape with which they would have to contend. Lord Kitchener, it will be remembered, initiated in 1914 a policy designed to bring the Moslem faith under Britain’s sway. When it looked as though that might not work—for the Sherif Hussein’s call to the Faithful in 1916 fell on deaf ears—Kitchener’s associates proposed instead to sponsor other loyalties (to a federation of Arabic-speaking peoples, or to the family of King Hussein, or to about-to-be-created countries such as Iraq) as a rival to pan-Islam. Indeed they framed the postwar Middle East settlement with that object (among others) in view.

The global jihad espoused by Osama bin Laden and other contemporary extremists is clearly rooted in contemporary issues and interpretations of Islam. It owes little to the Wahhabi tradition, outside of the nineteenth-century incorporation of the teachings of Ibn Taymiyya and the Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyyah into the Wahhabi worldview as Wahhabism moved beyond the confines of Najd and into the broader Muslim world. The differences between the worldviews of bin Laden and Ibn Abd al-Wahhab are numerous. Bin Laden preaches jihad; Ibn Abd al-Wahhab preached monotheism. Bin Laden preaches a global jihad of cosmic importance that recognizes no compromise; Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s jihad was narrow in geographic focus, of localized importance, and had engagement in a treaty relationship between the fighting parties as a goal. Bin Laden preaches war against Christians and Jews; Ibn Abd al-Wahhab called for treaty relationships with them. Bin Laden’s jihad proclaims an ideology of the necessity of war in the face of unbelief; Ibn Abd al-Wahhab preached the benefits of peaceful coexistence, social order, and business relationships. Bin Laden calls for the killing of all infidels and the destruction of their money and property; Ibn Abd al-Wahhab restricted killing and the destruction of property… The militant Islam of Osama bin Laden does not have its origins in the teachings of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and is not representative of Wahhabi Islam as it is practiced in contemporary Saudi Arabia, yet for the media it has come to define Wahabbi Islam in the contemporary era. However, “unrepresentative” bin Laden’s global jihad of Islam in general and Wahhabi Islam in particular, its prominence in headline news has taken Wahhabi Islam across the spectrum from revival and reform to global jihad.

Besides producing reductive scientific and religious systems, the old herding cultures produced reductive and predatory economic systems that increasingly viewed humans as economic units and led gradually to gross inequalities in the distribution of wealth. By the historic era three thousand years ago, we see in our most ancient writings such as Homer, the Old Testament, and Sumerian cuneiform writings a well-established economic system dominated by rich cattle-owning kings battling over lands for their livestock, with the masses of people reduced to mere resources who fought, produced, and consumed to benefit the wealthy elite. Early science was used to manipulate livestock bloodlines to maximize flesh, milk, and wool output, and religion was used to justify and even mandate the slaughter of animals for food. These are precisely the institutions we have inherited and that operate today and live in us because we continue to eat foods derived from reduced animals.

Paradox is any self-contradictory proposition that, when investigated, may prove to be well-founded or true. Once understood, it opens the gateway to higher wisdom. But how can contradictory principles both be true? As the Buddhist Riddle of Five Truths puts it: “It is right. It is wrong. It is both right and wrong. It is neither right nor wrong. All exist simultaneously.” Charles Dickens expressed the paradox of his era, equally true today, when he wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,” going on to describe that time as one of belief and incredulity, light and darkness, hope and despair. Two opposing statements can each be true depending on the observer: it’s true that spiders are merciless killers from the viewpoint of tiny insects caught in their webs—but for most humans, nearly all spiders are harmless creatures. A story of the Sufi sage Mullah Nasruddin expresses the nature of paradox when he’s asked to arbitrate between two men with opposing views. Hearing the first man, he remarks, “You’re right.” When he hears the second man, he also says, “You’re right.” When a bystander points out, “They can’t both be right,” the mullah scratches his head and says, “You’re right.” Let’s go deeper and consider four central sets of paradoxical truths: * Time is real. It moves from past to present to future. * There is no time, no past, no future—only the eternal present. * You possess free will and can thus take responsibility for your choices. * Free will is an illusion—your choices are influenced, even predetermined, by all that preceded them. * You are, or possess, a separate inner self existing within a body. * No separation exists—you are a part of the same Consciousness shining through billions of eyes. * Death is an inevitable reality you’ll meet at the end of life. * The death of the inner self is an illusion. Life is eternal. Must you choose one assertion and reject the other? Or is there a way to meaningfully resolve and even reconcile such apparent contradictions?

Christianity has been the means of reducing more languages to writing than have all other factors combined. It has created more schools, more theories of education, and more systems than has any other one force. More than any other power in history it has impelled men to fight suffering, whether that suffering has come from disease, war or natural disasters. It has built thousands of hospitals, inspired the emergence of the nursing and medical professions, and furthered movement for public health and the relief and prevention of famine. Although explorations and conquests which were in part its outgrowth led to the enslavement of Africans for the plantations of the Americas, men and women whose consciences were awakened by Christianity and whose wills it nerved brought about the abolition of slavery (in England and America). Men and women similarly moved and sustained wrote into the laws of Spain and Portugal provisions to alleviate the ruthless exploitation of the Indians of the New World. Wars have often been waged in the name of Christianity. They have attained their most colossal dimensions through weapons and large–scale organization initiated in (nominal) Christendom. Yet from no other source have there come as many and as strong movements to eliminate or regulate war and to ease the suffering brought by war. From its first centuries, the Christian faith has caused many of its adherents to be uneasy about war. It has led minorities to refuse to have any part in it. It has impelled others to seek to limit war by defining what, in their judgment, from the Christian standpoint is a "just war." In the turbulent Middle Ages of Europe it gave rise to the Truce of God and the Peace of God. In a later era it was the main impulse in the formulation of international law. But for it, the League of Nations and the United Nations would not have been. By its name and symbol, the most extensive organization ever created for the relief of the suffering caused by war, the Red Cross, bears witness to its Christian origin. The list might go on indefinitely. It includes many another humanitarian projects and movements, ideals in government, the reform of prisons and the emergence of criminology, great art and architecture, and outstanding literature.

Unlike most preachers in the medieval era, Francis was conflicted and sometimes even hostile toward academics and theologians. He believed that book knowledge was like material possessions — too much of it occasioned pride and got in the way of simple devotion to Jesus. (In The Last Christian, Adolf Holl imagined Francis meeting Augustine, Barth, Aquinas, and Bultmann in heaven for the first time and asking them what they would be without their books. When they can’t come up with an answer, Francis says, “Without your books perhaps you might have become Christians” [p. 63].) When Francis preached, he avoided theological arguments and polemics like the plague. Rather, his preaching was more autobiographical than intellectual, more performative than argumentative, more spontaneous than scripted, more genuine than contrived, more about transformation than about information. The endgame was to help his listeners find peace, reconciliation, and shalom with God, themselves, others, and creation. As Francis said, “We have been called to heal wounds, to unite what has fallen apart, and to bring home those who have lost their way.

Mr. President, Dr. Biden, Madam Vice President, Mr. Emhoff, Americans and the world, when day comes we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry asea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast. We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace. In the norms and notions of what just is isn’t always justice. And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it. Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished. We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one. And yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect. We are striving to forge our union with purpose. To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man. And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another. We seek harm to none and harmony for all. Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true. That even as we grieved, we grew. That even as we hurt, we hoped. That even as we tired, we tried that will forever be tied together victorious. Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division. Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid. If we’re to live up to her own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made. That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb if only we dare. It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit. It’s the past we step into and how we repair it. We’ve seen a forest that would shatter our nation rather than share it. Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy. This effort very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated. In this truth, in this faith we trust for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us. This is the era of just redemption. We feared it at its inception. We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour, but within it, we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves so while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe? Now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us? We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be a country that is bruised, but whole, benevolent, but bold, fierce, and free. We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation. Our blunders become their burdens. But one thing is certain, if we merge mercy with might and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright. So let us leave behind a country better than one we were left with. Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one. We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the West. We will rise from the wind-swept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution. We will rise from the Lake Rim cities of the Midwestern states. We will rise from the sun-baked South. We will rebuild, reconcile and recover in every known nook of our nation, in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful. When day comes, we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid. The new dawn blooms as we free it. For there is always light. If only we’re brave enough.

John Quincy Adams on Islam: “In the seventh century of the Christian era, a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar [i.e., Muhammad], the Egyptian, combining the powers of transcendent genius, with the preternatural energy of a fanatic, and the fraudulent spirit of an impostor, proclaimed himself as a messenger from Heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth. Adopting from the sublime conception of the Mosaic law, the doctrine of one omnipotent God; he connected indissolubly with it, the audacious falsehood, that he was himself his prophet and apostle. Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST: TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE…. Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. The war is yet flagrant…While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and good will towards men.” (Emphasis in the original)

Now that the worst cold is over, now that the snow is beginning to thaw in the Crimea and in southern Russia, I am unable to leave my post, as preparations for the final confrontation are being made, to settle accounts with this conspiracy in which the banking houses in the plutocratic world and the vaults of the Kremlin pursue the same goal: the extermination of the Aryan people and races. This community of Jewish capitalism and Communism is nothing new to us old National Socialists, especially to you, my oldest comrades in arms. As before, during, and after the First World War in our country, so today the Jews and again only the Jews have to be held responsible for tearing apart the nations. There is a difference, however, if we compare the present world struggle with the end of the war from 1914–1918. In 1919, we National Socialists were a small group of believers who not only recognized the international enemy of mankind but also fought him. Today, the ideas of our National Socialist and Fascist revolution have conquered great and mighty states. My prophecy will be fulfilled that this war will not destroy the Aryan, but, instead, it will exterminate the Jew. Whatever the struggle may bring, however long it may last, this will be its final result. And only then, after the elimination of these parasites, a long era of international understanding, and therefore of true peace, will come over the suffering world. Adolf Hitler – proclamation for the 22-th anniversary of the N.S.D.A.P. (read by Gauleiter Adolf Wagner) Fuhrer Headquarters, February 24, 1942

On the other hand, white women face the pitfall of being seduced into joining the oppressor under the pretense of sharing power. This possibility does not exist in the same way for women of Color. The tokenism that is sometimes extended to us is not an invitation to join power; our racial "otherness" is a visible reality that makes that quite clear. For white women there is a wider range of pretended choices and rewards for identifying with patriarchal power and its tools. Today, with the defeat of ERA, the tightening economy, and increased conservatism, it is easier once again for white women to believe the dangerous fantasy that if you are good enough, pretty enough, sweet enough, quiet enough, teach the children to behave, hate the right people, and marry the right men, then you will be allowed to co-exist with patriarchy in relative peace, at least until a man needs your job or the neighborhood rapist happens along. And true, unless one lives and loves in the trenches it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless. But Black women and our children know the fabric of our lives is stitched with violence and with hatred, that there is no rest. We do not deal with it only on the picket lines, or in dark midnight alleys, or in the places where we dare to verbalize our resistance. For us, increasingly, violence weaves through the daily tissues of our living — in the supermarket, in the classroom, in the elevator, in the clinic and the schoolyard, from the plumber, the baker, the saleswoman, the bus driver, the bank teller, the waitress who does not serve us.

Cribbage!” I declared, pulling out the board, a deck of cards, and pen and paper, “Ben and I are going to teach you. Then we can all play.” “What makes you think I don’t know how to play cribbage?” Sage asked. “You do?” Ben sounded surprised. “I happen to be an excellent cribbage player,” Sage said. “Really…because I’m what one might call a cribbage master,” Ben said. “I bet I’ve been playing longer than you,” Sage said, and I cast my eyes his way. Was he trying to tell u something? “I highly doubt that,” Ben said, “but I believe we’ll see the proof when I double-skunk you.” “Clearly you’re both forgetting it’s a three-person game, and I’m ready to destroy you both,” I said. “Deal ‘em,” Ben said. Being a horse person, my mother was absolutely convinced she could achieve world peace if she just got the right parties together on a long enough ride. I didn’t know about that, but apparently cribbage might do the trick. I didn’t know about that, but apparently cribbage might do the trick. The three of us were pretty evenly matched, and Ben was impressed enough to ask sage how he learned to play. Turned out Sage’s parents were historians, he said, so they first taught him the precursor to cribbage, a game called noddy. “Really?” Ben asked, his professional curiosity piqued. “Your parents were historians? Did they teach?” “European history. In Europe,” Sage said. “Small college. They taught me a lot.” Yep, there was the metaphorical gauntlet. I saw the gleam in Ben’s eye as he picked it up. “Interesting,” he said. “So you’d say you know a lot about European history?” “I would say that. In fact, I believe I just did.” Ben grinned, and immediately set out to expose Sage as an intellectual fraud. He’d ask questions to trip Sage up and test his story, things I had no idea were tests until I heard Sage’s reactions. “So which of Shakespeare’s plays do you think was better served by the Globe Theatre: Henry VIII or Troilus and Cressida?” Ben asked, cracking his knuckles. “Troilus and Cressida was never performed at the Globe,” Sage replied. “As for Henry VIII, the original Globe caught fire during the show and burned to the ground, so I’d say that’s the show that really brought down the house…wouldn’t you?” “Nice…very nice.” Ben nodded. “Well done.” It was the cerebral version of bamboo under the fingernails, and while they both tried to seem casual about their conversation, they were soon leaning forward with sweat beading on their brows. It was fascinating…and weird. After several hours of this, Ben had to admit that he’d found a historical peer, and he gleefully involved Sage in all kinds of debates about the minutiae of eras I knew nothing about…except that I had the nagging sense I might have been there for some of them. For his part, Sage seemed to relish talking about the past with someone who could truly appreciate the detailed anecdotes and stories he’d discovered in his “research.” By the time we started our descent to Miami, the two were leaning over my seat to chat and laugh together. On the very full flight from Miami to New York, Ben and Sage took the two seats next to each other and gabbed and giggled like middle-school girls. I sat across from them stuck next to an older woman wearing far too much perfume.

Foreign nongovernment organizations (NGOs) that support Russian democratic civic groups are a particular target of Russian accusations of foreign economic intrigue. In 2004, President Putin accused Russian NGOs of pursuing "dubious group and commercial interests" for taking foreign money. FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev told the Russian State Duma in 2005 that the FSB had uncovered spies working in foreign-sponsored NGOs. He further claimed, "Foreign secret services are ever more actively using non-traditional methods for their work and, with the help of different NGOs educational programs, are propagandizing their interests, particularly in the former Soviet Union." Patrushev accused the United States of placing spies undercover within the Peace Corps, which was expelled from Russia in 2002, the Saudi Red Crescent, and the Kuwaiti NGO Society for Social Reform. Patrushev attributed an economic motive to these perceived foreign plots, alleging that industrialized states did not want "a powerful economic competitor like Russia." Echoing Soviet-era accusations of nefarious Western economic intent, he claimed that Russia had lost billions of dollars per year due to U.S., EU, and Canadian "trade discrimination. Pushing for stronger regulation of NGOs, Patrushev said, "The imperfectness of legislation and lack of efficient mechanisms for state oversight creates a fertile ground for conducting intelligence operations under the guise of charity and other activities. In 2012, Putin signed the "foreign agent law," which ordered Russian civil rights organizations that received any foreign funding to register as "foreign agents.

Still, the appeal of regressive ideas is perennial, and the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress always has to be made. When we fail to acknowledge our hard-won progress, we may come to believe that perfect order and universal prosperity are the natural state of affairs, and that every problem is an outrage that calls for blaming evildoers, wrecking institutions, and empowering a leader who will restore the country to its rightful greatness. I have made my own best case for progress and the ideals that made it possible, and have dropped hints on how journalists, intellectuals, and other thoughtful people (including the readers of this book) might avoid contributing to the widespread heedlessness of the gifts of the Enlightenment. Remember your math: an anecdote is not a trend. Remember your history: the fact that something is bad today doesn’t mean it was better in the past. Remember your philosophy: one cannot reason that there’s no such thing as reason, or that something is true or good because God said it is. And remember your psychology: much of what we know isn’t so, especially when our comrades know it too. Keep some perspective. Not every problem is a Crisis, Plague, Epidemic, or Existential Threat, and not every change is the End of This, the Death of That, or the Dawn of a Post-Something Era. Don’t confuse pessimism with profundity: problems are inevitable, but problems are solvable, and diagnosing every setback as a symptom of a sick society is a cheap grab for gravitas. Finally, drop the Nietzsche. His ideas may seem edgy, authentic, baaad, while humanism seems sappy, unhip, uncool. But what’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?

Elijah’s mission is to return “the so-called Negro” to Islam, to separate the chosen of Allah from this doomed nation. Furthermore, the white man knows his history, knows himself to be a devil, and knows that his time is running out, and all his technology, psychology, science, and “tricknology” are being expended in the effort to prevent black men from hearing the truth. This truth is that at the very beginning of time there was not one white face to be found in all the universe. Black men ruled the earth and the black man was perfect. This is the truth concerning the era that white men now refer to as prehistoric. They want black men to believe that they, like white men, once lived in caves and swung from trees and ate their meat raw and did not have the power of speech. But this is not true. Black men were never in such a condition. Allah allowed the Devil, through his scientists, to carry on infernal experiments, which resulted, finally, in the creation of the devil known as the white man, and later, even more disastrously, in the creation of the white woman. And it was decreed that these monstrous creatures should rule the earth for a certain number of years—I forget how many thousand, but, in any case, their rule now is ending, and Allah, who had never approved of the creation of the white man in the first place (who knows him, in fact, to be not a man at all but a devil), is anxious to restore the rule of peace that the rise of the white man totally destroyed. There is thus, by definition, no virtue in white people, and since they are another creation entirely and can no more, by breeding, become black than a cat, by breeding, can become a horse, there is no hope for them.

All of us sit here at this conference and feel secure in our belief that we live in an era beyond this kind of…authoritarian regime change; but what sort of political climate do you think could potentially break apart our current stasis and deliver us back in time, so to speak? Thank you, I am gratified there has been so much interest in our little project. Gilead Studies languished for many years, I suppose those who had lived through those times did not want them resurrected for various reasons including what might have been done to them and what they themselves might have done. But at this distance, we can allow ourselves some perspective. It’s fortunate that is the last question as my voice is giving out. As to your question, in times of peace and plenty, it is hard to remember the conditions that have led to authoritarian regime changes in the past. And it is even harder to suppose that we ourselves would ever make such choices or allow them to be made. But when there is a perfect storm and collapse of the established order is in the works precipitated by environmental stresses that lead to food shortages, economic factors such as unrest due to unemployment, a social structure that is top heavy with too much wealth being concentrated among too few, then scapegoats are sought and blamed, fear is rampant, and there is pressure to trade what we think of as liberty for what we think of as safety. And, when the birth rate of any society is low enough to create an aging shrinking population, then commercial and military authorities will become alarmed. Their customer base and their recruitment base will be in jeopardy and there will be extreme pressure on women of childbearing age to make up the population deficit, thus our handmaid and her tale.

He imagined himself at the lectern discussing the ancient Greeks to his American students: “The First Persian War, in which Miltiades defeats Darius at Marathon in 490 BC, leads to the Second Persian War, in which the Athenian navy commanded by Themistocles destroys the Persian navy under Xerxes at Salamis in 480 BC. Ten years of war gives the Greeks fifty years of peace, a golden age. The Athenians secure peace on the Hellespont through the Delian League, a mutual-security pact in which the other Greek city-states pay Athens a tribute to protect them against future Persian aggression. Sound familiar?” Lin Bao would then imagine himself looking out at his class, at their blank expressions, in which the past held no relevance, in which there was only the future and that future would always be American. Then, in his imagined class, Lin Bao would tell his students of their past but also of their future. He would explain how America’s golden age was born out of the First and Second World Wars, just as Greece had found its greatest era of prosperity in the aftermath of the two Persian Wars. Like the Athenians with the Delian League, Lin Bao would explain how the Americans consolidated power with mutual-security pacts such as NATO, in which they would make the largest contributions in exchange for military primacy over the western world—much as the Athenians had gained military primacy of the then-known world through the Delian League. Lin Bao would always wait for the question he knew was coming, in which one of his students would ask why it all ended. What external threat overwhelmed the Delian League? What invader accomplished what the Persian fleet could not at Salamis? And Lin Bao would tell his students that no invader had come, no foreign horde had sabotaged the golden age forged by Miltiades, Themistocles, and Greece’s other forefathers. “Then how?” they would ask. “If the Persians couldn’t do it, who did?” And so, he would say, “The end came—as it always does—from within.

Ken MacLeod, a Scottish science fiction author, describes the Singularity as “the Rapture for nerds” and in the same way Christians are divided into preterist, premillennialist, and postmillennialist camps regarding the timing of the Parousia,39 Apocalyptic Techno-Heretics can be divided into three sects, renunciationist, apotheosan, and posthumanist. Whereas renunciationists foresee a dark future wherein humanity is enslaved or even eliminated by its machine masters and await the Singularity with the same sort of resignation that Christians who don’t buy into Rapture doctrine anticipate the Tribulation and the Antichrist, apotheosans anticipate a happy and peaceful amalgamation into a glorious, godlike hive mind of the sort envisioned by Isaac Asimov in his Foundation novels. Posthumanists, meanwhile, envision a detente between Man and Machine, wherein artificial intelligence will be wedded to intelligence amplification and other forms of technobiological modification to transform humanity and allow it to survive and perhaps even thrive in the Posthuman Era .40 Although it is rooted entirely in science and technology,41 there are some undeniable religious parallels between the more optimistic visions of the Singularity and conventional religious faith. Not only is there a strong orthogenetic element inherent in the concept itself, but the transhuman dream of achieving immortality through uploading one’s consciousness into machine storage and interacting with the world through electronic avatars sounds suspiciously like shedding one’s physical body in order to walk the streets of gold with a halo and a harp. Furthermore, the predictions of when this watershed event is expected to occur rather remind one of Sir Isaac Newton’s tireless attempts to determine the precise date of the Eschaton, which he finally concluded would take place sometime after 2065, only thirty years after Kurzweil expects the Singularity. So, if they’re both correct, at least Mankind can console itself that the Machine Age will be a short one.

What was the battle? What were the aims of the romantics? Why was the subject the focus of such violent interest? Hugo and his generation were all ‘enfants du siècle’, all, give or take a year or two, born with the century. Brought up amidst the dramas of Napoleon’s wars, they had reached manhood to the anticlimax of peace and Bourbon rule. Restless and dissatisfied, their dreams of military glory frustrated, they had turned them- selves instead towards the liberation of the arts, their foes no longer the armies of Europe but the tyrannies of classical tradition. For thirty years, while the nation’s energies had been absorbed in politics and war, the arts had virtually stood still in France, frozen, through lack of challenge, in the classical attitudes of the old régime. The violent emotions and experiences of the Napoleonic era had done much to render them meaningless. ‘Since the cam- paign in Russia,’ said a former officer to Stendhal, ‘Iphigénie en Aulide no longer seems such a good play.’ By the 1820s while the academic establishment, hiding its own sterility behind the great names of the past, continued to denounce all change, the ice of clas- sicism was beginning to crack. New influences were crowding in from abroad: Chateaubriand, the ‘enchanter’, had cast his spell on the rising generation; the po- etry of Lamartine, Hugo and Vigny heralded the spring. An old society lay in ruins; the tremendous forces which had overturned it were sweeping at last through the realms of art and literature, their momentum all the greater for having been so long delayed. Nor, despite the seeming stability of the Restoration, had the political impetus of earlier years been spent. In the aftermath of the Empire exhaustion had brought a temporary longing for repose. Now, to the excitement of creative ferment was added a hidden dimension: a growing undercurrent of political dissent, as yet unexpressed for fear of reprisal. The romantic rebellion, with its claims for freedom in the arts, cloaked the political revolution once more preparing in the shadows.