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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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....

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

an empathic and patient listener, coaxing each of us through the maze of our feelings, separating out our weapons from our wounds. He cautioned us when we got too lawyerly and posited careful questions intended to get us to think hard about why we felt the way we felt. Slowly, over hours of talking, the knot began to loosen. Each time Barack and I left his office, we felt a bit more connected. I began to see that there were ways I could be happier and that they didn’t necessarily need to come from Barack’s quitting politics in order to take some nine-to-six foundation job. (If anything, our counseling sessions had shown me that this was an unrealistic expectation.) I began to see how I’d been stoking the most negative parts of myself, caught up in the notion that everything was unfair and then assiduously, like a Harvard-trained lawyer, collecting evidence to feed that hypothesis. I now tried out a new hypothesis: It was possible that I was more in charge of my happiness than I was allowing myself to be. I was too busy resenting Barack for managing to fit workouts into his schedule, for example, to even begin figuring out how to exercise regularly myself. I spent so much energy stewing over whether or not he’d make it home for dinner that dinners, with or without him, were no longer fun. This was my pivot point, my moment of self-arrest. Like a climber about to slip off an icy peak, I drove my ax into the ground. That isn’t to say that Barack didn’t make his own adjustments—counseling helped him to see the gaps in how we communicated, and he worked to be better at it—but I made mine, and they helped me, which then helped us. For starters, I recommitted myself to being healthy. Barack and I belonged to the same gym, run by a jovial and motivating athletic trainer named Cornell McClellan. I’d worked out with Cornell for a couple of years, but having children had changed my regular routine. My fix for this came in the form of my ever-giving mother, who still worked full-time but volunteered to start coming over to our house at 4:45 in the morning several days a week so that I could run out to Cornell’s and join a girlfriend for a 5:00 a.m. workout and then be home by 6:30 to get the girls up and ready for their days. This new regimen changed everything: Calmness and strength, two things I feared I was losing, were now back. When it came to the home-for-dinner dilemma, I installed new boundaries, ones that worked better for me and the girls. We made our schedule and stuck to it. Dinner each night was at 6:30. Baths were at 7:00, followed by books, cuddling, and lights-out at 8:00 sharp. The routine was ironclad, which put the weight of responsibility on Barack to either make it on time or not. For me, this made so much more sense than holding off dinner or having the girls wait up sleepily for a hug. It went back to my wishes for them to grow up strong and centered and also unaccommodating to any form of old-school patriarchy: I didn’t want them ever to believe that life began when the man of the house arrived home. We didn’t wait for Dad. It was his job now to catch up with

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

The next time you feel yourself giving in to the sometimes overwhelming urge to panic about the fate of literature in the digital age, follow this simple remedy: remember that you dream. For that is ironclad proof . . . that literature—that narrative art in whatever form—will never die. Humans, strange creatures that we are, make sense of our lives by telling stories. In the space between each day and the next, we refresh our minds by concocting the most fantastic and elaborate fictions. We spend roughly a third of our lives thus, re-arranging our scattered experiences into stories. That we do it at all is bizarre and inexplicable. But as long as we do it, we will crave stories—human stories, stories that speak to us—in our waking life. The Internet, powerful as it is, cannot change that.

issues of policy as well. They hit it off

Thus, the central objection raised against the human settlement and terraforming of Mars: Such projects may be technologically feasible, but there is no possible way that they can be paid for. On the surface, the arguments given supporting this position appear cogent, for Mars is a distant place, difficult to access, and possesses a hostile environment that holds no apparent resources of economic value. These arguments appear ironclad, yet it must be pointed out that they were also presented in the past as convincing reasons for the utter impracticality of the European settlement of North America and Australia.

The heavy-hulled ship with its steel bow and iron-clad sides groaned, squeaked and crackled like a huge old wheelbarrow breaking under a load of big rocks.

Following the evidence, I concluded that individuals fare best by constructing equity-oriented, broadly diversified portfolios without the active management component. Instead of pursuing ephemeral promises of market-beating strategies, individuals benefit from adopting the ironclad reality of market-mimicking portfolios managed by not-for-profit investment organizations. The

Case studies of Cold War-era conflicts suggest two ironclad, unwritten rules: first, no nuclear power may use military force against another nuclear power; and, second, a nuclear power, using military force against a non-nuclear nation, may not use nuclear weapons. Moreover, possessing nuclear weapons did not necessarily deter a non-nuclear nation from waging war with a client state of a nuclear power, as the United States found out in the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

Solid, sound leadership… and ironclad determination to face discouragement, risk, and increasing work without flinching, will always characterize the man who has a sure-enough, bang-up fighting unit.

If we are the creations of a loving God, shouldn’t that love be the law that guides us? And if we are to love—love God, love others, love ourselves—doesn’t that require compassion, patience, and understanding, qualities that defy an ethical order based strictly on ironclad law?

I’ve always been impressed by Kobe’s resilience and ironclad self-confidence. Unlike Shaq, who was often plagued by self-doubt, Kobe never let such thoughts cross his mind. If someone set the bar at ten feet, he’d jump eleven, even if no one had ever done it before. That’s the attitude he brought with him when he arrived at training camp that fall, and it had a powerful impact on his teammates.

Some lines you just don't cross. Not in my business." "Your business?" Georgia rolled her eyes. "You mean the private detective business? I wasn't aware you guys had such ironclad rules about making out with clients." She ignored the choking sound he made. "Seriously, have you even seen The Maltese Falcon?" Darius' face heated. "This isn't some movie, Ms. Clare. You're not Mary Astor, and I'm sure as hell no Humphrey Bogart. Here in the real world, there are rules.

Monogamy operates differently at different levels of differentiation. I didn’t know this until I saw it with my clients. We think of monogamy as an ironclad agreement containing no ifs, ands, or buts. But it is really a complex system with rules and dynamics of its own. Differentiation changes monogamy by returning genital ownership to each partner. Emotional Siamese twins act as if their partner’s genitals are communal property.

I feel an ironclad kinship with this man. Sevro asked why I saved him, and I could aspire to notions of valor and honor. But the deepspine reason is I desperately want him to be a friend again. I crave his approval.

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.

Speaking of beards—is there a reason Drago hasn’t removed his? He really should remove it, now that he’s a footman.” “I’m afraid it wasn’t open for negotiation,” Gabriel said ruefully. “He’s always had it. In fact, whenever he makes an ironclad vow, he swears by his beard.” “Well, that’s silly. No one can swear by a beard. What if it catches fire?” Gabriel smiled and leaned over her. “Take the matter up with Drago, if you wish. But be forewarned: he’s very attached to it.” “Well, of course he’s attached to it, it’s his beard.

This desire led to the third pillar of caste—endogamy, which means restricting marriage to people within the same caste. This is an ironclad foundation of any caste system, from ancient India, to the early American colonies, to the Nazi regime in Germany.

The smell of the forest filled his nostrils. He could feel the cold hard ground beneath his cheek, and the hinge of his glasses, which had been knocked sideways by the fall, cutting into his temple. Every inch of him ached, and the place where the Killing Curse had hit him felt like the bruise of an iron-clad punch. He did not stir, but remained exactly where he had fallen, with his left arm bent out at an awkward angle and his mouth gaping. He had expected to hear cheers of triumph and jubilation at his death, but instead hurried footsteps, whispers, and solicitous murmurs filled the air. “My Lord . . . my Lord . . .” It was Bellatrix’s voice, and she spoke as if to a lover. Harry did not dare open his eyes, but allowed his other senses to explore his predicament

This tense situation exploded early one January morning in 1917 when a group of Mexican women mounted an angry revolt against the immigration officials stationed along the El Paso, Texas–Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, border. They earned their living by day cooking and cleaning in the homes of well-to-do Texans, and each night returned to their homes in Ciudad Juárez. But this particular morning, instead of quietly waiting to cross the border so that they could begin their workdays, the women became enraged over a newly established quarantine against the possible entry of typhus fever. The ironclad measure was established by edict of the surgeon general of the United States. It applied to every Mexican— both immigrants and dayworkers each time they crossed the border into the United States—and included physical examinations, mandatory disinfection of all baggage and personal belongings, and delousing baths with a mixture of kerosene, gasoline, and vinegar. Most intolerable to the Mexicans was the inherent danger of bathing in flammable and noxious agents like gasoline and kerosene. Only nine months earlier, a group of twenty-six Mexicans incarcerated in the El Paso jail underwent a similar disinfection procedure and, soon after a newly arrived prisoner lit a cigarette, were burned to death. While this practice offended and frightened those who were to be subjected to the baths, its dangerous nature seemed to be all but lost on the Americans ordering them.

Something in the lone survivor knows that even the ironclad law of Now can be outlasted.

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.

No matter what the challenge or adversity, my ironclad conviction is that God is always good, is always on his throne, is always working, always knows what he is doing, and that his love for me never stops.

12:40 p.m.: start making the plan. Remember when you could be roused from a night being spent on the couch in your pajamas, curled around a pint of Chubby Hubby, and goaded into joining your friends at the bar even though you’d already taken off your bra? Yeah, I can’t either, but I know those days existed. I have the liver damage to prove it. Now when I go out I have to start gearing up for that shit at least three days in advance, and if I’m actually going to go through with it, it has to include both an ironclad reservation and a reliable seating arrangement. Showing up at a restaurant and hoping for the best is a young person’s game. If I’m going out, I need to know that there is a table with my name on it and a comfortable seat pulled up to it. I’m too old to hover anxiously near the door, sweating under my coat in my good outside clothes, watching people who actually planned ahead be ushered to their awaiting tables and served the foods I am dying to eat. I’m not that organized, though, so I spend a long time scrolling through OpenTable to try to find a reservation for 7 p.m. at a place that has more than a few high-tops left and won’t attempt to put us outside. It’s slim pickings.

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.

He also has incredible willpower, along with having ironclad values, such as honesty, empathy, integrity and loyalty.

That was an ironclad rule of politics: the lesser came, hat in hand, to plead with the greater.

But it is hard to copy an emotional territory that your brand occupies in the mind of your customer.

I noticed, first, upper-caste people tended to be lighter in complexion and sharper in features, though that is not an ironclad indicator. Secondly, I noticed that they were more likely to speak English with British diction, although that could be a sign of education and class as much as caste hierarchy. More revealingly and more consistently, I began to be able to distinguish people from their bearing and demeanor, in accord with the universal script of caste. It was no accident that my caste radar worked more efficiently when there was a group of people interacting among themselves. Caste is, in a way, a performance, and I could detect the caste positions of people in a group but not necessarily a single Indian by himself or herself.

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.

All decisions are taken two levels above the highest level of understanding