“
Spoon!” James said, running at his uncle Gabriel and jabbing him in the thigh. Gabriel mussed the boy’s hair affectionately.
“You’re such a good boy,” he said. “I often wonder how you could possibly be Will’s.”
“Spoon,” James said, leaning against his uncle’s leg lovingly.
“No, Jamie,” Will urged. “Your honorable father has been impugned. Attack, attack!
”
”
Cassandra Clare (The Whitechapel Fiend (Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy, #3))
“
Nemo Me Impugn Lacessit—No One Assails Me with Impunity. Or the alternative version—Do Not Fuck with Us or We Will Hurt You
”
”
Michael Grant (BZRK (BZRK, #1))
“
Ralston looked down his long, elegant nose at the vile creature at his feet, and said, “You just impugned the honor of my future marchioness. Choose your seconds. I will see you at dawn.”
Leaving Oxford sputtering on the ground, Ralston spun on one elegant heel to face Benedick. “When I am done with him, I am coming for your sister. And, if you intend to keep me from her, you had better have an army at your side.
”
”
Sarah MacLean (Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake (Love By Numbers, #1))
“
An third, some saucy tart once tried to impugn my virtue against an oil painting of him, and in the halls of memory, some things demand context.
”
”
Casey McQuiston (Red, White & Royal Blue)
“
That we are not totally transformed, that we can turn away, turn the page, switch the channel, does not impugn the ethical value of an assault by images. It is not a defect that we are not seared, that we do not suffer enough, when we see these images. Neither is the photograph supposed to repair our ignorance about the history and causes of the suffering it picks out and frames. Such images cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers. Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs which we have accepted up to now that ought to be challenged? All this, with the understanding that moral indignation, like compassion, cannot dictate a course of action.
”
”
Susan Sontag (Regarding the Pain of Others)
“
He was impugning my virtue. I ought to have been offended, but for some reason the idea tickled me. That could be my next career: instrument of torture! Seducing prisoners, and then revealing my dragon scales! They would confess out of sheer horror.
”
”
Rachel Hartman
“
I don’t recall any formal agreement. I recall a great deal of scowling and a few attempts at impugning my character, but that could characterize many of our conversations
”
”
Heather Fawcett (Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries (Emily Wilde, #1))
“
What changes when a woman marries? What does a woman lose and what does she gain? For Abishag, marrying king David gave her instant status. As a wife, impugning Abishag's character meant a swift death. As a wife, she inspired fear.
What changes when a woman is widowed? For Abishag, it meant foreign women came to Jerusalem to marry Solomon--and she was relegated to that of a spectator. In Abishag's widowhood, none feared her.
”
”
Michael Ben Zehabe (Song of Songs: The Book for Daughters)
“
In the letter he left for the coroner he had explained his reasoning (for suicide): that life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is the moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision. ... Alex showed me a clipping from the Cambridge Evening News. 'Tragic Death of "Promising" Young Man.' ... The verdict of the coroner's inquest had been that Adrian Flinn (22) had killed himself 'while the balance of his mind was disturbed.' ... The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself. Perhaps those authorities feared that the suicide's reasoning might impugn the nature and value of life as organised by the state which paid the coroner?
”
”
Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
“
When people want to insult a man, they cast slurs upon his courage. But the worst they can say about a woman is to impugn her chastity.
”
”
Sharon Kay Penman (When Christ and His Saints Slept (Henry II & Eleanor of Aquitaine, #1))
“
I have just come from the East End,” he said. “Something about the stories disturbed me, for more than the obvious reasons. I went there to have a look about for myself. And what happened last night proves my theory. There have been many murders recently—all of women, women who . . .”
“Prostitutes,” Tessa said.
“Quite,” Gabriel said.
“Tessa has such an extensive vocabulary,” Will said. “It is one of the most attractive things about her. Shame about yours, Gabriel.”
“Will, listen to me.” Gabriel allowed himself a long sigh.
“Spoon!” James said, running at his uncle Gabriel and jabbing him in the thigh. Gabriel mussed the boy’s hair affectionately.
“You’re such a good boy,” he said. “I often wonder how you could possibly be Will’s.”
“Spoon,” James said, leaning against his uncle’s leg lovingly.
“No, Jamie,” Will urged. “Your honorable father has been impugned. Attack, attack!
”
”
Cassandra Clare (Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy)
“
4. The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life- preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong), are the most indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely IMAGINED world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live—that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
“
TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
“
You're such a good boy, he said. I often wonder how you could possibly be Will's.
Spoon, James said, leaning against his uncle's leg lovelingly.
No, Jamie, Will urged. Your honorable father has been impugned. Attack, attack!
”
”
Cassandra Clare (Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy)
“
Maybe, despite ideology, politics, and history, a genuine catastrophe is always personal bathos at the core. Life can’t be impugned for any failure to trivialize people. You have to take your hat off to life for the techniques at its disposal to strip a man of his significance and empty him totally of his pride.
”
”
Philip Roth (I Married a Communist (The American Trilogy, #2))
“
What the extremists were doing was entirely contrary to the Koran, which excoriates anyone who impugns a woman’s reputation and sentences them to eighty lashes.
”
”
Geraldine Brooks (Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women)
“
How could we not impugn marriage, then? It becomes so intertwined with your quality of life, as one of the only institutions operating constantly throughout every other moment of your existence, that the person you are married to doesn’t stand a chance. You hold hands while you’re walking down the street when you’re happy, you turn away icily to stare out the window as the car goes over the bridge when you’re not, and exactly none of this has anything to do with that person’s behavior. It has to do with how you feel about yourself, and the person closest to you gets mistaken for the circumstance and you think, Maybe if I excised this thing, I’d be me again. But you’re not you anymore. That hasn’t been you in a long time. It’s not his fault. It just happened. It was always going to just happen.
”
”
Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Fleishman Is in Trouble)
“
On page 603 it is stated that at first Blumenthal could not remember the lunch with me and my wife at which he had loudly impugned two female witnesses against Clinton. This makes it distinctly odd that he should have such have a vivid and detailed but mistaken recollection of the same lunch on page 607.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens
“
The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself. Perhaps those authorities feared that the suicide‟s reasoning might impugn the nature and value of life as organised by the
Page | 49 .
state which paid the coroner? And then, since you had been declared temporarily mad, your reasons for killing yourself were also assumed to be mad. So I doubt anyone paid much attention to Adrian‟s argument, with its references to philosophers ancient and modern, about the superiority of the intervening act over the unworthy passivity of merely letting life happen to you.
”
”
Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
“
The test distills into a few questions: What is your attitude toward people who surpass you in the creation of wealth or in other accomplishments? Do you aspire to equal their excellence, or does it make you seethe? Do you admire and celebrate exceptional achievement, or do you impugn it and seek to tear it down?
”
”
George Gilder (The Israel Test: Why the World's Most Besieged State is a Beacon of Freedom and Hope for the World Economy)
“
To recognize untruth as a condition of life; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
“
Our inherent sense of radical self-love doesn’t speak to us with cruelty or viciousness. Radical self-love does not malign our gender, sexuality, race, disability, weight, age, acne, scars, illnesses. A world of body terrorism that impugns us because of our identities is the only thing that would dare speak to us with such malice. Just
”
”
Sonya Renee Taylor (The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love)
“
These are treacherous times, and I know how easily perceptions can be twisted by a single word spoken into the wrong ear. Impugn a man's character, and everything that man does is made to seem underhanded, suspect, fraught with double motives.
”
”
Paul Auster (Travels in the Scriptorium)
“
The verdict of the coroner's inquest had been that Adrian Finn (22) had killed himself 'while the balance of his mind was disturbed.' I remember how angry that conventional phrase made me: I would have sworn on oath that Adrian's was the one mind which would never lose its balance. But in the law's view, if you killed yourself you were by definition mad, at least at the time you were committing the act. The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself. Perhaps those authorities feared that the suicide's reasoning might impugn the nature and value of life as organised by the state which paid the coroner? And then, since you had been declared temporarily mad, your reasons for killing yourself were also assumed to be mad. So I doubt anyone paid much attention to Adrian's argument, with its references to philosophers ancient and modern, about the superiority of the intervening act over the unworthy passivity of merely letting life happen to you.
”
”
Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending)
“
I understand that you come from a generation of women who had to work hard to be heard, but for you to impugn my feminism and act as though I'm a scourge upon women everywhere, just because I refuse to spread your particular agenda? That's dark, and it's not what you fought for. If you continue this way, you're worse than they are (they = men). We are all just trying to get by. There is room for all of us.
”
”
Lena Dunham (Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned")
“
There is no point in expending good money on the pursuit of an engine that can power aircraft without propellers. What is wrong with airships anyway? They have borne mankind aloft for over a hundred relatively accident-free years and I see no reason to impugn their popularity...
”
”
Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next, #1))
“
Antisemitism is a categorical impugning of Jews as collectively embodying distasteful and/or destructive traits. In other words, antisemitism is the belief that Jews have common repellent and/or ruinous qualities that set them apart from non-Jews. Descent is determinative; individuality is illusory.
”
”
Peter Hayes (Why?: Explaining the Holocaust)
“
In the hour of temptation, God's goodness is always impugned, and God's truth is always brought into question, and all other tokens of His love, His veracity, are always obscured.
”
”
T. Austin-Sparks (The Law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus)
“
The trouble with truth is that people are unwilling to be convinced that they have been deceived. It impugns their judgment. It stains their character. People love themselves above all.
”
”
Jeff Wheeler (Fireblood (Whispers from Mirrowen, #1))
“
Some dread failure overtook us, one in which the intellect, knowing only itself, rose to dominate our proud selves, and by the seduction of language then set about denigrating all that was not rational, all that hovered tantalizingly out of reach, beyond its power to comprehend, much less explain away. Although it works hard at doing precisely that: explaining away, dismissing, impugning, mocking. The cynical eye is cast, and the cleverness of the mind ascends to assume the pose of the haughty. What results, sadly, is an intellect that won’t be denied its own sense of superiority.
”
”
Steven Erikson (Fall of Light (The Kharkanas Trilogy, #2))
“
The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our text- books have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. Yet Darwin was so wedded to gradualism that he wagered his entire theory on a denial of this literal record:
"The geological record is extremely imperfect and this fact will to a large extent explain why we do not find interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps, He who rejects these views on the nature of the geological record, will rightly reject my whole theory."
Darwin's argument still persists as the favored escape of most paleontologists from the embarrassment of a record that seems to show so little of evolution. In exposing its cultural and methodological roots, I wish in no way to impugn the potential validity of gradualism (for all general views have similar roots). I wish only to point out that it was never -seen- in the rocks.
Paleontologists have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.
[Evolution’s Erratic Pace - "Natural History," May, 1977]
”
”
Stephen Jay Gould
“
This kind of misinformation about the criminal-justice system and the police can only increase hatred of the police. That hatred, in turn, will heighten the chances of more Michael Browns attacking officers and getting shot themselves. Police officers in the tensest areas may hold off from assertive policing. Such de-policing will leave thousands of law-abiding minority residents who fervently support the police ever more vulnerable to thugs. Obama couldn’t have stopped the violence in Ferguson with his address to the nation. But in casting his lot with those who speciously impugn our criminal-justice system, he increased the likelihood of more such violence in the future.
”
”
Heather Mac Donald (The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe)
“
I’m tired of these sophistries. I’m tired of these right-wing fuckers. They wouldn’t lift a finger themselves. They work contentedly in offices and banks. Yet now they sit pontificating in parliament, in papers, impugning our motives, questioning our judgements. And why? Because they themselves need to feel better by putting down everyone whose work is so much harder than theirs. You only have to say the words ‘social worker’…’probation officer’ … ‘counsellor’ … for everyone in this country to sneer. Do you know what social workers do? Every day? They try and clear out society’s drains. They clear out the rubbish. They do what no one else is doing, what no one else is willing to do. And for that, oh Christ, do we thank them? No, we take our own rotten consciences, wipe them all over the social worker’s face, and say ‘if…’ FUCK! ‘if I did the job, then of course if I did it…oh no, excuse me, I wouldn’t do it like that…’ Well I say: ‘OK, then, fucking do it, journalist. Politician, talk to the addicts. Hold families together. Stop the kids from stealing in the streets. Deal with couples who beat each other up. You fucking try it, why not? Since you’re so full of advice. Sure, come and join us. This work is one big casino. By all means. Anyone can play. But there’s only one rule. You can’t play for nothing. You have to buy some chips to sit at the table. And if you won’t pay with your own time…with your own effort…then I’m sorry. Fuck
off!
”
”
David Hare (Skylight)
“
A. L. Rowse—who, it must be said, never allowed an absence of certainty to get in the way of a conclusion—in 1973 identified the dark lady as Emilia Bassano, daughter of one of the queen’s musicians, and, with a certain thrust of literary jaw, asserted that his conclusions “cannot be impugned, for they are the answer,” even though they are unsupported by anything that might reasonably be termed proof.
”
”
Bill Bryson (Shakespeare: The World as Stage)
“
Not uncommonly, when a woman says something that impugns a man, particularly one at the heart of the status quo, especially if it has to do with sex, the response will question not just the facts of her assertion but her capacity to speak and her right to do so. Generations of women have been told they are delusional, confused, manipulative, malicious, conspiratorial, congenitally dishonest, often all at once.
”
”
Rebecca Solnit (Men Explain Things to Me)
“
I admit that my concern for society is in some sense hollow and reminiscent of some goody-two-shoes A-student trying to show off to his teacher, just as you impugn it to be. But part of it also derives from innate compassion that your point fails to take account of. Trying to work out the degree to which my actions arise from sincerity and the degree to which they are merely a pretense to virtue would be a fruitless exercise.
”
”
Keiichirō Hirano (A Man)
“
God is forbearing, gracious, and longsuffering, but he is also a God of holiness, wrath, and judgement.57 The wrath of God, unlike the love or holiness of God, should not be thought of as an intrinsic perfection of God; rather it is a function or expression of God’s holiness against sin. Where there is no sin, there is no wrath, but there will always be love and holiness. Where God in his holiness confronts his image-bearers in their rebellion, there must be wrath, otherwise God is not the jealous and self-sufficient God he claims to be, and his holiness is impugned.58
”
”
Peter J. Gentry (Kingdom through Covenant: A Biblical-Theological Understanding of the Covenants)
“
The fundamental ambiguity of the human condition will always open up to men the possibility of opposing choices; there will always be within them the desire to be that being of whom they have made themselves a lack, the flight from the anguish of freedom; the plane of hell, of struggle, will never be eliminated; freedom will never be given; it will always have to be won: that is what Trotsky was saying when he envisaged the future as a permanent revolution. Thus, there is a fallacy hidden in that abuse of language which all parties make use of today to justify their politics when they declare that the world is still at war. If one means by that that the struggle is not over, that the world is a prey to opposed interests which affront each other violently, he is speaking the truth; but he also means that such a situation is abnormal and calls for abnormal behavior; the politics that it involves can impugn every moral principle, since it has only a provisional form: later on we shall act in accordance with truth and justice. To the idea of present war there is opposed that of a future peace when man will again find, along with a stable situation, the possibility of a morality. But the truth is that if division and violence define war, the world has always been at war and always will be; if man is waiting for universal peace in order to establish his existence validly, he will wait indefinitely: there will never be any other future.
”
”
Simone de Beauvoir (The Ethics of Ambiguity)
“
Neurotic suffering indicates inner conflict. Each side of the conflict is likely to be a composite of many partial forces, each one of which has been structured into behavior, attitude, perception, value. Each component asserts itself, claims priority, insists that something else yield, accommodates. The conflict therefore is fixed, stubborn, enduring. It may be impugned and dismissed without effect, imprecations and remorse are of no avail, strenuous acts of will may be futile; it causes - yet survives and continues to cause - the most intense suffering, humiliation, rending of flesh.
Such a conflict is not to be uprooted or excised. It is not an ailment, it is the patient himself. The suffering will not disappear without a change in the conflict, and a change in the conflict amounts to a change in what one is and how one lives, feels, reacts.
”
”
Allen Wheelis (How People Change)
“
The falseness of a judgement is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgement: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating. And we are fundamentally inclined to claim that the falsest judgements (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong), are the most indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely IMAGINED world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live—that the renunciation of false judgements would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
“
But it is easy to be angry with the father, the judge, and the friend. It is also fitting, up to a point. Yet it would be a mistake to view them as on a different plane of moral obtuseness, as opposed to merely being on the extreme end of a himpathetic spectrum on which many of us lie. Brock Turner's defenders exhibited forgiving tendencies, and spun exonerating narratives, that are all too commonly extended to men in his position. And such tendencies seem largely from capacities and qualities of which we're rarely critical: such as sympathy, empathy, trust in one's friends, devotion to one's children, and having as much faith in someone's good character as is compatible with the evidence.
These are all important capacities and qualities, all else being equal. But they can have a downside, when all else is not equal: for example, when social inequality remains widespread. Their naive deployment will tend to further privilege those already unjustly privileged over others. And this may come at the expense of unfairly impugning, blaming, shaming, further endangering, and erasing the less privileged among their victims. In some cases, the perpetrators, knowing this, select their victims on this basis.
”
”
Kate Manne (Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny)
“
Fiancé. The very word scraped him raw. Dom had met Blakeborough half a dozen times back when he’d been courting Jane, but their paths hadn’t crossed since then. As Dom recalled, the earl had been too handsome for his own good.
Through the years, however, rumors had begun to circulate about the man’s disposition--that he was a curmudgeon of sorts, cynical about women and about marriage in general. Which is why Dom had initially been surprised to hear that Jane was engaged to the arse.
Still was engaged to the arse.
Dom scowled. He’d spent the entire trip imagining what he would do when confronted with the man.
The idea of challenging Blakeborough to a duel over Jane was tempting, but not remotely practical. For one thing, it would hurt Jane’s reputation. For another, it might result in Dom losing her anyway. Because if afterward Dom had to flee to avoid prosecution, she might not agree to leave England with him. Besides, it would be awfully hard to drag Rathmoor Park out of arrears from afar.
Dom had even considered telling Blakeborough that his fiancée was no longer chaste. But that would send her into an apoplectic fit, and rightly so. A gentleman didn’t impugn a woman’s reputation to gain what he wanted. Even if what he wanted was the woman as his wife.
No, he would just have to hope that Jane did the right thing and broke with the fellow. In the meantime, Dom would pray he could speak to the man with civility…or at least without wanting to call him out.
”
”
Sabrina Jeffries (If the Viscount Falls (The Duke's Men, #4))
“
CAN WE TRUST ANYTHING THE NEW YORK TIMES SAYS ABOUT IMMIGRATION? In 2008, the world’s richest man, Carlos Slim Helu, saved the Times from bankruptcy. When that guy saves your company, you dance to his tune. So it’s worth mentioning that Slim’s fortune depends on tens of millions of Mexicans living in the United States, preferably illegally. That is, unless the Times is some bizarre exception to the normal pattern of corruption—which you can read about at this very minute in the Times. If a tobacco company owned Fox News, would we believe their reports on the dangers of smoking? (Guess what else Slim owns? A tobacco company!) The Times impugns David and Charles Koch for funneling “secret cash” into a “right-wing political zeppelin.”1 The Kochs’ funding of Americans for Prosperity is hardly “secret.” What most people think of as “secret cash” is more like Carlos Slim’s purchase of favorable editorial opinion in the Newspaper of Record. It would be fun to have a “Sugar Daddy–Off” with the New York Times: Whose Sugar Daddy Is More Loathsome? The Koch Brothers? The Olin Foundation? Monsanto? Halliburton? Every time, Carlos Slim would win by a landslide. Normally, Slim is the kind of businessman the Times—along with every other sentient human being—would find repugnant. Frequently listed as the richest man in the world, Slim acquired his fortune through a corrupt inside deal giving him a monopoly on telecommunications services in Mexico. But in order to make money from his monopoly, Slim needs lots of Mexicans living in the United States, sending money to their relatives back in Oaxaca. Otherwise, Mexicans couldn’t pay him—and they wouldn’t have much need for phone service, either—other than to call in ransom demands. Back in 2004—before the Times became Slim’s pimp—a Times article stated: “Clearly . . . the nation’s southern border is under siege.”2 But that was before Carlos Slim saved the Times from bankruptcy. Ten years later, with a border crisis even worse than in 2004, and Latin Americans pouring across the border, the Times indignantly demanded that Obama “go big” on immigration and give “millions of immigrants permission to stay.”3
”
”
Ann Coulter (¡Adios, America!: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole)
“
I have finished Russell's Nightmares and must confess that they did not come up to expectation. No doubt it was my fault for expecting too much, knowing how unsatisfactory I find his philosophical views; but I had hoped that, at least, when he was not writing normal philosophy, he would be entertaining. Alas! I found his wit insipid, and his serious passages almost intolerable—there was something of the embarrassment of meeting a Great Man for the first time, and finding him even more preoccupied with trivialities than oneself.
In his Introduction, Russell says 'Every isolated passion is, in isolation, insane; sanity may be defined as a synthesis of insanities', and then he proceeds to give us examples of isolated insanities—the Queen of Sheba as Female Vanity, Bowdler as Prudery, the Psycho-Analyst as Social Conformity, and so on. Amongst these, as you noted, is the Existentialist as Ontological Scepticism. Here, Russell's satire is directed partly against what Sartre has called 'a literature of extreme situations'; and this, for an Englishman, is no doubt a legitimate target, since the English do not admit that there are such things—though, of course, this makes the English a target for the satire of the rest of Europe, particularly the French.
But what Russell is not entitled to do is to group the insanity of doubting one's existence along with the other insanities, and this for the simple reason that it precedes them. One may be vain or modest; one may be prudish or broadminded; one may be a social conformist or an eccentric; but in order to be any of these things, one must at least be. The question of one's existence must be settled first—one cannot be insanely vain if one doubts whether one exists at all and, precisely, Russell's existentialist does not even succeed in suffering—except when his philosophy is impugned (but this merely indicates that he has failed to apply his philosophy to itself, and not, as Russell would have us believe, because he has failed to regard his philosophy in the light of his other insanities). The trouble really is, that Russell does not, or rather will not, admit that existence poses a problem at all; and, since he omits this category from all his thinking nothing he says concerns anybody in particular.
”
”
Nanavira Thera
“
According to Luke, far from denouncing the cult, like Stephen, they worshipped together every day in the temple.22 Indeed, the revered Pharisee Gamaliel, whose views were more liberal than Paul’s, is said to have advised the Sanhedrin to leave the Jesus movement alone: If it was of human origin, it would break up of its own accord like other recent protest groups.23 But for Paul, the Hellenistic followers of Jesus were insulting everything he believed to be most sacred, and he greatly feared that their devotion to a man executed so recently by the Roman authorities would put the entire community at risk. Paul himself had never had any dealings with Jesus before his death, but he would have been horrified to learn that Jesus had desecrated the temple and argued that some of God’s laws were more important than others. For a Pharisee with extreme views, like Paul, a Jew who did not observe every single one of the commandments was endangering the Jewish people, since God could punish such infidelity as severely as he had punished the ancient Israelites in the time of Moses. But above all, Paul was scandalized by the outrageous idea of a crucified Messiah.24 How could a convicted criminal possibly restore the dignity and liberty of Israel? This was an utter travesty, a scandalon or “stumbling block.” The Torah was adamant that such a man was hopelessly polluted: “If a man guilty of a capital offense is put to death and you hang him on a gibbet, his body must not remain on the tree overnight; you must bury him the same day, for the one who has been hanged is accursed of God, and you must not defile the land that Yahweh your God has given you.”25 True, his followers insisted that Jesus had been buried on the day of his death, but Paul was well aware that most Roman soldiers had little respect for Jewish sensibilities and might well have left Jesus’s body hanging on his cross to be consumed by birds of prey. Even though this was no fault of his own, such a man was an abomination and had defiled the Land of Israel.26 To imagine that these desecrated remains had been raised to the right hand of God was abhorrent, unthinkable, and blasphemous. It impugned the honor of God and his people and would delay the longed-for coming of the Messiah, so it was, Paul believed, his duty to eradicate this sect.
”
”
Karen Armstrong (St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate (Icons))
“
She was capable of inventing stories impugning his integrity, loyalty, devotion as a father.
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Ariel Leve (An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir)
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Our culture prides itself on the quality of our hospitality and courtesy. And of course we are entitled to demand that the tongue be cut out of anyone who impugns our honor, or that of any member of our family.” The flicker of his smile did not reach his eyes.
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Jane Johnson (The Tenth Gift)
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Criticism of basic concepts in the Imperial Navy would have impugned the top-level admirals, and brought instant dismissal of the critic,” Hara wrote.
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James D. Hornfischer (Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal)
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If I complain about the difficult circumstances of my life, I impugn the sovereignty and goodness of God and tempt my listener to do the same.
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Jerry Bridges (Respectable Sins)
Elliot McGucken (The Physics of Time: Time & Its Arrows in Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, The Second Law of Thermodynamics, Entropy, The Twin Paradox, & Cosmology Explained via LTD Theory's Expanding Fourth Dimension)
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As US forces began marching toward Baghdad, Buchanan wrote a cover story whose title asked, “Whose War?” He offered the same answer he had a decade prior, during the previous war with Saddam. Rather than attack the most famous and important leaders of the “War Party,” all of whom were gentiles, he impugned the Jewish intellectuals who backed the invasion. He said that these neoconservatives put Israel’s interests ahead of America’s. He called them a “cabal.” He accused them of colluding with a foreign power. He might as well have been quoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
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Matthew Continetti (The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism)
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being fair with readers means explaining why they’re dishonest. For the most part, that means talking about the nature of modern U.S. conservatism, about the interlocking network of media organizations and think tanks that serves the interests of right-wing billionaires, and has effectively taken over the G.O.P. This network—“movement conservatism”—is what keeps zombie ideas, like belief in the magic of tax cuts, alive. If you’re having a real, good-faith debate, impugning the other side’s motives is a bad thing. If you’re debating bad-faith opponents, acknowledging their motives is just a matter of being honest about what’s going on.
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Paul Krugman (Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future)
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On the ball field, a twelve-year-old might care about nothing but winning. And not just winning, but beating the opposition. He’ll impugn the referee’s motives, stomp on toes, and hold nothing back in order to win. That same kid doesn’t care at all about being at the top of his class, but he cares a lot about who sits next to him on the bus. In the jazz band, someone is keeping track of how many solos he gets, and someone else wants to be sure she’s helping keep the group in sync. The people you’re seeking to serve in this moment: What are they measuring? If you want to market to someone who measures dominion or affiliation, you’ll need to be aware of what’s being measured and why. “Who eats first” and “who sits closest to the emperor” are questions that persist to this day. Both are status questions. One involves dominion; the other involves affiliation.
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Seth Godin (This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See)
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could further impugn his honor, voice hardening. “‘Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.’” “Iron sharpeneth iron, so you’re being an ass because I, too, am a piece of metal.
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Shelby Mahurin (Serpent & Dove (Serpent & Dove, #1))
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The universe's most perfect and holy Being came to heal us from our wounds, redeem us from death, and shepherd us into immortality and life eternal That was Christ's testament to our worth(inness), and no force on earth or in hell can impugn a worth so powerfully affirmed,"
"More commonly, healing begins gradually when we first open ourselves to the possibility that we are already in the embrace of a love greater than any we have known. Even those who doubt can begin by considering the rem arable, yet historical, fact of a young, itinerant Galilean rabbi who two thousand years ago offered himself up to barbaric execution as a criminal. He endured unspeakable pain, because by so doing He was offering, personally, repost from the pains and humiliations and failures and wounds of my life, whether inflicted by others or by my own foolish choices. As the Book of Mormon testified would happen, we have found ourselves "drawn" to this person of unfathomable kindness and compassion.
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Fiona Givens (All Things New: Rethinking Sin, Salvation, and Everything in Between)
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The universe's most perfect and holy Being came to heal us from our wounds, redeem us from death, and shepherd us into immortality and life eternal That was Christ's testament to our worth(inness), and no force on earth or in hell can impugn a worth so powerfully affirmed,
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Fiona Givens (All Things New: Rethinking Sin, Salvation, and Everything in Between)
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Of course, I mean that Catholicism was not tried; plenty of Catholics were tried, and found guilty. My point is that the world did not tire of the church’s ideal, but of its reality. Monasteries were impugned not for the chastity of monks, but for the unchastity of monks. Christianity was unpopular not because of the humility, but of the arrogance of Christians.
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G.K. Chesterton (The G.K. Chesterton Collection [34 Books])
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Today we see that the question of Hegel is, for the bourgeoisie, merely a matter of impugning Marx. This Great Return to Hegel is simply a desperate attempt to combat Marx, cast in the specific form that revisionism takes in imperialism's final crisis: a revisionism of a fascist type.
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Louis Althusser (The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings)
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Whist?” she managed. “With my mother?”
“It seems she wishes to be a card sharp upon her entrance into English society, and as the resident gambler here, I am to instruct her.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Do you impugn my integrity, your highness?”
“I don’t. I don’t believe you have any integrity to be impugned.” She said it lightly.
“Clever girl,” he said with a knowing, sideways glance at her that tore her breath from her lungs. “Very clever girl.”
-Jacqueline & Cam
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Katharine Ashe (Kisses, She Wrote (The Prince Catchers, #1.5))
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If you compare the written prayers from the psalms, the Lord's Prayer, or those we find in the prayer books of the church, one thing will immediately strike any reader: The prayers from those sources are theologically rich and aesthetically appropriate. I cannot always say this of the spontaneous prayers of many Christians—and I am not impugning their motives or questioning their hearts.
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Scot McKnight (Praying with the Church: Following Jesus Daily, Hourly, Today)
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To tolerate Socrates would be to say to him that we care so little for our way of life that we are willing to let you challenge and impugn it every day.
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Steven B. Smith (Political Philosophy)
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Some were mistresses. Some alleged they were victims of sexual harassment—even rape. There were actresses, career businesswomen, and former employees. It seemed too strange not to be true, but not everyone believed them. The Clinton pattern was deny-deny-deny. Behind the scenes, the Clinton Machine slut-shamed accusers, impugned their integrity, and supposedly even paid them off and intimidated them.
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Gary J. Byrne (Crisis of Character: A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience with Hillary, Bill, and How They Operate)
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was willing to stay silent about Felix’s simmering hatred for his stepmother, but I couldn’t let this guy impugn my professional reputation—or what was left of it in the aftermath of my client dying, apparently as a result of my
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Melissa F. Miller (Rosemary's Gravy (We Sisters Three, #1))
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I got the housekeeper’s letter this morning, so I drove here to consult with Blakeborough, hoping he might know more. That Jane might have bent the rules of propriety to write to her fiancé.”
Blakeborough was watching Jane closely. “As I told your uncle, however, you never bend the rules of propriety.”
The blush that stained her cheeks made Dom want to leap between her and the earl to defend her honor. But since the man hadn’t actually impugned it, that would alert the man to the fact that her honor needed defending.
Still, it was clear Blakeborough had noticed her blush, for his gaze flicked suspiciously between her and Dom. “Of course, I was glad to hear that Jane was among friends. I shouldn’t have liked to think of her riding the roads alone.
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Sabrina Jeffries (If the Viscount Falls (The Duke's Men, #4))
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Barack Obama has spent two decades of his public life advocating for radical anti–Second Amendment zealots’ most extreme anti-gun policies. In his five years in the Oval Office, he has surrounded himself with anti-gun radicals and empowered them to defy federal law and risk innocent lives in pursuit of their agenda of destroying the Second Amendment. He has wealthy, Second Amendment–hating allies right along with him. Through their unified campaign for power and their efforts to impose a vision of a nearly gun-free American on an unwilling nation, they have insulted gun owners, lied to them, impugned their motives, and accused them of spreading misinformation—a case of the pot calling the kettle black, if ever there was one.
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Dana Loesch (Hands Off My Gun: Defeating the Plot to Disarm America)
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For what seemed like half the night, Mirelle laid waste to anything Gen might be thinking good about himself and pointed out repeatedly that she was before Eldaloth himself when it came to Gen getting permission to do anything besides stay within earshot of the Chalaine. He was fairly sure she would have impugned his parentage for all of his faults if he had any parentage to speak of. At one point, he thought she might actually make up some parents for him just for that purpose, but mercifully, she did eventually tire and tell him to get out of her sight.
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Brian Fuller (Duty (The Trysmoon Saga, #2))
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And then, a second surprise: for the first time in my adult life I was not leaping to become my mother's judge, or her defense attorney. For so many years, those had been the only two roles I could play. Prosecutor was the default - there was always an abundance of her qualities to criticize and impugn - but the prosecutor's costume could be instantly traded for the defender's if, and only if, I was in the docket along with her. Neither posture carried much meaning now.
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Sana Krasikov (The Patriots)
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I mourned now because when she had been alive I had not understood her. To the end, she frustrated my understanding, defied it with her own silences, her suppressions and elisions. Not about her past in the camps, per se. I was careful not to probe too hard into her tour through the bowels of hell, respecting her silence on the subject. No, what I blamed her for was another kind of silence. What I could not abide was her unwillingness to condemn the very system that had destroyed our family. Her refusal to impugn the evil that had deprived me of a father and left me motherless in those years when a boy most needs a mother's love. I am not a crybaby. I am not one to nurse old wounds. Others suffered more, God knows. I t would have been enough for me if she had said, just one time, Yes, what they did to you, to me, to our family - that was unforgivable. But she did not say those words, and her muteness - her apologism for the system that she insisted - to me! - 'would always take care of the children' - became a second, no less painful, abandonment. In the sixties and seventies, when I was compulsively reading samizdat, I wanted her to be as cynical and disillusioned as I was. I wanted her to be angry for the miseries that she had endured: the murder of her husband, the forcible separation from her child, seven years of bondage and humiliation and hunger. That all this failed to enrage her infuriated me all the more. For it left me to carry the anger for both of us.
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Sana Krasikov (The Patriots)
George R.R. Martin (A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1))
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Academic freedom does allow for protest. Students should protest and argue about positions with which they disagree. But academic freedom does not imply that differences of opinion may be voiced via taunts, nor does it suggest that intimidation is a legitimate and productive means to affect change. Academic freedom does not mean that students should be pressured to avoid unique and difficult educational opportunities because others impugn them.
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Jill Schneiderman (Anti-Zionism on Campus: The University, Free Speech, and BDS)
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The Arguer does not understand that words are never neutral, and that by arguing with a superior he impugns the intelligence of one more powerful than he. He also has no awareness of the person he is dealing with. Since each man believes that he is right, and words will rarely convince him otherwise, the arguer’s reasoning falls on deaf ears. When cornered, he only argues more, digging his own grave.
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Robert Greene (The 48 Laws of Power)
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By employing the politics of sexual anxiety, a political leader represents, albeit indirectly, freedom and equality as threats. The expression of gender identity or sexual preference is an exercise of freedom. By presenting homosexuals or transgender women as a threat to women and children—and, by extension, to men’s ability to protect them—fascist politics impugns the liberal ideal of freedom. A woman’s right to have an abortion is also an exercise of freedom.
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Jason F. Stanley (How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them)
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There are many, actually. I’m not surprised that you are unaware of them; those that impugn the creator are far more prevalent. Every scientific theory formed to dispose of the creator is, in essence, another attempt to overcome the innate yearning for God within us. I would say that when a man argues against the existence of God, he is always first arguing with himself because his very own nature argues otherwise.
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D.I. Hennessey (Quest (Niergel Chronicles #2))
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A Quotation of the Foreword of Sheikh Hasan ‘Abdul-Bassir ‘Arafah (General Manager of the Islamic Da‘wah, the Ministry of Awqaf of Egypt in Alexandria):
For the present, there is a ferocious attack on our Islamic heritage. Modernity Thoughts and radical groups still misunderstand and impugn the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. Besides, to offend the companions of the Prophet ﷺ. The Prophet ﷺ had witnessed to them with fairness. They were like the stars in the heavens. The book’s contents are simple but not easy, written down by Eng.: Ahmad ElYamany. The author was affected by his father’s upbringing; I mean that his father educated him according to the Thought of Al-Azhar Ash-Sharif (1). His father did his best upon a pulpit of Masjid(s) for standing up for the Sunnah until his death. Now, the author does follow the example of his father. He did write down this book to explain The Study of Tradition Terminology (2) for ordinary people in simple words. Besides, he does show how the previous Imams of the ‘Ummah took care of The Study of Tradition Terminology. This book geared-towards an obstacle against those who make a ferocious attack on the Sunnah and the heritage.
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(1) The Thought of Al-Azhar Ash-Sharif: I do mean the Sunni Madhab. The Sunni Madhab is a term generally applied to the large sect of Muslims, which consists of:
• Regarding Fiqh: who follows one of these authorised Madhabs:
- Madhab of Imam Abu Hanifah (مذهب أبو حنيفة), Madhab of Imam Malik (مذهب مالك), Madhab of Imam Ash-Shafi‘i (مذهب الشافعي), or Madhab of Imam Ahmad son of Hanbal (مذهب أحمد بن حنبل).
• Regarding Creed: who follows one of these authorised Theologies:
- The Ash‘arism Theology (Ash‘ariyah: Arabic المدرسة الأشعرية) or The Maturidism Theology (Maturidiyah: Arabic: المدرسة الماتُريدية).
• Regarding Sufism: who follows one of any authorised Orders or Schools (Tariqah: Arabic: الطريقة الصوفية) of Sufism, such:
- Al-Ghazzaliyah (الغزَّالية), Al-Qadiriyah (القادرية), Ash-Shazliyah (الشاذلية), Ar-Rifa‘iyah (الرفاعية), and so on.
(2) The Study of Tradition Terminology: (Arabic: علم مصطلح الحديث), pronounced in the Roman Transliteration: ‘Ilm Mustalah Al-Hadith. The word Al-Hadith or Hadith means Communication or Narration. In the Islamic context, it has come to denote the record of what the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, said, did, or tacitly approved.
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أحمد اليمني (The Hadith And The Narrators ... In Simple Words)
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forward. “The trouble with truth is that people are unwilling to be convinced that they have been deceived. It impugns their judgment.
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Jeff Wheeler (Fireblood (Whispers from Mirrowen, #1))
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We buck when we hear these things because we are proud. We say that we do not want God’s holiness impugned, but really we do not want our autonomy restricted. If God appoints all the seasons of every man’s life, then no man can live unto himself, and no man can find the fount of wisdom within. If God decrees all things, then I cannot escape Him, not even by plunging myself into all depravity. A man who embraces evil simply finds himself a tool in the hand of the Almighty. A man who rejects evil and follows wisdom finds himself a son in the family of the Almighty. The one option not offered us is that of thwarting and restricting the purposes of God.
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Douglas Wilson (Joy at the End of the Tether: The Inscrutable Wisdom of Ecclesiastes)
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As I stated earlier, it impugns the God of the Bible and makes Him capricious and nothing less than a trickster of sorts.
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L.A. Marzulli (Countermove: How the Nephilim Returned After the Flood)
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There was one kid in particular everyone knew as Cricket. To say that he would “give me the cold shoulder” would impugn shoulders. Cricket, fifteen years old, would walk away when I approached and would return to the bola (I noticed) once I left. I investigated and discovered his name was William. One day I walk up to this group of gang members, with Cricket among them, and he doesn’t disappear on me. I shake hands with all of them, and when I get to Cricket, he actually lets me shake his hand. “William,” I say to him, “How you doin’? It’s good to see ya.” William says nothing. But as I walk away (I always made a point of not staying very long), I can hear William in a very breathy, age-appropriate voice, say to the others, “Hey, the priest knows my name.” “I have called you by your name. You are mine,” is how Isaiah gets God to articulate this truth. Who doesn’t want to be called by name, known? The “knowing” and the “naming” seem to get at what Anne Lamott calls our “inner sense of disfigurement
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Gregory Boyle (Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion)
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Since men prize fidelity, women do battle with other women both to display signals of fidelity and to disparage their rivals by impugning their fidelity.
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David M. Buss (The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill)
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To help us think about this question, it is useful to start by considering a slightly different question. Rather than think about the origin of natural reality, let us consider the origin of causal reality. Since causal reality is the whole causal network, it cannot be that there is a cause of causal reality: such a cause both would and would not belong to causal reality. So it cannot be that it is true both that causal reality began to exist and that whatever began to exist had a cause of its beginning to exist. In order to maintain logical consistency, theists and atheists alike must either accept that causal reality did not begin to exist, or else accept that there are some things that began to exist that do not have causes of their beginning to exist. Among positions that atheists adopt, one very popular position is that causal reality is natural reality: the entire network of causes is just the entire network of natural causes. Atheists who take this position can say about ‘natural reality’ versions of 1 and 2 whatever theists say about the ‘causal reality’ versions of 1 and 2: if theists can say that causal reality did not begin to exist, then atheists can say that natural reality did not begin to exist; and if theists can say that causal reality is a counterexample to the claim that whatever began to exist had a cause of its beginning to exist, then atheists can say that natural reality is a counterexample to the claim that whatever began to exist had a cause of its beginning to exist. But, given all of this, it is obvious that the derivation above presents no serious logical challenge to atheism: consistent atheists simply do not accept 1 and 2, just as consistent theists do not accept the ‘causal reality’ versions of 1 and 2. Of course, that this derivation does nothing to impugn the logical consistency of atheism does not entail that there are no other derivations that do impugn the logical consistency of atheism. However, I think that it quite safe to say that no one has ever produced a derivation that does present a logical challenge to atheism: wherever theists have found inconsistent sets of sentences that include the claim that there are no gods, it has always turned out that reflective, thoughtful, informed atheists reject one or more of the other claims in the inconsistent set of sentences. Moreover, while past failure does not guarantee future failure, the null return on massive past investment certainly provides no reason at all to expect future success. At the very least, the challenge here for critics of atheism is clear: find a set of unambiguous, clearly articulated claims, including the claim that there are no gods, that can be shown to satisfy the following two conditions: (a) the set of claims is logically inconsistent; and (b) thoughtful, intelligent, reflective, well-informed atheists accept all of the claims in the set. Good luck.
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Graham Oppy (Atheism: The Basics)
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I apologize for not realizing Kenshiro was sending a secret code,” Todai said. “I should’ve known. He is undoubtedly an asshole, but he would never impugn my honor to say that I, a true heavy-metal fan, liked Nickelback. There are lines that even mercs will not cross.
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Zachary Hill (Sakura: Intellectual Property)
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Don’t impugn the integrity of love just because you’re unable to live up to its standards.
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Sarvesh Jain
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Ralston looked down his long, elegant nose at the vile creature at his feet, and said, “You just impugned the honor of my future marchioness. Choose your seconds. I will see you at dawn.” Leaving Oxford sputtering on the ground, Ralston spun on one elegant heel to face Benedick. “When I am done with him, I am coming for your sister. And, if you intend to keep me from her, you had better have an army at your side.
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Sarah MacLean (Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake (Love By Numbers, #1))
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Antisemitism is a categorical impugning of Jews as collectively embodying distasteful and/or destructive
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Peter Hayes (Why?: Explaining the Holocaust)
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Antisemitism is a categorical impugning of Jews as collectively embodying distasteful and/or destructive traits.
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Peter Hayes (Why?: Explaining the Holocaust)
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The binary tribalism of our politics chokes off deeper discussion and prevents the discovery of common ground… Binary tribalism also gives way to purposeful mischaracterization, a favorite ploy of the far left to shoot down their ideological opposition without the hard work of substantiating their accusations or provide supporting evidence for their arguments. It’s insidious and heavily relied upon by those who wish to impugn their opponents as hateful or bigoted…
The enemy of binary tribalism is common ground, and rediscovering the nuance of national discourse is the first step in establishing it. If you agree with one aspect of an ideology but not the rest, you risk coming to a better understanding of the political opposition. You might even see them as human.” -pp. 40, 51
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Dana Loesch (Grace Canceled: How Outrage is Destroying Lives, Ending Debate, and Endangering Democracy)
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Ambitious natures are apt to be overconfident and to shrink from asking counsel of more experienced persons for fear their infallibility might be impugned,
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David McCullough (The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge)
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Within the pages and pages of crazed ruminations documented in large fonts, all caps, and eye-scorching neons, he found only a few articles of interest, mostly from skeptics. The true believers’ integrity was impugned by their incompetent design skills and lack of Internet savvy.
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Jared C. Wilson (Otherworld)
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Given how important the idea of intelligence is to most people’s vanity, it is critical never inadvertently to insult or impugn a person’s brain power. That is an unforgivable sin. But if you can make this iron rule work for you, it opens up all sorts of avenues of deception. Subliminally reassure people that they are more intelligent than you are, or even that you are a bit of a moron, and you can run rings around them. The feeling of intellectual superiority you give them will disarm their suspicion-muscles.
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Robert Greene (The 48 Laws of Power)
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impugning the bionic soldiers,
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Vaughn Heppner (Battle Pod (Doom Star, #3))