Method Man Best Quotes

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The really dangerous American fascist... is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection. ~quoted in the New York Times, April 9, 1944
Henry A. Wallace
Common sense is the best distributed commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it.
René Descartes (Discourse on Method)
Each choose that method which expresses your selfhood best, and condemn no other man because he expresses his Self otherwise.
Voltairine de Cleyre (A Loving Anarchist! The Spirit of Voltairine de Cleyre (The Anarchy Classic!))
I knew that the languages which one learns there are necessary to understand the works of the ancients; and that the delicacy of fiction enlivens the mind; that famous deeds of history ennoble it and, if read with understanding, aid in maturing one's judgment; that the reading of all the great books is like conversing with the best people of earlier times; it is even studied conversation in which the authors show us only the best of their thoughts; that eloquence has incomparable powers and beauties; that poetry has enchanting delicacy and sweetness; that mathematics has very subtle processes which can serve as much to satisfy the inquiring mind as to aid all the arts and diminish man's labor; that treatises on morals contain very useful teachings and exhortations to virtue; that theology teaches us how to go to heaven; that philosophy teaches us to talk with appearance of truth about things, and to make ourselves admired by the less learned; that law, medicine, and the other sciences bring honors and wealth to those who pursue them; and finally, that it is desirable to have examined all of them, even to the most superstitious and false in order to recognize their real worth and avoid being deceived thereby
René Descartes (Discourse on Method)
Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers," who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery. Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
John Maynard Keynes (The Economic Consequences of the Peace)
Porn gives a guy his reward for free; a reward that should be her single best agency is rendered valueless when a man can get off to an infinite variety of sexual experience at the click of a mouse. It’s unlimited access to unlimited sexual availability without the stress of learning methods to earn it from women as a reward.
Rollo Tomassi (The Rational Male)
You frequently state, and in your letter you imply, that I have developed a completely one-sided outlook and look at everything in terms of science. Obviously my method of thought and reasoning is influenced by a scientific training – if that were not so my scientific training will have been a waste and a failure. But you look at science (or at least talk of it) as some sort of demoralizing invention of man, something apart from real life, and which must be cautiously guarded and kept separate from everyday existence. But science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment. Your theories are those which you and many other people find easiest and pleasantest to believe, but so far as I can see, they have no foundation other than they leaf to a pleasanter view of life (and an exaggerated idea of our own importance)... I agree that faith is essential to success in life (success of any sort) but I do not accept your definition of faith, i.e. belief in life after death. In my view, all that is necessary for faith is the belief that by doing our best we shall come nearer to success and that success in our aims (the improvement of the lot of mankind, present and future) is worth attaining. Anyone able to believe in all that religion implies obviously must have such faith, but I maintain that faith in this world is perfectly possible without faith in another world… It has just occurred to me that you may raise the question of the creator. A creator of what? ... I see no reason to believe that a creator of protoplasm or primeval matter, if such there be, has any reason to be interested in our significant race in a tiny corner of the universe, and still less in us, as still more significant individuals. Again, I see no reason why the belief that we are insignificant or fortuitous should lessen our faith – as I have defined it.
Rosalind Franklin
But even when a man has offended against his own rational code, I doubt whether a sense of sin is the best method of arriving at a better way of life. There is in the sense of sin something abject, something lacking in self-respect. No good was ever done to any one by the loss of self-respect. The rational man will regard his own undesirable acts, as he regards those of others, as acts produced by certain circumstances, and to be avoided either by a fuller realization that they are undesirable, or, where this is possible, by avoidance of the circumstances that caused them.
Bertrand Russell (The Conquest of Happiness)
Erasure is as important as writing. Prune what is turgid, elevate what is commonplace, arrange what is disorderly, introduce rhythm where the language is harsh, modify where it is too absolute. . . . The best method of correction is to put aside for a time what we have written, so that when we come to it again it may have an aspect of novelty, as of being another man's work; in this way we may preserve ourselves from regarding our writings with the affection that we lavish upon a newborn child.
Quintilian (De Institutione Oratoria)
If there were a way of putting an end to himself by some purely mental act he would put an end to himself at once, without further ado. His mind is full of stories of people who bring about their end - who methodically pay bills, write goodbye notes, burn old love letters, label keys, and then, once everything is in order, don their Sunday best and swallow down pills they have hoarded for the occasion and settle themselves on their neatly made beds and compose features for oblivion. Heroes all of them, unsung, unlauded. I am resolved not to be of any trouble.
J.M. Coetzee (Slow Man)
No man is an island—” Much as we may feel and act as individuals, our race is a single organism, always growing and branching—which must be pruned regularly to be healthy. This necessity need not be argued; anyone with eyes can see that any organism which grows without limit always dies in its own poisons. The only rational question is whether pruning is best done before or after birth. Being an incurable sentimentalist I favor the former of these methods—killing makes me queasy, even when it’s a case of “He’s dead and I’m alive and that’s the way I wanted it to be.” But this may be a matter of taste. Some shamans think that it is better to be killed in a war, or to die in childbirth, or to starve in misery, than never to have lived at all. They may be right. But I don’t have to like it—and I don’t.
Robert A. Heinlein (Time Enough for Love)
Disappointed in his hope that I would give him the fictional equivalent of “One Hundred Ways of Cooking Eggs” or the “Carnet de la Ménagère,” he began to cross-examine me about my methods of “collecting material.” Did I keep a notebook or a daily journal? Did I jot down thoughts and phrases in a cardindex? Did I systematically frequent the drawing-rooms of the rich and fashionable? Or did I, on the contrary, inhabit the Sussex downs? or spend my evenings looking for “copy” in East End gin-palaces? Did I think it was wise to frequent the company of intellectuals? Was it a good thing for a writer of novels to try to be well educated, or should he confine his reading exclusively to other novels? And so on. I did my best to reply to these questions — as non-committally, of course, as I could. And as the young man still looked rather disappointed, I volunteered a final piece of advice, gratuitously. “My young friend,” I said, “if you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is to keep a pair of cats.” And with that I left him. I hope, for his own sake, that he took my advice.
Aldous Huxley (Collected Essays)
Die beste Methode, sich von einem Schriftstellerwerk zu befreien, das einen gleich in was für einer Hinsicht nicht mehr in Ruhe läßt, sei es, weil man es am höchsten schätzt, sei es, daß man es haßt, ist, seinen Erzeuger kennenzulernen. Wir gehen zum Erzeuger eines literarischen Werkes und sind es los, habe ich zu Gambetti gesagt.
Thomas Bernhard (Extinction)
Man has the choice of two methods of race improvement. He can breed from the best or he can eliminate the worst by segregation or sterilization.
Madison Grant (The Passing of the Great Race or the Racial Basis of European History)
Our hosts had been kind to us and considerate as only Mexicans can be. Furthermore, they had taught us the best ways to go hunting, and we shall never use any other. We have, however, made one slight improvement on their method: we shall not take a gun, thereby ovbiating the last remote possibility of having the hunt cluttered up with game. We have never understood why men mount the heads of animals and hang them up to look down on their conquerors. Possibly it feels food to these men to be superior to animals, but it does seem that if they were sure of it they would not have to prove it. Often a man who is afraid must constantly demonstrate his courage and, in the case of the hunter, must keep a tangible record of his courage. for ourselves, we have mounted in a small hardwood plaque one perfect borrego dropping. And where another man can say "There was an animal, but because I am greater than he, he is dead and I am alive, and there is his head to prove it," we can say, "There was an animal, and for all we know there still is and here is the proof of it. he was very healthy when we last heard of him
John Steinbeck (The Log from the Sea of Cortez)
It was supposed that the pearl buyers were individuals acting alone, bidding against one another for the pearls the fishermen brought in. And once it had been so. But this was a wasteful method, for often, in the excitement of bidding for a fine pearl, too great a price had been paid to the fisherman. This was extravagant and not to be countenanced. Now there was only one pearl buyer with many hands, and the men who sat in their offices and waited for Kino knew what price they would offer, how high they would bid, and what method each one would use. And although these men would not profit beyond their salaries, there was excitement among the pearl buyers, for there was excitement in the hunt, and if it be a man's function to break down a price, then he must take joy and satisfaction in breaking it as far down as possible. For every man in the world functions to the best of his ability, and no one does less than his best, no matter what he may think about it. Quite apart from any reward they might get, from any word of praise, from any promotion, a pearl buyer was a pearl buyer, and the best and happiest pearl buyer was he who bought for the lowest prices.
John Steinbeck (The Pearl)
We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. We have adopted Christianity merely as an improved method of agri-culture. We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man’s struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten.
Henry David Thoreau (Walden)
On behalf of those you killed, imprisoned, tortured, you are not welcome, Erdogan! No, Erdogan, you’re not welcome in Algeria. We are a country which has already paid its price of blood and tears to those who wanted to impose their caliphate on us, those who put their ideas before our bodies, those who took our children hostage and who attempted to kill our hopes for a better future. The notorious family that claims to act in the name of the God and religion—you’re a member of it—you fund it, you support it, you desire to become its international leader. Islamism is your livelihood Islamism, which is your livelihood, is our misfortune. We will not forget about it, and you are a reminder of it today. You offer your shadow and your wings to those who work to make our country kneel down before your “Sublime Door.” You embody and represent what we loathe. You hate freedom, the free spirit. But you love parades. You use religion for business. You dream of a caliphate and hope to return to our lands. But you do it behind the closed doors, by supporting Islamist parties, by offering gifts through your companies, by infiltrating the life of the community, by controlling the mosques. These are the old methods of your “Muslim Brothers” in this country, who used to show us God’s Heaven with one hand while digging our graves with the other. No, Mr. Erdogan, you are not a man of help; you do not fight for freedom or principles; you do not defend the right of peoples to self-determination. You know only how to subject the Kurds to the fires of death; you know only how to subject your opponents to your dictatorship. You cry with the victims in the Middle East, yet sign contracts with their executioners. You do not dream of a dignified future for us, but of a caliphate for yourself. We are aware of your institutionalized persecution, your list of Turks to track down, your sinister prisons filled with the innocent, your dictatorial justice palaces, your insolence and boastful nature. You do not dream of a humanity that shares common values and principles, but are interested only in the remaking of the Ottoman Empire and its bloodthirsty warlords. Islam, for you, is a footstool; God is a business sign; modernity is an enemy; Palestine is a showcase; and local Islamists are your stunned courtesans. Humanity will not remember you with good deeds Humanity will remember you for your machinations, your secret coups d’état, and your manhunts. History will remember you for your bombings, your vengeful wars, and your inability to engage in constructive dialogue with others. The UN vote for Al-Quds is only an instrument in your service. Let us laugh at this with the Palestinians. We know that the Palestinian issue is your political capital, as it is for many others. You know well how to make a political fortune by exploiting others’ emotions. In Algeria, we suffered, and still suffer, from those who pretend to be God and act as takers and givers of life. They applaud your coming, but not us. You are the idol of Algerian Islamists and Populists, those who are unable to imagine a political structure beyond a caliphate for Muslim-majority societies. We aspire to become a country of freedom and dignity. This is not your ambition, nor your virtue. You are an illusion You have made beautiful Turkey an open prison and a bazaar for your business and loved ones. I hope that this beautiful nation rises above your ambitions. I hope that justice will be restored and flourish there once again, at least for those who have been imprisoned, tortured, bombed, and killed. You are an illusion, Erdogan—you know it and we know it. You play on the history of our humiliation, on our emotions, on our beliefs, and introduce yourself as a savior. However, you are a gravedigger, both for your own country and for your neighbors. Turkey is a political miracle, but it owes you nothing. The best thing you can do
Kamel Daoud
Sometimes it seems as though the only way a man can judge his own niceness, his own decency, is by looking at his relationships with women, or rather, with prospective or current sexual partners. It’s easy enough to be nice to your mates. You can buy them a drink, make them a tape, ring them up to see if they’re OK … there are any number of quick and painless methods of turning yourself into a Good Bloke. When it comes to girlfriends, though, it’s much trickier to be consistently honorable. One moment you’re ticking along, cleaning the toilet bowl, and expressing your feelings and doing all the other things that a modern chap is supposed to do; the next, you’re manipulating and sulking and double-dealing and fibbing with the best of them. I can’t work it out.
Nick Hornby (High Fidelity)
But psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods, asking of course every moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncertainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical means. This method taxes patience to the utmost, and could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored. Such Germans as Weber, Fechner, Vierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot ; and their success has brought into the field an array of younger experimental psychologists, bent on studying the elements of the mental life, dissecting them out from the gross results in which they are embedded, and as far as possible reducing them to quantitative scales. The simple and open method of attack having done what it can, the method of patience, starving out, and harassing to death is tried ; the Mind must submit to a regular siege, in which minute advantages gained night and day by the forces that hem her in must sum themselves up at last into her overthrow. There is little of the grand style about these new prism, pendulum, and chronograph-philosophers. They mean business, not chivalry. What generous divination, and that superiority in virtue which was thought by Cicero to give a man the best insight into nature, have failed to do, their spying and scraping, their deadly tenacity and almost diabolic cunning, will doubtless some day bring about. No general description of the methods of experimental psychology would be instructive to one unfamiliar with the instances of their application, so we will waste no words upon the attempt.
William James (The Principles of Psychology: Volume 1)
Take terrorism, one example among the methods used in that struggle. We know that leftist tradition condemns terrorism and political assassination. When the colonized uses them, the leftist colonizer becomes unbearably embarrassed. He makes an effort to separate them from the colonized's voluntary action; to make an epiphenomenon out of his struggle. They are spontaneous outbursts of masses too long oppressed, or better yet, acts by unstable, untrustworthy elements which the leader of the movement has difficulty in controlling. Even in Europe, very few people admitted that the oppression of the colonized was so great, the disproportion of forces so overwhelming, that they had reached the point, whether morally correct or not, of using violent means voluntarily. The leftist colonizer tried in vain to explain actions which seemed incomprehensible, shocking and politically absurd. For example, the death of children and persons outside of the struggle, or even of colonized persons who, without being basically opposed, disapproved of some small aspect of the undertaking. At first he was so disconcerted that the best he could do was to deny such actions; for they would fit nowhere in his view of the problem. That it could be the cruelty of oppression which explained the blind fury of the reaction hardly seemed to be an argument to him; he can't approve acts of the colonized which he condemns in the colonizers because these are exactly why he condemns colonization. Then, after having suspected the information to be false, he says, as a last resort, that such deeds are errors, that is, they should not belong to the essence of the movement. He bravely asserts that the leaders certainly disapprove of them. A newspaper-man who always supported the cause of the colonized, weary of waiting for censure which was not forthcoming, finally called on certain leaders to take a public stand against the outrages, Of course, received no reply; he did not have the additional naïveté to insist.
Albert Memmi (The Colonizer and the Colonized)
Add to this the species of government which prevails over nine tenths of the globe, which is despotism: a government, as Locke justly observes, altogether "vile and miserable," and "more to be deprecated than anarchy itself."(2*) Certainly every man who takes a dispassionate survey of this picture will feel himself inclined to pause respecting the necessity of the havoc which is thus made of his species, and to question whether the established methods for protecting mankind against the caprices of each other are the best that can be devised. He will be at a loss which of the two to pronounce most worthy of regret, the misery that is inflicted, or the depravity by which it is produced. If this be the unalterable allotment of our nature, the eminence of our rational faculties must be considered as rather an abortion than a substantial benefit; and we shall not fail to lament that, while in some respects we are elevated above the brutes, we are in so many important ones destined for ever to remain their inferiors.
William Godwin (Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness)
But there is a way of despising the dandelion which is not that of the dreary pessimist, but of the more offensive optimist. It can be done in various ways; one of which is saying, "You can get much better dandelions at Selfridge's," or "You can get much cheaper dandelions at Woolworth's." Another way is to observe with a casual drawl, "Of course nobody but Gamboli in Vienna really understands dandelions," or saying that nobody would put up with the old-fashioned dandelion since the super-dandelion has been grown in the Frankfurt Palm Garden; or merely sneering at the stinginess of providing dandelions, when all the best hostesses give you an orchid for your buttonhole and a bouquet of rare exotics to take away with you. These are all methods of undervaluing the thing by comparison; for it is not familiarity but comparison that breeds contempt. And all such captious comparisons are ultimately based on the strange and staggering heresy that a human being has a right to dandelions; that in some extraordinary fashion we can demand the very pick of all the dandelions in the garden of Paradise; that we owe no thanks for them at all and need feel no wonder at them at all; and above all no wonder at being thought worthy to receive them. Instead of saying, like the old religious poet, "What is man that Thou carest for him, or the son of man that Thou regardest him?" we are to say like the discontented cabman, "What's this?" or like the bad-tempered Major in the club, "Is this a chop fit for a gentleman?" Now I not only dislike this attitude quite as much as the Swinburnian pessimistic attitude, but I think it comes to very much the same thing; to the actual loss of appetite for the chop or the dish of dandelion-tea. And the name of it is Presumption and the name of its twin brother is Despair. This is the principle I was maintaining when I seemed an optimist to Mr. Max Beerbohm; and this is the principle I am still maintaining when I should undoubtedly seem a pessimist to Mr. Gordon Selfridge. The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.
G.K. Chesterton (The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton)
Having described the basic methods of Hindu-Arabic arithmetic in the first seven chapters, Leonardo devoted most of the remainder of the book to practical problems. Chapters 8 and 9 provide dozens of worked examples on buying, selling, and pricing merchandise, using what we would today call reasoning by proportions—the math we use to check the best deal in the supermarket.
Keith Devlin (The Man of Numbers: Fibonacci's Arithmetic Revolution)
Sahl was never a great comic. His nervous, jabbing, keep-them-off-balance delivery was the strategy of a man who was not comfortable in front of an audience. His creative method -- a rapid scanning of the day's output of newspapers, magazines, and radio broadcasts -- was a recipe for superficiality or, at best, the kind of quick, shallow laugh triggered by a topical allusion. Sahl was always devoid of the two basic ingredients of great humor: imagination and soul. He could make fun of the latest Hollywood movies. He could stab at the pieties of his own class. He could take an abrupt insight into politics or wold events and phrase it neatly into a gag. What he could never do was suggest a world of living, breathing people behaving in ridiculous yet recognizably human patterns.
Albert Goldman (Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce!!)
Man knows himself as body, and what he knows of spirit comes through grace. The poet would call it inspiration. But the spirit bloweth where it listeth. Man has no control over his inspiration. If a piece of music or a poem has moved him once, he can never be certain that it will happen again. But man hates to think that he has no control over the spirit. It would discourage him too much. He likes to believe that he can summon the spirit by some ordinary act. Instead of striving to prepare himself for it through discipline and prayer, he tries to summon it arbitrarily through some physical act—drinking Düsseldorf beer, for instance. . . Stein said, chuckling: Which is the way all good Düsseldorfers summon the spirit, since our Dunkelbier is the best in Germany. The priest laughed with him, and for a moment Sorme had a curious impression that he was listening to an argument between two undergraduates instead of two men in their late sixties. He shrank deeper into his armchair, wanting them to forget his presence. The priest stopped laughing first, and Sorme had a glimpse of the tiredness that always lay behind his eyes. Stein also became grave again. He said: Very well. But what has this to do with the murderer? It has to do with sex. For sex is the favourite human device for summoning the spirit. And since it is also God's gift of procreation, it nearly always works. . . unlike music and poetry. Or beer, Stein said. Quite. But even sex is not infallible. And man hates to think that he has no power over the spirit. The more his physical methods fail him, the more voraciously he pursues them. His attempts to summon the spirit become more and more frenzied. If he is a drinker, he drinks more, until he has more alcohol than blood in his veins. If he is a sensualist, he invents sexual perversions. Ah, Stein said. There are many other ways, of course—the lust for money and power, for instance. All depend upon man's refusal to face the fact that the spirit bloweth where it listeth, that no physical act can be guaranteed to summon it. . .
Colin Wilson (Ritual in the Dark (Visions))
To pastors and teachers Compose catechisms particularly to teach prayer, not by reasoning nor by method, for the simple are incapable thereof; but to teach the prayer of the heart, not of the understanding; the prayer of God's Spirit, not of man's invention. Alas! By wanting them to pray in elaborate forms . . . you create their chief obstacles. The children have been led astray from the best of fathers, by your endeavouring to teach them too refined, too polished a language . . . A father is much better pleased with an address which love and respect in the child throws into disorder, because he knows it proceeds from the heart, than by a formal and barren harangue, though ever so elaborate in the composition. The simple and undisguised emotions of filial love are infinitely more expressive than all language and all reasoning.
Jeanne Guyon (A Short and Easy Method of Prayer)
A substantial good drawn from a real evil, is of the same benefit to society as if drawn from a virtue; and where men have not public spirit to render themselves serviceable, it ought to be the study of government to draw the best use possible from their vices. When the governing passion of any man, or set of men, is once known, the method of managing them is easy; for even misers, whom no public virtue can impress, would become generous, could a heavy tax be laid upon covetousness.
Thomas Paine (The Crisis)
At this point, I must describe an important study carried out by Clare W. Graves of Union College, Schenectady, N.Y. on deterioration of work standards. Professor Graves starts from the Maslow-McGregor assumption that work standards deteriorate when people react against workcontrol systems with boredom, inertia, cynicism... A fourteen-year study led to the conclusion that, for practical purposes, we may divide people up into seven groups, seven personality levels, ranging from totally selfpreoccupied and selfish to what Nietzsche called ‘a selfrolling wheel’-a thoroughly self-determined person, absorbed in an objective task. This important study might be regarded as an expansion of Shotover’s remark that our interest in the world is an overflow of our interest in ourselves—and that therefore nobody can be genuinely ‘objective’ until they have fully satiated the subjective cravings. What is interesting—and surprising—is that it should not only be possible to distinguish seven clear personality-ypes, but that these can be recognised by any competent industrial psychologist. When Professor Graves’s theories were applied in a large manufacturing organisation—and people were slotted into their proper ‘levels’—the result was a 17% increase in production and an 87% drop in grumbles. The seven levels are labelled as follows: (1) Autistic (2) Animistic (3) Awakening and fright (4) Aggressive power seeking (5) Sociocentric (6) Aggressive individualistic (7) Pacifist individualistic. The first level can be easily understood: people belonging to it are almost babylike, perhaps psychologically run-down and discouraged; there is very little to be done with these people. The animistic level would more probably be encountered in backward countries: primitive, superstitious, preoccupied with totems and taboos, and again poor industrial material. Man at the third level is altogether more wide-awake and objective, but finds the complexity of the real world frightening; the best work is to be got out of him by giving him rules to obey and a sense of hierarchical security. Such people are firm believers in staying in the class in which they were born. They prefer an autocracy. The majority of Russian peasants under the Tsars probably belonged to this level. And a good example of level four would probably be the revolutionaries who threw bombs at the Tsars and preached destruction. In industry, they are likely to be trouble makers, aggressive, angry, and not necessarily intelligent. Management needs a high level of tact to get the best out of these. Man at level five has achieved a degree of security—psychological and economic—and he becomes seriously preoccupied with making society run smoothly. He is the sort of person who joins rotary clubs and enjoys group activities. As a worker, he is inferior to levels three and four, but the best is to be got out of him by making him part of a group striving for a common purpose. Level six is a self-confident individualist who likes to do a job his own way, and does it well. Interfered with by authoritarian management, he is hopeless. He needs to be told the goal, and left to work out the best way to achieve it; obstructed, he becomes mulish. Level seven is much like level six, but without the mulishness; he is pacifistic, and does his best when left to himself. Faced with authoritarian management, he either retreats into himself, or goes on his own way while trying to present a passable front to the management. Professor Graves describes the method of applying this theory in a large plant where there was a certain amount of unrest. The basic idea was to make sure that each man was placed under the type of supervisor appropriate to his level. A certain amount of transferring brought about the desired result, mentioned above—increased production, immense decrease in grievances, and far less workers leaving the plant (7% as against 21% before the change).
Colin Wilson (New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow & the Post-Freudian Revolution)
Der Gedanke, dass ich bald tot sein werde, ist die wichtigste Entscheidungshilfe für die großen Fragen des Lebens. Weil fast alles – alle äußeren Erwartungen, aller Stolz, alle Versagensangst – im Angesicht des Todes bedeutungslos wird, bleibt nur das wirklich Bedeutsame übrig. Sich vor Augen zu halten, dass man sterben wird, ist die beste Methode, die ich kenne, um nicht in die Falle zu tappen, sich selbst vorzumachen, man habe etwas zu verlieren. Wir alle sind bereits nackt. Es gibt keinen Grund, nicht seinem Herzen zu folgen.
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
Kieran stilled, his whole body going stiff. “What do you use? Your fingers, or a vibrator?” I slid my forearm across my forehead, my body pounding again. “None of your business,” I forced out, my throat tight. “Can I watch?” He glanced back, his tone teasing but his eyes on fire. “You can use both methods, and then compare them with my cock. See which one gets you off the best.” “Vibrator, easy.” I cleared my throat. “It’s got all the bells and whistles. Men just aren’t equipped to compete.” “I’m not a man.” His voice was deep and rich. “I’m a god.
K.F. Breene (Sin & Magic (Demigods of San Francisco, #2))
What, then, is active imagination? In practice it’s exactly what Jung did in his visions and conversations with inner figures such as Philemon, Ka, and Salome mentioned above: entering a fantasy and talking with one’s “self”—at least a part of oneself “normally” left unconscious—asking questions and receiving knowledge that one—“you”—did not know. In many ways, it’s something we engage in often already, but in a shallow, fleeting way, when we “ask ourselves” what we think or will do about a situation. More abstractly, it’s a method of consciously entering into a dialogue with the unconscious, which triggers the transcendent function, a vital shift in consciousness, brought about through the union of the conscious and unconscious minds. Unexpected insights and self-renewal are some of the results of the transcendent function. It achieves what I call that elusive “Goldilocks” condition, the “just right” of having the conscious and unconscious minds work together, rather than being at odds. In the process it produces a third state more vivid and “real” than either; in it we recognize what consciousness should be like and see our “normal” state as at best a muddling through. We’ve already seen how the transcendent function helped Jung when faced with the dilemma of having to choose between science and the humanities. Then it operated through a dream, producing the mandala-like symbol of the giant radiolarian. In the simplest sense, the transcendent function is our built-in means of growth, psychological and spiritual—it’s “transcendent” only in the sense that it “transcends” the frequent deadlock between the conscious and unconscious minds—and is a development of what Jung earlier recognized as the “prospective tendencies in man.
Gary Lachman (Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life & Teachings)
Here is a typical story about Mr. John Jones. Mr. Jones works in an office. He had hoped for a little raise but his hope, as hopes often are, was disappointed. The salaries of some of his colleagues were raised but not his. Mr. Jones could not take it calmly. He worried and worried and finally suspected that Director Brown was responsible for his failure in getting a raise. We cannot blame Mr. Jones for having conceived such a suspicion. There were indeed some signs pointing to Director Brown. The real mistake was that, after having conceived that suspicion, Mr. Jones became blind to all signs pointing in the opposite direction. He worried himself into firmly believing that Director Brown was his personal enemy and behaved so stupidly that he almost succeeded in making a real enemy of the director. The trouble with Mr. John Jones is that he behaves like most of us. He never changes his major opinions. He changes his minor opinions not infrequently and quite suddenly; but he never doubts any of his opinions, major or minor, as long as he has them. He never doubts them, or questions them, or examines them critically—he would especially hate critical examination, if he understood what that meant. Let us concede that Mr. John Jones is right to a certain extent. He is a busy man; he has his duties at the office and at home. He has little time for doubt or examination. At best, he could examine only a few of his convictions and why should he doubt one if he has no time to examine that doubt? Still, don’t do as Mr. John Jones does. Don’t let your suspicion, or guess, or conjecture, grow without examination till it becomes ineradicable. At any rate, in theoretical matters, the best of ideas is hurt by uncritical acceptance and thrives on critical examination. 2. A mathematical example. Of all quadrilaterals with
George Pólya (How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method (Princeton Science Library Book 34))
What happened? Many things. But the overriding problem was this: The auto industry got too comfortable. As Intel cofounder Andy Grove once famously proclaimed, “Only the paranoid survive.” Success, he meant, is fragile—and perfection, fleeting. The moment you begin to take success for granted is the moment a competitor lunges for your jugular. Auto industry executives, to say the least, were not paranoid. Instead of listening to a customer base that wanted smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, the auto executives built bigger and bigger. Instead of taking seriously new competition from Japan, they staunchly insisted (both to themselves and to their customers) that MADE IN THE USA automatically meant “best in the world.” Instead of trying to learn from their competitors’ new methods of “lean manufacturing,” they clung stubbornly to their decades-old practices. Instead of rewarding the best people in the organization and firing the worst, they promoted on the basis of longevity and nepotism. Instead of moving quickly to keep up with the changing market, executives willingly embraced “death by committee.” Ross Perot once quipped that if a man saw a snake on the factory floor at GM, they’d form a committee to analyze whether they should kill it. Easy success had transformed the American auto
Reid Hoffman (The Startup of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career)
The post-anthropocentric shift away from the hierarchical relations that had privileged ‘Man’ requires a form of estrangement and a radical repositioning on the part of the subject. The best method to accomplish this is through the strategy of de-familiarization or critical distance from the dominant vision of the subject. Dis-identification involves the loss of familiar habits of thought and representation in order to pave the way for creative alternatives. Deleuze would call it an active ‘deterritorialization’. Race and post-colonial theories have also made important contributions to the methodology and the political strategy of de-familiarization (Gilroy, 2005).
Rosi Braidotti (The Posthuman)
In his book The Next Million Years, Charles Galton Darwin notes that anyone who wishes to make a sizable impact on human history has the choice of three levels at which to work. The agent may choose direct political action, or create a creed, or attempt to change the genetic composition of the human species. The first method is the weakest because the effects of political action seldom outlast their agent. The third is not feasible, for even if we had the knowledge and technique, a genetic policy would be difficult to enforce for even a short period and would almost certainly be dropped before any perceptible effects were achieved. "That is why," Darwin concludes, "a creed gives the best practical hope that man can have for really controlling his future fate." p187
Huston Smith (The World's Religions)
We had been out for one of our evening rambles, Holmes and I, and had returned about six o’clock on a cold, frosty winter’s evening. As Holmes turned up the lamp the light fell upon a card on the table. He glanced at it, and then, with an ejaculation of disgust, threw it on the floor. I picked it up and read: CHARLES AUGUSTUS MILVERTON, Appledore Towers, Hampstead. Agent. “Who is he?” I asked. “The worst man in London,” Holmes answered, as he sat down and stretched his legs before the fire. “Is anything on the back of the card?” I turned it over. “Will call at 6:30--C.A.M.,” I read. “Hum! He’s about due. Do you feel a creeping, shrinking sensation, Watson, when you stand before the serpents in the Zoo, and see the slithery, gliding, venomous creatures, with their deadly eyes and wicked, flattened faces? Well, that’s how Milverton impresses me. I’ve had to do with fifty murderers in my career, but the worst of them never gave me the repulsion which I have for this fellow. And yet I can’t get out of doing business with him--indeed, he is here at my invitation.” “But who is he?” “I’ll tell you, Watson. He is the king of all the blackmailers. Heaven help the man, and still more the woman, whose secret and reputation come into the power of Milverton! With a smiling face and a heart of marble, he will squeeze and squeeze until he has drained them dry. The fellow is a genius in his way, and would have made his mark in some more savoury trade. His method is as follows: He allows it to be known that he is prepared to pay very high sums for letters which compromise people of wealth and position. He receives these wares not only from treacherous valets or maids, but frequently from genteel ruffians, who have gained the confidence and affection of trusting women. He deals with no niggard hand. I happen to know that he paid seven hundred pounds to a footman for a note two lines in length, and that the ruin of a noble family was the result. Everything which is in the market goes to Milverton, and there are hundreds in this great city who turn white at his name. No one knows where his grip may fall, for he is far too rich and far too cunning to work from hand to mouth. He will hold a card back for years in order to play it at the moment when the stake is best worth winning. I have said that he is the worst man in London, and I would ask you how could one compare the ruffian, who in hot blood bludgeons his mate, with this man, who methodically and at his leisure tortures the soul and wrings the nerves in order to add to his already swollen money-bags?” I had seldom heard my friend speak with such intensity of feeling.
Arthur Conan Doyle (The Complete Sherlock Holmes)
I struggle with words. Never could express myself the way I wanted. My mind fights my mouth, and thoughts get stuck in my throat. Sometimes they stay stuck for seconds or even minutes. Some thoughts stay for years; some have stayed hidden all my life. As a child, I stuttered. What was inside couldn't get out. I'm still not real fluent. I don't know a lot of good words. If I were wrongfully accused of a crime, I'd have a tough time explaining my innocence. I'd stammer and stumble and choke up until the judge would throw me in jail. Words aren't my friends. Music is. Sounds, notes, rhythms. I talk through music. Maybe that's why I became a loner, someone who loves privacy and doesn't reveal himself too easily. My friendliness might fool you. Come into my dressing room and I'll shake your hand, pose for a picture, make polite small talk. I'll be as nice as I can, hoping you'll be nice to me. I'm genuinely happy to meet you and exchange a little warmth. I have pleasant acquaintances with thousands of people the world over. But few, if any, really know me. And that includes my own family. It's not that they don't want to; it's because I keep my feelings to myself. If you hurt me, chances are I won't tell you. I'll just move on. Moving on is my method of healing my hurt and, man, I've been moving on all my life. Now it's time to stop. This book is a place for me to pause and look back at who I was and what I became. As I write, I'm seventy hears old, and all the joy and hurts, small and large, that I've stored up inside me...well, I want to pull 'em out and put 'em on the page. When I've been described on other people's pages, I don't recognize myself. In my mind, no one has painted the real me. Writers have done their best, but writers have missed the nitty-gritty. Maybe because I've hidden myself, maybe because I'm not an easy guy to understand. Either way, I want to open up and leave a true account of who I am. When it comes to my own life, others may know the cold facts better than me. Scholars have told me to my face that I'm mixed up. I smile but don't argue. Truth is, cold facts don't tell the whole story. Reading this, some may accuse me of remembering wrong. That's okay, because I'm not writing a cold-blooded history. I'm writing a memory of my heart. That's the truth I'm after - following my feelings, no matter where they lead. I want to try to understand myself, hoping that you - my family, my friends, my fans - will understand me as well. This is a blues story. The blues are a simple music, and I'm a simple man. But the blues aren't a science; the blues can't be broken down like mathematics. The blues are a mystery, and mysteries are never as simple as they look.
B.B. King (Blues All Around Me: The Autobiography of B.B. King)
If the interest of a scientific expositor ought to be measured by the importance of the subject, I shall be applauded for my choice. In fact, there are few questions which touch more closely the very existence of man than that of animated motors—those docile helps whose power or speed he uses at his pleasure, which enjoy to some extent his intimacy, and accompany him in his labors and his pleasures. The species of animal whose coöperation we borrow are numerous, and vary according to latitude and climate. But whether we employ the horse, the ass, the camel, or the reindeer, the same problem is always presented: to get from the animal as much work as possible, sparing him, as far as we can, fatigue and suffering. This identity of standpoint will much simplify my task, as it will enable me to confine the study of animated motors to a single species: I have chosen the horse as the most interesting type. Even with this restriction the subject is still very vast, as all know who are occupied with the different questions connected therewith. In studying the force of traction of the horse, and the best methods of utilizing it, we encounter all the problems connected with teams and the construction of vehicles. But, on a subject which has engaged the attention of humanity for thousands of years, it seems difficult to find anything new to say. If in the employment of the horse we consider its speed and the means of increasing it, the subject does not appear less exhausted. Since the chariot-races, of which Greek and Roman antiquity were passionately fond, to our modern horse-races, men have never ceased to pursue with a lively interest the problem of rapid locomotion. What tests and comparisons have not been made to discover what race has most speed, what other most bottom, what crossings, what training give reason to expect still more speed?
Etienne-Jules Marey
Sorrow is knowledge. How gladly one would exchange the false claims of priests–that there is a God who demands the Good from us, who is guardian and witness of each act, each moment, each thought, who loves us and wants the best for us in every misfortune—how gladly one would exchange these claims for truths which would be just as salutary, calming, and soothing as those errors! But there are no such truths; at the most, philosophy can oppose those errors with other metaphysical fictions (basically also untruths). But the tragic thing is that we can no longer believe those dogmas of religion and metaphysics, once we have the rigorous method of truth in our hearts and heads, and yet on the other hand, the development of mankind has made us so delicate, sensitive, and ailing that we need the most potent kind of cures and comforts—hence arises the danger that man might bleed to death from the truth he has recognized. Byron expressed this in his immortal lines: Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth, the tree of knowledge is not that of life.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits)
who are always right, and are given to reminding us of it, are irritating; prophets are irritating, and Owen Meany is decidedly a prophet. Because I don’t start a novel until I know the ending, every novel of mine is predestined. In A Prayer for Owen Meany, it was not that much of a stretch to make the main character aware (to some degree) of his own predestination. After all, I am always aware of the predestination of my characters. In Owen’s case, he bears the terrible burden of foreseeing his own death. His tenacious faith tells him that even his death—like his size, like his voice, like practicing the shot—is for a reason. Separate from the Vietnam background and the apparent religious miracle, A Prayer for Owen Meany is also a novel about the loss of childhood, which I thought was best signified by the loss of a childhood friend. People are always losing things in my novels—not just, as Johnny Wheelwright does, a finger and a mother and a best friend. In my first novel, Setting Free the Bears, another best friend is lost—stung to death by bees! In my second and third novels, The Water-Method Man and The 158-Pound
John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)
But interviews with [Margaret Dumont] reveal her to have been a perceptive and talented comic actress. “Many a comedian’s lines have been lost on the screen because the laughter overlapped,” she said in the 1940s. “Script writers build up to a laugh, but they don’t allow any pause for it. That’s where I come in. I ad lib—it doesn’t matter what I say—just to kill a few seconds so you can enjoy the gag. I have to sense when the big laughs will come and fill in, or the audience will drown out the next gag with its own laughter.” A much harder job, it must be stressed, onscreen than onstage. Margaret Dumont objected to the term “stooge,” with her usual dignity. “I’m a straight lady,” she insisted, “the best straight woman in Hollywood. There’s an art to playing straight. You must build up your man, but never top him, never steal the laughs from him.” She showed great insight into the Marx Brothers’ brand of humor: “The comedy method which [they] employ is carefully worked out and concrete. They never laugh during a story conference. Like most other expert comedians, they involve themselves so seriously in the study of how jokes can be converted to their own style that they don’t ever titter while approaching their material.
Eve Golden (Bride of Golden Images)
We were talking about childhood dramas. Then I remembered. “You had said something that had confused me,” I said. “You had said that a person cannot play a control drama with us unless we play the matching drama. I didn’t understand that.” “Do you understand now?” “Not really. What are you getting at?” “The scene outside clearly demonstrated what happens if you do play the matching drama.” “How?” She glanced at me briefly. “What drama was the man playing with you?” “He was obviously the Intimidator.” “Right, and what drama did you play?” “I was just trying to get him off my back.” “I know, but what drama were you playing?” “Well, I started off in my aloofness drama, but he kept coming after me.” “Then?” The conversation was irritating me but I tried to get centered and stay with it. I looked at Julia and said, “I guess I was playing a Poor Me.” She smiled. “That’s right.” “I noticed you handled him with no problem,” I said. “Only because I didn’t play the drama he expected. Remember that each person’s control drama was formed in childhood in relation to another drama. Therefore each drama needs a matching drama to be fully played out. What the intimidator needs in order to get energy is either a poor me, or another intimidator. “How did you handle it?” I asked, still confused. “My drama response would have been to play the Intimidator myself, trying to out intimidate him. Of course, this would probably have resulted in violence. But instead I did what the Manuscript instructs. I named the drama he was playing. All dramas are covert strategies to get energy. He was trying to intimidate you out of your energy. When he tried that on me, I named what he was doing.” “That’s why you asked why he was so angry?” “Yes. The Manuscript says that covert manipulations for energy can’t exist if you bring them into consciousness by pointing them out. They cease to be covert. It is a very simple method. The best truth about what’s going on in a conversation always prevails. After that the person has to be more real and honest.” “That makes sense,” I said. “I guess I’ve even named dramas myself before, though I didn’t know what I was doing.” “I’m sure. That’s something all of us have done. We’re just learning more about what is at stake. And the key to making it work is to simultaneously look beyond the drama at the real person in front of you, and send as much energy their way as possible. If they can feel energy coming in anyway, then it’s easier for them to give up their way of manipulating for it.” “What could you appreciate in that guy?” I said. “I could appreciate him as a little insecure boy needing energy desperately.
James Redfield (The Celestine Prophecy (Celestine Prophecy, #1))
By the middle of the 17th century in Japan the concept of focus had evolved to a high level of sophistication and had taken on the psychological overtones that we will examine later in this chapter. In his classic on strategy, A Book of Five Rings (1645), the samurai who is best known in the West, Miyamoto Musashi, removed the concept from the physical world entirely by designating the spirit of the opponent as the focus: Do not even consider risking a decision by cold steel until you have defeated the enemy’s will to fight.59 This is a revealing statement by a man reported to have won some sixty bouts, virtually all of which ended in the death of his opponent (not surprising, when you consider that the samurai long sword, the tachi, was a four foot blade of steel, sharp as a modern razor, and strong enough to chop cleanly through a water pipe.) Once you accept Musashi’s dictum as a strategic principle, then you might ask how to carry it out, how to actually defeat the opponent’s spirit. Musashi was no mystic, and he grounded all his methods in real actions his students could take. We will encounter him and his techniques many times in this book. The ability to rapidly shift the focus of one’s efforts is a key element in how a smaller force defeats a larger, since it enables the smaller force to create and exploit opportunities before the larger force can marshal reinforcements.
Chet Richards (Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business)
The use of ghosts as a means of social control predated the Klan. Slave owners employed so-called patterollers, usually poor whites, who would patrol the countryside at night; such patrols would regularlyuse spook stories, among other tactics, to help keep enslaved people from escaping. "The fraudulent ghost," [Gladys-Marie] Fry writes, "was the first in a gradually developed system of night-riding creatures, the fear of which was fostered by white for the purpose of slave control." A man in a white sheet on horseback riding ominously through a forest could help substantiate rumers that the forest was haunted and that those who valued their lives best avoid it. By spreading ghost stories, Southern whites hoped to limit the unauthorized movement of black people. If cemeteries, crossroads, and forests came to be known particularly as haunted, it's because they presented the easiest means of escape and had to be patrolled. Now it's common to think of such places as the provenance of spirits. We have stories for such places: a tragic death, forlorn lovers, a devil waiting to make a deal -- stories that reflect a rich tradition of American folklore. But all this might have come much later, and these places might have first earned their haunted reputation through much more deviant methods. In the ghost-haunting legacies of many of these public spaces lies a hidden history of patrolling and limiting access.
Colin Dickey (Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places)
The philosophers who in their treatises of ethics assigned supreme value to justice and applied the yardstick of justice to ali social institutions were not guilty of such deceit. They did not support selfish group concerns by declaring them alone just, fair, and good, and smear ali dissenters by depicting them as the apologists of unfair causes. They were Platonists who believed that a perennial idea of absolute justice exists and that it is the duty of man to organize ali human institutions in conformity with this ideal. Cognition of justice is imparted to man by an inner voice, i.e., by intuition. The champions of this doctrine did not ask what the consequences of realizing the schemes they called just would be. They silently assumed either that these consequences will be beneficiai or that mankind is bound to put up even with very painful consequences of justice. Still less did these teachers of morality pay attention to the fact that people can and really do disagree with regard to the interpretation of the inner voice and that no method of peacefully settling such disagreements can be found. Ali these ethical doctrines have failed to comprehend that there is, outside of social bonds and preceding, temporally or logically, the existence of society, nothing to which the epithet "just" can be given. A hypothetical isolated individual must under the pressure of biological competition look upon ali other people as deadly foes. His only concern is to preserve his own life and health; he does not need to heed the consequences which his own survival has for other men; he has no use for justice. His only solicitudes are hygiene and defense. But in social cooperation with other men the individual is forced to abstain from conduct incompatible with life in society. Only then does the distinction between what is just and what is unjust emerge. It invariably refers to interhuman social relations. What is beneficiai to the individual without affecting his fellows, such as the observance of certain rules in the use of some drugs, remains hygiene. The ultimate yardstick of justice is conduciveness to the preservation of social cooperation. Conduct suited to preserve social cooperation is just, conduct detrimental to the preservation of society is unjust. There cannot be any question of organizing society according to the postulates of an arbitrary preconceived idea of justice. The problem is to organize society for the best possible realization of those ends which men want to attain by social cooperation. Social utility is the only standard of justice. It is the sole guide of legislation. Thus there are no irreconcilable conflicts between selfíshness and altruism, between economics and ethics, between the concerns of the individual and those of society. Utilitarian philosophy and its finest product, economics, reduced these apparent antagonisms to the opposition of shortrun and longrun interests. Society could not have come into existence or been preserved without a harmony of the rightly understood interests of ali its members.
Ludwig von Mises (Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution)
Though Aristotle allows so many several forms of corrupted governments; yet he insists upon no one form of all those that he can define or describe, in such sort, that he is able to say that any one city in all Greece was governed just according to such a form; his diligence is only to make as many forms as the giddy or inconstant humour of a city could happen upon; he freely gives the people liberty to invent as many kinds of government as they please, provided he may have liberty to find fault with every one of them; it proved an easier work for him to find fault with every form, than to tell how to amend any one of them; he found so many imperfections in all sorts of common-weals, that he could not hold from reproving them before ever he tells us what a commonweal is, or how many sorts there are, and to this purpose he spends his whole second book in setting out, and correcting the chief commonweals of Greece, and among others the Lacedemonian, the Cretan and Carthaginian commonweals; which three he esteems to be much alike, and better than any other, yet he spares not to lay open their imperfections, and doth the like to the Athenian; wherein he breaks the rule of method, by delivering the faults of commonweals, before he teach us what a commonweal is; for in his first book, he speaks only of the parts, of which a city, or a commonweal is made, but tells us not what a city or commonweal is, until he come to his third book, and there in handling the sorts of government, he observes no method at all, but in a disorderly way, flies backward and forward from one sort to another: and howsoever there may be observed in him many rules of policy touching government in general, yet without doubt where he comes to discourse of particular forms, he is full of contradiction, or confusion, or both: it is true, he is brief and difficult, the best right a man can do him, is to confess lie understands him not; yet a diligent reader may readily discern so many irregularities and breaches in Aristotle's books of Politics, as tend to such distraction or confusion, that none of our new politicians can make advantage of his principles, for the confirmation of an original power by nature in the people, which is the only theme now in fashion: for Aristotle's discourse is of such commonweals as were founded by particular persons, as the Chalcedonian by Phaleas, the Milesian by Hippodamas, the Lacedemonian by Lycurgus, the Cretan by Minos, the Athenian by Solon, and the like: but the natural right of the people to found, or elect; their kind of government is not once disputed by him: it seems the underived majesty of the people, was such a metaphysical piece of speculation as our grand philosopher was not acquainted with; he speaks very contemptuously of the multitude in several places, he affirms that the people are base or wicked judges in their own cases, ‘οι πλειστοι φαυλοι κριται περι των οικειων and that many of them differ nothing from beasts; τι διαφερουσιν ενιοι των θηριων; and again he saith, the common people or freemen are such as are neither rich, nor in reputation for virtue; and it is not safe to commit to them great governments; for, by reason of their injustice and unskilfulness, they would do much injustice, and commit many errors and it is pleasanter to the multitude to live disorderly, than soberly, ‘ηδιον γαρ τοις πολλοις το ζην ατακτως η το σωφρονως.
Robert Filmer (Patriarcha and other Political Writings)
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Have no anxiety about anything,' Paul writes to the Philippians. In one sense it is like telling a woman with a bad head cold not to sniffle and sneeze so much or a lame man to stop dragging his feet. Or maybe it is more like telling a wino to lay off the booze or a compulsive gambler to stay away from the track. Is anxiety a disease or an addiction? Perhaps it is something of both. Partly, perhaps, because you can't help it, and partly because for some dark reason you choose not to help it, you torment yourself with detailed visions of the worst that can possibly happen. The nagging headache turns out to be a malignant brain tumor. When your teenage son fails to get off the plane you've gone to meet, you see his picture being tacked up in the post office among the missing and his disappearance never accounted for. As the latest mid-East crisis boils, you wait for the TV game show to be interrupted by a special bulletin to the effect that major cities all over the country are being evacuated in anticipation of a nuclear attack. If Woody Allen were to play your part on the screen, you would roll in the aisles with the rest of them, but you're not so much as cracking a smile at the screen inside your own head. Does the terrible fear of disaster conceal an even more terrible hankering for it? Do the accelerated pulse and the knot in the stomach mean that, beneath whatever their immediate cause, you are acting out some ancient and unresolved drama of childhood? Since the worst things that happen are apt to be the things you don't see coming, do you think there is a kind of magic whereby, if you only can see them coming, you will be able somehow to prevent them from happening? Who knows the answer? In addition to Novocain and indoor plumbing, one of the few advantages of living in the twentieth century is the existence of psychotherapists, and if you can locate a good one, maybe one day you will manage to dig up an answer that helps. But answer or no answer, the worst things will happen at last even so. 'All life is suffering' says the first and truest of the Buddha's Four Noble Truths, by which he means that sorrow, loss, death await us all and everybody we love. Yet "the Lord is at hand. Have no anxiety about anything," Paul writes, who was evidently in prison at the time and with good reason to be anxious about everything, 'but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.' He does not deny that the worst things will happen finally to all of us, as indeed he must have had a strong suspicion they were soon to happen to him. He does not try to minimize them. He does not try to explain them away as God's will or God's judgment or God's method of testing our spiritual fiber. He simply tells the Philippians that in spite of them—even in the thick of them—they are to keep in constant touch with the One who unimaginably transcends the worst things as he also unimaginably transcends the best. 'In everything,' Paul says, they are to keep on praying. Come Hell or high water, they are to keep on asking, keep on thanking, above all keep on making themselves known. He does not promise them that as a result they will be delivered from the worst things any more than Jesus himself was delivered from them. What he promises them instead is that 'the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.' The worst things will surely happen no matter what—that is to be understood—but beyond all our power to understand, he writes, we will have peace both in heart and in mind. We are as sure to be in trouble as the sparks fly upward, but we will also be "in Christ," as he puts it. Ultimately not even sorrow, loss, death can get at us there. That is the sense in which he dares say without risk of occasioning ironic laughter, "Have no anxiety about anything." Or, as he puts it a few lines earlier, 'Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say, Rejoice!
Frederick Buechner
Christianity and Judaism place great emphasis on a God of love, although some verses of the Bible appear to really jumble this message. What are we to think of a God who allows – or even orders – some of His holy men to commit mass murder? In Elijah’s slaughter of the Baal priests, he does not even say this was commanded by the Lord as is the justification in some other Old Testament atrocities. Should any serious Bible student just ignore such mayhem? Or should one accept that this is God’s way of punishing the wicked and no man has the right to question His methods? I say this is totally contrary to the action of love. Honesty demands that we recognize that much of the Bible was not inspired by a God of love. A God that commands or disregards mass murder by his holiest people is not a God most people would like to spend eternity with. I think the better view is that God did not inspire the writings of the Bible to any more of a degree than He inspired the writing of this book or any other book. What we read in the Bible came from the thoughts of the biblical authors. Many penned their best understanding of God within the cultural and social fabric of their day and age.
J.L. Miller (The Holy and the Hereafter or is it Hooey?)
2.1 Abduction No, we’re not talking about kidnapping but, rather, an important dimension of scientific and ordinary as well as philosophical rationality. Consider the following example. A man is found in a cabin in a remote forest, with all the doors and windows securely locked from the inside, hanging dead from a noose. A suicide note in the man’s handwriting lies on the table nearby. What would best explain this set of facts? Abduction, a term coined by the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), is a tool to do just that.
Julian Baggini (The Philosopher's Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods)
I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. – Socrates
Larry Berg (The Best of Socrates: The Founding Philosophies of Ethics, Virtues & Life (Philosophy, Socrates, Plato, Socratic Method, Ancient Greece, Philosophers, Virtues, Ethics, Morals Book 1))
The question that soon comes to obtrude itself upon the mind of a thoughtful man in a great city, is this old persistent question of whether his method of life is such as to answer to the ideal of fulfilling his best self? It seemed to me that the inhabitants of cities were too busy getting a living to have time to live.
William James Dawson (The Quest of the Simple Life)
I have yet to see any method which can predict a man’s development more than a short time ahead. And even if we could predict human growth, we should have no right to play providence. However ‘scientific’ the method, it would still at best work with 60% or 70% of accuracy; and no man has a right to dispose of other people’s lives and careers on probability.34
Kenneth Hopper (Puritan Gift, The: Reclaiming the American Dream Amidst Global Financial Chaos)
To the Teachers in Our Schools My Dear Brethren and Sisters: The Lord will work in behalf of all who will walk humbly with Him. He has placed you in a position of trust. Walk carefully before Him. God’s hand is on the wheel. He will guide the ship past the rocks into the haven. He will take the weak things of this world to confound the things that are mighty. I pray that you will make God your Counselor. You are not amenable to any man, but are under God’s direction. Keep close to Him. Do not take worldly ideas as your criterion. Let there be no departure from the Lord’s methods of working. Use not common fire, but the sacred fire of the Lord’s kindling. Be of good courage in your work. For many years I have kept before our people the need, in the education of the youth, of an equal taxation of the physical and mental powers. But for those who have never proved the value of the instruction given to combine manual training with the study of books, it is hard to understand and carry out the directions given. Do your best to impart to your students the blessings God has given you. With a deep, earnest desire to help them, carry them over the ground of knowledge. Come close to them. Unless teachers have the love and gentleness of Christ abounding in their hearts, they will manifest too much of the spirit of a harsh, domineering master. The Lord wishes you to learn how to use the gospel net. That you may be successful in your work, the meshes of your net must be close. The application of the Scriptures must be such that the meaning shall be easily discerned. Then make the most of drawing in [268] the net. Come right to the point. However great a man’s knowledge, it is of no avail unless he is able to communicate it to others. Let the pathos of your voice, its deep feeling, make an impression on hearts. Urge your students to surrender themselves to God. “Keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life. And of some have compassion, making a difference: and others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire; hating even the garment spotted by the flesh.” Jude 1:21-23. As you follow Christ’s example you will have the precious reward of seeing your students won to Him.
Ellen Gould White (Testimonies for the Church Volume 7)
Bell had developed the Method from his youth and considered it a core medical skill. “All careful teachers have first to show the student how to recognize accurately the case,” he would declare. This was best done with the doctor’s own eyes, informed by experience. Patients, after all, could lie or misperceive their own symptoms. A man with a long-term injury might fail to recognize how his work did him damage; a drunkard might conceal his consumption. For Bell, observation sliced straight to the bone of diagnostic truth. It was all about trifles: “the accurate and rapid appreciation of small points in which the disease differs from the healthy state.
Zach Dundas (The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes)
Westcliff turned to the black-haired man beside him. “Hunt, I would like to introduce Matthew Swift—the American I mentioned to you earlier. Swift, this is Mr. Simon Hunt.” They shook hands firmly. Hunt was five to ten years older than Matthew and looked as if he could be mean as hell in a fight. A bold, confident man who reputedly loved to skewer pretensions and upper-class affectations. “I’ve heard of your accomplishments with Consolidated Locomotive Works,” Matthew told Hunt. “There is a great deal of interest in New York regarding your merging of British craftsmanship with American manufacturing methods.” Hunt smiled sardonically. “Much as I would like to take all the credit, modesty compels me to reveal that Westcliff had something to do with it. He and his brother-in-law are my business partners.” “Obviously the combination is highly successful,” Matthew replied. Hunt turned to Westcliff. “He has a talent for flattery,” he remarked. “Can we hire him?” Westcliff’s mouth twitched with amusement. “I’m afraid my father-in-law would object. Mr. Swift’s talents are needed to built a factory and start a company office in Bristol.” Matthew decided to nudge the conversation in a different direction. “I’ve read of the recent movement in Parliament for nationalization of the British railroad industry,” he said to Westcliff. “I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on the matter, my lord.” “Good God, don’t get him started on that,” Hunt said. The subject caused a scowl to appear on Westcliff’s brow. “The last thing the public needs is for government to take control of the industry. God save us from yet more interference from politicians. The government would run the railroads as inefficiently as they do everything else. And the monopoly would stifle the industry’s ability to compete, resulting in higher taxes, not to mention—” “Not to mention,” Hunt interrupted slyly, “the fact that Westcliff and I don’t want the government cutting into our future profits.” Westcliff gave him a stern glance. “I happen to have the public’s best interest in mind.” “How fortunate,” Hunt commented, “that in this case what is best for the public also happens to be best for you.” Matthew bit back a smile. Rolling his eyes, Westcliff told Matthew, “As you can see, Mr. Hunt overlooks no opportunity to mock me.” “I mock everyone,” Hunt said. “You just happen to be the most readily available target.
Lisa Kleypas (Scandal in Spring (Wallflowers, #4))
As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.
Timothy Ferriss (Tribe Of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World)
The mainsail is now to be taken in; and as the method of performing this evolution has long been a subject of hot controversy at sea, I take the opportunity of saying, that Falconer's couplet,— "For he who strives the tempest to disarm Will never first embrail the lee yard-arm," has, in my opinion, done a world of mischief, and split many thousands of sails. I, at least, plead guilty to having been sadly misled by this authority for many years, since it was only in the last ship I commanded that I learned the true way to take in the mainsail when it blows hard. The best practice certainly is, to man both buntlines and the lee leechline well, and then to haul the LEE clew-garnet close up, before starting the tack or slacking the bowline. By attending to these directions, the spar is not only instantaneously relieved, but the leeward half of the sail walks sweetly and quietly up to the yard, without giving a single flap. After which the weather-clew comes up almost of itself, and without risk or trouble. Meanwhile
Basil Hall (The Lieutenant and Commander Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from Fragments of Voyages and Travels)
{2} Neither did I but vacant seasons spend In this my scribble; nor did I intend But to divert myself in doing this From worser thoughts which make me do amiss. Thus, I set pen to paper with delight, And quickly had my thoughts in black and white. For, having now my method by the end, Still as I pulled, it came; and so I penned It down: until it came at last to be, For length and breadth, the bigness which you see. Well, when I had thus put mine ends together, I shewed them others, that I might see whether They would condemn them, or them justify: And some said, Let them live; some, Let them die; Some said, JOHN, print it; others said, Not so; Some said, It might do good; others said, No. Now was I in a strait, and did not see Which was the best thing to be done by me: At last I thought, Since you are thus divided, I print it will, and so the case decided. {3} For, thought I, some, I see, would have it done, Though others in that channel do not run: To prove, then, who advised for the best, Thus I thought fit to put it to the test. I further thought, if now I did deny Those that would have it, thus to gratify. I did not know but hinder them I might Of that which would to them be great delight. For those which were not for its coming forth, I said to them, Offend you I am loth, Yet, since your brethren pleased with it be, Forbear to judge till you do further see. If that thou wilt not read, let it alone; Some love the meat, some love to pick the bone. Yea, that I might them better palliate, I did too with them thus expostulate:-- {4} May I not write in such a style as this? In such a method, too, and yet not miss My end--thy good? Why may it not be done? Dark clouds bring waters, when the bright bring none. Yea, dark or bright, if they their silver drops Cause to descend, the earth, by yielding crops, Gives praise to both, and carpeth not at either, But treasures up the fruit they yield together; Yea, so commixes both, that in her fruit None can distinguish this from that: they suit Her well when hungry; but, if she be full, She spews out both, and makes their blessings null. You see the ways the fisherman doth take To catch the fish; what engines doth he make? Behold how he engageth all his wits; Also his snares, lines, angles, hooks, and nets; Yet fish there be, that neither hook, nor line, Nor snare, nor net, nor engine can make thine: They must be groped for, and be tickled too, Or they will not be catch'd, whate'er you do. How does the fowler seek to catch his game By divers means! all which one cannot name: His guns, his nets, his lime-twigs, light, and bell: He creeps, he goes, he stands; yea, who can tell Of all his postures? Yet there's none of these Will make him master of what fowls he please. Yea, he must pipe and whistle to catch this, Yet, if he does so, that bird he will miss. If that a pearl may in a toad's head dwell, And may be found too in an oyster-shell; If things that promise nothing do contain What better is than gold; who will disdain, That have an inkling of it, there to look, That they may find it? Now, my little book, (Though void of all these paintings that may make It with this or the other man to take) Is not without those things that do excel What do in brave but empty notions dwell.
John Bunyan (The Pilgrim's Progress from this world to that which is to come, delivered under the similitude of a dream)
The search for better, for more competent men, from the presidents of our great companies down to our household servants, was never more vigorous than it is now. And more than ever before is the demand for competent men in excess of the supply. What we are all looking for, however, is the readymade, competent man; the man whom some one else has trained. It is only when we fully realize that our duty, as well as our opportunity, lies in systematically cooperating to train and to make this competent man, instead of in hunting for a man whom some one else has trained, that we shall be on the road to national efficiency. In the past the prevailing idea has been well expressed in the saying that “Captains of industry are born, not made”; and the theory has been that if one could get the right man, methods could be safely left to him. In the future it will be appreciated that our leaders must be trained right as well as born right, and that no great man can (with the old system of personal management) hope to compete with a number of ordinary men who have been properly organized so as efficiently to cooperate. In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first. This in no sense, however, implies that great men are not needed. On the contrary, the first object of any good system must be that of developing first-class men; and under systematic management the best man rises to the top more certainly and more rapidly than ever before.
Frederick Winslow Taylor (The Principles of Scientific Management)
What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life? Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl. He introduces the insights that he learned from surviving imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp. He outlines methods to discover deep meaning and purpose in life. The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. His 81 Zen teachings are the foundation for the religion of Taoism, aimed at understanding “the way of virtues.” Lao Tzu’s depth of teachings are complicated to decode and provide foundations for wisdom. Mind Gym by Gary Mack is a book that strips down the esoteric nature of applied sport psychology. Gary introduces a variety of mindset training principles and makes them extremely easy to understand and practice. What purchase of $ 100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months (or in recent memory)? A book for my son: Inch and Miles, written by coach John Wooden. We read it together on a regular basis. The joy that I get from hearing him understand Coach Wooden’s insights is fantastically rewarding.
Timothy Ferriss (Tribe Of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World)
As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson American essayist, leader of the 19th-century transcendentalist movement
Timothy Ferriss (Tribe Of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World)
The man who keeps calm when the other fellow gets angry has infinitely the best of the matter. Let the other fellow fret and stew and get red in the face, but you keep calm and you will win the fight every time. Control yourself, change the subject, and absent yourself when anger shows. Cultivate poise, refrain from lowering yourself to the methods of the ignorant, which is anger. By keeping your temper when your adversary gets angry you thereby show your superiority, and your adversary instinctively feels you are a bigger man than he is. A cool head is wonderful capital for an employer or an employee.
Napoleon Hill (The Prosperity Bible: The Greatest Writings of All Time on the Secrets to Wealth and Prosperity)
To fix the thoughts by writing, and subject them to frequent examinations and reviews, is the best method of enabling the mind to detect its own sophisms, and keep it on guard against the fallacies which it practises on others: in conversation we naturally diffuse our thoughts, and in writing we contract them; method is the excellence of writing, and unconstraint the grace of conversation. To read, write, and converse in due proportions is, therefore, the business of a man of letters.
Samuel Johnson
The only satisfactory channel of evocation is the operator himself. In the Egyptian method of evocation, known as the assumption of the god-forms, the operator identifies himself with the god and offers himself as the channel of manifestation. It is his own magnetism that bridges the gulf between Malkuth and Yesod. There is no other method so satisfactory, for the amount of magnetism in a living being is far greater than in any metal or crystal, however precious. This ancient method is also known to us under another name; it is called by moderns, mediumship. The best magical weapon is the magus himself, and all other contrivances are but a means to an end, the end being that exaltation and concentration of consciousness which makes a magus of an ordinary man. "Know ye not that ye are the temple of the living God?" said a Great One. If we know how to use the symbolic furniture of this living temple, we have the keys of heaven in our hands.
Dion Fortune (The Mystical Qabalah)
Morty: Hey, gang, come on! Look it, just `cause we're losing doesn't mean it's all over. Phil: Cut the crap, Morty. I mean, the Mohawks have beaten us the last twelve years, they're gonna beat us again. Tripper: That's just the attitude we don't need. Sure, Mohawk has beaten us twelve years in a row. Sure, they're terrific athletes. They've got the best equipment that money can buy. Hell, every team they're sending over here has their own personal masseuse, not masseur, masseuse. But it doesn't matter. Do you know that every Mohawk competitor has an electrocardiogram, blood and urine tests every 48 hours to see if there's any change in his physical condition? Do you know that they use the most sophisticated training methods from the Soviet Union, East and West Germany, and the newest Olympic power Trinidad-Tobago? But it doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter. IT JUST DOESN'T MATTER. I tell you, IT JUST DOESN'T MATTER! IT JUST DOESN'T MATTER! IT JUST DOESN'T MATTER! The group: IT JUST DOESN'T MATTER! IT JUST DOESN'T MATTER... Tripper: And even, and even if we win, if we win, HAH! Even if we win! Even if we play so far over our heads that our noses bleed for a week to ten days. Even if God in Heaven above comes down and points his hand at our side of the field. Even if every man, woman and child held hands together and prayed for us to win, it just wouldn't matter, because all the really good looking girls would still go out with the guys from Mohawk cause they've got all the money! It just doesn't matter if we win or we lose. IT JUST DOESN'T MATTER!
Bill Murray
My mother ran when she was pregnant with Chelsea. She realized she didn’t want her daughters being raised by a monster. She paid a man to smuggle the two of us out of the country. We lived in North Carolina for ten years. She thought he’d forgotten about us. He hadn’t. He killed my mother and took my sister and me back to Russia. I was a bit rebellious, to say the least. He realized that Chelsea was his best method of controlling me so he broke her legs one day. I did what he asked after that.
Lexi Blake (Love and Let Die (Masters and Mercenaries, #5))
the last time her mother had made a desperate attempt to set Lorenda up on a date, she’d ended up eating frozen pizza with Clifford the maintenance man while he discussed the best methods of cleaning a toilet. For three foxtroting hours.
Shelly Alexander (It's In His Arms (Red River Valley, #4))
Your memoirs captivated my attention to thinking of our current duplicitous educational system; the methods that schools are teaching young adults, to the growing number of suicidal and shooting cases in learning institutions. If I may, I’ll like to request your permission to administer a human behavioral study on your adolescent life. This is a simple study which entails me asking you questions through our regular correspondence so I can better understand what’s going through your mind when you were inducted into the Enlightened Royal Oracle Society and subsequently your services in the various Arab Households. Although I am familiar with the ancient Greco Roman pederasty ideology, I am beginning to excogitate if there are valuable merits, to this form of mentorship between an erastês and an erômenos. In your memoirs you mentioned that your secondary school education derived from this ancient practice. Obviously your positive experiences had made you a balanced and well-rounded man of the world. Let me know your thoughts if you are interested in this research? I’ll continue reading your weekly blogs and wish you the very best in the soon to be published Initiation, the 1st of your five books memoir. My spirits are uplifted when reading your correspondence. Keep them coming, my friend. All the best! Dr. A.S.
Young (Unbridled (A Harem Boy's Saga, #2))
The critic must therefore work from within. His negative position is based on his positive: his primary work is to supplement his author's partial account of some matter by adding certain aspects which the author has overlooked ; but, since the parts of a philosophical theory never stand to one another in a relation of mere juxtaposition, the omission of one part will upset the balance of the whole and distort the remaining parts; so his additions will entail some correction even of those elements which he accepts as substantially true. 20. Criticism, when these two aspects of it are considered together, may be regarded as a single operation: the bringing to completeness of a theory which its author has left incomplete. So understood, the function of the critic is to develop and continue the thought of the writer criticized. Theoretically, the relation between the philosophy criticized and the philosophy that criticizes it is the relation between two adjacent terms in a scale of forms, the forms of a single philosophy in its historical development; and in practice, it is well known that a man's best critics are his pupils, and his best pupils the most critical.
R.G. Collingwood (An Essay on Philosophical Method)
As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
Timothy Ferriss (Tribe Of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World)
One thing I can say after experience with both sides of the coin is that all humans get their kicks in the same careless way. Poor as dirt or rich as a king. Lacking in any worldly knowledge or as educated as a bloody encyclopedia. Crude and filthy or refined as diamonds. Free drinks and cheap music and easy thrills will make animals of the worst and the best of men. Sin does us all the same, and that is one of the truest things I have learned in my life. The simple genius of the devil is to trick you into thinking he has a different method for every man. I wish you knew how exceptionally lacking in imagination the devil actually is.
K.B. Ezzell (Inferno (The Broken, #2))
You told me he was human. Deep down, he’d remained human, and tried to protect you as best he could. Yet you hate him.” “You’ll forgive me if I find his methods of protecting me to be unpalatable.” “But it was the demon, not the man, who killed your healer.” Dorian clenched his jaw. “It makes no difference.” “Doesn’t it?” Manon frowned. “Most can barely withstand a few months of Valg infestation. You barely withstood it.” He tried not to flinch at the blunt words. “Yet he held on for decades.
Sarah J. Maas (Throne of Glass)