“
I love classic beauty. It’s an idea of beauty with no standard.
”
”
Karl Lagerfeld
“
Hale." Kat sighed. "The headmaster's car? Really? That's not to cliched for you?"
What can I say?" He shrugged. "I'm an old-fashioned guy. Besides, it's a classic for a reason." He leaned against the window. "It's good to see you, Kat."
Kat didn't know what to say. It's good to see you, too? Thanks for getting me kicked out? Is it possible you've gotten even hotter? I think I might have missed you?
”
”
Ally Carter
“
Innovation! One cannot be forever innovating. I want to create classics
”
”
Coco Chanel
“
A classic,' suggested Anthony, 'is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it's safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It's acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion.
”
”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
“
I guess you can call me "old fashioned". I prefer the book with the pages that you can actually turn. Sure, I may have to lick the tip of my fingers so that the pages don't stick together when I'm enraptured in a story that I can't wait to get to the next page. But nothing beats the sound that an actual, physical book makes when you first crack it open or the smell of new, fresh printed words on the creamy white paper of a page turner.
”
”
Felicia Johnson
“
In classic Steve fashion, he would agree to something, but it would never happen,” said Lack. “He would set you up and then pull it off the table. He’s pathological, which can be useful in negotiations. And he’s a genius.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
“
London is speared by the tube map of fashion zone: zone one is classic-edgy, zone two is edgy-dowdy while the counties do a classic, edgy, dowdy hotch potch - epitomised so beautifully by Kate Moss.
”
”
Tyne O'Connell
“
The Classic Notting Hill junkie, i.e; Armani underwear, Pink’s shirt and Burberry belt tourniquets
”
”
Tyne O'Connell (Latest Accessory (Meet Me at the Bar, #2))
“
God did not make this person as I would have made him. He did not give him to me as a brother for me to dominate and control, but in order that I might find above him the Creator. Now the other person, in the freedom with which he was created, becomes the occasion of joy, whereas before he was only a nuisance and an affliction. God does not will that I should fashion the other person according to the image that seems good to me, that is, in my own image; rather in his very freedom from me God made this person in His image. I can never know beforehand how God's image should appear in others. That image always manifests a completely new and unique form that comes solely from God's free and sovereign creation. To me the sight may seem strange, even ungodly. But God creates every man in the likeness of His Son, the Crucified. After all, even that image certainly looked strange and ungodly to me before I grasped it.
”
”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community)
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Her voice was trained, supple as leather, precise as a knife thrower's blade. Singing or talking, it had the same graceful quality, and an accent I thought at first was English, but then realized was the old-fashioned American of a thirties movie, a person who could get away with saying 'grand.' Too classic, they told her when she went out on auditions. It didn't mean old. It meant too beautiful for the times, when anything that lasted longer than six months was considered passe. I loved to listen to her sing, or tell me stories about her childhood in suburban Connecticut, it sounded like heaven.
”
”
Janet Fitch (White Oleander)
“
In taking that photograph, I understood something I will never forget: how I wished to arrest all the beauty that came before me. Not the classical beauty of symmetry and exact proportions or the fancy of fashion, which is ever-changing with the seasons, but the beauty of a soul, that inner life that reveals itself so seldom, just for an instant, and only if you look closely and learn to see with an open heart.
”
”
Elizabeth Ross (Belle Epoque)
“
Fashion is merely a form of ugliness so unbearable that we are compelled to alter it every six months.
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”
Oscar Wilde (Only Dull People Are Brilliant at Breakfast (Penguin Little Black Classics, #119))
“
This man bore no resemblance to the bearded, grizzled Akeley of the snapshot; but was a younger and more urban person, fashionably dressed, and wearing only a small, dark moustache.
”
”
H.P. Lovecraft (The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack: 40 Modern and Classic Lovecraftian Stories)
“
What are we after when we open one of those books? What is it that makes a classic a classic? ... in old-fashioned terms, the answer is that it wll elevate your spirit. And that's why I can't take much stock in the idea of going through a list of books or 'covering' a fixed number of selections, or anyway striving for the blessed state of having read this, or the other. Having read a book means nothing. Reading a book may be the most tremendous experience of your life; having read it is an item in your memory, part of your receding past... Why we have that odd faith in the magic of having read a book, I don't know. We don't apply the same principle elsewhere: We don't believe in having heard Mendelssohn's violin concerto...
I say, don't read the classics -- try to discover your own classics; every life has its own.
”
”
Rudolf Flesch (How to Make Sense)
“
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor -- anywhere in the world.
”
”
Patrick Henry (15 Documents and Speeches That Built America (Unique Classics) (Declaration of Independence, US Constitution and Amendments, Articles of Confederation, Magna Carta, Gettysburg Address, Four Freedoms))
“
You see, you have classical features,” I explained, in a matter-of-fact voice. “It seems a waste when I’m not a gentleman.” He grinned — a little sarcastic sort of grin. “Don’t talk like that,” I said quickly. “Gentlemen are men who behave like gentlemen. And you certainly do.” He shook his head. “You can only be a gentleman if you’re born one, Miss Cassandra.” “Stephen, that’s old-fashioned nonsense,” I said. “Really, it is. And, by the way, will you please stop calling me ‘Miss’ Cassandra.
”
”
Dodie Smith (I Capture the Castle)
“
Built-in shelves line my bedroom, adjacent to my Japanese platform bed, purchased for its capacious rim, the better to hold those books that must be immediately accessible. Yet still they pile on my nightstand, and the grid of shelves continues in floor-to-ceiling formation across the wall, stampeding over the doorway in disorderly fashion, political memoirs mixed in with literary essays, Victorian novels fighting for space with narrative adventure, the Penguin classics never standing together in a gracious row no matter how hard I try to impose order. The books compete for attention, assembling on the shelf above the sofa on the other side of the room, where they descend by the window, staring back at me. As I lie in bed with another book, they lie in wait.
”
”
Pamela Paul (My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues)
“
Many people in this room have an Etsy store where they create unique, unreplicable artifacts or useful items to be sold on a small scale, in a common marketplace where their friends meet and barter. I and many of my friends own more than one spinning wheel. We grow our food again. We make pickles and jams on private, individual scales, when many of our mothers forgot those skills if they ever knew them. We come to conventions, we create small communities of support and distributed skills--when one of us needs help, our village steps in. It’s only that our village is no longer physical, but connected by DSL instead of roads. But look at how we organize our tribes--bloggers preside over large estates, kings and queens whose spouses’ virtues are oft-lauded but whose faces are rarely seen. They have moderators to protect them, to be their knights, a nobility of active commenters and big name fans, a peasantry of regular readers, and vandals starting the occasional flame war just to watch the fields burn. Other villages are more commune-like, sharing out resources on forums or aggregate sites, providing wise women to be consulted, rabbis or priests to explain the world, makers and smiths to fashion magical objects. Groups of performers, acrobats and actors and singers of songs are traveling the roads once more, entertaining for a brief evening in a living room or a wheatfield, known by word of mouth and secret signal. Separate from official government, we create our own hierarchies, laws, and mores, as well as our own folklore and secret history. Even my own guilt about having failed as an academic is quite the crisis of filial piety--you see, my mother is a professor. I have not carried on the family trade.
We dwell within a system so large and widespread, so disorganized and unconcerned for anyone but its most privileged and luxurious members, that our powerlessness, when we can summon up the courage to actually face it, is staggering. So we do not face it. We tell ourselves we are Achilles when we have much more in common with the cathedral-worker, laboring anonymously so that the next generation can see some incremental progress. We lack, of course, a Great Work to point to and say: my grandmother made that window; I worked upon the door. Though, I would submit that perhaps the Internet, as an object, as an aggregate entity, is the cathedral we build word by word and image by image, window by window and portal by portal, to stand taller for our children, if only by a little, than it does for us. For most of us are Lancelots, not Galahads. We may see the Grail of a good Classical life, but never touch it. That is for our sons, or their daughters, or further off.
And if our villages are online, the real world becomes that dark wood on the edge of civilization, a place of danger and experience, of magic and blood, a place to make one’s name or find death by bear. And here, there be monsters.
”
”
Catherynne M. Valente
“
This is all a tale of an older world and a forgotten countryside. At this moment of time change has come; a screaming line of steel runs through the heather of no-man’s-land, and the holiday-maker claims the valleys for his own. But this busyness is but of yesterday, and not ten years ago the fields lay quiet to the gaze of placid beasts and the wandering stars. This story I have culled from the grave of an old fashion, and set down for the love of a great soul and the poetry of life.
”
”
John Buchan (The Best Short Stories of John Buchan, Volume 1)
“
Does a creature of fashion not need a fine mind?” asked the Polish count. “More than anything else, she must have very fine taste,” answered Madame d’Espard.
”
”
Honoré de Balzac (The Human Comedy: Selected Stories (New York Review Books Classics))
“
A Fourth Turning brings new interest in the rational and classical, in simplicity, restraint, and decorum—while gender-related fashions begin to reformalize and return to elegance.
”
”
William Strauss (The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny)
“
Fashion is a double-edged sword; the more fashionable it is, the less timeliness it has. However, the life expectancy of hotel design is usually between seven to ten years. Too fashionable design may be out of date after two years; that is the reason why hotel design prefers to classic elements. (Chen Tao, Chen Tao’s Interior Design Co., Ltd – Hangzhou, China)
”
”
Editorial Board of Approaching Hotel Designers (The Wisdom in Design. Approaching Hotel Designers)
“
Now a regular occurrence in the eighteenth century repeats itself: the aristocracy accepts the viewpoint and standards of value of the middle class; virtue becomes a fashion in the upper class.
”
”
Arnold Hauser (The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism)
“
What Mayer did in the thirties― what he was situated to do as a Jew yearning to belong― was provide reassurance against the anxieties and disruptions of the time. He did this by fashioning a vast, compelling national fantasy out of his dreams and out of the basic tenets of his own dogmatic faith― a belief in virtue, in the bulwark of family, in the merits of loyalty, in the soundness of tradition, in America itself.
”
”
Neal Gabler (An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood)
“
Fawn M. Brodie, whose classic life of Smith earned her excommunication from the Mormon Church, saw the Book of Mormon as 'one of the earliest examples of frontier fiction, the first long Yankee narrative that owes nothing to English literary fashions'.105 There was quite a genre of 'lost race' novels at the time. A century on, J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings saga formed an English Catholic parallel, conscious or unconscious, to Smith's work.
”
”
Diarmaid MacCulloch (A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years)
“
I was only trying to get you to come here. You know,classic honeymoon. Sweet young wife teaches wizened old grouch how to have fun.That sort of thing."
"Wizened old grouch?" he echoed in astonishment. "The old part I can accept, even the grouch.But I am definitely not wizened." In punishment he tugged her hair.
"Ow!" She swung around and glared indignantly at him. "Wizened sort of seemed to fit.You know, wizard, wizened."
Gregori crushed her hair to his face to hide the sudden emotion overwhelming him. The fragrance of flowers and fresh air surrounded him.So this was what he had sought all those long centuries. Fun. Belonging.Someone with whom to share laughter and teasing and to make even the difficult moments in life beautiful.She was so much a part of him, he couldn't return to a barren existence again.He would never choose to stay in the world without her.
"Do you think I am too old, Savannah?" he asked softly,taking strands of her hair into his mouth. So soft.So much like silk but even better.
"Not old,Gregori," she corrected gently. "Just old-fashioned. You have a tendency to believe women should always do as they're told."
He found himself laughing. "Not that you do.
”
”
Christine Feehan (Dark Magic (Dark, #4))
“
SHE WAS A KNOCKOUT. A stoned fox. I’d never seen her before. Not one of the cutesy Irish Barbie Dolls I normally fell for, this was something of a different class altogether. No disco glam or sparkles or fashionably trashy stripper chic. No make-up or slutty, revealing outfit. No desperate, tits-in-your-face “notice me” B.S. This was something pure and earthy -- fresh as newly cut grass. The smoking-hot girl next door, but yet completely of another world and time. A true classic.
”
”
Quentin R. Bufogle (KING OF THE NEW YORK STREETS)
“
Seymour had already begun to believe, and I agreed with him as far as I was able to see the point, that education by any name would smell as sweet, and maybe much sweeter, if it didn't begin with a quest for knowledge at all, but with a quest, as Zen would put it, for no-knowledge. Dr. Suzuki says somewhere, that to be in a state of pure consciousness, satori, is to be with God before He said, 'Let there be light.' Seymour and I thought it might be a good thing to hold back this light from you and Franny, at least as far as we were able, and all the many lower, more fashionable lighting effects—the arts, sciences, classics, languages—'til you were both able at least to conceive of a state of being where the mind knows the source of all light.
”
”
J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)
“
So, teaching him only that which she loved, not that which she had been taught, Janet read to Gibbie of Jesus, and talked to him of Jesus, until at length his whole soul was full of the Man, of His doings, of His words, of His thoughts, of His life. Almost before he knew, he was trying to fashion his life after that of the Master.
Janet had no inclination to trouble her own head, or Gibbie's heart, with what men call the plan of salvation. It was enough to her to find that he followed her Master.
”
”
George MacDonald (The Baronet's Song & The Shepherd's Castle)
“
But there was the other dream, the unpractical persistent one, first fashioned in her imagination by that new boy at school who spoke the words, “…the heart that has truly loved never forgets, but as truly loves on to the close…” –Thomas Allen, Jenny Kissed Me!
”
”
Thomas Allen (Jenny Kissed Me!)
“
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)
“
the large wood-paneled restaurant. The place has a classic old-fashioned feel: brass lamps, dark green leather upholstery, crisp white linen, and sparkling crystal glasses. The atmosphere buzzes with the chatter of businessmen and -women and the clatter of cutlery on fine china.
”
”
E.L. James (The Mister (Mister & Missus, #1))
“
For the studies, first they should begin with the chief and necessary rules of some good grammar, either that now used, or any better: and while this is doing, their speech is to be fashioned to a distinct and clear pronunciation, as near as may be to the Italian, especially in the vowels.
”
”
Benjamin Franklin (The Complete Harvard Classics - ALL 71 Volumes: The Five Foot Shelf & The Shelf of Fiction: The Famous Anthology of the Greatest Works of World Literature)
“
It may no longer be fashionable to make such comparisons, but the economic evidence is unequivocal: liberal democratic societies are more peaceful, prosperous, and tolerant than those that permit autocratic rule, as in Russia; one-party rule, as in China; or theocracy, as in Iran. Yet these days, those who advocate the superiority of Western civilization are demonized, especially on university campuses, as racists or white supremacists. Few within the establishment are willing to challenge the politically correct consensus and insist instead on upholding the core classical liberal values.
”
”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women's Rights)
“
He always kept three books at hand—one scientific, one of classical literature or history, one light fiction—which he took up in turn, giving each exactly twenty minutes according to a pocket watch placed on the table beside his chair. In this fashion, he said, he was able to remember what he read.
”
”
David McCullough (The Path Between the Seas)
“
You can wear a variety of clothing. But you should have one designer you favor. I suggest Amano."
"Ooh," Noriko hums. "I love him."
Ichiko taps out something on her tablet and hands me photographs of his latest runway show. "I see it now. You are a small-town girl who supports the local artist. An up-and-comer like you. That's your brand." She winks at me. "Amano's pieces are flattering with a nod to classical elements, but with a certain modern flair."
Women strut down a white runway. One wears a black silk furisode with flowing kimono sleeves and a lotus flower motif. Another sports a red evening gown with a matching capelet. Another, a turquoise fitted dress with a square neckline and beaded belt. All so pretty. I like.
”
”
Emiko Jean (Tokyo Dreaming (Tokyo Ever After, #2))
“
Cicero once wrote that to be completely free one must become a slave to a set of laws. In other words, accepting limitations is liberating. For example, by making up one’s mind to invest psychic energy exclusively in a monogamous marriage, regardless of any problems, obstacles, or more attractive options that may come along later, one is freed of the constant pressure of trying to maximize emotional returns. Having made the commitment that an old-fashioned marriage demands, and having made it willingly instead of being compelled by tradition, a person no longer needs to worry whether she has made the right choice, or whether the grass might be greener somewhere else. As a result a great deal of energy gets freed up for living, instead of being spent on wondering about how to live.
”
”
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (Flow: The Classic Work On How To Achieve Happiness: The Psychology of Happiness)
“
In an experiment that became an instant classic, the psychologist John Bargh and his collaborators asked students at New York University—most aged eighteen to twenty-two—to assemble four-word sentences from a set of five words (for example, “finds he it yellow instantly”). For one group of students, half the scrambled sentences contained words associated with the elderly, such as Florida, forgetful, bald, gray, or wrinkle. When they had completed that task, the young participants were sent out to do another experiment in an office down the hall. That short walk was what the experiment was about. The researchers unobtrusively measured the time it took people to get from one end of the corridor to the other. As Bargh had predicted, the young people who had fashioned a sentence from words with an elderly theme walked down the hallway significantly more slowly than the others.
”
”
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
“
A whole people discovered, on the 15th of May, 1796, that everything which until then it had respected was supremely ridiculous, if not actually hateful. The departure of the last Austrian regiment marked the collapse of the old ideas: to risk one’s life became the fashion. People saw that in order to be really happy after centuries of cloying sensations, it was necessary to love one’s country with a real love and to seek out heroic actions.
”
”
Stendhal (The Charterhouse of Parma (Centaur Classics) [The 100 greatest novels of all time - #19])
“
The notion that we ought to dress for men is, then, a foolish notion indeed. And we ought to dispense with the rules for how to do it, rules that would reduce us women to a second childhood, during which we dress in the morning in what was laid out for us on the night before. In fact, we ought to dispense with the rules of 'fashion' more generally, for the are founded on this misguided premise: that women, grown women!, are unable to dress themselves.
”
”
Sinead Murphy (The Jane Austen Rules: A Classic Guide to Modern Love)
“
Open a dictionary at random; metaphors fill every page. Take the word "fathom." for example. The meaning is clear. A fathom is a measurement of water depth, equivalent to about six feet. But fathom also means "to understand." Why?
Scrabble around in the word's etymological roots. "Fathom comes from the Anglo-Saxon faethm, meaning "the two arms outstretched." The term was originally used as a measurement of cloth, because the distance from fingertip to fingertip for the average man with his arms outsretched is roughly six feet. This technique was later extended to sounding the depths of bodies of water, since it was easy to lower a cord divided into six-foot increments, or fathoms, over the side of a boat. But how did fathom come to mean "to understand," as in "I can't fathom that" or "She's unfathomable"? Metaphorically, of course.
You master something- you learn to control or accept it-when you embrace it, when you get your arms around it, when you take it in hand. You comprehend something when you grasp it, take its measure, get to the bottom of it-fathom it.
Fathom took on its present significance in classic Aristotelian fashion: through the metaphorical transfer of its original meaning (a measurement of cloth or water) to an abstract concept (understanding). This is the primary purpose of metaphor: to carry over existing names or descriptions to things that are either so new that they haven't yet been named or so abstract that they cannot be otherwise explained.
”
”
James Geary (I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World)
“
New York is the worst-dressed rich city in the world. There is an inexplicable lost connection between the countless clothes shops, sophisticated, expensive, modern, classic, amused, serious, postmodern, and vintage, and the stuff, the schmutter that people actually put on in the morning. It’s a city where the rich dress worse than the poor. Generally poor people affect an élan that money can’t buy. Style rises from the bottom. But not in New York. There’s a one-class-fits-all, oversized blahness. They all shop in department stores and boutiques and fashionable chain stores.
”
”
A.A. Gill (To America with Love)
“
Perhaps a tuberose, she thought. Very pervasive, but not headachy. Her fingers lingered for a moment over her bottle of Fracas. She adored the classic punchy floral, but it was one of her mother's favorites, so not conducive to a good night's sleep either. Not after that phone call earlier.
Maybe something woody? The black tea, leather and tobacco in Atelier Cologne's Oolang Infini would be deep enough to drown out Digger's pungent expulsion, yet subtle enough to sleep on. But no, the guaiac wood in it reminded her too much of old-fashioned coal-tar soap, which was David's smell.
”
”
Maggie Alderson (The Scent of You)
“
Walking into a bookshop is a depressing thing. It’s not the pretentious twats, browsing books as part of their desirable lifestyle. It’s not the scrubby members of staff serving at the counter: the pseudo-hippies and fucking misfits. It’s not the stink of coffee wafting out from somewhere in the building, a concession to the cult of the coffee bean. No, it’s the books.
I could ignore the other shit, decide that maybe it didn’t matter too much, that when consumerism meets culture, the result is always going to attract wankers and everything that goes with them. But the books, no, they’re what make your stomach sink and that feeling of dark syrup on the brain descend.
Look around you, look at the shelves upon shelves of books – for years, the vessels of all knowledge. We’re part of the new world now, but books persist. Cheap biographies, pulp fiction; glossy covers hiding inadequate sentiments. Walk in and you’re surrounded by this shit – to every side a reminder that we don’t want stimulation anymore, we want sedation. Fight your way through the celebrity memoirs, pornographic cook books, and cheap thrills that satisfy most and you get to the second wave of vomit-inducing product: offerings for the inspired and arty. Matte poetry books, classics, the finest culture can provide packaged and wedged into trendy coverings, kidding you that you’re buying a fashion accessory, not a book.
But hey, if you can stomach a trip further into the shop, you hit on the meatier stuff – history, science, economics – provided they can stick ‘pop.’ in front of it, they’ll stock it. Pop. psychology, pop. art, pop. life. It’s the new world – we don’t want serious anymore, we want nuggets of almost-useful information. Books are the past, they’re on the out. Information is digital now; bookshops, they’re somewhere between gallery and museum.
”
”
Matthew Selwyn (****: The Anatomy of Melancholy)
“
Segways are a classic example of this phenomenon. You've seen them on occasion in malls or in airports, looking something like an old-fashioned lawn mower gone vertical, ridden around by someone in a security professional's uniform. Kind of dorky looking, but don't kid yourself. The gyroscopic balance control is fabulous, and the control movements once mastered are graceful. The hope was these devices would become a universal transport mechanism. Why didn't that happen? In a word: stairs. Stairs are pesky little devils that crop up everywhere, and Segways do not handle them well at all. That's what we call a showstopper.
”
”
Geoffrey A. Moore (Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers)
“
And is not all of life material- based on the material- permeated by the material? Should not one learn, gladly, to utilize the beauty of the fine material? I do not speak of the gross crudities of soporific television, of loud brash convertibles and vulgar display- but rather of grace and line and refinement- and there are wonderful and exciting things that only money can buy, such as theater tickets, books, paintings, travel, lovely clothes- and why deny them when one can have them? The only problem is to work, to stay awake mentally and physically, and NEVER become mentally, physically, spiritually flabby or over complacent!
”
”
Elizabeth Winder (Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953)
“
Let us grant courage and the love of pure adventure their own justification, even if we cannot produce any material support for them. Mankind has developed an ugly habit of only allowing true courage to the killers. Great credits accrue to the one who bests another; little is given to the man who recognises in his comrade on the rope a part of himself, who for long hours of extreme peril faces no opponent to be shot or struck down, but whose battle is solely against his own weakness and insufficiency. Is the man who, at moments when his own life is in the balance, has not only to safeguard it but, at the same time, his friend's- even to the extent of mutual self-sacrifice- to receive less recognition than a boxer n the ring, simply because the nature of what he is doing is not properly understood? In his book about the Dachstein, Kurt Maix writes: "Climbing is th emost royl irrationality out of which Man, in his creative imagination, has been able to fashion the highest personal values." Those personal values, which we gain from our approach to the mountains, are great enough to enrich our life. Is not the irrationality of its very lack of purpose the deepest argument for climbing? But we had better leave philosophical niceties and unsuitable psychoanalisis out of this.
”
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Heinrich Harrer (The White Spider: The Classic Account of the Ascent of the Eiger)
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The days became for Christina endless preparation. Ceaseless winds tore through her massing battle ranks, the grey cold sun above marking the timeless date. With skies of blue and cloud overhead, driving, uncompromising time stood still, lingering, as if giving Christina precious eons to perfect her shaving straight razor cuts of mind and sword. She worked alone now, forging the essence of herself in the policies and ways of hammer and anvil, pounding away with the classic, living Japanese blade. Her deft hands spun dervishly, wroughting out the iron of her will, fashioning a blade-mind remade unto her. --Brickley, The Lady and the Samurai
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Douglas M. Laurent
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She found unexpected satisfaction in the half-forgotten masterpieces of the past, in poets not quite divine whom fashion had left on one side, in the playwright, novelists, and essayists whose remembrance lives only with the bookworm. It is a relief sometimes to look away from the bright sun of perfect achievement; and the writers who appealed to their age and not to posterity have by contrast a subtle charm. Undazzled by their splendor, one may discern more easily their individualities and the spirit of their time; they have pleasant qualities not always found among their betters, and there is even a certain pathos in their incomplete success.
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W. Somerset Maugham (Mrs Craddock (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin))
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There are two kinds of crisp potatoes that I prefer above all others. The first are called Swiss potatoes, and they're essentially a large potato pancake of perfect hash browns; the flipping of the pancake is so wildly dramatic that the potatoes themselves are almost beside the point. The second are called potatoes Anna; they are thin circles of potato cooked in a shallow pan in the oven and then turned onto a plate in a darling mound of crunchy brownness. Potatoes Anna is a classic French recipe, but there is something so homely and old-fashioned about them that they can usually be passed off as either an ancient family recipe or something you just made up.
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Nora Ephron (Heartburn)
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Books are an absolute necessity. I always have at least two with me wherever I go, to say nothing of my digital collection, and whenever I can get my hands on a delicious new reading piece, I will finish it at a slackened pace, to savour it with all the esteem it deserves, gratulating in its pleasance, deliciating in every word with ardent affection. I have an extensive library that I could never do without, and there are at least four books decorating every surface in my house. A table is not properly set without a book to furnish it. Half of my great collection is non-fiction, mostly science and history books, ranging from the archaeological to the agricultural, and my fiction section is dedicated to the classics, mostly books published before the world forgot about exquisite prose. I have all the greats in hardcover, but I do not read those: hardcover is for smelling and touching only. For all my favourite authors, I have reading copies, which I might take with me anywhere, to read in cafes or to be used as a swatting tool for unwanted visitors, but books are always fashionable even as ornaments; everyone likes a reader, for a good collection of books betrays a intellectualism that is becoming at anytime. Never succumb to the friable wills of those who reject the majesty of books: there is nothing so repelling as willful illiteracy.
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Michelle Franklin (I Hate Summer: My tribulations with seasonal depression, anxiety, plumbers, spiders, neighbours, and the world.)
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In reality, however, this type of command and control has not been fashionable in military circles since 1806 when the Prussian Army, a classic plan-driven organization, was decisively defeated by Napoleon’s decentralized, highly motivated forces. Napoleon used a style of war known as maneuver warfare to defeat larger, better-trained armies. In maneuver warfare, the goal is to minimize the need for actual fighting by disrupting your enemy’s ability to act cohesively through the use of shock and surprise. A key element in maneuver warfare is being able to learn, make decisions, and act faster than your enemy — the same capability that allows startups to disrupt enterprises.
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Jez Humble (Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean (O'Reilly)))
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The highest use of the great masters of literature is not literary; it is apart from their superb style and even from their emotional inspiration. The first use of good literature is that it prevents a man from being merely modern. To be merely modern is to condemn oneself to an ultimate narrowness; just as to spend one’s last earthly money on the newest hat is to condemn oneself to the old-fashioned. The road of the ancient centuries is strewn with dead moderns. Literature, classic and enduring literature, does its best work in reminding us perpetually of the whole round of truth and balancing other and older ideas against the ideas to which we might for a moment be prone.
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G.K. Chesterton
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Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age. —from “Learning in War-Time” (The Weight of Glory)
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C.S. Lewis (A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works)
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classic work like The Tale of Genji, as one recent translator has it, “The more intense the emotion, the more regular the meter.” As in the old-fashioned England in which I grew up—though more unforgivingly so—the individual’s job in public Japan is to keep his private concerns and feelings to himself and to present a surface that gives little away. That the relation of surface to depth is uncertain is part of the point; it offers a degree of protection and makes for absolute consistency. The fewer words spoken, the easier it is to believe you’re standing on common ground. One effect of this careful evenness—a maintenance of the larger harmony, whatever is happening within—is that to live in Japan, to walk through its complex nets of unstatedness, is to receive a rigorous training in attention. You learn to read the small print of life—to notice how the flowers placed in front of the tokonoma scroll have just been changed, in response to a shift in the season, or to register how your visitor is talking about everything except the husband who’s just run out on her. It’s what’s not expressed that sits at the heart of a haiku; a classic sumi-e brush-and-ink drawing leaves as much open space as possible at its center so that it becomes not a statement but a suggestion, an invitation to a collaboration. The reader or viewer is asked to complete a composition, and so the no-color surfaces make
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Natsume Sōseki (The Gate)
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So all that took place at the hotel,” he said, “consisted of a—”
“The association,” Rachael said, “wanted to reach the bounty hunters here and in the Soviet Union. This [having sex] seemed to work…for reasons which we do not fully understand. Our limitation again, I guess.”
“I doubt if it works as often or as well as you say,” he said thickly.
“But it has with you.”
“We’ll see.”
“I already know,” Rachael said. “When I saw that expression on your face, that grief. I look for that.”
“How many times have you done this?”
“I don’t remember. Seven, eight. No, I believe it’s nine.” She—or rather it—nodded. “Yes, nine times.”
“The idea is old-fashioned,” Rick said.
Startled, Rachael said, “W-What?”
Pushing the steering wheel away from him, he put the car into a gliding decline. “Or anyhow that’s how it strikes me. I’m going to kill you,” he said. “And go on to Roy and Irmgard Baty and Pris Stratton alone.”
“That’s why you’re landing?” Apprehensively, she said, “There’s a fine; I’m the property, the legal property, of the association. I’m not an escaped android who fled here from Mars; I’m not in the same class as the others.”
“But,” he said, “if I can kill you then I can kill them.”
Her hands dived for her bulging, overstuffed, kipple-filled purse; she searched frantically, then gave up. “Goddamn this purse,” she said with ferocity. “I never can lay my hands on anything in it. Will you kill me in a way that won’t hurt? I mean, do it carefully. If I don’t fight; okay? I promise not to fight. Do you agree?”
Rick said, “I understand now why Phil Resch said what he said. He wasn’t being cynical; he had just learned too much. Going through this—I can’t blame him. It warped him.”
“But the wrong way.” She seemed more externally composed now. But still fundamentally frantic and tense. Yet, the dark fire waned; the life force oozed out of her, as he had so often witnessed before with other androids. The classic resignation. Mechanical, intellectual acceptance of that which a genuine organism—with two billion years of the pressure to live and evolve hagriding it—could never have reconciled itself to.
“I can’t stand the way you androids give up,” he said savagely.
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Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
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We like to think of the old-fashioned American classics as children's books. Just childishness, on our part.
The old American art-speech contains an alien quality, which belongs to the American continent and to nowhere else. But, of course, so long as we insist on reading the books as children's tales, we miss all that.
One wonders what the proper high-brow Romans of the third and fourth or later centuries read into the strange utterances of Lucretius or Apuleius or Tertullian, Augustine or Athanasius. The uncanny voice of Iberian Spain, the weirdness of old Carthage, the passion of Libya and North Africa; you may bet the proper old Romans never heard these at all. They read old Latin inference over the top of it, as we read old European inference over the top of Poe or Hawthorne.
It is hard to hear a new voice, as hard as it is to listen to an unknown language. We just don't listen. There is a new voice in the old American classics. The world has declined to hear it, and has blabbed about children's stories.
Why?—Out of fear. The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences. And it is like trying to use muscles that have perhaps never been used, or that have been going stiff for ages. It hurts horribly.
The world doesn't fear a new idea. It can pigeon-hole any idea. But it can't pigeon-hole a real new experience. It can only dodge. The world is a great dodger, and the Americans the greatest. Because they dodge their own very selves.
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D.H. Lawrence (Studies in Classic American Literature)
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There were days when she was very happy without knowing why. She was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day. She liked then to wander alone into strange and unfamiliar places. She discovered many a sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream in. And she found it good to dream and to be alone and unmolested. There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why,-when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation. She could not work on such a day, nor weave fancies to stir her pulses and warm her blood.
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Kate Chopin (THE AWAKENING - A Solitary Soul (Feminist Classics Series): One Women's Story from the Turn-Of-The-Century American South)
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So few were the readers at that time in Philadelphia, and the majority of us so poor, that I was not able, with great industry; to find more than fifty persons, mostly young tradesmen, willing to pay down for this purpose forty shillings each, and ten shillings per annum. On this little fund we began. The books were imported; the library was opened one day in the week for lending to the subscribers, on their promissory notes to pay double the value if not duly returned. The institution soon manifested its utility, was imitated by other towns, and in other provinces. The libraries were augmented by donations; reading became fashionable; and our people, having no publick amusements to divert their attention from study, became better acquainted with books, and in a few years were observ'd by strangers to be better instructed and more intelligent than people of the same rank generally are in other countries.
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Benjamin Franklin (The Complete Harvard Classics - ALL 71 Volumes: The Five Foot Shelf & The Shelf of Fiction: The Famous Anthology of the Greatest Works of World Literature)
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However, one cannot ignore the folklore of the times; the story of the Odyssey and other legends recounting the adventure and dangers of travelling through the Dardanelles and Bosporus, the legends of the Argonauts and Heracles, the nymph of Arethusa, and the goddess of Syracuse.[23] Centuries of overseas ventures undoubtedly produced a pioneering spirit among the Greeks. I am in agreement with A.G. Woodhead’s emphasis on the ‘general spirit of adventure’ that permeated ‘the dawn of classical Hellas’, and his observation that ‘many of the colonies had their origins in purely individual enterprise or extraordinary happenings.’[24] He writes: ‘This personal element, indeed, probably deserves more stress than it has received. It is fashionable to look for great impersonal causes and trends which, singly or in combination, produce a human response, and the economic considerations already discussed fall into that category.
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Ricardo Duchesne (Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age)
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What we have here is a war—the war of matter and spirit. In the classical era, spirit was in harmony with matter. Matter used to condense spirit. What was unseen—the ghost of Hamlet’s father—was seen—in the conscience of the king. The spirit was trapped in the matter of theater. The theater made the unseen, seen. In the Romantic era, spirit overwhelms matter. The glass of champagne can’t contain the bubbles. But never in the history of humanity has spirit been at war with matter. And that is what we have today. The war of banks and religion. It’s what I wrote in Prayers of the Dawn, that in New York City, banks tower over cathedrals. Banks are the temples of America. This is a holy war. Our economy is our religion. When I came back to midtown a week after the attack—I mourned—but not in a personal way—it was a cosmic mourning—something that I could not specify because I didn’t know any of the dead. I felt grief without knowing its origin. Maybe it was the grief of being an immigrant and of not having roots. Not being able to participate in the whole affair as a family member but as a foreigner, as a stranger—estranged in myself and confused—I saw the windows of Bergdorf and Saks—what a theater of the unexpected—my mother would have cried—there were only black curtains, black drapes—showing the mourning of the stores—no mannequins, just veils—black veils. When the mannequins appeared again weeks later—none of them had blond hair. I don’t know if it was because of the mourning rituals or whether the mannequins were afraid to be blond—targets of terrorists. Even they didn’t want to look American. They were out of fashion after the Twin Towers fell. To the point, that even though I had just dyed my hair blond because I was writing Hamlet and Hamlet is blond, I went back to my coiffeur immediately and told him—dye my hair black. It was a matter of life and death, why look like an American. When naturally I look like an Arab and walk like an Egyptian.
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Giannina Braschi
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His was the sort of physical beauty that attracted even as any great work of art ensnared the eye. One did not have to wish to own such a creation, often it was enough just to study and appreciate it. Only a little above average height, his form was well proportioned and well muscled, with not an extra jot of flesh. He had a fencer’s easy play of movement. But it was his face that first and last attached the eye. It was a lean countenance, the ivory white skin so taut across the fine bone structure as to appear to have been stretched to fit. Feature by feature, it was not a classic visage, but the sum more than compensated for the parts. His cheekbones were high and perhaps too pronounced. The nose was straight, a trifle too long and thin, the mouth not at all the full, plump standard of Greek statuary, for while well cut it was thin as well, and bore at times a half-quirked, sensuous smile. The eyes were long and almond-shaped and pulled down slightly at the corners, rather than tilting upward in classical fashion. But despite the astonishing thick, bright-silver-tipped gilt hair and slightly darker brows, it was the eyes that one’s gaze returned to again and again. From afar, or even in shadow, Lord North’s eyes were unexceptional save for their keen expression. But in clear light and up close it could be seen that they were extraordinary. For to speak with the nobleman from his right side, one would look for answer in his grave gray eye. Yet to approach him from the left, one would seek response from his cool blue orb. His eyes were not so dissimilar as to shock, but seeing him once, the viewer would be troubled by some nagging discrepancy and turn to search his face until his varicolored eyes were at last discovered, and the viewer amazed and enchanted. To see him once was to remember him forever, to hear his name was to recall him instantly. His reputation was as varied and colorful as his strange countenance. He was said to be a libertine, he was whispered to be beyond mere libertine.
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Edith Layton (Lord of Dishonor)
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Yet each time, after consulting her watch, she sat down again at my request, so that in the end she had spent several hours with me without my having demanded anything of her; the things I said to her were related to those I had said during the preceding hours, were totally unconnected with what I was thinking about, what I desired, and remained doggedly parallel to all this. There is nothing like desire for obstructing any resemblance between what one says and what one has on one’s mind. Time presses, and yet it seems as though we were trying to gain time by speaking about things that are utterly alien to the one thing that preoccupies us. We chatter away, whereas the words we should like to utter would have by now been accompanied by a gesture, if indeed we have not – to give ourselves the pleasure of immediate action and to slake the curiosity we feel about the ensuing reactions to it – without a word, without so much as a by-your-leave, already made this gesture. It is true that I was not in the least in love with Albertine: born from the mist outside, she could do no more than satisfy the fanciful desire awakened in me by the change in the weather, poised midway between the desires that are satisfied by culinary arts and by monumental sculpture respectively, because it made me dream both of mingling my flesh with a substance that was different and warm, and of attaching to some point of my recumbent body a divergent body, as Eve’s body is barely attached by the feet to the side of Adam, to whose body hers is almost perpendicular in the Romanesque bas-reliefs in the Balbec cathedral, representing in so noble and so placid a fashion, still almost like a classical frieze, the creation of woman; in them God is followed everywhere, as by two ministers, by two little angels recalling – like the winged, swirling creatures of the summer that winter has caught by surprise and spared – cupids from Herculaneum still surviving well into the thirteenth century, flagging now in their last flight, weary, but never relinquishing the grace we might expect of them, over the whole front of the porch.
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Marcel Proust
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Toward the end of Feynman’s life, his conservative view of quantum science became unfashionable. The fashionable theorists reject his dualistic picture of nature, with the classical world and the quantum world existing side by side. They believe that only the quantum world is real, and the classical world must be explained as some kind of illusion arising out of quantum processes. They disagree about the way in which quantum laws should be interpreted. Their basic problem is to explain how a world of quantum probabilities can generate the illusions of classical certainty that we experience in our daily lives. Their various interpretations of quantum theory lead to competing philosophical speculations about the role of the observer in the description of nature. Feynman had no patience for such speculations. He said that nature tells us that both the quantum world and the classical world exist and are real. We do not understand precisely how they fit together. According to Feynman, the road to understanding is not to argue about philosophy but to continue exploring the facts of nature.
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Freeman Dyson (Dreams of Earth and Sky)
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Charles is difficult to pigeonhole politically. Tony Blair wrote that he considered him a “curious mixture of the traditional and the radical (at one level he was quite New Labour, at another definitely not) and of the princely and insecure.” He is certainly conservative in his old-fashioned dress and manners, his advocacy of traditional education in the arts and humanities, his reverence for classical architecture and the seventeenth-century Book of Common Prayer. But his forays into mysticism and his jeremiads against scientific progress, industrial development, and globalization give him an eccentric air. “One of the main purposes of the monarchy is to unite the country and not divide it,” said Kenneth Rose. When the Queen took the throne at age twenty-five, she was a blank slate, which gave her a great advantage in maintaining the neutrality necessary to preserve that unity. It was a gentler time, and she could develop her leadership style quietly. But it has also taken vigilance and discipline for her to keep her views private over so many decades. Charles has the disadvantage of a substantial public record of strong and sometimes contentious opinions, not to mention the private correspondence with government ministers protected by exemptions in the Freedom of Information Act that could come back to haunt him if any of it is made public. One letter that did leak was written in 1997 to a group of friends after a visit to Hong Kong and described the country’s leaders as “appalling old waxworks.
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Sally Bedell Smith (Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch)
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In an experiment that became an instant classic, the psychologist John Bargh and his collaborators asked students at New York University—most aged eighteen to twenty-two—to assemble four-word sentences from a set of five words (for example, “finds he it yellow instantly”). For one group of students, half the scrambled sentences contained words associated with the elderly, such as Florida, forgetful, bald, gray, or wrinkle. When they had completed that task, the young participants were sent out to do another experiment in an office down the hall. That short walk was what the experiment was about. The researchers unobtrusively measured the time it took people to get from one end of the corridor to the other. As Bargh had predicted, the young people who had fashioned a sentence from words with an elderly theme walked down the hallway significantly more slowly than the others. The “Florida effect” involves two stages of priming. First, the set of words primes thoughts of old age, though the word old is never mentioned; second, these thoughts prime a behavior, walking slowly, which is associated with old age. All this happens without any awareness. When they were questioned afterward, none of the students reported noticing that the words had had a common theme, and they all insisted that nothing they did after the first experiment could have been influenced by the words they had encountered. The idea of old age had not come to their conscious awareness, but their actions had changed nevertheless. This remarkable priming phenomenon—the influencing of an action by the idea—is known as the ideomotor effect. Although
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Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
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The school is teeming with activity. The rooms are small and large, many are special-purpose rooms, like shops and labs, but most are furnished like rather shabby living or dining rooms in homes: lots of sofas, easy chairs, and tables. Lots of people sitting around talking, reading, and playing games. On an average rainy day—quite different from a beautiful suddenly snowy day, or a warm spring or fall day—most people are inside. But there will also be more than a few who are outside in the rain, and later will come in dripping and trying the patience of the few people inside who think the school should perhaps be a “dry zone.” There may be people in the photo lab developing or printing pictures they have taken. There may be a karate class, or just some people playing on mats in the dance room. Someone may be building a bookshelf or fashioning chain mail armor and discussing medieval history. There are almost certainly a few people, either together or separate, making music of one kind or another, and others listening to music of one kind or another. You will find adults in groups that include kids, or maybe just talking with one student. It would be most unusual if there were not people playing a computer game somewhere, or chess; a few people doing some of the school’s administrative work in the office—while others hang around just enjoying the atmosphere of an office where interesting people are always making things happen; there will be people engaged in role-playing games; other people may be rehearsing a play—it might be original, it might be a classic. They may intend production or just momentary amusement. People will be trading stickers and trading lunches. There will probably be people selling things. If you are lucky, someone will be selling cookies they baked at home and brought in to earn money. Sometimes groups of kids have cooked something to sell to raise money for an activity—perhaps they need to buy a new kiln, or want to go on a trip. An intense conversation will probably be in progress in the smoking area, and others in other places. A group in the kitchen may be cooking—maybe pizza or apple pie. Always, either in the art room or in any one of many other places, people will be drawing. In the art room they might also be sewing, or painting, and some are quite likely to be working with clay, either on the wheel or by hand. Always there are groups talking, and always there are people quietly reading here and there. One
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Russell L. Ackoff (Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track)
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Maxims & Other Quotes
If you need an adjective or adverb, you're still fishing for he right noun or verb. 34
Was this a true story? It seemed somehow unimaginable, a fantasy of some kind. But he told it with such conviction that, against my own wishes, I believed him.
Was this indeed the essence of storytelling? Did one simply have to relate a tale in a believable fashion, with the authority of the imagination? 36
Memory is a mirror that may easily shatter. 81
Readers become invisible even to themselves. Only the story lives. It’s the fate of the writer, yes, as well, to disappear. ~ Alastair Reid 83
‘There is only now,’ Borges exclaimed with unstoppable force. ‘Act, dear boy! Do not procrastinate! It’s the worst of sins. I’ve thought about this, you see: the progression toward evil. Murder, this is very bad, a sin. It leads to thievery. And thievery, of course, leads to drunkenness and Sabbath-breaking. And Sabbath-breaking leads to incivility and at last procrastination. A slippery slope into the pit!’ 98
Borges: I no longer need to save face. This is one of the benefits of extreme age. Nothing matters much, and very little matters at all. 100
Borges: Believe me, you will one day read Don Quixote with a profound sense of recollection. This happens when you read a classic. It finds you where you have been. 102
Parini: I try not to think of the phallus, except when I can think of nothing else, which is most of the time.
Borges: This is the fate of young men, a limited focus. One of the few advantages of my blindness has been that I no longer focus my eyes on objects of arousal. I look inward now, though the mind has mountains, dangerous cliffs. 105
Borges: Writers are always pirates, marauding, taking whatever pleases them from others, shaping these stolen goods to our purposes. Writers feed off the corpses of those who passed before them, their precursors. On the other hand they invent their precursors. They create them in their own image, as God did with man.108
Borges: Nobody can teach you anything. That’s the first truth. We teach ourselves. 115
Borges: One should avoid strong emotion, especially when it interferes with the work at hand. We have European blood in our veins, you and I. Mine is northern blood. We’re cold people, you see. Warriors. 125
Borges: The influence of Quixote was such that Sancho acquired a taste for literary wisdom. Such wisdom in his aphorisms! ‘One can find a remedy for everything but death.’ Or this: ‘Make yourself into honey and the flies will devour you.’ 151
Borges: You see, I designed my work for the tiniest audience, ‘fit company though few.’ A writer’s imagination should not be diluted by crowds! 151
Borges: If you don’t abandon the spirit, the spirit will not abandon you. 181
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Jay Parini (Borges and Me: An Encounter)
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During [Erté]’s childhood St. Petersburg was an elegant centre of theatrical and artistic life. At the same time, under its cultivated sophistication, ominous rumbles could be distinguished. The reign of the tough Alexander III ended in 1894 and his more gentle successor Nicholas was to be the last of the Tsars … St. Petersburg was a very French city. The Franco-Russian Pact of 1892 consolidated military and cultural ties, and later brought Russia into the First World war. Two activities that deeply influenced [Erté], fashion and art, were particularly dominated by France. The brilliant couturier Paul Poiret, for whom Erté was later to work in Paris, visited the city to display his creations. Modern art from abroad, principally French, was beginning to be show in Russia in the early years of the century …
In St. Petersburg there were three Imperial theatres―the Maryinsky, devoted to opera and ballet, the Alexandrinsky, with its lovely classical façade, performing Russian and foreign classical drama, and the Michaelovsky with a French repertoire and company …
It is not surprising that an artistic youth in St. Petersburg in the first decade of this century should have seen his future in the theatre. The theatre, especially opera and ballet, attracted the leading young painters of the day, including Mikhail Vrubel, possibly the greatest Russian painter of the pre-modernistic period. The father of modern theatrical design in Russia was Alexandre Benois, an offspring of the brilliant foreign colony in the imperial capital. Before 1890 he formed a club of fellow-pupils who were called ‘The Nevsky Pickwickians’. They were joined by the young Jew, Leon Rosenberg, who later took the name of one of his grandparents, Bakst. Another member introduced his cousin to the group―Serge Diaghilev. From these origins emerged the Mir Iskustva (World of Art) society, the forerunner of the whole modern movement in Russia. Soon after its foundation in 1899 both Benois and Bakst produced their first work in the theatre, The infiltration of the members of Mir Iskustva into the Imperial theatre was due to the patronage of its director Prince Volkonsky who appointed Diaghilev as an assistant. But under Volkonsky’s successor Diagilev lost his job and was barred from further state employment. He then devoted his energies and genius to editing the Mir Iskustva magazine and to a series of exhibitions which introduced Russia to work of foreign artists … These culminated in the remarkable exhibition of Russian portraiture held at the Taurida Palace in 1905, and the Russian section at the salon d'Autumne in Paris the following year. This was the most comprehensive Russian exhibition ever held, from early icons to the young Larionov and Gontcharova. Diagilev’s ban from Russian theatrical life also led to a series of concerts in Paris in 1907, at which he introduced contemporary Russian composers, the production Boris Godunov the following year with Chaliapin and costumes and décor by Benois and Golovin, and then in 1909, on May 19, the first season of the ballet Russes at the Châtelet Theatre.
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Charles Spencer (Erte)
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When the victor, in a fight of the cities, according to the law of warfare, executes the whole male population and sells all the women and children into slavery, we see, in the sanction of such a law, that the Greek deemed it a positive necessity to allow his hatred to break forth unimpeded; in such moments the compressed and swollen feeling relieved itself; the tiger bounded forth, a voluptuous cruelty shone out of his fearful eye. Why had the Greek sculptor to represent again and again war and fights in innumerable repetitions, extended human bodies whose sinews are tightened through hatred or through the recklessness of triumph, fighters wounded and writhing with pain, or the dying with the last rattle in their throat? Why did the whole Greek world exult in the fighting scenes of the "Iliad"? I am afraid, we do not understand them enough in "Greek fashion," and that we should even shudder, if for once we did understand them thus.
But what lies, as the mother-womb of the Hellenic, behind the Homeric world? In the latter, by the extremely artistic definiteness, and the calm and purity of the lines we are already lifted far above the purely material amalgamation: its colours, by an artistic deception, appear lighter, milder, warmer; its men, in this coloured, warm illumination, appear better and more sympathetic — but where do we look, if, no longer guided and protected by Homer's hand, we step backwards into the pre-Homeric world?
Only into night and horror, into the products of a fancy accustomed to the horrible. What earthly existence is reflected in the loathsome-awful theogonian lore: a life swayed only by the children of the night, strife, amorous desires, deception, age and death. Let us imagine the suffocating atmosphere of Hesiod's poem, still thickened and darkened and without all the mitigations and purifications, which poured over Hellas from Delphi and the numerous seats of the gods! If we mix this thickened Boeotian air with the grim voluptuousness of the Etruscans, then such a reality would extort from us a world of myths within which Uranos, Kronos and Zeus and the struggles of the Titans would appear as a relief. Combat in this brooding atmosphere is salvation and safety; the cruelty of victory is the summit of life's glories.
And just as in truth the idea of Greek law has developed from murder and expiation of murder, so also nobler Civilisation takes her first wreath of victory from the altar of the expiation of murder. Behind that bloody age stretches a wave-furrow deep into Hellenic history. The names of Orpheus, of Musaeus, and their cults indicate to what consequences the uninterrupted sight of a world of warfare and cruelty led — to the loathing of existence, to the conception of this existence as a punishment to be borne to the end, to the belief in the identity of existence and indebtedness. But these particular conclusions are not specifically Hellenic; through them Greece comes into contact with India and the Orient generally. The Hellenic genius had ready yet another answer to the question: what does a life of fighting and of victory mean? and gives this answer in the whole breadth of Greek history.
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Friedrich Nietzsche (Homer and Classical Philology)
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If there was any politician in America who reflected the Cold War and what it did to the country, it was Richard Nixon—the man and the era were made for each other. The anger and resentment that were a critical part of his temperament were not unlike the tensions running through the nation as its new anxieties grew. He himself seized on the anti-Communist issue earlier and more tenaciously than any other centrist politician in the country. In fact that was why he had been put on the ticket in the first place. His first congressional race in 1946, against a pleasant liberal incumbent named Jerry Voorhis, was marked by red-baiting so savage that it took Voorhis completely by surprise. Upon getting elected, Nixon wasted no time in asking for membership in the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was the committee member who first spotted the contradictions in Hiss’s seemingly impeccable case; in later years he was inclined to think of the case as one of his greatest victories, in which he had challenged and defeated a man who was not what he seemed, and represented the hated Eastern establishment. His career, though, was riddled with contradictions. Like many of his conservative colleagues, he had few reservations about implying that some fellow Americans, including perhaps the highest officials in the opposition party, were loyal to a hostile foreign power and willing to betray their fellow citizens. Yet by the end of his career, he became the man who opened the door to normalized relations with China (perhaps, thought some critics, he was the only politician in America who could do that without being attacked by Richard Nixon), and he was a pal of both the Soviet and Chinese Communist leadership. If he later surprised many long-standing critics with his trips to Moscow and Peking, he had shown his genuine diplomatic skills much earlier in the way he balanced the demands of the warring factions within his own party. He never asked to be well liked or popular; he asked only to be accepted. There were many Republicans who hated him, particularly in California. Earl Warren feuded with him for years. Even Bill Knowland, the state’s senior senator and an old-fashioned reactionary, despised him. At the 1952 convention, Knowland had remained loyal to Warren despite Nixon’s attempts to help Eisenhower in the California delegation. When Knowland was asked to give a nominating speech for Nixon, he was not pleased: “I have to nominate the dirty son of a bitch,” he told friends. Nixon bridged the gap because his politics were never about ideology: They were the politics of self. Never popular with either wing, he managed to negotiate a delicate position acceptable to both. He did not bring warmth or friendship to the task; when he made attempts at these, he was, more often than not, stilted and artificial. Instead, he offered a stark choice: If you don’t like me, find someone who is closer to your position and who is also likely to win. If he tilted to either side, it was because that side seemed a little stronger at the moment or seemed to present a more formidable candidate with whom he had to deal. A classic example of this came early in 1960, when he told Barry Goldwater, the conservative Republican leader, that he would advocate a right-to-work plank at the convention; a few weeks later in a secret meeting with Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal Republican leader—then a more formidable national figure than Goldwater—Nixon not only reversed himself but agreed to call for its repeal under the Taft-Hartley act. “The man,” Goldwater noted of Nixon in his personal journal at the time, “is a two-fisted four-square liar.
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David Halberstam (The Fifties)
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God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first and accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.
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Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community)
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Oh dear,” she was saying as she looked around the room. “This place screams classic caveman! Fred and Wilma really outdid themselves this time. I’ll have to be sure and send a thank you note for the lovely rock walls. Really, would it have hurt to have updated the décor by a few million years? I really am going to have to mark you down on Trip Advisor. This is simply too blasé considering today’s fashions and travelers’ expectations.
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S.E. Smith (Choosing Riley (Sarafin Warriors, #1))
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Even as their priorities added billions, the group insisted that the overall bill had to come in under $800 billion, because any figure higher than that just seemed “too much.” As far as we could tell, there was no economic logic to any of this, just political positioning and a classic squeeze play by politicians who knew they had leverage. But this truth went largely unnoticed; as far as the Washington press corps was concerned, the mere fact that the four senators were working in “bipartisan” fashion signified Solomonic wisdom and reason.
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
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However we might be deceived by his irony, which would prove fatal for false romanticism, he took the side of Emma and her finally murderous passion with its contempt for the bourgeois subject. He failed to see the citoyen, in both Homais and the country doctor; he only saw, only fashioned, the bourgeois that he himself was, endowing him with the repellent traits of the merchant Lheureux.
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Jean Améry (Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man (New York Review Books Classics))
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You don’t need to be a hippie to own a Volkswagen campervan. VW camper soon became just as well known for its funky yet functional design, as well as a fashion statement.
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Auto Classics Trade
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We noted earlier that among advocates of frugal simplicity there are two main notions of self-sufficiency: not being excessively dependent on another person’s favors or good opinion, and doing things for oneself as opposed to relying too heavily on someone else’s services or on technology. When classical thinkers like Epicurus and Seneca praise self-sufficiency, they do not primarily have in mind doing everything for oneself after the fashion of Robinson Crusoe; after all, some of them had servants and slaves. Rather, they conceive of self-sufficiency as meaning, above all else, not being dependent on another person’s patronage. One way to achieve this, of course, is to be like Seneca or Marcus Aurelius and hold wealth or power in one’s own right; but the more secure way is to follow the example set by the likes of Socrates and Diogenes and become indifferent to the material benefits that patronage promises.
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Emrys Westacott (The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less)
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The judge’s name didn’t appear on any of them, but it was obvious that he was a man burning with the fever of literature. He had doubtless read the Spanish classics and a few Latin ones, and he was quite familiar with Nietzsche, who was the fashionable author among magistrates of his time. The marginal notes, and not just because of the color of the ink, seemed to be written in blood. He was so perplexed by the enigma that fate had touched him with, that he kept falling into lyrical distractions that ran contrary to the rigor of his profession. Most of all, he never thought it legitimate that life should make use of so many coincidences forbidden literature, so that there should be the untrammeled fulfillment of a death so clearly foretold.
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Gabriel García Márquez (Chronicle of a Death Foretold)
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What is important to stress here, however, is what a crude burlesque of medieval history it is to speak of a miraculous retreat of a Christian Dark Ages of “obscurantism, stagnation, and terror” before the cleansing gales of Islamic civilization. Latin Christendom was for centuries deprived of the classical inheritance that Eastern Christendom had preserved and Islam had captured, but not because it had rejected that inheritance. Nor was the Baghdad caliphate the rescuer of a “lost civilization” that the Christian world had sought to extinguish; Islam was the beneficiary of Eastern Christendom, and Western Christendom in its turn was the beneficiary of both.
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David Bentley Hart (Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies)
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with the collapse of the empire of the West—which was induced by centuries of internal wasting and external pressure: of plague, warfare, and demographic decline—it was the church’s monasteries alone that saved classical civilization from the total eclipse it would otherwise have suffered. And, in the East, it was a Christian civilization that united the intellectual cultures of the Greek, Egyptian, and Syrian worlds, and that preserved Hellenic wisdom in academies and libraries in Greece, Syria, and Asia Minor.
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David Bentley Hart (Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies)
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One of East Africa's best-kept skincare secrets is Qasil powder. Qasil is a fine powder made from the leaves of the Gob tree, which is endemic to Somalia and is popular among Somali women. This fine powder is loaded with nutrients that help the skin and hair detox. It draws impurities from beneath the skin's surface, aids in the healing of obstinate breakouts, and dramatically reduces the appearance of pores and dark spots when used as a face mask for women.
Where to Buy qasil powder?
When preparing your own DIY facial mask, this is a must-have ingredient so it deeply cleanses, balances, and purifies the skin. It's also popular for gently exfoliating, hydrating, and leaving the skin soft and supple.
Qasil powder skin benefits appearance while also providing a natural glow.
INGREDIENTS THAT CAN BE USED TO Form A Disguise WITH QASIL
Turmeric powder can aid in the healing of acne and the fading of dark spots ( for oily skin )
Sandalwood Powder is used to give the skin a healthy glow.
Huda organics – to promote overall skin health, combat early indications of ageing, and work wonders on fine wrinkles.
Rose water is used to tone the skin and aid in the deep washing process.
Honey is used to rejuvenate the skin.
The use of a face mask skin care is one of the most important processes that many women overlook or misunderstand. Some women are unable to choose the appropriate product for their skin type, while others are unaware of new products that can improve their skincare routine. So, if you're not sure what the best face masks for women in India are, or which skin types they suit, here's a list of items to help you make smarter grooming decisions in the future.
Throughout the classical era, herbal medicine and its active constituents have been a trusted source of medicine. As in treatment of symptoms, herbal supplements including plant based remedies in raw state or their bioactive substances are gaining popularity [1]. Plants are abundant in medicinal chemicals, and practically every part of a plant can be used as medicine in some fashion. Flowers, fruits, seeds, roots, leaves, bark, and other parts seem to be the most widely used. Due to the rise in disease kinds, resilience to existing drugs, and need for drugs with fewer complications, there has been a push to use mainstream science / concepts to find the greatest source of medicine.
So you should buy organic qasil powder from Huda Organics, which is located in the United Kingdom, ST Westend, London, WC2H 9JQ.
You can reach us at 7566209608 or via email at info@hudaorganics.com.
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Huda
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The man who is credited with the victory at the Battle of Midway has been honored in classic naval fashion; the USS Nimitz,
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Hourly History (Battle of Midway - World War II: A History From Beginning to End (World War 2 Battles))
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Honesty, which seems “old-fashioned” to the fast crowd, is the basis of all enduring success, since it brings with it knowledge of the self.
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Tom Butler-Bowdon (50 Success Classics: Winning Wisdom for Work & Life from 50 Landmark Books (50 Classics))
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It was 1992, and the Knicks were hosting their first annual summer camp for youngsters. Like many camps with professional teams, the club wanted to have one of its players make an appearance for a day. Not someone like Ewing, a star who had too many demands on his time already. But not someone from the end of the bench, either. So they asked Mason—basically still new to the NBA—if he’d appear for $1,500. The forward said yes, and the team provided him with a limousine to the camp that day. Mason had his window rolled down as the vehicle arrived, and the kids hovered around it like paparazzi, wanting to catch a glimpse of him up close. Yet Mason stayed in the car. First for two minutes. Then five. Then almost fifteen. Finally Ed Tapscott, then the club’s administrative director, came outside. He’d been responsible for Mason’s appearance at the camp that day, and couldn’t figure out why Mason wasn’t making his way inside the gym. “I’m not getting out of the car for anything less than $2,000, bro. And I want cash,” Mason told him. Tapscott figured he was joking at first. But Mason was completely serious. Sure, he’d agreed to the $1,500 figure before, but now—with an army of young, excited kids waiting inside—he had the leverage to play hardball. Tapscott said he wasn’t even sure he could realistically get access to that much cash that soon. “I had to give one of our staffers my ATM card,” he recalls. “What choice did I really have in a situation like that?” With assurance of the pay increase, Mason hopped out. He played in a couple of scrimmages with the children. But, in classic Mason fashion, he couldn’t turn off his competitiveness. While playing, Mason inadvertently elbowed a kid, knocking the child out cold and breaking his nose, which gushed with blood. When the boy regained consciousness, he woke to find a worried Mason hovering over him. The child smiled and asked the Knick to sign his bloody T-shirt. Meanwhile, Tapscott said he and others running the camp were merely happy to escape the situation without the threat of a lawsuit.
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Chris Herring (Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks)
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She had bought herself a fashionable hat for the occasion, but had done nothing to accommodate it; so that the hat perched on her bird's-nest of ginger hair as if it had dropped there from an upper window as she walked along the street.
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Josephine Tey (Classic collection of Josephine Tey. Illustrated: The Man in the Queue, A Shilling for Candles, The Franchise Affair, To Love and Be Wise, The Daughter of Time and others)
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If we go back to the classics, or at least what I regard as the classics, say for example, Humboldt's "Limits of State Action" which inspired Mill and is a true libertarian-liberal classic. The world that Humboldt was considering, which was partially an imaginary world. But the world for which he was developing this political philosophy was a post-feudal but pre-capitalist world. It was a world in which there is no great divergence among individuals in the kind of power that they have and what they command, let's say. But there was a tremendous disparity between individuals on the one hand and the state on the other. Consequently, it was the task of a liberalism that was concerned with human rights and equality of individuals and so on. It was the task of that liberalism to dissolve the enormous power of the state which was such an authoritarian threat to individual liberties. And from that, you develop a classical liberal theory in, say, Humboldt's or Mill's sense.
Well, of course, that is pre-capitalist. He couldn't conceive of an era in which a corporation would be regarded as an individual, let's say, or in which such enormous disparities and control over resources and production would distinguish between individuals in a massive fashion. Now, in that kind of a society, to take the Humboldtian view is a very superficial liberalism. Because while opposition to state power in an era of such divergence conforms to Humboldt's conclusions, it doesn't do so for his reasons. That is, his reasons lead to very different conclusions in that case. Namely, I think his reasons lead to the conclusion that we must dissolve the authoritarian control over production and resources which leads to such divergences among individuals. In fact, I think one might draw a direct line between classical liberalism and a kind of libertarian socialism, which I think can be regarded as a kind of an adapting of the basic reasoning of classical liberalism to a very different social era.
So, my own feeling has always been that to achieve the classical liberal ideals, for the reasons that led to them being put forth in a society so different, we must be led in a very different direction. It's superficial and erroneous to accept the conclusions which were reached for a different society and not to consider the reasoning that led to those conclusions. The reasoning, I think, is very substantial. I'm a classical liberal in this sense, but I think it leads me to be a kind of an anarchist, you know, an anarchist socialist.
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Noam Chomsky
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Cleon was not, to be sure, the first to have used the courts in this fashion.
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Paul Anthony Rahe (Sparta's Second Attic War: The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta, 446-418 B.C. (Yale Library of Military History))
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Clothing for men and women changed markedly, in both styles and fabrics, over Jane Austen’s lifetime. Following the French Revolution grotesquely elaborate fashions gave way to naturalistic styles, imitating the Classical world. Ladies wore simple gowns based on Greek and Roman styles that were copied from the many archaeological finds then being unearthed at places like Pompeii and Herculaneum. Men’s fashions were influenced by more practical military dress, which resulted in sober clothing, more suitable for country life than the extravagance of the urban fashions of the preceding period.
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Roy A. Adkins (Jane Austen's England: Daily Life in the Georgian and Regency Periods)
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Possibly she insists upon being called a Scottish terrier because, at the moment, Scottish terriers are high in fashion — it is queer, isn’t it that there should be fashions in dogs? Scotties are a sane style; they are, so to say, serviceable and they give good wear. They have all the compactness of a small dog and all the valor of a big one. And they are so exceedingly sturdy that it is proverbial that the only thing fatal to them is being run over by an automobile — in which case the car itself knows that it has been in a fight.
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Dorothy Parker (Dog Tales: Classic Stories About Smart Dogs)
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But in truth the man knew that she had saved his boy’s life, and that he had injured her instead of thanking her. He was now taking her to his heart, and as words were wanting to him, he was showing his love after this silent fashion. He held her by the hand as though she were a child,
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Elsinore Books (Classic Short Stories: The Complete Collection: All 100 Masterpieces)
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Blue high heels, a timeless and enchanting accessory, have long held a special place in fashion. These stunning footwear pieces effortlessly blend sophistication with a dash of whimsy, making them a coveted addition to any fashion-conscious individual's wardrobe.
In all its shades, the color blue has always been associated with a sense of calm, serenity, and depth. When translated into high heels, this color takes on a whole new dimension, turning a pair of shoes into a fashion statement that exudes confidence and charm.
One of the most remarkable aspects of blue high heels is their versatility. Whether you opt for a classic navy, a vibrant royal blue, or an ethereal pastel shade, there's a blue heel to suit every occasion. Navy blue heels, for example, are an excellent choice for corporate settings, exuding professionalism and power. On the other hand, a pair of electric blue stilettos can add a playful pop of color to your evening ensemble, making you the center of attention at any event.
Blue high heels also beautifully complement a wide range of outfits. They can elevate a simple jeans-and-blouse combo, add a touch of elegance to a cocktail dress, or provide a striking contrast to an all-black ensemble. Their ability to effortlessly blend into various styles and settings is a testament to their timeless appeal.
In addition to their aesthetic charm, blue high heels offer the wearer a sense of empowerment. The elevation they provide not only increases height but also boosts confidence. Walking in heels requires poise and balance, qualities that further enhance one's self-assurance.
Blue high heels are a must-have for anyone looking to infuse their wardrobe with elegance and style. These captivating footwear pieces offer versatility, empowerment, and a touch of sophistication, making them an indispensable accessory for fashion enthusiasts. Whether stepping into the boardroom, hitting the town, or simply looking to turn heads, blue high heels will always rise to the occasion, leaving a lasting impression wherever you go.
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kokania
“
They arrived at Cathay, an old-fashioned Chinese restaurant with the retro classics like chow mein and egg foo young, cracked vinyl booths, and a grumpy old woman at the front counter who watched you eat as if fearing you’d pocket the utensils. The
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Harlan Coben (The Innocent)
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In my mind, there was nothing better than a cupcake with a funny little twist. I liked bold pairings of fresh ingredients slathered high with decadent, old-fashioned waves of icing- organic pear and chai tea cake topped with vanilla-ginger buttercream was one of my current favorites. But Lolly St. Clair had more classic taste, and so I'd made an array of delicately flavored Meyer lemon, vanilla, and mocha cupcakes for the benefit.
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Meg Donohue (How to Eat a Cupcake)
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Question: A number of people have noted that you use the term "libertarian socialist" in the same context as you use the word ''anarchism." Do you see these terms as essentially similar? Is anarchism a type of socialism to you? The description has been used before that anarchism is equivalent to socialism with freedom. Would you agree with this basic equation?
The introduction to Guerin's book that you mentioned opens with a quote from an anarchist sympathizer a century ago, who says that "anarchism has a broad back," and "endures anything." One major element has been what has traditionally been called "libertarian socialism." I've tried to explain there and elsewhere what I mean by that, stressing that it's hardly original; I'm taking the ideas from leading figures in the anarchist movement whom I quote, and who rather consistently describe themselves as socialists, while harshly condemning the "new class" of radical intellectuals who seek to attain state power in the course of popular struggle and to become the vicious "red bureaucracy" of which Bakunin warned; what's often called "socialism." I rather agree with Rudolf Rocker's perception that these (quite central) tendencies in anarchism draw from the best of Enlightenment and classical liberal thought, well beyond what he described. In fact, as I've tried to show they contrast sharply with Marxist-Leninist doctrine and practice, the "libertarian" doctrines that are fashionable in the U.S. and UK particularly, and other contemporary ideologies, all of which seem to me to reduce to advocacy of one or another form of illegitimate authority, quite often real tyranny.
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Noam Chomsky (Chomsky On Anarchism)
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There used to be a time when neighbors took care of one another, he remembered. [Put “he remembered”first to establish reflective tone.] It no longer seemed to happen that way, however. [The contrast supplied by “however”must come first. Start with “But.”Also establish America locale.] He wondered if it was because everyone in the modern world was so busy. [All these sentences are the same length and have the same soporific rhythm; turn this one into a question?] It occurred to him that people today have so many things to do that they don’t have time for old-fashioned friendship. [Sentence essentially repeats previous sentence; kill it or warm it up with specific detail.] Things didn’t work that way in America in previous eras. [Reader is still in the present; reverse the sentence to tell him he’s now in the past. “America”no longer needed if inserted earlier.] And he knew that the situation was very different in other countries, as he recalled from the years when he lived in villages in Spain and Italy. [Reader is still in America. Use a negative transition word to get him to Europe. Sentence is also too flabby. Break it into two sentences?] It almost seemed to him that as people got richer and built their houses farther apart they isolated themselves from the essentials of life. [Irony deferred too long. Plant irony early. Sharpen the paradox about richness.] And there was another thought that troubled him. [This is the real point of the paragraph; signal the reader that it’s important. Avoid weak “there was”construction.] His friends had deserted him when he needed them most during his recent illness. [Reshape to end with “most”; the last word is the one that stays in the reader’s ear and gives the sentence its punch. Hold sickness for next sentence; it’s a separate thought.] It was almost as if they found him guilty of doing something shameful. [Introduce sickness here as the reason for the shame. Omit “guilty”; it’s implicit.] He recalled reading somewhere about societies in primitive parts of the world in which sick people were shunned, though he had never heard of any such ritual in America. [Sentence starts slowly and stays sluggish and dull. Break it into shorter units. Snap off the ironic point.]
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William Zinsser (On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction)
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In seeing the thinkers in this tradition as embodying a certain fundamental viewpoint, I am far from denying that there is disagreement between them. Indeed, I try to show how Fichte’s concept of absolute freedom differs subtly from Kant’s, as well as how Fichte develops the theme of intersubjectivity in a new and creative direction. I also try to show how Kant and Herder differ concerning the correct way of understanding human nature, cultural difference and history; and also how Hegel’s theory of imputation differs from Kant’s, and deepens it. And, of course, I emphasize the radical difference between Marx’s treatment of themes having to do with right and the way these themes were treated by the thinkers earlier in the tradition.
At the same time, in treating the German philosophers of this period whose thought interests me, I always tend to emphasize continuities and agreements rather than squabbles and the differences. I think it is both shortsighted and wrongheaded to treat these thinkers as though the fundamental issue is whether we should choose Hegel over Kant, or defend Kant against Hegel, or even champion Marx over against the entire later German idealist tradition, trying to show that he has rendered the entire classical German philosophical tradition obsolete (a dogmatic sectarian attitude that is not as fashionable now as it once was). Instead, I think that despite the controversies within this tradition, there is something unified and important in it, when it comes to themes of freedom, right, ethics, humanity, community, and history, which sets the classical German tradition apart from other strands in modern philosophy.
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Allen W. Wood (The Free Development of Each: Studies on Freedom, Right and Ethics in Classical German Philosophy)
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Exactly why the sources were intertwined in this way is unclear. Exploring this issue really involves asking two questions: (1) Why were all of these sources retained, rather than just retaining the latest or most authoritative one? (2) Why were they combined in this odd way, rather than being left as complete documents that would be read side by side, much like the model of the four different and separate gospels, which introduce the Christian Bible or New Testament?
Since there is no direct evidence going back to the redaction of the Torah, these issues may be explored only in a most tentative fashion, with plausible rather than definitive answers. Probably the earlier documents had a certain prestige and authority in ancient Israel, and could not simply be discarded.9 Additionally, the redaction of the Torah from a variety of sources most likely represents an attempt to enfranchise those groups who held those particular sources
as authoritative. Certainly the Torah does not contain all of the early traditions of Israel. Yet, it does contain the traditions that the redactor felt were important for bringing together a core group of Israel (most likely during the Babylonian exile of 586-538 B.C.E.).
The mixing of these sources by intertwining them preserved a variety of sources and perspectives. (Various methods of intertwining were used-the preferred method was to interleave large blocks of material, as in the initial chapters of Genesis. However, when this would have caused narrative difficulties, as in the flood story or the plagues of Exodus, the sources were interwoven-several verses from one source, followed by several verses from the other.) More than one hundred years ago, the great American scholar G. F Moore called attention to the second-century Christian scholar Tatian, who composed the Diatessaron.10 This work is a harmony of the Gospels, where most of the four canonical gospels are combined into a single work, exactly the same way that scholars propose the four Torah strands of J, E, D, and P have been combined. This, along with other ancient examples, shows that even though the classical model posited by source criticism may seem strange to us, it reflects a way that people wrote literature in antiquity
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Marc Zvi Brettler (How to Read the Bible)
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12. Historians today rely on classics like Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, Caesar’s Gallic War, and Tacitus’s Histories. The earliest copies we have for these date from 1,300, 900, and 700 years after the original writing, respectively, and there are eight extant copies of the first, ten of the second, and two of the third. In contrast, the earliest copy of Mark’s gospel is dated at AD 130 (a century after the original writing), and there are 5,000 ancient Greek copies, along with nearly 20,000 Latin and other ancient manuscripts. The sheer volume of ancient manuscripts provides sufficient comparison between copies to provide an accurate reproduction of the original text. Ironically, a number of fashionable scholars attracted to the so-called gnostic gospels as an “alternative Christianity” have far fewer manuscripts, and the original writings cannot be dated any earlier than a century after the canonical Gospels.
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Michael Scott Horton (Pilgrim Theology: Core Doctrines for Christian Disciples)
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Rieff's point is the classical one: that in order to have a truly human existence there must be limits; and what we call culture or the superego sets such limits. Culture is a compromise with life that makes human life possible. He quotes Marx's defiant revolutionary phrase: "I am nothing and should be everything." For Rieff this is the undiluted infantile unconscious speaking. Or, as I would prefer to say with Rank, the neurotic consciousness-the "all or nothing" of the person who cannot "partialize" his world. One bursts out in boundless megalomania, transcending all limits, or bogs down into wormhood like a truly worthless sinner. There is no secure ego balance to limit the intake of reality or to fashion the output of one's own powers.
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Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death)
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But there was the other dream, the unpractical persistent one, first fashioned in her imagination by that new boy at school who spoke the words, “…the heart that has truly loved never forgets, but as truly loves on to the close…” –Thomas Allen, Jenny Kissed Me!
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Thomas Allen