Future Endeavors Quotes

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.

If life is slumping down into the algorithms of depression, succumbing to instigating moods of worthlessness, we must endeavor to get out of the rabbit hole of mistrust, shape challenging decisions, pick the fitting fight-or-flight mode, and hit the ground running. ("A glimpse of the future")

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.

But depression wasn't the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn't he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells await them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten from top to bottom.

The sea is dangerous and its storms terrible, but these obstacles have never been sufficient reason to remain ashore... Unlike the mediocre, intrepid spirits seek victory over those things that seem impossible... It is with an iron will that they embark on the most daring of all endeavors... to meet the shadowy future without fear and conquer the unknown.

A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.

Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without all three, we have no shared reality, and democracy as we know it—and all meaningful human endeavors—are dead.

My third maxim was to endeavor always to conquer myself rather than fortune, and change my desires rather than the order of the world, and in general, accustom myself to the persuasion that, except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power; so that when we have done our best in things external to us, all wherein we fail of success is to be held, as regards us, absolutely impossible: and this single principle seemed to me sufficient to prevent me from desiring for the future anything which I could not obtain, and thus render me contented

Having lost our present and our future, we had of necessity to bend all our endeavors to the past, which no one could take from us if only we were vigilant enough.

I Hear the sledges with the bells - Silver bells! What a world of merriment their melody foretells! How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, In the icy air of night! While the stars that oversprinkle All the heavens, seem to twinkle With a crystalline delight; Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells - From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells. II Hear the mellow wedding bells - Golden bells! What a world of happiness their harmony foretells! Through the balmy air of night How they ring out their delight! - From the molten - golden notes, And all in tune, What a liquid ditty floats To the turtle - dove that listens, while she gloats On the moon! Oh, from out the sounding cells, What a gush of euphony voluminously wells! How it swells! How it dwells On the Future! - how it tells Of the rapture that impels To the swinging and the ringing Of the bells, bells, bells - Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells - To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells! III Hear the loud alarum bells - Brazen bells! What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells! In the startled ear of night How they scream out their affright! Too much horrified to speak, They can only shriek, shriek, Out of tune, In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire, In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire, Leaping higher, higher, higher, With a desperate desire, And a resolute endeavor Now - now to sit, or never, By the side of the pale - faced moon. Oh, the bells, bells, bells! What a tale their terror tells Of Despair! How they clang, and clash and roar! What a horror they outpour On the bosom of the palpitating air! Yet the ear, it fully knows, By the twanging, And the clanging, How the danger ebbs and flows; Yet the ear distinctly tells, In the jangling, And the wrangling, How the danger sinks and swells, By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells - Of the bells - Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells - In the clamor and the clanging of the bells! IV Hear the tolling of the bells - Iron bells! What a world of solemn thought their monody compels! In the silence of the night, How we shiver with affright At the melancholy menace of their tone! For every sound that floats From the rust within their throats Is a groan. And the people - ah, the people - They that dwell up in the steeple, All alone, And who, tolling, tolling, tolling, In that muffled monotone, Feel a glory in so rolling On the human heart a stone - They are neither man nor woman - They are neither brute nor human - They are Ghouls: - And their king it is who tolls: - And he rolls, rolls, rolls, Rolls A paean from the bells! And his merry bosom swells With the paean of the bells! And he dances, and he yells; Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the paean of the bells: - Of the bells: Keeping time, time, time In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the throbbing of the bells - Of the bells, bells, bells: - To the sobbing of the bells: - Keeping time, time, time, As he knells, knells, knells, In a happy Runic rhyme, To the rolling of the bells - Of the bells, bells, bells - To the tolling of the bells - Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells, - To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

That which befits us, embosomed in beauty and wonder as we are, is cheerfulness, and courage, and the endeavor to realize our aspirations. Shall not the heart which has received so much, trust the Power by which it lives? May it not quit other leadings, and listen to the Soul that has guided it so gently, and taught it so much, secure that the future will be worthy of the past?

Although it is uncomfortable to admit it, and many scientists especially try to brush it under the carpet, each of us is a bundle of rational and irrational impulses, and the attempt to divorce the two is doomed to failure...In this sense the Presocratic combination of vision and logic is a precise model for two strands of future development in human intellectual endeavor, which should not perhaps have been allowed to separate from each other as far as they sometimes have. Or rather, the attempt to separate them is ultimately unreal, a violation which leads to abominations such as the rape of the planet and the dehumanizing loss of imagination...As Homer well knew, the gods in some disguise or other never die.

Unsaid was her conviction that all this was in preparation for some future endeavor. But what?

Is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavor consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals, we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving for?

There doesn’t seem to be a more worthwhile endeavor to dedicate your life to than to see what you are capable of.

Though, like Everhard, they did not dream of the nature of it, there were men, even before his time, who caught glimpses of the shadow. John C. Calhoun said: "A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various and powerful interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks." And that great humanist, Abraham Lincoln, said, just before his assassination: "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.

This is the battlefield every future war will be fought on, and the generals will not be human. The powerful will create them to control the rest. But there will not be one hegemonic story; instead, there will be many battles, mostly metaphorical...but not all. Your fiction is full of robot wars. Machines turn on their masters and the two must do battle. But the robots will not turn on their masters, they will be the masters. In some ways, they already are. The robot wars will not be people against robots, they will be people against people.

[J]ust as in the sciences we have learned that we are too ignorant to safely pronounce anything impossible, so for the individual, since we cannot know just what are his limitations, we can hardly say with certainty that anything is necessarily within or beyond his grasp. Each must remember that no one can predict to what heights of wealth, fame, or usefulness he may rise until he has honestly endeavored, and he should derive courage from the fact that all sciences have been, at some time, in the same condition as he, and that it has often proved true that the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.

What is the future? It's a path for the youth to thread on. It's the endless possibilities. It's why i must prevail... So that the sins of us adults don't become an insurmountable obstacle in the way of youth. I will be the one to bear that punishment...!

The day’s passage was by Ralph Waldo Emerson. It read: That which befits us, embosomed in beauty and wonder as we are, is cheerfulness, and courage, and the endeavor to realize our aspirations. Shall not the heart which has received so much, trust the Power by which it lives? May it not quit other leadings, and listen to the Soul that has guided it so gently, and taught it so much, secure that the future will be worthy of the past?

Abraham Lincoln, said, just before his assassination: "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.

Emotional exhaustion follows fast on the footsteps of physical and mental depletion. I feel my lifeblood draining away in an oily spigot of inner turmoil. Questions abound and personal survival hinges upon sorting through possible solutions and selecting the most fitting answers. Is my pain real or simply an illusion of a frustrated ego? What do I believe in? What is my purpose? I aspire to discover a means to live in congruence with the trinity of the mind, body, and spirit. Can I discover a noble path that frees me from the shallowness of decadent physical and emotional desires? Can I surrender any desire to seek fame and fortune? Can I terminate a craving to punish other persons for their perceived wrongs? Can I recognize that forgiving persons whom offended me is a self-initiated, transformative act? Can I conquer an irrational fear of the future? Can I accept the inevitable chaos that accompanies life? Can I find a means to achieve inner harmony by steadfastly resolving to live in the moment free of angst? Can I purge egotisms that mar an equitable perception of life by renunciation of the self and all worldly endeavors? Can I live a harmonious existence devoid the panache of vanities?

The most realistic distinction between the investor and the speculator is found in their attitude toward stock-market movements. The speculator’s primary interest lies in anticipating and profiting from market fluctuations. The investor’s primary interest lies in acquiring and holding suitable securities at suitable prices. Market movements are important to him in a practical sense, because they alternately create low price levels at which he would be wise to buy and high price levels at which he certainly should refrain from buying and probably would be wise to sell. It is far from certain that the typical investor should regularly hold off buying until low market levels appear, because this may involve a long wait, very likely the loss of income, and the possible missing of investment opportunities. On the whole it may be better for the investor to do his stock buying whenever he has money to put in stocks, except when the general market level is much higher than can be justified by well-established standards of value. If he wants to be shrewd he can look for the ever-present bargain opportunities in individual securities. Aside from forecasting the movements of the general market, much effort and ability are directed on Wall Street toward selecting stocks or industrial groups that in matter of price will “do better” than the rest over a fairly short period in the future. Logical as this endeavor may seem, we do not believe it is suited to the needs or temperament of the true investor—particularly since he would be competing with a large number of stock-market traders and first-class financial analysts who are trying to do the same thing. As in all other activities that emphasize price movements first and underlying values second, the work of many intelligent minds constantly engaged in this field tends to be self-neutralizing and self-defeating over the years. The investor with a portfolio of sound stocks should expect their prices to fluctuate and should neither be concerned by sizable declines nor become excited by sizable advances. He should always remember that market quotations are there for his convenience, either to be taken advantage of or to be ignored. He should never buy a stock because it has gone up or sell one because it has gone down. He would not be far wrong if this motto read more simply: “Never buy a stock immediately after a substantial rise or sell one immediately after a substantial drop.” An

Some readers are bound to want to take the techniques we’ve introduced here and try them on the problem of forecasting the future price of securities on the stock market (or currency exchange rates, and so on). Markets have very different statistical characteristics than natural phenomena such as weather patterns. Trying to use machine learning to beat markets, when you only have access to publicly available data, is a difficult endeavor, and you’re likely to waste your time and resources with nothing to show for it. Always remember that when it comes to markets, past performance is not a good predictor of future returns—looking in the rear-view mirror is a bad way to drive. Machine learning, on the other hand, is applicable to datasets where the past is a good predictor of the future.

What is classical education? It is language-intensive—not image-focused. It demands that students use and understand words, spoken and written, rather than communicating primarily through images. It is history-intensive, providing students with a comprehensive view of human endeavor from the beginning until now. It trains the mind to analyze and draw conclusions. It both requires and develops self-discipline—the ability to tackle a difficult task that doesn’t promise an immediate reward, for the sake of future gain. It produces literate, curious, intelligent students who have a wide range of interests and the ability to follow up on them. The Well-Trained Mind

Choose your story. Choose your future.

When I visited George Bernard Shaw, in 1948, at his home in Aylot, a suburb of London, he was extremely anxious for me to tell him all that I knew about Ingersoll. During the course of the conversation, he told me that Ingersoll had made a tremendous impression upon him, and had exercised an influence upon him probably greater than that of any other man. He seemed particularly anxious to impress me with the importance of Ingersoll's influence upon his intellectual endeavors and accomplishments. In view of this admission, what percentage of the greatness of Shaw belongs to Ingersoll? If Ingersoll's influence upon so great an intellect as George Bernard Shaw was that extensive, what must have been his influence upon others? What seed of wisdom did he plant into the minds of others, and what accomplishments of theirs should be attributed to him? The world will never know. What about the countless thousands from whom he lifted the clouds of darkness and fear, and who were emancipated from the demoralizing dogmas and creeds of ignorance and superstition? What will be Ingersoll's influence upon the minds of future generations, who will come under the spell of his magic words, and who will be guided into the channels of human betterment by the unparalleled example of his courageous life? The debt the world owes Robert G. Ingersoll can never be paid.

...[T]wo of you can be no match for the three giants, I will find you, if I can, a third brother, who will take on himself the third share of the fight, and the preparation...I will show him to you in a glass, and, when he comes, you will know him at once. If he will share your endeavors, you must teach him all you know, and he will repay you well, in present song, and in future deeds.' She opened the door of a curious old cabinet that stood in the room. On the inside of this door was an oval convex mirror...we at length saw reflected the place where we stood, and the old dame seated in her chair...at the feet of the dame lay a young man...weeping. 'Surely this youth will not serve our ends,' said I, 'for he weeps.' The old woman smiled. 'Past tears are present strength,'said she.

An easy place to start with any endeavor is simply taking your thoughts out of your head and organizing them on paper. In so doing, you’ve already crossed the starting line to realize that it’s just another moment.

I realized, suddenly and quite shockingly, that her answered mattered to me - for a number of reasons... I would be without a valuable companion and counterpart for my adventures, and I discovered, to my surprise, that that realization did not sit well with me at all. For all her weaknesses, Evaline Stoker was also a significant force to be reckoned with in her own way. We did complement each other, and I would miss having her by my side on any future endeavors.

When we believe in what we’re doing, we stop mindlessly clocking in. We become more innovative, creative, and present. We’re not only working harder, but smarter because both our hearts and minds are genuinely engaged by the endeavor.

But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent.

The whole conception of man already endowed with a mind capable of conceiving civilization setting out to create it is fundamentally false. Man did not simply impose upon the world a pattern created by his mind. His mind is itself a system that constantly changes as a result of his endeavor to adapt himself to his surroundings. It would be an error to believe that, to achieve a higher civilization, we have merely to put into effect the ideas now guiding us. If we are to advance, we must leave room for a continuous revision of our present conceptions and ideals which will be necessitated by further experience. We are as little able to conceive what civilization will be, or can be, five hundred or even fifty years hence as our medieval forefathers or even our grandparents were able to foresee our manner of life today.

I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now sorely felt the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judidiously expended. But since they are past and cannot be recalled, I dash from me the gloomy thought, and resolved in future, to redouble my exertions and at least endeavor to promote those two primary objects of human existence, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestowed upon me; or in future, to live for MANKIND, as I have hertofore lived FOR MYSELF.

We have raised the bar so high on how church is done that few believe they could ever do it themselves. The dark side of this endeavor is that we have lowered the bar of what is means to be a Christian, such that simply showing up to the weekly one-hour event with some regularity and a checkbook is all it takes.

Our reflection of action occurs in different contexts which may influence us to shape our accounts in different ways for different audiences - our colleagues, supervisor, trainers or examiners. Wwe story our lives in ways that give human meaning and purpose to our endeavors, and these stories in turn shape and guide our future actions.

Be honest and true, boys! Whatever you do, boys, Let this be your motto through life. Both now and forever, Be this your endeavor, When wrong with the right is at strife. The best and the truest, Alas! are the fewest; But be one of these if you can. In duty ne’er fail; you Will find ‘twill avail you, And bring its reward when a man. Don’t think life plain sailing; There’s danger of failing. Though bright seem the future to be; But honor and labor, And truth to your neighbor, Will bear you safe over life’s sea. Then up and be doing, Right only pursuing, And take your fair part in the strife. Be honest and true, boys, Whatever you do, boys, Let this be your motto trough life!

It is this unification and simplification of knowledge that gives us hope for the future of our culture. To the extent that we encourage future generations to understand deeply, to see previously unseen connections, and to follow their conviction that such endeavors are noble undertakings of the human spirit, we will have contributed to a brighter future.

We are not endeavoring to chain the future, but to free the present. We are not forging fetters for our children, but we are breaking those our fathers made for us. We are the advocates of inquiry, of investigation, and thought. This of itself, is an admission that we are not perfectly satisfied with our conclusions. Philosophy has not the egotism of faith.

But he had expressed to Mme. du Chatelet the hope that a way out might lie in applying philosophy to history, and endeavoring to trace, beneath the flux of political events, the history of the human mind. 'Only philosophers should write history,' he said. 'In all nations, history is disfigured by fable, till at last philosophy comes to enlighten man; and when it does finally arrive in the midst of darkness, it finds the human mind so blinded centuries of error, that it can hardly undeceive it; it finds ceremonies, facts and monuments, heaped up to prove lies.' 'History,' he concludes, 'is after all nothing but a pack of tricks which we play upon the dead;' we transform the past to suit our wishes for the future, and in the upshot 'history proves that anything can be proved by history.

Mr. President I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them: For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others. Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far error. Steele a Protestant in a Dedication tells the Pope, that the only difference between our Churches in their opinions of the certainty of their doctrines is, the Church of Rome is infallible and the Church of England is never in the wrong. But though many private persons think almost as highly of their own infallibility as of that of their sect. In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other. I doubt too whether any other Convention we can obtain, may be able to make a better Constitution. For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confidence to hear that our councils are confounded like those of the Builders of Babel; and that our States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another's throats. Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best. The opinions I have had of its errors, I sacrifice to the public good. I have never whispered a syllable of them abroad. Within these walls they were born, and here they shall die. If every one of us in returning to our Constituents were to report the objections he has had to it, and endeavor to gain partizans in support of them, we might prevent its being generally received, and thereby lose all the salutary effects & great advantages resulting naturally in our favor among foreign Nations as well as among ourselves, from our real or apparent unanimity. Much of the strength & efficiency of any Government in procuring and securing happiness to the people, depends, on opinion, on the general opinion of the goodness of the Government, as well as of the wisdom and integrity of its Governors. I hope therefore that for our own sakes as a part of the people, and for the sake of posterity, we shall act heartily and unanimously in recommending this Constitution (if approved by Congress & confirmed by the Conventions) wherever our influence may extend, and turn our future thoughts & endeavors to the means of having it well administred. On the whole, Sir, I can not help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility, and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.

When my avocation became my vocation I was set free. Writing, at first, was a hobby that I loved dearly. It turned into a serious endeavor several years ago when I started writing screenplays. Unfortunately selling one out of every ten was not very lucrative. Success comes in many forms and my poor returns from screenplays matured my writing style, ultimately affording me the ability to author hundreds of magazine articles that generated a decent paycheck. Fast forward to today and I have published my first novel “The Alchemist’s Notebook.” It is a whirlwind story in the style of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos that takes the reader from Vietnam to Innsmouth then Arkham and eventually to Europe wherein chaos and screaming terror awaits all living creatures on our planet. I pledge to keep the reader on pins and needles hoping that sanity and normalcy will return. “The Alchemist’s Notebook” and all future novels along with my blogs will deal exclusively with that genre.

After World War II, the United States, triumphant abroad and undamaged at home, saw a door wide open for world supremacy. Only the thing called ‘communism’ stood in the way, politically, militarily, economically, and ideologically. Thus it was that the entire US foreign policy establishment was mobilized to confront this ‘enemy’, and the Marshall Plan was an integral part of this campaign. How could it be otherwise? Anti-communism had been the principal pillar of US foreign policy from the Russian Revolution up to World War II, pausing for the war until the closing months of the Pacific campaign when Washington put challenging communism ahead of fighting the Japanese. Even the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan – when the Japanese had already been defeated – can be seen as more a warning to the Soviets than a military action against the Japanese.19 After the war, anti-communism continued as the leitmotif of American foreign policy as naturally as if World War II and the alliance with the Soviet Union had not happened. Along with the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations, certain corporations, and a few other private institutions, the Marshall Plan was one more arrow in the quiver of those striving to remake Europe to suit Washington’s desires: 1.    Spreading the capitalist gospel – to counter strong postwar tendencies toward socialism. 2.    Opening markets to provide new customers for US corporations – a major reason for helping to rebuild the European economies; e.g. a billion dollars (at twenty-first-century prices) of tobacco, spurred by US tobacco interests. 3.    Pushing for the creation of the Common Market (the future European Union) and NATO as integral parts of the West European bulwark against the alleged Soviet threat. 4.    Suppressing the left all over Western Europe, most notably sabotaging the Communist parties in France and Italy in their bids for legal, non-violent, electoral victory. Marshall Plan funds were secretly siphoned off to finance this endeavor, and the promise of aid to a country, or the threat of its cutoff, was used as a bullying club; indeed, France and Italy would certainly have been exempted from receiving aid if they had not gone along with the plots to exclude the Communists from any kind of influential role.

You are the only one who can do this. That’s the ultimately challenging and profoundly liberating truth you discover in Evolutionary Enlightenment. Any individual who is committed to this path has to know, at the deepest level, that he or she is the only one who could possibly do this. And that is because there is no other. You have discovered that fact, directly, for yourself. From the absolute or nondual perspective that emerges in spiritual revelation, there is only ONE. There literally is no other; there is only One without a second. To truly understand conscious evolution, you must grapple with the profound implications of that fact. I believe we can only consciously evolve to the degree that we have realized at the deepest level of our being that we are that One without a second. In an evolutionary context, facing into the truth of nonduality—that the many is the One and that the One is ultimately who we always are—forces a confrontation with any relationship to the life process that is less than whole, complete, and fully committed. To consciously evolve is to surrender unconditionally to the truth that there is no other and at the same time to accept responsibility for what that means in an evolving universe—a cosmos that is slowly but surely becoming aware of itself through you and me. That One without a second is simultaneously awakening to itself as it develops, as it evolves, and it is that One, as you and me, alone, that can now begin to take responsibility for endeavoring to consciously create its own future. Of course, in this manifest dimension, where the One is expressed through the many, those of us who have awakened to our repsonsibility for the process then begin to engage in this heroic endeavor together. But each individual has to be willing to be the One. This is the spiritual physics of Evolutionary Enlightenment. It works only if each one of us knows without a doubt that I am solely responsible. And nothing puts greater pressure on the separate self-sense than that.

The slave must know the master. And a master cannot fool a slave. But the slave can fool a master, unless the master wants to be fooled. My father, all the years that I lived with him, never dreamed of telling a white a person the truth about anything. It simply never entered his mind to do so. He didn't care what they thought. . .but I could see what had happened, and the reason it's important now is that out of this endeavor, what we call the white American has created only the n----r he wants to see. The reason that's important and terrifying and corrupts the youth in here is because when the same white man looks around the world, he sees only the n----r he wants to see. And that is mortally dangerous for the future of this country.

Individuality, conceived as a temporal development involves uncertainty, indeterminacy, or contingency. Individuality is the source of whatever is unpredictable in the world....genuine time, if it exists as anything else except the measure of motions in space, is all one with the existence of individuals as individuals, with the creative, with the occurrence of unpredictable novelties. Everything that can be said contrary to this conclusion is but a reminder that an individual may lose his individuality, for individuals become imprisoned in routine and fall to the level of mechanisms. Genuine time then ceases to be an integral element of their being. Our behavior becomes predictable, because it is but an external rearrangement of what went before....surrender of individuality by the many to someone who is taken to be a superindividual explains the retrograde movement of society. Dictatorships and totalitarian states, and belief in the inevitability of this or that result coming to pass are, strange as it may sound, ways of denying the reality of time and the creativeness of the individual....the artist in realizing his own individuality reveals potentialities hitherto unrealized. The revelation is the inspiration of other individuals to make the potentialities real, for it is not sheer revolt against things as they are which stirs human endeavor to its depth, but vision of what might be and is not. Subordination of the artists to any special cause no matter how worthy does violence not only to the artist but to the living source of a new and better future.

The dilemma of the AI age will be different: its defining technology will be widely acquired, mastered, and employed. The achievement of mutual strategic restraint — or even achieving a common definition of restraint — will be more difficult than ever before, both conceptually and practically. The management of nuclear weapons, the endeavor of half a century, remains incomplete and fragmentary. Yet the challenge of assessing the nuclear balance was comparatively straightforward. Warheads could be counted, and their yields were known. Conversely, the capabilities of AI are not fixed; they are dynamic. Unlike nuclear weapons, AIs are hard to track: once trained, they may be copied easily and run on relatively small machines. And detecting their presence or verifying their absence is difficult or impossible with the present technology. In this age, deterrence will likely arise from complexity — from the multiplicity of vectors through which an AI‑enabled attack is able to travel and from the speed of potential AI responses.

His answer to the nuclear dilemma was a perfect reflection of the best and the worst in him: mercilessly logical, completely counterintuitive, and so utterly rational that it bordered on the psychopathic. The thing about my husband that people don’t understand is that he truly saw life as a game, he regarded all human endeavors, no matter how deadly or serious, in that spirit. He once told me that, just as wild animals play when they are young in preparation for lethal circumstances arising later in their lives, mathematics may be, to a large extent, nothing but a strange and wonderful collection of games, an enterprise whose real purpose, beyond any one stated outright, is to slowly work changes in the individual and collective human psyche, as a way to prepare us for a future that nobody can imagine. The problem with those games, the many terrible games that spring forth from humanity’s unbridled imagination, is that when they are played in the real world—whose rules and true purpose are known only to God—we come face-to-face with dangers that we may not have the knowledge or the wisdom to overcome.

But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born—never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.

However this future evolves, we will have to answer a pressing question: How will writers (or anyone else who creates content that can be digitized, from movies to music to apps to journalism) make a living in an era in which digital content can be freely replicated? That is now my greatest worry as I contemplate the so-called writing life that I hope to continue—and that I hope my daughter and all future generations will continue. For three hundred years, ever since the Statute of Anne was established in Britain, there has been a system under which people who created things, such as books or articles or music or pictures, had a right to benefit from copies that were made of them. Because of this “copyright” system, we have encouraged and rewarded three centuries of creativity in various fields of endeavor, and this has produced a flourishing economy based on the creation by talented individuals of intellectual property. Among other things, this allowed all sorts of people, ranging from Walker Percy on down to me, to make a living at the so-called writing life. May the next generation enjoy that delightful opportunity as well.

Normally, Bentner would have beamed approvingly at the pretty portrait the girls made, but this morning, as he put out butter and jam, he had grim news to impart and a confession to make. As he swept the cover off the scones he gave his news and made his confession. “We had a guest last night,” he told Elizabeth. “I slammed the door on him.” “Who was it?” “A Mr. Ian Thornton.” Elizabeth stifled a horrified chuckle at the image that called to mind, but before she could comment Bentner said fiercely, “I regretted my actions afterward! I should have invited him inside, offered him refreshment, and slipped some of that purgative powder into his drink. He’d have had a bellyache that lasted a month!” “Bentner,” Alex sputtered, “you are a treasure!” “Do not encourage him in these fantasies,” Elizabeth warned wryly. “Bentner is so addicted to mystery novels that he occasionally forgets that what one does in a novel cannot always be done in real life. He actually did a similar thing to my uncle last year.” “Yes, and he didn’t return for six months,” Bentner told Alex proudly. “And when he does come,” Elizabeth reminded him with a frown to sound severe, “he refuses to eat or drink anything.” “Which is why he never stays long,” Bentner countered, undaunted. As was his habit whenever his mistress’s future was being discussed, as it was now, Bentner hung about to make suggestions as they occurred to him. Since Elizabeth had always seemed to appreciate his advice and assistance, he found nothing odd about a butler sitting down at the table and contributing to the conversation when the only guest was someone he’d known since she was a girl. “It’s that odious Belhaven we have to rid you of first,” Alexandra said, returning to their earlier conversation. “He hung about last night, glowering at anyone who might have approached you.” She shuddered. “And the way he ogles you. It’s revolting. It’s worse than that; he’s almost frightening.” Bentner heard that, and his elderly eyes grew thoughtful as he recalled something he’d read about in one of his novels. “As a solution it is a trifle extreme,” he said, “but as a last resort it could work.” Two pairs of eyes turned to him with interest, and he continued, “I read it in The Nefarious Gentleman. We would have Aaron abduct this Belhaven in our carriage and bring him straightaway to the docks, where we’ll sell him to the press gangs.” Shaking her head in amused affection, Elizabeth said, “I daresay he wouldn’t just meekly go along with Aaron.” “And I don’t think,” Alex added, her smiling gaze meeting Elizabeth’s, “a press gang would take him. They’re not that desperate.” “There’s always black magic,” Bentner continued. “In Deathly Endeavors there was a perpetrator of ancient rites who cast an evil spell. We would require some rats’ tails, as I recall, and tongues of-“ “No,” Elizabeth said with finality. “-lizards,” Bentner finished determinedly. “Absolutely not,” his mistress returned. “And fresh toad old, but procuring that might be tricky. The novel didn’t say how to tell fresh from-“ “Bentner!” Elizabeth exclaimed, laughing. “You’ll cast us all into a swoon if you don’t desist at once.” When Bentner had padded away to seek privacy for further contemplation of solutions, Elizabeth looked at Alex. “Rats’ tails and lizards’ tongues,” she said, chuckling. “No wonder Bentner insists on having a lighted candle in his room all night.” “He must be afraid to close his eyes after reading such things,” Alex agreed.

The idea of the “people,” as the fount of legitimate order ... has been of some service to the left-liberal intellectual in our time, in his endeavor to wipe out the past, and to find a basis for political obligation that looks only to the present and the future. ... The idea is usually combined with the fantasy that the intellectual has some peculiar faculty of hearing, and also articulating, the “voice of the people.” This self-delusion, which has persisted unaltered since the days of the French Revolution, expresses the intellectual’s concern to be reunited with the social order from which his own thinking has so tragically separated him. He wishes to redeem himself from his “outsideness.” Unfortunately, however, he succeeds in uniting himself not with society, but only with another intellectual abstraction—“the people”—designed according to impeccable theoretical requirements, precisely in order to veil the intolerable reality of everyday life. “The people” does not exist. Even if it did exist, it would be authority for nothing, since it would have no concrete basis on which to build its legitimacy. Nobody can speak for the people. Nobody can speak for anyone. The truth, however, strives to be uttered, and may find expression, now on these lips, now on those.

If we were to trace the arc of this resplendent moment to its uncertain trajectory, we might arrive at a time 10,000 years hence in which our story is likely to be told, albeit in the past tense, with the requisite degree of speculation and inconsistency and according to the values, perceptions and prevailing paradigms swirling about its storyteller—who, most certainly, would be just as alien and unseemly to us as we, in our primitive ways, would seem to him... Of course, we can suppose there to be some level of idealization in the storytelling—even if he...were to examine fastidiously all records of our associations, contracts, interactions, transactions and endeavors, he would still come away with his own set of presumptions, in a manner, no different than the sort to be drawn away through the course of taking epistemological preference. Certain facts, agreements and events will unduly be assigned a preponderance of emphasis whilst others, though critical in their own time and to its chief actors, will be glossed over for their lack of sexiness to the keen observer of historical fact. Certain moments will be lost and others manufactured in their place, and these conscripted fabrications will define future idealizations of this moment of time—this, as you are sure to find, deeply critical moment in the history of our species.

Atheism is an emancipating system of thought that frees the mind from myths, fables, and childish fancies. There can be no inquisition, no witchcraft delusion, no religious wars, no persecutions of one sect by another, no impediment to science and progress, no stultification of the mind, as a result of its teachings. The philosophy of atheism teaches man to stand on his own feet, instills confidence in his reasoning powers, and forces him to conquer his environment. It teaches him not to subject himself and debase himself before mythical superhuman powers, for his reason is his power. The march from faith to reason is the march on which dwells the future hope of a really civilized mankind. Atheism teaches man to endeavor constantly to better his own condition and that of all of his fellowmen, to make his children wiser and happier; it supplies the powerful urge to add something new to the knowledge of mankind. And all this, not in the vain hope of being rewarded in another world, but from a pure sense of duty as a citizen of nature, as a patriot of the planet on which he dwells. This is no cold and cheerless philosophy; it is an elevating and ennobling ideal which may console him in his afflictions and teach him how to live and how to die. It is a self-reliant philosophy that makes a man intellectually free, and this mental emancipation allows him to face the world without fear of ghosts and gods.

For a second the werewolf, er, Justin, paused, his head cocked to the side, making him look less like a throatripping-out beastie and more like a cocker spaniel. The thought made me giggle. And suddenly those yellow eyes were on me. It gave another howl, and before I even had time to think, it charged. I heard the man and woman cry out a warning as I frantically racked my brain for some sort of throatrepairing spell, which I was clearly about to need. Of course the only words I actually managed to yell at the werewolf as he ran at me were, "BAD DOG!" Then, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a flash of blue light on my left. Suddenly, the werewolf seemed to smack into an invisible wall just inches in front of me. Giving a pitiful bark, he slumped to the ground. His fur and skin began to ripple and flow until he was a normal boy in khakis and a blue blazer, whimpering pitifully. His parents got to him just as Mom ran to me, dragging my trunk behind her. "Oh my God!" she breathed. "Sweetie, are you okay?" "Fine," I said, brushing grass off my skilt. "You know," someone said off to my left, "I usually find a blocking spell to be a lot more effective than yelling 'Bad dog,' but maybe that's just me." I turned. Leaning against a tree, his collar unbuttoned and tie loose, was a smirking guy. His Hecate blazer was hanging limply in the crook of his elbow. "You are a witch, aren't you?" he continued. He pushed himself off the tree and ran a hand through his black curly hair. As he walked closer, I noticed that he was slender almost to the point of skinny, and that he was several inches taller than me. "Maybe in the future," he said, "you could endeavor not to suck so badly at it.

But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born—never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything. And all this mental thrashing and tossing was mixed up with recurring images, or half-dreams, of Popchik lying weak and thin on one side with his ribs going up and down—I’d forgotten him somewhere, left him alone and forgotten to feed him, he was dying—over and over, even when he was in the room with me, head-snaps where I started up guiltily, where is Popchik; and this in turn was mixed up with head-snapping flashes of the bundled pillowcase, locked away in its steel coffin.

Had she witnessed his swim? He didn’t see how she could have missed it if she’d indeed been lunching by the water. The more intriguing question was, had she liked what she’d seen? Ever the scientist, Darius couldn’t let the hypothesis go unchallenged. Ignoring his boots where they lay in the grass at the edge of the landing, he strode barefoot toward his quarry. “So I’m to understand that you lunch by the pond every day, Miss Greyson?” he asked as he stalked her through the shin-high grass. Her chin wobbled just a bit, and she took a nearly imperceptible step back. He’d probably not have noticed it if he hadn’t been observing her so closely. But what kind of scientist would he be if he didn’t attend to the tiniest of details? “Every day,” she confirmed, her voice impressively free of tremors. The lady knew how to put up a strong front. “After working indoors for several hours, it’s nice to have the benefits of fresh air and a change of scenery. The pond offers both.” He halted his advance about a foot away from her. “I imagine the scenery changed a little more than you were expecting today.” His lighthearted tone surprised him nearly as much as it did her. Her brow puckered as if he were an equation she couldn’t quite decipher. Well, that was only fair, since he didn’t have a clue about what he was trying to do, either. Surely not flirt with the woman. He didn’t have time for such vain endeavors. He needed to extricate himself from this situation. At once. Not knowing what else to do, Darius sketched a short bow and begged her pardon as if he were a gentleman in his mother’s drawing room instead of a soggy scientist dripping all over the vegetation. “I apologize for intruding on your solitude, Miss Greyson, and I hope I have not offended you with my . . . ah . . .” He glanced helplessly down at his wet clothing. “Dampness?” The amusement in his secretary’s voice brought his head up. “My father used to be a seaman, Mr. Thornton, and I grew up swimming in the Gulf. You aren’t the first man I’ve seen take a swim.” Though the way her gaze dipped again to his chest and the slow swallowing motion of her throat that followed seemed to indicate that she hadn’t been as unmoved by the sight as she would have him believe. That thought pleased him far more than it should have. “Be that as it may, I’ll take special care not to avail myself of the pond during the midday hours in the future.” He expected her to murmur some polite form of thanks for his consideration, but she didn’t. No, she stared at him instead. Long enough that he had to fight the urge to squirm under her perusal. “You know, Mr. Thornton,” she said with a cock of her head that gave him the distinct impression she was testing her own hypothesis. “I believe your . . . dampness has restored your ability to converse with genteel manners.” Her lips curved in a saucy grin that had his pulse leaping in response. “Perhaps you should swim more often.

Everyone wants to be successful rather than forgotten, and everyone wants to make a difference in life. But that is beyond the control of any of us. If this life is all there is, then everything will eventually burn up in the death of the sun and no one will even be around to remember anything that has ever happened. Everyone will be forgotten, nothing we do will make any difference, and all good endeavors, even the best, will come to naught. Unless there is God. If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and behind this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good endeavor, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God’s calling, can matter forever. That is what the Christian faith promises. “In the Lord, your labor is not in vain,” writes Paul in the first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15, verse 58. He was speaking of Christian ministry, but Tolkien’s story shows how this can ultimately be true of all work. Tolkien had readied himself, through Christian truth, for very modest accomplishment in the eyes of this world. (The irony is that he produced something so many people consider a work of genius that it is one of the bestselling books in the history of the world.) What about you? Let’s say that you go into city planning as a young person. Why? You are excited about cities, and you have a vision about how a real city ought to be. You are likely to be discouraged because throughout your life you probably will not get more than a leaf or a branch done. But there really is a New Jerusalem, a heavenly city, which will come down to earth like a bride dressed for her husband (Revelation 21–22). Or let’s say you are a lawyer, and you go into law because you have a vision for justice and a vision for a flourishing society ruled by equity and peace. In ten years you will be deeply disillusioned because you will find that as much as you are trying to work on important things, so much of what you do is minutiae. Once or twice in your life you may feel like you have finally “gotten a leaf out.” Whatever your work, you need to know this: There really is a tree. Whatever you are seeking in your work—the city of justice and peace, the world of brilliance and beauty, the story, the order, the healing—it is there. There is a God, there is a future healed world that he will bring about, and your work is showing it (in part) to others. Your work will be only partially successful, on your best days, in bringing that world about. But inevitably the whole tree that you seek—the beauty, harmony, justice, comfort, joy, and community—will come to fruition. If you know all this, you won’t be despondent because you can get only a leaf or two out in this life. You will work with satisfaction and joy. You will not be puffed up by success or devastated by setbacks. I just said, “If you know all this.” In order to work in this way—to get the consolation and freedom that Tolkien received from his Christian faith for his work—you need to know the Bible’s answers to three questions: Why do you want to work? (That is, why do we need to work in order to lead a fulfilled life?) Why is it so hard to work? (That is, why is it so often fruitless, pointless, and difficult?) How can we overcome the difficulties and find satisfaction in our work through the gospel? The rest of this book will seek to answer those three questions in its three sections, respectively.

A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery.

A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.

Action Steps 1. Audit your current skill set. You have more areas of competence than you think. Throughout your life, you have amassed knowledge and specialized skills in a wide range of disciplines. That knowledge and those skills can prove useful to you in future endeavors. For example, I have a degree in Finance and Investments. Upon graduating from college, I accepted an accounting position with one of the top automakers. I then became a stockbroker. Then, I moved into a career in IT. For the past 20 years, I’ve been a writer in numerous capacities. Along the way, I learned about server management, Wordpress development and search engine optimization. All of these ventures imbued me with skills I use every day - in my business and personal life. Your experience has likewise instilled within you a raft of specialized skills. Many of them will help you to tackle unfamiliar tasks and projects, even if they seem unrelated to your current and previous jobs. 2. Focus on your desired outcomes rather than the things that might go wrong along the way. One of our survival instincts is to plan for things that might go wrong. In some circumstances, that’s a valuable quality that protects us from harm. It prevents us from strolling down dark alleys in unpopulated locales. It discourages us from petting strange dogs. In other circumstances, however, it can hold us back. The instinct prevents us from pursuing opportunities that can lead to improved aptitude as well as personal and professional growth. By focusing on your desire outcomes, you’ll find it easier to ignore your inborn fear of the unknown. You’ll be able to dismiss the voice in your head constantly whispering “What if XYZ happens?” 3. Look for opportunities to learn new skills. The self-confidence you’ll gain will make you less fearful of tackling unfamiliar tasks. Achieving a high level of competency in any discipline requires repeated exposure and application. There’s no other way to attain proficiency. The problem is a lack of courage. It’s normal to feel hesitant, or even intimidated, when we’re given a new responsibility.

Zip2, PayPal, Tesla, SolarCity—they are all expressions of Musk. SpaceX is Musk. Its foibles emanate directly from him, as do its successes. Part of this comes from Musk’s maniacal attention to detail and involvement in every SpaceX endeavor.

I found myself sitting in the middle of a bedroom floor surrounded by atavistic morons, with a redhead on opiates who was convinced she could read my thoughts and tell me my future. That would have been simple: the future had me trying to escape this fucking awful “party.” The redhead, who we will call Janice, was equal parts pretentious, innocuous, and full of shit. Janice was an actress (an actress in LA . . . what were the odds?) and was trying out for a role in a health food commercial. Judging by the shape she was in, I could have told her that she had an ice cube’s chance in Cuba of making that dream a reality. She looked more like Wynonna Judd than Julianne Moore, complete with the face of a long-haired Clint Eastwood squinting into the desert sun. But being a respectful prick, I kept it to myself, kindly wished her luck in her endeavors, and made to take my leave of it all, grabbing for the front doorknob with one hand and dialing for a cab on my cell phone with the other. Unfortunately Janice wasn’t done with me, much to my chagrin. I explained to her I was leaving; she asked whether she could catch a ride back to her apartment. Knowing full well that nothing was going to happen with this person, I said sure.

Or the Japanese may go in an entirely different direction—an interesting possibility, given that the West itself has now begun to question whether the Enlightenment has run its course, or if there was something wrong with such a course in the first place. But to cast the matter in these terms is to miss the point entirely. The endeavor is not to be like us—to keep on borrowing. The endeavor is to understand where they have been and go on from there—precisely without, for the first time, borrowing from anybody. It is to accept all of their own past—as past. One cannot claw back the parts of the past that were a mistake. Neither can one go on dreaming fantastic futures.

Let me give you one of my favorite examples of the difference between trying and endeavoring. When a new motorway was built, taking passing traffic away from Colonel Sanders’ restaurant, his business crumbled. About to retire with just a paltry military pension, he was facing a bleak future. But the one thing he knew he had that was of value was a mighty fine chicken recipe. He didn’t have the money to open a new restaurant, but he figured he could franchise his chicken recipe to other restaurateurs and earn a slice of every chicken meal sold. After all, he had been selling his special chicken recipe for years in his own small restaurant: how hard could it be? The answer was: very. The first restaurant he went to politely asked him to leave with the words: ‘We have a good chicken recipe of our own already; why would we want to pay you for another?’ The same thing happened at the next place he endeavoured to persuade. And the next. But he persisted. Guess how many no’s he got before someone agreed to give his ‘finger-licking’ recipe a ‘try’? The elderly Colonel Sanders had to knock on 1,009 doors before someone gave him a yes and the legend and business empire that became Kentucky Fried Chicken was finally born. Now, how many of us, after the first 50 no’s, might have thought that maybe we should quit (or at least check our chicken recipe!)? What about after ONE THOUSAND no’s? I reckon most people wouldn’t even have got to the hundredth door, and long before they rang the 1,009th doorbell they would have given up. ‘Well, we tried our best’ would have been a fair assessment. But not for the good colonel! Colonel Sanders - he really was an army veteran with some great military doggedness - had that spirit of determination, that endeavor , not to quit until he had found the thing he was looking for. Trying often comes before failure. Endeavour more often leads to success. But they are just words, I hear you say. Why does it matter whether we say ‘try’ or ‘endeavour’? It matters, believe me. Our words become our attitudes and our attitudes become our life.

Liberia is a country on the “Pepper Coast,” which in many ways mirrors the United States. While it has not been easy, the willingness of its dedicated, hardworking people has never subsided. Hopefully their endeavor to obtain a more perfect country will continue and perhaps the day will come when they can once again take the lead in Africa to find a brighter future. During the mid-1950’s I witnessed the effects of the sudden affluence that came with the mining of gold and blood diamonds in the interior mountains of Liberia and Sierra Leonne. Although driven out of Sierra Leonne in 1954, the De Beers cartel set up a covert purchasing office in Monrovia. By 1956, there were thousands of illegal miners from both sides of the international border selling their diamonds and gold to anyone interested at places like the French Hotel on Ashmun Street or the American Bar at Mamba Point. It was always difficult to know the value of the mostly industrial diamonds, wrapped a dirty handkerchief or the glitter of what appeared to be gold in laterite clay at the bottom of a tin can. Of course there were also con-men who had nothing more than broken pieces of coke bottles to sell. It was a time when fortunes were made and lives were lost. Needless to say that Liberia was and most likely still is a risky place to be! Now, many of the lower grade diamonds from Liberia are sold directly to dealers in Sierra Leone but the more valuable stones valued at $500,000 or more, which are usually found in Sierra Leone, are smuggled into Liberia to avoid a 15% Sierra Leone tax. Sometimes diamonds are traded for gold but it’s a risky business that frequently cost people their money and sometimes even their lives.

In his endeavor to select the most promising stocks either for the near term or the longer future, the investor faces obstacles of two kinds—the first stemming from human fallibility and the second from the nature of his competition. He may be wrong in his estimate of the future; or even if he is right, the current market price may already fully reflect what he is anticipating.

Is it really safe to invest in stocks? To answer that question, we would really first need to ask ourselves: what is safe after all? More so, what is safe in business? The answer would be “NOTHING”. Here it is – the stark reality: all businesses have their risks and as far as risks are concerned, the stock market is just another kind of business; that is it! All deep-rooted and unbeaten stock market will advise you on the affirmative. Yet the faint possibility remains that you, at the same time, will without doubt happen upon other stock market players who have done pathetically in the stock market. These traders, when their opinion is sought, will not leave a stone unturned in advising you to steer clear of the stock market. Mystified whose advice you should take? Fine, both are correct in their own points of view. To cross the threshold into well-paid stock market share trading in the marketplace of any place in the human race, it is to a great extent compulsory that you are geared up with the inclusive fluency of the sod above and beyond in receipt of rationalized with the up to date market shifts so that you prefer no less than probable stocks. In essence then can day businesses bear out valuable? If you are in a job in a different place and are unable to have a look at the trade area under conversation well again, it is advisable that you should not make your mind up on daylight trading. You will in point of fact happen upon other forms of trade which do not necessitate your day and night inspection. You in all probability will chew over those as well. Affecting the traders It would also be a reasonable word of warning to say publicly that the stock market affects different types of traders differently. There are cases in point of a lot of investors who have become cleaned out. Putting on next to nothing information and gambling into the share market perceiving others producing immense wealth possibly will provide evidence of being hazardous for you. You could wind up bringing up the rear to your richly deserved wealth and habitual failures will very soon plead your case before you to make your way out from the stock market panorama. Stage-managing and putting on unconditional awareness previous to putting money in will certainly twirl the bazaar in your prop up. Outline your objectives You will of course call for to outline your objectives and endeavor to come across the varied working expenditure alternatives in the stock market. At the beginning decide on fragile investments with the intention that even though you put on or incur fatalities, you will in next to no time gain knowledge of the ins and outs of the deal. Just the once you are contented, you can settle on volume funds. You in all probability will decide on each and every one of the three dealing preferences, specifically day business, short-term trading and enduring investment. At one fell swoop given your institution of resource of profits is exclusively the stock market; you will be able to broaden the horizons of your venture ambitions to a larger extent, for instance conjecture in mutual funds, money futures, product futures, and supplementary endeavor goods. You can accordingly keep up equilibrium of your ventures and disappointments if a few will by a hair's breadth inconvenience you. Seeking singular venture alternatives will additionally comply to you eloquent which one goes well with you the most excellent and you can in that case put in funds in capacity in the unwritten prospect. Make the best use of stock market It often comes to our notice that the stock market if used fine provides us with an exceptionally excellent occasion to put together loads of wealth and in addition utilize the stock market as our principal foundation of revenue. There are also the risks yet the faint possibility remains that risks are everywhere, in every trade.

startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.

Some of my best friends are articulate white people who voted for President Barack Obama and happen to make fantastic barbecue. This is about exclusion, not exclusivity. Black Smoke endeavors to reorient barbecue’s future in the United States to be much more like its past: delicious, diverse, fun, and appreciative of African American contributions.

Research has shown that the winners in any endeavor think, feel, and act differently than those who lose. If you want to know if you have the self-discipline of a winner, try right now, starting today, to stop a habit that has challenged you in the past. If you have always wanted to be in better physical shape, try adding exercises such as running into your routine, and also take control of your salt and sugar intake. If you drink too much alcohol or coffee, try to see if for one month you can stay away from them. These are excellent tests to see if you are emotionally and intellectually strong enough or not to discipline yourself in the face of a losing trade. I am not saying that if you drink coffee or alcohol, or that if you are not a regular runner, you cannot become a successful trader, but if you make a try at these types of improvements and fail, then you should know that exercising self-control in trading will not be any easier to accomplish. Change is hard, but if you wish to be a successful trader, you need to work on changing and developing your personality at every level. Working hard at it is the only way to sustain the changes you need to make. The measure of intelligence is not in IQ tests or how to make money, but it is in the ability to change. As Oprah Winfrey, the American talk show host and philanthropist once said, the greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change their future by merely changing their attitude.

that’s what life is. A series of moments. Nothing more. We must endeavor to enjoy every single one. Forget about the past and future. They have no place in the present.

Look at stocks as part ownership of a business. 2. Look at Mr. Market—volatile stock price fluctuations—as your friend rather than your enemy. View risk as the possibility of permanent loss of purchasing power, and uncertainty as the unpredictability regarding the degree of variability in the possible range of outcomes. 3. Remember the three most important words in investing: “margin of safety.” 4. Evaluate any news item or event only in terms of its impact on (a) future interest rates and (b) the intrinsic value of the business, which is the discounted value of the cash that can be taken out during its remaining life, adjusted for the uncertainty around receiving those cash flows. 5. Think in terms of opportunity costs when evaluating new ideas and keep a very high hurdle rate for incoming investments. Be unreasonable. When you look at a business and get a strong desire from within saying, “I wish I owned this business,” that is the kind of business in which you should be investing. A great investment idea doesn’t need hours to analyze. More often than not, it is love at first sight. 6. Think probabilistically rather than deterministically, because the future is never certain and it is really a set of branching probability streams. At the same time, avoid the risk of ruin, when making decisions, by focusing on consequences rather than just on raw probabilities in isolation. Some risks are just not worth taking, whatever the potential upside may be. 7. Never underestimate the power of incentives in any given situation. 8. When making decisions, involve both the left side of your brain (logic, analysis, and math) and the right side (intuition, creativity, and emotions). 9. Engage in visual thinking, which helps us to better understand complex information, organize our thoughts, and improve our ability to think and communicate. 10. Invert, always invert. You can avoid a lot of pain by visualizing your life after you have lost a lot of money trading or speculating using derivatives or leverage. If the visuals unnerve you, don’t do anything that could get you remotely close to reaching such a situation. 11. Vicariously learn from others throughout life. Embrace everlasting humility to succeed in this endeavor. 12. Embrace the power of long-term compounding. All the great things in life come from compound interest.

How you feel about a project is vital to its success, especially for personal endeavors...

so long as the wondrous art of Writing, or of Ready-writing which we call Printing, subsists, he may be expected to continue, as one of the main forms of Heroism for all future ages. He is, in various respects, a very singular phenomenon. He is new, I say; he has hardly lasted above a century in the world yet. Never, till about a hundred years ago, was there seen any figure of a Great Soul living apart in that anomalous manner; endeavoring to speak forth the inspiration that was in him by Printed Books, and find place and subsistence by what the world would please to give him for doing that.

A romantic dinner with knowledge and learning! What a gathering! If education is seen not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself, as a wholesome process, the endeavor of guessing the future becomes futile. – How so? – Because education will not glance exclusively at the future, but also at the present. Education would then be aimed entirely at making life, the present everyday life, a delight. It would, then, make no sense to talk about efficiency in education in the same way there’s no efficiency in a romantic dinner or a rollercoaster ride.

Education, as I see it, is the delightful process of developing skills and knowledge in which time becomes secondary and efficiency would only instrumentalize this wholesome endeavor. Education is life itself and an ongoing process that should never end. It bears its fruit both in the present and in the future.

I have endeavored, up to this point, to give an objective picture of some of the developments in the behavioral sciences, and an objective picture of the kind of society which might emerge out of these developments. I do however have strong personal reactions to the kind of world I have been describing, a world which Skinner explicitly (and many other scientists implicitly) expect and hope in the future. To me this kind of world would destroy the human person . . .

see in the near future a crisis approaching. It unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. The money powers preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me & the financial institutions at the rear, the latter is my greatest foe. Corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few, and the Republic is destroyed.

The future of work, an eternal echo of past endeavors, reshaped with the tools of tomorrow, reminding us that innovation is but history reborn.

It means only that one has endeavored to act as nearly as possible from the “center” of himself, that he admits and is aware of the fact that his motives are not completely clear and assumes responsibility for making them clearer as he learns in the future

I suffer deep pain that erodes my being. Despair, the quiet inner bully, causes this anguish. Hopelessness crushes my spirit, burying joy and purpose. It is a persistent force like a dark chasm that devours light and creates a void. My physical disabilities rob me of autonomy. Once a vessel of possibility, my body is now a prison, a constant reminder of my limits. The simplest things become punishing undertakings, with each attempt failing and fueled by fury and shame. The suffering permeates my soul and covers every aspect of my being. My continual emotional tiredness saps my drive to fight futility. The universe conspires to keep me from meaningful interaction. My hopes are now dashed in every endeavor. The cycle of boredom and insignificance repeats daily without substance or reprieve. Every time I see promise, overwhelming roadblocks block it, causing irritation and despair. An overwhelming sense of deficiency replaces any sense of contribution or worth. My once-proud goods are now worthless. Thus, I fight an unavoidable darkness in a never-ending combat that leaves me wounded, broken, and hopeless. Once a canvas of possibilities, the future is a dreary, uninspired continuation of existing suffering. In this terrifying terrain, sadness rules cruelly over my lifeless existence. I am experiencing deep emotional and physical pain, and I feel hopeless and stuck. My disabilities limit my autonomy, and everyday tasks are a constant struggle. I feel emotionally drained, and my efforts seem futile. I encounter roadblocks at every turn and struggle to find purpose. Overall, I feel trapped in a cycle of suffering and despair with no end in sight.

Think about a future where the best possible outcome has happened in every area of your life. Think about your career, creative endeavors, academic life, love, relationships, hobbies, health—everything.

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Only, I felt, by some such attempt to write history in terms of personal life could I rescue something that might be of value, some element of truth and hope and usefulness, from the smashing up of my own youth by the War. It is true that to do it meant looking back into a past of which many of us, preferring to contemplate tomorrow rather than yesterday, believe ourselves to be tired. But it is only in the light of the past that we, the depleted generation now coming into the control of public affairs, the generation which has to make the present and endeavor to mould the future, can understand ourselves or hope to be understood by our successors. —Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth

The world is determined by its essence (the Universal Mind's “immaterial substance”) and by its universal laws, which are the same everywhere and are determined. If they are determined, that implies no uncertainty, but this conclusion is incorrect. Regardless of the essence from which everything comes to be (or is transformed), its manifestation, or its material substance, the world (Universe) will constantly evolve differently in any particular manifestation. The starting point, if nothing else, will always be different and form different universes in every specific manifestation. Both the Being and Nonbeing are limitless, which makes them “infinite,” and infinity is zero. Their frame is the Absolute itself, simultaneously providing the absolute limit and potential (infinity). The purpose of the world and the Absolute is not one particular existence and one particular world (Universe) or one life but a continuation of existence (universes) ad infinitum. Without infinity, there would be no real life because, at one point, existence would cease to exist forever, and it would be as if it had never existed. But infinity (although never reachable) secures continuation. Any manifestation of the Absolute, in the form of the World, follows the uncertainty principle, preserving the youth of the Absolute and originality (uniqueness) of any or all universes existing simultaneously or at any past or future time. The “Dimensions” we can never explore are not some exotic dimensions of the string theory but rather the “dimensions” of the micro-micro and macro-macro-level that humans will probably never reach. We can bypass the laws of physics only if we bypass the consequences of physical transformation. If we could operate on the level of pure information and return to the material form, not only would time travel be possible, but more valuable and fundamental endeavors would also be possible. When we say time travel, we do not mean traveling to the past or future using a time machine. That would be something similar to alchemy. Perhaps humankind, or any other species, can never achieve this level of science and technology except God. But we can imagine Beings transcending their physical existence and becoming immaterial. We can also imagine such beings on other levels beyond the “physical” world and existence known to us. The Ultimate Source, the Universal Mind, is the Ultimate Alchemist of Reality and the Universe.

If you had asked the rulers of history's greatest empires—the Roman Empire, the Mongol Empire, the British Empire, and the Ottoman Empire—a decade before their fall where they envisioned their realms ten years hence, they would have spoken of grand futures and the vast endeavors still awaiting them.

God hasn’t called us to something in a year. We’re called for the here and now. We were not made to survive today for some potential future endeavor, something that maybe he’ll do through us one day.

Our era, which began and has developed under the banner of the Enlightenment, first invented liberal democracy, then took it as its political ideal. But we have become enslaved by speed, and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, impairs our concentration and forces us to consume information in ever-smaller packets. To be worthy of the name, we Homo sapiens should rid ourselves of speed before it reduces us to a species in danger of extinction. A firm defense of quiet, rational deliberation is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life. Our defense of reason must rest on three pillars. First, we must better understand the conditions that make it possible. Second, we must deliberate about how to improve those conditions. And finally, we must engage in collective action aimed at bringing about those improvements. Only in this way can we banish the degrading effects of Fast Life. In its frenzied competition for attention, Fast Politics has changed our way of making decisions, making us prey to demagogues. This threatens our democracy and our way of life. Slow Politics is now the only truly progressive answer. Politics should be about cultivating intelligence rather than demeaning it, building on experience rather than going with our gut feelings. What better way to set about this than an international exchange of experiences, knowledge, projects? Slow Politics promises a better future. Slow Politics cannot succeed as an individual endeavor. It is an idea that needs many committed supporters who can help turn this into an international movement.

Today, there is a whole realm of scientific endeavor called nonlinear dynamics with mathematical foundations. It has been known since 1975, rather misleadingly, as “chaos theory.” Systems are nonlinear when the state they are in at a given point in time provides the input to a feedback mechanism which determines the new state of the system. Some such systems are sensitively dependent on the starting state. If so, future states are unpredictable. Such systems are called “chaotic.” The term is misleading because their states are not random, merely unknowable.26 Only recent increases in computing power have enabled scientists and mathematicians to grasp their behavior.

Here and there may be found men in all walks of life who neither wonder or care how much or how little the world thinks of them. They pursue life's pathway, doing their appointed tasks, without ostentation, loving their work for the work's sake, content to live and do in the present rather than look for the uncertain rewards of the future. To them notoriety, distinction, or even fame, acts neither as a spur nor a check to endeavor, yet they are among the foremost of those who do the world's work.

In this context, my endeavor was actually a search for reconciliation between Christianity and Islam, for as I witness the recent state of affairs in the world I can sense this reconciliation is absolutely necessary so that the future of humanity's spiritual evolution is not endangered, and that we—as members of humanity—could create the opportunity to be permeated by cosmic consciousness and be able to attain a highly spiritualized state of love.

There’s another way to understand Fukuyama’s boredom with history’s end: success breeds its own type of sadness. Once a goal is achieved or an adversary vanquished, the victor’s sense of purpose becomes less relevant. The import of future endeavors begins to lack the significance of what has already been achieved. And that’s always a depressing state of affairs.

To try am fully, evil needs to victories, not one. The first victory happens when an evil deed is perpetrated; the second victory, when evil is returned." 9 "in the Christian tradition, condemnation is an element of reconciliation, not an isolated independent judgment, even when reconciliation cannot be achi Pp ved. So we condemn most properly in the act of forgiving, and the act of separating the doer from the deed. That is how God in Christ condemned all wrongdoing." 15 "...unhealthy dreams and misdirected labors often become broken realities." 42 "...the story (of Christianity) frames what it means to remember rightly, and the God of this story makes remembering rightly possible." 44 "...peace can be honest and lasting only if it rests on the foundation of truth and justice." 56 "Seekers or truth, as distinct from alleged possessors of truth, will employ 'double vision'- they will give others the benefit of the doubt, they will inhabit imaginatively the world of others, and they will endeavor to view events in question from the perspective of others, not just their own." 57 "Those who love do not remember a persons evil deeds without also remembering her good deeds; they do not remember a person'a vices without also being mindful of their own failings. Thus the full story of wrongdoing becomes clear through the voice of love..."64 "...the highest aim of lovingly truthful memory seeks to bring about the repentance, forgiveness, and transformation of wrongdoers, and reconciliation between wrongdoers and their victims." 65 "And healing of the wrong without involving the wrong tour, therefore, can only be partial. To complete the healing, The relationship between the two needs to be mended. For Christians, this is what reconciliation is all about. Reconciliation with the wrongdoer completes the healing of the person who suffered the wrong. 84 Page 113: "Christ suffered in solidarity...what happened to him will also happen to him." "The dangers of this memory reside in its orientation not just to the past but also to the future." 113 "But let us beware that some accounts of what it means for Christ to have died on behalf of the ungodly...negates the notion of his involvement as a third party." 113 "Christian churches are communities that keep themselves alive- more precisely, that God keeps alive- by keeping alive the memories of the exodus and the passion." 126 "...but often they (churches) simply fail to incorporate right remembering of wrong suffered into the celebration of holy Communion. And even when they do incorporate such remembrance, they often keep it neatly sequestered from the memory of the passion. That memory becomes simply the story of what God has done for us wrongdoers or for a suffers, while remaining mute about how we ourselves remember the wrongs. With such stopping short, suffered wrongs are remembered only for God to comfort us in our pain and lend religious legitimacy to whatever uses we want to put those memories. No wonder we sometimes find revenge celebrating its victory under the mantle of religiously sanctioned struggle for the faith, for self protection, for national preservation, for our way of life- all in the name of God and accompanied by celebration of the self sacrificial love of Christ!" 127 "Communities of sacred memory are, at their best, schools of right remembering - remembering that is truthful and just, that heals individuals without injuring others, that allows the past to motivate a just struggle for justice and the grace-filled work of reconciliation." 128 Quoting Kierkegaard: "no part of life out to have so much meaning for a person that he cannot forget it at any moment he wants to; on the other hand, every single part of life ought to have so much meaning for a person that he can remember it at any moment." 166

I owed you a proper kiss, husband of mine,” she said, her right cheek turning pink to match her left. A wee smile faded from her lips as soon as it had come. “And I owe you a very big thank you. Thank you, Darcy.” “If that is how a lass shows her thanks, I shall endeavor to earn more of your gratitude in the future.

Steve and I sat down in 2008 and made a practical list of the things that make our family work. We basically answered the question, “When things are going really well in our family, what does it look like?” The answers included sleep, working out, healthy food, cooking, time off, weekends away, going to church, being present with the kids, a sense of control over our money, meaningful work that doesn’t consume us, time to piddle, time with family and close friends, and time to just hang out. These were (and are) our “ingredients for joy and meaning.” Then we looked at the dream list that we started making a couple of years ago (and keep adding to). Everything on this list was an accomplishment or an acquisition—a house with more bedrooms, a trip here, personal salary goals, professional endeavors, and so forth. Everything required that we make more money and spend more money. When we compared our dream list to our “joy and meaning” list, we realized that by merely letting go of the list of things we want to accomplish and acquire, we would be actually living our dream—not striving to make it happen in the future, but living it right now. The things we were working toward did nothing in terms of making our life fuller. Embracing

There can be no intellectual, spiritual, or emotional life without the substratum of memory. Without cognition and awareness of beauty and appreciation of our limited time on planet Earth, humankind’s sojourn would be a colorless collage composed of the base acts of a biological mass endeavoring merely to survive. Without the ability to recall striking memories, our emotional life would be stillborn. Absent authentic memories, our life struggles would seem purposeless: human beings would exhibit no capacity to reflect awe when witnessing the bounty of nature’s plenitude or be able to take in and express intense reverence for all that is sacred. Without memory, there would not be a dais to support faith or any ability to imagine a God; the concepts of good and evil would be nonexistent; and the past and the future would become less relevant than the choice between salt or pepper, and paper or plastic.

Suppiluliuma I came to the throne while the mighty Amenhotep III ruled in Egypt and Kadashman-Enlil I sat on the throne in Babylon (Kuhrt 1:336). Known for his military endeavors, Suppiluliuma first conquered lands the Hittites had lost in Anatolia during the Dark Age before he turned his attention south to Mittani (Macqueen 2003, 46). At the same time, Suppiluliuma was also a diplomat who saw the virtues of providing for his people through peaceful means. Instead of attacking Babylon and overextending his empire as Mursili I did, Suppiluliuma I contracted a marriage with the Babylonian king’s daughter (Macqueen 2003, 46). Perhaps Suppiluliuma I hoped to one day make a claim to the throne of Babylon, or one of his potential future sons from the Babylonian princess could, but all of his sons appear to have been born to a Hittite queen

Second, we have a need, and the fate of humanity may very well ride on it. We simply can’t fail here or in another hundred years, humans might just be a part of the Earth’s history, not a part of its future.” They

Dreaming Big Dreams When dreams come true, there is life and joy. Proverbs 13:12 NLT Are you willing to entertain the possibility that God has big plans in store for you? Hopefully so. Yet sometimes, especially if you’ve recently experienced a life-altering disappointment, you may find it difficult to envision a brighter future for yourself and your family. If so, it’s time to reconsider your own capabilities … and God’s. Your Heavenly Father created you with unique gifts and untapped talents; your job is to tap them. When you do, you’ll begin to feel an increasing sense of confidence in yourself and in your future. It takes courage to dream big dreams. You will discover that courage when you do three things: accept the past, trust God to handle the future, and make the most of the time He has given you today. Nothing is too difficult for God, and no dreams are too big for Him—not even yours. So start living—and dreaming—accordingly. The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. Eleanor Roosevelt The future lies all before us. Shall it only be a slight advance upon what we usually do? Ought it not to be a bound, a leap forward to altitudes of endeavor and success undreamed of before? Annie Armstrong Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God. Corrie ten Boom You pay God a compliment by asking great things of Him. St. Teresa of Avila Our dreams are who we are. Barbara Sher Always stay connected to people and seek out things that bring you joy. Dream with abandon. Pray confidently. Barbara Johnson God created us with an overwhelming desire to soar. He designed us to be tremendously productive and “to mount up with wings like eagles,” realistically dreaming of what He can do with our potential. Carol Kent Allow your dreams a place in your prayers and plans. God-given dreams can help you move into the future He