Manifesto Best Quotes

Whenever I can’t sleep, I like to lie in the darkness and pretend I’ve been assassinated. I’ve found this is the best way to get comfortable. I imagine I’m in the coffin at my funeral, and people from my past are walking by my corpse and making comments about my demise.

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.

Do not measure her on a scale of what a girl should be. Measure her on a scale of being the best version of herself.

Jewel moved 432,000 hardcover copies of A Night Without Armor, thereby making her the best-selling American poet of the past fifty years.

This must be our day to define the best of who we are and what we will stand for. Tonight, in the glow of gratitude for our free will, let us write down the words and phrases that describe our ideal identity. Put them on beautiful paper and in ink. Carry them everywhere. Look at these words, memorize them, verbalize them—become them. The more we align our actions with this identity, the more free, motivated, and whole we shall become. Life will feel brighter and more our own, more deep and satisfying. Destiny will smile on us and we will be welcomed into the gates of heaven as people of purpose and integrity.

...above all, let your focus be on remaining a full person. Take time for yourself. Nurture your own needs. Please do not think of it as 'doing it all'. Our culture celebrates the idea of women who are able to 'do it all' but does not question the premise of that praise. I have no interest in the debate about women doing it all because it is a debate that assumes that caregiving and domestic work are singularly female domains, and idea that I strongly reject. Domestic work and caregiving should be gender-neutral, and we should be asking not whether a woman can 'do it all' but how best to support parents in their dual duties at work and at home.

Socialism was made to be an ideology of radical democracy, of working-class self-emancipation, not a tool for state-managed development. A revolution from above, with an unelected party overseeing the creation of a social surplus and rerouting it to certain ends, even with the best of intentions, is a formula for authoritarianism.

I am not alone in the conviction that real, lasting national security can best be obtained through complete transparency of government, business, and other facets of society, and this includes open access to all of the many available types of information.

We should not be asking whether a woman can "do it all" but how best to support parents in their dual duties at work and at home

When a woman becomes her own best friend, life is easier. —DIANE VON FURSTENBERG

Looking back on the fifty years since I first became aware of its flaws, the word that summarizes my feelings about Neoclassical economics today is that it is, as Marx once described the proto-Neoclassical Jean-Baptiste Say, ‘dull’ [...] Its vision of capitalism at its best is a system manifesting the harmony of equilibrium, where everyone is paid their just return (their ‘marginal product’), growth is occurring smoothly at a rate that maximizes social utility through time, and everyone is motivated by consumption – rather than accumulation and power – because, to quote Say, ‘the producers, though they have all of them the air of demanding money for their goods, do in reality demand merchandise for their merchandise’ [...] What a bland picture of the complex, changing world in which we live!

Online dating: Your last best hope of finding people like you who don't like people like you.

The worst ministry work assumes that the old ways of doing things are the best ways simply because “that’s the way it’s always been done.” You

When we dare to understand the other, we find the seeds of our best selves.

For all governments—but especially democratic governments—must work hard at persuading their subjects that all of their deeds of oppression are really in their subjects’ best interests

one of the smartest ways to write fiction today is to say that you’re not, and then to do whatever you very well please. Fiction writers, take note. Some of the best fiction is now being written as nonfiction.

Draw a line down a page. On one side place your limiting beliefs. On the other write corresponding liberating truths. Consider the side with your liberating truths your new personal manifesto for achieving your goals.

Not as a girl who should be a certain way. See her weaknesses and her strengths in an individual way. Do not measure her on a scale of what a girl should be. Measure her on a scale of being the best version of herself.

Giving respect means to do no harm; to allow others their rights in expressing themselves; and to honor the fact that their own thoughts, feelings, and actions are real and justifiable in their own minds, even if we see them as unimportant or wrong. Respect does not necessarily mean approval; one can respect another’s right to speak but not necessarily approve of what is spoken. Respect means that we see others as doing their best with what they have, who they are, and what hand they’ve been dealt, even if we find their efforts wanting in any way. It means seeing the divinity in others, and never inviting disrespect into our lives by projecting disrespect onto others.

The Romanticists did not present a hero as a statistical average, but as an abstraction of man’s best and highest potentiality, applicable to and achievable by all men, in various degrees, according to their individual choices.

APART. Such a simple concept. So concrete. So easy to represent on charts or diagrams with dots and pushpins either in or out. Yet real life is not dots. Some of us appear to be in, but we are out. And that is where we want to be. Not just want but need, the way tuna need the sea. Simple: an orientation, not just a choice. A fact. To paraphrase that Boston song, more than a feeling. We are loners. Which means we are at our best, as Orsino says in Twelfth Night, when least in company.

These days – with very few exceptions – you’ll only find professional success in a niche. The greater your knowledge and the greater your ability within that niche, the greater your success. If you’re the best in the world within your niche, you’ve made it.

(Paragraph 128) Since many people may find paradoxical the notion that a large number of good things can add up to a bad thing, we illustrate with an analogy. Suppose Mr. A is playing chess with Mr. B. Mr. C, a Grand Master, is looking over Mr. A’s shoulder. Mr. A of course wants to win his game, so if Mr. C points out a good move for him to make, he is doing Mr. A a favor. But suppose now that Mr. C tells Mr. A how to make ALL of his moves. In each particular instance he does Mr. A a favor by showing him his best move, but by making ALL of his moves for him he spoils his game, since there is not point in Mr. A’s playing the game at all if someone else makes all his moves. The situation of modern man is analogous to that of Mr. A. The system makes an individual’s life easier for him in innumerable ways, but in doing so it deprives him of control over his own fate.

If Pepper was not mistaken, Carney’s father was the first person to take him there—Big Mike was a proponent of a proper meal before a robbery. Breaking a guy’s leg or casing a warehouse didn’t necessarily require nutritional prep, but a robbery called for a hearty sit-down, without fail. Pepper, reluctant to offer praise on anything or anybody, privately assessed that it was the best chicken he’d ever tasted.

If we all took media messages at their absolute face value, we’d all be sleeping with our best friends. And that does happen, sometimes.* But herein lies the trap: We’ve also been trained to think this will always work out over the long term, which dooms us to disappointment. Because when push comes to shove, we really don’t want to have sex with our friends… unless they’re sexy. And sometimes we do want to have sex with our blackhearted, soul-sucking enemies… assuming they’re sexy.

Our attempts at conversion are asking women to devalue what they find valuable about their existence, to take on our values of independence, success, and sexuality. And yet despite our attempts at converting women to our values, we rarely seem to pause and ask ourselves if these things actually make us happy. If this way of life is the best we can do. To question this is not to run screaming back to the kitchen, to allow men to make our decisions for us and go back to our subjugation. It is to ask if maybe there were things we discarded that we should go back and reclaim.

Incapable of a positive state of happiness, which is the only thing that can justify one’s existence, the male is, at best, relaxed, comfortable, neutral, and this condition is extremely short-lived, as boredom, a negative state, soon sets in; he is, therefore, doomed to an existence of suffering relieved only by occasional, fleeting stretches of restfulness, which state he can achieve only at the expense of some female. The male is, by his very nature, a leech, an emotional parasite and, therefore, not ethically entitled to live, as no one has the right to live at someone else’s expense.

The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.

Ethics has three levels, the good for self, the good for others, and the good for the transcendent purpose of a life.1 The good for self is the prudence by which you self-cultivate, learning to play the cello, say, or practicing centering prayer. Self-denial is not automatically virtuous. (How many self-denying mothers does it take to change a lightbulb? None: I’ll just sit here in the dark.) The good for a transcendent purpose is the faith, hope, and love to pursue an answer to the question “So what?” The family, science, art, the football club, God give the answers that humans seek. The middle level is attention to the good for others. The late first-century BCE Jewish sage Hillel of Babylon put it negatively yet reflexively: “Do not do unto others what you would not want done unto yourself.” It’s masculine, a guy-liberalism, a gospel of justice, roughly the so-called Non-Aggression Axiom as articulated by libertarians since the word “libertarian” was redirected in the 1950s to a (then) right-wing liberalism. Matt Kibbe puts it well in the title of his 2014 best seller, Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto.2 On the other hand, the early first-century CE Jewish sage Jesus of Nazareth put it positively: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It’s gal-liberalism, a gospel of love, placing upon us an ethical responsibility to do more than pass by on the other side. Be a good Samaritan. Be nice. In

In 1978, an activist named Judi Chamberlin published one of the movement's most revered manifestos called 'On Our Own: Patient-Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System.' Chamberlin had been diagnosed with a mental illness and found traditional psychiatric intervention unhelpful and even traumatic. She did recover, however, and she credited that recovery to an alternative mental health care facility she stayed at in Canada. Chamberlin and many other madness pride activists believe that people with 'lived experience' should not only have a proverbial seat at the table when it comes to the creation of mental health care systems, but that such people are uniquely equipped to understand what constitutes the best treatment. A slogan Chamberlin sought to make famous was 'Nothing about us without us.

Schnall’s strong reaction to the failed replication of her own work provoked a mixed reaction from the psychological community. While many psychologists were bewildered by her response, a number of prominent US psychologists voiced support for her position. Dan Gilbert from Harvard University likened Schnall’s battle to the plight of Rosa Parks, and he referred to some psychologists who conducted or supported replications as “bullies,” “replication police,” “second stringers,” McCarthyists, and “god’s chosen soldiers in a great jihad.” Others accused the so-called replicators of being “Nazis,” “fascists,” and “mafia.” Rather than viewing replication as an intrinsic part of best scientific practice, Gilbert and his supporters framed it as a threat to the reputation of the (presumably brilliant) researchers who publish irreproducible findings, stifling their creativity and innovation

In terms of literary history, the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is seen as a landmark. The volume contains many of the best-known Romantic poems. The second edition in 1800 contained a Preface in which Wordsworth discusses the theories of poetry which were to be so influential on many of his and Coleridge's contemporaries. The Preface represents a poetic manifesto which is very much in the spirit of the age. The movement towards greater freedom and democracy in political and social affairs is paralleled by poetry which sought to overturn the existing regime and establish a new, more 'democratic' poetic order. To do this, the writers used 'the real language of men' (Preface to Lyrical Ballads) and even, in the case of Byron and Shelley, got directly involved in political activities themselves. The Romantic age in literature is often contrasted with the Classical or Augustan age which preceded it. The comparison is valuable, for it is not simply two different attitudes to literature which are being compared but two different ways of seeing and experiencing life. The Classical or Augustan age of the early and mid-eighteenth century stressed the importance of reason and order. Strong feelings and flights of the imagination had to be controlled (although they were obviously found widely, especially in poetry). The swift improvements in medicine, economics, science and engineering, together with rapid developments in both agricultural and industrial technology, suggested human progress on a grand scale. At the centre of these advances towards a perfect society was mankind, and it must have seemed that everything was within man's grasp if his baser, bestial instincts could be controlled. The Classical temperament trusts reason, intellect, and the head. The Romantic temperament prefers feelings, intuition, and the heart.

These caring arrangements are unreliable and unjust. The nuclear family cannot be the assumed basic unit of care, nor can market outsourcing be the solution to the gender inequality of current care expectations or practices. In both cases, after all, women end up doing the lion's share of both unpaid and paid care work (two-thirds of paid and three-quarters of unpaid care work globally). Why should women have to do all this care work? And what if you don't have a family that can support you - what if your family has rejected you, or you have rejected them? What if you cannot afford to pay for privatised care services? At best, the consequences of this regime of care have often led to the neglect and isolation of those most in need of care, and at worst to needless sickness and death. The neoliberal insistence on only taking care of yourself and your closest kin also leads to a paranoid form of 'care for one's own' that has become one of the launch pads for the recent rise of hard-right populism across the globe.

We’ve lost our way” is how another manifesto author, Andrew Hunt, put it in a 2015 essay titled “The Failure of Agile.” Hunt tells me the word agile has become “meaningless at best,” having been hijacked by “scads of vocal agile zealots” who had no idea what they were talking about. Agile has split into various camps and methodologies, with names like Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) and Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). The worst flavor, Hunt tells me, is Scaled Agile Framework, or SAFe, which he and some other original manifesto authors jokingly call Shitty Agile for Enterprise. “It’s a disaster,” Hunt tells me. “I have a few consultant friends who are making big bucks cleaning up failed SAFe implementations.” SAFe is the hellspawn brainchild of a company called Scaled Agile Inc., a bunch of mad scientists whose approach consists of a nightmare world of rules and charts and configurations. SAFe itself comes in multiple configurations, which you can find on the Scaled Agile website. Each one is an abomination of corporate complexity and Rube Goldberg-esque interdependencies.

JULIAN HUXLEY’S “EUGENICS MANIFESTO”: “Eugenics Manifesto” was the name given to an article supporting eugenics. The document, which appeared in Nature, September 16, 1939, was a joint statement issued by America’s and Britain’s most prominent biologists, and was widely referred to as the “Eugenics Manifesto.” The manifesto was a response to a request from Science Service, of Washington, D.C. for a reply to the question “How could the world’s population be improved most effectively genetically?” Two of the main signatories and authors were Hermann J. Muller and Julian Huxley. Julian Huxley, as this book documents, was the founding director of UNESCO from the famous Huxley family. Muller was an American geneticist, educator and Nobel laureate best known for his work on the physiological and genetic effects of radiation. Put into the context of the timeline, this document was published 15 years after “Mein Kampf” and a year after the highly publicized violence of Kristallnacht. In other words, there is no way either Muller or Huxley were unaware at the moment of publication of the historical implications of eugenic agendas.

Listening to vegetarians talk about the benefits of a plant-based diet, it can be hard to separate health claims from ideological, ethical, or environmental claims. At various times it has been claimed that vegetarianism can end world hunger; end food cravings; reverse global warming; reverse heart disease; reduce violent crime; reduce cholesterol; improve the sex drive; reduce the sex drive; end sexism; cure cancer, and usher in the Age of Aquarius. Apparently soybeans grow best in bullshit.

Eighty years ago, John Maynard Keynes put it best: I do not feel that selling at very low prices is a remedy for having failed to sell at high ones. . . . I would say that it is from time to time the duty of the serious investor to accept the depreciation of his holdings with equanimity and without reproaching himself.

Premium Pricing Improves Commitment We never want our clients to be in situations where it is easy for them to decide to not take our advice. Any time someone hires an outside expert, the ultimate outcome he seeks is to move forward with confidence. What is the value of good advice not acted upon? Yes, it is our job to tell him what to do, but that is often the easy part. We are equally obliged to give him the strength to do it. We are not meeting our full obligations to our clients when we make recommendations that they find easy to ignore. The price we charge for such guidance should be enough that our clients feel compelled to act, lest they experience a profound sense of wasted resources. There must be the appropriate amount of pain associated with our pricing. This implies the need for our pricing to change as the size of the client changes. Larger organizations need to pay more to ensure their commitment. Larger Clients Get Greater Value Another reason larger clients must pay more is they derive greater financial value from similar work we would do for smaller organizations. To charge John Doe Chevrolet what we would charge General Motors for the same work would be irresponsible of us. The larger client pays more to ensure his commitment to solving his problem and to ensure his commitment to working with us – and he pays more because we are delivering a service that has a greater dollar value to him. Reinvesting in Ourselves Of all the investment opportunities we will face in our lives, few will yield returns greater than those opportunities to invest in ourselves. Price premiums give us the profit to reinvest in our people, our enterprise and ourselves. The corporations that we most admire are the ones that invest in research and development. We must follow their path. While others get by on slim margins, winning on price, we will use some of our greater profit margins to better ourselves and put greater distance between our competition and us. Better Margins Equal Better Firms and Better Clients On these many levels, charging more improves our ability to help our clients and increases the likelihood that we will deliver high-quality outcomes. It allows us to select the best clients – those that we are most able to help. Like leaning into the discomfort of money conversations, charging more might not come naturally or seem easy, but it is better for everyone, including the client, and so this too we shall learn to do with confidence.

believe that this is simpler than it sounds. It is about identifying the obstacles in our way and taking today’s best-practice ideas—those found in the Agile Manifesto and in books like Lean Startup, Lean Software Development, Lean Enterprise, The DevOps Handbook, and others on today’s management bookshelves—and applying them to IT leadership.

There are a lot of Jesuses running around these days. There is the Jesus who wants you to find a good parking spot at the mall. There is the Jesus invoked at music awards, and the one raised like a flag to celebrate capitalism and affluence. There is the Jesus drawing lines about who is in and who is out. And there is the Jesus on both sides of the picket lines. There is the one in the slums, and the one in suburbia, and the one in Africa, and the one in America, and the one in Calgary. There is the Jesus who told Mother Theresa to touch the lepers and love with her hands. There is the one who lead the bravest and kindest of men and women all the way to the end. And then there is the Jesus who supposedly inspired manifestos of hate, crusades, murder, and wars. And then there is the Jesus who likes everything you like, and hates everything, or everyone, you hate and is quite pleased with everything about you. I like that Jesus best sometimes.

Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin? –Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs

The best business advice I ever got was simple but quite impactful: ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

It was the economist John Maynard Keynes, a liberal who believed socialists were well-intentioned idiots, who presented the best approach of the time to taming capitalism. The methods laid out in his 1936 work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, once implemented, would help spur employment, ensure productive investment, and mitigate crises. Before the Keynesian revolution, the reigning classical theory

In 1981, the Business Roundtable wrote in its Statement on Corporate Responsibility that companies should always consider the effects their actions have on a number of groups including their shareholders, their communities, their employees, and society at large. But by 1997, their Statement on Corporate Governance discussed only how they could best serve their shareholders.” Employees, communities, and society at large were no longer a priority. Only shareholders were.

Of all organizations, it was oddly enough Wal-Mart that best recognized the complex nature of the circumstances, according to a case study from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Briefed on what was developing, the giant discount retailer’s chief executive officer, Lee Scott, issued a simple edict. “This company will respond to the level of this disaster,” he was remembered to have said in a meeting with his upper management. “A lot of you are going to have to make decisions above your level. Make the best decision that you can with the information that’s available to you at the time, and, above all, do the right thing.” As one of the officers at the meeting later recalled, “That was it.” The edict was passed down to store managers and set the tone for how people were expected to react. On the most immediate level, Wal-Mart had 126 stores closed due to damage and power outages. Twenty thousand employees and their family members were displaced. The initial focus was on helping them. And within forty-eight hours, more than half of the damaged stores were up and running again. But according to one executive on the scene, as word of the disaster’s impact on the city’s population began filtering in from Wal-Mart employees on the ground, the priority shifted from reopening stores to “Oh, my God, what can we do to help these people?” Acting on their own authority, Wal-Mart’s store managers began distributing diapers, water, baby formula, and ice to residents. Where FEMA still hadn’t figured out how to requisition supplies, the managers fashioned crude paper-slip credit systems for first responders, providing them with food, sleeping bags, toiletries, and also, where available, rescue equipment like hatchets, ropes, and boots. The assistant manager of a Wal-Mart store engulfed by a thirty-foot storm surge ran a bulldozer through the store, loaded it with any items she could salvage, and gave them all away in the parking lot. When a local hospital told her it was running short of drugs, she went back in and broke into the store’s pharmacy—and was lauded by upper management for it.

Life is hard in the days, but in the decades, the creator surges ahead from connecting the dots. Three decades of research by Korn Ferry7 shows that learning agility is the single-best predictor of career success, not grades or college pedigrees.

How do you inspire people: give them meaningful work, show you trust them, empower them, and create opportunities for them to do their best work, and create opportunities for them to realize and achieve their potential.

A key differentiator between good leaders and the best leaders is this: good leaders support their teams, where the best leaders develop their teams.

The best leaders think broadly and act directly. The best leaders articulate a clear and compelling vision. The best leaders model the ethics and the values and the behaviors that the company stands for. “As the leadership goes in this regard, so goes the health of the company” (Interview with Mike Irizarry, 12/19/22). The best leaders deliver.

It may go without saying, but I will say it anyway: the way leaders get things done is through other people. The best leaders “are being able to separate a process that’s not leading anywhere from process that is leading somewhere” (Interview with Doug Lowell, 7/21/22). Busy-ness isn’t the measure; valuable results are the measure.

Invest in deeply understanding the customer problem. When the customer says, ‘I want ‘X’, ‘X’ may not actually be the solution. Dig in further to understand what attributes of ‘X’ are appealing to your customer. The best solution may actually be ‘Y’, that happens to do some things like ‘X’. Get a clear understanding of your customer needs and ensure that your team is fully aware of what problem you are trying to solve. And encourage, even require, that your team verify their assumptions with their customer throughout the development lifecycle.

People who need daily motivating, daily pep talks, will drain your energy and will distract you from the work of the leader. People who aspire to do great work, people who are inspired by the opportunity to contribute, to make a difference, to work with like-minded colleagues, these are the people who are more likely to bring their best selves to their work.

Having great components is not enough. We are obsessed in medicine with having great components, the best drugs, the best devices, the best specialists, but pay little attention to how to make them fit together well. Berwick notes how wrong-headed this approach is. Anyone who understands systems will know immediately that optimizing parts is not a good route to system excellence, he says. He gives the example of a famous thought experiment, of trying to build the world’s greatest car by assembling the world’s greatest car parts. We connect the engine of a Ferrari, the breaks of a Porsche, the suspension of BMW, the body of a Volvo. What we get, of course, is nothing close to a great car. We get a pile of very expensive junk.

The best leaders think broadly and act directly.

The best leaders consider the dynamic of the company, of the industry, of the customer, of the broader environment and of the immediate environment, including social and cultural dynamics, and then they act. A leader understands the dynamic of the business, the importance of the objective, and the role of the team well enough to determine the next best actions.

Leaders act. The best leaders bring people together, and they engage with them. These leaders work to establish an organizational routine of connecting with customers, their peers, and their teams. They engage resources and connect them—see Leadership is conjunctive above—and they enable new and unexpected or unanticipated or even unimagined outcomes.

One way that the best leaders make interpretations of complex or ambiguous situations understandable for their teams is metaphors. The best leaders develop metaphorical thinking and recognize the value of metaphors. Metaphorical descriptions can provide employees with new perspectives and nuanced points of view that in turn aid in their thinking and their understanding.

For most white Americans, the perception and meaning of the Civil War had not changed since Gone with the Wind. They resisted the notion that the war had been caused by slavery, and they treated both the North and South as noble American combatants. Black people were, at best, parenthetical figures in American history books, including books on the Civil War. King’s manifesto attempted to change the narrative.

That’s what we called him. Our prince. And we were princesses. God’s princesses. His daughters, who deserved nothing less than God’s best. And while we were determining God’s best, the message was clear: don’t settle for anything less. Ladies, we’ve gone nuts. Of course God wants us to marry a great guy. Of course he wants us to find someone who loves us, treats us right, and maybe even makes our heart beat a little faster. He certainly wants someone whose calling we can join, a man with whom we can serve God with effectiveness and joy. But while I’m all for understanding our worth in God’s eyes, remember that we’re not perfect prima donnas who deserve the best and nothing less. On the contrary, we’re sinners who will someday marry other sinners. God has a plan for our future marriages, and it’s not to fulfill all our dreams or give us a storybook ending. His goal is to work out his purposes and glorify himself.

Of all organizations, it was oddly enough Wal-Mart that best recognized the complex nature of the circumstances, according to a case study from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Briefed on what was developing, the giant discount retailer’s chief executive officer, Lee Scott, issued a simple edict. “This company will respond to the level of this disaster,” he was remembered to have said in a meeting with his upper management. “A lot of you are going to have to make decisions above your level. Make the best decision that you can with the information that’s available to you at the time, and, above all, do the right thing.” As one of the officers at the meeting later recalled, “That was it.” The edict was passed down to store managers and set the tone for how people were expected to react. On

As the Tea Party grew, the Democrats and their allies let their deepest insecurities get the best of them. The public was starting to understand! Accusations of Astroturf quickly gave way to uglier smears against the grassroots citizens who opposed big-government policies.

one of Papert’s best-known lines in his manifesto: “should the computer program the kid or should the kid program the computer?

When I travel and give lectures abroad and I'm asked how best to help women in my part of the world, I say, help your own community's women fight misogyny. By doing so, you help the global struggle against hatred of women. I have written this book in that spirit; it is my flag, my manifesto that exposes misogyny in my part of the world as a way to connect to that global feminist struggle. Those countries that have managed to reduced their levels of misogyny were not created more respectful of women's rights. Rather, women in these countries have fought hard to expose systemic violations and to liberate women from them.

The best ways to motivate human beings are the oldest ways, tapping into timeless needs and emotions: hunger, thirst, fear of death, sex, beauty, identity, status, respect, honor, shame, love, compassion, community, fun. All of these tie back, directly or indirectly, to those most fundamental and evolutionary of motivations: survival and reproduction. The secret is learning how to tap these ancient motivations, and harnessing them to achieve modern goals.

THIS BOOK contains three parts. Part One is a brief history of humanity through five ages of existence—Animal, Paleolithic, Agricultural, Industrial, Information—each containing lessons for how to be healthy today. Part Two applies these lessons to multiple areas of modern-day life: food, fasting, movement, bipedalism (standing, walking, running), temperature, sun, and sleep. Part Three is a more speculative vision of how those most ancient of roles—hunter and gatherer—can instruct and inspire us to build healthy and ethical relationships to other living things. In short, to understand where we come from, to make the best of where we are, and to craft a better future.

Theoretically, people might form intentional communities (the current term for communes) and/or polyamorous clans of one hundred to one hundred fifty in Ecotopia (the term for a theoretical independent Pacific Northwest), living off the land, all local and sustainable-like. But these utopian societies won't be able to count on being left alone to live peacefully. The millions of partisans who follow Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and right-wing televangelists happen to be the best-armed people around, and they despise just about everyone who doesn't think and pray like them. They will see collapse as affirmation of their beliefs that secular liberalism is destructive. They will also see it as an opportunity to create a new, ordered world atop the ashes. They will act to stop teenage sluts from getting abortions, teach niggers a lesson, and slaughter those spics, dots, and everyone else who doesn't fit into their vision of what and who is right. ¶ Anarchist may opt out of revolution, but counterrevolution will come to them.

No longer will we live in a society that says we have to work 40 hours a week, save until we retire at 65, live for the future, or start living just before we die.  The Strong Minded Man will live for today, plan for the future, stop taking from society and start creating for society.  When we turn from societal consumer to societal producer we free ourselves from any rules that society bestows on itself.

Develop flourishing schools … The purpose of the education system should be to create capable and emotionally well-rounded young people who are happy and motivated. At its heart, education policy must acknowledge that the best way of enabling people to realize their potential is to value them for who they are rather than their measuring their performance against exams and targets. Children have multiple intelligences and all schools should have a strategy to develop pupils’ overall well-being. The curriculum needs to be broadened to include more opportunities around sports, arts, creativity and other engaging activities. An education system which promotes flourishing would lead to higher productivity, a more entrepreneurial society and greater active citizenship.

Teamwork may just be hard in certain lines of work. Under conditions of extreme complexity, we inevitably rely on a division of tasks and expertise—in the operating room, for example, there is the surgeon, the surgical assistant, the scrub nurse, the circulating nurse, the anesthesiologist, and so on. They can each be technical masters at what they do. That’s what we train them to be, and that alone can take years. But the evidence suggests we need them to see their job not just as performing their isolated set of tasks well but also as helping the group get the best possible results. This requires finding a way to ensure that the group lets nothing fall between the cracks and also adapts as a team to whatever problems might arise.

DON’T HURT PEOPLE, AND don’t take their stuff. That’s it, in a nutshell. Everyone should be free to live their lives as they think best, free from meddling by politicians and government bureaucrats, as long as they don’t hurt other people, or take other people’s stuff.

If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say and why? A single bottom line of profit motive no longer serves our interdependent world. We must move from a focus on shareholders to one on stakeholders, take a long-term view, and measure what matters, not just what we can count. That’s a lot easier to say than to do. So we created a manifesto at Acumen, a moral compass to guide our decisions and actions. It is an aspirational document, one I think about daily, though I don’t always live up to it. It is long for a billboard, but maybe if we put it in the right place and encouraged people to pause for just a moment, which in itself wouldn’t be so bad. Here it is: It starts by standing with the poor, listening to voices unheard, and recognizing potential where others see despair. It demands investing as a means, not an end, daring to go where markets have failed and aid has fallen short. It makes capital work for us, not control us. It thrives on moral imagination: the humility to see the world as it is, and the audacity to imagine the world as it could be. It’s having the ambition to learn at the edge, the wisdom to admit failure, and the courage to start again. It requires patience and kindness, resilience and grit: a hard-edged hope. It’s leadership that rejects complacency, breaks through bureaucracy, and challenges corruption. Doing what’s right, not what’s easy. It’s the radical idea of creating hope in a cynical world. Changing the way the world tackles poverty and building a world based on dignity. Or else, I might borrow Rilke’s gorgeous mantra to “Live the Questions,” which is a simple reminder to have the moral courage to live in the gray, sit with uncertainty but not in a passive way. Live the questions so that, one day, you will live yourself into the answers. . . . What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? Don’t worry all that much about your first job. Just start, and let the work teach you. With every step, you will discover more about who you want to be and what you want to do. If you wait for the perfect and keep all of your options open, you might end up with nothing but options. So start.

But the fact that in Texas barbecue, you’re taking one of the worst pieces of the animal and converting it into one of the best is a miracle itself.

Embrace tomfoolery as if it were a rich relative on his deathbed.

So, for example, whether transgender women should be housed in women-only prisons should depend not on an abstract debate about how to define the term “woman,” but on an evidence-based assessment of how best to protect the safety of all inmates.

A party, or any institution that is in power or opposition, does all things to get only its own goal and interests, no matter in a legal way or through illegal resources, like forces, print and electronic media, and negative propaganda among the people, spending the millions of money for this. It is called dirty politics by the support of evil spirits. Most of the political parties criticize the party in power, not for the best of the people, but to get the power for themselves. Political parties are national and democratic assets, not leaders; don’t destroy them; however, remove corrupt and criminal ones from them. Undoubtedly, political parties constitute the key mother pillar of all pillars of democracy; no state can achieve its goals and interests without them. The day you vote is an opportunity to vote not for a leader but for a party manifesto and constructive thoughts and plans. Indeed, you will have good fortune, a bright and joyful social status, and prosperity will always be a part of your society and life. Political parties in every society are a convenient avenue and beneficial wager for those donors who donate and rule the world, not through bona fide democracy and its genuine process. As a result, the people of the world remain slaves even in a civilized environment in their societies.” A coalition, in a political term, defines a conditional and non-significant journey that starts risking the collapse without notice, whereas it also mirrors a hollow and unstable organ to decide and solve wide-scale subjects and issues. In the third world, political leaders run political parties in the frame of their factory management.

We are big fans of the agile software movement. In 2001, seventeen software developers met in Snowbird, Utah, and published the “Manifesto for Agile Software.” The four main values in the manifesto remind us how the best friction fixers think and act: (1) “individuals and interactions over processes and tools”; (2) “working software over comprehensive documentation”; (3) “customer collaboration over contract negotiation”; and (4) “responding to change over following a plan.” Agile software teams deliver their work in small increments rather than in one “big bang” launch. Rather than following a rigid plan, they constantly evaluate results and constraints and update the software, and how they work, along the way.

Sit on the shore while everything else goes on by you, and get through the low-level anxiety and the boredom and the feeling that you've already seen it all. That's a good time to learn. Here's what's there to see. Everything we do and don't do makes a wake, a legion of waves and troughs that pound the shores at the edges of what we mean, grinding away on the periphery of what we know. They go on, after the years in which we lived our individual lives are long passed. If we don't learn that simple, devastating, and redeeming detail of being alive-that what we do, all the jangle of our declarations and defeats, lasts longer than we ourselves do, that the past isn't over-then the parade of our days stands to indict much more than it bequeaths. This is something that we have to learn now. Many of us count on our best intent winning the day or getting us off the hook of personal or ecological consequence. It hasn't, and it won't.

You have hardly started living, and yet all is said, all is done. You are only twenty-five, but your path is already mapped out for you. The roles are prepared, and the labels: from the potty of your infancy to the bath-chair of your old age, all the seats are ready and waiting their turn. Your adventures have been so thoroughly described that the most violent revolt would not make anyone turn a hair. Step into the street and knock people's hats off, smear your head with filth, go bare-foot, publish manifestos, shoot at some passing usurper or other, but it won't make any difference: in the dormitory of the asylum your bed is already made up, your place is already laid at the table of the poètes maudits; Rimbaud's drunken boat, what a paltry wonder: Abyssinia is a fairground attraction, a package trip. Everything is arranged, everything is prepared in the minutest detail: the surges of emotion, the frosty irony, the heartbreak, the fullness, the exoticism, the great adventure, the despair. You won't sell your soul to the devil, you won't go clad in sandals to throw yourself into the crater of Mount Etna, you won't destroy the seventh wonder of the world. Everything is ready for your death: the bullet that will end your days was cast long ago, the weeping women who will follow your casket have already been appointed. Why climb to the peak of the highest hills when you would only have to come back down again, and, when you are down, how would you avoid spending the rest of your life telling the story of how you got up there? Why should you keep up the pretence of living? Why should you carry on? Don't you already know everything that will happen to you? Haven't you already been all that you were meant to be: the worthy son of your mother and father, the brave little boy scout, the good pupil who could have done better, the childhood friend, the distant cousin, the handsome soldier, the impoverished young man? Just a little more effort, not even a little more effort, just a few more years, and you will be the middle manager, the esteemed colleague. Good husband, good father, good citizen. War veteran. One by one, you will climb, like a frog, the rungs on the ladder of success. You'll be able to choose, from an extensive and varied range, the personality that best befits your aspirations, it will be carefully tailored to measure: will you be decorated? cultured? an epicure? a physician of body and soul? an animal lover? will you devote your spare time to massacring, on an out-oftune piano, innocent sonatas that never did you any harm? Or will you smoke a pipe in your rocking chair, telling yourself that, all in all, life's been good to you?

Artists hear what no one else hears. They see what no one else sees. They say what no one else says. They must. And to do this, they traffic in the slippery yield of their own souls. They bring to earth the wrack and lode of depths that only they can reach and still come back alive. Inspiration is a flash. A momentary flicker that-if the would-be recipient is mired in mindless chatter-might easily die unseen. It cannot be repeated, duplicated, slowed down, cached for viewing at some more convenient time. The mind awaiting inspiration must be primed, ever awake, aware. For this it is best off alone.

Before he died, Cesare Pavese, believer in the Great Manifesto, wrote, “We do not remember days, we remember moments.” I remember running down a road on my way to a nursery of flowers. I remember her smile and her laugh when I was my best self and she looked at me like I could do no wrong and was whole. I remember how she looked at me the same way even when I wasn’t. I remember her hand in mine and how that felt, as if something and someone belonged to me.

The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.

In No Contest, Alfie Kohn characterizes competition as coming from situations where resources are scarce. But education involves a resource that can never be scarce: one person having knowledge and wisdom does not prevent someone else from having it. It might be scarce in the sense that not many people have it, especially when it comes to very specialized knowledge, but the whole point of education should be to share knowledge and wisdom with the next generation and thus ensure that it keeps growing. So the fact that we make education competitive is at worst contradictory and at best a choice that we should acknowledge and question.

Leer Chizalum lezen. Leer haar van boeken houden. De beste manier is en passant het voorbeeld te geven. Als ze jou ziet lezen, zal ze begrijpen dat lezen nuttig is. Als ze niet naar school zou gaan en alleen maar boeken zou lezen, zou ze aantoonbaar beter geïnformeerd raken dan een conventioneel opgevoed kind. Boeken zullen haar helpen de wereld te begrijpen en te onderzoeken, haar helpen zichzelf uit te drukken, en haar helpen bij wat ze ook maar wil worden - kok, wetenschapper, zanger, ze profiteren allemaal van de vaardigheden opgedaan door lezen. Ik bedoel geen schoolboeken. Ik bedoel autobiografieën, romans, geschiedkundige boeken, boeken die niets met school te maken hebben. Als niet haar aan het lezen krijgt, betaal haar dan om te lezen. Ik ken een opmerkelijke Nigeriaanse vrouw, Angela, alleenstaande moeder, die haar kind grootbracht in de vs; haar kind hield niet van lezen, en dus besloot ze haar 5 cent per bladzijde te betalen. Een dure onderneming, grapte ze later, maar een waardevolle investering.

the house, her adoptive family had her committed to a state mental institution. The State of Virginia sought to have her forcibly sterilized. The 8-to-1 majority decision was written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., one of the most respected judges in American history. It reads like something out of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi manifesto, Mein Kampf. Which, in fact, was partly inspired by the American eugenics movement. Justice Holmes wrote: We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not

The DIY MFA Mindfulness Manifesto Writer’s block does not exist. Resistance is your compass. Do not compound failure with guilt. There is no such thing as a “best practice.” Iterate, iterate, iterate.

The best/worst example of this is OB/GYNs—largely women—getting paid less to do a vulvar biopsy than urologists—largely men—receive for doing a scrotal biopsy. Same procedure, same equipment, same pain level, same sexual consequences. Different reimbursement.

Even when we don’t have all the answers for the best ways to deprogram from our brainwashing regarding rest, we can still go forth. We can always be open to dreaming into the process of rest.

I myself do not read poetry for anything but pleasure. I read only the poems I like. This means, of course, that I have to read a lot of poems I don't like before I find the ones I do, but, when I do find the ones I do, then all I can say is, "Here they are", and read them to myself for pleasure. [...] You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick, and say to yourself, when the works are laid out before you, the vowels, the consonants, the rhymes or rhythms, "Yes, this is it. This is why the poem moves me so. It is because of the craftsmanship." But you're back again where you began. You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in. The joy and function of poetry is, and was, the celebration of man, which is also the celebration of God. "Poetic Manifesto" 1951

I, myself, do not read poetry for anything but pleasure. I read only the poems I like. This means, of course, that I have to read a lot of poems I don't like before I find the ones I do, but, when I do find the ones I do, then all I can say is, 'Here they are', and read them to myself for pleasure. [...] You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick, and say to yourself, when the works are laid out before you, the vowels, the consonants, the rhymes or rhythms, 'Yes, this is it. This is why the poem moves me so. It is because of the craftsmanship.' But you're back again where you began. You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in. The joy and function of poetry is, and was, the celebration of man, which is also the celebration of God. Poetic Manifesto" 1951

Mindful Parenting Manifesto A Mindful Parent is a new generation of parent: present, evolving, calm, authentic, and free. Mindful Parents reject the culture of “not good enough,” knowing that when we free ourselves from unnecessary stress and limiting stories, our authentic, peaceful nature shines through. Mindful Parents practice self-compassion and see their challenges as teachers, not flaws. Mindful Parents value wisdom over reactivity, empathy over obedience, and begin anew every day. Mindful Parents live what we want our kids to learn, knowing that the best parenting is in modeling. Mindful Parents go within and get quiet to access their power. Mindful Parents practice presence, create their experience, embrace imperfection, and love themselves. Mindful Parents are motivated, knowing that with every step, they are changing things for the generations that follow. I am a Mindful Parent.

Finally, who is your sacred community, your sangat? You just need three kinds of people. Someone like Brynn who sees the best in you. Someone like Shannon or Jess who is willing to fight by your side. And someone like Ram’s father who can fight for you when you need help. Bring them together and you’ve created a pocket of revolutionary love.

In his recent critique of fashionable ecological philosophies, Andreas Malm pointedly remarks: 'When Latour writes that, in a warming world, 'humans are no longer submitted to the diktats of objective nature, since what comes to them is also an intensively subjective form of action,' he gets it all wrong: there is nothing intensively subjective but a lot of objectivity in ice melting. Or, as one placard at a demonstration held by scientists at the American Geophysical Union in December 2016: 'Ice has no agenda - it just melts.'' The reverse claim is that human interventions have only had such a menacing and even fatal consequences for our living conditions within the Earth system because human agency has not yet sufficiently freed itself from its dependence on natural history. This seems to be the conviction behind the 'Ecomodernist Manifesto,' for instance, which claims that 'knowledge and technology, applied with wisdom, might allow for a good, even great, Anthropocene,' and that a good Anthropocene 'demands that humans use their growing social, economic, and technological powers to make life better for people, stabilize the climate, and protect the natural world.' In this confrontation, an age-old dualism has assumed a new guise: the attempt to establish a complicity with the forces of destiny - if necessary at the price of surrendering human subjectivity or perhaps involving other forms of self-sacrifice - is juxtaposed with the attempt to achieve human autonomy by subordinating the planet under the superior power of human ingenuity. These two positions, a modernist stance and a position critical of it, are usually considered to represent mutually exclusive alternatives. Actually, however, the two positions have more in common than first meets the eye. At the beginning of chapter 3, I referred to Greek philosophers who suggested that the best way to protect oneself against the vicissitudes of fate was to learn how to submit oneself to it willingly, sacrificing one's drives and ambitions while expecting, at the same time, that this complicity with destiny would empower one to master worldly challenges. What unites the seemingly opposite positions, more generally speaking, is a shared move away from engagement with the concrete and individual human agency (i.e., with empirical human subjects and with the unequal power distribution in human societies) toward some powerful form of abstraction, be it 'to distribute agency' or to use the 'growing social, economic, and technological powers' of humanity for a better Anthropocene. I suggest that we take a more systemic look at the role of humanity in the Earth system, taking into account both its material interventions and the knowledge that enabled them.

All of my best friends are imaginary, but at least the cadre of dogs that once existed in my life were real. If I had a choice between super-hero, anti-hero or villain, anti-hero would win out. Somewhere in between solves the detrimental problems that those in power refuse to deal with because of financial gain. A manifesto is nothing more than a more assertive pamphlet. The mythology of comic books was extremely creative and brilliant in concept. The imaginary world offers the psychological escape that is sometimes paramount from the real world. It creates a balance that is sometimes necessary to equalize the mind. It's like an uncomplicated form of math when you don't understand math, and explains that two plus two is four in another way. Star Trek, Star Wars, and Harry Potter were very creative concepts, whole new worlds now exist for people to inhabit. Such things create jobs, revenue, and things for people to occupy themselves with. Dystopia offers great warnings about existence, alerts and informs the populace. Take vampires and werewolves, iconic in creation, still existing after a century. There's a romance angle, and something that also allows kids to enjoy Halloween by playing dress up. Here's my point: I'm a regular person that exist in a world that needs to be fixed, explored and expanded. I'm a cog in the machine, and I don't want to be in the machine. That's what a base job is, and that job usually defines the person. Writing defines me, nothing else.

If you define patriotism as being the best at the expense of other peoples and nations, and if you blame others for your own problems or refuse to engage, then you cannot be a patriot and a global citizen.

The 68-page first issue of Calling All Girls contained four comic stories—an 8-pager on Queen Elizabeth (the mother of the current queen); a 9-pager on famed author Osa Johnson, “the famed jungle adventuress,” as the story so quaintly dubbed her; a fictional 7-pager on Judy Wing, Air Hostess No. 1 (aviation themes were huge in the early years of comics, just as they were in all of popular culture); and a fictional 8-pager on the teenage adventures of the Yorktown Younger Set, which “lives in a town like yours. The other half of the first issue contained text stories of a wide variety, with an astonishing amount of reading material for the teen girl’s dime. There was a 4-page story devoted to Connie Martin, a Nancy Drew knockoff; a 4-pager devoted to circus girls; a 3-pager on Gloria Jean herself; a 3-pager by publisher George Hecht on “13 ways girls can help in the national defense”; a 2-pager on manners; a 3-pager by best-selling sports novelist John R. Tunis on women in sports; a 2-pager on grooming; a 4-pager on a fictional female boater; a 2-pager on films; a 2-pager on fashion, with delightful drawings; a page on fashion accessories; and a 2-pager on cooking, by the famed food writer Cecily Brownstone. This issue gave girls an awful lot of reading, some of it inspirational and showing they could be more than “just a girl,” as the boys in Tubby’s clubhouse used to call Little Lulu and her friends a decade later in their Dell Comics adventures. The most intriguing aspect of Calling All Girls is that it approached schoolgirls not as boy-crazy or male-dependent, but as interesting individuals in their own right. The ensuing issues of Calling All Girls expanded on this theme. This was definitely a mini “feminist manifesto” for teens!

Too many of the Black elite get drafted into white-adjacent privilege, suckled by personal prosperity and personal comfort, blinded by the glamour of the high society. They become the neo house Negroes, placated, passive, a resurrection of an antebellum relic in which the best and brightest of Black society, those who would otherwise be the generals in resistance and rebellion, are lulled to sleep by luxuries.

Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. —Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Have you ever thought, why is it that whenever there is tension at the border, people of each nation are made to believe, primarily by their government, armed forces and media, that it's the fault of the neighboring nation - they are made to believe that their neighbor is always the aggressor - the Indian people are made to believe that China or Pakistan is the aggressor, the Azerbaijani people are made to believe that Armenia is the aggressor - the Bulgarian people are made to believe that Turkey is the aggressor - and so on. And not a single citizen questions this conviction, out of their primitive, stone-age tenets of nationalism. Not a single nation on this planet has ever, till now, fully, unconditionally, uncompromisably devoted itself to the course of international harmony. Each state wants its people to feel, think and behave as loyal subjects in the best interest of their own nation over that of the neighboring nation, over that of the world. When will this nationalist barbarism end? When will this insane savagery end?

Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) was a German philosopher, economist, political theorist, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known works are the “The Communist Manifesto” and “Das Kapital”. He died stateless and poverty-stricken with fewer than a dozen mourners attending his funeral. His last words reportedly were: “Go away! Last words are for fools who haven't said enough!

The very best missed at least one of these minimum steps 6 percent of the time—once in every sixteen patients.