Ironclad Quotes

How were you supposed to change- in ways both big and small- when your family was always there to remind you of exactly the person you apparently signed an ironclad contract to be?

Did you mean it? What you said.” He held her stare. Let some inner wall within him come crumbling down. Only for her. For this sharp-eyed, cunning little liar who had slipped through every defense and ironclad rule he’d ever made for himself. He let her see that in his face. Let her see all of it, as no one had ever done before. “Yes.” Her mouth tightened, but not in displeasure. So Lorcan said softly, “I meant every word.

..."We were the pair. One too afraid to feel anything lest she lose control of her ironclad hold on her emotions, and the other so hungry to feel anything that she´d risk her free will for one night of fun."...

It is...highly probable that from the very beginning, apart from death, the only ironclad rule of human experience has been the Law of Unintended Consequences.

The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning.

How were you supposed to change—in ways both big and small—when your family was always there to remind you of exactly the person you apparently signed an ironclad contract to be?

A powerful AI system tasked with ensuring your safety might imprison you at home. If you asked for happiness, it might hook you up to a life support and ceaselessly stimulate your brain's pleasure centers. If you don't provide the AI with a very big library of preferred behaviors or an ironclad means for it to deduce what behavior you prefer, you'll be stuck with whatever it comes up with. And since it's a highly complex system, you may never understand it well enough to make sure you've got it right.

With an iron-clad fist, I wake up and French-kiss the morning.

The thing about fantasy — there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy. You don’t have sex near unicorns. It’s an ironclad rule. It’s tacky.

You listen to me,” she says. Her jaw is set, ironclad. It’s the game face he’s seen her use to stare down Congress, to cow autocrats. Her grip on his hand is steady and strong. He wonders, half-hysterically, if this is how it felt to charge into war under Washington. “I am your mother. I was your mother before I was ever the president, and I’ll be your mother long after, to the day they put me in the ground and beyond this earth. You are my child. So, if you’re serious about this, I’ll back your play.” Alex is silent. But the debates, he thinks. But the general. Her gaze is hard. He knows better than to say either of those things. She’ll handle it. “So,” she says. “Do you feel forever about him?” And there’s no room left to agonize over it, nothing left to do but say the thing he’s known all along. “Yeah,” he says, “I do.” Ellen Claremont exhales slowly, and she grins a small, secret grin, the crooked, unflattering one she never uses in public, the one he knows best from when he was a kid

And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny … is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.

But it won't be much of a battle, will it?" Alek asked. "What can an airship do to a pair of ironclads?" "My guess is, we'll stay absolutely still for an hour.  Just so we don't fall into any bad habits.

He followed an ironclad rule. He NEVER WATCHED HIMSELF.

How were you supposed to change - in ways both big and small - when your family was always there to remind you of exactly the person you apparently signed an ironclad contract to be?

it occurred to Strike that his sister’s determination to cling to stability and her notion of normality, her iron-clad refusal to dwell endlessly on the awful possibilities of human behaviour, was a form of extraordinary courage.

Or did a Martian sit within each, ruling, directing, using, much as a man's brain sits and rules in his body? I began to compare the things to human machines, to ask myself for the first time in my life how an ironclad or a steam engine would seem to an intelligent lower animal.

For the previous few years, Putin had sat comfortably in the Kremlin, knowing that whatever happened in the US Congress, President Obama opposed the Magnitsky Act. In Putin’s totalitarian mind, this was an ironclad guarantee that it would never become law. But what Putin overlooked was that the United States was not Russia.

They were all strangers, each living in a far-off city with lives and children of their own. She wanted to think there was some iron-clad bond that connected her to them for life, but that’s not how it worked. Families required constant maintenance.

Don’t take yourself too seriously. Take yourself as seriously as death itself. Don’t worry. Worry your ass off. Have iron-clad confidence, but doubt. It keeps you alive and alert! Believe you are the baddest ass in town – and [that] you suck! It keeps you honest. Be able to keep two completely contradictory ideas alive and well inside of your heart and head at all times. If it doesn’t drive you crazy, it will make you strong. And when you walk on stage tonight to bring the noise, treat it like it’s all we have – and then remember it’s only rock’ n’ roll.

You may well know a lawyer, or of a friend of a friend who’s a lawyer, who is fabulously well off. If so, I offer you an iron-clad guarantee that they are not a criminal lawyer.

She wanted to think there was some iron-clad bond that connected her to them for life, but that’s not how it worked. Families required constant maintenance.

At its most basic, the logic of 'meritocracy' is ironclad: putting the most qualified, best equipped people into the positions of greates responsibility and import...But my central contention is that our near-religious fidelity to the meritocratic model comes with huge costs. We overestimate the advantages of meritocracy and underappreciate its costs, because we don't think hard enough about the consequences of the inequality it produces. As Americans, we take it as a given that unequal levels of achievement are natural, even desirable. Sociologist Jermole Karabel, whose work looks at elite formation, once said he 'didnt think any advanced democracy is as obsessed with equality of opportunity or as relatively unconcerned with equality of condition' as the United States. This is our central problem. And my proposed solution for correcting the excesses of our extreme version of meritocracy is quite simple: make America more equal

Mankind, I suppose, is designed to run on - to be motivated by - temptation. If progress is a virtue then this is our greatest gift. (For what is curiosity if not intellectual temptation? And what progress is there without curiosity?) On the other hand, can you call such profound weakness a gift,or is it a design flaw? Is temptation itself at fault for man's woes, or it simply the lack of judgment in response to temptation? In other words, who is to blame? Mankind , or a bad designer? Because i can't help but think that if God had never told Adam and Eve to avoid the fruit of the tree of knowledged, that the human race would still be running around naked, dancing, in wonderment and blissfully naming and stuff between snacks, naps, and shags. By the same token, if Balthasar had passed that great ironclad door that first day without a word a warning, I might have never given it a second glance, and once again, much trouble could have been avoided. Am I to blame for what happened, or is it the author of temptation, God Hisownself?

In the excitement of trying on dresses she had forgotten Mammy’s ironclad rule that, before going to any party, the O’Hara girls must be crammed so full of food at home they would be unable to eat any refreshments at the party.

Above everything else, beyond the long hardships, one out- come is the most invaluable. The sisterhoods. The lifelong friends and bonds that will never lessen. Years can go by, and I will pick up with each of those sisters as if a single day hasn’t passed. Only we can truly understand one another; not even our husbands can fully grasp what we’ve been through with each other and how ironclad those bonds are.

How dare Marilyn slight her honor? How can she possibly suggest that the solemn word of a junkie who has smoked, snorted, and shot up every chemical on the planet is not legally binding? How dare Marilyn imply that Heather’s word is not the verbal equivalent of an ironclad contract

He was an old Drag man with his bit getting short. He was the first to attempt to teach me to control my emotions. He would say, “Always remember whether you be sucker or hustler in the world out there, you’ve got that vital edge if you can iron-clad your feelings. I picture the human mind as a movie screen. If you’re a dopey sucker, you’ll just sit and watch all kinds of mindwrecking, damn fool movies on that screen.” He said. “Son, there is no reason except a stupid one for anybody to project on that screen anything that will worry him or dull that vital edge. After all, we are the absolute bosses of that whole theatre and show in our minds. We even write the script. So always write positive, dynamic scripts and show only the best movies for you on that screen whether you are pimp or priest.” His rundown of his screen theory saved my sanity many years later. He was a twisted wise man and one day when he wasn’t looking, a movie flashed on the screen. The title was “Death For an Old Con.

If you want to make a true picture in your mind of a battle between great modern ironclad ships you must not think of it as if it were two men in armour striking at each other with heavy swords,’ he said. ‘It is more like a battle between two egg-shells striking each other with hammers.

When you consider the many pressures that couples face today, only an iron-clad determination will hold them together for a lifetime. Those who go into marriage with a mushy commitment are likely to wobble and fall apart when the hard times come. And as we all know, hard times will come.

The day of democracy is past," he said. "Past for ever. That day began with the bowmen of Crecy, it ended when marching infantry, when common men in masses ceased to win the battles of the world, when costly cannon, great ironclads, and strategic railways became the means of power. To-day is the day of wealth. Wealth now is power as it never was power before—it commands earth and sea and sky. All power is for those who can handle wealth....

They talk o' rich folks bein' stuck up and genteel, but for iron-clad pride o' respectability there's nowt like poor chapel folk. Why, 'tis as cold as the wind on Greenhow Hill -- aye, and colder, too, for 'twill never change.

Conjugation of the irregular verb “to design”: I create, You interfere, He gets in the way. We cooperate, You obstruct, They conspire.

Holy hell, did she love her a good dimple. And this one was deadly. She needed to get him to stop smiling. Now.

For all I knew, Ikea was mass-producing a flat-pack lean-to called the ‘Fükd’ just for the occasion.

How were you supposed to change--in ways both big and small--when your family was always there to remind you of exactly the person you apparently signed an ironclad contract to be?

until I met a woman who cracked my ironclad defenses like no one had before.

But the streets aren't black and white. Despite the many ironclad codes, the streets function off of one element that the media can't understand: circumstance.

Checklists educate people about what’s best, showing them the ironclad right way to do something.

Despite Michael’s ironclad alibi, and the State’s obvious evidentiary defects, a Connecticut court, nevertheless, convicted him of Martha’s murder in 2002 after a six-week jury trial.

THE SEVEN TRAITS OF ELITE CAPTAINS 1. Extreme doggedness and focus in competition. 2. Aggressive play that tests the limits of the rules. 3. A willingness to do thankless jobs in the shadows. 4. A low-key, practical, and democratic communication style. 5. Motivates others with passionate nonverbal displays. 6. Strong convictions and the courage to stand apart. 7. Ironclad emotional control.

Let’s get one fucking thing straight,” Castle snaps, yanking me hard to his body. “You. Are. MINE.” My core quivers. “Not his,” he rasps. “Not any other man’s. And the next one who touches you as if that is not an iron-clad, irrefutable fact will not be getting back up again. Ever. Is that clear?

Destiny comes suddenly, bringing concern; she stares at you with horrible eyes and clutches you at the throat with sharp fingers and hurls you to the ground and tramples upon you with ironclad feet; then she laughs and walks away, but later regrets her actions and asks you through good fortune to forgive her. She stretches her silky hand and lifts you high and sings to you the Song of Hope and causes you to lose your cares. She creates in you a new zest for confidence and ambition. If your lot in life is a beautiful bird that you love dearly, you gladly feed to him the seeds of your inner self, and make your heart his cage and your soul his nest. But while you are affectionately admiring him and looking upon him with the eyes of love, he escapes from your hands and flies very high; then he descends and enters into another cage and never comes back to you. What can you do? Where can you find patience and condolence? How can you revive your hopes and dreams? What power can still your turbulent heart?

There is no guarantee that starting a small conversation will lead to something larger. But the failure to take any step at all, no matter how small, comes with an ironclad guarantee that we will not be part of helping change happen.

If there was any perception of a fairy-tale marriage or life, it was absolutely smoke and mirrors. The ironclad safety that Tommy provided from my family turned into an ironclad dungeon. The control and imbalance of power in our relationship accelerated.

No mates exist for countless miles around, and a chestnut, though both male and female, will not serve itself. Yet still this tree has a secret tucked into the thin, living cylinder beneath its bark. Its cells obey an ancient formula: Keep still. Wait. Something in the lone survivor knows that even the ironclad law of Now can be outlasted. There’s work to do. Star-work, but earthbound all the same. Or as the nurse to the Union dead writes: Stand cool and composed before a million universes. As cool and composed as wood.

Since when do you wear dresses?” he said, the second he saw her. “Ugh,” Kit said, frowning. How were you supposed to change—in ways both big and small—when your family was always there to remind you of exactly the person you apparently signed an ironclad contract to be?

But you seem to have a very strong intuition, which I share, that we should consider honesty to be a nearly ironclad principle, because it is to everyone’s advantage so much of the time, and it allows us to live the kinds of lives and maintain the kinds of relationships we want to have.

Unfortunately, it was an ironclad rule of life that the hardest-working people tended to be the ones who lost out in the end. If you blow the whistle and warn about the dangers ahead, it’s usually your job to clean up the mess that results—something Beretta was about to learn the hard way.

There's not much to say about loneliness, for it's not a broad subject. Any child, alone in her room, can journey across its entire breadth, from border to border, in an hour. Though not broad, our subject is deep. Loneliness is deeper than the ocean. But here, too, there is no mystery. Our intrepid child is liable to fall quickly to the very bottom without even trying. And since the depths of loneliness cannot sustain human life, the child will swim to the surface again in short order, no worse for wear. Some of us, though, can bring breathing aids down with us for longer stays: imaginary friends, drugs and alcohol, mind-numbing entertainment, hobbies, ironclad routine, and pets. (Pets are some of the best enablers of loneliness, your own cuddlesome Murphy notwithstanding.) With the help of these aids, a poor sap can survive the airless depths of loneliness long enough to experience its true horror -- duration. Did you know, Myren Vole, that when presented with the same odor (even my own) for a duration of only several minutes, the olfactory nerves become habituated -- as my daughter used to say -- to it and cease transmitting its signal to the brain? Likewise, most pain loses its edge in time. Time heals all -- as they say. Even the loss of a loved one, perhaps life's most wrenching pain, is blunted in time. It recedes into the background where it can be borne with lesser pains. Not so our friend loneliness, which grows only more keen and insistent with each passing hour. Loneliness is as needle sharp now as it was an hour ago, or last week. But if loneliness is the wound, what's so secret about it? I submit to you, Myren Vole, that the most painful death of all is suffocation by loneliness. And by the time I started on my portrait of Jean, I was ten years into it (with another five to go). It is from that vantage point that I tell you that loneliness itself is the secret. It's a secret you cannot tell anyone. Why? Because to confess your loneliness is to confess your failure as a human being. To confess would only cause others to pity and avoid you, afraid that what you have is catching. Your condition is caused by a lack of human relationship, and yet to admit to it only drives your possible rescuers farther away (while attracting cats). So you attempt to hide your loneliness in public, to behave, in fact, as though you have too many friends already, and thus you hope to attract people who will unwittingly save you. But it never works that way. Your condition is written all over your face, in the hunch of your shoulders, in the hollowness of your laugh. You fool no one. Believe me in this; I've tried all the tricks of the lonely man.

One thing is certain, however. The metaphysical 'rule', which is held as an ironclad conviction by those whom I have debated the issue of creation, namely that "out of nothing nothing comes," has no foundation in science. Arguing that it is self-evident, unwavering, and unassailable is like arguing, as Darwin falsely did, when he made the suggestion that the origin of life was beyond the domain of science by building an analogy with the incorrect claim that matter cannot be created or destroyed. All it represents is an unwillingness to recognize the simple fact that nature may be cleverer than philosophers or theologians.

First, within weeks after taking office, Johnson pardoned scores of former Confederates, ignoring Congress’s 1862 Ironclad Test Oath that expressly forbade him to do so, and handed out full amnesty to thousands whom, just the year before, he had called “guerrillas and cut-throats” and “traitors … [who] ought to be hung.

Now, here's the real beauty of this contorting contradiction. Both working mothers and stay-at-home mothers get to be failures. The ethos of intensive mothering has lower status in our culture ("stay-at-home mothers are boring"), but occupies a higher moral ground ("working mothers are neglectful"). So, welcome to the latest media catfight: the supposed war between working mothers and stay-at-home mothers. Why analyze all the ways in which our country has failed to support families while inflating the work ethic to the size of the Hindenburg when you can, instead, project this paradox onto what the media have come to call, incessantly, "the mommy wars." The "mommy wars" puts mothers into two, mutually exclusive categories--working mother versus stay-at-home mother, and never the twain shall meet. It goes without saying that they allegedly hate each other's guts. In real life, millions of mothers move between these two categories, have been one and then the other at various different times, creating a mosaic of work and child-rearing practices that bears no resemblance to the supposed ironclad roles suggested by the "mommy wars." Not only does the media catfight pit mother against mother, but it suggests that all women be reduced to their one role--mother--or get cut out of the picture entirely.

Another lesson is that smart professionals might give an instruction to a program based on a sensible-seeming and normally sound assumption (e.g. that trading volume is a good measure of market liquidity), and that this can produce catastrophic results when the program continues to act on the instruction with iron-clad logical consistency even in the unanticipated situation where the assumption turns out to be invalid. The algorithm just does what it does; and unless it is a very special kind of algorithm, it does not care that we clasp our heads and gasp in dumbstruck horror at the absurd inappropriateness of its actions. This is a theme that we will encounter again.

How I love, how I loved to stare At the ironclad shores, On the balcony, where forever No foot stepped, not mine, not yours. And in truth you are -- a capital For the mad and luminous us; But when over Nieva sail Those special, pure hours And the winds of May fly over You past the iron beams You are like a dying sinner Seeing heavenly dreams...

Love of knowledge can draw on its credit indefinitely ... love of knowledge is iron-clad.

I've been thinking," he said huskily. A tremulous smile curved her lips. "About what?" "Trust. When I told you I couldn't count on someone loving me..." "Yes, I remember." "I realized that before I can have trust... actually feel it... I'll have to start doing it. Trusting blindly. I'll have to learn how. It's... difficult." Her beautiful eyes shimmered. "I know, darling," she whispered. "But if I'm ever going to try it with anyone, it has to be you." Phoebe inched closer to him. Her eyes were so bright, they were like bottled lightning. "I've been thinking, too." "About?" "About surprises. You see, there was no way of knowing how much time Henry and I would have together before his decline started. As it turned out, it was even less time than we'd expected. But it was worth it. I would do it again. I wasn't afraid of his illness, and I'm not afraid of your past, or whatever might leap out at us. That's the chance everyone takes, isn't it? The only ironclad guarantee is that we'll love each other." Her voice thickened with emotion. "And I do, West. I love you so very much.

There were eruptions against the convict labor system in the South, in which prisoners were leased in slave labor to corporations, used thus to depress the general level of wages and also to break strikes. In the year 1891, miners of the Tennessee Coal Mine Company were asked to sign an “iron-clad contract”: pledging no strikes, agreeing to get paid in scrip, and giving up the right to check the weight of the coal they mined (they were paid by the weight). They refused to sign and were evicted from their houses. Convicts were brought in to replace them.

Promise me that you’ll never cut me out. Promise me that you’ll never walk away—no matter how badly I fuck up.” I wanted to bind her in this moment—an ironclad agreement that she would never leave—no matter how bad things got. Because I would fuck it up. She would end up hating me. I had debts to extract, her brother to dispatch, and an empire to steal. I wasn’t perfect.

Although at the age of twenty-eight I had become preposterously famous, I was still partially gagged by the indoctrination of aggrieved lower-middle-class humility. In my work I had not dissembled, I was sure of that, but the nagging inheritance of 'Who do you think you are?' is hard to drown out in the presence of those who seem to have an ironclad awareness of who they are.

Destiny comes suddenly, bringing concern; she stares at you with horrible eyes and clutches you at the throat with sharp fingers and hurls you to the ground and tramples upon you with ironclad feet; then she laughs and walks away, but later regrets her actions and asks you through good fortune to forgive her. She stretches her silky hand and lifts you high and sings to you the Song of Hope and causes you to lose your cares. She creates in you a new zest for confidence and ambition.

These days I don’t care much for having an ironclad theology or an airtight apologetic. I know many people who have such things. Now I simply want my presence on the planet to result in less pain, less inequality, less poverty, less suffering, and less damage for those sharing it with me. I want the sum total of my minutes and my efforts to yield more compassion, more decency, more laughter, more justice, and more goodness than before I showed up. In other words: I just want to do Love right.

Ibarra’s advice is nearly identical to the short-term planning the Dark Horse researchers documented. Rather than expecting an ironclad a priori answer to “Who do I really want to become?,” their work indicated that it is better to be a scientist of yourself, asking smaller questions that can actually be tested—“Which among my various possible selves should I start to explore now? How can I do that?” Be a flirt with your possible selves.* Rather than a grand plan, find experiments that can be undertaken quickly. “Test-and-learn,” Ibarra told me, “not plan-and-implement.

He had lived by ironclad rules for so long. Protect Tavvy, protect Livvy and Ty, protect Dru. Protect Emma. Recently that he widened out slightly- he would protect Mark, because Mark had come back, and he would protect Cristina, because Emma loved her. It was a sort of love few other people could understand. It was total and it was overwhelming and it could be cruel. He would destroy a whole city if he thought that city posed some threat to his family. When you were twelve years old and you were all that stood between your family and annihilation, you didn't learn moderation.

Let us resolve to have a politics shot through with doubt, so that, if it ever comes time to do murder for our politics, our very opinions about politics will make us hesitate, long and hard, before pulling the trigger. Let us be meta-rational about our politics, and recognize that this is an area where we humans have constantly gotten things wrong, and where we have constantly killed and died in vain. Let us adopt a world-view that accords well with our well-known human failings. Let us tell ourselves— hopefully with all the allure of an ironclad certitude—that we are prone to being wrong, and that it is ghastly to kill for a mistake. With others in the same position, we can share a bond of camaraderie, regardless of our particular conclusions. We can know the future may make fools of us all, and that in all probability it will. But we don’t know just how the future will do it, and anyway, we are still permitted to believe, as long as we do it modestly. If our beliefs are to be overthrown by something better, that happy event will arrive only because you and I have earnestly fought the good fight in the present. And it’s a fight in which, at any rate, we can now join sincerely and without fear.

This is the lesson history told me: when a religion gets so mired in bureaucracy that compassion takes second place to the law, and the law is iron-bound and iron-clad and has no room in it for exceptions, then it’s no longer a religion for humans, it’s a religion for paper-pushers, painted saints, and marble statues.

The day of democracy is past,” he said. “Past for ever. That day began with the bowmen of Crecy, it ended when marching infantry, when common men in masses ceased to win the battles of the world, when costly cannon, great ironclads, and strategic railways became the means of power. To-day is the day of wealth. Wealth now is power as it never was power before—it commands earth and sea and sky. All power is for those who can handle wealth…. You must accept facts, and these are facts. The world for the Crowd! The Crowd as Ruler! Even in your days that creed had been tried and condemned. To-day it has only one believer—a multiplex, silly one—the mall in the Crowd.

There isn't one tight little circle of cheaters and one tight little circle of honest students. Some kids cheat at home but not at school; some kids cheat at school but not at home. Whether or not a child cheated on, say, the word completion test was not an iron-clad predictor of whether he or she would cheat on, say, the underlining A's part of the speed test. If you gave the same group of kids the same test, under the same circumstances six months apart, Hartshorne and May found, the same kids would cheat in the same ways in both cases. But once you changed any of those variables-the material on the test, or the situation in which it was administered-the kinds of cheating would change as well.

Rivers flood our tallest levees and break through our mightiest dams. Beaches keep moving, despite jetty walls and truckloads of imported sand. “Our domination of nature is a delusion,” Carol says. “We cannot exempt ourselves from nature’s ironclad laws. We cannot grow infinitely on a finite planet.” Mother Nature is a tough old broad. Like the humble tortoise lining up against the hotshot hare, she will outlast us. We can’t sustain our blustery sprint to the front of the pack. Our current reign has lasted fewer than ten thousand years—barely a blip in the earth’s four-billion-year history. Our supremacy is short-lived, and our species’ future is uncertain. Only one thing is for sure: we need Mother Nature a lot more than she needs us.

The European and the African have an entirely different concept of time. In the European worldview, time exists outside man, exists objectively, and has measurable and linear characteristics. According to Newton, time is absolute: “Absolute, true, mathematical time of itself and from its own nature, it flows equitably and without relation to anything external.” The European feels himself to be time’s slave, dependent on it, subject to it. To exist and function, he must observe its ironclad, inviolate laws, its inflexible principles and rules. He must heed deadlines, dates, days, and hours. He moves within the rigors of time and cannot exist outside them. They impose upon him their requirements and quotas. An unresolvable conflict exists between man and time, one that always ends with man’s defeat—time annihilates him. Africans apprehend time differently. For them, it is a much looser concept, more open, elastic, subjective. It is man who influences time, its shape, course, and rhythm (man acting, of course, with the consent of gods and ancestors ). Time is even something that man can create outright, for time is made manifest through events, and whether an event takes place or not depends, after all, on man alone. If two armies do not engage in a battle, then that battle will not occur (in other words, time will not have revealed its presence, will not have come into being). Time appears as a result of our actions, and vanishes when we neglect or ignore it. It is something that springs to life under our influence, but falls into a state of hibernation, even nonexistence, if we do not direct our energy toward it. It is a subservient, passive essence, and, most importantly, one dependent on man.

Good women don't have bad things happen to them- in order to be raped, I need first to be made into this caricature of a bad woman. This male psycho-sexual logic looks at penetration as punishment. This is the rape that disciplines, the rape that penalizes me for the life I have presumably led. This is the rape that tames, the rape that puts me on the path of being a good wife. This is the rape whose aim is to inspire regret in me. This is the rape whose aim is to make me understand that my husband can do with my body as he pleases. This is rape as ownership. This rape contains rage against all the men who may have touched me, against all the men who touch me, against all the men who may have desired me. This nightly rape comes with a one-point agenda: she must derive no pleasure from sex. And yet, whenever he takes me against my will, he taunts me for enjoying it. In his ironclad logic: I am a whore, so I can be raped; I let myself be raped, so I am a whore.

Always remember whether you be a sucker or hustler in the world out there, you've got that vital edge if you can iron-clad your feelings. I picture the human mind as a movie screen. If you're a dopey sucker you'll just sit an watch all kinds of mind-wrecking, damn fool movies on that screen... Son, there is no reason except a stupid one for anybody to project on that screen anything that will worry him or dull that vital edge. After all, we are the absolute bosses of that whole theatre and show inside our minds. We even write the script. So always write positive, dynamic scripts and show only the best movies for you on that screen whether are pimp or priest.

Who is going to fight them off, Randy?” “I’m afraid you’re going to say we are.” “Sometimes it might be other Ares-worshippers, as when Iran and Iraq went to war and no one cared who won. But if Ares-worshippers aren’t going to end up running the whole world, someone needs to do violence to them. This isn’t very nice, but it’s a fact: civilization requires an Aegis. And the only way to fight the bastards off in the end is through intelligence. Cunning. Metis.” “Tactical cunning, like Odysseus and the Trojan Horse, or—” “Both that, and technological cunning. From time to time there is a battle that is out-and-out won by a new technology—like longbows at Crecy. For most of history those battles happen only every few centuries—you have the chariot, the compound bow, gunpowder, ironclad ships, and so on. But something happens around, say, the time that the Monitor, which the Northerners believe to be the only ironclad warship on earth, just happens to run into the Merrimack, of which the Southerners believe exactly the same thing, and they pound the hell out of each other for hours and hours. That’s as good a point as any to identify as the moment when a spectacular rise in military technology takes off—it’s the elbow in the exponential curve. Now it takes the world’s essentially conservative military establishments a few decades to really comprehend what has happened, but by the time we’re in the thick of the Second World War, it’s accepted by everyone who doesn’t have his head completely up his ass that the war’s going to be won by whichever side has the best technology. So on the German side alone we’ve got rockets, jet aircraft, nerve gas, wire-guided missiles. And on the Allied side we’ve got three vast efforts that put basically every top-level hacker, nerd, and geek to work: the codebreaking thing, which as you know gave rise to the digital computer; the Manhattan Project, which gave us nuclear weapons; and the Radiation Lab, which gave us the modern electronics industry. Do you know why we won the Second World War, Randy?” “I think you just told me.” “Because we built better stuff than the Germans?” “Isn’t that what you said?” “But why did we build better stuff, Randy?” “I guess I’m not competent to answer, Enoch, I haven’t studied that period well enough.” “Well the short answer is that we won because the Germans worshipped Ares and we worshipped Athena.” “And am I supposed to gather that you, or

Beautiful,” said Amar. “I found it gruesome,” I said, shivering. Amar rose and walked to where I stood. “I was not talking about the story.” “Oh.” “Why do you like such a gruesome tale?” In Bharata, we were taught that it was a tale of the god’s might. But I saw another story within it: the play of interpretation that turned something terrifying and iron-clad into something that could be conquered. I was reminded of the star room where Amar had taken me only days ago. The story was like a different way of seeing. “It gave me hope…that maybe there was some way around the horoscope. It was a lesson in language too, almost like a riddle…” Amar stared at me and then he laughed. “Only my queen would find hope in horror.” He took my hand in his and his gaze was burning. “You are my hope and more.” “What does that make you? My horror?” “And more,” he said. All I saw were his eyes. Velvet dark. The kind of umbra that shadows envy. Amar stared at me and his gaze was desperate with hope. Reckless. I should’ve stopped. I should’ve stepped away. But I didn’t. I leaned forward, and a soft growl--like surrender--escaped his throat. He dug his fingers into my back and pulled me into a kiss. Amar’s kiss was furious. No heat. Just lightning. Or maybe that was what his touch teased out of me--vivid streaks of light, dusk and all her violent glory. I was lost. I leaned into his kiss and the world around us peeled into nothing. I felt like I could stand over chasms empty of time, and this moment, like a chain of soft-blooming stars, would still be ours. We kissed until we couldn’t breathe. And then we kissed until we needed the touch of one another like breath itself.

It was passages like these, where there is a clear mocking of literalist readings of Scripture, that had brought me back around to Christianity after a long stretch, following college, when my notion of God and Jesus had grown, to put it gently, tenuous. During my sojourn in ironclad atheism, the primary arsenal leveled against Christianity had been its failure on empirical grounds. Surely enlightened reason offered a more co­herent cosmos. Surely Occam’s razor cut the faithful free from blind faith. There is no proof of God; therefore, it is unreasonable to believe in God. Although I had been raised in a devout Christian family, where prayer and Scripture readings were a nightly ritual, I, like most scientific types, came to believe in the possibility of a material conception of reality, an ultimately scientific worldview that would grant a complete metaphysics, minus outmoded concepts like souls, God, and bearded white men in robes. I spent a good chunk of my twenties trying to build a frame for such an endeavor. The problem, however, eventually became evident: to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning — to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in. That’s not to say that if you believe in meaning, you must also believe in God. It is to say, though, that if you believe that science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life itself doesn’t have any. In other words, existential claims have no weight; all knowledge is scientific knowledge. Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue. Between these core passions and scientific theory, there will always be a gap. No system of thought can contain the fullness of human experience. The realm of metaphysics remains the province of revelation (this, not atheism, is what Occam argued, after all). And atheism can be justified only on these grounds. The prototypical atheist, then, is Graham Greene’s commandant from The Power and the Glory, whose atheism comes from a revelation of the absence of God. The only real atheism must be grounded in a world-making vision. The favorite quote of many an atheist, from the Nobel Prize–winning French biologist Jacques Monod, belies this revelatory aspect: “The ancient covenant is in pieces; man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance.” Yet I returned to the central values of Christianity -- sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness -- because I found them so compelling. There is a tension in the Bible between justice and mercy, between the Old Testament and the New Testament. And the New Testament says you can never be good enough: goodness is the thing, and you can never live up to it. The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.

I remembered how, as a boy, I would stew over all the things Mamá wouldn’t do, things other mothers did. Hold my hand when we walked. Sit me up on her lap, read bedtime stories, kiss my face good night. Those things were true enough. But, all those years, I’d been blind to a greater truth, which lay unacknowledged and unappreciated, buried deep beneath my grievances. It was this: that my mother would never leave me. This was her gift to me, the ironclad knowledge that she would never do to me what Madeleine had done to Thalia. She was my mother and she would not leave me. This I had simply accepted and expected. I had no more thanked her for it than I did the sun for shining on me.

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker calculates the average homicide rate among eight primitive societies, arriving at an alarming 14 per cent. This figure appeared in respected journals like Science and was endlessly regurgitated by newspapers and on TV. When other scientists took a look at his source material, however, they discovered that Pinker mixed up some things. This may get a little technical, but we need to understand where he went wrong. The question we want to answer is: which peoples still hunting and gathering today are representative of how humans lived 50,000 years ago? After all, we were nomads for 95 per cent of human history, roving the world in small, relatively egalitarian groups. Pinker chose to focus almost exclusively on hybrid cultures. These are people who hunt and gather, but who also ride horses or live together in settlements or engage in farming on the side. Now these activities are all relatively recent. Humans didn’t start farming until 10,000 years ago and horses weren’t domesticated until 5,000 years ago. If you want to figure out how our distant ancestors lived 50,000 years ago, it doesn’t make sense to extrapolate from people who keep horses and tend vegetable plots. But even if we get on board with Pinker’s methods, the data is problematic. According to the psychologist, 30 per cent of deaths among the Aché in Paraguay (tribe 1 on his list) and 21 per cent of deaths among the Hiwi in Venezuela and Colombia (tribe 3) are attributable to warfare. These people are out for blood, it would seem. The anthropologist Douglas Fry was sceptical, however. Reviewing the original sources, he discovered that all forty-six cases of what Pinker categorised as Aché ‘war mortality’ actually concerned a tribe member listed as ‘shot by Paraguayan’. The Aché were in fact not killing each other, but being ‘relentlessly pursued by slave traders and attacked by Paraguayan frontiersmen’, reads the original source, whereas they themselves ‘desire a peaceful relationship with their more powerful neighbors’. It was the same with the Hiwi. All the men, women and children enumerated by Pinker as war deaths were murdered in 1968 by local cattle ranchers.40 There go the iron-clad homicide rates. Far from habitually slaughtering one another, these nomadic foragers were the victims of ‘civilised’ farmers wielding advanced weaponry. ‘Bar charts and numeric tables depicting percentages […] convey an air of scientific objectivity,’ Fry writes. ‘But in this case it is all an illusion.

The Ukrainian people would soon find out how ironclad these assurances were. The corrupt Viktor Yanukovych had returned to power in the last election, thanks to the efforts of the equally crooked political consultant Paul Manafort, whose office manager in Kyiv, Konstantin Kilimnik, had deep ties to Russian intelligence. Their paymasters included tycoons enmeshed with both organized crime and the Kremlin. Manafort collected many millions in fees from Yanukovych, laundering them in offshore accounts, and attracting the attention of the FBI, which began wiretapping him in a foreign intelligence investigation. Manafort also cut business deals with the country’s richest and most odious oligarchs, including Dmytro Firtash, a Putin crony and a prominent associate of Russian organized crime indicted on federal corruption charges in Chicago in October 2013.

True light-heartedness begins with an appreciation of one’s utter cosmic unimportance and nullity: nothing we have ever done, said or thought matters in any way. It’s only the monstrous illusions of our ego which give us an impression that we count and then torture us that we don’t count enough. Furthermore, no one will ever particularly understand us or love us properly – and that isn’t a personal curse, but an iron-clad fact of nature which we would do well to stop kicking against and to be constantly disappointed by. Everything we deeply want either will not happen or will be unsatisfying when it does. We must stop crying as if any of it really mattered or there ever was another way. We must pity ourselves and then change tack. The tragic view is too obvious. Being miserable is too predictable. Now let’s surprise ourselves with a little irresponsible laughter, the kind it can take a lifetime of sorrow to perfect.

Soldiers,' he made an insult of the word. 'Once we were crusaders Khayon, and now we're warriors, but we were never soldiers. Keep that foolishness to yourself.' I swallowed my argument, following his train of thought. It was not the first time legionaries have disagreed over those semantics, and it would be far from the last. Some believed soldiering came down to discipline, or fighting for a state or a leader rather than for yourself. Some believed warriorhood was a matter of heart that elevated them above a soldier's station, while others considered it a state of barbarity that dragged them beneath it. Some questions have no answers. No matter how seriously we took warfare, no matter how adamantly we clung to our disciplined roots as a Space Marine Legion, many of our number were ultimately the raiders and marauders that time had made them. For better or worse, we would never have the ironclad discipline of a Throne-loyal Adeptus Astartes force. Even back then, we had lost much of the discipline we had once possessed as Legions of the Great Crusade.

For most of history those battles happen only every few centuries—you have the chariot, the compound bow, gunpowder, ironclad ships, and so on. But something happens around, say, the time that the Monitor, which the Northerners believe to be the only ironclad warship on earth, just happens to run into the Merrimack,

Financial Issues People with self-control issues will either not have a budget or have pretty hard time sticking to one. They’re easily swayed by their impulses and sweet discounts on stuff they don’t even need.

Take some serious you-time and come up with a goal for every part of your life: social, romantic, personal, career, and any other significant aspect of your being.

SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound.

I plan to lose 50 pounds by this time next year by continuing to eat healthy and by working out 3-4 times per week.

Not that it’s easy to always be in a good mood, but positivity can be cultivated at any point. A simple “I can do this” or even “I want to be able to eventually do this” can go a long way in getting your mind to the right place to want to exercise willpower.

Planter bewilderment at the demise of the Confederacy, however, soon gave way to an ironclad resolve to restore the power dynamics of the master-slave hierarchy by other means, using all tools at their disposal: political, religious, social, and economic.

The Dark Cloud Is a contract that is iron-clad and causes lots of unnecessary suffering Is a play on words that sounds like a system that is buffering Is a helicopter that loses control and quickly crashes and burns Is a danger zone that warns refugees not to take many turns

Now all he had were delusions that tortured him, and though they were only perception, never reality, the voices were a jail no less ironclad for the fact that no one else could see the bars or hear the warden.

Yes, high politics and historic issues produced the conflict; yes, decisions by politicians and generals changed the course of events. But it was only a war in the first place because the American people wanted to fight. They volunteered by the millions for years of combat; they demanded offensives and decisive battles. Even those who never enlisted applied themselves to logistics, military transportation, and weapons technology—inventing ironclad ships, new pontoon bridges, and repeating rifles, for example. Then there were African Americans, who conducted what one historian has called the greatest slave rebellion in history. They risked death to desert to Union lines by the hundreds, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands. In the end, what happened on factory floors and plantation fields, in town-square meetings and polling places, mattered more than any general’s orders.44

Um, I’m sorry. The contract I signed said I would be provided with a sugar momma. Do I need to look over it again? Because if not, I will need to hire a new lawyer and find out how it can be broken.” “Seems like you are out of luck. That contract is ironclad. The Crown only employs the best lawyers.

This one demon, her entire job is judging the souls of people who made bad musical adaptations on Earth.” “What if they don’t end up down here?” “Oh, no,” he said. “If you make a bad musical, you automatically go to hell. Iron-clad rule.

You have a choice in how you respond to anything that happens in your life. You may think that you don’t, but you always do. Remember, first and foremost, that a response is also an inward state of being. You may be conditioned to respond in a particular way, and that conditioning may seem ironclad, natural, and unquestionable to you, but it’s always just one option no matter how ingrained. No matter what happens to you, you hold the power to determine what comes next. You are in charge of your reaction, and in this way, you are all powerful. Remember, my friend, it’s not what happens that counts; it is how you react. Your mental attitude determines what you make of it, either a stepping stone or a stumbling block. Walk

Nothing Worth Earning Ever Comes Early

A powerful AI system tasked with ensuring your safety might imprison you at home. If you asked for happiness, it might hook you up to life support and ceaselessly stimulate your brain’s pleasure centers. If you don’t provide the AI with a very big library of preferred behaviors or an ironclad means for it to deduce what behavior you prefer, you’ll be stuck with whatever it comes up with.

What Sturgeon says is that things swung round – the science of killing a man sort of galloped ahead of the science of stopping him being killed. Guns, mostly. And suddenly the sons of the rich didn’t like the idea of being soldiers, not once it was them getting shot up with the rest of the poor bastards.

But the rich guys: Sturgeon says they had all the time in the world to learn stuff, and all the money in the world, and they bought the best armor that no poor bastard was going to stick a knife through, and they would just wade in and make a game of how many poor bastards they could cut up on the way. And even if things went really bad for them, they didn’t die, Sturgeon says. He says they just let themselves get captured and ransomed, and had a fine old time telling jokes to the rich guys who grabbed them about all the poor bastards they killed.

Stigma works like this: Comic makes people with herpes the butt of his joke. Audience laughs. People with herpes see their worst fears affirmed—they are disgusting, broken, unlovable. People without herpes see their worst instincts validated—they are clean, virtuous, better. Everyone agrees that no one wants to fuck someone with herpes. If people with herpes want to object, they have to 1) publicize the fact that they have herpes, and 2) be accused of oversensitivity, of ruining the fun. Instead, they stay quiet and laugh along. The joke does well. So well that maybe the comedian writes another one. I cycled through that system over and over in my head. It was maddeningly efficient—what were people supposed to do? More broadly, in a nation where puritanical gasbags have a death grip on our public education system, can we really expect ironclad safe sex practices in people from whom comprehensive sex ed has been withheld? Blaming and shaming people for their own illnesses has always been the realm of moralists and hypocrites, of the anti-sex status quo. Isn’t comedy supposed to be the vanguard of counterculture? Of speaking truth to power? The longer I turned it over the more furious I became. Why do we all just laugh along with this?

I bet he was looking for any reason to leave his IKEA birthday party early. The imminent arrival of Little Baby Flörp is an ironclad excuse.

Love is grabbing hold of the Great Lion's mane And wrestling and rolling deep into Existence While the Beloved gets rough And begins to maul you alive. True Love, my dear, Is putting an ironclad grip upon The sore, swollen balls Of a Divine Rogue Elephant And Not having the good fortune to Die!

Did you mean it? What you said?” He held her stare. Let some inner wall within him come crumbling down. Only for her. For this sharp-eyed, cunning little liar who had slipped through every defense and ironclad rule he’d ever made for himself. He let her see that in his face. Let her see all of it, as no one had ever done before. “Yes.