Maverick Quotes

I would rather be damned by my honesty, than caged by my lies.

You are a light that will always guide me, a whisper I'll always strain to hear.

Do you know, every time I've seen you you've been like the Grim Reaper of goodwill and cheer. You should find another profession.

For a thinking person, the most serious mental illness is not being sure of who you are.

I want you to love me very hard. Because I’m pretty sure I’ve never loved someone as hard as I love you, Maverick.

Nowadays, ads don't just sell a product. They sell an attitude! Look at this one! Here's a cool guy saying nobody tells him what to do. He does whatever he wants and he buys this product as a reflection of that independence. So basically, this maverick is urging everyone to express his individuality through conformity in brand-name selection?

Innovation is deviance which means that the rebellious personality is a natural resource for practical creativity. As an innovator, you need to reject the old to establish a new, better, status quo. And one of the most powerful sources of newness is the rebel or maverick, mind.

She couldn't turn away from the eyes that held her. Eyes as deep, as Dark as the night, yet there was something that sparked with warmth, that kept those eyes from being cold.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder…

You'd be surprised at how many of us want justice in this case," says Uncle Carlos. "But of course, classic Maverick. Every cop is automatically a bad cop.

It’s the way I’ve imagined you looking at me my entire life, Maverick.

I found myself in the position of that child in a story who noticed a bit of string and - out of curiosity - pulled on it to discover that it was just the tip of a very long and increasingly thick string...and kept bringing out wonders beyond reckoning

A man is known by his heroes.

I am often described to my irritation as a 'contrarian' and even had the title inflicted on me by the publisher of one of my early books. (At least on that occasion I lived up to the title by ridiculing the word in my introduction to the book's first chapter.) It is actually a pity that our culture doesn't have a good vernacular word for an oppositionist or even for someone who tries to do his own thinking: the word 'dissident' can't be self-conferred because it is really a title of honor that has to be won or earned, while terms like 'gadfly' or 'maverick' are somehow trivial and condescending as well as over-full of self-regard. And I've lost count of the number of memoirs by old comrades or ex-comrades that have titles like 'Against the Stream,' 'Against the Current,' 'Minority of One,' 'Breaking Ranks' and so forth—all of them lending point to Harold Rosenberg's withering remark about 'the herd of independent minds.' Even when I was quite young I disliked being called a 'rebel': it seemed to make the patronizing suggestion that 'questioning authority' was part of a 'phase' through which I would naturally go. On the contrary, I was a relatively well-behaved and well-mannered boy, and chose my battles with some deliberation rather than just thinking with my hormones.

Then he glanced at Roar, who waited on the dock. Maverick had never heard him speak a word. He’d only seen Roar stare vacantly at the water, or at the sky. “You know, you could do a lot better than him, ladybug.” Aria shook her head. “No. I couldn’t.

People declare themselves experts, entrepreneurs, inventors, innovators, mavericks, and coaches without any real-life experience. And they do this not because they actually think they are greater than everybody else; they do it because they feel that they need to be great to be accepted in a world that broadcasts only the extraordinary. Our

When people of similar frequencies come together, output is not a simple sum of individual work, but exponential. In science we term this phenomenon as resonance. Output at this stage is beyond any logical limit.

Why would you take a drug that is guaranteed to kill you in forty years? One reason, right? It's the only thing that will stop you dying tomorrow.

Too often, an event’s importance is not recognized until it is too late for proper recording.

Oh. Well, seven supposed to be holy and the number of perfection,” I say. “I think I wanna make Maverick his middle name. Everybody say he look like me. Since that’s the case, I want him to be the best version of me. The perfect Maverick Carter.

Finn Maverick is nothing but a glorified bully. He’s nothing to me. Except the man my attraction awakens for.

Yes, he would be gone, but she knew now what it meant to love. She might not know what it meant to be loved, but loving was almost as good.

Talking is not easy. Talking intends to convey what you mean. Lying is easy, not talking. When one lies, one does not care, and that’s the easy part.

Tell me what you value and I might believe you,” management guru Peter Drucker once said, “but show me your calendar and your bank statement, and I’ll show you what you really value.

Movies are a couple of hours, while books transport you for days or weeks. You can live in the pages of a book.

It only takes one minute of bravery. One minute of insane, embarrassingly crazy courage to change your life. Sometimes, it only takes that one minute for something great to happen.

Maverick opens it. “Merry Christmas!” he exclaims. Except it’s October, it’s Thanksgiving, and now Mav just looks like a big dork.

Tell me what you value and I might believe you,” management guru Peter Drucker once said, “but show me your calendar and your bank statement, and I’ll show you what you really value.” So

Mind control of individuals, the general population and even assets of the Web is aimed at ensuring there are no surprises, maverick behaviour or situations and responses the Elite can't predict.

She could afford anything, she could give anything, but she could not share a moment of her life with anybody. She was a beautiful and a glamorous diamond with an astronomical price tag, but to a crude reality — she was still a stone, a living stone. Nothing else but a stone in an aesthetic sense.

I don't need you to make allowances for anything." Damn her pride. "If you can stand to pay for it, then I can wear it." His brow arched. "Don't let your mouth write checks your body can't cash, sweetheart. Because trust me, I know exactly how to dress a woman for prime impact.

Resonance happens when your mind and heart come into sync.

When free from the confines of our normal identity, we are able to look at life, and the often repetitive stories we tell about it, with fresh eyes. Come Monday morning, we may still clamber back into the monkey suits of our everyday roles—parent, spouse, employee, boss, neighbor—but, by then, we know they're just costumes with zippers.

That a work of the imagination has to be “really” about some problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of storytelling is frivolous, not to say reactionary. The demand that stories must be “about” something is from Communist thinking and, further back, from religious thinking, with its desire for self-improvement books as simple-minded as the messages on samplers. The phrase “political correctness” was born as Communism was collapsing. I do not think this was chance. I am not suggesting that the torch of Communism has been handed on to the political correctors. I am suggesting that habits of mind have been absorbed, often without knowing it. There is obviously something very attractive about telling other people what to do: I am putting it in this nursery way rather than in more intellectual language because I see it as nursery behavior. Art — the arts generally — are always unpredictable, maverick, and tend to be, at their best, uncomfortable. Literature, in particular, has always inspired the House committees, the Zhdanovs, the fits of moralizing, but, at worst, persecution. It troubles me that political correctness does not seem to know what its exemplars and predecessors are; it troubles me more that it may know and does not care. Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to examine our assumptions, there are 20 rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others, no less rabble-rousers because they see themselves as anti-racists or feminists or whatever.

In our national parlance, what's usually meant by the word "maverick" is someone who skirts the edge of sanity--or is so insane as to appear sane--who then does something absolutely insane and yet, after the passage of time, and especially if the maverick's creation yields a profit of any kind, is deemed less and less insane until the maverick worms his or her way into the fibers of history. Then generations grow to envy the ingenuity and courage of the maverick while glossing over the maverick's genetic kookiness. On such shoulders, a country rises.

Even the most incorrigible maverick has to be born somewhere. He may leave the group that produced him--he may be forced to--but nothing will efface his origins, the marks of which he carries with him everywhere. I think it is important to know this and even find it a matter for rejoicing, as the strongest people do, regardless of their station. On this acceptance, literally, the life of a writer depends.

Select people in every era must work outside the boundary lines of conventional society in order to make the clearest and most penetrating observations. A person whom makes advancements that rock the cradle of civilization is always a maverick preacher.

Yeah, I am crazy. Ok. May be I am. But I prefer to be crazy than being a dummy.

Beauty lies in one’s heart and sex lies in one mind. It all depends on where your belief lies.

We can’t help who we love, Maverick,” he

if God is not sovereign, God is not God. If there is even one maverick molecule in the universe—one molecule running loose outside the scope of God’s sovereign ordination—we cannot have the slightest confidence that any promise God has ever made about the future will come to pass.

By the way, the next time you get your cholesterol checked, make a note of the season. Because sunlight converts cholesterol to vitamin D, cholesterol levels can be higher in winter months, when we continue to make and eat cholesterol but there’s less sunlight available to convert it.

A streak of Puritanism runs deep within American society. Permissive and pioneering as we may be on the one hand, we are strict and conservative on the other. As much as we may be a country of mavericks and entrepreneurs, we are also a country of finger waggers and name-callers. As much as we may be a country of compassion for the underdog, we are also a country that believes in self-reliance.

I kissed his forehead and then his temples. I kissed every place on his face all except his lips. I got close, but never full on the lips. I gave every place on his face my full attention. Maverick quietly said to me, "You missed a spot Charlie." "I'm pretty sure I didn't," I replied. "No Charlie, you did and I'm not waiting anymore for you to give it the attention that it so desperately deserves.

When people look at a dangerous violent criminal at the beginning of his developmental process rather than at the very end of it, they will see, perhaps unexpectedly, that the dangerous violent criminal began as a relatively benign human being for whom they would probably have more sympathy than antipathy.

It’s hard to process. To accept I have failings as basic as arousal and attraction for the wrong person. And Finn Maverick is the most wrong person that I could ever want. Not only is he heartless and without morals, he’s also in the closet. The last time I visited Narnia, I was six years old and have no desire to go back again.

Words want to be sampled, relished, remembered; they need breathing space in the shape of commas, colons, semi-colons and full stops. Words are individual. They are content to string along together in sentences and paragraphs, but remain mavericks, outsiders beyond the crowd, the mob, the gang. A long novel begins with the first word.

New Rule: Just because a country elects a smart president doesn't make it a smart country. A couple of weeks ago, I was asked on CNN if I thought Sarah Palin could get elected president, and I said I hope not, but I wouldn't put anything past this stupid country. Well, the station was flooded with emails, and the twits hit the fan. And you could tell that these people were really mad, because they wrote entirely in CAPITAL LETTERS!!! Worst of all, Bill O'Reilly refuted my contention that this is a stupid country by calling me a pinhead, which (a) proves my point, and (b) is really funny coming from a doody-face like him. Now, before I go about demonstration how, sadly, easy it is to prove the dumbness that's dragging us down, let me just say that ignorance has life-and-death consequences. On the eve of the Iraq War, seventy percent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11. Six years later, thirty-four percent still do. Or look at the health-care debate: At a recent town hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his congressman to "keep your government hands off my Medicare," which is kind of like driving cross-country to protest highways. This country is like a college chick after two Long Island iced teas: We can be talked into anything, like wars, and we can be talked out of anything, like health care. We should forget the town halls, and replace them with study halls. Listen to some of these stats: A majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is. Twenty-four percent could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War. More than two-thirds of Americans don't know what's in Roe v. Wade. Two-thirds don't know what the Food and Drug Administration does. Some of this stuff you should be able to pick up simply by being alive. You know, like the way the Slumdog kid knew about cricket. Not here. Nearly half of Americans don't know that states have two senators, and more than half can't name their congressman. And among Republican governors, only three got their wife's name right on the first try. People bitch and moan about taxes and spending, but they have no idea what their government spends money on. The average voter thinks foreign aid consumes more twenty-four percent of our budget. It's actually less than one percent. A third of Republicans believe Obama is not a citizen ad a third of Democrats believe that George Bush had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, which is an absurd sentence, because it contains the words "Bush" and "knowledge." Sarah Palin says she would never apologize for America. Even though a Gallup poll say eighteen percent of us think the sun revolves around the earth. No, they're not stupid. They're interplanetary mavericks. And I haven't even brought up religion. But here's one fun fact I'll leave you with: Did you know only about half of Americans are aware that Judaism is an older religion than Christianity? That's right, half of America looks at books called the Old Testament and the New Testament and cannot figure out which came first. I rest my case.

The so-called “black magician” is a “new brain” hominid fear-merchant who has somewhere learned that there are more powerful intimidations than physical assault. The dimensions of horror, terror and mindwarp are discovered. You can scare more people, and acquire greater power, by the exploitation of psychic assault. When a human’s “mind” or reality-construct is threatened, the person virtually ceases to exist as human, and regresses to the status of a terrorized mammal in a trap. Just as the physical bully feeds on fear and is thrown off stride by the appearance of real courage, the psychic terrorist feeds on gullibility and is baffled by intelligence. When the bully confronts true courage, he automatically ceases to attack. Instead, he seeks to make the maverick into an ally, and often offers the position of second-in-command. If that is declined in a respectful (not churlish) manner, he will probably agree to recognize the other as a separate sovereign with a private turf. The psychic terrorist, similarly, is only accustomed to bamboozling the credulous. Confronted with a self-disciplined independent mind, he hesitates. Eventually, like the physical bully, he laughs and offers comradeship. “You and me, we’re smart. We’re not like these other jerks.” A nudge and a conspiratorial wink.

Do not talk just about the issues – but give an alternate.

Achieving success is your ability to eliminate the weakness and biases that are inherent within yourself

Success is a place in time, Don't be late

2 percent of America’s electricity now goes to keeping the Internet cool, to keeping the link unbroken, for America and for the world.

When you make something a priority, anything is possible.

So I ask you, can you walk a mile? Every day, rain or shine, pain or gain, because you know you have to just to stay alive, just to breathe. Can you walk that mile?

Robots do not celebrate anything. Celebration is an expression of joy, which cannot be mechanized.

All this security and prospects are different for different people. Somebody is happy playing music and with a less pay, somebody is secure in the corporate world with a high pay with headache. We have individual tastes, tastes are not universal.

Biting the hand that feeds you, that's what you're doing Mary Logan, biting the hand that feeds you.' Again Mama laughed, 'If that's the case, Daisy, I don't think I need that little bit of food.' With the second book finished, she stared at a small pile of second grade books on her desk. 'Well, I just think you're spoiling those children, Mary. They've got to learn how things are sometime.' 'Maybe so,' said Mama. 'But that doesn't mean they have to accept them. And maybe we don't either.

I hit the goddamn jackpot with celebrity dreams this a.m. In the latest dream I was in bed with Tom and Katie. I’ve never thought much of Tom Cruise but as I watched him fuck Katie fueled with insane lust and cocaine I murmured, 'God, Tom, I admire you so much.' Katie went to the bathroom to clean up and Tom fucked me. I was too happy to remember that I always preferred Ice Man to Maverick.

Railroads brought about lasting social effects, as well. The companies’ ruthless attention to keeping time impelled passengers to carry pocket watches,* and led to the eventual establishment of time zones.

I personally believe mavericks are people who write their own rulebook. They are the ones who act first and talk later. They are fiercely independent thinkers who know how to fight the lizard brain (to use Seth Godin’s term). I don’t believe many are born, rather they are products of an environment, or their experiences. They are usually the people that find the accepted norm does not meet their requirements and have the self-confidence, appetite, independence, degree of self reliance and sufficient desire to carve out their own niche in life. I believe a maverick thinker can take a new idea, champion it, and push it beyond the ability of a normal person to do so. I also believe the best mavericks can build a team, can motivate with their vision, their passion, and can pull together others to accomplish great things. A wise maverick knows that they need others to give full form to their views and can gather these necessary contributors around them. Mavericks, in my experience, fall into various categories – a/ the totally off-the-wall, uncontrollable genius who won’t listen to anyone; b/ the person who thinks that they have the ONLY solution to a challenge but prepared to consider others’ views on how to conquer the world &, finally, the person who thinks laterally to overcome problems considered to be irresolvable. I like in particular the third category. The upside is that mavericks, because of their different outlook on life, often sees opportunities and solutions that others cannot. But the downside is that often, because in life there is always some degree of luck in success (i.e. being in the right place at the right time), mavericks that fail are often ridiculed for their unorthodox approach. However when they succeed they are acclaimed for their inspiration. It is indeed a fine line they walk in life.

There has to be something wrong when spurning reproduction doesn’t make Gabriella and me the “mavericks” we’d both have prided ourselves as in our younger days but standard issue for our era. Surely the contemporary absorption with our own lives as the be-all and end-all ultimately hails from an insidious misanthropy—a lack of faith in the whole human enterprise. In its darkest form, the growing cohort of childless couples determined to throw all their money at Being Here Now—to take that step aerobics class, visit Tanzania, put an addition on the house while making no effort to ensure there’s someone around to inherit the place when the party is over—has the quality of the mad, slightly hysterical scenes of gleeful abandon that fiction

Micah knew the power of a look. When two people touched from across a distance, that touch could be frightening, wary, or a stroke of gentleness. He stroked her gently. He never let his eyes dip below her chin; rather, he let himself take in every nuance of expression, every shift of each facial motion, the flicker of her lashes, the shadows in her eyes, the tension in her small body. She was like a bird ready to fly. Poised at the edge of her seat, her body stiff and prepared to run.

American culture, perhaps more than any other, prizes individualism. Our narratives of art, politics, and business idolize the person who triumphs against the odds, with only himself or herself to answer to. The lone wolf. The stranger in town. The maverick. The plucky kid. The Final Girl. You've only got yourself, in the end. It's all up to you.

The second is trickier: the person who knows what to do next is the leader. We’re entirely nonhierarchical in that way. But in a combat environment, when split seconds make all the difference, there’s no time for second-guessing. When someone steps up to become the new leader, everyone, immediately, automatically, moves with him. It’s the only way we win.

There's an irresponsible owner behind every gun accident.

Computers can not dream, they can not visualize – That is your part and that’s how you create, innovate and make difference.

the creation of any sense of unity among a population of potentially disharmonious settlers almost always requires the deliberate agency of man.

Can’t” is always a lie. Learn to see it that way, and you’ll solve problems differently.

dreams weren’t built on fear. They were built on the courage you used to get over it.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,”24 William Blake

Well, trust me. Nowadays, babies travel with more crap than a rock band.” He

brainwaves slow from agitated beta to daydreamy alpha and deeper theta. Neurochemically, stress chemicals like norepinephrine and cortisol are replaced by performance-enhancing, pleasure-producing compounds such as dopamine, endorphins, anandamide, serotonin, and oxytocin.

M. and I have plagued each other with our differences for more than forty years. But it is also a tonic. Along with the differences that abide in each of us, there is also in each of us the maverick, the darling stubborn one who won’t listen, who insists, who chooses preference or the spirited guess over yardsticks or even history. I suspect this maverick is somewhat what the soul is, or at least that the soul lives close by and companionably with its agitating and inquiring force. And of course all of it, the differences and the maverick uprisings, are part of the richness of life. If you are too much like myself, what shall I learn of you, or you of me? I bring home sassafras leaves and M. looks and admires. She tells me how it feels to float in the air above the town and the harbor, and my world is sweetened by her description of those blue miles. The touch of our separate excitements is another of the gifts of our life together.

The more evil society becomes, the more it needs a few mavericks to shift the trend. Even if nine out of ten students in a school are extravagant, a frugal student can at least show the difference between extravagance and frugality; even if nine out of ten officials in an organization are corrupt, an upright official can at least show the difference between corruption and righteousness. Good and bad, right and wrong are all seen in contrast to each other. When a society becomes corrupt, everyone follows the others to the bad side, and no one resists the trend until the general public loses all sense of right and wrong, and there is no sense of guilt in the world anymore. Therefore, when the whole society is corrupt, if there is one good person, his significance and value are immeasurable.

Cowgirl Interlude (Bonanza Jellybean) She is lying on the family sofa in flannel pajamas. There is Kansas City mud on the tips and heels of her boots, boots that have yet to savor real manure. Fourteen, she knows she ought to remove her boots, yet she refuses. A Maverick rerun is on TV; she is eating beef jerky, occasionally slurping. On her upper stomach, where her pajama top has ridden up, is a small deep scar. She tells everyone, including her school nurse, that it was made by a silver bullet. Whatever the origin of the extra hole in her belly, there are unmistakable signs of gunfire int he woodwork by the closet door. It was there that she once shot up one half of an old pair of sneakers. "Self-defense," she pleaded, when her parents complained. "It was a [sic] out-law tennis shoe. Billy the Ked.

Watching Nigel Farage rudely insult fellow members of the European Parliament today - the first occasion they were all assembled in Brussels since the tragic 'Brexit' referendum result - made me feel utterly ashamed to be British. Let it be known that Nigel Farage is the very epitomy of a narrow-minded 'Little Englander' who does not represent the vast majority of outward-looking people from Great Britain. His shameful and unofficial campaign to convince the British electorate to leave the European Union was peppered with lies and deceit. His populist and xenophobic rhetoric has also subsequently contributed to ugly scenes of racial abuse and hate crime directed at Eastern European nationals and ethnic minorities living and working in the UK, in the wake of the referendum result. Fellow Europeans, world citizens, let this be a wake-up call. Deny your own domestic peddlers of populism and nationalism the opportunity to follow the example of this unelected, disrespected maverick, intent on making a name for himself, for he has unwittingly unleashed a wrecking ball on Britain's future economic prosperity, cultural diversity and social harmony.

If you employed a strategy that is not conducive to the results you are looking for, then you will not achieve the desired result. You have to understand that it’s not you that failed; it’s just that you employed the wrong strategy.

Jindagi bhar gadhe ki tarah slog marane se aur kuchh din rich Arab Shaikh ki tarah paisa bahane se quality of life change nahi ho jaati. We only remember one week of good time, but never go back to what we scarified for that one week.

This approach requires great effort. The first step for all of them was the decision to make this process the most important thing in their life. That meant breaking away from their customary schedules, social activities, television viewing habits, and so on. Had they continued to follow their habitual routines, they would have continued being the same person who had manifested illness. To change, to cease being the person they had been, they could no longer do the things they had typically done. Instead, these mavericks sat down every day and began to reinvent themselves. They made this more important than doing anything else, devoting every moment of their spare time to this effort. Everyone practiced becoming an objective observer of his or her old familiar thoughts. They refused to allow anything but their intentions to occupy their mind. You may be thinking, “That’s pretty easy to do when faced with a serious health crisis. After all, my own life is in my hands.” Well, aren’t most of us suffering from some affliction—physical, emotional, or spiritual—that affects the quality of our life? Don’t those ailments deserve the same kind of focused attention? Certainly,

I have learned to prioritize my actions into three buckets: things that drain my energy, things I don’t mind and are important and useful, and things that give me energy and bring me joy. My goal is to break my daily actions down so that I spend none of my time on tasks that fall into the first category, 10 percent of my time on the second category, and 90 percent of my time in the final category, the one that Robert Greene calls primal inclinations. When I find myself drifting too far from the goal, I reset my actions.

The cities of the eastern American fall line are well known today—Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Fredericksburg, Philadelphia—even though the part that the very similar accidents of geology and river behavior played in their origins may have been long forgotten.

If you're wonderful in any way somebody will fuck with you. Just like if you're horrible in any way they're gonna fuck with you. The world is for the average and the common. Those are the people who never hurt - they just fall asleep. The rest of us, we're The Walking Wounded.

Any scientist that wants to change the prevailing paradigm is automatically branded a heretic, apostate, infidel, blasphemer, maverick or lunatic, exactly as happens with religion. The scientist must break with his peers, and have his job, career and funding placed in extreme jeopardy. How many careerist scientists are up for that? The answer is zero. The result is that scientists go on thinking what the establishment and the funding bodies expect them to think, even though they themselves must, deep down, know they are supporting ludicrous claims that make no sense.

THIS IS HOW AMERICA BECAME A HOTSPOT OF A GLOBAL PANDEMIC. Because my generation was raised to believe not just that safety is for dweebs but that it’s EVIL! Maverick is a full psycho and would definitely be at the “reopen America” protests because he wants the RIGHT to get his b-hole waxed even if he isn’t actually GOING to go get his b-hole waxed and even though he knows that many thousands more marginalized and high-risk people will die and many b-hole waxing businesses will ultimately fail because you cannot sustain an economy on a handful of slobbering fascists who feel the need, the need for a Jamba Juice. Goose alludes to some dark past involving Maverick’s dad, who was also a fighter pilot: “Every time we go up there, it’s like you’re flyin’ against a ghost.” And I’m sorry, but that is not an excuse! Go to therapy! You can be in a men’s group with Snape!

But Mandelbrot continued to feel oppressed by France’s purist mathematical establishment. “I saw no compatibility between a university position in France and my still-burning wild ambition,” he writes. So, spurred by the return to power in 1958 of Charles de Gaulle (for whom Mandelbrot seems to have had a special loathing), he accepted the offer of a summer job at IBM in Yorktown Heights, north of New York City. There he found his scientific home. As a large and somewhat bureaucratic corporation, IBM would hardly seem a suitable playground for a self-styled maverick. The late 1950s, though, were the beginning of a golden age of pure research at IBM. “We can easily afford a few great scientists doing their own thing,” the director of research told Mandelbrot on his arrival. Best of all, he could use IBM’s computers to make geometric pictures. Programming back then was a laborious business that involved transporting punch cards from one facility to another in the backs of station wagons.

She looked around the room, glanced over him and Micah waited. Her Gaze passed him, then again. On the third pass she lingered as she continued to watch her, allowing his gaze to memorize those features just before her eyes met his. A jolt od power flashed through him. Her ligth blue eyes flickered with interest, fear, then interest again, as though she wasn't certain which she should feel. He let his gaze continue to hers, let his mind reach out to her, soothe her, ease her. He used his eyes rather than his expression to calm the fear that he knew he would be rising within her. Micah knew the power of a look. When two people touched from across a distance, that touch could be frightening, wary, or a stroke of gentleness. He stroked her gently. He never let his eyes dip below her chin; rather, he let himself take in every nuance of expression, every shift of each facial motion, the flicker of her lashes, the shadows in her eyes, the tension in her small body. She was like a little bird ready to fly. Poised at the edge of her seat.her body stiff and prepared to run. Easy, little bird, he thought, letting his thoughts touch his gaze. There is no pain here; there is no fear.

I will. See you later, and thanks again.” Before Carlisle had a chance to leave out of the window she leaned over and kissed him, nothing ostentatious, just sweet and sensitive. He took no time in hesitating. He reached his arm out and pulled her body close to his. He pressed them together and let his mouth open hers, his tongue slipped inside, and he stole a few more moments of sweetness with her before slipping out of her window and walking down the street, into the distance and eventually out of sight.

Congenital disease can warp the heart with great variety. Valves can be sealed tight, missing parts—or absent altogether. Major vessels can be misplaced, narrowed, or blocked completely. A chamber can be too small or missing, a wall too thick or thin. The heart’s electrical system—its nerves—may go haywire. The muscle can be weak. Holes may occur almost anywhere, in almost any size. Studying heart pathology, one is reminded that the genetic symphony that produces a normal baby is indeed a wondrous and delicate one.

Nothing exists in life as it is. The idea is to believe and make it possible through your passion. If she did not exist, I would have dreamed of her, imagined of her – in the same way I described. She would be in my mind, my heart and my senses and it is you, who’s taught me that your heart never lies. I feel her. I see her image. I hear her encouraging words. How can I doubt my own feelings? She exists – because I believe in her, because I create an image of her through my imagination and push her to that limit. What matters is who can bring this passion out of me, who can trigger these feelings. She has the potential of a heavenly angel and my senses, my beliefs, and my feelings turn her into reality.

You can build your “willpower muscle” the same way you strengthen any muscle in your body: by doing hard things you don’t want to do. A simple trick I use is to keep a heavy-duty spring-loaded hand-grip trainer on my desk. When I think about it, I squeeze it until it burns and my arm tells me to stop and then keep squeezing. Another technique I use is to hold my breath until my lungs scream at me to breathe and then hold it longer. When you successfully do the things you don’t want to do, everything else seems easier by comparison. Your willpower grows.

Botox studies pointed in the opposite direction. Somehow, changes in the body—freezing the face with a neurotoxin—were producing changes in the mind: the ability to feel sadness or empathy. The horse appeared to be steering the rider. And we now know why. Our facial expressions are hardwired5 into our emotions: we can’t have one without the other. Botox lessens depression because it prevents us from making sad faces. But it also dampens our connection to those around us because we feel empathy by mimicking each other’s facial expressions. With Botox, mimicry becomes impossible, so we feel almost nothing at all.

Politics is the science of domination, and persons in the process of enlargement and illumination are notoriously difficult to control. Therefore, to protect its vested interests, politics usurped religion a very long time ago. Kings bought off priests with land and adornments. Together, they drained the shady ponds and replaced them with fish tanks. The walls of the tanks were constructed of ignorance and superstition, held together with fear. They called the tanks “synagogues” or “churches” or “mosques.” After the tanks were in place, nobody talked much about soul anymore. Instead, they talked about spirit. Soul is hot and heavy. Spirit is cool, abstract, detached. Soul is connected to the earth and its waters. Spirit is connected to the sky and its gases. Out of the gases springs fire. Firepower. It has been observed that the logical extension of all politics is war. Once religion became political, the exercise of it, too, could be said to lead sooner or later to war. “War is hell.” Thus, religious belief propels us straight to hell. History unwaveringly supports this view. (Each modern religion has boasted that it and it alone is on speaking terms with the Deity, and its adherents have been quite willing to die—or kill—to support its presumptuous claims.) Not every silty bayou could be drained, of course. The soulfish that bubbled and snapped in the few remaining ponds were tagged “mystics.” They were regarded as mavericks, exotic and inferior. If they splashed too high, they were thought to be threatening and in need of extermination. The fearful flounders in the tanks, now psychologically dependent upon addictive spirit flakes, had forgotten that once upon a time they, too, had been mystical. Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical has been killed. Or, at least diminished. Those who witness the dropping of the fourth veil might see clearly what Spike Cohen and Roland Abu Hadee dimly suspected: that not only is religion divisive and oppressive, it is also a denial of all that is divine in people; it is a suffocation of the soul.

Look at this site - it is beautiful and deep. When we come here, we get ourselves lost in its beauty and vastness. Years of sorrow and pain lies in the depth of this lake. You do not know what was here 40-50 years back. Probably, a ditch full of stagnant water and mud breeding mosquitoes. Now here we have beautiful lake surrounded by lush green bushes and beautiful flowers. The place is beautiful today, so we come and enjoy its company, its presence. We do not think about its past or we do not to know what will happen here years later. We enjoy the beauty of its present.

Simplify? Let me try. In school days, we are taught that if there are four animals in a room and you add two more, the total will be six. That is logic. But behind this logic, there are underlying assumptions. Now, if somebody tells you, there are four rats in the room and if you add two more cats in the room, how many animals in total exist in the room now? The answer will depend upon assumption. If you just use your mathematical brain, you will say six animals. If you use your human brain, you will say two animals. Why two animals? Because the two cats will eat the four rats in no time.

The thing about Dostoevsky's characters is that they are alive. By which I don't just mean that they're successfully realized or developed or "rounded". The best of them live inside us, forever, once we've met them. Recall the proud and pathetic Raskolnikov, the naive Devushkin, the beautiful and damned Nastasya of The Idiot, the fawning Lebyedev and spiderish Ippolit of the same novel; C&P's ingenious maverick detective Porfiry Petrovich (without whom there would probably be no commercial crime fiction w/ eccentrically brilliant cops); Marmeladov, the hideous and pitiful sot; or the vain and noble roulette addict Aleksey Ivanovich of The Gambler; the gold-hearted prostitutes Sonya and Liza; the cynically innocent Aglaia; or the unbelievably repellent Smerdyakov, that living engine of slimy resentment in whom I personally see parts of myself I can barely stand to look at; or the idealized and all too-human Myshkin and Alyosha, the doomed human Christ and triumphant child-pilgrim, respectively. These and so many other FMD creatures are alive-retain what Frank calls their "immense vitality"-not because they're just skillfully drawn types or facets of human beings but because, acting withing plausible and morally compelling plots, they dramatize the profoundest parts of all humans, the parts most conflicted, most serious-the ones with the most at stake. Plus, without ever ceasing to be 3-D individuals, Dostoevsky's characters manage to embody whole ideologies and philosophies of life: Raskolnikov the rational egoism of the 1860's intelligentsia, Myshkin mystical Christian love, the Underground Man the influence of European positivism on the Russian character, Ippolit the individual will raging against death's inevitability, Aleksey the perversion of Slavophilic pride in the face of European decadence, and so on and so forth....

Hi, Billy. Gretchen.” Again, I feel the strength and tenderness of his touch, and it sends chills throughout my body. I shiver slightly with thoughts of him touching me, and I look down concealing my desire. “Are you cold? Eat some of that. It’ll warm you up; I promise. It’s good for your metabolism also. It’s a thermogenic— it heats up your body from the inside, helping it to metabolism fat, and burn more calories.” “I can eat food to burn fat? Is there anything sweet that does that?” “Ha-ha,” he says, being serious. “Sugar is the Devil, Miss Gretchen Lane. You’re going to learn that with me as your trainer.” “Yeah,

Daddy looks past me at my boyfriend. “So . . . Plain-Ass Chris.” Seven snorts. DeVante snickers. Momma goes, “Maverick!” as I say, “Daddy!” “At least it’s not white boy,” Chris says. “Exactly,” Daddy says. “It’s a step up. You gotta earn my tolerance in increments if you gon’ date my daughter.” “Lord.” Momma rolls her eyes. “Chris, baby, you’ve been out here all night?” The way she says it, I can’t help but laugh. She’s basically asking him, “You do realize you’re in the hood, right?” “Yes, ma’am,” Chris says. “All night.” Daddy grunts. “Maybe you do got some balls then.” My mouth drops, and Momma says, “Maverick Carter!” Seven and DeVante crack up. But Chris? Chris says, “Yes, sir, I’d like to think I do.” “Daaaaamn,” says Seven. He reaches to give Chris dap, but Daddy cuts him a hard eye and he pulls his hand back. “A’ight, Plain-Ass Chris,” Daddy says. “Boxing gym, next Saturday, you and me.” Chris lifts his oxygen mask so fast. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said—” “Calm down, I’m not gon’ fight you,” Daddy says. “We gon’ train. Get to know each other. You been seeing my daughter for a minute now. I gotta know you, and you can learn a lot about a man at a boxing gym.” “Oh . . .” Chris’s shoulders relax. “Okay.” He puts the oxygen mask back on. Daddy grins. It’s a little too mischievous for my liking. He’s gonna kill my poor boyfriend.

There is one notable exception to Jablonski and Chaplin’s equation—and it’s the exception that proves the rule. The Inuit—the indigenous people of the subarctic—are dark-skinned, despite the limited sunlight of their home. If you think something fishy’s going on here, you’re right. But the reason they don’t need to evolve the lighter skin necessary to ensure sufficient vitamin D production is refreshingly simple. Their diet is full of fatty fish—which just happens to be one of the only foods in nature that is chock-full of vitamin D. They eat vitamin D for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, so they don’t need to make it. If you ever had a grandmother from the Old World try to force cod liver oil down your throat, she was onto something for the same reason—since it’s full of vitamin D, cod liver oil was one of the best ways to prevent rickets, especially before milk was routinely fortified with it.   IF YOU’RE WONDERING how people who have dark skin make enough vitamin D despite the fact that their skin blocks all those ultraviolet rays, you’re asking the right questions. Remember, ultraviolet rays that penetrate the skin destroy folate—and ultraviolet rays that penetrate the skin are necessary to create vitamin D. Dark skin evolved to protect folate, but it didn’t evolve

Nonconformity is an affront to those in the mainstream. Our impulse is to dismiss this lifestyle, create reasons why it can’t work, why it doesn’t even warrant consideration. Why not? Living outdoors is cheap and can be afforded by a half year of marginal employment. They can’t buy things that most of us have, but what they lose in possessions, they gain in freedom. In Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, lead character Larry returns from the First World War and declares that he would like to “loaf.”23 The term “loafing” inadequately describes the life he would spend traveling, studying, searching for meaning, and even laboring. Larry meets with the disapproval of peers and would-be mentors: “Common sense assured…that if you wanted to get on in this world, you must accept its conventions, and not to do what everybody else did clearly pointed to instability.” Larry had an inheritance that enabled him to live modestly and pursue his dreams. Larry’s acquaintances didn’t fear the consequences of his failure; they feared his failure to conform. I’m no maverick. Upon leaving college I dove into the workforce, eager to have my own stuff and a job to pay for it. Parents approved, bosses gave raises, and my friends could relate. The approval, the comforts, the commitments wound themselves around me like invisible threads. When my life stayed the course, I wouldn’t even feel them binding. Then I would waiver enough to sense the growing entrapment, the taming of my life in which I had been complicit. Working a nine-to-five job took more energy than I had expected, leaving less time to pursue diverse interests. I grew to detest the statement “I am a…” with the sentence completed by an occupational title. Self-help books emphasize “defining priorities” and “staying focused,” euphemisms for specialization and stifling spontaneity. Our vision becomes so narrow that risk is trying a new brand of cereal, and adventure is watching a new sitcom. Over time I have elevated my opinion of nonconformity nearly to the level of an obligation. We should have a bias toward doing activities that we don’t normally do to keep loose the moorings of society. Hiking the AT is “pointless.” What life is not “pointless”? Is it not pointless to work paycheck to paycheck just to conform? Hiking the AT before joining the workforce was an opportunity not taken. Doing it in retirement would be sensible; doing it at this time in my life is abnormal, and therein lay the appeal. I want to make my life less ordinary.